We're currently going through season five of 24, a show that simultaneously horrifies and thrills us. The pro-torture nonsense, dodgy politics, absurd plotting, flat dialogue, rarely adhered to real-time ground rules, etc. etc. etc. It's all hard to defend on both political and quality grounds (especially when we rail against CSI: Miami), but when it's on, it is totally on, justifying any amount of crap with total thrill delivery. Just as we have been told over and over again, season five is the best season yet, featuring some of the most entertaining action I've seen in a TV show, and though season six is supposed to be terrible, this has so far been good enough to carry us through another four seasons. The momentum, the berserk action, the sheer devil-may-care craziness of the whole thing, has been thrilling enough to forgive a multitude of sins. That said, I've been noticing a few things as it has been progressing, and I'll be coming back here to reveal them over the next couple of weeks as we barrel through the season. First things first, though. I have to get the most important thing out of the way right now. Forgive me for being blunt, but...
1. I will tolerate any amount of narrative contrivance if it brings back Tony Almeida.
I am incandescent with rage over the death of 24's secret weapon, Tony Almeida, who is basically what Jack Bauer would be like if he wasn't a psychopath. Consumed with anguish over the death of his wife Michelle in an explosion that actually had no purpose within the plot and never got adequately explained (like so much in this show), Tony is taken to CTU HQ instead of hospital (because of Reason X), regains consciousness very quickly (considering he has been blown up and heavily singed), and tries to kill Christopher Henderson, assassin, scumbag, and former cyborg law enforcer.
Of course, at the last second his conscience gets in the way (because it's Tony), which is something that would never happen to Jack; the only reason he ever stops himself from killing someone is because they have information that will save hundreds ::pant:: of thousands ::pant:: of lives, dammit! Hell, he even got his daughter and the President's brother to kill people while he wasn't around. His psychotic nature is too big for his formidable macho shell to hold, and it has to spill out onto other people from time to time.
Of course, Tony deciding against killing Henderson backfires, and he is stabbed in the chest with a syringe full of fictional drugs. He dies in Jack's arms, his friend sobbing over him even as I tried to hold back the tears and the horror myself. Of course, I knew all about it, having been spoiled well in advance, but still, I thought we'd get a bit more Tony action before that happened. It sucked, and I know that I wasn't the only one to be affected by Tony's tragic, senseless death, and definitely not the only person to think Tony is the shit. (Check out Brian Hall's impersonation in those two 24 spoofs. It's an uncanny approximation of the great man.) That said, there are some who contribute to this blog who are not fans of Tony. I'll let them announce themselves at some point.
Of course, 24 barely plays by the rules of reality, and so last year producer Howard Gordon, knowing full well that fans loved him, announced that everyone's favourite soppy hardass was coming back. However, it's no time to rejoice. I'm as worried as I can be about a fictional character who gets seriously injured whenever there is a terrorist strike in the US (broken ankle, shot in the neck, shot in the back, blown up, injected with deadly fictional drugs, run over by a garbage truck, fired out of a cannon into a wall, cut in half with a laser, etc.). This time, the writers have gone after his soul. This time, he's the bad guy.
How can this be? Until now Tony has been so damn heroic he practically poops Excaliburs out of his toned butt, though I guess seeing his wife die a few hours before getting jabbed in the chest with a syringe by the guy who killed her would make anyone a bit miffed, but going all the way around to being evil? It's David Mamet all over again. And yet, it'll be good to have the guy back even if he has bombs or gas or diseases at his beck and call. I don't care what they do to get him back. Jack's tears could be pure magic juice for all I care. He could have been injected with Mutant Growth Hormone by mistake. Exposure to radiation from the season two nuclear blast could have made him prone to hibernation every so often, coming back stronger than ever. Fuck it, make him bionical, like this.
Just hurry up and get this thing going so we can see the man back in action! Dammit!
In 2004, Maxim UK appointed an American editor, Greg Gutfeld, with the remit to revolutionise the title and make it stand out in an increasingly homogeneous market. The result was an astonishing magazine. Surreal, daring, iconoclastic, hilarious, unafraid to take risks – even some of the nudey pictures were given a bizarre twist, featuring concepts such as “You Are The Fly” and “You Are The Slug”, in which the reader got an insect’s or mollusc’s-eye view of a glistening topless lovely chasing him with a swat or a salt-shaker. But the inevitable glossy images of nearly-naked women seemed almost incidental to the mag, which showed a consistently fierce irreverence towards everything on its pages. I loved it. It was the first time in years I’d enjoyed reading a lad mag. I enthused about it to everyone I knew and urged them to read it.
No-one did. Maxim spectacularly failed to pull out of its sales nosedive. After two years, Gutfeld’s contract was not renewed and Maxim was relaunched as a monthly version of the weekly lads’ titles that had enjoyed so much recent success. It stopped taking the piss out of everything and started rotating its cover between the likes of Gemma Atkinson, Sophie Howard and Emily Scott. In other words, rather than genuine celebrities, women who were largely known – if at all – for being the sort of women who appeared on Maxim covers.
Surprisingly, this wasn’t what the readers wanted either. With sales dipping below 100,000 for the first time in 2007’s final batch of circulation figures, Maxim has been rejigged yet again. Although most magazines undergo regular overhauls, to go through so many different iterations in such a short space of time is unusual (certainly compared with US Maxim, which has stuck with pretty much the same boring template since its launch and is looking decidedly dated) and reflects the difficulties in which Maxim finds itself.
Maxim’s choice of cover girls since the relaunch clearly demonstrates the changing nature of the magazine. Goodbye WAGs and models; hello actual famous people.
I’m not convinced Mischa Barton is the ideal cover star, though. The new, classier look of the front page (steely grey background, dark red fonts) suggests Maxim is aiming for an older reader these days, not the teenage market it once attracted. I’m a 32-year-old man who sat through all four seasons of The O.C., and even I’m not interested in Barton. She is too young, for one thing; not notably talented, for another; and, crucially, not very sexy, certainly by the traditional standards of men’s magazines. March’s issue featured the far more sultry Eva Mendes and May’s has Sarah Michelle Gellar who, while also not classic men’s-mag totty, is at least age-appropriate. So Barton is an odd choice, one which I strongly suspect was influenced by the availability of relatively cheap photos from US Maxim.
Elsewhere on the cover, there are clues among the sex and football staples that indicate Maxim’s shifting target readership: fitness, property, exotic holidays and a promise of “223 ways to look your best” in a fashion special. Not things you would imagine drooling 17-year-olds care much about. The mag’s slogan, which for years has crowed “The world’s biggest men’s magazine”, has become “Your life made easy”.
Page 8 The editor’s letter – have I mentioned that these set the tone? – is fairly straightforward, a matey, chatty intro that sticks safely to pointing up a few of the salient features in the mag. Its most telling aspect is that Michael Donlevy doesn’t mention sex or women until the final paragraph, another sign of where the title’s priorities now lie. It’s followed by Mailbox, which contains two interesting things (not the letters!): instructions on how to download sexy (on second thoughts that should probably be “sexy”) pictures to your mobile phone, and encouragement to go to the website and see more pictures, win prizes and join the debate on subjects brought up by features in the mag. Yes, that says “join the debate”. Maxim appears to be suggesting that its readers think! (And increase web traffic.)
Page 14 The front section is now called Inbox, which is less a sign of embracing technology and more an appropriation of what’s now a familiar everyday term. It starts with pictures of a woman in her underwear! Who could have guessed? I think it’s interesting, though, that the woman is 28-year-old mother of one Donna Air, wearing a cardigan.
I’m not suggesting that this makes Maxim exactly progressive or anything. But choosing this over all the other women and other photos and other poses they could have included shows, once more, a determination to grow up.
The rest of Inbox is largely composed of plugs for gadgets, games and kit and it’s fairly standard, but it also has The Maxim Debate, in which two writers (one woman, one man) consider the merits of couples fighting in public. Again, it’s not Plato, but it encourages readers to engage their brains – and it also gives women a voice in the mag, one that isn’t just talking about how much they love sex and being naked and kissing other girls and sexy sexy sex.
Page 34 The first feature is an interview with The League Of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith, with questions provided by readers. A good subject and, as with Heat, a good way to interact with readers (although curiously this doesn’t appear to be connected with the website). The next one is World Of Maxim, pictures of women taken from editions around the world. In the previous Maxim incarnation this feature was in danger of taking over the mag, but now it’s just two shots over three pages. Considering these pictures must provide a fairly cheap way of padding out your content, its reduction is surprising and a little gratifying.
Men’s mags have always included what might be termed Dumb Adventures and this is no exception, as writer Jerome Starkey goes to Afghanistan and attempts to play Buzkashi, which is best described as a cross between rugby and polo with a dead goat for a ball. This is a fun read – unless you’re the goat – with some vivid, energetic pictures, although not for the squeamish.
Still, I’d rather look at these pictures than the Mischa Barton spread, in which the insipid starlet strives to vamp it up for the camera and fails comprehensively. The interview tries its hardest to make her sexy, as these interviews always do, but the suggestive questions about nudity and her character’s lesbian experiences in The O.C. don’t go anywhere. Not only is Barton not sexy, she’s not funny or interesting either. I appreciate it’ll need to get somewhat chillier round Satan’s way before men’s mag cover stars are chosen for their sparkling wit or ability to interpret Ibsen, but this is a feeble and wan interview. The captions – tellingly, likely to be the only part of the feature originated by Maxim’s UK staff – are the best things about it.
Page 54 Comedy is another staple of lad mags, and Maxim’s four-part comedy tour of the British Isles continues with Rob Brydon’s guide to Wales. This is a fine idea, and kudos to Maxim for netting the talented and in-demand Brydon, but unfortunately comedians are rarely as funny in interviews as when working with prepared material. Even with careful editing, this is a little dry. Next is an article on the psychology of football, examining why the sport can turn even intelligent men into emotional wrecks, which isn’t the liveliest piece either. But once again it shows that Maxim is no longer content to print the Ten Wackiest Own Goals or whatever.
I feel as though I’m defending the mag quite a lot, so happily here come five pages of dross to dismiss! The Sexy Seven Sins is a trashy sexy-girl shoot dressed up as helpful sex-life advice, and it’s poorly conceived. Some of the tips are about how to overcome “sinful” feelings such as sloth, while others are about making envy or gluttony work for you in the sack. Just nonsense. It’s followed by another Dumb Adventure, sending writer Martin Robinson to train as an SAS sniper, which is more like it.
Page 81 Fashion never sits all that comfortably in the mass-market men’s mags – whose readers probably feel buying a non-porn magazine is girly enough without it being full of shoes – but Maxim has embraced it thoroughly with this 27-page special. Strangely, it seems to be aimed at a younger readership than the rest of the mag, with lots of bright colours and not-very-classy brands (Ben Sherman, Fred Perry) although there are attempts to be more cutting-edge such as a focus on six up-and-coming British imprints. Perhaps it will take a while for the fashion pages, which after all are primarily designed to attract advertising, to catch up with the mag, which can’t afford to distance itself from its established ad clients.
Page 117 I do like a good reviews section and this, in the main, is one. It’s not huge, perhaps reflecting the fact that in 2008 we’re bombarded with promotional material every day and we hardly need monthly magazines to join in, but it’s smart and audience-appropriate. While the reviews are not in-depth, I like that it affords games the same space as movies or DVDs, acknowledging that they’re of equal importance to most young(ish) men. I also like the little featurettes sprinkled through the section, wittily comparing two straight-to-DVD releases or rounding up debut albums. I was already warming to it when I turned to page 122 to find an interview with Mark Heap and Kevin Eldon, two of the UK’s finest and yet most mysteriously underappreciated comic actors. Big hooray!
Page 131 Outbox, whose section name seems even more arbitrary than Inbox, contains the stuff to fulfil the “Your life made easy” pledge – tips for all the most important things in men’s lives today: fitness, travel, cars, poker. Poker? It may sound a little silly, but with the game’s popularity increasing, it’s useful to know at least a little about it these days – just so you don’t feel left out of conversations, if nothing else. This is also a handy pretext for some cross-promotion of Maxim’s sister magazine, betting title Inside Edge! The fitness and food pages in particular are simple and practical, although it must be said these few pages aren’t going to make your life that easy. If this stuff is what Maxim is about now, it could do with more space.
Page 162 Where other mags might stick a list or an interview, Maxim devotes a page to Girl Talk and, once again, this isn’t two young nubile wannabes in their M&S underwear chatting about groping, as you might expect from a lad mag. It’s a proper column, written by proper writers. It’s thoughtful, witty and not shy of using words like “unmitigated” and “chivalry”. All right, this one’s about sex and has “DILDO” in the headline in big bold capital letters, but I think the crucial point is that it’s what a woman thinks, not a man’s idea of what women think.
It’s official: unlike Jackie Treehorn, Maxim has decided that it no longer wants to treat objects like women, man. The focus of the relaunched magazine is on men and what they want out of life, rather than women and how we can get their bras to fall off. That’s not to say it doesn’t contain any female flesh but, as with the Gutfeld version of Maxim, it really feels as if the shots of partially dressed women are the least important component of the issue, included mostly because it’s expected of lad magazines rather than because the editor wants them there. To put it crudely, Maxim was turning into a wank mag, and it certainly isn’t that any more.
Maxim’s problem might be that it’s spent too long being Maxim. A magazine-buying man in his late 20s and early 30s who has outgrown the loutish teenage idiocy peddled by lad mags since the early 1990s is going to pick up Men’s Health or GQ, while teenagers themselves are buying Nuts. I don’t doubt that the readership exists for a non-laddish middle-market magazine. The difficulty for Maxim lies in letting potential readers know that it is that mag. I think it needs to take more risks with the cover. Unlike the upmarket men’s mags and its rival Loaded, Maxim has never had a man as its cover star. If it’s serious about changing its image and readership so totally, it needs to shake things up even more than it already has. That could be a place to start.
When he heard the news, even Moses needed a hug. Charlton Heston died today, and though I wanted to talk about him and his work, I didn't want to say too much about his politics, other than to say that the views he held later in life were antithetical to mine, and that though he came out of Bowling for Columbine looking bad, Michael Moore came off looking bad too for haranguing a sick old man (that said, the end of the interview, with Heston walking away, followed by Moore, is oddly enough more dramatic and "exciting" than most car chases made today, though much slower). But how easy is it to talk about Charlton Heston without talking about his political influence?
I've found that having a blog makes me want to write about everything that happens around me in some form or another (one good reason not to get Twitter, because I would be chained to it), but when sitting down to do it, I realise I've not reached a point of comprehension complete enough to ensure what I write won't look ridiculous or ill-informed or outright embarrassing. Commenting on contemporary politics of any kind is too daunting to get into, which is why I've concentrated more on pop culture chatter (though again I pledge my support for Firefly/Pilager '08).
I'm sure I've failed over and over for many reasons (though I'm right about Torchwood), and that's bad enough, but when it comes to talking about politics, I find it even harder. It's not like I know nothing about it, but I'm not able to comment from a position of superiority, and that's a failing that makes me shrink from talking about it (even though a blog is meant to be about personal experience either as monologue or starting point for a dialogue, and not a source of encyclopaedic knowledge). A blog post about my experience reading and watching both versions of The Fountainhead lies unwritten because I know it will open me up to all sorts of criticism, either justified or cranky or knee-jerk and hostile. The technical term for this is, "cowardice".
It's the same with Charlton Heston's gun love. I strongly believe he was wrong, but today it struck me that even though I didn't hold to his beliefs, his work had a big effect on me. I've been working on a project looking at sci fi in popular culture, and the late 60's/early 70s featured some outright classics, three of which starred Heston. It meant that during for a short period he was the populist face of bold sci fi, appearing in films using the genre to comment on the world in the aftermath of the counterculture clashes of the Vietnam period (Tom Cruise and Will Smith do a similar thing now), starring in a trilogy of good to great movies that remain relevant or intriguing to this day.
That's all I want to talk about, and yet with someone as divisive as Heston was, it's hard to get into it without paying lip-service to my mixed feelings about him. People focus on his right-wing views later in life, but let's not forget his support for the civil rights movement and his march with Martin Luther King. This article has some good pithy background on that. So, now I've reluctantly touched on his political life, here are five (personal, pop-culture-related) reasons why Charlton Heston's death has affected me above and beyond any comment about what he eventually stood for.
5. It's not that great a movie, and it's the kind of film that would be loathed today for following a trend and being nothing more than a big event movie, and the moment that shocked me most is a rip of the end of The Poseiden Adventure, but when Charlton Heston dies at the end of Earthquake, my young self (watching it on TV) was horrified, mortified... terrified.
He did many better movies (only a few of which I've seen), but to see him try to save Ava Gardner and then meet his maker was just too much for me, and haunted me for ages. Apparently it was his idea as well (unveil the spoiler at the bottom). So yeah, not a brilliant movie, but compare it to Dante's Peak, or Volcano, or The Day After Tomorrow, or any of the recent disaster movies that pop up every so often like the bling-encrusted but spoiled brats of the genre, thumbing their mechanical noses at the classy parents borne in the 70s, and you see real craft there. Plus, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Richard Roundtree, Walter Matthau, and Geneviève Bujold, who I thought was all French and classy and hott when I was young. It may not be The Towering Inferno, but it's not The Swarm, so it wins some kind of award. Okay, so everything that isn't The Swarm deserves an award, but still.
4. A lot of comment flies around about Charlton playing a Mexican in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, but never mind that, feel the quality of that Hestonian intensity! This is my favourite Welles movie, and this original trailer is incredibly salacious, all sweat and low camera angles and shadows. I love it.
3. "WHAT IS THE SECRET OF SOYLENT GREEN?!?!?! WHAT IS THE SECRET??!?! SERIOUSLY, I'VE BEEN HIDING IN A CAVE WITH NO BROADBAND ACCESS??!?? IS THE SECRET THAT IT IS TASTY DELICIOUS TO THE MAX?!?!! IS IT LOW-FAT?!?! HELP A GUY OUT!!!" I love old trailers.
I'm actually including this because I'm so impressed he was willing to play an almost irredeemable asshole in Soylent Green. In a future where food is nothing more than slabs of protein made in a factory, where natural foodstuffs are rare and the difference between the haves and have-nots is even more pronounced than it is now, where fighting to survive means you have to be ready to kick a lot of ass for things we take for granted now, Heston had to sell that at the risk of alienating the audience. His macho bravado, chauvinism, brutality and uncompromising attitude are a sight to see. Many actors would resist playing someone this unlikeable, but Heston knew what he was doing.
2. Obviously, Planet of the Apes has to go in here somewhere. It's one of the great final scenes of all time, one that made my poor child brain turn into a cinder when I first saw it, but just like THE SECRET OF SOYLENT GREEN, it's been spoiled to the point where it's impossible to recapture that amazement. I came close a few years back, while living with a flatmate who had not only never seen it but had no idea about the twist. How he managed this I don't know, though it might have had something to do with his dismissive attitude towards any non-musical cultural artifact that was American. I badgered him into watching it one night even though he was initially sceptical and kept whining that he didn't want to see a dumb ape movie, but that Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack and hyper-intense Heston performance held his attention right up to this incredible scene.
He looked like he had been punched in the gut. "Fuck! It was Earth all along!" Priceless.
1. Shades of Caruso is heavily pro-I Am Legend, thinking the most recent re-telling of the story is a much-misunderstood classic that will be reappraised over time (our copy of it is in-bound from the US and is highly anticipated even though There Will Be Tears). That said, though Canyon thinks I have brain-problems for even considering it, I'm also a big fan of The Omega Man, Boris Segal's version of Richard Matheson's novel, partially because Ron Grainer's score is excellent, but mainly because Heston was at his most Hestony for the majority of it. With no one else onscreen, he perspired and grimaced and filled the screen with machismo tainted by loneliness and madness, a violent tough guy and killing machine reduced to rewatching Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock over and over again just to see crowds again. The sight of this iconic he-man, who had represented the word of God and hung out with Jesus and fought film wars with Sam Peckinpah, sitting in an empty theatre watching hippies dance about like the last living embodiment of the fossilised losers of the culture wars, was a memorable image.
The best scene, though, comes early on, when trying to find a new car to replace the one he just crashed. Coming across a car dealership with the right model parked inside, Heston engages in a bit of banter with an imaginary salesman, and his response to the outrageously high price (again imaginary), is possibly my favourite line reading of any dialogue ever in all of cinema ever ever no comebacks. It probably won't affect other people the way it affected me (i.e. gales of laughter). It's just so out of the blue, but then I guess he too is insane from the first frame of the movie, just like Will Smith is in I Am Legend. Plus, you know, he's right.
When starting this blog and trying to find a shape for it, I often posted long rambling posts about five things that made me very very happy. I enjoyed making them (because who doesn't like reminiscing about things that make them happy?), but five things ended up being a very cumbersome amount of random stuff to go on about. In the interest of making this blog a little more streamlined, consider that concept consigned to the dustbin of blog history, and I now unveil a replacement, wherein I will talk about one thing at a time. This might look like a cynical way to get smaller posts out there so I don't have to do as much work, but rest assured, our one or two readers, Canyon, Masticator and I will still be doing large posts as often as we can. Because blogging is our lifeblood!
The idea for my inaugural AiA post came while shopping in HMV for their quite beautiful super deluxe boxset of The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (still not getting the lavish praise and universal acclaim it deserves, though Mark "Zoot Suit" Kermode was raving about it recently, so ten points to him), as well as a cheap copy of Walter Hill's Wild Bill. Browsing through the Anime section for Ghost in the Shell bargains, I spotted something in the nearby World Cinema section, and it blew my mind.
An outrageous comedy about poltergeists, disco queens and short circuiting foam machines. Young, beautiful and in love, Marc (Clovis Cornillac) and Emma (Julie Depardieu) move into the house of their dreams, a magnificent old mansion that has been uninhabited for thirty years. What Emma and Marc don't know is that in the 1970's, the basement was a gay nightclub. One night thirty years ago, when the revellers were in full swing, an electrical fault with the foam machine started a fire that destroyed the club. Five bodies are never found. Today the house is haunted by the ghosts of five gay, mischievous clubbers. The problem is that Marc can see them, and Emma can't. Cracks start to appear in their relationship as Emma watches the man that she loves become increasingly obsessed by visions of naked men and clubbers in 70's disco gear, dancing to Boney M. But when Marc loses his job and Emma walks out on him, who's he going to call but the sex-starved spooks themselves! Can the Poltergays save their man, his marriage and still strut their stuff?
Two five star reviews on Amazon! That's good, right? I have to see this now.
(Apologies to anyone who read an early draft of this and thought it was poorly edited. It was, partially because I'm a terrible idiot, but mostly because the computer I'm using is massively unreliable and I had to just post and walk away or it would have gone out of the window. Hopefully things are fixed now.)
My plan to chronicle my adventures in sci fi cinema pretty much foundered not long after I started, a long-gestating plan to talk about Southland Tales falling by the wayside. That said, I still do intend to inspect that, as it is a fascinating project (which is not praise, BTW), but it will be in a different, more combative format. I've still been experiencing good and bad sci fi since my last Sci Fi Through Space/Time post, but never got around to talking about them. In fact, I woke up today fully intending to talk about a movie I saw recently and fell in love with, but instead, while trying to eat a bowl of penne (aka the worst pasta shape in the world), I decided to watch Bob Shaye's The Last Mimzy, and it's such an oddity I just had to bring it up here. The other movie will have to wait until another time (hopefully not next September).
Ostensibly a kids’ movie owing a debt to ET, The Last Mimzy is actually a mash note to Buddha that will doubtless be picked up by New Agers the world over, portraying as it does a post-Age of Aquarius world filled with flowers and telepathy and flying children in stark contrast to the nasty now, which contains nothing but hate and gadgets and fear and other deeply unpleasant things. I got a hint of that from the trailers, and it made me curious to see it when it had a feeble release last year, but mainly it stuck in my head because Charlie Brooker used to use the word "mimsy" as a slang word for the lower ladyparts, and the thought of a kids’ movie about that amused me greatly.
The Last Mimzy ignores the intellectual and atmospheric (even quite cynical) tone of the story, going instead for something much more optimistic and woolly, but with incidental details that held my interest throughout. As I said when I started this project, I was looking for sci fi films that were not of the norm, that were as inventive and original and peculiar and stimulating as the best of sci fi literature, and though this falls far short of those expectations, it represents a collision of sci fi tropes, cultural markers, and potential corporate fiddlings that fascinated me.
Beginning in a cuddly tunic-wearing pastoral future of much lazy sci fi, a teacher mind-melds with her young students and tells them the history of their civilisation, beginning with the travails of a scientist attempting to save humanity from itself. The world soul and the gene pool have become so corrupted that humanity faces extinction. Nothing in that world is pure enough to save us, and so he sends objects back in time using a complicated and interestingly visualised Einstein-Rosen Bridge in the hope of educating the recipients enough to reconstruct the mechanism and send back the living computer (known as a Mimzy, and yes, I did smirk) with a sample of their DNA, which, compared to that of his fellow man, is pure. Knowing that adults would not be able to understand such a concept (an idea taken from the short story), he packages the Mimzy as a toy rabbit, in the hope that it would be handed to a child, who would then communicate with the Mimzy, learn from it, and save the future.
There's a hodge-podge of ideas all over this plot, and that's before I get into the meat of the movie (the previous paragraph accounts for 3% of the movie's length, and about 75% of the interesting ideas). There are many influences here, more than I could find right now, so I'll just go through the ones that came to mind while watching.
Sending things to the past to save the future = The Terminator franchise (and Harlan Ellison's Soldier primarily please don't sue me Harlan!!!).
Using the past to save the future = John Varley's short story Air Raid and the subsequent movie Millennium, which also reminded me of The Last Mimzy due to its unorthodox effects and ugly, muted pallette.
Children targeted by peculiar force = John Wyndham's Chocky, as well as the kids’ TV show from the 80s, which also featured tunnel effects and crystal shapes.
Children taught to use advanced technology during dreams = Explorers, which was one of my favourite films when younger.
Humanity transformed to a higher state of being thanks to powers that appear to be paranormal = Phenomenon, one of the most New Age movies ever made.
Future jeopardised by the death of the world soul = Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within, as well as the seventh installment of the game that inspired the movie.
Future society as utopian, peaceful land of plenty = Star Trek.
Well, there are lots of examples of utopian sci fi, but that's the one that sprang to mind, mostly because The Last Mimzy is filled with the kind of New Age sentiment and imagery beloved of the more extreme Star Trek fans, the ones who believe Gene Roddenberry was providing a template for humanity to live by (similar to the goals of Scientology, though without the Church and the structure and financial power). The film definitely posits that we will one day be saved by the potential of the human race (a potential which is contained within an object of such unbelievable sentimental significance that it threatens to drown the movie in a sea of cynicism from the more sceptical viewer, but I'll get to that soon), and living in a utopian society that makes Roddenberry's vision look like Baltimore in The Wire, but prior to that it has to cast us as lost souls missing out on realising our full potential, and it leads to some amazing anvillicious moments.
Shaye and his writers Bruce Joel Rubin and Toby Emmerich (from a screen story by Carol Skilken and J.M. Barrie fan James V. Hart) go to great lengths to show us how the modern world is in the process of enormous FAIL. Metal detectors erected in schools, kids using technology to cheat at exams, a populace disassociated form itself; it's horrible! Except not really. My favourite shot is of a bus full of people ignoring each other because they're listening to iPods, texting, typing on laptops, and playing PSPs (which appear throughout, though I can imagine Sony is really pissed at how the machine is used as a symbol of youth corruption). I weep for humanity!
Except that might work in an idyllic area like the one this film is set in (the outskirts of Seattle and some lovely looking areas of British Columbia), but everywhere else, there is no way people want to be talking on the bus. Just a couple of days ago, while trying to get home and read a book I was really interested in, I had to wait for the driver to argue with a guy who crashed into our vehicle, and then bitch at some passengers who had a go at him a bit later. There was no one on that bus I wanted to talk to. Yay distractions that stop me from having to communicate with my fellow man who are often quite hostile and unpleasant!
After setting up this horrible world of soullessness, we are introduced to our two protagonists, Noah and Emma Wilder, played by Chris O'Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn. He's older and is truly obnoxious and nasty, she's cutesy and innocent and cloying. Noah is a pretty unpleasant kid at the start, deep in an existential fugue so powerful he lashes out at everything around him, hating himself and his life, cutting himself off from everyone by incessantly playing evil computer games, and picking on his sister. By the end he is a little hero helping to save humanity, but in the early stages he is tough to associate with. That's fine. I get what the goal was there, but showing him using games to cut himself off from everyone else is a bit rich coming from a film co-written and directed by men whose company, New Line, licences out its film properties to gaming companies for adaptation. Perhaps Shaye resents this, and doesn't want the money. If so, it's news to Peter Jackson. As you can see, I had trouble reconciling the nature of the filmmakers and the message they were trying to sell.
The kids are taken to a beach house by their mother, Jo (played by Joely Richardson), while their father David (played by Timothy Hutton), can't make it because his law job keeps him from spending time with his kids blah blah, While playing on a beach they find the mysterious box sent from the future by the scientist. Inside it are weird mineral artifacts, a blue blob thing (which I thought would come to life and start interacting with the kids, though it thankfully doesn't), and a toy rabbit that talks to Emma and educates her. Noah fixates upon a slab of green crystal, which his mother only sees as a rock. Oh adults, your wonderless minds are impermeable as steel!
After spending time with the objects, the kids (especially Emma) realise they have properties that appear magical, much as Arthur C. Clarke said future technology would appear like magic to us. Fragments of a broken rock, when thrown at the floor, will hover and rotate, creating a localised field that temporarily undoes objects on a molecular level. Mimzy communicates with Emma and unlocks her telepathic potential, as well as predicts the future for her. The crystal slab improves Noah's vision, as well as teaches him how to access a lattice of connective energy in reality that can be used to open small wormholes, and shows him how to generate sound waves on a frequency that can be used to manipulate insects and spiders into doing his bidding. Using that, he makes a mindblowing science fair entry, using spiders to create a bridge structure that could revolutionise the construction industry. This is what would happen more regularly if computer games and Facebook were banned obviously.
This was my favourite section of the movie, pulling weird concepts and effects out of the ether even though many of the ideas would come to nothing later. I particularly liked the scene with Hutton showing his son how to play golf, and Noah using his wormhole power to send the ball 300ft. So, you know, yay for humanity, but bad news for Titleist. I guess the future contains no sport. (Wow, can I go there tomorrow?)
Sadly, the film goes off the rails in a peculiar way at that point, and by peculiar I mean predictable, but featuring plot developments I really thought I would never see in a kids’ movie. The growing power of the kids scares their parents, who react badly to the presence of the objects. Richardson in particular has an unpleasant freakout, after which the family starts to fall apart. At around this time the crystal slab merges with the weird blob artifact, creating a new object in an electromagnetic pulse explosion that wipes out Seattle's power grid.
This is enough to attract the attention of Homeland Security, headed up by Michael Clarke Duncan, who barges into their house under the authority of the PATRIOT Act (yes, in the middle of a kids’ film), and detains the family, impounds the objects, and generally acts like a bit of a dick. It's at this point that we can add Poltergeist (family unit threatened by outside force) and ET (family unit exposed to otherworldly thing detained by government) to the list of films mimicked.
Poltergeist was strongly on my mind during the scenes with Noah's science teacher, Larry (played by super-awesome Rainn Wilson), and his fiancee Naomi, played by Kathryn Hahn. Noah's accelerated braingrowth attracts Larry's attention, as does his doodling of complex Tibetan mandalas. While Noah and Emma's parents are wary of their children now that they have begun to change, Larry and Naomi see the potential of the two, Larry because of the science angle, Naomi because she is a big Buddhist hippie type. They try to convince Jo that the kids are special, in a scene similar to one in Poltergeist, when benign paranormal investigators attempt to help the Freeling family. However, in that film JoBeth Williams is receptive to what they say, but here Joely Richardson's character freaks out.
To be honest, I don't blame her. She has put the weird behaviour of her kids down as just growing pains, and then suddenly two hippies show up blathering on about mandalas, tulkus and palm reading. This is especially bogus as, except for the mandala idea (mandalas being maps of the universe, as well as being a pretty pattern that shows up throughout the movie), none this litany of Buddhist folklore has any bearing on the film whatsoever.
Which is one of the reasons the movie baffled me so much. Here I was watching a very optimistic movie (almost to the point of parody) that had been made by guys I thought were nothing more than suits, as well as being co-written by someone who appeared to be the most downbeat person in Hollywood. In the past I have resisted watching movies by Bruce Joel Rubin as they are entirely humourless and self-consciously obsessed with death. In an interview with Premiere magazine conducted prior to the release of Jacob's Ladder, Rubin spent a lot of time talking about how fascinated he was by death, and how it was his muse. A quick look at his IMDb page shows him working almost exclusively on this topic for years. Brainstorm is the bonkers tale of a machine that records what happens to Louise Fletcher after her death. Ghost is obviously about Patrick Swayze stalking his girlfriend after death. Jacob's Ladder is about a Vietnam vet who doesn't realise he is dead and in a Hell populated with Francis-Bacon-esque fellas with the rapid shaky head thing that's been ripped off repeatedly ever since. My Life is about a terminally ill man coming to terms with his impending doom. Deep Impact is about an entire planet coming to terms with its impending doom. Even his adaptations of books, Deceived and Deadly Friend, are about death in some way (faked death and implanting a brain into a robot after death, respectively). Only Stuart Little 2 seems to have escaped that, though I haven't seen it. Perhaps the whole family dies at the end, after trying to come to terms with it for a while.
I don't know. It's an impressive sight, someone who has managed to corner the market on an entire subject, but his obsession with it always smacked of self-importance, as if this was his badge of profundity, not helped that his scripts have often been horribly depressing. Deep Impact in particular made me miserable for weeks after seeing it. Of those movies, I only really enjoyed Brainstorm, and I don't even think it's that great. I just liked the concept, and Doug Trumbull's weird decision to turn it into a slapstick comedy whenever he could.
Turns out I misunderstood where Rubin was coming from, and poking around the internet today has shown me the error of my ways. His obsession with death is not the morbid and ostentatious thing I thought it was, but rooted in his belief in Buddhism. He's been a believer for twenty-five years, and though the theme of dealing with death has been prevalent in his work, The Last Mimzy is the first film of his that I've seen that deals with his Buddhism. Seems I was wrong about his interest in death all along. That's not to say I suddenly like his work. I still don't enjoy any of the films I listed earlier. I just think he's not as pretentious now, is all.
Sadly, considering this is the first time I've seen Rubin's belief system represented within a film, it's via the characters of Larry and Naomi, who are almost the comic relief. Perhaps it's just that Rainn Wilson and Kathryn Hahn are light and likeable (and of course Wilson is Dwight Schrute, which tends to hang in the head even when he plays someone completely different), but their Buddhism isn't taken very seriously. Rubin isn't the last name on the script; the last draft of the script appears to belong to New Line Head of Production Toby Emmerich, who might have rewritten them a bit. I suspect this is definitely the case as Emmerich's only other screenplay credit is on Frequency, at the end of which a secondary character become a multi-millionaire by investing in Yahoo! thanks to a stock tip from the future. In The Last Mimzy, Naomi obsesses over a dream Larry had where he accurately predicted lottery numbers that he never played, and at the end of the film he has another prediction. Emmerich has a big boner for characters coming into unearned money, it seems.
The thing that really grates about that scene, though, is that Naomi reads Emma's palm and sees that she is indeed a tulku, and has great potential to change the world. This turns out to be the case, but what has her status as a tulku got to do with the future? Why is she the chosen one? She discovered the box by accident, and there's no hint that it was aimed at her. It's just a weird shout-out to Buddha that is shoe-horned in with extra palm-reading thrown in (or is part of a larger plot that was removed in the final draft). Even the mandala stuff is half-heartedly explained. It's a map of the universe? Or a nice design for a rug? You decide. It's all such a peculiar hodgepodge of religion, superstition, and science.
When Homeland Security finally storm in and arrest the whole family, they take Mimzy from Emma, who is already freaking out about her friend dying in a total lift from ET designed to add some artificial suspense to what has been aimlessly flicking back and forth between genial sci fi exploration and shrill family drama. After the scientists have had a chance to poke around with it, they discover it is in fact an enormously powerful sentient computer, and an electron microscope shot of part of it unveils the most bizarre bit of product placement since Evolution turned into a huge ad for Head and Shoulders shampoo.
Yes, Mimzy is built using an Intel processor. Again, not the best product placement as Mimzy is dying by this point, but it's okay. Using their new powers, Noah and Emma escape the building and meet up with Larry and Naomi (who gets contacted via dreamail), before heading back to the beach house to send Mimzy back. While on their way there, Emma cries about Mimzy's increasing feebleness (not as emotional a scene as Elliot crying over ET's corpse, but then it is an inanimate toy that occasionally chirrups that we're talking about), and a tear falls on the rabbit/supercomputer. You know where I'm going with this, don't you.
In a burst of effects, Noah and Emma manage to use the future tech to send Mimzy back to the future, with all the adults present. Michael Clarke Duncan's Homeland Security boss is turned into a pussycat and forgives everyone, the family reconciles, and Larry gets those lottery numbers. Better still, the future scientist uses the DNA included in the tear to heal humanity, and the benevolent future-teacher finishes her story, at which point her students lift into the air and fly off. Very satisfying, though utterly mechanical.
At this point the film goes into code-overdrive, with image after image of New Age significance appearing. Just like Republican presidents are good at filling their speeches with coded lines that can only be picked up by their hard-Right Christian followers, The Last Mimzy resonates with New Age symbolism. In ET the film ended with a resurrection and a rainbow, two things that chimed with Christian viewers. Here we have mandalas, greys (or rather future dwellers wearing environment suits that look alien), doorways of light, and vortexes, all of which would excite those viewers who think The X-Files is a documentary in disguise.
That's not a criticism, but it's something you would expect from a filmmaker operating on the fringe of Hollywood. Instead it's directed by the CEO of a major motion picture production house, written by an Oscar winner and the head of production of that same studio, and given a hard sell and wide opening on over 3000 screens (an opening it didn't capitalise on; it only grossed $26,702,770 worldwide). It's not a good enough movie to justify the time I've spent talking about it except that it is such a peculiar movie to come out of Hollywood, pretty much qualifying as ET meets What The Fuck Do We Know?
I’ve shown this movie to a lot of people and most people don’t think twice about televisions in the family house all the time. That, a little bit more heavy-handed way at the beginning of the movie – that bus scene where the two kids are riding, there was a lot more stuff about people working on computers; it’s beautiful outside in the middle of Seattle, the mountains are incredible, the mist and all that stuff – and all people can do is watch their video screens, or listening to music, or stare off into space.
Staring off into space is pretty much analogous with looking out of a bus window at the pretty trees, Bob. I too like looking at pretty things, and it definitely makes me momentarily happy, but working on a laptop, playing a handheld game, or surfing the net is a form of interaction far deeper than passively staring at stuff. The mind is working, not idling. Still, I do think he believes in what he's talking about, even though I think he's horribly wrong. Moving on, I especially like how he rationalises making horror movies and then railing against modern civilisation.
So, am I worried about humanity? Well, I am worried about humanity, but there’s more to it than that, and this does make you count after a while when you don’t recognize this stuff. When I was making Nightmare on Elm Street, I had two daughters, who at that time were 10-12 years old; and I actually showed them early cuts of the movie – ‘Is this scary? Do you like this?’ They gave me good ideas and they were really delightful. When I came home after work, I would turn on the television and the news would be on, and they would get up and walk out of the room, every time; and it finally dawned on me what was going on – it was just too bloody scary.
Or, as Canyon pointed out, it's because the news is horribly boring to a teenager. Yes, Bob, even your brainy kids. To be honest, fair enough. I do not hold to the theory that modern culture and media are responsible for the alienation of children and the breakdown of society, so I'll give him a break on that (especially as some of my favourite movies are on that New Line list), but his complaints about technology are ill-served by the movie. He seems to think they're part of the reason our society is so fractured, but anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis, and interacts with people over it, knows what a wonderful connective technology it is. One of the movie's utopian ideas is that eventually we will become telepathic. Great! Less strain on our vocal chords. Otherwise, it would bring people together in much the same way that the internet does now.
But people who use the internet are not interacting with the people around them, I hear you cry (using my telepathy)! Fine by me. When I'm at work and using the internet to communicate with people, that's because I don't want to talk to the people around me. Better than any form of communication yet devised, the internet brings people with similar interests or mindsets together, and that's a wonderful, inclusive, joyous thing, and being done via a laptop or iPhone or Nintendo DS doesn't make it any less valid. Canyon and I know all about this, having met online.
What's worse is that no matter how cleverly the objects sent from the future are made to look like natural objects (slivers of crystalline mica, sea-shells with crystals embedded in them, floating rocks), they're still forms of technology. Human potential appears to be unlocked in a New Agey way, but how much of that is because of the presence of the technology? Will the kids keep their powers once the tech is sent back to the future? Even if they do, it's all down to the machines we make. Worry all you like about technology, but right now, email and message boards and talkbacks and online gaming (yes, even the kind where 12 year olds call me a faggot and then teabag me) bring us together. Sorry, personal bugbear. I'll move on now.
Oh, and that future tech is used to fix those awful problems and save the world. So how can he really hate it? Right, sorry, now I'll move on.
Thanks to all of this research, I realise now that Shaye and Rubin and Emmerich really seem to believe in what they are doing, and have committed themselves to sending a message, using the film to teach kids about New Age philosophy in much the same way the artifacts teach the kids. Creepy, but I guess they're honest about it. Shaye in particular is very happy with the idea of a child's tear saving the world, an idea so schmaltzy it could actually kill a person. I'm serious. His explanation of why that was included is almost more entertaining than the film itself.
So, that is ultimately what this is about; is it possible, and it happens to be scientifically feasible, that there are a set of genes that actually together are responsible for behavior that we would call innocence. And there is good scientific evidence that there very well might be; and as we do carry junk DNA around in our body, nobody knows what this is doing there – this is DNA that doesn’t operate, it doesn’t turn on other genes, it doesn’t do anything. They don’t know what that DNA used to do, and it is possible that over time, whatever the kind of ‘quote, innocence, unquote’ that we carry around us today, because of disuse, they may ultimately turn off, and that’s the underlying theme.
An interesting story, I don’t know if it’s press worthy, but I’ll tell you anyhow; so, the little voice over at the end where the teacher is talking about Emma’s tears and all that stuff, there was a line in the film that ‘The precious gene of innocence was returned to humanity.’ It may be a little overly arch, but notwithstanding that; so at the last test screening, when we were in the middle of mixing the film, it got very good test reactions. They said, the guy who was running the test, the focus group, how many people rated the film ‘excellent’ – I don’t know, half the group did; how many rated it ‘very good,’ and another third, and how many rated it ‘good,’ and that’s what they would get. So just to sort of get a perspective on what’s going on, he asked one of the guys who rated it very good, ‘Why didn’t you rate it excellent,’ cause that’s what they do. He said, ‘I was about to rate it excellent, until that teacher, or who ever it was, talked about the gene of innocence; I said enough of that stuff.’ So we actually went into the mixing studio the next day and took the line out and changed it. So as I said, it’s a fine line to tell a story, but not really tell the story; but I do believe we are getting isolated, more and more isolated.
Ignoring the fact that someone with Shaye's fierce reputation is worrying about other people losing their childlike viewpoint is a bit rich, I guess even the most committed of storytellers will be afraid to go all out and just use phrases like "Gene of Innocence" in their movies, but I'm quite pleased that Shaye thought that idea was important but was willing to not use it because of a test screening. If he had ignored it, after using test screenings to judge his studio's movies, I would have cried havoc and let slip the Dogs of War (they're outside right now, in the Kennel of War, chewing on a Bonio Dog Biscuit of War).
So, I find myself in an odd position, tentatively welcoming a personal vision of the world from a bunch of multi-millionaires who would normally be considered to be the enemy of personal visions, and in one case has been instrumental in screwing over a filmmaker who just wanted to know how much money his movies had made (which is not exactly advanced future ethics at play there). A project like this that is willing to run as counter-programming to the Christian monopoly over message movies is rare enough, but I guess when you're as rich as Croesus and have a studio at your beck and call you can make whatever the hell you want. Shame The Golden Compass had its balls removed though, eh Bob?
So what about the film itself? It qualifies as occasionally intriguing sci fi even though it often feels like a mixture of ideas from other better works, but is it actually any good? For the most part, no. The performances are quite indifferent (and the kids are not that well handled by Shaye), though I enjoyed watching Wilson and Hahn, who seemed to be the only cast members trying to force some life into the movie. It's also a strikingly ugly movie, lit poorly and blocked incompetently, with some scenes featuring a hand-held camera so badly operated that it masks what is going on and interferes with the tone being set.
What makes that especially irksome is that the DoP is the usually excellent Jim Muro, whose work on Roll Bounce and Open Range was so impressive, and who was responsible for the classic horror-comedy Street Trash. For some reason, his work on this is murky and hard to watch. It annoyed me greatly. Even worse is the insipid and repetitive soundtrack by musical genius Howard Shore, whose work on the Lord of the Rings films was so beautiful, and whose ongoing collaboration with David Cronenberg is one of the most fruitful joint ventures in cinema history. His "discography" is littered with classics, and many a poor movie has been saved by his work. Here, however, I wanted to mute the movie.
Horribly disappointing stuff, and that's before we get to the big song, Hello (I Love You) by Roger Waters. Quick disclosure: I hate Pink Floyd and cannot understand the appeal of their dreary prog noodlings. Only a couple of tracks from Dark Side of the Moon would get onto my iPod, and then I'd probably delete them after one listen and then hate myself for spending 79p on them. When I realised that Pink Floyd references kept cropping up throughout the movie I was annoyed, but as it seemed in keeping with the New Age ethos, I let it go. And then, over the credits, plays the most insipid piece of sentimental doggerel I've heard since Ringo Starr's Liverpool 8. Apologies if you feel compelled to click on this video and are rendered diabetic by the cloying sentiment within.
That video encapsulates why I ended up not liking the movie. For all of the stuff I liked, and for all of the boldness of the concept (especially as this is meant to be a kids’ film), and ignoring the shoddiness of the filmmaking on show, the pompous and self-important tone of it was alienating. Didacticism in movies is bad enough when the thing you're being lectured about isn't even a concrete thing. Bitching to kids that playing games is no way to live your life is one thing (and as a gamer I resent that already), but not having anything to replace that is pretty rich. Is the film telling kids to put down their games and master the ability to warp reality? If so, is there something about today's youth that we don't know about? Screw knife crime, I want to make sure I don't get teleported into a volcano, Jumper-style.
For a kids' film it's not very entertaining, and for adults it's too light, so it ends up pleasing no one, despite the positive things it has. Compare that to Joe Dante's Explorers, which features three kids getting dream messages that contain plans for a force-field generating circuit that, when plugged up to a PC and car battery, allows them to fly into space to meet the aliens who beamed the information to them. Whereas The Last Mimzy features desperate scientists contacting children to save the future, in Explorers the aliens are just teenagers who are bored, have stolen a spaceship from their dad, and are looking to make friends and watch TV with them. It's the tonal opposite to The Last Mimzy, and is flawed, but works beautifully anyway just by being so willfully odd and eager to flout convention.
That said, there is one thing The Last Mimzy has over all of the films I've mentioned here: Rainn Wilson walking around in his pants!
I'll let you decide if this is a good or a bad thing.
"...Admiral, I need to know, and I need to know now. What is perfection? Is it the innocent smile of a happy child? Is it the excited gleam in a lover's eye? Is it the sun rising over the fog-shrouded city of Macchu Picchu?" And now I can answer, with 100% confidence, "No. It's Seth Rogen leaping onto Gary Cole like a spider monkey at the 2:09 point in this trailer for Pineapple Express."
You're welcome. I know, I know, that trailer's been around for ages, and the majority of humanity has already seen it, but I just watched it for the thousandth time this year and I had to link to it, just to become yet another cog in the hype machine. It's in my blogging contract that I use up a day a week lazily sticking a movie on the blog. Failure to comply means having to review all four seasons of Desperate Housewives, which ain't happening while I've got a say in the matter. Posting a trailer as beautifully constructed as that makes up for being a studio-fellating shill/whore hybrid.
Rogen and co-screenwriter Evan Goldberg performed a bit of miracle writing with their first collaboration Superbad, a movie that escalated perfectly from an inauspicious beginning to a full-on meltdown of comic payoffs that had been set up with such elegance that the blood, sweat, and tears they had shed to polish the script were all but invisible. So, great writer and likeable actor, but I never realised what a great physical presence Rogen has. Like a flying bear, he sells that moment perfectly. I think I snapped three ribs laughing when I first saw it.
Apatow gets a lot of flack for what is seen to be misogyny, and I'll agree Superbad had some dodgy moments (Canyon is also in two minds about it), but even taking that into account it only narrowly missed my 2007 top ten list. That escalation of comedic intensity, and the confidence with which the movie flirted with audience estrangement, really impressed me. From what has been said about Pineapple Express, it seems like Rogen, Goldberg, and director David Gordon Green have added violence to the mix, which could be a brave step too far, but advance reports are very promising.
Besides, that trailer is so good it not only makes me forget James Franco's phoned-in Spider-Man 3 performance (which I don't entirely blame him for, but still), and it not only circumvents my general (ironic) apathy toward stoner comedies, it even makes me want to track down that M.I.A. song despite my hatred for her first album being so strong that I considered selling my ears just so I wouldn't risk accidentally hearing it again.
We have to shout from the rooftops; Friday Night Lights is coming back for a third season of 13 episodes, all of which are guaranteed. Just as with Veronica Mars I have been holding two thoughts in my head in a kind of DoubleThink mode, loving it and yet not wanting to commit to it too much because shows this wonderful rarely last long. Mars, Firefly, Journeyman, Deadwood, Dollhouse (we all know it, let's not kid ourselves that Fox will suddenly surprise us); we've been burned before. But finally, some good news!
Yes, 13 episodes is not the amount I would like (can 365 installments a year be managed somehow?), but I'd rather have an HBO-size season than nothing at all. More Smash! More Riggins! More Landry! Best of all, more wonderful Coach and Mrs. Coach sparring! Where's my booze and pompoms? It's go time!
