Marshmallow World

I've been so crazy busy recently that I feel like I need reminders to remember that Christmas is imminent. I do love this season, but it's kind of difficult to remember that when I feel frantically swamped with work. My own particular Christmas is a kind of secular, materialistic, pop-culture Christmas - the kind of Christmas that gets railed against in A Charlie Brown Christmas, even as Vince Guaraldi's dreamy score fits right under that pop culture-loving column. I thought I'd take some time to offer examples of some of my favorite holiday media.

My Favorite Holiday Movie: A Muppet Family Christmas

This is NOT repeat NOT The Muppets Christmas Carol, which takes the already creepy weirdness of A Christmas Carol and puts Muppets in on top of that. A Muppet Family Christmas is a TV movie from the late 80s, and it is glorious. Why, you ask? Well, the movie is chock-full of Muppets. Practically every Muppet ever created. Muppet Show Muppets, Sesame Street Muppets AND the Fraggles. Who could ask for anything more? Also, Jim Henson and co. avoided a key error by using pre-existing Christmas songs and not trying to make up any of their own. I don't know if I can convey the awesomeness of this movie in words. I mean, the Swedish Chef tries to cook Big Bird for Christmas dinner. Amazing.

This movie is so excellent, I decided that there should be two clips. In the first, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem rock out to Jingle Bell Rock, and it is excellent. There is also one of my favorite lines of dialogue: "She loves canine humor!" Every time I watch this movie, I want to quote it in everyday life. I'm pretty sure that no one would have any idea what I was talking about, though.



In the second, the Sesame Street Muppets arrive, and some more of my favorite lines of the movie occur. "Where we come from, this is small talk." And, my personal favorite, which pops into my head practically every time it precipitates, "Barometers are falling sharply...Oh no!"



A Close Second, and Not Necessarily Less Awesome: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

So not that long ago I was having a conversation with one of my friends who's Jewish about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and I referenced this special, forgetting as I always do that this holiday experience is not universal, and she was like, "Rudolph? Which one?" And I was like, "Which One?!?! THE one." This stop-motion special is so essential to the way that I experience Christmas now that I imagined it crossing cultural and religious lines and bringing joy to all regardless of color or creed because Rudolph is straight-up awesome, to the degree that sometimes when the songs come up on my iTunes shuffle in, like, June, I still listen to them. "A Holly Jolly Christmas"? "Silver and Gold"? Classic. It's almost like one of those things from the 60s like The Graduate where I watch and wonder what it must have felt like to watch it anew, when the songs were fresh and unheard and hadn't become part of the larger culture. I mean, in the 60s people probably kind of wrote it off as a TV special for kids, but it just feels significant to me.



That song's not even really seasonal, just really pretty and will make you feel better about yourself. How did Clarice end up being such a nice, decent reindeer when everybody else is so assy to Rudolph?

My Favorite Christmas Album: A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

I was reading something earlier today about how people apparently like their Christmas songs classic and 40s style, and that they're bothered by stuff like Bruce Springsteen's "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." This is entirely the opposite of how I feel. The pop-y Christmas songs of the 50s and 60s are so bouncy and fun and fresh, and are epitomized by A Christmas Gift for You. Spector brought his Wall of Sound to the holiday season, and created a bunch of girl-group classics. It's so good that it got on the Rolling Stone 500 Best Albums list that was compiled a few years ago, and it's a Christmas album. Since I got the album a few years ago, "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" with Darlene Love has slowly crept up to become my favorite. Her voice is a knockout on practically everything she sings on the album. However, for a long time, before I even knew that a whole album of this stuff existed, one of my favorites was the Ronettes' version of "Sleigh Ride."



I mean, it's just so fun. Who can argue with that?

My Least Favorite Christmas Song, by a Vast Margin: "Christmas Eve in Washington"

Only people from the DC area know about this song, which gets insane amounts of airplay once radio stations switch over to the all-Christmas, all-the-time format in December. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I couldn't find a video or anything with the song. I don't know if I have adjectives sufficient to describe the epic awfulness of this song. The tune always reminds me of another overwrought song, "God Bless the U.S.A." The lyrics are extremely cheesy and basically list DC area landmarks like they were picked out of a travelogue. I'm pretty sure that with a different set of landmarks, you could construct a practically identical song about a completely different city. Suffice it to say that the chorus begins, "It's Christmas Eve in Washington, America's hometown/For it's here that freedom lives and peace can stand her ground." There must be some people who like it, because it gets played over and over again until it seems like it's invading my dreams. But I can't remember a time, even as a small child, when I ever enjoyed hearing it. I think that sales of the song go to charity, so I feel bad trashing it. Maybe if it wasn't played so frequently. I love going home for the holidays, but I am dreading hearing that song again.

New Name

The signature on my posts has changed, as I switched the account for the blog. It's not indicative of a psychotic break or anything.

Also, I changed my Google to iGoogle, and I am in love with the wee little fox in the theme.

The Goodwill Index

I'm concerned that my nearly decade-long love of Seth Rogen might be blinding me to the extent of the sexism in Knocked Up, and I don't really know what to do about it. I kept meaning over the summer to write about how freaking excited the popularity of Knocked Up and Superbad made me as someone who has loved the works of Apatow dating back to Freaks and Geeks. I remember trying in vain to find someone else who watched the show when it originally aired when I was in middle school, and I remember the joyous day that I bought my treasured DVD set. No longer having to explain who Seth Rogen is when I talk about him to my friends is a thing of wonder after some eight-odd years. Katherine Heigl's recent remarks on the sexism in Knocked Up, and the resulting reactions to those remarks, have had me thinking as I peruse blog comments. I don't disagree that the male POV is dominant in the movie, which is entirely what I expected as a longtime Apatow/Rogen fan. I just don't see all of the problems that some people find with it. I completely disagree with the idea that the happy ending for Ben and Allison is based upon them ending up together. The wedding is such a noteworthy scene in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin that I firmly believe that if Apatow wanted the audience to think that they got married, he would have shown us that. All the ending really shows us is that they work together as parents, which to me is independent of the outcome of their "romantic" relationship. I just don't know. I mean, I am a feminist. If people who generally hold a similar set of beliefs about the ways that women should be depicted on screen feel so strongly that Knocked Up does a disservice to its female characters, am I missing something?

Anyway, this whole personal crisis had me thinking about what I like to call my "Goodwill Index" - the amount of goodwill for a specific actor or actress that is built up in my mind due to past TV shows or movies. For example, the Wilson brothers have basically an infinite Goodwill Index due to my love of Wes Anderson movies. Where this relates to the above discussion of Knocked Up is when the Goodwill Index comes into conflict with a present-day project that may be completely abhorrent, or at the very least problematic. My sense of Goodwill Indices have given essential free passes to David Anders and Kristen Bell in the past season of Heroes due to their massive stockpiles of Alias and Veronica Mars-related love. Over the past few months, I have been examining and re-examining my feelings about Jason Lee as his predominantly Almost Famous (with some Kevin Smith in there) related Goodwill Index comes in violent conflict with the pure bile that rises within me every time I come in contact with the trailers for Underdog and Alvin and the Chipmunks. I mean, really? Really, Jason Lee? That is a lot of goodwill that's being thrown down the drain. (Alvin and the Chipmunks is a really rough one, because there's also Justin Long (GI from Ed) and Matthew Gray Gubler (GI from being Intern No. 1 in The Life Aquatic) It's like fingernails on a chalkboard, except the chalkboard is MY BRAIN.) I would maybe give Cameron Crowe a call, because I heard that Elizabethtown was not so good, and you both could probably do with an awesomeness-recovering change of pace.

Writing for the Sake of Writing

I've got writer's block for everything important that needs to get written RIGHT NOW. This may get a bit random, and maybe even abnormally prolific, over the next week or so, as somewhat of a dumping ground for rambling/chisel for the aforementioned block.

I watched Cold Case earlier tonight. I have an odd sort of relationship with Cold Case - I rarely make time to watch it, it's the sort of thing that just sort of occurs to me to do sometimes after The Amazing Race, particularly in times like right now, when football pushes the CBS shows back so they're not airing on the hour and it's not worth it to change to Desperate Housewives in the middle of the show, or it's a rerun like tonight. The thing about Cold Case is, I've cried at the end of practically every episode of that show that I've ever seen. I cried tonight, and not five minutes before I did, I was thinking that I wasn't that emotionally invested in this week's episode - I mean, I guess there's a scale. Most get some kind of sniffle or tearing up. Then there are some that are so touching ("Boy in the Box" or "Forever Blue") that I bust into sobs at the end. They've got their show-ending montage down to a science, and the moment when the episode's departed returns to gaze upon their loved ones now that their murder has been solved and their soul is at peace is the showstopper. It's not always the most subtle show, but it's not like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where you practically expect Ty Pennington to break the fourth wall, gaze into the camera, and wail "CRY!!!"

No real point to that, I guess, just saying that if you've got nothing better to do, you could do a lot worse than Cold Case.

Below is one of said montages, from the episode "Forever Blue." It doesn't really make much sense out of context, and I don't know if I can do the emotionally-wrenching-ness of the episode justice with a short synopsis - it's about the murder of a police officer in the late 1960s, who ends up having been in love with another police officer and it is all very, very sad. The first time I saw this episode, I was watching with a suitemate, and we were both sobbing hyper-emotionally at the end.

Musicalfest 2007: Cabaret and Company

I was having a conversation recently with some friends of mine who insisted that they did not like musicals at all. Now, to me this seems like a simplistic opinion. The world of musicals is so varied that it seems impossible to blanket-statement dislike musicals. The difference between what you get with Rodgers and Hammerstein and, say, Kander and Ebb or Sondheim stylistically and thematically is pretty vast, considering that both fall under the "musical" heading. Jukebox musicals are coming from a completely different place than musicals that start out being developed for the stage, film or TV. There's so much that goes into what a musical is - story, song, dance - that define each show stylistically on what seems to me to be a pretty vast spectrum. The two musicals that this post is about seem to me to be emblematic of the kinds of musicals that don't necessarily come to mind when people condemn them wholesale.

I initially became introduced to the music from Cabaret and Company through the online radio website AccuRadio. I've started to reach a point where my music collection is driving me a little stir-crazy just by existing with the selection of music that it currently contains, so I occasionally have to frantically find some other music resource to tap into. A few days with the 60s and 70s Broadway station convinced me that Cabaret and Company (along with A Chorus Line, the movie of which I hope to watch and write about at some later date) were different from other musicals in a completely fascinating way. I mean, talking about A Chorus Line, a song like "Dance Ten, Looks Three" is worlds apart from "My Favorite Things." Cabaret carries the dark, seductive tones of the work of Kander and Ebb, while the super-adult nature of Company is unexpectedly absorbing.

Due to my new love, Netflix, I was able to watch the movies that grew out of the stage show. For Company, that film is the Pennebaker documentary of the recording of the original cast album. It's really too bad that the film didn't grow into the intended series, because it seems like a fascinating process, the confluence of vocals and instruments necessary to capture forever a song usually performed on stage in an extended series of one-shot deals. The tongue-twister nature of "Getting Married Today" and emotionally draining performance in "Being Alive" are highlighted by the multiple attempts to capture words and emotions and preserve them for posterity.

Cabaret is a totally different animal. Apparently dramatically different from the stage show, the movie, as directed by noted choreographer Bob Fosse, is nonetheless both astounding and chilling. It seems easy to forget, in the American Idol-era of unjustified, over-the-top praising of talent, what it truly means to be a triple threat. One of the things that I love about movie musicals is when they feature someone who really can do it all. Liza (with a Z!) Minnelli is one of those people. Her presence almost becomes shocking as she goes from song to song. Lingering beneath the talent displayed by Minnelli and Joel Grey as the MC is the constant knowledge that the audience has of the potential fate for all of the characters we see. Not to take every comparison back to Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Sound of Music, but I think that it's worth noting that there is even a dramatic difference in tone and style between two musicals that both concern the rise of Nazism in Europe. Even when it's clear that the characters are deceiving themselves into ignoring the way that the world around them (in early 1930s Berlin) is changing, the film never lets the audience forget that they know how the bigger story really ends. The only other film that I can recall seeing in recent years that left me feeling similarly shaken was Capote, where a similar feeling of foreboding about an inevitably bleak future for the people concerned in the film swept over me as the credits rolled.

I keep thinking about writing posts instead of actually writing them, and then they just float around in my mind driving me crazy, so I want to write down other entries that I have in mind so I don't forget them:

-West Side Story, Hairspray and Cats: When dance defines a musical
-Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady: The non-singing actor as musical star
-High School Musical and High School Musical 2: The modern musical phenomenon

Edited to add: Since watching Cabaret, I've become kind of totally obsessed with this song from the film:



I mean, "Everybody loves a winner, so nobody loved me"? Killer.