Mood Music XLVII

I was going to try to finish up enough pending posts this evening to try to match the overall number of 2010 posts with that of 2009, but if Black Swan taught me anything, it's that sometimes you just have to let go of goals that necessitate one's behaving like a crazy person in order to accomplish them. So I thought instead I'd wrap up with some party tracks for New Years Eve - a few of my favorites from my party playlist compiled earlier this month:

And my favorite segment from All Day:

See you in 2011!

Happy December 26th

Screened: November 2010

November 7: For Colored Girls

Screened: In the theater

What a two-headed monster of a movie. The performances were pretty uniformly great, especially Thandie Newton and Kimberley Elise, but the monologues from the original stage work never gelled with Tyler Perry's dialogue or his script's tendency toward over-the-top melodrama. (Michael Ealy's character dropping his children out of the apartment window? Good grief.) Add to that the fact that various of the actresses had pretty clearly performed the work in some prior theater experience, giving the cadences of their readings of most of the monologues a disconcertingly stagy quality. I admire Perry for even trying to adapt the work for the screen, but this was kind of a glorious mess.

November 13: Oklahoma!; The Young Victoria

Screened: At home, DVR from TCM and Netflix Instant Watch

I spent the better part of this day having an epic neurotic meltdown, so this was my movie night. A soothing inoffensive-film-romance balm to my weary soul. Oklahoma! holds up pretty well for material that's nearly seventy years old, even if the dream ballet is really boring if you've seen it more than twice. And The Young Victoria is exactly the kind of British period romance that's useful to have around for woe-is-me weekends. (Although I always sort of wish the epilogue added some sort of title card about how Victoria and Albert's descendants messed Africa up. But I digress.)

November 22: Dead Presidents

Screened: At home, on HBO

I probably wouldn't have checked this movie out if my TV hadn't already been tuned to HBO. I always thought it was predominantly a heist movie that was emblematic of some of the issues of the post-Do the Right Thing/Boyz n the Hood "Will there be a Black film revolution? No? Okay, then!" moment in the mid-nineties. But I was pleasantly surprised to find a film that mostly mused on urban discontent in the Vietnam years, then in the last twenty minutes devolved into a heist movie that felt like it got edited in from somewhere entirely different. It's really interesting to read the comments on the movie's Netflix page - half say something like, "I thought this was a heist movie, what an interesting surprise!" and the other half are like, "I thought this was a heist movie, WTF?"

November 24: Burlesque

Screened: In the theater

Sometimes it's really nice to go to the movies and see a film that is exactly what it was advertised to be. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a cheesy-bordering-on-trashy "country girl dreams of stardom" movie. The movie benefitted from having as good a cast as they could've hoped for - where a lower-budget endeavor might have looked for a "Cher type" or a "Stanley Tucci type" or an "Alan Cumming type," here they actually had those actors, which made it as classy as possible within the constraints of the central premise of the film. A delightful trifle of a film - I envision errant cable viewings for years to come.

November 25: Babies

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

A totally perfect movie to watch while lying around like a beached whale after Thanksgiving dinner and dessert.

November 27: The Family That Preys

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

November 29: I Can Do Bad All By Myself; Madea Goes to Jail

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

I always sort of knew that being interested in race and cinema meant that I would have to familiarize myself with the Perry oeuvre sooner or later. To some extent, I land a bit on the Spike Lee side of the argument - like, "Some people like minstrel shows!" is not a valid response to criticism, Spike Lee knows some people like minstrel shows, it's central to the core premise of Bamboozled - but I respect the extent to which he's employed a lot of black actors who aren't getting a huge amount of work or attention in Hollywood, even if that employment is situated within some of the heaviest melodrama I've ever seen (and I own three seasons of Dynasty on DVD).

Mood Music XLVI

Enjoy the Portuguese subtitles. Without classes, I'm going to have to really plan my days so I don't turn into a moody hermit. That is, so I don't spend any more time being a moody hermit than is absolutely necessary. There has to be a difference between occasion-appropriate moody hermitness and pointless, self-indulgent moody hermitness, right? Hermitness? Hermitude? Hermitosity?

Week(s) in TV: Catching Up

I'm supposed to be working on a paper, but I figured that this was not entirely useless as a stalling tactic as it gets me writing something, which is better than writing nothing even if it's not germane to the task at hand. I keep starting weekly posts and then having them sort of fade into the ether as I get farther and farther into each successive week without posting, so this is sort of a multi-week commentary compendium including the various cable shows that have concluded their seasons in the past few weeks.

Boardwalk Empire

- When I do the Dream Emmy Ballot in the summer, the supporting drama categories are always the ones where I end up with about twenty performances that I love, and BE added some great actors there. Michael Kenneth Williams never seemed to get enough to do, besides that unbelievably excellent scene with Chalky and the guy from the Klan, but still used every second he appeared on screen to radiate a kind of simmering menace that made Chalky seem like the greatest badass of all time. Similarly, Jack Huston made a lot out of relatively little screen time, particularly in selling Richard's war wounds as more than a gimmicky period flourish.

- Try as I might, I just cannot bring myself to care about Angela and her problems. The whole "drifting along ineffectually, letting oneself be swayed by whomever happens to be physically closest" thing is likely very true to the way a fair number of people go through life, but it's terribly boring to watch. And unlike, say, Mad Men, where I think the writers made a decent case for Betty's continued presence by emphasizing the degree to which Don places importance on his children, the same can't really be said here for Angela in relation to Jimmy. The writers made me care more about Pearl in two episodes than they did about Angela through the whole entire season.

- I honestly wasn't sure for much of this season whether I would be excited for the next when it wrapped, but the finale sold me - I'm genuinely interested to see where the alliance between Jimmy, Eli and the Commodore goes. It seems like BE has all the tools necessary to pull out a superlative second season, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether they stick the landing.

The Walking Dead

Conversely, I don't know if I'm just that into The Walking Dead. It wasn't bad, but the first six episodes didn't feature the kind of character development or plot advancement that makes a show feel like vital viewing. (This post from io9 delves really well into the differences between the show and the comic - which I started reading over the summer, then tapered off - and how those differences tended to make the show a bit shallower.) Depending on how many shows I'm watching next fall, I may pick it back up again when the second season starts, but at present I'm not burning to see more.

Gossip Girl

Last week's episode concluded what is easily the best-executed narrative arc the show's ever done. (Considering the entire Schwartz/Savage oeuvre, it may be the best-executed narrative arc on GG or The O.C.) Eleven episodes must be some kind of record for them as far as sustaining a storyline, and the writers managed to make Juliet's motivation logical (as logical as Gossip Girl ever gets, anyway) and to resolve the story with a decent payoff. The only disappointment is that Juliet and Serena ended on good terms - Katie Cassidy could've made a stellar recurring villain for the show.

Glee

While watching both "Special Education" and "A Very Glee Christmas," I was struck by how little I cared about the seeming dissolution of the relationships between Rachel and Finn and Will and Emma. For all of the show's emphasis on the pairings of characters, there isn't a huge degree of chemistry among any of them. Some work well plot-wise, but there's no real, say, Matt Saracen/Julie Taylor or Chuck Bass/Blair Waldorf in this group. That said, I will observe that Artie and Brittany seem to be shaping up to be a great example of the Dream Relationship - that being when one finds someone who takes in the various things about them that are maybe a little nutty, crazy, flaky, whatever, and finds those things charming.

Sons of Anarchy

- I'll be interested to see how this season plays back on DVD. I watched both prior seasons within the span of about two weeks, so this season was going to feel like slow going no matter what happened, and I suspect that the trip to Ireland will play better within a shorter span of time and that the way it eventually circled around to bring John Teller's history in will fit better with the show's mythology as it's been laid out so far. Regardless, it's difficult to quibble with the story's denouement in the finale. If you're going to dispatch with a pair of villains who've outlived their narrative usefulness, best to do so with extreme badassery as the culmination of an epic triple-cross. The potential for a degree of narrative resetting with Jax, Clay and company coming out of jail (presumably) at the beginning of next season seems really promising - why is next fall so far away?

- I so hope that this season's finale, like the prior two, appears on the DVDs with a cast commentary. Kurt Sutter gathers together a giant group of cast members, then they proceed to basically ignore whatever gravity the plot would seem to dictate and replace it with a lot of catcalling, insults of each other's stage fighting and motorcycle riding abilities and general raucousness. I really, really want to rewatch the moment when Chibs slices Jimmy up with a cast commentary soundtrack.

- I found him kind of one-note in his early appearances, but I have to say that Chucky is growing on me. Once they minimized the masturbation jokes and focused on his potential as an odd-but-game friend of the club he became a great figurehead for the community built around SAMCRO.

Terriers

Between the time when I initially planned to write about this and now, Terriers was officially cancelled by FX. As was frequently true throughout the season, I find myself at a loss for words to encapsulate what was so good about Terriers. There were the perfect marriages of character and actor with Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James. The ensemble of smart female characters like Katie, Maggie and Steph, truly unlike any other on TV. The marvelous frayed-edges and lived-in-ness of the universe of Ocean Beach. The push and pull between laid back amiability and tangible danger that somehow never seemed to tip the balance too far any one way. I wasn't surprised that the show got cancelled - all I could really do was shrug and sign up for an Amazon update when the DVDs are available - but man, will I miss it.

I suppose the other side of the coin as far as The Walking Dead is that in the past six months alone we've had both Rubicon and Terriers come and go, and while I feel like I'll miss the characters and their universes and chase down other work by the actors from the latter two, right now I feel like I could quite contentedly never watch TWD again.

Mood Music XLV

How frequently does one have to have an evening of drunkenness devolve into hysterical tears to qualify as a weepy drunk? I figure I'm at about 25%.

Mood Music XLIV

There is a direct line from this performance to me deciding to throw a holiday party next weekend.

Because sometime afterward, my sister mentioned wanting to add more sequined items to her wardrobe. And I remarked that while watching this performance, I was positively mesmerized by Régine Chassagne's outfit and that a trip to H&M and Forever 21 while we were home for Thanksgiving would likely satisfy our quest for sequins. So, off to the mall we went (not on Black Friday, I'm not crazy) and while H&M was unexpectedly sequin-light (though I did have to wrench myself away from a glorious leopard-print maxi-dress - I love dressing like a crazy old lady with seventies-ish taste, but even in shopping mode I had the wherewithal to recognize that I had no reasonable place to wear that dress), I ultimately found a lovely dress at Forever 21. After we returned home and contemplated the spoils of our outing (see "Night"), I held up my dress and commented to my sister, "This dress needs a party." And she concurred, because among many other lovely things, she is also my number one enabler.

So now I'm in obsessive party-planning mode, and "Sprawl II" gets a spot on the playlist. Fun!

Week in TV: November 14-20

Glee

- I know lots of people think she's too smug, or pretentious, or out of touch with common people or whatever, but I kind of love Gwyneth. While all the celebrity-guest-star announcements were initially worrying, Glee seems to be building a stable of tertiary characters who could reasonably recur - more Friends than Will and Grace.

- This isn't a show where I frequently identify with the characters, but when Mercedes was questioning Kurt about the guy he tried to set her up with, ultimately figuring out that he matched them up mainly because they're both black? I have been there, girl.

- There's bad timing, and then there's using yet another spectacularly awful "mash-up" to close your show on the day after the new Girl Talk album hits the web. He's probably far too legit for the job, but Glee should try to hire Gregg Gillis as a mash-up consultant, because that business is sounding pretty rough.

Sons of Anarchy

- I was skeptical about the Irish storyline, and I still ultimately feel that Kurt Sutter seems to have a clearer sense of how it all fits together in the show's broader mythology than is necessarily being communicated on-screen, but I have to say that I really like how the Abel kidnapping storyline has come back around to inform Jax's thinking about his father and his feelings about the club. The twist of Abel getting adopted initially felt like one plot turn too many, but was ultimately worth it for that wrenching sequence of Jax following Abel around with his new family.

- Images like Gemma pointing a gun at a baby are why I love television, truly.

The Good Wife

I'll talk more about For Colored Girls in my November movie post (mixed feelings) but I have to say that I think I sold Tyler Perry a bit short, because I still feel totally wigged out when I see Michael Ealy, even in TGW's "hobnobbing with Chicago's legal cognoscenti" mode.

Also Watched: Chuck, 90210, Gossip Girl, Raising Hope, Modern Family, Cougar Town, Hellcats, Terriers, Community, 30 Rock, Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, Degrassi

Mood Music XLIII

I've been listening to Layla more frequently recently. There's something really appealing about the general tone of desperation and straight-up craziness in that album. Just listen to those lyrics.

Sometimes I wish I was one of those people who just charges around without a filter, broadcasting emotions everywhere to everyone without a care in the world as to who's listening. Take my feelings about some event or person and act like they're everyone's business and not just mine. Of course, any time I get publicly hyper-confessional I nearly always regret it later, and normally I have the wherewithal to set up my boundaries where they need to be. Sometimes, though, I'd just love to make like Clapton and put my crazy heart out on display.

Mood Music XLII

Screened: October 2010

October 1: Iron Man 2

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

I didn't think it was bad, necessarily, but in this movie much more than the first you could really see all the pieces being moved into place for the 2011-2 Marvel Universe Cinema Explosion. I'm sure for some superhero fans that really gets them pumped, but now I'm feeling a bit wary of Thor and Captain America. If the path to The Avengers doesn't unwind organically, I'm afraid that the whole enterprise is going to collapse under its own weight.

October 2: A Home at the End of the World

Screened: At home, DVR from HBO

October 4: Date Night

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

October 6: Who's That Knocking on My Door

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

So, sometime around the end of September/beginning of October, forces conspired to prompt me to dive headfirst into Martin Scorsese's filmography. I've seen quite a few of his movies, having taken an undergraduate course that studied his work alongside that of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, but there are still quite a few I haven't yet seen, and several I haven't watched since that class. The press around the beginning of Boardwalk Empire frequently invoked different ideas of how Scorsese's artistic vision framed the show, and the kinds of continuing criticism one reads when one frequents the websites of television critics paint an interesting portrait of what people view as markers of the Scorsese-esque. After letting it rattle around in my head for a few days, I decided to give in to my self-imposed movie marathon impulses and institute Scorsesefest 2010, watching the features in chronological order.

Introductory movie, and a first-time viewing for me. There's something sort of charming about the fact that even the early work of acclaimed directors can feel so student-y - as an American Studies person with a few film studies courses under my belt, I couldn't help but be amused by the conversations he has his characters engage in regarding The Searchers. It was interesting to watch this film in relatively close proximity to Mean Streets - you can see where a lot of the ideas about male camaraderie, Catholic imagery, and the relationships between young men and women got more refined as Scorsese got more experience as a filmmaker.

October 6: Daughters of the Dust

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

October 8: Boxcar Bertha

Screened: At home, DVR from TCM

Another one that was new to me. I'm left mostly fascinated by how unbelievably fake the blood looks in movies from the sixties and seventies. It looks like paint, the kind of bright primary red that kids use. How alarming would it be if something the color of a stop sign came out of your body?

October 9: Mean Streets

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

I love, love, love the first twenty minutes of this movie. The opening credits, the character introductions, the soundtrack choices. (Listening to "Tell Me" about five times in a row was a crucial step on the way to instituting the one-woman film festival.) Perfection. While the film then starts to drag a bit for me, I think on this viewing I was better able to appreciate the way that it captures a sort of age of liminality when you're trying to be an adult even though you don't really know how to do so.

October 9: The Social Network

Screened: In the theater

The movie managed to address the ongoing discussion around Facebook and how it has or hasn't altered the meaning of friendship to its relevant generation without directly engaging those debates that always seem to involve a lot of hand-wringing over the fate of the Millenials. Take away the millions upon millions of dollars, and you've still got a painfully honest picture of the way people in their late teens and early twenties come together, fall apart and learn (or avoid learning) how to become adults. Great performances by Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield; Eduardo Saverin should send Garfield a fruit basket or a bucket full of cash or something - Garfield's wounded-Bambi eyes generate more sympathy than favorable press or positive legal outcomes ever could.

October 15: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

Of all the Scorsese works I didn't see for class, I think this was the one that I was most interested to see for the first time. When you're watching Scorsese alongside Woody Allen and Spike Lee, it quickly becomes evident that you're dealing with a lesser-evil situation as far as depictions of women go - when I get to The Departed, I can talk about how excited I was when I first saw it that Vera Farmiga's character had a real job - so the female protagonist is really intriguing. (Boxcar Bertha doesn't really have much of a personality, unfortunately.) While I liked Ellen Burstyn's performance a lot, it's a very seventies movie, in a dated way rather than an iconic one. Not that I didn't like it, just that I don't know that I'll ever feel a burning desire to watch it again.

October 15: Taxi Driver

Screened: At home, from personal collection

The Scorsese filmography is one where, generally speaking, men recur and women do not. Which is to say, from Harvey Keitel through Leonardo Dicaprio, you've got a number of actors who show up in more than one Scorsese film, and few actresses for whom the same is true. Watching Taxi Driver this time around, I couldn't help but wonder what it might've been like if Scorsese had worked with Jodie Foster as an adult. She has such a dynamic presence, in that sardonic-seventies-tween sort of way that doesn't seem to exist among child actors nowadays, that it's intriguing to speculate on how she might work as a Scorsesian adult.

October 16: New York, New York

Screened: At home, from personal collection

- I'm trying to think of what a contemporary analogue would be to Scorsese taking De Niro and making New York, New York as the film following Taxi Driver, but I'm fairly stumped. Young directors on their way up the ladder of industry success generally don't do things like this these days. It's especially jarring to watch the films in order, as both feature pans from De Niro's feet up to his head - Taxi Driver towards its end, when Travis is first revealed in shaved-head, ready-for-crazy-action mode, and New York, New York at its beginning, showing Jimmy for the first time. It's a bit of a downer, and it'll never have the same reputation as the films of the great book musicals, but I love New York, New York, flaws and all.

- I love the many layers of meta-commentary in the "Happy Endings" sequence. It is so very perfectly fifties, and utilizes Liza Minnelli and all her attendant history (baggage?) so well.

- "The World Goes 'Round" seems like it could be a perfect song for Glee. It has just the right tone for a bittersweet, episode-ending montage.

October 17: The Last Waltz

Screened: At home, from personal collection

I'd been fighting it since the "Tell Me" scene in Mean Streets, but this was officially the point in this endeavor when I realized that the impulse to accumulate soundtracks was going to become a problem.

October 21: Raging Bull

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

In terms of Scorsese's period pieces and the way he incorporates aesthetic elements of contemporaneous films, it was really interesting to watch Raging Bull so closely after New York, New York. He doesn't broadcast his influences as explicitly as, say, Tarantino or Todd Haynes, but you can feel a love of those unique things that mark each era as distinct from one another. This was the movie where I most appreciated the opportunity to watch it outside of the class setting and just take time to absorb the beauty of the film.

October 22: Please Give

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

October 30: Winter's Bone

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

Mood Music XLI

Mood Music XL

I'm back(ish)! I've had multiple posts pending in various stages of drafts for a while now, which I'm attempting to balance with a semi-crazed work load. So there will be more frequent posting, eventually. Among the things I haven't yet discussed: last month's venture into the Scorsese filmography. I love many of his soundtrack choices, but recently I've fixated on this particular selection from The Last Waltz:

Week in TV: October 24-30

Boardwalk Empire

- The theme song is slowly growing on me. It's still not the kind of song you can imagine playing in the background as someone makes their way from the audience to the podium at an awards show, but it's got its own sort of swagger.

- Somehow, this episode managed to reference not one, but two different things that have come up in my reading this semester that make my skin crawl: the phrase "feeble-minded" and the contraceptive concept of douching with Lysol. Ew.

Glee

- I don't think I've previously discussed A.V. Club writer Todd VanDerWerff's breakdown of Glee's three showrunner-writers and what each brings to the episodes they write, but it's gotten a strong example this season in the way Will's been written in the episodes by Ryan Murphy. Where he normally seems like an enthusiastic, if occasionally hapless teacher, in Murphy's two episodes so far this season he's come across as a psycho with no boundaries, who then wonders why acting like a psycho with no boundaries isn't immediately winning Emma over to his side. Murphy can usually make his particular brand of heightened reality work within Glee's universe, but when a character's doing something so cringe-inducingly awful that you want to avert your eyes from the television, that's when you should maybe re-evaluate that character's path.

- Over the summer, I had designs on writing a post about what I though Glee could learn from other high-school shows, which obviously never quite materialized. (If this season is structured like the first, with the multi-month winter hiatus, it still might make an appearance.) The repeated mentions of the club going to Nationals brought up one of those points - where the first season's first thirteen episodes were loosely structured around the trip to Sectionals, there's been no real mention of them so far. The show I'd refer to here as an example is Friday Night Lights - each season of FNL, especially the first and third, where the team actually makes it to the State Championship game, utilizes the game-by-game structure of the football season as a narrative frame. Given that they didn't make it past Regionals last year, all this talk about New York is increasingly seeming like a) totally wishful thinking that is b) completely divorced from reality and c) not in a wacky, fun way.

Sons of Anarchy

One of the things I love and hate about cable dramas is that you never quite know where the writers set their boundaries. When you're not beholden to the same kinds of Standards and Practices as the networks, where do you draw the line on what's too much, especially when your show takes place in a relatively insane, violent universe? I'm thinking specifically about Jax's new Belfast flirtation with the girl he doesn't know is his half-sister, which seems to bring up these two voices in my head as I watch. One says, uneasily, "Even on a show as crazy as this one, incest is totally a line that they wouldn't cross," and the other says, "OR WOULD THEY?!?" And then both yell at the TV for persons in the know to intervene.

Private Practice

This television season seems to be featuring a disproportionate number of actors jumping around the dial - Zosia Mamet, Kevin Alejandro, Paula Malcomson, etc. - but none have been quite so disorienting as the Wednesday/Thursday juxtaposition of the Gustafson-heavy Terriers episode and Rockmond Dunbar then appearing on PP as a guy on the downlow. I mean, it partly indicated to me how quickly I've embraced Terriers (so good), but it also made for a weirder-than-it-was-supposed-to-be hour of television on Thursday.

Also Watched: Sherlock, Luther, 90210, Gossip Girl, Raising Hope, Detroit 1-8-7, The Good Wife, Modern Family, Cougar Town, Hellcats, Terriers, Top Chef: Just Desserts, Community, The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Degrassi