How We Waited Out The Election

Only now, as the smoke clears and the euphoria dies down, do I realise how much the wait for November the fourth had turned my mind into a stagnant pond, a Moebius strip of re-thought thoughts, cognition turned into a chore thanks to the insane worry over something I literally had no control over (at least Canyon could vote, an act that made her justifiably happy). Two days later, and look at me! I'm all florid and shit, like what I was previous, like.

During that interminable wait, we tried to keep ourselves occupied and not just keep reading the same four websites (though we enjoyed it all) and getting even more obsessed than usual with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Our efforts bore some pleasant fruit (the cherries and strawberries of the week) and some disappointing fruit too (mangoes, sharon fruit and unripe bananas, metaphorically speaking).

Burn After Reading

I had high hopes for this after the excellence of No Country For Old Men had erased disappointed memories of the previous four Coen Brothers movies (yes, I'm not crazy about O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Man Who Wasn't There), but it was frustratingly slight. Being more of a fan of their hyper-weird comedies than their dramas, with The Big Lebowski at the top of my faves list and Raising Arizona close on its tail, I was hoping this would be similarly unhinged and frenetic, but instead it was like Fargo with more jokes, which is a problem considering I don't really like Fargo that much. At least, not as much as many seem to.


Of course, mid-level Coen Brothers movies still have a lot to recommend. Almost all of the performances were great (though weirdly Malkovich did my head in with. His. Stilted. Fucking. Line. Readings. And. Laboured. Fucking. Profanity.), with special kudos to the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins (who broke my heart). That said, why did they bother casting Tilda "Goddess" Swinton for a part that had about twelve lines? Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to see her on screen in any capacity, but she seemed ill-served. Here's hoping she becomes a Coen repertory player and turns up again, except with something to do other than be annoyed with the men in her life.


Even with that cast, the film never seemed to come alive, though the central point, that of lampooning the arrogance and solipsism of a bunch of self-regarding twerps who think their pitiful lives have some greater meaning, when in fact all they are little more than a bunch of horny morons, was beautifully done, perhaps even more so than the previous times they have tried to make that point (No Country, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.). I've had more fun thinking about the film than I did watching it. That said, Brad Pitt is a better comedic actor than I thought possible.


I'm grateful to the Coens for proving that.

Quantum of Solace

Casino Royale is possibly my favourite Bond movie since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, leapfrogging over The Living Daylights, The Spy Who Loved Me and Goldeneye, but poverty has delayed us going to see the latest movie. Instead I've been rewatching this over and over again.



We might still see it this week, once I've sold a kidney, following the wonderful news that Vue Cinemas have instituted over-18's only performances for people who don't want to put up with hordes of little shits treating cinemas like the local bus depot. A black man is elected President of the United States and a cinema chain (in our home town, no less) finally realises moviegoers have been staying away because of the behaviour of a bunch of oiks, all in the same week? This truly is the golden age of civilisation. Speaking of which...

Civilisation Revolution


If anything stops me blogging, it will be this game. In its previous manifestations it was already the greatest game ever made (yeah chess, thass right. What have you done for me lately?), but now it's less fussy, faster paced, and filled with endearing silliness. Canyon has been forced to put up with my wasting hours on the hellishly addictive thing, so much so that I'm now responding to her conversational gambits with a reflexive "Follum follum!" If you've played it, you know what that means.

Tropic Thunder

It's taken us way longer than we would have liked to see Ben Stiller's attack on Hollywood, and it was not even worth the wait. Despite the odd great moment, the whole ambitious exercise falls flat with upsetting regularity. Though Robert Downey Jr.'s performance is just as amazing as we had heard, he didn't actually seem have anything funny to say, and we ended up laughing at Jack Black's cold turkey shenanigans instead. Stiller's original concept for the film is hugely appealing, but the execution of it just didn't seem to click at all, with the plot drifting along from one lengthy and ultimately unfunny scene to another, seemingly without direction or purpose. It made Zoolander look like a tightly plotted Preston Sturges movie (I say that as a fan of Zoolander who thinks it sometimes ambles when it should be sprinting). While Adam McKay's movies mostly come alive in the editing room, this never takes shape, and no amount of amusing scenes with Tom Cruise dancing and swearing can save it. Dispiriting stuff, though I'm hoping to see a longer cut soon that might justify that brilliant idea, and maybe even give Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson something to do other than be straight men. Zoolander got funnier with each viewing, so maybe something similar will happen here, though I doubt it.


Compare that to Pineapple Express, which we watched again, and is now, definitely, my favourite comedy of the year. Considering it's a stoner comedy it's built with the same care that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg lavished on Superbad, progressing with logical beauty from scene to scene with only a couple of moments at the end of the second act that show they love their McKee a bit too much. It's not a deal breaker at all, though, and the Hot Fuzz-style genre mash-up of the final act is even more satisfying second time around, with kudos going to Rogen's repeated declarations of, "Nice!" whenever anything goes his way (such as the hilarious respawning machine guns in the underground lair).


In comparison, Tropic Thunder looks like a first cut mess, something you would show to a studio head to reassure them that the money is on the screen. How talented individuals like Stiller, Etan Cohen (partly responsible for the magnificent Idiocracy) and Justin Theroux could botch this is beyond me. The latter name is especially troubling. My previous excitement at his participation in Iron Man 2 has withered completely. Let's hope he's better off without the improvisational scenes between the leads that appear to have derailed the film so badly.

Justice Society of America by Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham

Is this the best comic on the market right now? In terms of superheroism, perhaps it is, though of course it has been great since Geoff Johns jumped onto the title early in the previous incarnation. Johns is always great value (especially lately; he's on fire), but JSA is better than ever, making me retroactively like Kingdom Come more than I originally did. However, the main reason is...





...OMG Hawkman is a TOTAL BADASS. Trust Goody-Two Shoes Jay to get in his way though.

Hunger

Turner Prize-winning director Steve McQueen's meditation on Bobby Sands' hunger strike has been damned by some of the UK press for daring to portray the Republican struggle in a noble light, which is hilariously inappropriate as that is absolutely not what the film is about at all. While, yes, it is set in The Maze and follows Sands' strike from conception to death, and while it shows in horrific detail the back-and-forth mental and physical combat between the imprisoned IRA soldiers/terrorists/politicians (delete as applicable) and the guards, it's pretty much an abstract exploration of what art is. Prisoners daub the walls of the cells with shit, flood the corridors of the prison with urine, and, eventually, stage a protest that turns their bodies, as depicted by McQueen, into a time-lapse photo of living, breathing decay. Even the poster shows one of the "paintings" by a prisoner (a nod to previous Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili?).


This is, as far as I can tell, the one reading of the movie that explains the peculiar structure. The first third of the film concerns a new prisoner (Davey, played by Brian Milligan) learning the ropes of prison life and the protests therein via his cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon), the middle third is the much-debated conversation between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and his priest (Liam Cunningham) about mortality and politics, and the final third is an impassive, minimalist depiction of Sands' lengthy death with Davey and Gerry disappearing from the movie altogether. Bear in mind, except for the middle section, there is almost no dialogue, with only a minimal amount of verbally communicated information giving background on what is happening. There is barely any character development, but then that's not what the film is about. It's about their acts, their attempts to say something with little more than their bodies as the conduit of their emotion and rage. Much of what they do has little effect. The shit paintings are blasted away and the urine is washed up in a shot of audience-patience-defying length. Only the deaths of the hunger strikers seem to have any effect, though that is relegated to a few title cards at the end of the movie giving a few nuggets of information about the subsequent years.


Getting angry about the movie for glamourising the strike (shurely shome mishtake; it's nigh-unwatchable) or having a pro-IRA agenda seems wrong-headed, though I understand many people are never going to allow themselves to move on from those horrible years during the struggle. However, in the terms of the film, that struggle is less important than McQueen's interest in the way the prisoners and hunger strikers express themselves, with the only scene that debates the details of the Republican battles and the morality of politicised suicide being the notorious static art/anti-art shot of a drab room and Sands and his priest smoking and talking for twenty minutes, which, while hypnotic and superbly played, stands in contrast with the bleak, almost silent beauty of the rest of the movie. McQueen seems to be staring into his soul and wondering why he is an artist, and how his art compares to something as drastic as turning the place you live into a hellhole using only the waste products of your body, or allowing yourself to be brutalised just to make a statement and to psychologically affect those who torture you. Isn't art meant to affect the people who experience it? Isn't making a person beat you to a bloody pulp the most extreme way to do that? Where does that leave McQueen and the rest of the YBAs?


Can you tell that I thought it was amazing? There's a lot to digest (really, no pun intended), especially as it is attracting some fascinating debate, as in this excellent piece from Frieze magazine. It's definitely on my end of year best film list, and strongly recommended for anyone who can handle the body horror.

I'm unsure as to whether admitting that I spent the last couple of weeks doing all of that in addition to habitually checking on Obama's progress makes me look more or less sad. I could lie and say I also went sailing, if that helps. Of course, now we're waiting for his press conferences as if they were episodes of Friday Night Lights, as we tuned into CNN last night to see him talk about getting a shelter dog (which made Canyon almost swoon) and expressing condolences over a journalist's damaged arm (which almost finished me off). Compared to that slavish devotion to the President-Elect, acting like a couple of lovestruck groupies, six hour marathons of CivRev almost look cool.

Bad News Follows Good, As Always

The post-election joy party continues, with even more politiblog haunting, even more excited chatter, and even more news watching. Enduring the dour coverage on Fox News was entertaining for a minute or two (a first), but you have to wonder what nasty trickery they're going to employ to belittle President-Elect Obama's achievement over the next few years. I had enough of CNN FutureNews HoloUpdate 3000 on election night, so I won't be watching that network for a while. BBC was fun last night. Jeremy Paxman was interviewing a constant stream of pundits, writers (including West Wing and House writer/producer Eli Attie), elected officials, and spokespersons, asking each of them pretty much if racism was over. Yes, he did it with more subtlety than that, but his interviewees treated it with the short shrift it deserved. And, of course, because it was the BBC, there were the obligatory gaffes. An interview with Alice Walker went haywire as Paxman cut to her sitting in some sort of meditative, head-waving trance, unaware the satellite link was active. That was pretty embarrassing, though the subsequent interview was spiky and interesting enough to make up for it.


However, it's not all good news. In the midst of all this, we all found out that Michael Crichton died yesterday after a battle with cancer that he had kept from public attention. AICN has a nice piece on it here, with clips from many of his films, including some he directed. In the later years of his career I stopped reading his novels, as I belatedly realised some of our politics had never really matched up. I think it was when I understood that Crichton's perfect villain would be a sexually aggressive, female, environmentally aware geneticist from Japan who farts nanobots. Of course, it's not lost on me that I stopped reading his books but am currently voluntarily subjecting myself to the seemingly endless flagellation of reading Atlas Shrugged, so I'm one to talk. Believe me, as unpleasant as I find a lot of Michael Crichton's politics, I'd much rather be reading any of his books instead of Rand's whiny shriek. It never seems to end.

Beyond any other caveat or consideration, I maintain that Crichton was the best thriller writer I have ever read, a master of suspense and pace who kept me hooked even when the subject matter was as dry as corporate malfeasance in the aerospace industry (Airframe, which I blasted through in a few hectic hours). For a long time, especially at the crest of his popularity, the release of a Crichton novel was, at least for this jerkoff blogger, an event on a par with the release of a new Spielberg movie, so you can imagine how excited I was when Jurassic Park came out. Having tried to read other bestselling thrillers by dreary, inexplicably successful hacks like John Grisham, James Patterson and Tom Clancy (who I still read even though he's an awful, ponderous writer with even more unpleasant views), I am even more grateful for Crichton's work, which showed those other writers up even when he was not operating at full capacity.

That said, why his books and films featured characters with the most vanilla names ever has always mystified me. Just a random selection of names from his books includes Karen Ross and Peter Elliott (Congo), Norman Johnson and Harry Adams (Sphere), Peter Smith, Tom Graham and John Connor (Rising Sun, with the former renamed Webster/Web in the Philip Kaufman movie), and of course Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant from Jurassic Park. Why the dull names for the main characters? Was it some kind of device to increase audience association? Why did I become obsessed with this? Do I have a problem with boring names? Haven't I got more important things to be worried about? Apparently not. Thanks for temporarily curing me of my woes, President-Elect Obama!

His books and films have been so popular that I often forget he was also the creator of ER, which was, for a long time, my favourite show on TV (until I discovered Buffy). Though he had some right-leaning tendencies in later years (and his response to criticism was less than classy), ER's compassionate air led one to believe he had the same notions. A show so fascinated by the poverty of County General Hospital and the desperation of the board trying to keep it running in the face of corporate indifference has to be run by those of a more liberal mindset, right? Perhaps it was producer and writer John Wells, but I'd like to think that Crichton, a former doctor, agreed.

It's also easy to forget that he directed movies too, some of them genuinely great. Westworld and Coma are terrific thrillers, with the former regularly cited as an influence on The Terminator and, with much less frequency, Stephen Malkmus.



I even liked Runaway, which features Tom Selleck vs. Gene Simmons and his acid-injecting spider-bots! How could that be anything less than awesome, even though it never inspired a song by Stephen Malkmus?



And (really embarrassing admission coming up), I also liked Looker, which featured an uncomfortable-looking Albert Finney going up against James Coburn and his fugue-state-inducing light gun.



Seeing that film at an early age might have been the reason why I have a healthy distrust of advertising, even though most of it is pure nonsense. For that alone, I owe a great debt to Michael Crichton. He shall be missed.

Hawkmonkey Endorses Barack Obama

As I've said before, this blog is in slowdown for a while, but even more so with the election upon us. It's affecting us in all sorts of ways (from horrible panic to sleeplessness to random outbreaks of crying), but it's not just me and Canyon, and maybe Masticator, who I'm sure would be grateful for some event to take Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross off the front pages of the UK papers.


The election has also affected the reincarnated half-Thanagarian reality-anomaly/sock monkey hybrid who is keeping the streets of our town safe at night. I think he's felt strongly about this election for a long time now, but is only now endorsing Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States of America.


After many threats and demands, Canyon and I carved that Halloween pumpkin for Hawkmonkey, as his sock hands are not built for sensitive work like that. They're perfect for cracking heads, though, hence our fear.


We used a variety of knives and a screwdriver (no pumpkin sculpting tools around, sadly, which meant we had to improvise, McGyver-style), as well as the evil FridgeKiller, the knife that stabbed a deadly hole in our fridge recently. It didn't do any damage to anything other than the pumpkin, which makes a change, after a recent bagel-slicing task ended in blood and tears. That goddamn knife is possessed.


I must admit, I was reluctant to do this for Hawkmonkey. Regular readers may remember my early support for the Rufus T. Firefly / Dickie Pilager ticket, but that faltered a while ago, what with it being revealed that Firefly is a Freedonian by birth, and therefore ineligible to run, and Pilager, after taking over the campaign, could never get past his association with the evil industrialist Wes Benteen. A shame. Firefly's pro-eating-crackers-in-bed / anti-whatever-it-is philosophy is exactly what the world needs right now, but these silly rules just got in the way. As a result, much as I don't want to, I'm forced to throw my support and formidable political influence behind the duo of Merkin Muffley and Bob Roberts.


I'm not sure they're good for the USA, but Muffley reminds me of my nervy, ineffectual self, and I'm reassured to know that Bob Roberts is there to run things from the sidelines, and after the last eight years we all know that a powerful, sneaky, vicious and immmoral vice-president is vital. Plus, he's a kickass musician. Know hopelessness!

All Hail the Fingers Of Fury!

If a writer has writers' block, then a blogger will suffer from Blogger Clog, and that's certainly the case here. There are numerous reasons for my infrequent posting, perhaps most importantly this goddamn illness, which, while little more than a cold, has been hanging around for weeks. Hard to be prolific when one side of my head feels heavier than the other. On top of that is a much busier than usual week at work which has drained me of much energy, and oh God this election this fucking election it's driving my brain crazy with the excessive checking of the politiblogs, so much so that, even though I've been enjoying his updates, if Andrew Sullivan writes "know hope" one more time I'll either turn violent or cry or cry violently. It's the classic split between his faith and my atheism; he can know hope all he likes, but I'll not relax until Obama's inauguration. People who know me will be very familiar with my fatalistic tendencies. ::takes break from hard minute's blogging to check fivethirtyeight.com::

Another reason, which is probably the main one if I was willing to sit and poke at my ossified brain in order to find out, is my attempt to finish reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Though I'm wary of saying anything about it for fear of angering her many many fans/followers/cultists, I have to say it is about to defeat me. No, Randian visitors, her worldview has not dominated mine, as if it had been dismantled and bested by a philosophy of vast strength and power, like the machines that conquer and crush the rocks and mountains of the earth. I'm just, well, really really really fucking bored by now. Her insanely florid prose might have amused me before, but by now, after being shouted at in a self-pitying and mean-spirited tone for 700 pages, I might not be able to make it. But I must! For am I not a human being? Is not my mind the Alpha and Omega, the force that can harness nature and bend it to my will, able to withstand this mighty onslaught, bearing the winds and rains of her ideas and rising, triumphant, like a Titan, like the owner of himself and his destiny, masterful and immortal? Fuck you, book! You shall never defeat me!

However, I do just want to get it over and done with by now, if only because I need a break from it. I'm glad I'm reading it, especially at a time like this, when one presidential candidate is bellowing "Socialist!" and running from person to person like Kevin McCarthy in the first two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the world's most powerful Objectivist, Alan Greenspan, is talking about how there is a flaw in the world that makes his free market ideals untenable (I'm totally paraphrasing; please don't correct me, people). Before reading Atlas Shrugged I would have thought his comment rather cheeky, blaming people for the market disaster and not The Market itself, but now I see his point (though I don't necessarily agree with it). If I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right (again, don't comment, I don't need clarification just yet), the Objectivist creed would work just fine as long as everyone was "moral" by Rand's code, but after many many years Greenspan has apparently discovered that people (i.e. traders and bankers and economists and anyone who deals with money anywhere in the world ever) won't abide by that code of behaviour, and will in fact take as many short cuts as possible to fill their pockets with as much Fat Bank as they can. I see where he's coming from. I think he's a bit tapped to be suddenly saying, "Oh, it's humanity's fault for this and not mine for coming up with a system of economics that doesn't take into account actual human behaviour as it really actually exists for reals, but instead bases its assumptions about what people are like on the idealised ramblings of a writer from the 50s who had a weird thing for dominatory industrialists and smokestacks and trains going into tunnels and which therefore cannot possibly work," but I do see where he's coming from. Thanks for the recession, jerkwad.

So yeah, it's been interesting to listen to Republican and conservative thought with a new, deeper understanding of where it's coming from, and to finally comprehend why followers of that creed hate taxation as much as they do even though I think they're wrong, and so I do owe a debt of thanks to Ayn Rand for giving me such a long-winded peek into that mindset. Sadly, my brain is dying from the melodrama and the hate and the victimhood, and I just want to get it over with so I can move onto something fun (I got John Hodgman's new book two days ago and it's begging to be read). Until then, time I would devote to blogging is being taken up with enduring the endless Rand-ting, so it's like another blog slowdown, and one I really don't want to endure but will because I'm stubborn like that and hate leaving books unfinished (especially when I'm 700 pages in). I will get back to the planned post about Mad Men, and some Face/Offs I've been looking forward to as soon as I can, but for now, I must complete this mammoth task.

In the meantime, here is the other thing that has totally possessed my mind over the last week, but luckily it's a thing that is making the brain very very happy. Marnie Stern, super-genius guitarist, has just appeared on my Radar of Unbelievable Awesomeness with her new album This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That (which is a phrase attributed to Zen philosopher Alan Watts, according to AV Club). It is absolutely incredible, easily on my 2008 best list along with Re-Arrange Us by Mates of State and The Family Afloat by Bound Stems and several other lovely works. Stern's guitar playing is unlike anything I've heard before, and strumming along to it would be the most insane Rock Band challenge ever (especially as Zach Hill's drumming is almost as complex and frenetic). This is her new single, Transformer, and it should be number one across the planet.



Even better is her song Ruler, which you can find on her MySpace page. Thank you for keeping the book cooties from smothering my brain, Marnie Stern.

This Week In TV Year II (Week 6) Part 1

Illness has struck with the force of Hawkmonkey's fearsome mace, and both Canyon and I are punctuating our gravelly, barely audible conversations with noseblowing and low-decibel groaning. As a result, this week's post has gone horribly awry, so I'm pushing this out with proper proofing or editing or even thinking before it gets any later than it already is (and I've still got more to moan about tomorrow). Apologies for any inconvenience. Blame bacteria!

Highlight of the Week:

Mad Men (or Magnificent Men, as I'm thinking it should be re-titled) might have been especially strong and startlingly different than usual this week, but despite that brilliance, it doesn't take the top spot this week because...


WILSON'S BAAAAAAAACK!!! And yes, I'm aware it was only a matter of time before our favourite oncologist got over his fury at House, but to have it happen in such a wholly satisfying stand-out episode was a double pleasure. Though their relationship had seemed to be broken forever, the showrunners came up with an elegant solution, by showing the rift between them is not borne of Wilson's anger over House's involvement in Amber's death, but is rooted in Wilson's own insecurity. His reflexive need to run away from things before they can run out on him is what finally pushed him into falling out with House, at the same time that it has been the foundation of their friendship (House will never leave, and thus represents the only sanctuary Wilson has from that fear).


It wasn't all about Wilson coming to terms with his demons. Personal growth for House doesn't necessarily mean fixing his bitchy attitude, and this week saw him coming to terms with his bitterness over his genetic lineage by realising that it makes no difference in the end. He is who he is no matter what his DNA says, a rare instance of nurture winning out over nature in a medical show like this. Either that or House's final epiphany, "My dad is dead," is just him being finally hit by the news he got at the start of the episode. Either way, it was a beautifully realised moment, making me wonder if his superb eulogy was partially genuine too (I keep forgetting how great Hugh Laurie is).


Of course, parenthood was at the heart of the unusually compelling Disease of the Week thread too. An adopted Chinese woman with addiction problems and abandonment issues seeks out her original parents, who deny she exists. Encountering a magnet, a rash of unpleasant symptoms threaten her life in classic House stylee, and eventually we find out that an attempt on her life by her father while still a baby is responsible for her illness. In a straight-from-the-headlines plot twist, her brain was pierced by needles, which were moved by the magnet, causing a cascade of symptoms through her body. Though using the over-familiar Chinese one-baby rule as a plot device pissed me off at first, at least this was based on a real and very depressing case.


Thematically the show was so tightly bound that it could very well have seemed contrived, but with the focus aimed at House and Wilson's hugely entertaining bickering those connections between the A, B and C plots didn't come together until the final act, though I appreciate that could be a subjective thing, especially as I was so happy to see my favourite sparring duo together that I wasn't in the mood for splitting hairs.


I even forgave Kutner's announcement that the needles in the patient's head were pressing on her "addiction centres", as, even though this is total horseshit in medical terms, it mirrored the solution to House and Wilson's relationship problems. Now that Wilson recognises what has been causing his destructive tendencies, the grief needle has been removed and we can get back to normal. It's the best present the show could give me.

Baffling Turn of Events of the Week:

A couple of years ago, David Milch's perplexing John From Cincinnati diverted my attention for a few weeks, just as I once went crazy for Sudoku and Limines for Xbox 360. Trying to unravel the meaning of it almost made up for the utter tedium of it all, as characters paced around rooms (to denote boredom), spoke cod-Shakespearian (to denote eccentricity, which I actually enjoyed a lot), and screeched at dolphin frequencies (to denote furious anger, which I most certainly did not enjoy). In the middle of all this laboured weirdness, John (aka Surf Jesus) delivered his Sermon from the Mount, 21st Century Style, which was the one scene in the whole sorry exercise that I loved unreservedly.



I didn't watch further (the axe had pretty much fallen by the time I got around to it, so I knew it was pointless to keep watching), but I was impressed by how much it changed the direction of the show, dropping a moment of such batshit oddity into the proceedings that it now lives on in my memory as a completely different thing than it would have if I'd stopped watching just before it happened. This week, Mad Men did something similar, and it is taking me some time to assimilate it.


One of the few criticisms the show has received, along with "the pace is too slow," (which is bullshit), and "the symbolism is too obvious," (which strikes me as occasionally accurate) is that there is very little plot momentum. As the show's stock in trade is incremental character revelation, I don't see that as a problem, and in the moments where plot does move forward, even small things (like Roger leaving Mona) are like explosions. This episode did big plot and small character work, but the character work was utterly unlike anything yet experienced on the show, and the plot stuff has the potential to completely change the template of the show. In other words, it was a headfuck.


What initially seemed to be an opportunity to show Don and Pete in a new environment, and what I had thought would be a "road trip" plot along the same lines as this week's House, became a baffling journey into super-liberal European-style hedonism, with Don the Reluctant Square cast into a world of sex, booze, and loucheness that had nothing to do with the world of sex, booze, and loucheness that he already occupies.

I will admit that I totally misunderstood what was going on at first, but I get the feeling that was the point. After Don and Pete are shown a presentation on MIRV warheads and imminent nuclear destruction - which, incidentally, is not a good thing to show someone in the midst of a decade-long existential crisis - Don is approached by a dandyish European Viscount doing the European Viscount version of "My mate fancies you!" (The difference between this version of that chat-up line and the more common version is that in this version it's his daughter with the crush. Those Europeans!)


Of course, when Don sees who fancies him, he is instantly entranced. Joy, who could only have been more obviously named if she was called "A Balm For Your Troubled Soul, Don Draper", drives him into a confused frenzy of lust, hope, and confusion, and despite his sadness over Betty kicking him out of the house, he follows her to a swish pad across town, where he promptly drinks something unusual, faints, and wakes up on a couch, surrounded by weirdos, with one sinister looking chap on the verge of sticking a needle in his arm.


I mean, who wouldn't think something was up? Don, of course, doesn't realise he looks like a handsome film version of a spy, and is not aware of the filmic conventions of that genre. Getting abducted and drugged is par for the course for a spy, and with Cold War technology and paranoia entering the plot, it was hard not to suspect something was up.

Of course, Don was actually just hanging out with some decadent Eurotoffs, getting laid, and feeling all funny when a copy of The Sound and the Fury gets waved at him (remember my theory that culture is Don's Kryptonite). That he looks like Matt Helm or one of the Men from U.N.C.L.E., or that the dinner scene reminded me of the moment in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where an undercover James Bond has dinner in Blofeld's mountaintop hideaway, is neither here nor there. Luckily Don didn't end up hunted by assassins and forced to watch his wife get killed on their honeymoon, but sadly he did become more lost than he already was.


It's fair to say that since embodying the American Dream, and realising that it doesn't solve the problems he has been battling his whole life, the beatnik, cultural, European lifestyle has been appealing to him. He has been involved with a hipster poet (Midge), a Jewish entrepreneur (Rachel), and a brassy managerial sassmouth (Bobbie), and seemed most intrigued by the first two mistresses (actual or potential). They hinted at a world outside the one he finds himself trapped in, and Bobbie was just someone he shtupped out of habit, all the while feeling unfulfilled because she offered him nothing but empty sex.


As a result, being offered a good time by the alluring and unfamiliar Joy was exactly what he had been hoping for, and for the first time this season actually seemed momentarily happy. It was only after seeing a young boy made miserable by the actions of his father that Don realised not just that he had a obligation to his own children, and not just that he had once been the lonely child in a screwy family, but that if he had, in the past, lived the same life as his benefactors/captors, he probably would have been in the same boat anyway.


With the European dream dashed, he phones someone and identifies himself as Dick Whitman (which deserves a ZOMG for being so unexpected), and seems to be on the way to meet them soon. I had a hunch it would be Midge, having realised he was happiest living the hipster life with her (plus knowing she could score some weed for him), but if he's calling himself Dick Whitman, it's probable it's not someone we've seen before. With all other options exhausted, all he has is the past.

Overly Delayed Plot Resolution of the Week:

I love FNL's Smash Williams, and have been rooting for him to succeed in his mission to buy his mother a house since episode one, but I'm about done with that plot now. In the past, Smash has been hotheaded and cocky, with only the occasional impediment to his success getting thrown into his path. Now that he only has a few season three episodes before disappearing for good, we've had three episodes of him having second thoughts about pursuing a football career only to be brought around by someone else.


Don't get me wrong, each time this has happened it's been dramatised with the usual high FNLian standards, but even so, "I can't do it," "Yes you can," "No I can't," "Yes you can," ad infinitum gets boring way before I actually gets infinitum. Next week might see him get his wish, finally, which will suit me down to the ground. At least then I can relax about him and devote proper fretting energy to Matt Saracen and his doomed QB1 position.

Discovery of the Week:

It is actually possible to kill a man in the middle of Central Park in daylight and then drag him back to your top-floor warehouse/penthouse/loft apartment without anyone noticing.

It's also possible to kill your next door neighbour and never be interrogated by the police even though you have already beaten him up hours before right in front of his wife.

Really, if the Heroes showrunners aren't going to give a shit, why should the viewers?

Good Haircut of the Week:

Many internet people who watch Mad Men are offended that Kurt the European Homosexual is a hairdresser, thinking it an oddly stereotypical thing for the show to do, though really it is based around taking our assumptions about the 60s, applying them to well-drawn characters and showing why we have these assumptions. Even though we too thought it a bit obvious to make Kurt a hair stylist genius...


...it's great that Peggy looks so good now.


And she's going to see Bob Dylan too. Perhaps she will be the first Sterling Cooper employee to tune in, turn on, and drop out (Don's weirdness and sudden vanishing act to go find his outer Joy doesn't count).

Bad Haircut of the Week:

The godawful do foisted on Elina in America's Next Top Model in the recent makeover episode is a goddamn disgrace, worse than all of the previous too-tight weaves, bleach armageddons, or baldness experiments.


For once, the tears were well deserved.


Still, I may not like Elina much (her delusional, shallow crush on the awful, hypocritical Clark is the dealbreaker), but she's done some great work with this mop ever since, straightening it so that she doesn't look like a clown, and "owning it", as Tyra would say.

Overused Plot Device of the Week:

In three shows this week, main characters had visions of people from their past. In Mad Men Don was so disconjunctified by Betty's decision to kick him out of Casa de Draper that he's seeing her everywhere.


Of course, for we internet heathens who have committed the heinous act of blasphemy that is thinking that January Jones is not the most glorious and magical actress in the land, less Betty is not a bad thing, so the cameo was fine by us. How will her fans cope? Aiming yet more snotty abuse at the unbelievers who don't understand wot gud akting iz, I'll wager.


In Heroes, we finally found out the secret behind the appearances of Linderman, as shown above. Though, by now, we're watching Heroes for the unintentional comedy, it does crack out the odd surprise, and bringing back Parkman's dad was a big one.


It also put right one of the biggest problems of the second season, i.e. the huge build-up of The Boogeyman as the worst villain ever just for him to turn up in one episode and then vanish as if he'd never existed. Having him show up again and be responsible for one of this season's most interesting mysteries almost makes me think the showrunners know what they are doing. Almost.

Fringe featured the most bizarre hallucination moment of all. Olivia (aka Vanatron) is haunted by visions of her dead/undead lover John Scott, who keeps popping up to tell her he loves her as well as giving her clues to this week's Pattern mystery.


As we are unclear as to his actual status, what with him being in the hands of the possibly death-vanquishingly powerful MASSive Dynamic, this episode played with our expectations throughout, until Dr. Walter Bishop revealed that a piece of John Scott's consciousness had broken off inside Olivia's psyche during their mindmeld in episode one, and that his consciousness was communicating with her independently of the actual John Scott, who really is dead. Though he might not be. And Walter could be lying. We don't know anything, and cannot assume anything either. Five episodes in and this show is already a total mindfuck. That's some good going.

Nerd Joke of the Week:

"I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton. I was sent here by my father Jor-El to save the planet Earth." - Sen. Barack Obama at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner earlier this week.


Thanks to Captain Snarky for posting that picture in another internet venue. It made the germs forget to make me feel like whipped shit for two minutes.

Previously on Angel Actor of the Week:

Snarky Sheriff Costello, who put House and Wilson through the wringer this week, was played by Jack Conley.


We Buffy fans who stuck with Angel, which became the equal of its magnificent parent but failed to win over everyone (the haters!), should remember Sahjhan, the demon who plotted against Angel in the third season, and combined pure evil with sarcastic wise-assery. Conley did a great job in that, and a great job this week as well.

Previously on Lost Actor of the Week:

Okay, Brett Cullen has been around for a while, with memorable appearances in Ugly Betty, West Wing, Friday Night Lights, and the lamentable Ghost Rider, but he'll always be Goodwin to me. Moral ambiguity is everywhere on the show, but Goodwin, the Tailie-murdering romantic, was one of the most compelling examples. I'm always glad to see Cullen around, and this week he was in full evil mode in The Mentalist.

With Gregory Itzin turning up as well, not to mention Xander Berkeley last week and Zeljko Ivanek in the pilot, the weakness of the secondary cast is beginning to worry us. Nothing against any of the actors (and hey, one of them is called Tim Kang, and reminding me of Kang the Conqueror is always a good thing), but we're worrying that the characters have interchangeable personalities and the actors are not distinct enough to be anything other than redshirts, especially when character actors as outstanding as these are being cast.

Previously on 24 Actor of the Week:

As mentioned above, The Mentalist gained 1000 cool points this week by featuring a potentially recurring role for Gregory Itzin, formerly Evil President Charles Logan on 24.


We adore him (and his TV-wife Jean Smart), and having him show up here as a bureaucratic ass-covering foil for our unorthodox and playful hero would signal an uptick in the potential of a show that is, despite its success and renewal, is still not clicking right. Part of it is the cast. We're ready for Robin Tunney (as grouchy cop Teresa Lisbon) to depart the show in the same way that Kim Delaney vanished from CSI: Miami with barely any excuse. Generating no chemistry with Simon Baker is one thing, but the bitchface...

...is wearing on our patience. There needs to be a point to this character soon, because right now, all she is is a drain on the show's energy, which leaps back up whenever The Mentalist gets to mentalising his foes. More Itzin would help, and if he is going to be the pencil-pusher who stands in our hero's way, making Lisbon the ally of The Mentalist would go a long way to making her tolerable. I mean hey, this advice is offered for free, showrunners.

Mistake of the Week:

Broyles (aka Lance "Intensity" Reddick) calls on the Fringe team to investigate the case of a lift driving itself into the ground, killing eight people inside. The only problem with that is...

...there were only five people in the lift, and one of them, Joseph MEEEEEgar (as named by the ever-awesome Dr. Walter Bishop) survived using his powers of bioelectricity to levitate (which violates every law of physics, but whatever). Perhaps there is a reason for this that has yet to be explained, because otherwise, this is a bizarre error for a show that has spent so long getting the background details right.

Worrying Visual of the Week:


After Don calls the mysterious person and utters his real name, he writes an address on the last page of Joy's copy of The Sound and the Fury, rips it out, and then reclines in the opposite position to that of the title card chap, with the added symbolic value of Don being semi-nekkid instead of being dressed to the nines.


All very clever, but the news that Matthew Weiner is still not signed up to helm the third season (which was only this week greenlit) raises concerns that we are in the same boat as Joy; besotted with Don, and doomed to lose him and not know what happens at the end of the story. Was Weiner warning us? I'm so upset I'm adding awful alliteration (and assonance) to this post. I know AMC are developing other shows, a continuation of the life of Harry Caul from The Conversation (and scripted by Christopher McQuarrie) and an adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, both of which make me swoon with nerd joy, but I'd hate to think they are responsible for Weiner's urge to seek development deals elsewhere.

And on that potentially troubling bombshell, so ends part one of yet another way too long post. More as soon as disease lets me.