OMG You Guys, Part II

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON trailer

I thought that I wasn't that excited about this movie, but I was lying to myself. I totally am. In a concession to my epic nerd-dom, I'll just add that six months ago (#7), I totally said that the birthday party would make a good trailer if well-executed, and I was so right.

08-09 TV Season: Looking Back and Ahead

Reflecting on this past season in television put me in the mood for a mondo-post. Clips abound! (Hulu ones are clips, not full episodes) First, ten awesome finale moments, in no particular order:

Chuck - "Guys? I know kung fu."

It's a ballsy move, sticking a game-changing cliffhanger with a "To Be Continued" at the end of a show with uncertain prospects for returning.  Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz practically dared NBC to incur the wrath of fans by canceling the show, a gamble that thankfully paid off.  Now they've got at least 13 episodes to prove that this change was a good one - I can't wait to see what happens.

How I Met Your Mother - Barney and Robin work through their issues

The writers of HIMYM were armed and ready for the Moonlighting-invoking naysayers with this one, bringing their two commitment-phobes together in a way that satisfied the tension that's lingered between them all season without resorting to anything out of character.  It helps that Neil Patrick Harris and Cobie Smulders have a) excellent chemistry and b) deft comedic timing.  At this point, I could kind of care less about who Ted ends up with - I just want to see more of Barney and Robin trying to navigate their romantic minefield together.

Grey's Anatomy - 007

Every time I think I'm finally done with Grey's, Shonda Rhimes manages to pull me back in with a stroke of televisual genius.  The writers managed to build the rumored departures of T.R. Knight and Katherine Heigl into an emotionally tense hour of television with a doozy of an ambiguous ending.  One of my favorite feelings in television watching is when a moment causes my stomach to drop to my feet, the kind of moment that makes me say "Oh, shit" aloud, even if I'm watching alone in my living room.  The moment when Meredith realizes who the John Doe is (about 1:35 in the clip) was one of those.  I literally cannot stop myself from reading spoilers, so I knew something awful was going to happen to George, but I was still shocked, and that's good TV.  I'm excited to see what they do with this ending - any combination of George and Izzie living or dying has potential repercussions and hours of story. 

Lost - Juliet detonates the bomb

In many ways, this moment (at the very end of the clip, around 1:55) is about what's to come.  There are no clues as to whether the detonation will have the intended effect of hitting the reset button and preventing the plane crash and the wait until 2010 will be excruciating.  However, I had to give a spot to this moment because of the amazing job Elizabeth Mitchell does communicating Juliet's desperation.  Her determination not to die for nothing rendered the final moments of Lost Season 5 both heartbreaking and breathtaking.  I can't believe the crazy ride of this show is almost over, and I anxiously await the final chapter.

The Office - Jim & Pam's big news

Jim and Pam speak to the heart of the part of me that is totally a crazypants shipper about everything I watch.  I love them, I love them being happy, and this moment was beautifully done.  Unbelievable physical acting by John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer.

Gossip Girl - Chuck and Blair finally get their shit together

Alas, YouTube (or, rather, the CW's lawyers) won't let me embed this one.  Sometimes Gossip Girl can seem like a never-ending dance of "will they or won't they," which makes a denouement like this particularly satisfying.  Ed Westwick and Leighton Meester have some of the best chemistry on television, and they sell the sweet moments just as well as the combative ones.  Who knows what Stephanie Savage and co. will do with this relationship next season, but it's nice to have the two of them happy, even if it doesn't last.

Friday Night Lights - Tyra gets into UT

When I found out that I got into my first-choice school, over the phone from my mother while I was at school working on the newspaper, I sank to the ground and started crying.  In retrospect, it was probably pretty embarrassing, but nothing matches that specific feeling of elation, an emotion which shines through in this scene. All credit to Friday Night Lights, the writers and the actors for creating this wonderfully rendered world of authentically realized characters.  The journey of Tyra from the pilot until now (including the murder and drug-addled cowboy boyfriend) has been a joy to watch.  (Narrowly missing the slot, and deserving of an honorable mention: Matt taking his grandmother away from the nursing home.  Zach Gilford is regularly heartbreaking on this show, and that moment made me weep.)

Fringe - Leonard f-ing Nimoy!

I watched Fringe intermittently this season - when it went into its midseason hiatus, I felt like I wasn't really following the mythology, and when it came back I wasn't sure that I cared enough to pick it back up.  However, when I heard that J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman had capitalized on their Star Trek work and gotten Leonard Nimoy to play shadowy Big Bad William Bell, I knew I had to watch.  I don't have much more to say about that, beyond: Leonard f-ing Nimoy!  I extended the clip beyond his appearance to include the final shot of the alternate-universe Twin Towers, an indelible image that closed out the season with a bang.

ER - Life goes on

Ultimately, the ER finale spanned the entire season, bringing back old cast members in flashbacks and reunions to compose a body of work that honored the show's fifteen years and millions of fans.  At the beginning of the season, I thought that the ideal final scene would be a montage of daily life snapshots of the show's departed doctors.  This was just as good - an episode showing the ER continuing to work, right up until the end.  If you had told me when she was recurring on the show years ago that I would be glad to see Hallee Hirsch show up in the finale, I would have laughed right in your face, but her return as Rachel Greene managed to bring the show full circle without seeming too forced.  I love the final shot, when it pans out to show the exterior of County General in full for the first time, scored by the show's excellent theme song.

Battlestar Galactica - Roslin at rest

When we first meet Laura Roslin in the BSG miniseries, she is learning that she has cancer.  It remained as the specter haunting her through remission and recurrence, always threatening to keep her from shepherding the human race to a safe haven.  There was something undeniably peaceful about the "Dying Leader," having seen her seemingly impossible mission achieved, simply slipping away.  When I first watched this, I was crying so hard I was not breathing.  Even now, getting the clip, I still teared up.  There were some unsatisfactory things about the final season of BSG, but this was not one of them.

Honorable Mention:

30 Rock - Kenneth's cousin

Ultimately, the 30 Rock finale wasn't quite there for me - there was a lot about it that was funny (especially Liz's talk show romance advice - "Sir, have you ever kissed a gentleman?") but the season was just a bit less cohesive than its predecessors.  However, I must honor my 16-year-old self and acknowledge that I was kind of thrilled to see Clay Aiken in the finale, especially with the allusion to him being Kenneth's cousin.  I hope they do something more with this in the future - there's potential there.

Life on Mars - ...what?

I didn't really watch this show, but after I saw the finale of the UK version, with the classic tragic-time-traveler ending of the protagonist committing suicide, I was curious to see how the American version would end.  I was rewarded with one of the most batshit crazy things I've seen in quite some time.  I love insane things just about as much as I love really high-quality things, so this seemed like the place to shout out Life on Mars for some truly excellent crazy.

And looking ahead, five(-plus) fall returns to television about which I am psyched.

Michelle Forbes - True Blood

Technically, this is in two weeks, not the fall, and Forbes has been on TV recently on In Treatment.  However, I had to give this one a slot for returning her to what she did so awesomely as Admiral Cain on Battlestar Galactica - crazy bitch mode.  Even if True Blood and its literary source material hadn't become my new crazy-ass obsession (I'm sure I'll address this more fully in some other post, but apparently my childhood vampire phobia was keeping me from experiencing some seriously out-of-control, totally unhealthy pop-culture obsessions) I would still be psyched about getting to see her do what she does best yet again.

Thomas Calabro and Laura Leighton - Melrose Place

This is essentially what I wished for three years ago, but potentially more awesome because they're actually returning to play the same characters.  I love a good primetime soap opera - hopefully, this one will embrace the true Aaron Spelling spirit and really go for broke.

Kristin Chenoweth and Victor Garber - Glee

Both cast members on post-writers' strike second season casualties on ABC (Pushing Daisies and Eli Stone), I hope with all my heart that these Broadway vets will be utilized to the full extent of their abilities in guest spots on Glee. (The clip is my personal favorite part of the Glee pilot - the introduction of Rachel Berry.  Her Type-A persona seems like it could become grating, but Lea Michele absolutely sells the whole thing, from the way she smiles as she dabs at her tears, to the whole gay dads segment.  Also, I love "On My Own" - it's a gorgeous, heart-rending song, especially when it's performed well.)

Busy Phillips - Cougar Town

A post that keeps floating around in my mind but never quite making it to the blog is "Actresses from Past Judd Apatow Productions Who I Wish Were Getting the Same Boost in Fame as Their Male Counterparts," and I thought I'd mention that because Busy Phillips is at the top of that list.  Kim Kelly was a truly unique television character, and more than nearly any other character on Freaks and Geeks, I really wanted to know what would happen with her in the future.  As far as this fall is concerned, I really hope that Cougar Town will be better (specifically, less desperate for relevance) than it seems in this preview.

Tina Majorino - The Deep End

What I said about Percy Daggs goes for Tina Majorino, too.  Her work on Veronica Mars was stellar, and I'm glad to see her continuing to get work.  Former child stars who keep their shit together and prove to be good actors as adults don't get nearly enough credit, or at least they get overshadowed by the ones with drug problems.  Props to Tina for staying awesome.

Where No Man Has Gone Before

I wish I could say I was resourceful/intrepid/obsessed/awesome enough to have found this fab retro 70s-tastic Star Trek convention slideshow myself, but I wasn't. Liz pointed me to it. I just thought it was so rad that I had to give it a post here. It combines two of my most favorite things: pop culture phenomena and candid photographs from the seventies. I also got to file something under "learn something new every day" - the earliest Trek conventions were dominated by women, making things like this "What's in Star Trek for Girls?" piece on MTV seem especially insulting. Their answer: hot guys, which, true, but the actual answer is: awesomeness, which everyone loves, regardless of gender. No need to be reductive, MTV. Women made Star Trek the phenomenon it is today.

Sigh

Once upon a time, this commercial drove me up a wall.

But then came Veronica Mars, and Percy Daggs as Wallace, Veronica's accomplice/BFF, was a delight, so much so that I completely forgave any previous annoying ads. Now, Veronica Mars is cancelled, and Percy's last IMDB credit is in 2008. If you'd told me years ago that I'd be saying this, I would have called you crazy, but: I miss you, Percy. Come back to TV soon.

Fandom

I like the question at the heart of this Washington Post piece by Hank Stuever - do overinvested fans interfere with the production of quality films? - but I would have liked him to interrogate the idea a little more. He never quite lays out his rationale for what makes a film successful or not - it seems to be connected to box office numbers, but he never makes that explicit; to take it further, what about a film like The Golden Compass, dismissed as a flop in the U.S. but vastly more popular overseas? What about the involvement of creators? The two franchises where he cites manic fandoms are Harry Potter and Twilight, both of which have their creators actively involved in the book-to-film process - J.K. Rowling's outing of Dumbledore came due to her correcting some script reference on Order of the Phoenix, and Stephenie Meyer has stated that her sale of the Twilight rights to Summit contained a guarantee of some measure of story fidelity. (Not to mention that after Chris Columbus left the franchise the Harry Potter movies became much less beholden to their source material.) Is the fact that Gene Roddenberry is no longer around a factor in Star Trek's ability to play with his characters and mythology? What about the fact that even though J.J. Abrams has admitted that he wasn't a Trek fan, the screenwriters are? Or that Abrams has his own fanbase? Admittedly, it's not quite as crazy as, say, Joss Whedon's, but I was a huge, huge Alias fan (and Felicity, Lost, and Fringe in varying degrees) and that absolutely played a role in my wanting to see Star Trek - it is always thrilling to me to see the Bad Robot logo, and I totally laughed a crazy little laugh of recognition when Amanda Foreman showed up on the bridge.

Ultimately, it's a tough line for studios to walk. Aim for the biggest audience possible, and you risk not even bringing in the one group who should be automatic. Make it too niche, and that built-in audience is all you get. Personally, I'm a big fan of faithful adaptations, but there should always be room for some improvisation.

Why, ABC Family, WHY?!?

I know I've made my feelings about unnecessary remakes known before, but I saw this while watching ABC Family this evening, and was kind of appalled. So you take a classic late-90s teen movie ostensibly based on a Shakespeare tale...

...and you get this? Who thought it was a good idea to remake a 10-year-old movie with what appears to be terrible acting and a significant drop in charisma? Yikes.

Adaptations: Trailer Thoughts

I guess this really is a wait-and-see kind of deal.

News about this movie (namely, that it's rated PG and that the ending has been altered from that of the book) has only compounded my prior concerns about the book-to-screen adaptation of Half-Blood Prince (specifically not feeling that I've seen anything from Bonnie Wright in the movies so far to suggest that she's up to selling Harry and Ginny's (in my opinion, already undersold) Great and Epic Love). This trailer made me feel more optimistic than previous ones have, though - particularly the images of a cursed Katie Bell flying up into the air and the lake full of Inferi: both, to me, look like they will be haunting on the big screen, and also build visually on what Rowling originally wrote. Everything else cautions for reserved judgement - it's hard to tell from this two-and-a-half minute package how the somewhat disparate tones and storylines of the book are all being condensed. As a book, Half-Blood Prince has its strengths and weaknesses - the history of Tom Riddle's transformation into Voldemort serves as a well-executed example of Rowling's ability to spin stories, but cumulatively, there's something about it that screams "penultimate book in the series!" just moving pieces into place for the last installment.

To some extent, I don't go into the movies with terribly strong expectations anymore. Alfonso Cuaron's decision to streamline the plot for Prisoner of Azkaban made that film work very well, but also set the movies off on their own narrative, for better or worse. To me, that streamlining made Goblet of Fire a scattered, pale imitation of my favorite book in the series. I'm interested to see what ultimately makes it into the Deathly Hallows movie(s). Off the top of my head, I can think of a few characters who've been effectively written out of the movie narrative who figure into some of the book's biggest moments. If Fleur's not present (the dulling down of her character is one of my chief issues with the Goblet of Fire movie), what will be the incident that forces Harry, Ron and Hermione out of their normal lives and into that of fugitives? With Dobby absent since the Chamber of Secrets movie, will his death (one of the most wrenching moments of Deathly Hallows) be written out of the movie? Most have been solid adaptations of their source material, condensing a lot of plot, characters, and mythology into a few hours of story, but the more time has passed, the more I feel alienated from the movies as a fan of the books.

Mood Music XV: Palate Cleanser

I felt compelled to post this following Danny Gokey's mind-blowingly awful performance of "Dream On" during tonight's American Idol rock-themed show.  I don't have sufficient adjectives for how bad it was.

If Gokey stays around another week (which he doesn't merit), I hope that next week is when they do the "Clive Davis picks a song for you" thing, and that Clive Davis (who signed Aerosmith to Columbia way back in the day, and thus enabled that record's distribution to the masses) shames him publicly for doing such a grave disservice to such a sterling piece of rock music.

Quoted VI

"I am still almost as avid a television and film watcher today as I am a reader. I hasten to add that now my pleasure in being engaged by this media is bound up with the pleasure of the interrogating gaze that I direct toward it. My critical spectatorship, then, as astute cultural critic, bell hooks might say, involves the pleasure in being entertained in part by actively viewing and deconstructing representational strategies, in interrogating the politics shaping the 'power of the image,' to paraphrase visual studies feminist Annette Kuhn. What fascinates me about television and film culture is the power of these media to present appealing versions of realities and fictions, to perpetuate and create consumer desires, and to veil the reality of their political implications through the allure of the entertainment mask. Particularly interesting as well is the relationship they suggest between the political and cultural environment, specifically how television and film create, fictionalize, reconstruct, and/or presume to record contemporary social realities."

-Stephane Dunn

"Baad Bitches" & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U. of Illinois Press, 2008)

I don't have much to say beyond the fact that I love reading things that describe how I feel about why I like some of the media I like. Some things are just more fun when you deconstruct them.