I’m gearing up for Ask Me Anything! version 2.0, so get your questions in! Anything goes. There are no stupid questions! (Well, OK, there’s a few, but I think my readership is smart enough to avoid those, right?)
Norris Koana
The title of this post will make sense once you watch tonight’s episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which I of course watched last night courtesy of the good Canadians who show it on Sundays.
I was starting to have hopes for this show, but having seen this episode, I’m thinking that Aaron Sorkin is this close to completely blowing it. (You can’t see me, but I’m holding my thumb and forefinger really close together.) Why? Because Sorkin just can’t keep beating Matt and Harriet to death.
Let me back up a bit. Last week, Buffalo News TV critic Alan Pergament launched this column about Studio 60 thusly:
I’m still trying to understand why more of Buffalo and America hasn’t fallen in love with Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
It is one of the smartest, funniest and more romantic shows of the new season. It also has one of the season’s more appealing and unassuming stars, Sarah Paulson. Paulson, who plays born-again sketch performer Harriet Hayes, conceded during an interview on the show’s set in Hollywood last month that she stood out like a born-again Christian in Hollywood in a cast that includes Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet, Timothy Busfield and D.L. Hughley.
The article proceeds to give a nice profile of Sarah Paulson, whom I actually do think does a good job on the show as Harriet Hayes. The whole problem with the show, so far as I see it, isn’t the fact that Sorkin can’t help but fall in love with his own turns of phrase and therefore keep using them over and over and over again from one show to the next; nor is it Sorkin’s apparent Gilbert-and-Sullivan fetish that also crops up in everything he writes (not the weirdest fetish out there, as fetishes go, but it’s certainly unusual and hard to work into shows constantly). The problem is that Sorkin won’t write the interesting stuff for his interesting characters because he’s freaking obsessed with his two least-interesting characters.
Harriet Hayes doesn’t get to be interesting just because she’s a born-again Christian. Born-again Christians can be interesting, and yet, Harriet is not. And why isn’t she? Because there’s no struggle involved. She just flits about the show, with her faith never really being challenged in any serious way. There’s no evidence that she ever struggles with her faith in the way that, say, President Bartlet did in The West Wing. Remember when Jed Bartlet cursed God? Can anyone see Harriet Hayes ever cursing God? There’s no conflict in Harriet, and conflict is what makes characters interesting. Why is Peter Parker more interesting than Clark Kent? Because Parker’s internal conflict is a lot more interesting than Kent’s. We never see any internal conflict in Harriet. Sure, there’s lots of external conflict — non-religious groups think she’s a bigot, religious groups think she isn’t religious enough — and yet we never get any real idea how this all affects her. Her faith remains as it is, totally unchanged.
Matt Albie doesn’t have any internal conflict either. He’s the mirror-image of Harriet, and it shows every time they get together, and Matt almost immediately goes into some uber-clever indictment of religion that sounds pre-rehearsed in his brain. (In tonight’s episode, he actually cites the percentage of the American people who believe in angels. Who goes around knowing that stuff?) Sorkin’s approach to writing these two characters is to say that “Person X believes this and Person Y believes that, and all I gotta do now is have them argue about it at length.”
And he does this for enough of each episode that it totally takes over everything else. The internal power struggles at the fictional TV network? The trials and tribulations of a young writing staff thrown into the deep end without a life preserver? The production problems inherent in a weekly sketch comedy show? The neuroses of comics who have to play multiple characters each week and keep them all straight? All of that is more inherently interesting than Matt-and-Harriet, and yet, Sorkin keeps the focus on Matt-and-Harriet.
Which brings me to tonight’s episode.
One of Sorkin’s favorite devices is the interwoven series of flashbacks, in which today’s events are presaged by what happened weeks, months, or years before. Here we keep flashing back to Matt’s early days with the show, when he meets for the first time — you guessed it — Harriet Hayes. And in their first extended conversation, Matt goes right into talking about religion as though he’s a professional pollster, of course offending Harriet. For the balance of the episode, their flashback banter revolves around tiny minutiae regarding that first conversation, long after we, the audience, have stopped caring.
There’s another big strike at work here, too: Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson just don’t have the chemistry between them that might be able to make it all work, if Sorkin weren’t writing it so poorly.
(On chemistry: I’m not necessarily referring to romantic chemistry. On West Wing, Rob Lowe had terrific onscreen chemistry with Emily Procter, and their characters weren’t romantically linked in any way at all. Perry and Paulson don’t seem to even have that kind of chemistry. Not that they can’t appear onscreen together, but they can’t pull off what’s supposed to be the emotional center of a show together.)
We never, not once, buy the idea that these two are anything but doomed. I had hope of that in the previous couple of episodes, when Harriet suddenly realized that the relationship was utterly dead in the water, but now, here we are, beating it to death again. Now, maybe Aaron Sorkin is trying something more sophisticated here, in depicting Matt Albie as a guy who is hopelessly attached to a relationship that can’t possibly go anywhere, but the problem there is, it just doesn’t feel like Sorkin is writing that story. Instead it feels like Sorkin genuinely believes he can get these two together in the end, and right now he’s just working through it all. Well, I don’t want to see it. I want to see the other stuff.
Some of my favorite movies and TV shows are “backstage” stories set in show business. Shouldn’t it tell Aaron Sorkin something that he keeps dwelling on Matt Albie, a guy who almost never leaves his own office? There’s a reason why Captain Kirk was always leaving the bridge of the Enterprise, and it’s not because Kirk was some kind of grand adventurer. It’s because keeping him on the bridge would have made him a really boring character.
Ultimately, by having these two only ever talk about a single subject, we not only never see that Matt and Harriet could love each other, we end up with no clue why they ever would love each other. If Aaron Sorkin wants Studio 60 to succeed, he needs to put the Matt and Harriet relationship behind him. He can write about Matt, and he can write about Harriet. But constantly writing about Matt-and-Harriet is killing the show.
(No, I didn’t like tonight’s episode. Apparently Matt is now starting to lose it.)
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Widgets! Got your widgets here!
A pet peeve
I hate it when people point out that “Just because that’s the way we’ve always done it is no reason to keep doing it that way.” Why do I hate this? Well, it’s always true to note this, of course; it really is the case that tradition isn’t in itself a good reason to keep doing something.
What irritates me is that this bit of wisdom is, in my experience, usually advanced in support of making a change, in and of itself, as though change is a priori good. The above mantra is often tossed out there as a means of shutting off debate of a change that amounts to little more than a whim on the part of whoever wants things changed in the first place.
So my response is usually to say, “I agree, but you haven’t sold me on your idea yet, either. Why make a change?” If there’s no convincing answer forthcoming to that, then I say, keep things the way they are.
(No, this post is not occasioned by anything specific that happened at work or in real life recently. It’s just a thought that I have every so often. Kind of like my dislike of the idea of “common sense”.)
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Sentential Links #86
Yup, we’ve reached Installment #86 of Sentential Links. However, we will not be 86ing the series. Just in case anyone was wondering.
:: I had a wild hair and decided to redesign my weblog. (Sean’s is the first blog I ever saw, and aside from changing the contents of his sidebar on occasion, his blog has maintained its look for the entire time — until last week.)
:: Well, here it is. It’s not too pink, is it? (No. It’s more of a faded salmon color, actually. [Little Friends joke there.] Lynn redid her blog’s appearance too.)
:: Every time we receive one message it means we are not receiving something else. (I haven’t commented on the Anna Nicole Smith thing because it just doesn’t interest me, except that I’ve noted what Belladonna notes here — the media focus on her was absurd. I just don’t get it. Her death was the banner headline that day in the Buffalo News, beating out the ongoing trial of a former close associate of the Vice President of the United States. There’s a statement in there about our priorities.)
:: The ESRB is so eager to let me know if the game will torment my ears with bad words, or if my eyes might be scalded by the sight of boobies, but they never tell me what I really want to know: They never warn me that I need to pick up an extra controller or mouse while I’m buying the game, to replace the one I’m inevitably going to smash. (I have got to stop reading Shamus’s blog, because every day I read him I feel my resistance to allowing computer games in the home to slip a little. The other day at Target I very nearly dropped forty bucks on a five-pack of Star Wars games, but luckily for me and my wallet and that pesky marriage thing, I recovered after a self-administered dope-slap. But you can’t go around giving yourself dope-slaps forever; sooner or later their effectiveness wears off, and then you’re just that weird long-haired guy in overalls who keeps slapping himself in public. And believe me, I don’t want to be that guy.)
On the other hand: you’re doing exactly what you always wanted to do (or you’d get frustrated and go do something else). And what could be better than that?
Enough for now. Tune back in next week for more exciting stuff.
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Sunday Burst of Delusion
The money quote:
Rather than running away from this record, how about running on it? How about trumpeting the military success of the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and highlighting the need for inter-agency reform to offset the problems we have encountered in reconstruction?
The war was a military success, and everything that’s happened since has been “reconstruction”.
This is like saying that the Buffalo Bills won Super Bowl XXV because they led at halftime, and just ran into a few problems running out the clock.
(via)
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Hoo-boy….
First Step: Draw Dick Cheney. Yah, I know that’s a bit of a leap, I remember my old “how to draw superheroes” books where the first step would be a box, and the second step would be Captain America.
Of course, my visual arts mojo is such that drawing the box would trip me up.
:: Move over Pauline Kael! An AICN persona reviews the new movie 300:
I can’t spoil the plot because THANK GOD THERE ISN’T ONE. Just ass kicking that kicks ass that, while said ass is getting kicked, is kicking yet more ass that’s hitting someone’s balls with a hammer made of ice but the ice is frozen whiskey.
Ummm…OK then.
:: A dead whale carcass washes up on a beach in South Africa; South African police tow the carcass out to the waters off a place called Seal Island. I don’t know anything about Seal Island, but I can only assume that it’s called Seal Island by virtue of being home to lots of seals. And we all know what beasties love to munch on seals, right? Yup, sharks. Lots of sharks. Lots of Great White sharks. Who now have a nice big rotting whale carcass to nibble at. And by “nibble”, I mean, “take big honking bites out of”.
Here’s the nearly seven-minute video of the feeding frenzy. It’s pretty grisly stuff, as you might surmise, so keep that in mind, all ye queasy creatures out there. But it’s worth watching in that “Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom” way that always fascinated when the lion ran down the wounded gazelle…and that’s all before the guy in scuba gear goes into the water to get a better look.
And what do you suppose happens when a bunch of boy sharks and girl sharks get together and fill their bellies? Well, their thoughts may well turn to thoughts of, well, doin’ the underwater grind. A scientist hypothesizes that dead whale carcasses may well be essential to the continuation of the Great White species, by providing the opportunity for full-stomached shark orgies.
This is officially the greatest thing ever posted to YouTube, and quite possibly the entire Interweb. Icky dead things being fed upon by ravenous sharks, followed by scuba diving bravado, followed by the making of little sharks? I honestly can’t think of a way for this to get any better, unless it would be for one of the scientists to get up the next morning, when the carcass has been reduced to just chunks of internal organs held together mostly by gristle, and climb onto the carcass in an attempt to get even closer footage of sharks feeding….
Seriously, greatest thing on teh Internets EVER.
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A reminder!
In honor of this blog’s fast-approaching (this coming Thursday!) five-year blogiversary, I’m doing Round Two of Ask Me Anything!. Details here. (Anonymous questions are fine, although nothing…dirty. This blog is PG-13 at worst!)
Oh, and there’s no limit on questions, either. Ask one or ten, if you must.
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Geek Movies!
Via Jason Bennion I see a list of Fifteen geek movies to see before you die. Which ones have I seen? The ones in bold, of course:
Brazil (I can only count this by virtue of equating “seen” with “having been in the same room when it was on”. It was so long ago that I remember nothing from the movie. In fact, I may even be thinking of the wrong movie entirely. So on second thought, scratch that.)
The Matrix (Loved it when it came out. I liked it a little less every time I watched it afterwards. I got the second one from the library a while back, and I actually fell asleep in the first half hour, and it wasn’t one of those nights when I had gone to work at 5:00 a.m., either. I’ve never looked back, either. For additional hatin’ on The Matrix, check out 50 reasons to reject The Matrix, which includes the following:
You’ve worked as a policeman your whole life, protecting the innocent, enforcing the law. You retire with honors, then take a job as a security guard, working the metal detector on the ground floor of a skyscraper in order to help pay for your wife’s arthritis medication. You’re sitting there, on a slow day, reading your newspaper, when a girl walks in wearing a trenchcoat. She issues no demands, no warnings, no “freeze” or “drop your gun.” She just tears you in half with a spray of machine-gun fire, then does cartwheels along the walls while killing all your friends.
The Fifth Element (Good movie, but man, is it weird. And I’ve never understood people who insist that this movie is a great work of genius, with that unimaginably irritating character in it, and yet also tell me that Jar Jar Binks is too evil to let stand.)
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (I suppose, but I still think it’s overrated. But hey, KHAAAANNN!)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Good movie and all, but is it really indispensible geek viewing? Really?)
Serenity (Out of purism, I won’t watch this until I’ve seen all of Firefly. I know they say you don’t have to have seen the show to grok the movie, but I’m gonna do it right.)
Dark City
12 Monkeys (I liked it a lot. But I have to be in a special mood for Terry Gilliam. Same as I have to be in a special mood for Wild Turkey jello shots.)
Shaun of the Dead (You know, I like reading horror, but I’m not a great fan of movie horror.)
Darkman (Wow! One of the funnest nights ever in college involved this movie. We did one of our “Three movies and a bunch of beers” nights, and this one was the second movie. Most times the second movie ended up being the most fun, since that movie always occupied the “sweet spot” when we’d consumed enough beer to understand the plot and still laugh uproariously at horribly inappropriate stuff, like when the bad guy chastises an underling by cutting off his fingers with a cigar clipper, or when the hero coerces a baddie to give him information under threat of death — and then proceeds to kill the guy anyway. “Wait! I told you what I knew!” “I know you did — but let’s pretend you didn’t!” Oh, and Liam Neeson rocks.)
Army of Darkness
War Games (Incidentally, this was the last time I liked Matthew Broderick in anything. And even then I didn’t like him that much. A nerd like that, going out with Ally Sheedy? GAHHH!)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Well, duh! And check out the complete script, which includes a lot of different stuff from what actually ended up in the finished movie. For instance, here’s a bit that would have taken place just after the Bridge of Death, when Arthur and Bedevere are coming to the boat that will take them to the Castle Aggghhhhh:
Suddenly the air is filled with ethereal music, and out of the mist appears a wonderful barge silently and slowly drifting towards them. They gaze in wonder. The mysterious boat comes to where they are standing. As if bewitched, they find themselves drawing closer to the boat. As they are about to step in, a ragged figure looks up at them.
BOATKEEPER: (he is the same as the BRIDGEKEEPER and the SOOTHSAYER) He who would cross the Sea if Fate, must answer me these questions twenty-eight.
He fixes them with a baleful eye, ARTHUR and BEDEVERE exchange glances, then turn, with minds made up, pick him up bodily and throw him in the water. They climb into the boat and the boat moves off into the mist
Ni!)
Office Space (They said I could keep my radio at a reasonable volume.)
Repo Man (I don’t know the first thing about this movie!)
Jason points out a number of movies that could also be considered “Essential Geek viewing”; I’d add The Abyss and Superman to the list. Another? Well, it’s not a SF or horror flick, but neither is Office Space, and I’ve never met a single person that I held to be a Geek in Good Standing who hadn’t seen The Karate Kid.
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All those two had was EACH OTHER!
John’s got a brief post in which he describes a TV show moment that makes him cry. Since I myself have been known to blubber like a baby at certain movies and TV shows, I figure, why not make a list of such moments? (It’s not like this is a masculine blog or anything; I mean, geez, look at the picture at the top!)
:: Titanic. OK, I never found this movie to be the overwhelming emotional experience that many folks did, and Jack’s frigid and wet demise never made me tear up at all, but that brief bit where the mother in steerage is telling her two kids their last bedtime story before the waters swirl around them, and then the moment just after that when the elderly first-class couple is on their bed for the last time, always gets me. (Yes, I still like Titanic. I’ve never seen so befuddling an example of something so universally beloved at one point becoming so universally loathed a bit later on.)
:: Field of Dreams. When the catcher removes his mask, and Ray Kinsella realizes just who he is and just why he’s been doing all this weird stuff — oh, crap, where’s my Kleenex?
:: Back when ER didn’t suck, it could usually be counted on to have one big tear-jerking scene per year. The “Love’s Labor Lost” episode (Dr. Greene saves the baby but the mom dies) was one such episode; then there was the second season episode when one of the two ambulance-driver dudes died of the burns he suffered in a fire. I always found the episode where Dr. Greene died overdone — it was like the producers were saying, “You will cry now. Cry, damn you! CRY!!!” — but the episode before that one really got me. That was when, at the beginning of the episode, Dr. Carter is reading a letter to the ER staff from Dr. Greene, and then at the bottom, he gets to the note that Elizabeth had added to the end: “Mark died this morning.” The rest of the episode tracks everyone’s reaction to the news, and it ends with a flash-forward by about six months or so — and the last letter of Dr. Greene is still pinned to the bulletin board.
:: OK, I gotta mention the Little House on the Prairie episode when Laura Ingalls gets jealous over the attention being paid to her baby brother, and prays for the baby to die, which he then does. And then Laura runs away from home and goes up on top of this really high mountain (an oddly high point, given that the Ingalls family is supposed to be living in the flatlands of Minnesota, but who cares), whereupon she meets an angel played by Ernest Borgnine. While Laura’s learning all kinds of wisdom from the angelic Borgnine, Pa and Mr. Edwards are frantically searching for her. Yes, it’s exactly as maudlin as it sounds, but that moment at the end when Pa finally arrives…and then Laura turns to introduce her new friend, but he isn’t there…shit, I need more Kleenex.
:: The West Wing: when Aaron Sorkin was really on top of his shit, he could get me like nobody else. The opening minutes of the second-season premier, “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen”, gets me every time, when Toby starts speaking to Josh and then realizes he’s bleeding profusely from his gunshot wounds. “Two Cathedrals” is a tough one, too, as Jed Bartlet comes to grips with Mrs. Landingham’s death and his big MS problem. But nothing got me quite as much as the scene in “25”, Aaron Sorkin’s last episode of the show, when Toby spoke to his newly-born twins.
:: I don’t recall actually tearing up during the second half of Star Wars Episode III, but I definitely felt like I’d been punched in the gut as Anakin’s betrayal of the Jedi starts to play out. The look on Plo Koon’s face as he realizes that the clone troopers are now training their blasters on him is devastating.
:: The Shawshank Redemption: “I hope the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams…I hope.” Wow.
OK, that’s about it. I could go on, though.