Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Mood Music LX: Chilling in the Dark Edition

All in all, my Irene experience wasn't too bad; my power went out on Saturday night and came back on Monday morning. After I cursed the heavens for bringing me so tantalizingly close to the new episode of Doctor Who then yanking it away and stranding me in darkness on Saturday, I weighed my options and decided that a few hours of iPod battery charge was worth trading to combat the soul-rattling creepiness of sitting alone in the dark as wind and rain battered my building. The night's chosen theme: excellent soundtracks from movies set in the seventies.

Velvet Goldmine





The Virgin Suicides





Boogie Nights





Almost Famous





Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Moffat Influences My Life, Part Two




Part of me wants to add something crazy and/or different to my wardrobe for the fall, just so I can find an opportunity to introduce the "It's a [ ]. I wear a [ ] now. [ ]s are cool." construct in a real-life conversation.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Non-Random Links

For someone interested in black actors and the performance of race, the critical commentary around The Help is like a delicious smorgasbord of mind food. Whether the movie is any good or not (haven't seen it yet, but if my dissertation interests end up going where I think they're going, I'll probably end up seeing it about fifty times whether I want to or not), it's refreshing to see issues of race and representation being hashed out in national publications when they're so often overlooked or swept aside. Some samples:

"The Truth about the Civil Rights Era" by Martha Southgate, from Entertainment Weekly

"Black-and-White Struggle with a Rosy Glow" by Nelson George, from The New York Times (Plus: the trailer for the crazy-awesome-looking The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975)

A statement from the Association of Black Women Historians, with a great list of sources (some of which I've read) that interrogate the historical questions around race and class that they think The Help avoids

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Further Thoughts on Television

I moved to a new apartment a few months ago, and had to put my couch in storage, which left me with a few errant pillows with no real place to put them. As I drifted aimlessly around my apartment, looking for a place for my pointless pillow, I suddenly thought, "Steven Moffat was right."



While I clearly like to think and talk a lot about television, that kind of specific writer-associated thought is not something that happens to me a lot. That the same person wrote this and "Blink" seems like as good an argument as any that he should be better known over here. (In all fairness to the academy, I should have noted in my previous post that unlike his terribly deserving actors, Moffat did get an Emmy nomination for writing the first Sherlock episode. Maybe the breakthrough is imminent. Maybe the second series will be so impossible-to-ignore awesome and/or The Hobbit will raise the actors' profiles enough that the show will be showered with laurels next year. We'll see.)

Emmys 2011: Nomination Thoughts

A casualty of three weeks of schlepping up and down the East Coast on planes, trains and automobiles: timely reaction to the Emmy nominations, which were announced mere hours before I boarded one of said trains, sans laptop.

- My Record: Admittedly, I cast a pretty wide net with the "Wouldn't Be Surprised to See" category, but nevertheless, I'm pretty proud of myself. Out of 94 acting nominations, I only missed four: Barry Pepper in The Kennedys (that miniseries did much better, nomination-wise, that I thought it would), Taraji P. Henson in Taken From Me: The Tiffany Rubin Story (love her, haven't seen the movie, didn't think she was "big" enough to capture the attention of the voters, who, in the past at least, seemed to disproportionately go for big names and hype independent of actual performance), Idris Elba in The Big C (thought Laura Linney would get that show's only recognition, Elba makes for a low-key odd man out in the category, and part of me thought Darren Criss was kind of a lock), and Kristin Chenoweth in Glee (I'm really disappointed in myself for missing this one - while I think "Rumours" was one of this season's strongest episodes, I think that the dialed-down nature of the writing for April compared to last year made me think that Chenoweth wouldn't get recognized, but that's no reason not to include her in the field. I'm not really sure where my brain was on this one, frankly.)

- My Best Categories: Supporting Actress in a Drama and Supporting Actress in a Miniseries/Movie, where all the actual nominees were either on my ballot or in the honorable mention category; My Worst Categories: Supporting Actor in a Comedy, where zero actual nominees were on my ballot, and Lead Actor in a Comedy, Lead Actor in a Miniseries/Movie and Supporting Actress in a Comedy, where only two actual nominees appeared on my ballot or in honorable mention

- Pleasant Surprises: I was kind of shocked by the number of nominations Justified garnered - obviously, I put a fair number of those actors on my dream ballots, but I never in a million years thought Walton Goggins and Jeremy Davies would actually for real get nominated. Also awesome: Cat Deeley finally receiving the nomination she's deserved since the category's 2008 inception for Outstanding Host of a Reality Program.

- Things That Make Me Go, "Hmmm...": I felt pretty sure it was going to happen (when I saw it on nomination morning, I may have gasped and said, "I KNEW IT!" aloud like a total psycho), and I certainly don't begrudge her the attention or, in principle, have anything against basic-cable procedurals, but I'm kind of bummed that Mary McDonnell got a nomination for her soon-to-be-spunoff role on The Closer and never got one for playing Laura Roslin.

- Unpleasant Surprises: Everyone has shows they love that get totally shafted - this year I'm mourning a bit for United States of Tara - final season, and transcended the trappings of its concept, which too few Showtime shows seem to do - and Community, which had great character work framed by inventive work across all the genres it showcased. But one batch of snubs in particular really get to me.

A few days before the nominations were announced, it suddenly came to me, floating up out of the recesses of my mind. "I bet Benedict Cumberbatch isn't going to get nominated," I thought. My increasingly Anglophilic, television-loving soul rebelled against the very thought. He's so good! I might have scoffed aloud at the theatrical trailer for the Downey/Law sequel because they are so clearly owned by Cumberbatch/Freeman! I might have moaned aloud as if in actual physical pain when I read that PBS's TCA presentation indicated that the new batch of Sherlock episodes won't air in the US until next May! However, my rational, knowledgeable-of-Emmy-history head couldn't forget the dominating performances the academy's voters have overlooked in favor of the comfort of familiar names in the past. And my head, tragically, was right. (Aside: Increasingly Anglophilic also, in part, means "increasingly appreciative of Steven Moffat's talent for genre-hopping." I'm not sure why he isn't more well-known in the US, outside of Doctor Who fans, that is - maybe if the Coupling remake hadn't flamed out the way it did?)

- This Gold Derby post of the episodes submitted for consideration by the nominated actors is very interesting. As much as I love this little exercise, I don't know that I could be an Emmy voter. Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss in "The Suitcase" versus Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton in "Always"? A choice I'm glad I don't have to make.

- I ran out of the necessary energy required to complete the ballot posts on the overall drama/comedy series and miniseries/movie categories before (or even shortly after) the nominations were announced, but will pull together some concluding thoughts on the shows covered by this eligibility period. To be continued...

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Idle Thoughts

If Harry's mental connection to Voldemort is a byproduct of his being an inadvertently-created Horcrux, with all the soul-fracturing-and-storing that implies, then were Snape's Occlumency lessons ever really going to work?

This Must Be...Pop

I always think I should post more links to things I read on other sites. (See also: previous post) Such as: the ongoing Ultimate Pop Song Tournament at The Critical Condition. It's fun to read and vote, to see how others comment, to ponder the selection and seeding of songs; for example, while I think "Since U Been Gone" is a perfectly fine song, its high seeding and presence in the total absence of Britney Spears is baffling to me.

You can see to some extent how the age of the bracket-makers leaves some gaps in the field. The overall field of sixty-four skews about 2:1 in favor of songs released between 1980 and 1995, as opposed to 1996 through 2011, which is interesting in that it's prompted me to think about what songs have been formative to my taste in music and what I see as quintessentially "pop." I'm twenty-five now, so I was ideally positioned for pop music's resurrection in the late nineties with the attendant rise of TRL and the introduction of the Now That's What I Call Music series to the US, and thus probably place more importance on the status of the Spice Girls, Hanson and their immediate successors than someone whose formative years were in the eighties would.

Anyway, it makes a pretty solid playlist, suitable for scoring, say, a three-hour drive down the highway with stretches spent sitting in traffic. (She notes, from recent experience.) I love that it's reminded me how much I liked "Not Ready to Make Nice," and prompted me to finally hunt down songs I've waffled over adding to my collection for years, like "What's Love Got to Do With It" and "Edge of Seventeen." It's a compelling project; given the set of parameters - 1980-2011, top 40 charters, one song per artist - how would you select a top 64 (50? 100?) that represented what you understand to be the ultimate in pop music?

Random Links

Been percolating for a few weeks due to intermittent travel.

The excellent interviews conducted by Todd VanDerWerff for The AV Club with Michael Schur concerning each episode of the third season of Parks and Recreation.

A Vulture piece on rumors and discussions around movie follow-ups to TV shows: I think it's all neatly summed up in this quote - "these movies aren't just financially unlikely, they're creatively perplexing."

Mark Harris for Grantland on the MPAA, specifically the ratings associated with swearing

Dan Fienberg for HitFix on showrunners and actors versus the press

A Gold Derby piece, from before the nominations were announced, about series eligibility for the Emmys in different genres, specifically those British shows like Luther and Downton Abbey, which were submitted in Miniseries/Movie but have been renewed for a second series.

Garance Doré with photos from the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was so fortunate to get to see the exhibit when I was in New York last month, even with an hour-and-a-half wait in line to get in! It's unbelievable seeing that kind of artistry and craftsmanship up close; I kept having to firmly shove my hands into my pockets to resist the urge to reach out and touch everything. Doré didn't include any photos from my favorite collection - the gorgeous, meticulously-tailored wool tartan pieces from "The Widows of Culloden" - but her selections offer a glimpse of what made the experience so transporting.

Saturday, August 06, 2011

Mood Music LIX




I forgot how much I like this song, until Amazon had one of those delightful deals on The Very Best of Hall and Oates the other week. Now I kind of can't stop listening to it.



Bonus track! I realized while I was driving down the highway the other day that this song is kind of my car-dancing jam.

Quoted

I do think...that over-decorating is a lady thing but with misunderstood origins. It’s like when I wear a dress and someone says, “You’re dressed up today,” and I’m all, “A dress is one choice.” It’s actually less effort. Similarly, I built and stained the bookshelves in my apartment and this actually came up at breakfast with a friend this morning. She said, “You must really not sleep.” And I thought, “I must really not write.”

- Sloane Crosley
Interview from HelloGiggles