Life on Queen Street

First off, this quote from Annie Dillard: "There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind."

My horrorscope for the week is also pretty cool (no, that is not a typo):

In *The Devil's Dictionary,* Ambrose Bierce defines history as follows: "an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." Bear that in mind as you interpret what I mean by the following: You won't make history in the coming weeks. Instead, you will help generate an interesting and important story that will involve unfamous people who have little political power or military skill but have a great deal of potent grace and nuanced strength and soulful intelligence.

Only two more days until Underworld: Rise of the Lycans opens. And there's a clip:

It is a little sad how much I am looking forward to this movie. But werewolves versus vampires in the 13th century! Romeo & Juliet with vampires and werewolves (no, really, they mean it this time)! Rhona Mitra (who I am sneakingly fond of even though Doomsday was such fatuous, stupid crap - societal entropy does not go 'breakdown of social order, loss of physical infrastructure, cannibalism' - just No)! Michael Sheen, who although short, is really far too good to be in this sort of movie (but all the more reason to love him and it)! And Bill Nighy! Oh, how can you resist a movie where Bill Nighy gets to swan around in leather armour being all omnipotent and shit? It's just not possible.

Of course, I am going to have to choose between seeing Let the Right One In and Rise of the Lycans on Friday night. Seeing them both together would be a mistake and, I suspect, geographically impossible.

In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles news, SciFi Wire has an interview with Brian Austin Green:

Some fans are hating on the recent episodes for a lack of action.

Green: It can't be [all action]. It can't be. I think if it was up to the fans, truly, John Connor would already be John Connor in the future. The show would be, like, four episodes, and they would run out of s--t. You have to build, and you have to have moments where everything has to sit, and you have to think it through. It can't just be f--kin' go-go-go-go-go, because there's just no way we could last. What's funny is that, still to this day, one of the favorite scenes for people I talk to is the scene in the park, John and Derek sitting and watching the two [kids, young Kyle and Derek,] play baseball. That's, like, the least action scene of anything. It's sitting on a f--kin' bench talking, but then they complain there's not enough action, so you can't please everybody. I trust Josh. I hope that at the end of the day the fans will trust Josh, because he's done a really good job so far.

It's also important to note that some fans are assholes with poor reading comprehension, a massive sense of entitlement and limited critical faculties. It always surprises me that people so stupid can still manage to get online - damn you and your user-friendly ways, Mozilla. Damn you.

Meanwhile, 411mania.com named Lena Headey in The Sarah Connor Chronicles "Best Female TV Performance of 2008":

Lena Headey had, bar none, one of the toughest jobs on television this year. When the Writer's Guild went on strike at the beginning of the year, she found her brand-new television show taking over the coveted spot held by the juggernaut known as 24. But more than that, she had to take an iconic character, that of The Terminator's Sarah Connor, and make people believe that she was the same character that we had seen Linda Hamilton play in two great films. Living up to such a reputation is an unenviable task that many actresses would have tried nobly and failed drastically to deliver one. With Headey, who was already a hit with Terminator's likely demographic thanks to her work in 300, the role of Sarah paid homage to the original while expanding it into a fuller character for a new generation. Headey is every bit believable as Sarah Connor, pulling off the tough action roles as well as she does the quiet and emotional scenes of the movie. She's created a portrayal that is older and wiser...just as hard-boiled and paranoid as the Hamilton Sarah at times, but now trying to reconnect with her son again. If Headey had failed as Sarah, it wouldn't have mattered how good Thomas Dekker was as John, or how cool Summer Glau was as Cameron; the action scenes wouldn't have mattered. Without a believably Sarah, the show would have been lost. The fact that it's one of the best shows on TV should tell you a lot about how amazingly she's succeeded.

Damn straight and she did it while getting savaged by a bunch of small-minded misogynists (no, being born with a vagina does not exempt you from the ability to be a misogynist asshat) who equated the measure of her ability as an actor with the size of her biceps (see above re: assholes). Fuck them all. Lena Headey rocks.

And I guess Chrysler really liked the promotion the Dodge Ram is getting from The Sarah Connor Chronicles, since they've just announced that they're going to be "sponsoring" Terminator Salvation:

"This spring, 'Terminator 4' comes out and we will be one of the sponsors," Chrysler director of media Susan Thomson said in a presentation at the Automotive News World Congress. "We have a following with the 'Terminator' movies and we are going to continue with that."

Also, the next time people talk about The Sarah Connor Chroncles' ratings, keep in mind that the preem of the final 10 BSG episodes that were promoted and talked up to the ends of the Earth had
2.1 million viewers, 1.3 million adults 18-49. As much as it pains me to say it - Internet Q =/= ratings.

And good news for me (and many others on the flist), Mad Men creator Matt Wiener and AMC/Lionsgate kissed and made up and inked a contract that will see him stay with the show. MM is both one of the most overrated and one of the best TV shows currently ongoing (in their own ways, I'd argue TSCC, MM and FNL are the three best shows I currently watch) and I'm glad that it will continue under Wiener's pretentious-yet-talented leadership.

Finally, "your moment of Zen for the day":


source by way of coffeeandink

Hell, yes.

I've been wanting to write up my thoughts on the new TV season for a while and it's always been the last thing on a list of six things I needed/wanted to do, which is why I never got around to it. Today, I put it at the top of the list and Shazam! here I am, writing up my thoughts on the new TV season.

Last year this time I was in Ireland and consuming all my TV via the miracle of Flash Video, including new shows like CHUCK, PUSHING DAISIES, LIFE, PRIVATE PRACTICE, BIONIC WOMAN and BURN NOTICE; and old standbys like GREY'S ANATOMY, UGLY BETTY, DEXTER and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.

I was greatly enjoying CHUCK, PD and LIFE. BIONIC WOMAN was cancelled for lo, it was bad and the new show-runner wrote Katee Sackhoff's bad/anti-hero cyborg Sarah Corvus out of the show, which removed any sane person's reason for watching. GA was deep in the suck – the characters unrecognizable from the show's second-season high-water mark, the plots stupid beyond words as the show drifted from its "life and times of surgeon trainees" into bad melodrama land – UB was starting to flounder – really, who wants to watch their eponymous heroine torn between her conscience and her soon-to-be-someone else'-baby-daddy boyfriend? – and FNL was showing everyone why you don't mess with what works. But 30R was a solid weekly half-hour of glee, DEXTER was giving a seminar on anti-heroes and how to write them and L&O: SVU, while not groundbreaking in anyway, was reliably entertaining, if grim.

Then November and the writer's strike (fomented by the AMPTP in a deliberate attempt at union-breaking, which may end up backfiring on the producers in the long-run as the abrupt implosion of the US economy this fall chokes off the supply of hedge-fund money that was paying for a large chunk of studio excesses at a point when Hollywood, still arguing with SAG, has very little product in the pipeline), which lasted four months and shut down production on all series TV on the US networks as the productions ran out of scripts.

TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES started in January. By March, I had totally lost my mind for it. Then it came back and… I'm all suspicious and unsure that it can/will tell the story I want it to again, which is a problem that's entirely about my expectations and not the show itself, which is good (which is a post of it own).

The writer's strike ended (yay!), I moved back to Canada (boo!) and Fall TV started up in September, just in time for my post-MA brain slump (uh, Brain, please come back, I need you).

So, of the shows I was watching last fall, I've kicked CHUCK and PUSHING DAISIES to the curb. ( Pushing Daisies - dropped )

CHUCK, ( kicked to the curb )

PRIVATE PRACTIVE ( a sign I should be doing something else )

Of all the shows I watched last season, I loved LIFE most after TSCC. It had so much going for it – unique concept, interesting writing, awesome production values (let's hear it for the music supervisor), a brilliant performances from Damian Lewis (who should be cloned so we could all have one) and strong supporting work from Sarah Shahi, Adam Arkin and Robin Weigert. ( so why have I broken up with Life, then? )

As for BURN NOTICE, ( on hold (again) )

( Returning shows: GA, UB, FNL & DEXTER )

Meanwhile, there's not much new this season that I've really liked: FRINGE lost me after the pilot – dude, if characters don't care about the planeful of DEAD people, there's really no reason for me to invest in the diagesis either. Status: kill it with fire.

I did check out THE MENTALIST and while it's not bad, Simon Baker's character verges on awash in emo-manpain for which I have no patience. OTOH, the supporting cast is interesting. But I remember almost nothing from the episode I saw on Tuesday except for Simon Baker's pretty eyes and Robin Tunney's wan irritation with Baker's character. Status: seriously, dude, I should read a book instead.

Finally, I've been watching MAD MEN, mostly because there's not a lot on Sunday nights that I watch. I think New York Magazine's Vulture blog nails the secret of MAD MEN's appeal (and ultimately, why it's most popular with TV critics): At times, Mad Men has seemed like a walking catalogue of mid-century American fears: women in the workplace, media manipulation, alcoholism, rape, abortion, race, and homosexuality, for starters. As such, it's depicted a culture that suffers from a kind of panophobia — a fear of all things — probably because everyone has become so unmoored from any traditional sense of security.

Which also describes the current undercurrent of North American culture, if you hadn't gotten that already. Like FNL (and, in a way, TSCC), shows that most accurately pinpoint America's insecurities tend to be most widely rejected by American audiences.

SpoilerTV has a video with MAD MEN's cast.

( Stuff I read online today - more on TV, comics, movies and Remembrance Day in Ireland )

My day was like this… only without the sex.

The first time I read this I thought it said “Nancy Pelosi hospitalized with broken pelvis” and thought it was funny. I don’t know why, I just did. Nancy Regan with a broken pelvis, however, is not funny. Poor old lady.

Incredibly cute baby overwhelms with incredible cuteness. And there goes my biological clock… where’d I leave the snooze button?

The Whedonites have finally gone too far: no way in Hell (or Hellmouth) is Buffy tougher than Ripley. This means war. Let’s see how tough you are with a Xenomorph around your neck, kid.

Jezebel says “The Truth Might Not Be Pretty But Obama Makes You Like It Anway”. I say ask Stephane Dion how well the truth worked for him.

Then again, Jezebel also takes something like 1,000 words to comment on a New York Observer piece about the attraction of fictional characters like Don Draper, the sexist, boozing, womanizing, emotionally stunted protagonist of AMC’s soaper Mad Men, when four would have done just as well: girls like bad boys.

Not necessarily the sharpest obsevers of contemporary life, Jezebel, is what I'm saying.

Part embittered Republican anti-Bush screed, part review of Oliver Stone’s W.

NOOOOOOOOOO! KILL IT WITH FIRE! NUKE IT FROM ORBIT! SAVE YOURSELVES!!!!

Henson goes dark with adult puppet movie – as long as it’s better than The Dark Crystal, I’m in.

Where Canada’s election ranks in the Guardian’s consciousness – 250 years of faithful loyalty to the Queen and what does it get us? Fifth billing after Michelle Obama’s itinerary. xp

Martin Kettle on why Britain should have been paying more attention (Nota bene - “hung parliament” is British idiom for a minority parliament). And the Irish Taoiseach is Brian Cox Cowan (50 %).

Spanish politicians respond to Basque separtists with… Iron Maiden?

Once upon a time, I really loved Frank Cho – now I just want to smack him around with a copy Blacklash (violence may not solve anything but sometimes the fantasy makes me happy). While I’m at it, I kind of want to hit the Marvel editorial board that wouldn’t let him have his Shanna series (contradictory? A tad).

English national side avoids tripping over itself to defeat insignificant opponent in World Cup qualifier

What I would give my friends for Xmas if I wasn’t such a cheap bastard.

Finally… EW tells me today is National Grouch Day. That explains a great deal.

Oh, and can anyone tell me how to embed images in text on LJ?

eta - lj added some interesting formatted when I cut&pasted from Word but the links should work now.

Also: Kirk and Spock the Abrams version - I would need a negative integer to express my lack of interest in this movie but ignoring it makes me look less than au courant on pop culture.

The All-Father talks Avatar with Strombo.

And, filed under "essays I don't need to write anymore" - Slate on Red Dawn (spoilers) - guess who's playing the plucky insurgents now?

Two essays on the renewal of religous life in America that have nothing to do with the Sisters of Nazareth's prophecy that I'd be back.

>>Having already seen Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Wanted and Hellboy II this summer, I'm beginning to feel that The Dark Knight is getting overhyped in that "it's so fabulous because it's really a real movie not some comic book movie" way that makes me fear I'm going to really, really hate it.

Batman is hot, brooding, gothic, violent, deductive and an inherently absurd concept. It's when you loose sight of that last one (as much as when you fixate on it) that things go pear-shaped.

>>Fringe has potential but is ridiculously open-ended. I was on board until the one specific weirdness blossomed into a plethora of weirdnesses in the final act for our heroes to invetigate, leaving me with a sick "oh, good - a TV show with all of The X-Files and all of LOST's weaknesses rolled into one." It's also worth remembering that Abrams was spectacularly unsuccessful at making anything coherent or interesting out of Alias's wacky Rambaldi subplot of doom. So while the pilot itself was good, the series could go either way. Just once, I'd like to get up from watching one of these things feeling like the writers knew how the story was going to end. Ultimately, the series will depend on how whether or not people will embrace what is essentially an X-Files update with Pacey as Scully.

>>I actually wrote a post today breaking down the footage in a new SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES trailer shot by shot. I'm rather horrified.

>>The second episode of The Middleman is slightly better than the first, slightly funnier and the in-jokes are slightly better integrated into the whole so that we're not stopping for someone waving and pointing at how cute the script is every other minute. The deliberate messing with people's Character-of-Colour expectations would be better without the Chinese villain ripped from Big Trouble in Little China but I'm genuinely amused by Ida's onboard coffee maker. If episode one was an F (for fast-forwarded to the end), I'd give this one a C for watchable and mildly amusing.

>>Elizabeth Hoyt needs to get over the fake fairytale epigrams at the beginning of each chapter and the backwoodsman who comes to London is beyond incredible - a corporal in the colonial militia would never be invited to socialize with the aristocracy. Never. Let alone one who was so disdainful of fashion as to parade about London in moccasins. I can only surmise that the either character was intended to be Native American until Cassie-gate broke or Ms. Hoyt has watched Last of the Mohicans once too many times.

Twilight looks like the stupidest thing ever.

Emo teen vampires in love - are you fucking kidding me?

Sparlking emo teen vampires in love.

Jesus Christ on a stick.

Am I the only person who remembers when the blood-sucking undead were meant to be scary?


Thank you, lyssie for the link.

Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the 20th century. The story is wound through with regret for a time that has passed, opportunities lost and the pointless ruin that some people seem compelled to make of their lives. It is elegiac in tone and stately in pace and grand in its use of language.

What Brideshead Revisited is not, however, is a sexed-up tale of betrayal, forbidden love and thwarted romance, although those themes are present in the novel to an extent. I can only imagine, having watched the trailer, that people unfamiliar with the book or the magnificent 1980s British TV series (which remains the standard to which every Masterpiece Theatre series aspires) will either be very surprised by the movie itself or Miramax has fucked it up extraodinarily.

Given Julia's presence in the Venetian scenes, I tend to think the latter, alas.

My life writing assignment drained my batteries pretty dry this week. This is what's left:

Saw:

Iron Man - Robert Downey Jr. was great as Tony Stark, the effects were cool, the script funny and Jon Favreau dialed Gwyneth Paltrow back from gratingly annoying to tolerably charming. On the other hand, the big bad was ludicrous and in our post-The Incredibles media reality, there's no excuse for a bad guy to be caught monologuing ever. Stay until after the credits.

Persepolis - awesome and intense and searing - at some point I will have more to say about this but it's too rich in my mind right now. I need to digest a little more.

Bones - Booth, Brennan and a baby made for fun TV. Bones is definitely my favourite forensic procedural - not only do the girls get to be smart but it manages to avoid much of the female death porn that is CSI's stock-in-trade.

Speaking of CSI - the most recent episode was boring even as background viewing while I caught up on a week's worth of newspapers in my room. And last week's Supernatural was even worse. Couldn't make it through either episode. Ick.

Read:

Half of Anna Karenina - stupid Russians! Write shorter books. Also the title is a lie: the book is really about this dude Levin who's Tolstoy's Gary Stu and thinks well-intentioned and terribly patronizing ideas for how to improve the lives of the Russian peasantry. I should look up how the Leninists felt about Tolstoy - I can see it going either way.

On Writing by Stephen King - the dude knows his stuff. A bit of a refresher, particularly after this past year, but all stuff that needs to be said.

Realized:

Lena Headey as Sarah Connor (TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES) pretty much saved my sanity in February: grad school in a foreign country - lonely and depressed and February. It was ugly up inside my head and watching Sarah Connor kick ass helped, put me back in touch with the 18 year old inside of me, her enthusiasm and her passion. I should probably send a thank you card.

I write really well about my own life. I need to find that same voice and momentum in my writing about my fake lives and that probably comes from rewriting, rewriting and rewriting until I find the truth in it. Writing about myself is more about how much truth I leave out (I'm no James Frey - it's all true but it's not all of the truth - there are things, even when you're writing confessional memoirs, that no one else wants, needs or has a right to know about my life). It's finding that line that's the hard part.

If you're feeling oppressed by your grad school advisors, all of who think you're wasting your time writing a horror novel, there's no one better to read on writing than Stephen King.

Interesting review of Thelma and Louise in the context of the controversy and the other films featuring killer women released that year. You can dl the article here.

T&L was 17 years ago. I'm pretty sure the same movie would not be made in the US today.

If people are going to make an unnecessary sequel to the movie series you outgrew 20 years ago, it could be worse than this.

Yeah, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL: trailer, woo-woo, thrills, yadda-yadda.

I don't hate it. It appears very faithful to the original movies and to have much of their charm. It goes without saying that the film itself looks great. Whatever his failings as a writer and director, I would argue that George Lucas is the best producer in the business. He has a great eye for talent behind the scenes and his films always look amazing. And Spielberg is Spielberg - he does what he does very well, although I'd be surprised if Indy4 was anything other than a step backwards for him from the very nearly adult sensibility he brought to directing MUNICH.

But when everything is said and done, I don't love it either. I was 16 when the last INDIANA JONES movie came out and, while I loved them, I never imprinted on them the way I did ALIENS, X-MEN comics and, earlier, STAR WARS. I was a bit too young to moon over Dr. Jones and a bit too old to get entirely lost in the adventure and after Karen Allen's Marian Ravenwood, Indy's leading ladies got progressively less interesting and less honest. The Evil!Greedy!Nazi!Babe! in LAST CRUSADE (IMO the weakest of the original films) left a bad taste in my mouth at a time when I was discovering Ellen Ripley and Tasha Yar. Having no memory or nostalgic attachment to the Saturday-afternoon serials INDIANA JONES referenced, I drifted away from the movies. That was then, this is now and you'd think the collective braintrust of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg could have come up with a new story in the last 20 years rather than perpetually recycling their earlier successes.

But apparently not.

Still, unless KotCS is absolutely slated in the reviews, I'll go see it. Chances are good I'll see it within a day or two of its release because I don't do delayed gratification - waiting the 14 months or so of production time between the announcement of a cast and a film's release is generally enough for me - and I am excited by the cast, if not what I've heard of the plot or the new characters.

Writing this, I did ask myself what the difference between INDIANA JONES coming back 19 years after the last film and TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES 17 years after T2 (no, T3 as filmed does not count) beyond the idea of one excites me and the other doesn't. If there is anything but personal taste involved, I think it is that the latter represents a new take on the story and universe, while the former is another chapter of an established story. Also, I believe that there's a difference between storytelling in TV and film, TV being about how character changes over time, whereas film is about plot - a gross simplification but true nonetheless. As a writer, I'm a sucker for character stories (especially character stories with guns and explosions and killer robots/aliens) and INDIANA JONES, although populated by great characters, has never been a franchise known for great characterization.

But I'll still be sitting in the third row on the right-hand aisle with my popcorn come May, waiting to be entertained.

So, strolling through NeverNeverLand, I discovered someone had uploaded a camcorder copy of Cloverfield. The Post-Modern Ouroborosness was irresistable, so I gave it a watch.

Two things: even on my laptop, the camera work gave me a headache, so if you are at all sensitive to motion sickness, just skip it. Second, you won't be missing anything you can't afford to miss.

Forget Harry Knowles and the rest of the Online Geek Chorus with their overwrought plaudits: Cloverfield is a monster movie and nothing more. Unless the thought of Godzilla brings you to orgasm, the strongest impression Cloverfield will leave on you is a desire for dramamine.

There are a couple of genuine chills (by which I mean two) and a gross out. But the movie takes far too long to get going for a film that only lasts 73 minutes (not including about nine minutes of credits) and the characters introduced in those 20 minutes are not particularly engaging nor is the plot - a group of friends make their way from Lower Manhattan to Midtown to rescue another friend from the wreckage of her building - particularly compelling or sensical. Throughout the course of the movie, it also requires people in authority to act in boneheaded and unrealistic ways, beginning with the idea that a civilian would be allowed to wander around a military forward operation base with a live camera.

A good horror movie, like The Terminator, puts the protagonists into a constant state of danger, while far too often in Cloverfield, our bunch of yuppie idiots are allowed to wander around unchecked. We are given glimpses of the monster marauding off in the distance but there's seldom a sense of imminent danger. And since my brain wasn't dealing with massive amounts of stress-based neurotransmitters, I had time to wonder about things like "if they're evacuating Manhattan, why aren't the NYPD patrolling the streets to make sure people actually leave?" and "Where is the NYFD? You'd think they'd be attempting to rescue people from this collapsed building while the army fights the monster off in the distance." Apparently, in the Cloverfield universe, there's no such thing as first responders or emergency plans.

Which brings me to the thing that's probably most annoying about Cloverfield - it takes an awful big set of balls to make a movie about a monster knocking over buildings in New York City in a version of reality where 9/11 and the World Trade Centre didn't happen. Although it obviously did because Cloverfield ransacks the library of indelible images from that day - white clouds of debris billowing through city streets, rains of paper, shell-shocked survivors painted white with with concrete dust and ash wandering the streets - but if the Cloverfield monster is meant to be a metaphor for 9/11 it fails.

Cloverfield seeks to recreate the experience of such on-the-spot recordings as the Zapruder film or the Rodney King video, not to mention the upteen thousand images of the 9/11 attacks. However, what makes these amateur records such compelling viewing is what we, the audience, know about their context. The images, while shocking in themselves, accrue weight and meaning through what we know about the events that came before and came after. No movie using the faux-witness style, and certainly not Cloverfield, can match those experiences. We know that what we're watching isn't real and the extremely limited first person perspective of Cloverfield actually makes it harder to get lost in the movie as we're constantly being reminded that what we're viewing is a construct. Without the dramatic impact of a sustained narrative or any information on the monster itself, it's hard to look at Cloverfield's appropriation of 9/11 imagery and New York setting as anything more than an unpleasantly opportunistic attempt at piggybacking a genre film on the lingering echoes of real-world tragedy.

There was never going to be a good time for the next disaster movie set in New York, not that I understand why the monster always has to eat New York anyway. Still, having pulled the pin on the idea, I wish that JJ Abrams and his surrogates Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves had made a better movie as well as one that had the guts to confront directly the event they so deliberately evoke.

Bottom line: worth a trip to the cinema for the Godzilla-lover, a rental for everyone else. And then only if you've got a strong stomach. For everyone else, I recommend Nextwave #1, same story, better dialogue.