WARNING: Filler
Lately I’ve been swamped at work writing about turtles and burnt out at home from writing about turtles and haven’t written anything worth reading on this blog in ages. I know, I know, “but what about the people?” you’re asking. “What about your legions of fans?” I’ve let them down, I’ll admit. Turned soft. The term “yella belly” comes to mind. But me, I’m a man of principle, and I missed this old text box and these old yammerings. So here’s something. It’s not much, but it’s what has kept me busy post-work these last few weeks, or months, or whatever. I thought about doing the whole “Best of the Decade” thing a month ago when 2010 was starting but A) never got around to it, and B) it wasn’t the end of the decade. So, here’s this instead.
WRESTLEFEST I
Know what looks great on a brand new HDTV? You guessed it: professional wrestling. I know, I know, it’s professional wrestling. And honestly, the DVD a friend and I rented for our night of pizza, beer and nostalgia was old and had terrible production value and wasn’t even full widescreen. But…wrestling! Who woulda thought? Back in the day we loved this stuff. Like, seriously loved it. The catchphrases, the betrayals, everything. Even of all the things I love most today, the movies that nail me to the seat and leave me thinking about all these deep ideas and careful camera angles… barely do they ever have the hold on me that wrestling did back in the ’90s. Back then, when a wrestler you loved was talking, you listened. You didn’t dare leave to get a snack or a drink. If you had to pee, you held it. When The Rock was facing Goldberg in a pay-per-view, you gathered your friends together and ponied up 60bucks to watch it. There isn’t a two-hour film in the world I’d throw down $60 to watch today. Never.
Thinking wasn’t encouraged during Raw Is Raw or Monday Night Nitro, and you know what? That’s what made it good. None of it was real, you knew that, and these characters…you didn’t have to feel bad for them when they got pulverized in the ring or Chris Jericho made a nickname out of them (oh, Stinko Malenko!). We turned our backs on our favorites just as quickly as their allies did in the show. It was never personal, it was wrestling.
CHUCK (Mondays at 9pm on NBC)
It isn’t the smartest show in the world, the best written, the best acted or…really the best anything. But dammit, Chuck’s fun. When you get home late on a Monday or Tuesday after spending all day cooped up in an office writing about the subtle variations between the herbivorous green sea turtle and the omnivorous loggerhead, sometimes all you want is to watch good-looking, good-hearted, and often hapless people make jokes, download CIA computers into their heads, reference pop culture and kick ass. On a lazy Monday night, is that really too much to ask?
Side-favorite thing: Hulu. Ok, add this to the list of things that I’m way behind the boat on. But Hulu’s fantastic. Now if I can only get my computer and PS3 to sync…
“Behind the boat” double-side-favorite thing: 30 Rock. Season 1 and Season 2 were good, sometimes great and always funny. But season 3 had me rolling. I love so much about this season, and if I hadn’t just caught up to the latest season and started the when-is-it-supposed-to-get-good? Lost, it would be way more than just a sidenote.
COMMUNITY (Thursdays at 8pm on NBC)
Yeah, I like Chuck. But Community…Community I love. For my money, it’s tied with The Office (which I didn’t include b/c…well, isn’t it obvious?) for best comedy out right now. It’s a treasure.
Apparently from the same guys who produced Arrested Development (which I’m too lazy to fact-check right now), the show definitely isn’t as good as Arrested, but it plays its hand kinda the same way. All the characters here, like in Arrested, are charicatures, but the show knows that they are, it plays off of the fact that they are. This isn’t bad or lazy writing, it’s the best kind of writing, the kind that takes a genre or medium that seems to have little where else to go and explores that very fact. Community is the result of what happens when a show with incredibly talented people behind it don’t try to reinvent the wheel as much as they do just try to make it roll as smoothly as possible…while at the same time making reference to the fact that there’s a wheel at all.
If you’re not watching Community, start. It’s what I look forward to most in the week.
…wow…just realized how pathetic that sounds…
ALL THINGS EBERT
I know I’ve talked about Ebert before so I’ll just say that if the only Roger Ebert is you know is Roger Ebert the Film Critic, you’re truly missing out. One of my favorite things around, Ebert’s blog is consistently fascinating. He talks cinema often–and you can always visit his homepage for full reviews–but it’s the personal pieces that get me. Always an equal mix of personal essay, social (or sometimes self-)criticism, and reflection, reading his blog is like watching a quick-shot slideshow of someone’s thought process, someone who’s constantly taking in and examining new information and art while also taking time to look back, having balls enough to say, “You know what? I’m getting old. So this is my life…candidly.”
The guy can no longer speak; letters are his primary mode of communication now, not sounds. And so reading his letters are almost like reading his thoughts, an ongoing thread etched in elegant prose about what’s going on behind his desk and screen and fingers and eyes. Unable to speak, the great Roger Ebert has never had more to say.
COMICS
Don’t call them funny papers. Comics…they’re misunderstood. Maybe they always have been.
But, this isn’t a “this is why comics are quality” piece. You can find that in a million other places. This is a “I just got back into comics after years away from it and I’m glad I’m back cuz they’re awesome” piece. Which is better, I think.
Y: the Last Man – I followed this series as it was written a few years back, then, for whatever reason, stopped before getting the last trade. What was I thinking! Don’t ask me how but Brian K. Vaughn is able to pull off the most flagrantly conscious “hip” dialogue on the planet, the most consciously conscious around. Which isn’t to say his writing isn’t smart, it is. But the dialogue…in other hands would tank. No doubt about it. Try to talk like Yorick Brown in the real world and just wait for someone to go all 4th-grade throwback and call you a poseur.
Daredevil – I just read Kevin Smith’s “Gaurdian Devil” run and just bought Frank Miller’s “Born Again.” This is me jumping in headlong. After that…Bring on Bendis! It seems the darker the superhero the more I like them. I like a hero who’s just, almost–this close–about to go insane. He knows what he’s doing is crazy but he’s torn. He’s tormented by his power, obsessed with it, in a way. It’s like he knows that if stops fighting crime, not only his city will fall, but people will stop writing about him. And that can’t happen, because like Henry in Goodfellas, then our hero turn into an average nobody like us…he’d have to live the rest of his life like a schnook.
JOHN HUGHES
So I have this list of directors I keep on my computer. The idea is that I write down someone I’m interested in, either from a movie that grabbed me and made me want to check out the oeuvre (what a word) or someone I’ve heard a lot about and feel like I “should” see. Quentin Tarantino is an example of the first kind. He’s one of the first directors I checked out. Ingmar Bergman’s an example of the second.
Anyway, the idea is that I list these directors and then work down the list, watching each’s entire filmography in chronological order before moving onto the second. This has been a long process, but it’s one I find so rewarding–so much, in fact, that I’ll often put off a movie I want to see because I’d rather catch it in context. There’s so much more to a movie, I’ve found, than the actual movie. There’s the person/people making it, and their story and obsessions, their inclinations toward a certain theme or aesthetic, evolution and experimentation. Sure, you can watch Annie Hall a million times, but it’ll never really hold the same weight, it’ll never be so surprising yet make so much sense until you’ve seen all the “early Allen” slapstick comedies Woody made before it. You can watch The Wrestler, but something about it changes when you know that the same guy who made The Fountain put it together. I’ll say it: sometimes filmmakers are even more interesting than their films.
So John Hughes is next, and maybe after him Jim Jarmusch, or Billy Wilder, or the rest of Stanley Kubrick (finally). Tonight I’ll watch Sixteen Candles and next will be the (I fear, over-)hyped The Breakfast Club. I haven’t seen either of these movies, and I call myself a cinephile. Psh…
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 4:10 pm and is filed under film, television, white noise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
