Fumarama

Here is one of my problems with television criticism: the critics have to judge a show for a readers based only on one or (maybe two episodes). And I think that one of the great things about tv is that it is this ever evolving story, and so a show may take a while to find its groove. You see that even with popular shows, critics were a lot more excited about Entourage the second as opposed to the first season. But what can they do? It is a difficult medium to criticize in the traditional sense (that of books and movies and plays).

So despite my opposition to this method of criticism, I thought I would experiment and see how well I can judge shows based on their first episode. And thus we have my new project. I will watch every pilot episode of a fictional show on network tv (a girl needs parameters) and then well write about what i thought. This is good. I am reinserting purpose into my blog. You would not want it to flounder.

For the most part, none of this will come up until Mid-September when the new season really starts. But Fox has to start part of its season now because of those pesky baseball playoffs. So Monday night, I watched Vanished. And well, it seems like my project may be a failure even before it begins in earnest. I just have nothing to say about the show. I mean it is fine. A senator's wife goes missing, and then it appears that she had a bunch of secrets, and so it is a giant who done it. And I tend to like who done its, cause I always want to know who did it. At the same time, this story managed not to be particularly compelling. The dialogue was pretty awful. And they were all just such stock characters. Maybe I would watch it again if I had nothing going on in my life, but as it is, it does not make the cut.

At the end of Anything Else, (which I have not seen but read several reviews for) Woody Allen's character advises the young Woody Allen Surrigate to go take a job in LA. Many reviewers took this as a sign that Woody Allen could no longer find any inspiration in the City in which he made all his movies. For example, A.O. Scott of the New York Times (my first source of movie reviews, before i move on to the Post, Slate, Entertainment Weekly, and ocassionally the New Republic, Salon too but I hate watching that commercial)

Though Manhattan (shot this time by Darius Khondji) is as lovely, and as loved, as ever -- especially Central Park, which gives off an easy glow of enchantment in the background -- ''Anything Else'' views the city as a land of traps and snares. Dobel, intervening on his young friend's behalf, nudges Jerry toward a future in Los Angeles, where a nice television job is waiting. In ''Annie Hall,'' of course, California was a New York writer's worst nightmare, a land of endless vacuousness, without the friction and frenzy that make life interesting. (In ''Hollywood Ending'' it was the land of smooth talk and big money.)

This time, though, the golden West hovers as an attractive alternative, an escape from the enervating habits and connections that already, in his early 20's, threaten Jerry's sense of balance. The moral of this odd, diverting fable may not be all that shocking, unless of course, you consider the source.

When Match Point came out, it built on the Anything Else reviewer wisdom, he had lost his way in New York and needed to go to London. (I also read several reviews for Match Point. It is a terrible habit. Each review gives away small plot points, but between several reviews I can usually piece together the whole movie. I am trying to quit).

If ever there was a case to be made for an artist finding inspiration abroad, Allen's first foray out of New York makes a powerful argument. Desson Thomson, Washington Post.

Anyway, so I recently saw Scoop, the second Woody Allen London Inspired film. I enjoyed it immensely (although I think Stephen Hunter's terrible review of it in the WaPo is totally worth reading, he calls it "the worst film that Woody Allen has ever made." But here's the biggest fodder for the Woody Allen New York v. London conventional wisdom (spoiler), London kills the Woody Allen character. And its London's Londonness, in the form of driving on the wrong side of the street, that kills him. Poor guy. His character has come to hate New York, advising young writers to leave it, but actually leaving New York kills the Woody Allen character.

So the message of the movie as interpreted by me, sure, you may be sick of New York, think it is too hot (or cold), too crowded, too isolating, too much pressure, too expensive, and smelly, but the city and its norms seep so deeply into your bones (despite the fact that maybe you spent 5 of the last 7 years determined to leave but stupidly decided that to go to law school there) that if you are anywhere else it just does not quite feel right. And if you are a 70 year old man who has spent his whole life there, you end up driving on the wrong side of the road and crashing to your death.

I have a very high tolerance for the lame. Very very high. And despite that, this movie got so awfully, painfully corny at points that I burst out laughing at the most pivotal moments. And it was not good laughter. It was that awkward laughter where you find yourself embarrassed both to be sitting there watching this movie and for the actors and filmmakers for making something so bad. They needed to turn down the obvious, over the top emotion.

But on the other hand, the movie had a scene of random synchronized dancing, which I love.

I just saw the last half an hour of 10 Things I Hate About You again. God, I love that movie. But this time around, I really felt like I got a preview of Heath Ledger's Oscar Worthy performance in Brokeback Mountain. I mean you know the scene where Julia Stiles reads the poem about all the things she hates about him. He looks so tortured. I could totally see a proto-Ennis Del Mar.

I was in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, and sitting next to me at the restaurant was this (possible) couple. The woman was very tan and she was wearing a shirt that showed 40% of her breasts, which I am pretty sure were tan too. The guy was on his cell phone the entire meal. He was telling a story about a woman who tried to commit suicide and how she ruined an apartment in the process, and he was telling the story in this awful way, without emotion, but also like he was talking about some important business in the office or something, but you could just tell that he told all his stories this way, like everything out of his mouth, no matter how superficial, and I suspect that most of it is superficial, is just really important. And the woman kept picking up her cell phone (so that for much of their lunch they were both on their cell phones) and saying things like "talk to me" and "you are fired. Haha." And they were going to the races midday on a Thurs, obviously making me wonder what kind of jobs they have.

As we were walking out, I said to Christine: "this is a brand of awful I don't quite recognize."
She responded "California rich."

But here is the thing, my statement was not quite true, I just said it because I thought it was clever. (it is always a balancing act for me between being accurate and being pithy). I have seen such people before. At some point this spring I watched a marathon of the Real Housewives of Orange County. But seeing that couple in that restaurant was still really strange for me because in some wierd way I did not think that the people on the Real Housewives of Orange County were real.

The same scenerio replicated itself on the beach where there were all these teenage girls with perfect bodies in bikinis, and I was like "shit, I thought girls like this only existed on Laguana Beach" and Casey had to be like "well, Laguana Beach is not that far from here."

Here is the thing: reality tv is compelling precisely because it is real people. I mean if it was not for the fact that you could be like "WTF, who actually acts like this?" (I guess some people call it voyeurism), there would be no point in watching, because the stories themselves are not that interesting. But at the same time, there is this disconnect in the mind between the belief that I am watching real people, and the realization that they are actually flesh and blood people I could encounter. I tend to actually think of them just as characters. So in this weird way even as I watch reality tv, I am undermining the whole point of it. But the curiousity for it has not gone away.

This makes no sense. What am I doing?