Chuck Season Three

The story so far: One of my local TV stations used to run The Simpsons syndicated when I got home and was eating dinner. When Chuck started it was right after The Simpsons so even though the premise wasn't that promising I ended up watching maybe a third or so of the first season. Eventually The Simpsons was ditched in favor of Jeopardy or some other mindless game show so I now almost never watch "live" TV and consequently was mostly going to pass on Chuck )even though that makes it sound like I thought this through to a decision when really I never considered it). But a guy at work kept talking it up and eventually I watched nearly all the second season, missing only a few at the first. And it was pretty fun in a mostly haphazard sort of way. There was a big mis-step when they decided to Get Serious and have Chuck secretly witness Sarah murder an unarmed spy who was threatening him but I knew the show couldn't pull off any real drama and sure enough that lasted barely into the next episode. Then there was a big, reasonably inventive storyline at the end (Chevy Chase as an evil mastermind!) that worked pretty well and made big shakeups in the premise.

The story today: Except Season Three undid everything in the first episode. The worst decision was to kill off the corporate-shill store manager but not reveal that to most of the characters, instead telling them he'd been transferred to another store. So why not just transfer him? The murder is out of keeping with the show's tone, especially when it went to this much trouble to reboot. That was the other mistake - undoing the previous story elements so that the status quo is the same as the first two seasons.

There is one change that's been kept so far which is that Chuck now has an improved Intersect in his head that will let him do actions he couldn't before - kung fu, surgical procedures, speak foreign languages, etc. The mistake is that the writers decided to make it defective so that sometimes the Intersect works and sometimes not. Stated that way this seems like a decent approach that avoids making Chuck a superspy but clearly it wasn't thought completely through. The problem is that the defect is being used so that the Intersect doesn't work when that's "dramatic" but works when the writers need it to. So in a recent episode Chuck learned a martial arts kick when it was useful for a comic gag (and to start a subplot) but not when it was actually needed for a real fight.

There also doesn't seem to have been much thought about how the show should actually work now that the original concept has been more or less played out. The conflict between spy activity and Buy More regular life drove most of the humor but now that connection is long gone and we're left with a decent workplace sitcom and a half-assed spy show. Getting the two together will start to be more and more arbitrary, possibly ending up with the approach taken by Friends where all the main characters had to be in every episode so eventually the two or three main stories had no relation to each other and could have been shuffled with no effect on each other.

Oh and that whole romantic/sexual tension stuff is just not tense or funny or interesting - same for Chuck's timid nerdiness. I may give the show one more episode to do something but most likely it's a finished deal.

Avatar (Cameron 2009)

If I was 15 there's a good chance I'd think this was an amazing film but since that's been a long time ago now all I think is why so many awards are going to what is in every respect except budget a B-movie. Yes that does sound almost like a compliment but I mean it's closer to one of those lame Lippert productions that MST3K loved to ridicule (except that Avatar is mostly an animated film). It probably doesn't take any more than 15 minutes into Avatar than you can predict the entire story. Isn't there supposed to be some kind of second act twist? Or did Cameron (who can still direct an action sequence like nobody's business but shouldn't be writing his own films) believe that he'd actually done that? Michelle Rodriguez could have hooked him up with a Lost writer or two. (Just imagine The People teaming up with The Others leading a herd of polar bears.)

Some stray thoughts:

* So 140 years into the future when they send a super-expensive piece of biotech out into the field nobody bothers to put a GPS into it?

* The aliens are a mix of generic American Indians and Ewoks (and mostly "played" by black actors) while the evil miners & soldiers are almost all white guys. Did nobody point this out to Cameron? Or was a working title for the film Liberal Guilt? (Though not guilty enough for Cameron to realize how racist this is.) Can you imagine if he'd swapped Rodriguez and Ribisi's roles? Or better yet had the mining boss played by, say, Oprah?

* This good v. evil idea is also why the military sequences are deliberately evocative of Vietnam movies. Notice how the opening sequence is mostly VTOL-type craft but later we get what are essentially helicopters. I couldn't help but think of a line from Gardens of Stone where somebody says how can the enemy possibly hope to win by fighting helicopers with bows and arrows and the response is how could they possibly hope to defeat an enemy that would fight helicopters with bows and arrows.

* One reason for making the aliens that way is Cameron wanted them to be utopian and one function of utopias over the past four centuries is to criticize the existing social structure. But Cameron really should have been telling a story and he's made them so perfect that at some point there's really no drama. Even trying to make them underdogs he went so far to underpower them that he had to create a "flux" to reduce the power of most human weapons and vehicle. Apparently even that didn't satisify him and in the film's most jaw-dropping moment (again, not meant in a good way) he used a literal deus ex mundus to save the aliens. (Mama Planet has a sense of dramatic timing - note how she didn't bother attacking until it would change the course of the battle.)

* Why even bother making Jake lame? The story would have played out almost exactly the same if he wasn't and actually might have been more interesting if he had a conflict between duty and what he's seeing rather than wanting to get an operation. (Though honestly I'm not really sure if viewers are supposed to believe he's thinking at all considering how little is devoted to anything except his Dances With Wolves moments.)

* And like the Costner film this is in a long line where some white guy shows minorities/Third Worlders/indigenous people how they can save themselves and live a proper life. (Or similarly a man showing women how to be women in Tootsie.) What seems so obvious in stuff from the 30s & 40s probably gets a pass now if we have to read subtitles.

* So Rodriguez does show up to rescue our heroes from prison. Good for her. But wait - didn't she disobey direct orders and visibly break ranks? Shouldn't she be in prison herself waiting a court martial?

* For a world that's so deadly (I half expected something on the order of Harry Harrison's Deathworld) it's notable that by the end bodies can lie in the forest for hours and nothing tries to nibble on it. Maybe The People don't taste so good. Ever notice how many designers (or creative consultants if that's their title) when trying to come up with alien wildlife just add a couple of limbs? Now why would animals that live in a heavily undergrown jungle need extra legs? Especially on a planet that we're told has lower gravity (though apart from that bit of dialogue there's nothing else to indicate it).

* I also can't help wondering why the shaman woman knew the Tree of Life can transfer a consciousness. Is that something they do often? An inspired guess?

* The frequent use of 2008/9 slang ("bitch" etc), attitudes and the simplistic story mean that viewers in a 30-40 years will think this is just as dated as old stuff seems to us now. The dialogue part in SF is always tough because if you try to make it too much like a potential future then you're likely to lose readers/viewers (think of A Clockwork Orange (book not film) or Riddley Walker). Still, Cameron didn't even bother trying. Dude, the computers are just toys - they can't improve the film.

* Nobody cares but it was odd (well not too odd, in fact barely even worth mentioning) watching Drag Me to Hell in the morning and then going to this later and seeing the same character actor Dileep Rao (psychic and scientist respectively). He's been in exactly two feature films and I just happened to see them on the same day.

Two films

C.S. Lewis remarked somewhere (I think in The Discarded Image) that real art always gives too much or too little information for the average viewer/reader. Now of course this is pretty smug--gosh we know better than the plebes--and it's also dead-wrong unless you're a true elitist, but still it's something worth considering. Many artists do in fact give us too much, high modernists such as Joyce, Pound, Proust, etc being prime examples. Others keep it spare, Beckett, Glass or possibly Chekhov. And then there are some such as Shakespeare who in their time were perfectly transparent but today are too much. The point that I take from Lewis is more a general approach rather than absolutes - in other words many people have trouble with this type of art because they don't know how to deal with the abundance or the lack. After all somebody who can plow through enormous fantasy trilogies or for that matter the Aubery/Maturin series certainly has the stamina for Proust; it's the mindset that's a different issue.

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch 2009) - For the first 10, 15 minutes I thought Jarmusch had made a completely tedious clunker. Then the film's unique narrative (there really isn't much of one) and texture (repetition, blankness, calmness) started to take over and if by the end I wasn't 100% convinced it still stands as a pretty remarkable work. In the solid, verite-esque making-of doc on the DVD Jarmusch remarks that he's made his big-budget action film with fights, schemes, hot babes, exotic locations, etc and the odd thing is that he's completely right except for the "big budget" part. The catch? The Limits of Control is sort of the film that's left when you take all the stuff we usually see in an action thriller out, leaving us with walking, waiting, driving, sleeping. It's not a Warhol film because there actually are secret meetings, coded messages, an action sequence, clandestine activities, identity changes, it's just that in Jarmusch's world we're watching a pattern not pretending to delve into psychology or causation. And very little of this is ever explained. Why does the protagonist always order two espressos? Personal preference? (We only ever see him drink one.) A flag for his contacts? For part of the film I thought Jarmusch had made Dead Man II and that we'd get the same revelation as there or maybe as De Palma's Femme Fatale. In fact there are a few moments that are completely inexplicable such as a film poster portraying an event that the artist couldn't possibly have witnessed. And in the film's most audacious moment, the protagonist is confronted with the task of entering a building that appears utterly secure and fully monitored. His explanation of how it was accomplished more or less sums up the film and honors the thriller convention of its main character's ingenuity while otherwise utterly violating not just thriller conventions but those of most any form of film. That the moment works shows how much Jarmusch is in control or maybe just willing to trust a lack of control. This is a film that I suspect will improve on a second viewing.

La mujer sin cabeza / The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel 2008) - Another film that withholds or at least doesn't bother with certain information but one centered around a never-resolved mystery that suggests Blow-Up or L'Avventura. A woman on a remote road hits something - was it a dog or the boy whose body is found nearby several days later? The first section effectively creates a sense of anomie and directionless tension as the woman wanders through a hospital, her job and her home in what seems to be a kind of vauge shock. Martel presents much of this in an oblique method. The incident, for instance, is shot with a camera on the passenger's seat pointed at the driver and with one exception there are no edits or camera movements. Even when she pulls the car over to get out we can only see her in corners of the image or sections of the car window. Now the one exception is an unmotivated cutaway (meaning it's clearly not meant to be anything the woman sees) where we see the object in the road behind. It looks mostly like a dog but is in extreme longshot so you can't really tell - other sections of the film support the dog idea but it's clear after a while that resolving what happened isn't in any way the point of the film. In fact after a while I'm not sure what the point was meant to be and I don't mean that in a good way. Many reviewers claim it's an expose of privileged class but that's a difficult argument to make. Yes, the woman is a dentist and obviously pretty well off, and yes she does employ clearly not well-off Indians to garden or clean but that's hardly anything newsworthy, hardly even an observation. In one sequence where the woman drives a worker home the film even resorts to that idea that the lower classes may be poor but they have more fun, they're more open and more alive (or at least have better music). Martel's way of presenting a (non)story through stray bits of dialogue, glancing moments, apparently motiveless actions is one that normally I would love but here just leaves me cold. (And I feel like pointing out that some reviews have over-played the ambiguity - Hoberman says a "ghostly" handprint on the car window suggests the boy was hit but the print was there before the incident, while another reviewer says we're never shown how the woman gets to the hospital which for one thing doesn't really matter but more importantly there's a fairly long shot showing her being driven, a shot that's replicated later in the film. My pointing out thus endeth.)

Comics - happy happy joy joy?

"I just like the idea of my escapism actually feeling less oppressive than my real life again."

That mostly sums up the point of Will 2010 Be The Year Of Superheroic Niceness?, an accurate piece about The Big Two's plans to turn their lines lighter, less grim (marketing hooks are Heroic Age at Marvel and Brightest Day at DC). Though the piece avoids laying any blame on the actual comic writers that's really where it goes (and I'm including the editorial staff here since in this world they're far more a creative force than book publishing editors). They're the ones who seem incapable of moving beyond the status quo and whose collective idea of "serious" is determining which character dies next. So we get a constant stream of Big Events where Nothing Will Ever Be the Same (though it always is), heavy-handed preaching (do good, people) and sheer jaw-dropping stupidity (not the fun kind either). Just so we know that the creators are serious.

Some of this is almost built into the system. Since each company has to produce a significant number of issues each year, most featuring tentpole characters, after a while it's hard to keep that interesting. So there have to be changes though usually not ones that will alienate the readers (though the widely disparaged Kyle Rayner and One More Day events show that no matter how much fans complain they won't completely abandon characters). This is where the grim 'n' gritty comes in. Ever since the double-whammy of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns most comics creators have assumed that what gave those works their power was the violence and sex and took them as a license to go wild until we end up with the traditionally light DC giving us a teenaged girl tortured to death with power tools (though she got better) or another stuffed into a refrigerator. Or over at Marvel the entire Ultimatum mess.

Admittedly those are extreme examples but the general feel has been that comics creators think they have to engage with The Real World though the results are rarely worth the trouble. These are after all stories about grown people in colorful, tight costumes and boasting magical powers - there are limits to realism before they just become silly. (One of the nadirs is the Iron Man movie when in blatant Bush propaganda he trots over to the "Middle East" to vanquish the bad guys, though almost anything Judd Winick writes is also a good candidate.)

So in a way to move from the kids stigma that always haunts comics, many creators push to be more grown-up though apparently without really understanding what that might mean in this context. Just look at Identity Crisis which took a "real" novelist for writer and gave us a stupendously misjudged moment with the entire rape sequence. (The tiny footprints on a victim's brain was also misjudged but in an entirely different way.) This isn't the place to discuss why murder is acceptable for pure escapist entertainment (just turn on your TV or see the walls in libraries & bookstores) but not rape, or at least not in Anglo-American culture. In fact it's a little hard to imagine what the creators were thinking but the clear point is to, y'know, keep it real and apparently rape, murder and forced lobotomies are the only ways they could think to do that. Just recently in the Blackest Night event Kyle Rayner died and the forums were full of comments about how successfully DC managed to keep this quiet. The reason as it turns out is that he was resurrected the very next issue with The Power of Love just like T'Challa in the current Black Panther series. (And as much as I defend superhero comics it's stuff like this made by adults in all apparent seriousness that make me want to jump ship.) On a broader level that's why we're also getting this constant stream of dead characters or why potentially substantial stories such as Civil War end up being yet more one-sided blather - the creators are so blinded by an idea of "reality" that they can't think of anything else to do. (It's also why so many stories take five issues when one would really be enough - they want to tell every little moment.)

I'm not saying that we should go back to the Silver Age - that ship has, as they say, sailed. But it's notable that the kids comics released as Marvel Adventures and Johnny DC (most apparently cancelled now) have been more imaginative, substantial and plain fun than the regular series. And there are some that can be considered "grown-up" without falling into this grimness trap - at the moment I'd point out Brubaker's Captain America as an example even if he did kill off the main character. Perhaps this is in some way related to the constant need to point out a moral that tends to infect so much mainstream comics (though it's possibly even more prominent in TV). The creators don't entirely understand how to tell a story or at least don't feel comfortable if that's all they're doing.

I'm not suggesting that comic writers need to bone up on Henry James or Chekhov but certainly they appear to have read too narrowly. Geoff Johns is a perfect example of somebody intimately familiar with comics (at least superhero comics) but seems to have little beyond that. Just check out his recent Green Lantern run for an example of how turgid and insular a writer can get. It's enough to drive a reader over to Ware and Tomine and etc. Honestly though I don't expect anything to change. There's still going to be some good work done amidst the flow of junk and while some people will claim that's always the case for anything I can't help but keep hoping otherwise.

Being Human

When I first heard about this show a few months ago it was described as a vampire, werewolf and ghost are roommates. Pure sitcom fun, right? Well imagine my surprise watching the pilot ep to find that it's a fairly dark, quasi-existentialist drama, though admittedly with bits of low-key humor. (And I should point out that I watched the original BBC eps - apparently the ones airing on BBC America are heavily edited for content and time.) One interesting quirk is that after the pilot all the main roles except for one were recast but the entire pilot is still the beginning of the story. It's peculiar to see the story continue with different actors, though clearly part of the intention was to lighten it up just a bit. (Bunuel tried the same tactic in Tristana, definitely one of his lesser films.)

Being Human does go a bit overboard on underlining what "being human" might mean rather than letting that come out of the events. Doesn't help that most of the eps open with voice-over musings that suggest Mohinder wandered over from Heroes to lend a hand. But that's easy to let slide considering that it otherwise manages to be clever, reasonably surprising and sometimes even effectively moving, perhaps a result of spending a bit more time on daily life than the Big Plot Points. The ending seems a tad forced but mostly it effectively wraps up the stories by the end of the season without feeling arbitrary. Season two just started a week or so back.

And the world's best-selling author is....

...James Patterson? Then again his books are always on the new release tables and I couldn't tell him apart from Michael Connelly, John Sanford or any of those, though it seems likely they're imitating Patterson (even down to jacket design). This profile is actually pretty interesting even if it doesn't make me want to read any of his books. The journalist might have added a bit more context - this type of industrial fiction production dates back at least to Fantomas and American pulps and runs up through 50s/60s paperback originals and series like Mack Bolan, Perry Rhodan and The Executioner with companies like Harlequin coming from a less author-centered angle. Ever notice how people whose work is critically disparaged tend to fall back on the "well lots of people like it" defense. There is some truth in that but it's also worth remembering that Hitler won an election as far as the wisdom of crowds (if we didn't need reminding). It's hard to tell how much Patterson actually uses this himself and how much is just the journalist picking quotes.

A few links

* Newspaper articles are too long (and follow outdated stylistic ideas).

* The New Yorker on Neil Gaiman. (Though one error: the original Sandman did not wear a zoot suit, just a trenchcoat.)

* Creepy unexplained broadcasts.

* Top 10 Victorian detective stories.

* Dirda on Auster and Highsmith.