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November 25, 2007
TEN THOUGHTS AFTER WATCHING THE FIRST SIX EPISODES OF HEROES . . .
. . . which I bought on DVD recently. Basically, I wanted the thrill of what I had with LOST last Summer - a serialized drama with cliffhangers that I, unlike those who actually watched it week to week, would not have to hang too long on. Here are my thoughts.
I HAVE ONLY SEEN THE FIRST SIX EPISODES OF THE FIRST SEASON SO NOW SPOILERS! I MEAN, I'M ASSUMING THEY SAVE THE CHEERLEADER, BUT DON'T TELL ME HOW!
1) Easily the most compelling plotline is "The Cheerleader." She fits a classic superhero archetype: the tension between wanting to be normal, and enjoy trivial things, and wanting to be different. This is archetypal all the more because we all have this tension.
2) The Petrelli (sp?) brothers are kind of annoying. One of them is smug and wears really cool sunglasses, and the other is hunky and all emotional and stuff and is constantly pushing his bangs from his eyes.
3) Hiro is great. That guy is really funny. He has an energy that you don't usually see on TV, which is the land of cool.
4) I'm really surprised that they got away with all the heroes being very very white people, save this "Hiro" dude. I would think this would be more of an ethnic/racial grab bag, but it's not.
5) I really don't like the way it's shot. Too many shadows, too much darkness.
6) The character with the most potential at this point? Nikki.
7) The character with the most interesting future story-lines? Hiro. The character who I really don't care about? That smack-addict artist dude.
8) Why does the Indian guy have a punky, short-haired sidekick?
9) I really hope every episode isn't "You're a superhero!" "No I'm Not!" "Yes You Are!" "NO! I'M NOT!" "YES, YOU ARE!" Because this has been the plotline of almost every episode so far.
10) I really do think Cockroach should be a more prominent character, and that they should develop him beyond just "The Guy who gets Theo into deep doo-doo;" Face it, every Cockroach episode is a good one and the more they . . . oops, that's from my 1987 List of 10 THOUGHTS ABOUT THE COSBY SHOW.
Tell me if you love or hate this show. I'm not sold yet.
Posted by Andytown at 09:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 14, 2007
ON AEROPLANE
Most of you who know me, tolerate me, or can’t weasel out of a conversation with me, know about my hideous man-love for Neutral Milk Hotel. It was tumultuous at first for the Hotels and I; I remember hearing about them in 1998, in college, when a lot of my indie-rocker friends swore up and down that they were the new big thing, revolutionizing music, etc. At the time, however, I associated them with a lot of music I didn’t like or want to like: Mark Kozelek-related enterprises who sung about their troubled childhoods and why girls didn’t like them (until they were famous, and now girls like them, but it’s not authentic, you know . . .). I resisted most of the major music trends at the time: Pavement, Wilco, Radiohead . . . all of whom I now love. I associated them with esoterica and non-conformist conformism. I went on a trip with two of my best friends, Joey and James, and was forced to watch MEETING PEOPLE IS EASY over and over again, and thought Thom Yorke and his gang were depressive, pretentious louts.
In 1998 . . . I don’t know. I listened to the Talking Heads a lot; I was really interested in what Weezer was doing. I discovered Bob Dylan a year earlier and affirmed my fanship for Springsteen. I listened to Dylan’s GREATEST HITS VOLUME 3 (and, to a lesser extent, THE BIG LEBOWSKI soundtrack) over and over again. The tape would flip in my car and I would listen to it again. I really wasn’t interested in a guy who opened his albums by declaring that he was “The King of Carrot Flowers.”
And it’s all so stunningly and boringly ironic because now I’m writing a Masters paper on NMH. After repeated listens, I’m convinced IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA is perhaps the greatest album ever made. I’ve come to discover the lose thematic narrative that Jeff Mangum and his fellow Neutrals constructed about loss, innocence, domestic dispute, failed relationships, and (of course) Anne Frank. That’s what my paper is about in a nutshell – how the Anne Frank metaphor explains nothing but reveals everything. His obsession with her dual tragic irony and childlike innocence is what makes her “the only girl I ever loved.” He turns middle school required reading into something of mythic import, an arch-narrative that informs his own tragic existence and similarly ill-defined desire for transcendence.
I point this out because it’s so rare that an album can do this. Granted, I’ve been butt-kicked before by albums – Nick Drake’s BRYTER LAYTER, Velvet Underground’s S/T, and more recently Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s SOME LOUD THUNDER. But, to me, AEROPLANE is the MOBY-DICK of albums; it’s epic, in a way, and I’d only say something like that about an album.
As a writer, I’m interested in the weirdly cohesive, yet incoherent, mythic narrative that Mangum paints: First he is the King of Carrot Flowers, then he wants to befriend a Two Headed Boy, then he’s pining for Anne Frank, followed by a vision of a Communist Daughter that both Freud and Marx would have a field day with, then he’s singing about a carnival freak show, then he’s singing about ghosts, and finally the Two Headed Boy again (which, in full dualism mode, is him.) In between, he finds room for ambiguous references to Jesus and the aforementioned doomed Dutch diarist.
Unlike a lot of indie rock (but like a lot too, I guess), there’s no room for irony. I used to love The Decemberists, but now I’m finding them a bit too precocious. I firmly believe that Colin Meloy believes he was “born for the stage.” Yet the more I think about it, his “Mariner’s Revenge Song” and “Crane Wife” are like overlong creative writing projects. They’re wildly ambitious and yet too neat; pastiches of pastiches of pastiches . . . eventually that precocious seventh grader should get tired of making civil-war dioramas, but not Colin. And yet, I suppose this is why I kind of loved them in the first place.
But AEROPLANE resists my criticisms even in its sloppiness, precociousness, repetitions, excessive use of the theremin, and desire to remain uninterpreted.
In my favorite song, HOLLAND, 1945, Mangum sings
“But now we must pack up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on”
I think this is the emotional centerpiece of the album. It ties in with a central theme of my own life, the perhaps wrong-headed idea that I often reiterate, that “Well, maybe things are rough now, but it would probably be worse in early 1990s Rwanda. So get over it.”
Or maybe I’m wildly misinterpreting it. But I can’t wait to write about it. And I hope you listen to it.
Posted by Andytown at 10:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 11, 2007
I AM GOING TO NAME MY CHILD ANTHONY JOHNSON
Hi, Please enjoy one of the greatest moments of my life. I was there and it was glorious. In games like this, where your team's offense is doing nothing and seems capable of doing nothing, and the other team is driving and scoring at will, you imagine, kind of like a kid, that something like this will happen.
And it DID.
Thank you Anthony Johnson. You made my year. Now when I think of the Fall of 07, I will not think of all the tribulations I have had to endure or work I've had to do or movies I didn't get to see or . . .
I'll think of you, my brotha.
By the way, I'm reading Tom Perotta's THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER and it's already one of my favorite modern novels. Awesome social commentary, storytelling, characterization, etc.
Posted by Andytown at 06:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 04, 2007
I WROTE THIS REVIEW IN TEN MINUTES . . .
. . . SO DON'T BE MAD IF IT'S TERRIBLE.
I read INTO THE WILD this Summer and, like everyone else, was struck by the ambiguous and questionable heroics of the protagonist: was he a suicidal, arrogant misanthrope who deserved what he got, or an inspiring visionary with the misfortune of living a disorderly natural world and a time that sees him as, well, a suicidal, arrogant misanthrope? Chris McCandless’ story is fascinating for the same reasons as are such seemingly disparate texts as MOBY-DICK, FIGHT CLUB, THE BEACH, and THE SUN ALSO RISES. When McCandless announced, in one of his last letters, that he was venturing “Into the Wild,” it wasn’t just a pretentious mission statement; it was culmination of everything of everything he had lived for up to that point.
Krakauer leaves my big question mostly unanswered, though he does recognize the conflict. We tend to admire the spirit and iconoclasm of guys like McCandless and his hero, Henry David Thoreau, who don’t have much truck for Ipods, digital watches, and air conditioning. McCandless, however, could have used a grocery store and a refrigerator.
Sean Penn’s movie of INTO THE WILD has many of the same flaws as Sean Penn himself. It is often humorless, often over-dramatic, and prizes big moments over subtlety. Penn, my least favorite of all the great actors, has never been much for levity. His persona reminds me of Julius Caesar’s description of Cassius:
“Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit
That could be moved to smile at any thing.”
Even in FAST TIME AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, he seems like a really serious guy playing a stoner. He has moments of quirk and humanity, in films like SWEET AND LOWDOWN and the underrated SHE’S SO LOVELY, but often he gives us compellingly dark portraitures of tormented men: THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON, DEAD MAN WALKING, 21 GRAMS, and his (I think, annoying) Oscar nominated turn in MYSTIC RIVER. And let’s not forget that Penn is married to one of the most stunningly beautiful women the world has ever produced, Robin Wright (who, I argue, has aged wonderfully and without the aid of any plastics.)
So it’s unsurprising that Penn’s INTO THE WILD is a movie after his nature, his peculiarly somber personality, and his own tendency for cultural removal. But I was impressed while Penn clearly loves McCandless, as I did, he does not turn him into a messiah crucified by the centurion of culture. McCandless, in book and movie, is a free agent, and his free-ness that makes him wonderful is precisely what does him in. This is cause for catharsis; Penn gets that right.
Penn has a nice way of filming nature without giving into sweeping IMAX shots. He doesn’t ponder the beauty of a sunset so much as he has his character recognize it. The performances are all excellent. Emile Hirsch*, as Chris, has a tendency to mug and brood a little too much (just like Penn), but he is a charismatic and thoughtful version of the character we met in the book.
So I recommend INTO THE WILD; if I didn’t, I’d be very very upset that someone botched up this truly compelling book. But I’m not.
* - Apparently, Hirsch is playing SPEED RACER in a Wachowski-brothers version of the film. Wonder if the brothers W (one half of whom is a cross-dresser, or had a sex change, or something) will imbue this ridiculous bunch of kitsch with a complicated mythology and post-structuralist philosophical overtones? Don't be surprised if this ends up being the HEAVENS GATE of the TV Cartoon remake genre.
AFTERTHOUGHT . . . (meaning, after the ten minutes it took to write this)
It just hit me that the perfect director for this movie would have been Werner Herzog. Who else can best capture the sublimity of nature? I'm curious as to why this was never considered. Box office? Well, Penn's version isn't exactly doing big numbers. So why couldn't they have let Herzog have a crack at it?
Posted by Andytown at 01:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack