Trailer Thoughts

Speaking of which...



Spoiler Alert! That highly motivated running may in fact be the most action that occurs in this entire story. (Part of me really hopes they kept Stephenie Meyer's weird allusion to The Merchant of Venice, re: the minimal-action conclusion to this story's central conflict.)

So, I didn't really realize it until Entertainment Weekly posted their gallery of stills last week, but I kind of forgot how totally insane this book is. Something feels leaps-and-bounds more insane about actually seeing the "It's a Small World"-esque cavalcade of international vampires and Taylor Lautner-as-Jacob interacting with his child soulmate. So weird. Too weird? Awesomely weird?

I also totally forgot that Wendell Pierce had been cast in this until the appearance of his hand in this trailer. (His hand feels distinctive to me - I guess between Bunk's cigars on The Wire and Antoine's trombone playing on Treme, David Simon's made it at least cult-TV-prominent.) People always say such super-rational stuff about Twilight, The Wire and respective fans of each, so I'm curious to see how that plays out.

Misc. Music

On the one hand, I kind of feel like even Stephenie Meyer is probably like "Oh, I don't know about this one, you guys..." But on the other hand, I also sort of want them to write a song this bananas for the Breaking Dawn Part 2 soundtrack? (About becoming the Champion! Of non-violent vampire conflict resolution!) Apparently, it's supposed to be everywhere during the Olympics, so I guess two weeks of over-saturation will nudge me to one side or the other.

Random TV/Internet Love

What? Shut up. You're crying.

Mood Music LXIX

Idle TV Thoughts

My brain has latched onto this thought, and now I need to tease it out. So: after watching the Bunheads pilot, I was thinking that the vaguely-alluded-to story of Sasha's gay dad sounded like a lost verse from "At the Ballet" from A Chorus Line. (Yes, as was mentioned at the end of April - I'm still thinking about A Chorus Line and sometimes listening to the soundtrack and I really, really hope they'll go meta there and have like Priscilla Lopez come on and play a former dance colleague of Kelly Bishop's character.) And then I started wondering whether the town in the show being called Paradise is a reference to the line, "It wasn't paradise/But it was home" re: ballet class in the aforementioned song, which is not only Bishop's big number, but is also partially based on her actual life. And then I wondered whether that's too dense a reference even for Amy Sherman-Palladino. But then I remembered seeing this Gilmore Girls episode once where Carole King (singer of the show's theme song) was playing a record store owner in Stars Hollow with "Pleasant Valley Sunday" playing in the background. So who knows. (Please imagine all that being rattled off at rapid speed, ASP-style.)

OMG You Guys: Part V*

Needs more Lee Pace. And telepathic wolf communication.

*There was no post for Part IV, but I felt like it would be weird to say Part IV for the fifth movie. 

Quoted

"The Watergate that we wrote about in The Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse. By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise."

- Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
"40 Years After Watergate, Nixon Was Far Worse Than We Thought" from The Washington Post

I'm trying to keep from venturing too far down the rabbit hole on Mad Men, but in the past few days I keep wondering whether the general air of foreboding and cynicism creeping into the show is pointing right towards Nixon. There's of course the first-season dealings with his first presidential campaign, and Henry's continued presence has kept Republican politics on the show's periphery in a way that could easily shift into more prominent plot points. I thought all the malaise was going to be about mirroring the decline of New York City as the seventies approach. But the events of the last two episodes suggest that there are also some questions being brought forward about what happens when your success is derived from being complicit in a corrupt enterprise. 

Quoted

Honestly, there was talk around base camp right at the start of the season, literally in the first couple of days, of something happening to somebody. I'm not sure what it was, maybe people intuited it, there was just a feeling going, that someone was man overboard. I'm not sure where that came from. For me, when I went to all the costume fittings, I saw that he hadn't been taking as good care of himself. There were stains in his shirts and his waistcoats. I would point them out, "This is dirty," and they'd go, "Yeah, that's what we're doing this season." And I'd go, "Yeah, that's not good."

- Jared Harris, Interview from HitFix

They're thinking about all this on a level that we in the audience can't even really see. That's a little mind-boggling, to be frank.

"Killing Lane is the most agonizing thing we’ve ever done, both emotionally and professionally as writers. Jared Harris has been, and indeed still is, a beloved member of our Mad Men family. He is an incomparable actor and friend. Just wrapping our heads around and committing to his suicide took months. We spent weeks in the writers’ room debating the merits and consequences, and hours in his office choreographing the deed. Every detail was meticulously mapped out—from the placement of the rope and body, to the application of the make-up, to the suicide note (we actually wrote six).

"In the end, all we can say is that the experience is not over. There is still one more episode to digest and consider. And what a brilliant one it is from Matthew Weiner. A season-finale glimpse into Lane’s (and Don’s) tortured soul awaits. We don’t think anyone will be disappointed."

- Andre and Maria Jacquemetton, from Slate

I'm a bit scared, wondering what more could possibly be coming tomorrow night.

Trailer Thoughts

Well, this looks appealingly nuts. I think there's a lot of potential for interesting stories to be told that take place in the nineteenth and acknowledge the complicated history of race therein.* And a take this extreme practically demands attention and debate. I hope there will be a rich critical discussion around this movie this coming winter.

*This seems like as good a place as any to observe that I'm crazy excited about Twelve Years a Slave, not only because of the increasingly awesome casting news but because it's a true story and Chiwetel Ejiofor has long deserved a meaty starring role and I love that Steve McQueen's throwing his new bigger profile behind it.

I'm interested in some of the questions Ta-Nehisi Coates raised in his reaction post regarding the trailer. (For one thing, I think the question of whether we've hashed out the Soul on Ice deal enough varies depending on whether "we" is "people engaged in academic and critical discussions about race" or "America.") While the issue of women's function in liberating themselves is a critical one to keep in mind, I don't know that we'll fully know how that's going to shake out until we see the whole movie. Certainly, if you look at the first trailer for Inglourious Basterds, I don't think you get any real sense of how much of the movie is devoted to Shoshanna rather than the titular group. And I hope (and, to some extent, expect) that the man who gave Pam Grier such a showcase in Jackie Brown isn't employing Kerry Washington as just a pretty face. 

Quoted/Screened: May 2012

"My personal hope is that he lets a hundred (or maybe a dozen) Whedons bloom. Let's hope he repays the loyalty of his fans by opening the doors of the entertainment kingdom to the kind of writers and creators who might not get a crack at the big time without his backing. Nobody's done more than Whedon to create and inspire a generation of TV writers; many of the best scribes working today got their start on Whedonverse programs and most of the rest were powerfully influenced by his shows. I hope he throws his weight behind those writers' most impassioned passion projects..., backs those writers' pitches, gets their shows on the air and brings more fine entertainment products to the Web."

- Maureen Ryan, "Avengers Fans: Thank TV for That Awesome Movie (And What Joss Should Do Next)" at Huffington Post

I thought I'd let this stand as my Screened post for May, since the bulk of my movie viewing was contained in three trips to the theater to see The Avengers. (All 2D) (The only other movie I saw was We Bought a Zoo, which was much more charming than I expected.) The best was the first showing I went to, on Saturday the fifth, where the opening-weekend crowd responded to quips and plot developments with raucous laughs and cheers. The quippy banter of the script was perfectly suited to the viewing experience - it felt joyous to be among the crowd in a way I seldom feel in a packed theater. I rewatched some of the lead-up movies in the week before I saw The Avengers; while my opinion of Iron Man 2 hasn't really changed, I can see how The Avengers benefitted from letting that movie do a lot of heavy lifting in establishing SHIELD's presence in the broader plot and defining Tony Stark's relationship with them, and I think the weaving together of the various plot strands actually elevates the first Thor and Captain America movies a bit.

I also liked this LA Times interview with Joss Whedon - I think the comparison of Bruce Banner with Oz from Buffy is a really interesting one to make among the many "how does The Avengers fit in the Whedon-verse" analyses floating around. That was the other great feeling I had watching the movie for the first time - in that much-heralded shot that tracks from hero to hero in the midst of the final battle, my cult-TV-loving self couldn't help but think, "Holy crap, he really did it."

Mood Music LXVIII

This is A) the best mash-up they've ever done on Glee and B) the only track I bought from all the performances in the third season. I might give it a couple of episodes in the fall, just because their "plan" for following half the characters into their post-graduation lives sounds like a recipe for disaster and I love some good train-wreck television. But I've already deleted the season pass off of my DVR, and I'm probably going to chase that liberating feeling right out of regular Glee viewership.

What's all this new activity all of a sudden? I'm glad you asked, mythical reader. I'm trying to clear some, if not all, of the backlog of draft posts I've accumulated as I ready myself for Dream Emmy Ballot season. Half-finished movie thoughts from the winter, your hour is nigh.

Idle TV Thoughts

I. I was totally prepared to be over True Blood, but each new shot of Michael McMillan is wearing my resistance down. I love Reverend Steve too much to just drop the show altogether. (Okay, Chris Meloni's return to HBO doesn't hurt either.) (Also, HBO's seasonal "check out this HBO-type awesomeness right here" reel is some of my very favorite marketing, going back to the old ones you can see on DVDs of their early-aughts shows.)

II. I'm like 95% sure that the two seasons of The Killing don't hold together in any sort of logical way as a story that covers less than a month in show-time, but also I think Stephen Holder is my new fake TV boyfriend?