Things Not To Do While Traveling (#1 in a series)

When traveling on modern airplanes, don't watch episodes of the TV show Pan Am.

(Pan Am glamorizes old school plane travel.  Current travel pales in comparison.)

 

TV & Movie Review — Firefly and Serenity

A couple years ago, on a trip to Canada, my boyfriend picked up a copy of the Firefly boxed set at a thrift store, telling me how good it was.  We proceeded to watch the first disk’s worth of episodes the next few times I was at his place, but then he had a break-in where his big screen TV and most of his DVDs were stolen.  The TV and some DVDs were later recovered, but not this set.

I added the set to my Netflix queue, and eventually finished them a month or so ago, plus the follow-on movie, Serenity.  (Particularly of note in the boxed set is that it includes a handful of episodes which did not get aired during the half-season run of the TV show.  A must for anyone who enjoyed the show.)

In no way am I about to become a Browncoat (fan of the show) and rave about how it is the best television show ever.  (Sorry.  That would be Twin Peaks.  Or maybe Lost.  Or I’ll accept The Dick Van Dyke Show, if someone insists.)  And I won’t ever quote lines of dialogue or do Firefly cosplay.  (I will drool over Jayne a bit, though.)

Actually, it took several episodes for me to warm up to the show.  The first disk’s worth, it was simply okay: solidly a “Western in space”, with an intriguing mix of conflicted characters and unrevealed pasts.  Good enough for what it was, but not necessarily anything I would have pursued weekly if I randomly tripped over an episode.  By the end of the second disk, though, I was solidly interested in the show, because it was interesting, different, and engaging.  By the end of the boxed set, I was invested enough to be bummed by the doomed nature of the show.

The Serenity movie, though, is a must for fans of the show.  (Hard to say if it hangs together adequately by itself without the background of the television show.  I rather suspect that the Inara and Shepherd subplots would be pretty obscure.  But this definitely didn’t come across as just a double-length episode of the show, like some Star Trek films did.)  There were two big unanswered questions left over from the show — what are the Reavers, and what the fuck is up with River — and those both get answered in the movie.  (Or at least resolved.  I still have no idea why they did what they did to River — it felt rather like they came up with a solution and then stitched it backwards into her character to pretend it was the cause — but the subplot gets resolved, which is sufficient.)

The scenes with Serenity passing through the Reavers were very well done, a space battle/ballet which brought to mind the attack on the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi, but doubled.  And although I mourn (NON-SPECIFIC SPOILER) for the characters who died in the film, I also appreciate that Whedon did kill some of his precious children, making the story that much more heart-felt.

And a nagging non-question from the show — where does this actually take place, how big of a “universe” is it set in — also gets answered.  We’re so used to Star Trek and Star Wars, where the ships blithely skip all the way across the galaxy, that it was a bit of a shock to realize that the entire show occurs in a single solar system (albeit one with a couple dozen planets).  This information changed the perspective I had on the show a little bit, making things a lot more plausible for the characters to periodically run into people they knew.

(One thing that did annoy me with the extras on Serenity were the repeated comments that the movie was very special in that it was a movie based on cancelled television show, and that never happens.  Well, never since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, thirteen years before.  And double never since Star Trek: The Motion Picture, thirteen years before that.  So yes, it’s rare, but hardly unknown.  Or “thirteen years” is the definition of “never” in movie land.)

Now Dark Horse Comics is releasing collections of their Serenity comics.  Amazon, I’m coming for you.  (But still, no brown coat.  I promise.)
 

Stuff I Read: “Bleeding Cool”

For years, UK-based Rich Johnston’s “Lying in the Gutters&rdquos; column was the place to go to for advance news and rumors about the comic book industry.  He had an incredible hit rate for getting stuff right — which probably implies that lots of people were willing to feed stuff to him, that they trusted him.

About a year ago, “Lying in the Gutters” was transformed from a weekly column into the comics and comics-related film news (and rumor) site Bleeding Cool.

While other comics fan sites run lots of previews of soon-to-be-on-sale comics, interviews with creators, press release lightly rewritten as news stories, and fan musings on various subjects, Bleeding Cool remains the go-to place for all the latest stuff.  As an example, the current front page has bits on:

• Sponge Bob comics
• A new Transformer named "Spastic"
• Ads for The Walking Dead
• A Roy Lichtenstein painting auction
• J. Michael Straczinski
• A new Winnie the Pooh movie
• Torchwood and Dr. Who
• The Little Fockers movie
• Casting for the new Spider-Man movie
• Ghost Rider 2
• …and a lot more

Lots of rumors.  Lots of barely-there, bleeding-edge news.  Lots of trailers and such that don’t show up on other comics sites.

Not just cool.  Bleeding Cool.
 

Rocky Horror G(l)eek

I’m such a Rocky Horror geek.  I both loved and disliked the recent Glee episode.  (More on that later.)

During the 80s and early 90s, I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show roughly 50 times.  (Only twice in the last decade, though, and probably only a half dozen times after mid-1990, when I moved to California.  I guess I decided drinking and getting laid was a better use of my post-midnight time.)  I’ve been in several theater casts and even in an actual stage production.  Here are some memories…

Seattle / In College (1987–1988)

• My second time seeing it was at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle, on what turned out to be their 10th anniversary showing, during my junior year of college (1987, I guess).  Lots of people in costume, and the “opening act” was the Bugs Bunny cartoon “Rhapsody Rabbit”.  While we were waiting in line to get in, some Jesus Freaks were across the street with signs and a megaphone, telling us we were going to Hell for seeing the movie.  (Really.  For seeing a movie.)
   
• Our crew made a few more trips from Tacoma to the Neptune over the next year or so.  One time, one of the kids we approached to come with us said “You don’t want to see that movie!  That’s where they rip up the chairs in the theater and throw them at each other!”  (Makes Sue Sylvester’s interpretation of throwing toast seem benign, huh?)  Another time, my father came with us (drove us up); a youth pastor, he knew of the movie but had never seen it and afterward, he said he was glad he had seen it (in that “I didn’t really enjoy it, but now at least I know what it is” sense).
   
• The Neptune cast used to “sacrifice” (Rocky Horror) virgins before the show.  One time, we took a college friend up name Carol.  Carol Carroll, actually.  They had fun with that.  (“Ask her her name!  Ask her her last name!”  “No, what’s your last name?  No, your last name!”)
   
• My first theater cast part was at the Neptune, where they put me in a wedding dress and I played Betty Monroe.  My Ralph was wearing a Nixon mask.

Eugene and Portland / In Grad School (1988–1990)

• During grad school in Eugene, the local art theater started doing Rocky Horror, and after several of us showed up in costume, they asked us to create a theater cast.  We did that every Friday and Saturday for about a year.
   
• At one point, they even played it as a Saturday afternoon matinee.  (Lasted about 3 weeks, I think.)  There’s something truly wrong about exiting a showing of Rocky Horror into bright sunlight.
   
• Actors Cabaret of Eugene put on a live version of The Rocky Horror Show (note that the stage show name differs from the movie), and I was cast as one of the Tranyslvanian chorus.  (I had nothing prepared for my audition piece, so I sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.)  To this day, I struggle to sing the melody (rather than the harmony) for “The Time Warp”, and I still recall bits of the show choreography.  The show only ran for three performances, but it was lots of fun.
   
• A few times, several of us drove to Portland for their showing (must have been after the Eugene theater stopped showing it), and once we drove to somewhere near Seattle and provided a cast for a theater there.  Ah, the long drives in my old Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.  The Portland theater had a live band at the time which would play before the show; a cover of “Tainted Love” was their best/most memorable piece.
   
• At some point, a few of us from the Eugene cast were interviewed for a master’s thesis someone was doing on Rocky Horror and similar mass participation movie viewings (of which there were very few at the time).  I think I’ve got a copy of the thesis somewhere (God knows where).
   
• Over the years, I’ve played several roles in theater casts: Betty Monroe, Columbia, Dr. Frank N. Furter, Riff Raff, Magenta, Dr. Scott, Brad Majors, and Rocky.  I still have most of my costume bits (except the wheelchair), including the gold lame booties for Rocky and the laboriously hand-sequinned blue tap shoes for Columbia.  (Mmm, need pics!)

California and Seattle / The Last 20 Years (1990–2010)

• After moving to California, I went to showings in Palo Alto a few times.  In about November 1990 (I think), they had a costume contest.  At the time, I had let my hair grow long, aiming for a ponytail but my hair has so much body that it was more of a puffball.  For Halloween that year, I had done a French Maid drag costume (you can see where this is going), and I re-used that as Magenta.  With my own hair teased out big, and with a beard.  I won the costume contest and got a copy of the Rocky Horror Picture Show Book.
   
• One of the women in the square dance club was a big Barbie collector, and for Halloween that year, she dressed up as Janet from the Floor Show sequence, and brought a Barbie dressed to match.
   
• Since moving to Seattle in 2000, I’ve only seen Rocky Horror twice: I took my then-boyfriend Aaron to see it at a theater in West Seattle, and later then-boyfriend Rusty to the Cuff Complex for their annual showing.  In both cases, the guys were a bit scared of me for how well I knew the film and how much I threw myself into the songs, dances, and antics.

Which brings us back to the Glee episode.

While I was pleased that they did a Rocky Horror episode (and I’m glad that they didn’t echo back to the piece of Fame involving the movie), I still found this to be one of the weaker episodes thus far.

The Good

• I was tickled from the very start by the realization that Quinn in the show would play Magenta, the role played in the movie by… Patricia Quinn.  (In-joke or coincidence?)  Fox has stated that the lips in the intro are Santana’s (which means they are still Magenta’s lips, since Santana did some of the Magenta stuff, especially during "Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me"), but the voice sounds like Quinn to me; if they were mirroring the movie, then it should be one person’s lips and another’s voice, so it could be Quinn mashed-up with Santana (although technically, it should be Kurt’s voice over Santana’s lips).  (The comments thread in that article say that a producer tweet and that the soundtrack album indicates that it was indeed Santana’s voice as well as her lips.)
   
• The actress playing Mercedes was superb as Dr. Frank N. Furter (as she always is, of course!).
   
• The lyric changes in the songs to make them teen-appropriate (or really “TV appropriate”, I guess) caused me to snicker at times. (Although I give them props for changing “transsexual” to “sensational”; that one worked fairly well.)  Ultimately, the word switches didn’t really bother me, since they were addressed in the story as part of rewrites to make the show acceptable for a high school musical.
   
• “Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?” has now been added to my country DJ set (East Coast Swing, 162 bpm).  I also have “Physical” from Season One in there, as a West Coast Swing.
   
• I completely missed that the TV network guys were Barry Bostwick and Meatloaf.

The Bad

• Since when are Mr. Schuester and the Glee Club responsible for the school musical?  That came out of left field and wasn’t fleshed out very much.
   
• The episode didn’t serve to really move any of the subplots forward.  At best, it nodded to Sam and Quinn’s relationship and Sue’s TV career.
   
• The episode didn’t have as strong a “structure of a musical” structure.  “Will uses the show to get close to Emma” as the emotional crux didn’t really carry the right weight.  “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me“ as an Eleven O’Clock Number?
   
• The whole thing about casting Carl as Eddie and Will as Rocky seemed totally left field (it’s a high school musical!) and gave a really major “Eeewww” factor to things.)
   
• There has apparently been some outcry reaction to Kurt’s use of “tranny” in the episode.  I noticed it at the time but was more intrigued by the issue the character raised — it’s hard enough being out and gay without everyone thinking you want to be a drag queen or get a sex change as well — than I was at the potential perjorative.  But I’m not trans, either.

The Future

• Seeing a leather-clad motorcycle riding dentist made me wonder about whether there’s a Little Shop of Horrors episode in the works for next year.  (Similarly, Kurt’s references to the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music — an event which stems directly from the Rocky Horror phenomenon, as does the “Rocky Horror Lion King” from furry circles — needs a payoff at some point.  These kids are 16 going on 17, after all.)

 

TV Review — V

I was crazy for the original V mini-series, and V: The Final Battle (the sequel mini-series), and V: The Series (the 1984 TV series).  (Never bought the comics, though.)  Diana was a bitch goddess, Crystal Carrington for the truly man-eater set.  And the fact that I still remember the half-alien girl’s word for peace — “pretanama” (spelling per Wikiquote) — says the show stuck with me in deep ways.

I want to like the new V show.  Really I do.  Oh God, but I can’t quite manage it.

The reinvention is adequate, carrying forward many of the tropes of the original show — lizard aliens disguised as humans coming to Earth allegedly in peace but really with an ulterior motive, human teenager falls for a Visitor, 5th Column rebels with Visitor allies on the inside, TV newscaster blows off ethics to get the inside track on Visitor news, and so on.  And they’ve ditched the Nazi subtext, replacing it with domestic terrorism.  (On the other hand, they also dropped the squick-inducing eating of mice, which was way cool in the early 1980s.)

I have a natural soft spot in my heart for Agent Erica Evans, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, such that I always think of her as Juliet (from Lost), and the actress carries some of the underscores of that character into this role.  (I keep helfway wishing agents Mark Benford or Dale Cooper would show up, though!)  And there’s a weird attraction to Scott Wolf as newscaster Chad Decker, since he is visually reminiscent of Michael J. Fox, who played a newscaster covering an alien invasion in Mars Attacks!

Some of the acting is top drawer, especially most any scene with Mitchell.  (I really liked the eye movements she made in a scene at the FBI office when they are watching a press conference on TV and she knows it’s all a lie.)  And Morena Baccarin as Anna is just so slimy, she just about reaches Diana heights (Anna, Di-ana, mmm).  I am also intrigued by Christopher Shyer as Marcus.

(Although speaking of eye movements: can we skip the edge-of-romance meaningful looks between Father Jack and Erica.  Priests shouldn’t be on the make.  Eeewww.)

I get unnerved by the cinematography on the Visitor ship, which uses green/blue screen backdrops constantly, but almost all of them slightly skewed or with wrong perspective.  Is it shoddy work or is it intentional to emphasize the alienness?  I can’t be sure.  (But if I question it, that means that the effect has broken me out of the story and thus the question is answered: even if it is intentional, the result is shoddy work.)

But the real problem I have is that just about every episode has me all but screaming at the screen: “That makes no sense!  How can you be that stupid!  Why doesn’t anybody say something?”

• Father Jack confides in Chad Decker, who trots to Anna and then comes back and tells Father Jack that he did so.  But Father Jack keeps talking with him, further jeopardizing their 5th Column cell with every syllable.
• They blow up a shuttle and find human remains in it.  But no one asks why there are absolutely no Visitor remains as well.  (Viewers know Visitors can be immolated, turned to ash, but the FBI and the media don’t know that.)
• They blow up a shuttle, leaving debris scattered over a big field.  High-tech debris.  And the Visitors let the human police and FBI do the clean up, giving them access to Visitor tech.  (Viewers know the shuttle was a set-up by Anna, and thus might have been stripped of anything useful, but the FBI and the media don’t know that.)
• Hobbes is framed for the attack on Lisa and has his picture shown on the news.  But he still goes out to meet a contact in a public park: no hat, no sunglasses, no shaved beard, no hair cut, no bleached hair.  Why did the FBI have to search for this idiot for years?  (I suppose you could argue that Erica’s partner, who was a Visitor, was blocking efforts to catch him all that time to allow him to be used as a patsy later on, but come on.)
• And then there he is again in public in a church.  And not just that, but with Father Jack giving an anti-Visitor sermon that makes people angry enough to get up and walk out, right past the guy whose face was plastered all over the TV a couple days before because he tried to kill the daughter of the alien woman they are almost revering as a god.
• And Hobbes also sits right next to Erica: the terrorist the FBI has been hunting for for years, sitting next to the FBI agent heading up the task force to catch him?  WTF?
• Lisa’s face is slashed and her legs are broken.  Her legs get healed at the medical center at the start of the next episode (so the shock value of her mother having her legs broken is completely wasted).  But if they could heal her legs, why doesn’t anyone interrupt the press conference and ask why her face hadn’t been healed?  (Yes, Anna intentionally left it unhealed for the press conference shock value, but the press conference was held outside the medical center, and no one thought to ask about the facial injuries?  Does Anna really think she is fooling any humans about her having ulterior motives?)
• All the ships arrived at once at the beginning, but when Anna decides to leave, she has only one ship pull out rather than all of them.  Shouldn’t this be a rather obvious ploy to anyone in government circles?  To be sure, the blogosphere would be pouncing on it.
• Joshua calls while they are interrogating the human prisoner.  So do they leave the room to answer the call?  No, they pull out the special tech gadget and talk right in front of the guy.
• After putting an axe in the chest of the Visitor soldier who nearly killed them all, Hobbes — the experienced terrorist/soldier — leaves the guy struggling to get up.  What, you thought he would just die in a few minutes?  Shoot him in the head and be sure!
• Anna’s people know there are 5th Column rebels in their own ships, so why aren’t they constantly scanning for unauthorized communication activities, which Joshua does just walking down the hall?  We saw the intense monitoring of humans being down via the jacket cameras early on, so is it even conceivable that similar monitoring throughout the V ships doesn’t also occur?
• Speaking of unauthorized communication, Erica is constantly on her cell phone at the FBI office.  Surely all communications in those offices are super-sensitive and need to go through secure channels.  And God forbid that she turn away from the office windows through which someone could read her lips.
• Further on this topic, what is with allowing humans to walk around the V ship unescorted, going wherever they want?  (And Erica with a gun, to boot!)  Worst example of this being Joshua directing Chad to a “restricted” corridor.  Restricted to whom, given that a random human was able to walk right in with no escort, passcard, or security challenge?
• What the fuck is Anna’s plan?  In the original mini-series, we started to have an idea after an hour, but by the end of 13 episodes — the entire first season — we have no idea if she’s sucking the planet’s resources dry, eating the people, running from worse invaders, or what.

These things drive me up the wall, and not in the sense of “What does it mean?  I’ll have to keep watching!” from Lost.

I see the show has been renewed for a second 13-episode season.  Jesus Christ, please fix these fucked up plot holes!  (Yeah, I’m praying to Jesus to do it since I don’t think the writers will.)
 

TV Review — Smallville “Absolute Justice” (Season 9)

Wow.  Just wow.  This was an amazing two-hour episode of Smallville.  (Yes, I know it aired in February.  I just got around to watching it this week.  Better late than never!)

Not because either the story or the special effects were spectacular.  We’ve seen Clark interact with other heroes before, and the effects ranged from pretty good (Dr. Fate) to downright cheesy (Hawkman in general, and that final fight with the Icicle).  But just in terms of quality and significance, this was a level up from most episodes.

What differed was the level of detail packed into this episode.  Not that this should come as a surprise, given that it was written by comics writer Geoff Johns.  He also did Season 8’s centerpiece of Clark interacting with multiple super peers (the Legion of Super-Heroes), which exhibited a similar quantum jump up in, well, depth.

“Depth” is probably a good term here.  Most Smallville episodes have a passing, sometimes even “winking”, connection to the DC universe of the comics, featuring some version of a comic hero or villain that is recognizable but not really grounded as anything more than this week’s guest star.  But with the Justice Society (and Legion) episodes, Johns abundantly uses the high-level continuity and backstory of the the characters’ comic book versions to influence the characterizations and dialogue throughout the episode.  For viewers who don’t read the comics, there is probably only a little added value, but for comics readers, the characters and situations feel much more authentic than with most episodes.

In particular:

• The pairing of Hawkman and Green Arrow is right out of the Justice League of America comics of the 70s and 80s, rubbing the characters’ internal idealogies up against each other to create sparks.
• They wisely left out the 1940s origins of the Justice Society, merely keeping them as an earlier generation.
• The government requirement that the Justice Society unmask followed by them disbanding.
• Establishing the Justice Society as a “family”, in contrast to the Legion as a “club” and the Justice League as a “professional business organization”.
• Established Hawkman’s repeated past lives, although they only established him back 1000 years instead of the 5000 or so in the comics, and his link to Shayera.
• An Oreos reference for the Martian Manhunter.  And a mention of his family on Mars.
• Sylvester Pemberton’s intro heavily implied the Jack Knight Starman.
• Abigail “Ma” Hunkel (the Red Tornado).  Stripesy, and his real name, Pat.  Inza Nelson.  And of course all the props to provide non-character references to the JSA.
• Amanda Waller.  And Checkmate.  And the Suicide Squad.

Also of note:

• Dr. Fate’s helmet kept in the bowling ball bag was a nice nod to the Bowler from Mystery Men.
• Chloe’s experience in the dumpster while the super-hero fight went on outside was perhaps the best reflection that we’ve ever seen (or not seen, I guess) of what a non-super experiences during one of these fights.
• We really need to have a follow-up of this featuring Canary and her presumed mother, Black Canary.  (And for that matter, Bart needs to meet and train with Jay Garrick.)
• Icicle’s makeup seemed to owe a little to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze.
• Almost in an aside, boom, Martian Manhunter is restored to full capability.
• The breastplate for Hawkman, as a means of attached his wings, made a lot of sense.  (Although I wouldn’t have minded seeing a half-naked, hairy chested Carter Hall running through this episode!)

This was all squeezed into a two-hour episode (just 1 hour, 20 minutes of actual content).  Between what we actually saw and all the behind the scenes stuff (Chloe helping to find the other JSA members and their families), they could have pulled an entire season out of what was stuffed into this episode. (That’s actually one of the hallmark oddities of Smallville: they let stuff like this year’s Kandor plot meander through an entire season, and then they throw the Legion and the JSA at us for a single burst.  Maybe they should have done half the season on the Kandorians and half on the JSA?)

Smallville should really consider having Geoff Jones do an episode like this as the season opener and then mine it for all its worth throughout the season.

I’ve seen it said by others that the last episode of Smallville needs to have Clark in the red-and-blue suit (with cape), and I agree.  But after this episode, they need to have that last episode involve a big Crisis that brings back as many of the hero actors as they can: Green Arrow and Martian Manhunter, Hawkman and Star Girl, Canary and Arthur and Bart and Vic, Zatanna, and of course the Legion.  Oh heck, add in Diana or Donna.  Written by Geoff Johns.  Just to have them converse for 5 minutes, pose, and head off to deal with the Crisis as the show ends.
 

Frances Reid, R.I.P.

Frances Reid, the actress who played matriarch Alice Horton on the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives died this week at age 95.

(That’s a damn good run for anyone!)

Although I haven’t watched the show for years, I was a very faithful watcher in my late teens and 20s.  My first episode was Bo and Hope’s wedding, when Emma burst in to threaten everyone, under the control of the Dragon.  (I think that’s right.  My memory tells me around May 17, 1985, and web research says it was actually May 23 of that year, which might be the date the wedding actually finished; you know how soaps stretch things.)

After that, I was hooked and I watched Days every day for about a decade, missing less than one episode a year.  At one point, I had no TV picture reception where I lived, but I could get the sound just fine, so I would record it during the day and listen to it with dinner, like an old radio soap opera.  (It was months before I knew what the character of “Molly of the Mountains” looked like, and I had to imagine that whole “trapped in a wrecked train car” sequence.)  I was a regular poster in rec.arts.tv.soaps for a few years.  I even have the novelizations of the early years of the show, which filled in a lot of the Doug & Julie backstory.

But back to Frances Reid as Alice Horton.  What brought me back to the show day after day, more than the outlandish plots (like a drugged Marlena acting as the Salem Slasher and killed Alice by choking her with doughnuts, but it was really a plot by Toni DiMera in an exact duplicate of Salem created on a tropical island?  Really?  WTF?  Can’t we get back to simpler times, like Marlena possessed by the Devil?) was the sense of “family” the show promoted with the Horton clan, and Alice as the matriarch.  I fondly remember the annual Christmas tree decorating, pulling out the ornaments with the Horton kids/grandkids/great grandkids/etc. names on them.

In some ways, Alice Horton served as a bit of a substitute grandmother for me at the time, since she looked a bit like my own grandmother.  (Is that weird?)  (My grandmother is still alive, age 88 or so.)  Even though I haven’t even seen her face in over a decade, the Alice Horton and Frances Reid are still there in my heart.
 

Netflix

I signed us up for Netflix about a month ago.  (In case you live under a rock and don’t know what that is, Netflix charges you $20 or so a month and maintains a list of movies you plan to see, sending you the top three initially and then sending a new one when you mail back one you have out.)

I swear, this is the best thing since sliced bread.

It completely changes the way I look at video stores.  When we go to the video store — especially when Rusty’s son Josh is with us — we automatically gravitate to the New Releases wall (which is actually everything from the last year or so; it’s like half the store these days), and we pay little if any attention to the large number of other films out there in the other racks.  I’m sure that’s what most people do.  And as such, we especially get drawn to the big films among the New Releases, the stuff that they have shelves full of, not the ones with 3 copies.

How much do we miss among the New Releases, only seeing the big items?  Even more, how much have we missed in years past and never look for now?  Or how much might we like to see again, but never think of?

Netflix largely bypasses this for me.  Without a never-ending wall of just “New Releases”, I’m encouraged to pull out the things I’ve heard of and always wanted to see.  The stuff that I saw in college (twenty years ago) and want to revisit.  The B-movies.  The sequels that you could tell were made just for
a buck from the trailer.

We just sent back Amélie and American Beauty.  Coming up in our queue are Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, Ghostbusters II, Road to Perdition, the Notorious C.H.O. comedy concert, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Steel Magnolias, Memento, all three Harry Potter films, a God help us all, Showgirls!  Never in my life would I be apt to go to Blockbuster and rent more than a couple of these, but on Netflix, I just sit back and wait for them to surprise me in the mail every few days.

The other thing that’s great about Netflix is that there’s no time limit.  Sure, you can’t get the next movie until you send a current one back, but if you want to listen to all five director and actor commentary tracks, you can.  If you go away for a long weekend just after a batch of movies arrive, they can sit there and you can watch them when you get back.

In particular, I’ve purchased season one of Six Feet Under and the first two season of the American version of Queer as Folk, each with 20 or so hours of shows spread across 4-6 disks.  I don’t want to sit down and watch a marathon of a single show, just to churn through a disk.  I prefer to stretch these boxed sets out, watching one episode every day or three, taking a week or maybe two to go through each disk.  That’s expensive to do when renting from the video store at $5 for 5 days (or whatever), but it’s no problem with Netflix.

---

Updated on October 5, 2011

Well, it was the best thing since sliced bread.  The bread has gotten a bit stale and moldy of late.

I’m surprised at how little I remember of any of those films listed above, now six-plus years later.  That says something about the impacts that movies make on us these days, when there are too many to keep up with.

Tortured Phrasing

Want to really torture someone who is from the end of the Baby Boomer generation through Generation X?  (Roughly age 30–45.)

Ask them to say the letters of the alphabet… without singing it.  Without using any of the standard Sesame Street phrasing.  No slurring together of “LMNOP”, no grouping of “QRS” and “TUV”.

Not cruel enough?  Make them recite the Preamble of the United States Constitution, but not sing it, a là School House Rock.  “We the people / In order to form a more perfect union / Establish justice / Ensure domestic tranquility-ee-ee / ….”

Have them do a dramatic reading of the theme songs of The Brady Bunch or Gilligan’s Island.

It’s amazing how ingrained these bits of pop culture are in our psyches.  I can almost manage these stunts, but I inevitably get tripped up by the meter around the word “and” (“Do ordain… and establish” or “the Professor and… Mary Ann”).

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Added video links on January 4, 2011
 

Eht Tebahpla

You watched Sesame Street.  You know the tune.

Z Y X W V U T…

S R Q P ONMLK…

J I H…

G F E…

D…

C…

B…

A

Now you know your Z Y X
Won’t you come with me for sex?

(I put that together about a year ago, one Friday night while driving to the local bar.  Took me maybe 5 minutes.)
 

Nipples, Nipples, Every… er, Nowhere

Now we’re going great guns with hearings about the baring of Ms. Jackson’s nipple piercing during the Super Bowl.

An interesting opinion piece on it appeared at the International Herald Tribune site.  (Update: the IHT site is gone and its archives are allegeldy incorprated into the New York Times site.  This op-ed may have been the one I read at the time.)

I can only see two possible outcomes of this:

• The “wardrobe malfunction” explanation is accepted as the truth, and it is termed the accident that it (presumably) was.  Everyone apologizes, maybe CBS pays some token fines, greater future scrutiny of such choreography is promised, the whole thing blows over, and we return to the status quo.  Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

or…

• The FCC will institute new regulations prohibiting live televised feeds which don’t have a several second delay in them.  This is already standard in talk radio, where there’s like a three-second delay between speech and broadcast, enabling the station personnel to touch a “silencer” button to keep potty-mouthed callers from spewing curse words over the air waves.  Instituting something similar for television would allow appropriate personnel to push a “blur” or “blank” button and thus protect (ahem) us from future glimpses of naughty bits.

On the surface, sounds like a great idea.  Of course, “appropriate personnel” is just a euphemism for “censors”.  While we might have few qualms about a few seconds of blurred screen being presented to cover up a “wardrobe malfunction,” what else is going to be blurred, blacked out, or silenced?  Will stations with a conservative agenda push the “quiet” button when tough questions get asked of a sitting Republican politician?  Will cable companies in the Bible Belt black out CNN stories on gay marriage in Massachusetts?  Will liberal stations blur… well, I find it hard to think of them doing that, but for the sake of argument, would they blur things that liberals find objectionable?

I haven’t watched old Warner Brothers cartoons in years, but the last time I did, I was shocked by the violence.  Or rather, by the lack of violence, and how that lack of violence had been instituted.  Apparently the prints of the cartoons would get sent from station to station over the years, and on occasion, some station management would take it upon themselves to save their young viewers from the evil violence and would “edit” (censor) the cartoon.  That print would then be sent on in its edited (damaged) form to the next station, who might also edit it, and so on.

I saw one of the two “Duck Season!  Wabbit Season!” cartoons recently (“Rabbit Fire” and “Duck!  Rabbit, Duck!” are the titles, but most people simply recognize the prhrase).  (Yes, there are two: one takes place in autumn and one in winter; same general schtick, though.  There's apparently a third in the “trilogy”.)  It had been “edited” so that the image froze just before each time Daffy got blasted with Elmer’s shotgun, and then the picture started again with the after effects on Daffy’s bill — but the sound continued unstopped.  So you got images of Elmer leveling the shotgun, then a static image accompanied by the sound of a gun being fired, and then Daffy’s bill full of holes.  Now that’s “dethpicable.”

Another trash job was on “Hare Trimmed”, where Bugs is trying to protect Granny from Yosemite Sam’s intent to marry her for her inheritance.  The chop job on this was even worse: a few seconds before any “violence”, they would just cut to the next scene.  But not just to the next scene but into the next scene.  So you would have Yosemite Sam going through a door where he’s supposed to fall through a hole in the floor and off a cliff (or some such), cutting immediately to Sam chasing Granny down a hallway, in the middle of the dialogue.  Very surreal, and impossible to follow.

So is this what we can expect to happen with a “delayed live feed” rule in place?  A Half-Time Show where the on-site operators freezes the image but lets the sound play through, a network which blurs the frozen image, a cable company which chops the offensive sounds, and then a V-Chip on your local set which blanks out the entire screen — all at once?

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Updated on December 10, 2010
 

The “L” Word

Based on the print ads (like the one above, although this image comes from the show’s web site), “L” is for “lipstick”.  Not a butch dyke to be seen.
 

Come Out to the Regal Beagle

Move over, Will & Grace.  Queer as Folk be damned.  Bury Six Feet Under and tell no more Tales of the City.  The most influential television show in terms of gay rights was Three’s Company.

In case you don’t recall, the original premise of the show was that the only way for Jack to share the apartment with Chrissy and Janet was for him to pose as gay, and thus was someone who would not be a “risk” to the pair of single women.  (As I recall, it was upstairs neighbor Larry who came up with the idea.)  Jack thus had to play gay — which means John Ritter had to play straight playing gay, an echo of Victor, Victoria — while around Mr. Roper, the landlord, while also pursuing the life of a swinging single guy in the 1970s.

Today, of course, we tend to dismiss the show as perpetuating ugly stereotypes, but for the time, this was pretty groundbreaking.  The plotline wasn’t used every episode, and my memory says it was pretty much forgotten after the first season, resurrected for a bit when Don Knotts came on as the fey new landlord.  But just the fact that “gay” was used with any regularity at the time is impressive.  And although played for laughs, “gay” Jack was still accepted and treated as a whole person by his friends and neighbors.

In other words, Jack Tripper was one of the formative influences in my gay identity.  I wish it hadn’t taken John Ritter’s death to make me realize it, though.  I’ve gained a whole new level of respect for the man in the past few days, thanks to this realization.

I’m also struck by the idea that Three’s Company is ripe for being remade into a new sitcom today.  (Three’s Company II, bouncing off the line from the old theme song?  [Track 36 on this album])  There are a number of twists which could be done, most obviously being to make Jack be gay playing straight (rather than the original reverse).  Or maybe Janet and Chrissy are a lesbian couple and Jack’s a straight boy.  Or move a single straight girl in with a gay male couple: Jackie, Jon, and Chris?

[Weblog title reference: The Regal Beagle was the local bar in Three’s Company.]

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Updated on October 21, 2003

Updated on September 10, 2010

Added links.

Victor, Victoria is from after Three’s Company, so it wouldn't have been an influence on the show, but it is a remake of a German film from the 1930s.  The American musical version of La Cages aux Folles also post-dates the TV show, although the play and film it was based on are from the 1970s.

Dream Journal: Celebrity Dreams

I only rarely remember my dreams, and even then it’s usually just a single snapshot.  Of the dreams I do remember, a few have involved celebrities:

• Most recently (June 15, 2003), I dreamt that country music singer Terri Clark had died and her sister came by carrying a huge banner, asking people to be in a tribute show.
• Sometime around 1993 (maybe), I dreamt I was taking a tour of San Francisco, and we were underneath the Bay Bridge.  Our tour guide was Connie Chung.
• A couple years before that, I dreamt I was in a snow drift on a ski slope at Tahoe, strangling Annette Funicello.  (The memory snapshot I have of this dream is similar to Kirk strangling the shape-changing salt monster on Star Trek.)

As you can imagine, I try not to analyze these dreams too much.

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Updated on October 21, 2003

Updated on July 26, 2010

Added links, retitled to merge into Dream Journal thread.

Oscar Predictions

I’m going to a gay Oscar night party with Rich on Sunday.  This is only the second one I’ve ever been to, for good or for ill.  And as usual, I’ve only seen a handful on the nominees.  (Chicago, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Spirited Away, and Ice Age are it for this year, while last year, I think I had only seen Moulin Rouge!, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and Shrek; pretty consistent, ain’t I?)

Here are two predictions for this year:

1. The Hours will win, but just by a nose.
2. Whether #1 comes true or not, host Steve Martin will use that joke.

(Okay, I was wrong.  Denzel Washington used that joke when presenting the award.)

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Updated on June 29, 2010