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Saturday, March 09, 2002 ( 3/09/2002 08:52:00 AM ) Bill S. GOOD MOCKIN’ TONIGHT - This first week of pop culture blogging has turned into a de facto look at my nightly TV watchin’. But the matter becomes more tenuous when it comes to Fridays and Saturdays: neither night has a show I’m so loyal to that the presence of a new episode overrides everything else. Fri./Sat.’s lineup is mushy enough to allow either going out (something we don’t do all that often these days, but it’s nice to think we can!) or staying home and watching a movie. On those occasions when neither option is appealing – if my wife and I both feel too wiped by the week to even pay attention to a two-hour flick, for instance – the one show we’ll watch is Sci-Fi’s The Chronicle. You need series like this: quirky enough to be diverting but not so strong that you worry about missing something if you skip an episode. Chronicle, which can best be described as a campy blend of X-Files and Men in Black, is set in an imaginary version of the Weekly World News (instead of Bat Boy, they have Pig Boy – played by Curtis “Booger” Armstrong). The show concerns a hard-working trio of journalists (boy ingénue, sexy female abductee, wisecracking fanboy photog) as they investigate the comically weird. Last night’s episode snuggly fit the show’s modus operandi: sent to a convention of Elvis impersonators in hopes of getting a shot of the Real Thing, the gang runs into a pack of vampire Elvii who’ve been using the ongoing cons to breed more of their ilk. (Vamps are attracted to the role, we’re told, since they can work at night, wear sunglasses and get to wear capes.) The Real Elvis, apparently, faked his death after accidentally running into a den of vampires in Las Vegas; he’s been traveling the country ever since as a fearless vampire killer. A droll conceit: but, as with so much of Sci-Fi’s original programming, the execution is considerably less satisfactory. Chronicle’s idea of a good running joke is to have its characters quote Elvis songs as part of the dialog – a gag used to much better effect by the Powerpuff Girls w./ the Beatles’ oeuvre – what works in a ten-minute ‘toon just doesn’t hold up in an hour-long episode. I chuckled at parts of last night’s ep, but when I took a quick look at the show’s website next morning and discovered that the series isn’t going to be extended past March, I didn’t find myself getting that bent out of shape. Perhaps, I thought, this will encourage me to do more reading or something. # | Friday, March 08, 2002 ( 3/08/2002 09:41:00 AM ) Bill S. “DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME” - If it weren’t for Maura Tierney, I suspect I’d have given up on E.R. a long time ago – the show has long lost its ability to surprise. But I was entertained by last night’s entry, “Secrets and Lies.” The bulk of the episode took place in an old school room, as four of the cast regulars (Noah Wyle’s John Carter, Tierney’s Abbey Lockheart, Goran Visnjic’s Luka Kovac, and Sherry Stringfield’s Susan Lewis) plus intern Galant wait for a snow-stalled instructor to appear for a mandated sexual harassment course. Taken away from their crisis-packed work setting, the characters are forced to talk to each other – something that they’re rarely given occasion to do for any length of time. Though the episode title recalls Mike Leigh, a closer dramatic comparison has to be to John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. The parallel draws attention to the fact that few of the E.R. regulars have actually matured past high school: something about the nonstop collision of crisis upon crisis colludes in keeping ‘em in the mode of disconnected adolescence. (This is most strongly seen in the inability of Anthony Edwards’ Mark Green to be a sufficiently parental father to his own daughter.) This stuck state may be the core reason why the show has been spinning its wheels for so long, so perhaps its writers are using this ep as a tool to themselves. Yeah, I know: I’m an incurable optimist. . . # | ( 3/08/2002 09:37:00 AM ) Bill S. RALL-TY CHECK - As editorial cartoonists go, ultra-leftie Ted Rall has long carved out a place in the mainstream that few artists of his political ilk have managed to maintain. A bluntly aggressive polemicist in an age where most newspaper cartoonists seem content to push amusing reinforcement of the status quo, Rall has regularly managed to piss off a sizable portion of his readership – most recently with a string of cartoons slamming the Bush Administration’s war policies. In general, I don’t usually mind Rall’s cartoons – they’re hamfisted and loud, but I don’t think it’s the job of editorial cartoonists to be polite – but I can definitely understand the outrage over his most recent strip: “War Widows,” which was run and then cut this week by the New York Times. A sardonic look at the spouses of 9-11 victims (with a passing swipe at newsman Daniel Pearl’s widow), the cartoon makes the following points:
Rall, in other words, is slamming the “war widows” because they haven’t shown the right affect in front of the camera. This isn’t political commentary – it’s self-righteous thuggishness: the work of a man too blinkered by ideology to gauge the mean of rhetorical decency. I’m not surprised that the Times retracted the cartoon, and I suspect that it’ll have even longer-term consequences for Rall’s career as a syndicated cartoonist. In the meantime, Rall’s ideological foes will doubtless derive much pleasure from watching the man spontaneously combust. # | Thursday, March 07, 2002 ( 3/07/2002 04:30:00 AM ) Bill S. THE BANTER YET WAVES - I continue to watch and get enjoyment from Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing - despite the prediction of some pundits that the unapologetically liberal show would suddenly seem irrelevant in the wake of 9-11. Last night’s episode gives good indication why: set on the night of First Lady Abby Bartlett’s (Stockard Channing) birthday, the main plot focus was on Abby’s impending censure at the hands of a medical board for her role in covering up her husband’s M.S. (As scandals go, it’s much less loaded than anything that came out of the Clinton Admin, though it’s had dramatic repercussions throughout the season.) While also showing the wheeling/dealing that’s being handled by the rest of the series regulars, the ep keeps returning to Abby as she spits her frustration out on her husband (whose position pretty much guarantees that the consequences'll be more severe than they might otherwise) and struggles to maintain a game face as a big Washington brouhaha is held in her honor. The episode gave Stockard and Martin Sheen (one of the most engagingly complicated married couples on series television) several good opportunities to play off each other, though in the end the night belonged to Channing. Say what you will about Sorkin’s powers of political analysis (most embarrassingly put on display during the show’s quickly cobbled Post-9-11 Talkathon), the man knows how to write crisp dialog. Watching all those a-type smarties have at each other every week is like sitting through a marathon of Howard Hawks comedies. It’s a fantasy – I’d love to believe that our politicos were really capable of such nonstop wit, though after hearing parts of the Johnson and Nixon tapes, I know otherwise – but it’s an appealing one. From the show’s success, I’d guess that I’m not the only one who wants to share in that fantasy. For many viewers, I suspect that the show’s political arguments are the equivalent of all the medical technobabble spat out by Anthony Edwards and co. on E.R. It’s there to add texture and verisimilitude to what remains at heart a strong character-driven drama. How closely the show captures Beltway ways is ultimately less important than, say, the Tracy/Hepburn interplay between Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) and his assistant Donna Moss (Janel Moloney). Good banter is its own reward. # | Wednesday, March 06, 2002 ( 3/06/2002 10:12:00 AM ) Bill S. THE CRISIS RECONSIDERED - Back at my prime website, I’ve been undertaking a more focused pop critical project: conducting a year long monthly review of mainstream superhero titles that I haven’t read in close to fifteen years. (I’m half a year in and still holding up, thank you very much.) Recently, with DC’s The Flash, I found myself looking at a character that I hadn’t followed since the Silver Age model died in the mid-eighties. Realizing that I recalled diddly-squat about the actual occasion of his death, I pulled out a boxed copy of the series that featured it, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and re-read it for the first time since it came out. Written by Marv Wolfman and illustrated by team comics master George Perez, Crisis was an attempt at cleaning out what had become an excessively complex comics system. DC’s multiverse (which primarily consisted of versions of Earth featuring different superhero comic book lines that had imperialistically been swallowed by DC over the years) was an ungainly example of the Law of Diminishing Returns – there were so many worlds and character permutations to keep track of that it stymied new readers. Crisis, which primarily concerned itself with an evil entity’s destruction of all but one of these universes, was supposed to clean the slate. From what I can tell, it didn’t last. One of the things that Wolfman did in his series was kill off characters that had lost relevance to the current line: in addition to the Barry Allen Flash (who was quickly replaced by a successor), Superman’s cousin Kara (a.k.a. Supergirl) was also dramatically snuffed. Enter a comics shop today, though, and you’ll find a freshly minted Supergirl title on the shelves. Some concepts are too damn stubborn to stay dead. As for Crisis itself: jeez, what a stultifying read! Belaboring under the need to cram in every conceivable DC character into 300-plus pages of comic book story – and destroy a multitude of worlds along the way – Wolfman created the comic book equivalent of an ultra-bad seventies disaster movie. Characterization is minimal (even by mainstream superhero standards), while the plot is a repeated series of threats/false victories/redoubled threats: house cleaning that totally misses as an interesting story. And while I usually enjoy Perez’s artwork (he does some of the best buxom superheroines around), the story he serviced has so many overstuffed panels that it’s a struggle to pick apart what’s happening. And as bi-focal wearing geezer, I know I’m much less enamored of postage-sized art than I used to be. (Hear that, Chris Ware?) Both Wolfman and Perez have done good comics work elsewhere, but I’m guessing that Crisis’ll long remain the work that they’re both best known for - if only because it forced a major change in the DC’s superhero line and paved the way for a series of progressively less interesting multi-issue “epics” from DC and its prime competitor Marvel (and, no, I have no intention of re-reading Secret Wars!) The series remains in print as a thirty-five-buck trade paperback - which attests to its popularity, at least. But next time I feel the urge to re-read one of these multi-volume epics, I’m gonna remind myself of Crisis. That should suitably dampen my misplaced enthusiasm. # | ( 3/06/2002 08:09:00 AM ) Bill S. SPOT THE COMICS REF: I - As regular visitors to Sunnydale, CA., both my wife and I take great pleasure with playing Spot the Esoteric Comics Ref on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These references frequently come from the mouth of Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendan), the lone male Scooby Gang hold-out. So we fully were expecting at least one good one on last night’s ep – which focused on Xander’s impending wedding to ex-vengeance demon Anya (Emma Caulfield). Turns out, though, the story in question was a bit too grim to support the spare comics-themed quip (Xander gets cold feet after experiencing a cheerless ersatz vision of his future with Anya). So for now we’ll have to continue to mull over last week’s joke: it's currently in the running for the season’s best. In “As You Were,” demon-killing guerilla boy Riley Finn (Marc Blucas) returned to Sunnydale with his new wife - also given to wearing camouflage and carrying heavy artillery. Quip-ready Xander at one point refers to the couple as “Nick and Nora Fury,” a throwaway line that packs in double your pop refs for your bucks:
Most textured pop quip this side of a MST3K viewing: we can only hope that our man Xander (presently on the run from his spurned fiancé) pulls himself together soon enough to try and top it. I'll keep watching . . . # | Tuesday, March 05, 2002 ( 3/05/2002 09:30:00 AM ) Bill S. “IT’S A YIN/YANG THING” - HBO’s Six Feet Under began its second season this weekend: caught the premiere Monday night and it’s definitely hooked me for this go-round. When Alan (American Beauty) Ball’s series started, it seemed too cold and mired in the structures of mainstream series writing to be as surprising as it wanted. But as the series has progressed, Ball and his writers have both opened up the characters and effectively messed with our expectations – to strong comic and dramatic purpose. The opening formula remains the same: each show starts with a death that will send the corpse to the family-run funeral home (Fisher & Sons) that is the center of the series; each death is treated as an opportunity to examine some aspect of the main characters’ lives – in some of the more memorable episodes, one of the Fishers will have extended conversations with their personal visions of the deceased. What could be an endlessly sentimental device in the wrong hands (think of the movie, Da) serves to effectively illuminate the series’ characters. Season Two’s opener contained one of the best uses of this dramatic device to date: following the news that he has an inoperable brain tumor, eldest son Nate (Peter Krause) has an ecstasy-induced dream/hallucination where he plays Chinese checkers with his dead father (the unflappable Richard Jenkins: a recurring vision for all of the show’s family members) and the personifications of Death and Life. Death is visualized as a balding middle-aged white guy; Life a super-sized black woman – before Nate can get into the game, the two start to screw on a chair, while Nate can only watch both appalled and awed. When he wakes, he immediately writes down his dream revelation, which turns out to be a line from the Bhagavid Gita. Disgusted when he hears that his thought was not original, Nate immediately crumples up the scrawled piece of paper containing it. Which is one of the things that makes this show so wonderfully confounding: working on the fringe of life, Six Feet Under’s characters regularly have the opportunity to face revelation. But mundane concerns keep getting in the way of their ability to do anything with what they’re offered. It’s not the only reason to love the show (each of the series’ regulars are such prickly and well-defined individuals that it seems unfair to single any of ‘em out - Ball and company have given each plenty of opportunities to show their stuff). But one day after my viewing of the season’s premiere, it’s this small slice of priceless cosmic comedy that most sticks with me. # | Monday, March 04, 2002 ( 3/04/2002 08:00:00 AM ) Bill S. TRUTH STILL OUT THERE; AUDIENCE NOT - Well, the final eleven eps of The X-Files started last night, and Fox is promising that this last arc will answer all of our questions. I don’t believe ‘em (Trust No One!), but I’m watching anyway. I’ve invested too much time in this series to stop now, and I still haven’t developed the same degree of brand loyalty to ABC’s Files-indebted conspiracy series, Alias. I won’t argue that the show has lost something (besides a sizable share of its audience) ever since David Duchovny first started showing his boredom with it: his quirky personality was just the right leavening agent for a series that often ended on a downbeat or inconclusive note. Robert Patrick demonstrated that he can act on The Sopranos, but writer/creator Chris Carter and company have bent so far back to make his John Dogget the anti-Mulder that the nicest spin you can put on his character is to call him stolid. That leaves Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully (for my money a sexier actress than flavor-of-the-month Jennifer Garner), but to date she’s been given precious little to do this season. Still, the show is still capable of delivering the goods, especially in its stand-alone horror stories. Though they’ve had their moments, I’ve generally been less interested in the ongoing conspiracy eps: they’ve never felt as fully thought-out as, say, Joss Whedon’s season-by-season continuity on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. This final arc begins with a two-part mythos tale, of course - something to do with Scully’s mysteriously empowered baby (preternatural infants in peril: between this and Angel, you’ve gotta wonder if a new generation of TV scribes has recently entered the fatherhood track) - and the first night’s offering had all the requisite levels of dread and oddness. I had a good time watching it, but I’m more eagerly anticipating the upcoming Lone Gunman one-shot. With any luck, it’ll mute the pain of their lame-ass spin-off. I’m gonna miss the show - and I really don’t hold much hope for an ongoing movie franchise. But few TV series have lasted as long without seriously diluting themselves, and when you consider that X-Files has held up in a genre that’s even more difficult to convincingly sustain, the accomplishment is even more noteworthy. # | |
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