Depending on when you think the Modern Superhero Movie Era was born, it's either about to go to college or it's at least touring campuses. You could say that it began with the first X-Men in 2000, with that movie's somewhat darker tone and sophisticated themes (relative, at least, to where the Batman-franchise had ended up by then), as well as its (again, relative) dedication to source material, deliberate universe-building and employment of prestige directors. On the other hand, most if not all of these elements were present in the first Blade movie, which preceded the first X-Men by two years (even if that franchise didn't end up having the legs or broader cultural impact of the X-Franchise). Either way, we're about 16-18 years into the Modern Era, and it's worth asking whether the superhero movie matured at all over the years. Looking at this year's crop so far, I see only one clear example of growth in the genre, but it's deeper message has gone almost completely unnoticed by critics as far as I can tell.
Who would've guessed a year ago that there would be more articles written and more fan outrage over the last episode of How I Met Your Mother than over the last episode of Breaking Bad? I could be wrong about that. But it certainly seems like HIMYM's last episode--the ironically-yet-poignantly titled "Last Forever"--set off a disproportionate internet firestorm for what I'd always considered a mediocre situation comedy at best. (Albeit, one with a very clever gimmick at its center). In fact, I may be one of the few people who not only liked the final episode but thought it was the best part of the show.
Follow me below the fold to hear more (and then post a comment to tell me how wrong I am) ...
It was undeniably a great year for movies, so it's a bit ungrateful for me to complain that the 2014 Academy Awards nominations this year are so boring and predictable. But there's no wildcard nominations like Beauty and the Best or Babe for Best Picture, and the closest thing to a dark horse is Philomena. So, as I did last year, I'm going to propose some new Oscar categories to spice things up. These categories are designed to honor people and types of movies that the Academy currently ignores while also introducing some fun and excitement into Oscar Night ...
My favorite line from the video, regarding the lack of male nudity in Game of Thrones: "You'll show a pregnant woman get stabbed in the baby and you won't show one innocent little hardened dick."
Too true.
And in the meantime, Girls is back for a third season, meaning that it's time once again for Lena Dunham to have to justify showing nudity for purposes other than replicating straight male porn. It's not just the lack of dongs on cable TV and R-rated movies, it's the narrow view in our culture of the narrative possibilities of nudity in general.
Martin Scorsese's latest, The Wolf of Wall Street, is the very definition of "polarizing." According to the aggregated critics on Rotten Tomatoes, it is "amongst Scorsese's best work", "the worst writing Scorsese has ever been associated with", "the best film of 2013" and so horrible that "[i]t doesn't even deserve a grade." Critics are split on whether the movie has "propulsive purpose" or, alternatively, no discernible "point of view." There's also a raging, furious debate over whether the movie glorifies or condemns the capitalist excess of its pro/antagonist, Jordan Belfort.
The one point on which everyoneseems to agree, however, is the film's supposed debauchery. And yeah, sure, there is coke snorted or blown into various bodily orifices, a marching band in their underwear, and multiple depictions or orgies. But I have one important question to ask ... why don't we ever see Leo's penis?
More, with spoilers for Wolf of Wall Street below the fold.
Every December we seem to have the same discussion about our universal "love/hate relationship" for Christmas songs. For every earnest list of "best Christmas songs" online, there are at least as many "Christmas songs we hate" lists as well as "Christmas songs we love to hate" lists (as well as a handful of "Christmas songs that are surprisingly tolerable!" lists). The derision for "Christmas songs" as a genre probably stems from gross repetition - the fact that, generation after generation, we're subjected to the same dozen or so songs played every hour, on the hour, as we're stuck in line buying wrapping paper at Walgreens. But that just begs the question of why such a small universe of songs are deemed acceptable for the holiday season.
If you ask me, the problem is that our culture has such a narrow conception of what are appropriate topics for holiday music to discuss. Yeah, yeah, Christmas is a glorious time full of miracles, Jesus is the Son of God undoubtedly, and everyone should just get along already. Yet, surely such a supposedly momentous, singular event as the birth of God's only son to a virgin should inspire art and music that is more compelling and sophisticated than a series of glorified campfire ditties.
These days, unless you have a tailored religious message, it’s very hard to be an openly religious artist — no matter how much you’re attracted to the idea.
The truth in this statement is painfully clear when you consider that nearly all "Christmas songs" fit into one of two (maybe three) categories -- painfully earnest, celebratory songs ("Joy to the World", "Hark the Herald Angel Sings") and utterly frivolous, jokey songs ("Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth"). A subcategory of the latter type are the sardonic or outright cynical "anti-Christmas" songs, that tend to have very little to add to the discussion beyond antagonism for its own sake. Subtract out love songs that do little more than name-drop Christmas and Walgreens would have nothing left to play over their speakers during the holidays ... well, almost nothing, which brings me to the topic this post below the fold.
I had a flash of inspiration this evening to start a new tradition, my own spin on "Best Of" lists, which are a dime a dozen online (though I do plan on compiling my second annual "Best of Best of" list soon).
Instead, I'm going to list all the things I'm thankful for from the past twelve months, for whatever reason and in no particular order, starting with:
You may be wondering why I've paired together an image of Yoda sagely staring at Anchorman's Ron Burgundy picking food out of his teeth. Well, it has something to do with a series of children's books that were especially popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Allow me to explain below the line (with the most perfunctory of spoiler warnings for the Star Wars series) ...
There was an interesting collision of pop culture and government policy last month when the band The Slants lost their appeal to register their name with the U.S. Trademark Office (h/t to The TTABlog®). It's common for bands to register their name with the Trademark Office in order to confirm their right to prevent others from using the same name. Band names are a valuable commodity, after all, and legal disputes over who "owns" a name can be a nightmare - like a corporate dispute and divorce proceeding rolled into one. Just ask Sublime, or One Direction, or The Talking Heads.
What's less common is for the Trademark Office to reject an application because the band's name may be offensive, and what's rarer still is an opinion from the Trademark Office that a band's name is offensive because of the ethnicity of the band members. By attempting to avoid endorsing a potentially loaded term, the Trademark Office instead stumbled right into the debate over self-expression and ethnic identity.
More below the fold (and fair warning, this post naturally includes references to various ethnic, racial and sexual slurs, all of which are reprinted here for discussion purposes only without any malicious intent) ...
"Now you're looking for the secret. But you won't find it because of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled." -- Cutter, Prestige
It's now been a week since the last frame of Breaking Bad footage aired on national television and anyone with a mind to it has said their piece online. With all the hype and expectations now put to rest, I stand by what I said in my pre-finale post (and later argued to the estimable FILM CRIT HULK on Twitter), that wanting can be a lot more enjoyable than having when it comes to series finales. The quote above from Prestige captures this notion, and the sentiment was also expressed by Joanna Robinson in her podcast review of the finale on The Ones Who Knock. That is, for all the stylistic triumphs of "Felina", as enjoyable as it was, it didn't really aspire to surprise the audience in any way. Rather than hit us upside the head like the controversial Sopranos finale or throw a wild monkey wrench in the gears like the groundbreaking St. Elsewhere finale, "Felina" felt more like watching the dominoes fall just as they'd been arranged . That is, it was less a climax than a series of natural consequences to what came before.
Another way to put it is that "Felina" wasn't a finale at all. Sure, it's the last episode of the series, but narratively speaking, it's really Breaking Bad's epilogue. In theory, there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. In practice, however, there's a tendency now to treat the finale as the be-all, end-all of a series' worth, and to criticize any show that doesn't satisfy the urge to be stunned and amazed by the last shot. It's a stifling expectation to impose on any story however told, and I think it's time we drop that expectation when it comes to TV shows.
More below the fold with spoilers for Breaking Bad, Justice League Unlimited, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (through season 4), Lost and Stephen King's The Stand.
This is a special time in the life of a TV show that can only be experienced once, the final week leading up to the series finale when all remaining questions will be answered at last ... or not. But either way, the door will close for good. So this is the last, best chance you have to make a prediction as to how it all ends. "It" in this case is, of course, the Breaking Bad finale set to air on Sunday, September 29th.
I have to admit that this is my absolute favorite time to be a devotee of a series. When the pieces are all laid out on the table and you think you have a pretty good idea how the final picture is supposed to look, and yet ... "And yet" is that gnawing sensation that something amazing is waiting out there just over the horizon, something you can't quite see from your current vantage point. It's the essence of anticipation, when the lines of expectation and the potential for surprise crisscross on the graph of the mind.
One measure of a great thriller (or possibly any truly great story) is whether a fair number of outcomes to the central conflict are at least somewhat plausible while at the same time also being potentially satisfying. A story that can end only one way lacks imagination and probably has very little to say. On the other hand, a story that takes a wild turn out of nowhere for the sake of surprise betrays a lack of preparation by the storyteller. When a series hits that sweet spot, though, you'll find a veritablearmy of bloggerstrytheirhand at predicting the end in ways mutually exclusive from each other yet equally intriguing. (Salon.com in particular has a great round-up of predictions here.)
Of course, I have my own predictions. Not that I can take special credit for any one of these theories, but then the playing field is crowded enough that I don't think anyone can claim ownership over any single theory. (Though, if I could have claimed any one theory out there as my own, it would be the amazing "Breaking Bad is a prequel for Malcolm in the Middle" theory.)
"Do you remember when we used to be explorers?" - Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Insurrection
This past week saw the release of Star Trek[:] Into Darknesson DVD/Blu-Ray, which gave us all an opportunity to reflect on the visceral hatred that movie set off among Trekkies and critics alike. Seriously, it's gotten pretty ugly. Like, Prequel Trilogy ugly. So ugly that the attendees of a recent Star Trek Convention in Los Angeles voted Into Darkness as "the worst Star Trek movie ever." I've expressed my own issues with the film's bogus marketing tactics (which I believe amounted to a cynical manipulation of "spoiler" etiquette), while others have brutallytakendown the film's narrative shortcomings.
Yet, with a third movie a foregone conclusion for the "nuStar Trek" series (as it's come to be known), I don't want to dwell on the past. For despite all the topical political analogies that have been the franchise's bread and butter since the beginning, the singular defining feature of Star Trek has always been an unabashed optimism about the future. The Enterprise of the 1960s had a multi-racial cast during a time when the nation was tearing itself apart over racial tensions. The human race in the Original Series (TOS) had moved beyond national boundaries and economic class divisions. They'd put humanity's petty squabbles aside to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations. The mission statement of the franchise was captured perfectly in the opening narration of TOS, but I have to admit that I love this one sentence summation from the pilot episode even better:
What is out there in the black void beyond?
How do you recapture that spirit of exploration, that optimism for the future from the cynical, gritty, action-oriented "nuStar Trek" universe they've created? I can't tell you how, but I can recommend a handful of movies (and one TOS episode) that I hope the writers and director watch before they start banging out the plot for Star Trek Course Correction (which I think would make a great title).
I've started to notice that any time I've seen the trailer for the new Nelson Mandela biography, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, it's been paired back-to-back with Captain Phillips, the Somali pirate movie ... I'm not suggesting that this is deliberate, per se. But there probably is some trailer distribution algorithm (the same algorithm that prevents the Hangover Part III red band trailer from playing before The Croods) that is lumping together Mandela, the movie about the Nobel Prize laureate head of state, with the scary African pirate movies.
I get why this happens. It's a marketing decision and it's no surprise that it's going to be hamfisted at times. Still, the algorithm got a little out of control before Fruitvale Station, which I caught a few weeks back and highly recommend (whenever you're in the mood for devestating). It's the recreation of the tragic last day in the life of African American Oscar Grant. And judging from the trailers they lumped together before the movie, the trailer gods apparently figure if you've decided to see a movie about a black man, you'd probably like to see every movie starring African Americans coming out this year.
Here, for your viewing enjoyment, is the sequence of trailers (which is only missing a Tyler Perry film -- they must still be cutting the trailer for Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas).
I am a devoted fan of The /Filmcast and I deeply appreciate the way that David Chen, Devindra Hardawar and the rest leave any discussion of "spoilers" till the end of their reviews. I've frequently listened to the first half of reviews for movies I hadn't yet seen, and held off on listening to the "spoiler" portion until after I'd seen the movie in question. Now, I generally agree with their approach to "spoilers", that is, treating any plot detail as a spoiler unless it had already been revealed in a trailer or commercial. However, in a recent podcast of The Ones Who Knock ("TOWK"), David's spin-off podcast with Joanna Robinson, they took things a step further by treating the title of an episode airing the following week as a spoiler. At the time, I took the "spoiler warning" to heart and did all I could to avoid learning the title until after I saw the episode. In retrospect, however, I think that was a mistake.
That experience left me thinking about "Spoiler Orthodoxy", which is what I'm calling the perspective that any piece of information that reveals plot details of any sort is a "spoiler." I think it's time we reconsider what constitutes a "spoiler", and maybe push back against the Spoiler Orthodoxy when it takes control out of the storyteller's hands and treats all plot details as "spoilers" without differentiation. In fact, I'll go a step further and say that "spoiler warnings" can create false expectations that may even harm the viewing experience (particularly when the system is abused for the sake of marketing alone).
More below the fold, and (yes) "spoiler warning" for the latest season of Breaking Bad, the fourth season of Venture Bros. and Star Trek Into Darkness.
This is neither a political blog nor a "current events" blog. In fact, I very rarely write about cultural events as they're happening. But today I was struck by serendipity and felt compelled to write a few words about today's other big fifty year anniversary in American race relations. THE big anniversary is, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech (available in full here), and it's received the due attention from the news media ... when they took a breather from reporting on Miley Cyrus's ass that is. The other big anniversary came to my attention as I was shuffling through Bob Dylan songs on my iPod (for no particular reason) and stumbled upon this classic that I hadn't heard in years:
Curious about the veracity of Dylan's lyrics, I googled "Zantzinger" for more background on the factual background behind this song. As it happens, I learned that the sentencing ofWilliam Zantzinger for the killing of Hattie Carroll, the event that inspired this song, occurred exactly fifty years ago today, August 28, 1963.
Unlike a lot of people out there on the interwebs, I don't have much to say about the casting of Ben Affleck as Batman for the upcoming Man of Steel sequel. Personally, I would've been more excited by the prospect of Bryan Cranston trading in his Heisenberg hat for the Dark Knight cowl (as previously rumored before he was apparently cast as Lex Luthor instead), but honestly I found Snyder's Superman reboot to be such an incoherent mess that it's hard to care about the follow-up (whether "vs. Batman" or not). That said, I find the reaction of the fanbase to the casting news to be excessive, but not for the usual reasons given by the cynics (i.e. "Grow up fanboys, it's just a f*cking movie, and don't you know there are real problems in the world?"). The problem I have with all the nerd-rage has to do with the assumptions we make about comic book franchises, which is sadly encouraged by the way Warner Bros. treats its D.C. properties.
While I haven't fully given up on this year's crop of summer's blockbusters (not with The Wolverine, Kick-Ass 2 and The World's End still to be seen), I do believe this is the most disappointing summer I can recall -- at least for the major studio flicks. Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel both disappointed to degrees I just hadn't anticipated beforehand, as I discuss briefly here and here, respectively. One of the few bright spots, discounting the better of the non-blockbuster movies I've seen, was the non-franchise, non-sequel, non-reboot Pacific Rim. I'll admit that I had little to no hope in this film going into it, despite having had a good enough time with Guillermo del Toro's filmsinthepast. But after a year of so many overlong and overwrought (yet simultaneously small-minded) special effects blowouts, Pacific Rim was surprisingly streamlined and effective by comparison.
Superficially a single-premise film (i.e. Space Monsters vs. Giant Robots), the movie also delivered a stealth message that I was surprised to find
afterward received almost no attention from film critics. I don't have much to say about the movie's
artistic merits here, but I thought the reaction (or lack thereof) from so many
critics to the movie's obvious subtext says something interesting about what
contemporary moviegoers expect from a "message" movie, as opposed to a fun summer blockbuster.
While Pacific Rim has few spoilable moments, I will give you the standard issue "spoiler warning" regardless and continue this discussion below the fold.
The final eight episodes of Breaking Bad begin this week, bringing with them the promise of a massive payoff that's been five years in the making. Series-creator Vince Gilligan has summed up the show as one simple concept, the transformation of Mr. Chips into Scarface(that is, the transformation of a over-the-hill chemist teacher into a meth-dealing kingpin). While it's true that Gilligan's meth-dealing epic is part of trend of hyper-masculine, antihero character studies that followed in the Sopranos' wake, Breaking Bad's singular focus, cohesion and discipline of storytelling is deserving of special attention. So much of modern culture seems to play out like a reverse-"Stanford marshmallow experiment", promising maximum for those who refuse to wait. At the risk of sounding like the kids are on my yard again, I have to give props to TV that fully realizes the potential of the medium -- long-form fiction that breathes, takes its time and pays off only when the time is right.
Of course, quality is quality and any style or genre done right is worth watching. All that said, when a creative work bucks the trend in all the right ways, it's worth standing up and taking note. It's a big world and there's room for instant gratification alongside the long, slow payoffs. But Breaking Bad's narrative successes also say something about the ways so much of modern culture fails to nail the landing. (Before I say anything more, here's your spoiler warning for Star Wars, the Iron Man movies, Man of Steel, Looper, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, True Blood, Treme, and - of course - Breaking Bad through the fourth season.)
I recently moved to Seattle from New York, and my new hometown gave me a great welcoming present -- a well-timed concert by The Postal Service at the KeyArena. I was surprised to see that they were playing such a large venue, being a one-off side project of Ben Gibbard that had released only a single album a decade ago. (It made a little more sense to me that they had played the Barclays Center in New York, where even small up-and-coming acts will often play large venues even if they're otherwise playing in dive bars when they tour cross-country.) Unsurprisingly, much of the arena was empty the night of July 18th, and so the opening act carried the significant burden of trying to fill an 18-thousand capacity space with maybe 18 hundred attendees trickling in. This is the context in which it seems many Seattlites (myself included, if I may adopt my new home town's moniker) were introduced to one particularly spunky opening act who goes by the drag personae Big Freedia.
For those of you who haven't heard of Big Freedia before either, the Wikipedia summary is that she's "an American musician known for work in New Orleans genre of hip hop called bounce music." For those of you who haven't heard of "bounce music" before, here was my introduction to "bounce" (and, unbeknownst to me at the time, to the Queen Diva herself) from the HBO not-really-a-hit series Treme:
I'm here to say "balderdash!" Balderdash, I say! Aside from extrapolating to a ridiculous degree the reaction of a handful of the Twitterati to an entire audience, Ms. Ryder ignores entirely the delicate balance that goes into a successful concert experience, while at the same time sadly reducing Big Freedia to a "tolerance litmus test." It's hard not to conclude that Ms. Ryder's article is a conclusion in search of an argument. She clearly has something to say about the appropriation of black culture by white musicians (which may easily be said to summarize much of American music in general from the late 1800s to the present but in this case summarizes Miley Cyrus's foray into "twerking"). And perhaps the opportunity to package that message together with everybody's favorite hobby these days -- hispter-punching -- was just too tempting. (I can't wait for the third season of Girls to start so that we can read another dozen articles about the blinding whiteness of Lena Dunham, a topicthatjustcan'tbeexploredenough!)
But before we try to unpack just what the hell Miley Cyrus has to do with a dozen or so tweets from KeyArena and whether Big Freedia made sense as an opening act in The Postal Services' stadium tour, let me share a few thoughts on the strange alchemy of finding the perfect concert experience (and the many pitfalls that can turn an amazing show into a forgettable or even uncomfortable one).
Man of Steel, Episode One: The Phantom Menace Zone
(Quick programming note -- it's been almost two months since my last post, as I've spent the bulk of that time moving to a new city and finding a new job. So if you begin to notice a distinctly "west coast" quality to my writing, as opposed to the "east coast" stylings of my previous posts, that would be the result of my recent relocation from Manhattan to Seattle. And now back to your irregularly scheduled program ...)
Me: Hey, so did you hear that new symphony orchestra last night? What did you think?
Other Guy (OG): Oh man, the trumpets! They were so loud! It was amazing!
