Resolutions

I realized recently that June is a much better time than January for making behavior-altering resolutions, at least for those who schedule their year around an academic calendar. Right now, I actually have time to devote to things like getting more exercise or fixing my sleep schedule, whereas January always seems to flash by in a haze of new-semester madness. This applies here: the paltry post count for the past few months is depressing me, so in addition to "cook more vegetable dishes" and "stop falling asleep with the lights on," we have "write 30 posts for June." Whether this will actually translate to a post a day remains to be seen.

The good thing about this particular resolution is that I already have a lot of posts percolating, including but not limited to: the end of the TV season; Dream Emmy Ballots; long-postponed conclusions to Favorite Adaptations and Best of the 00s; the introduction of my personal year-by-year slog through the major Oscar nominees; Books Read and its new film companion; [belated] birthday baking; and thoughts on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Bill Condon: Future Twilight Director. I think it'll be a good month.

Books Read: May 2010

May 15: Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

The latest in the series from which True Blood derives its inspiration. The series tends to divide into books where momentous things happen, and books where characters are largely reacting to previous momentous events. This book seems to fall into the latter category, but was still solid. I think the continuing storyline of the impact of Katrina on Louisiana's vampire hierarchy was a shot in the arm for the series that continues to deliver for Harris. (It seems like their runs will only overlap for a couple of weeks, but I'm really intrigued to see how True Blood and Treme play back-to-back. At the very least, it will be accent-tastic.) I also like that Harris revisited the concept of having a famous dead person appear as a vampire (this time with a less litigious estate than that of "Bubba").

May 18: Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin

Her work may be branded with the condescending "chick-lit" label, but I really enjoy Giffin's work. Her characters always feel like adults, whereas other books lumped together under that umbrella can often come across as adults acting like teenagers. Heart of the Matter was heavier and darker than Giffin's previous books, but it never shied away from the resultant complexity. I feel like I'm going to be musing on this one for a while.

May 19: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Someday I'll have to tally all the books I end up reading either in anticipation of seeing a film adaptation or after seeing a film adaptation. This falls in the former category - I'm interested to see how the book's very interior narrative will translate to the screen, particularly in the way that its guiding concept informs the story's progression.

May 20: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

No matter how deeply I recognize, at least on an intellectual level, the pull of a popular young-adult book, somehow I still seem to find myself in circumstances where I'm totally drawn into a book and find myself finishing it at some ungodly hour of the morning. Collins takes a fascinating concept - an authoritarian government demands tribute from its citizens in the form of teenagers who fight to the death in a televised competition - and milks it brilliantly for all its tension and drama. Believe the hype.

May 24: What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

Another film-inspired choice...about which I apparently don't have much to say.

May 25: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Again, another late night. What can I say, they're addictive. A solid middle book to a trilogy - it made me look forward to the last installment coming out later this summer, and drew upon the world Collins established in The Hunger Games without being too repetitive.

May 28: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

The most recent Newbery winner (sometime I'll devote a full post to how I was Newbery-obsessed as a kid) and a very good one, at that. I liked the way that Stead drew upon A Wrinkle in Time not only to frame the narrative of When You Reach Me, but also to evoke a sense of the way a particular book can impact you when you're young. A worthy addition to the pantheon.

Maybe I'm Crazy

...but I'm pretty sure this song deserves a one-off character and storyline on Glee to truly capitalize on its super-creepy weirdness.

I honestly can't decide whether this is more disturbing sung to a rat or a human being.

P.S. If Ryan Murphy is going to keep recycling Popular storylines with the whole Kurt's dad/Finn's mom thing, can we also have Colfer and Monteith do the riff on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Please?

Books Read: April 2010

April 23 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I read this one for a class. It's interesting to see how frequently the Pulitzer committee has chosen these sort of multi-layered histories for their fiction prize in recent years. They may feature different protagonists and narrators, themes and tones, but there's still a lot in common between Oscar Wao and, say, Kavalier and Clay, Middlesex and The Known World. I dug Diaz's take on Oscar's epic nerdiness - it kind of makes me want to create an "Oscar Wao Sci-Fi/Fantasy Reference" tumblr.

April 30 - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The first book I've read using the Kindle for Mac application. I tend to not be a huge fan of reading on the computer, but it wasn't too bad. I think my biggest problem was the progress bar at the bottom of the window, which allowed me to rationalize spending time reading when I should have been doing other things. (75% read? I could probably finish in a few hours!) I was prompted to start reading North and South after I watched the BBC miniseries adaptation from 2004. I don't do too much nineteenth-century reading outside of Austen and the Brontes - Gaskell's take on labor conflict, as well as the relative agency she bestows upon her heroine, was truly unlike anything else I've read from the era.

Mood Music XXIX: Retro Saturday Night

As I noted a couple weeks ago, I spent some time reminiscing about "Retro Saturday Night," a radio show I used to listen to when I was in high school. The show was a fun, dance-y mix of R&B, pop and disco from the 70s. I thought I'd put together a mini-playlist sampling a few of the songs featured on Retro Saturday Night.

On the Value of Primers

That is, of the "See Spot Run" variety, rather than paint or makeup. I just finished watching Visions of Light, a documentary about the history of film cinematography. I was alerted to the film by Roger Ebert's blog post regarding Variety's dismissal of film critic Todd McCarthy, who wrote and co-directed Visions of Light. Ebert's brief description spoke to the film nerd within me, so I added it to my Netflix queue.

Working on finishing my thesis and looking ahead to putting together reading lists for my comps has pushed me to think a lot about gaps in my knowledge of fields I'd like to work in, and how best to fill them. I'm interested in popular culture and media (that much is obvious), but from more of a cultural history standpoint than an aesthetic one; I've never done much literary analysis, art history or visual culture work, and while it won't be a major field of study for me, I don't want to neglect it either. A film like Visions of Light, which clocks in at a little over ninety minutes, is an ideal primer text for me, anchoring a discussion of an aesthetic history of film in a wide selection of clips that directly illustrate each point. If only every area of academic study could have such a painless, jargon-light breakdown.

I thought I'd also include my favorite primer clip - TCM's explanation of why they show films in the letterbox format. The clips they use to illustrate how pan-and-scan cropping alters movies will make you never want to watch one in fullscreen format ever again.

I recently watched Grease in widescreen for the first time after I saw this piece, and it was sort of astonishing to feel myself noticing new things in a film I've seen dozens of times in the cropped format.

Music Monday

Remnant of a weekend dive into 70s r&b/soul/disco I used to listen to on the radio. Maybe someday when I'm really in the mood to stall instead of doing work, I'll do a full-tilt playlist. I forgot how much I like this song, especially the spoken part at the beginning. It would probably be too pretentious to introduce "dig" into my vocabulary, seventies-style, right?

Retraction!

As Jerry Orbach says at the end of Dirty Dancing, "When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong." You guys, I was wrong. 10 Things I Hate About You the TV show is not a pop culture travesty. It is a charming, delightful high school comedy.

From the pilot on, the show has really used the movie on which its based to provide little more than sketchy character guidelines. The actors don't really invite comparison with their earlier counterparts, because they're not really playing the same people. ABC Family has managed to carve out a decent niche for itself by presenting original material that's a step more mature than the offerings of, say, Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, which has the added bonus of making its characters seem more like actual teenagers. When 10 Things is at its best it's hilariously witty, and the show manages to feel simultaneously familiar and fresh. I also have to give it up to 10 Things for having a smart outspoken progressive teen feminist as its heroine - Kat Stratford remains the kind of character who is all too rare in popular media today.

Flashback: Totally Minnie

So recently the commercial I've been getting more than any other on Hulu is Verizon's new takeoff on Big Red's 80s ads.

It seems like kind of a genius campaign to me - it plays on the familiar while acknowledging the cheesy, and the jingle remains unbelievably catchy. It took me back to the video tapes of late-80s TV specials I used to watch ad nauseam as a kid. It's a means of media consumption that I assume would be totally foreign to kids today, who can get their made-for-TV movies on DVD weeks later or keep them stashed on DVRs. On those tapes, the commercials became part of the viewing experience; I was too young to be annoyed by them, so it never occurred to me to fast forward through them. Frankly, The Wizard of Oz still feels kind of incomplete when I watch it without the commercials touting McDonalds' employment of a young man with Down's Syndrome or an episode of 48 Hours featuring a story about a lifeguard trapped at the bottom of a pool. It's a fascinating glimpse into the world of whatever week the special aired and a mini-tour through a moment in history of advertising.

I thought it might be fun to write about some of the things I watched over and over as a kid. Several are really strange to watch again now, recognizing people who I didn't realize were celebrities at the time or noticing holes in plot logic that I once accepted at face value. The one the Big Red ads immediately brought to mind: Totally Minnie, starring Suzanne Somers and Robert Carradine.

To summarize: Somers is Carradine's guide at the "Minnie Mouse Center for the Totally Unhip." That's right, Somers is the "hip" one in this scenario. Oh, the "rapping." The special, which aired as part of the Wonderful World of Disney (or whatever its equivalent was at the time), is an impressive bit of Disney branding from the time right before they would recapture the hearts of America's children with The Little Mermaid, mashing up clips from old shorts and features with pop songs from the 70s and 80s. Bizarrely, this was my first encounter with the phrase "Miss Jackson if you're nasty":

I think repeated viewings of the following clip made me A) love "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" forever (I was really excited when I got older and realized that this was actually a real song and not just some random Disney thing) and B) buy heart-shaped sunglasses last year.

Every once in a while when I'm getting ready to go shopping, this ode to unrepentant materialism pops into my head. Oh, the tragic, tragic 80s fashion.

Walt Disney says Be Yourself! (Unless yourself is a cartoonist who wants to unionize!)

No. Just...No.

I'm officially beyond adjectives on this one. The mind boggles.

I was already staring in horror and then a cold chill went up my spine when Phantom Planet's "California" started. They had to drag The O.C. into this? Lee Pace and Judy Greer weren't enough? Good grief.

Adaptations: A Wrinkle in Time

I feel compelled to comment on today's news that A Wrinkle in Time is being prepared for a new film adaptation. I don't talk about it much, but I'm a bit of a Madeleine L'Engle superfan, and though it's being adapted by the screenwriter who brought us Bridge to Terabithia, which made me so rant-y, I'm willing to reserve judgment. (I still haven't seen the Bridge movie - if I come across it someday on cable I'll probably try to give it a go, but I'm not actively seeking it out at present.) With decent studio money and quality computer technology, the range of space worlds that L'Engle presents in Time should be fully realized in all their detail and complexity. In my mind, the film will live or die in casting. The right young actors playing beyond-precocious child prodigy Charles Wallace, supernerd in a BMOC's body Calvin and queen of teen awkwardness Meg could make the movie great, and even elevate subpar scripting. Time will tell.

The part of the news item I find really interesting is the suggestion that Disney views Time and its closest sequels as a potential film franchise. The books that make up the "Time Quartet" - Time, A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet - are connected through their protagonists, members of the Murry nuclear family, but are also fairly disparate works. Even if the film version of A Wrinkle in Time is successful, that doesn't necessarily indicate success for the other three. Wind features the same central trio of characters, but the book's plot, which focuses on an illness of Charles playing out on the mitochondrial level (it really doesn't translate well to concise summary) and utilizes a form of telepathic communication that L'Engle terms "kything," doesn't necessarily seem like it would transfer easily to film. Planet, my favorite of the four, is epic in scope but also features a lot of storytelling that is very interior to its characters. Additionally, Planet takes place about ten years after the events of Time, meaning that the filmmakers' ability to capitalize on any success of Time would be necessarily impacted by either significant passage of time or by recasting of the film's central characters. Finally, Many Waters is just an entirely different book than the other three. Meg and Charles are essentially swapped out for their twin brothers Sandy and Dennys, who accidentally travel through time and space to find themselves caught up in the story of Noah's Ark. In my opinion, Sandy and Dennys are L'Engle's most underdeveloped male characters; when they're introduced in A Wrinkle in Time, the twins are presented as the societal control subjects of the Murry family - the "normal" siblings against whom Meg and Charles are judged - which necessarily makes them kind of blank slates, and they're never given much more shading. It would be an understatement to call it a stretch to view success of the space-tripping adventures of Meg and Charles in Time as any indicator of the potential earnings of their boring brothers stuck in a tale from the Bible.

I could go into why I think the Austins have more cinematic potential than the Murrys, but I'll save any further ranting/cautious optimism for when more information comes out about the movie. Who knows, maybe against all odds and prior experience the people bringing this book to the screen just won't fight what's established it as a classic for nearly five decades. I suppose stranger things have happened.*

*I feel like I should have some perfectly selected classic quote to go here, a la Mrs. Who, but alas, I'm coming up blank.

Random TV Observation

I'm kind of in love with Zach Woods' line readings.

He was one of my favorite things about In the Loop. The Sabre storyline has been kind of hit-or-miss, but I hope they keep him around for a while on The Office.

Mood Music XXVIII

This song randomly wedged itself into my head this weekend. The sets they used for performances on variety shows in the sixties are so odd sometimes. I'm not sure which is weirder - the giant Uncle Sam in the background or the...cheerleaders?

OMG You Guys, Part III

My enthusiasm for the series has waned a lot in recent months, but I can still get excited about the new movies. And Eclipse is my favorite of the books, so I was really looking forward to this. However...

...this trailer is super-bland, right? There's no big moment here like Twilight's "Edward saves Bella from the Van of DOOM" or New Moon's "Birthday Party of TRAGEDY," but there should be some interesting little scenes they could pull from the story. No Rosalie/Jasper flashbacks? No Vampires vs. Wolves Smackdown? (Okay, there's probably effects work that still needs to be done for that. But this movie is coming out in, like, three months. Get it together, people!) There are snippets there that look good - Bella reckoning with having to leave her parents behind, Jacob generally being all up in everyone's business - but I was hoping for a little more awesomeness all around.

Also, when they had the first full shot of Kristen Stewart (about 0:30 in), I was like, "Oh, right. That's a wig." I know they had to go that route after she got her Runaways mullet, but the shots here are not making it look good at all.

"Reach for the Stars, Because the Stars Don't Have Arms to Reach for You!"

Two bits of silliness from the weekend. First, my personal favorite from the Zach Galifianakis-hosted Saturday Night Live:

SNL sketches that truly make me laugh are few and far between these days. What put this one over the edge for me was Galifianakis' pageant dad mouthing along with everything his daughter says. The horrors of stage parenting never go out of style.

Second, the hilarious "Handsome Men's Club" clip from Jimmy Kimmel's post-Oscar show.

I won't start listing what I love about this, because it'll just turn into a gushy synopsis of the whole ten minutes. I'll just remark that I love suck-up John Krasinski and Lenny Kravitz's musical commentary.