Review: Caddyshack

I understand why Caddyshack was popular, and as someone who loves things from his youth which I admit are objectively bad, I understand why people still like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good. I’m not such a snob that I think that popularity and quality never coincide, but here they do not. And part of me wants to sigh and shake my head at what was popular and considered funny in the long ago time of 1980, but it’s not as though much has changed.

Part of the problem is that Caddyshack is really two movies. One is centered around Danny, a young caddy from a large family who wants to go to college and get a caddy scholarship to do that. He’s sort of seeing an Irish girl with a very strong accent who also works at the club and in the course of the film also manages to hook up with Lacey, who is, well, the movie sex symbol. Our hero has a rival in another caddy and the teens who caddy operate on their own. And the film starts out seemingly about them, but then they quickly falls by the wayside.

Because there’s also another film happening at the same time, because the stars of the film - Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight - take over. And it’s sort of about a loutish new money member (Dangerfield) and the old school WASP judge (Knight). And then off to the side is Chase who’s playing an old money member but who’s a guy who does his own thing. And Murray plays Carl, a possibly insane groundkeeper.

One of the early scenes features Murray seeming to jerk off to a group of female golfers, but of course he’s not. His behavior and his comments are creepy rather than funny. And it distracts because Murray is in excellent form in a role that he mostly improvised. His fairly bizarre conversation with Chase’s character. Murray’s narration to himself as he tees off knocking the heads of a row of flowers. His story of caddying for the Dalai Lama. It’s a bizarre performance and except for that initial scene it’s brilliant. But to watch it today, after that opening my heart just sank. The film may have recovered, but it took awhile because all I could think was, this is disgusting misogynist nonsense.

The movie alternates between these two films I mentioned, but it mostly focuses on the adults. To the point where I often found myself forgetting about the kids and how he wants to get a caddy scholarship. And his Irish girlfriend thinks she might be pregnant, but then turns out not to be. Of course her Irish accent is, well, let’s just say not great. And Danny is also sleeping with someone else. Which in a movie that focused a little more on him might have worked? It doesn’t really.

Meanwhile this is essentially Rodney Dangerfield’s movie as he completely dominates the scenes he’s in and the scenes he’s in essentially as the film. And I can take issue with some aspects of the performance, but through force of personality and just being funny, he takes over the movie. The movie clearly wasn’t supposed to be about him the way the final cut worked out to be, but it’s his movie.

And I’m not his biggest fan, but he’s funny. I do keep thinking that he was much funnier when he did his act in a suit than when he dressed like a slob. I was reminded of that when watching the film.

Then there’s the gopher. Which in truth is all I remember of the movie from seeing it on cable when I was young. The gopher is causing havoc to the golf course and Murray’s Carl is supposed to be taking care of it. And of course doing a poor job of it. And so out of other options, Carl preps a massive amount of explosives. Stranger is the gopher crawling through tunnels and making funny sounds. The gopher is almost a third movie on top of the other two I already mentioned.

The strangest thing about this movie, though, is the ending. Carl sets off the explosives, which means that a large portion of the golf course explodes. Danny’s ball, which was perched on the very edge of the cup, drops in, giving them the win in the big golf game. And then we cut to Dangerfield looking at the camera yelling “we’re all going to get laid!”

And that’s the end of the movie.

Well, then the gopher dances to a Kenny Loggins’ song over the credits. But it’s just a bizarre ending and I have no idea what they were thinking. This wasn’t a movie that requires a lot to wrap top, but it just ended so abruptly.

I kept thinking that the film suffered from being made by people who could write scenes but couldn’t write films. They could build characters but they couldn’t build plots. This was early in the career of a lot of the people and the first movie that Harold Ramis directed. It’s amusing. They’re funny people. There are a few great moments in it. But overall it just falls flat. Just a series of sketches and scenes strung together that are mostly set at a golf club. I know some people talk about it as one of the best films about golf, one of the best sports, one of the funniest films. I just don’t get it.

Review: Debris

I waited until the first season of Debris finished before writing about the series. In part because I wanted to get a better sense of what they had set up. The first episode drops us into the world of the show, throwing around terminology and making references to events that are only later explained. (Or not, but when they start talking about Laghari reading, and other terms, there’s a reason the term “technobabble” was coined, but honestly, it works better here than in most shows. Particularly after a few episodes, the best way to deal with it is simply like being in a foreign country, and not being fluent, but you can follow the conversation and understand the context, but the nuance is sometimes lacking).

Of course quickly after the final episode aired, the show was canceled.

But I’m going to write about it anyway, because I really liked the show. Among other reasons, Debris was a great example of how to dramatize what’s happening, but not necessarily explain what’s happening. (For one excellent breakdown of this difference, refer to David Mamet’s famous - among many writers, at least - memo to the staff of the TV show The Unit where he lays out how the goal is not to convey information but to depict drama).

J.H. Wyman who created the show also created the short lived show Almost Human (which lasted one season in 2013-14) and was the show runner for Fringe, which was a show I loved. I still remember that first season finale of Fringe, which was shocking but also really helped to explain the world in fundamental ways. It was a reveal. Almost Human lasted one season and there were lots of things happening on the edges of the show. References to the wall are one that sticks in my mind to this day, and I remember it was deeply unsatisfying to finish the first season and get few answers or explanation of the show or its world. For all the show did well, I wanted answers. 

Maybe that comes from years of watching The X-Files and other shows, where the mysteries were excited, where we as fans wanted more, but there was no answer, and it was ultimately disappointing. As fans we want to know that there is a plan, that there are answers, that there is a logic to answering questions. As opposed to simply dragging things out indefinitely.

After one season, I can’t say that Debris answered many questions, but I definitely want more.

The first episode opens with text on the screen explaining that three years ago an alien spaceship was discovered drifting through the solar system and six months ago, debris from the ship started falling to earth. Which besides explaining the title, it also sets things up as we meet the Orbital team, or one of them anyway, a joint US-UK task force, with MI6 agent Fiona Jones and CIA agent Bryan Beneventi overseeing a team of scientists and technicians flying around tracking debris, recovering it, and coming up with a cover story for what’s happening.

I don’t know Riann Steele’s work, but Jonathan Tucker is to my mind one of the best actors of our generation. That’s a career that stretches from Sleepers and The Virgin Suicides, to The Deep End to more recent work like the shows Kingdom and City on a Hill. Debris is one of his least showy roles that he’s had in recent years, but it’s the kind of role that requires an immensely talented, disciplined actor who can slowly peel back the layers to who he is through how he works.

In the final scene of the first episode we also follow Bryan’s boss Maddox, played by two time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz. As the government is collecting the debris, they’re trying to reassemble the ship. Of course having Butz in the opening credits is odd as he seems peripheral to the action at best. Even stranger is Scroobius Pip in the credits, who plays a recurring character Anson Ash, working for Influx, which may be a terrorist group, and is collecting debris as well. 

Now there are a few aspects of the show which stuck in my craw. Bryan’s time in Afghanistan bothered me as it falls into cliches about the American war in Afghanistan, which is a larger issue for a larger essay. Another is the enlightened Native American with a special relationship to all this and hopefully the show will find a way to make the character more than a cliche. The reveal that Sebastian Roche’s character is more central to this plot than we even thought (even if that plot is…in some ways less clear than ever before). The reveal of the final seconds, which I won’t spoil and I’m still unsure what to make of it.

And all of this was so much that one of the episode’s other reveals - that George is being stalked by a smoke figure. And that it’s coming for him - is easy to be lost in the mix. I kept thinking of Bombie the Zombie from Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge comics. A figure that stalks Scrooge for decades. In Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, it’s explained the character is stalking Scrooge as revenge for his destruction and cheating, a cost that he never quite escape. I have a feeling based on George’s expression that this might be something similar.

If there is a theme or an idea unlaying the show, I keep thinking that it’s about wonder. In the opening episodes, each character is traumatized and exhausted in their own way. Fiona is still recovering from her father’s death and is numb, anhedonic, but she sees this ship and its debris, and the possibilities of it as something that helps to pull her out of that state, at least temporarily. She sees possibility in this wreckage. That it is something that can change us and offer new possibilities. And even the trauma of finding her father alive, having to disobey orders, she still finds wonder and is overwhelmed by the appearance of the ball of light along with everyone else in the penultimate episode. It is her refusal to accept people’s deaths, to see sacrifice as inevitable, and to see those decisions as choices and taking the easy way out that are some of the show’s great moments. This passion is the heart of the show. And it affects Bryan, as we see, but I think it affects more people than just him. Her father’s betrayal in the final episode, though, suggests that she is left in a more broken and traumatized place than at the beginning of the season. And I’m interested in how the show would have shown that, because one of the great things that the show has been interested in doing is not telling us who the characters are, but in showing us who they are, even as they are in difficult moments of their lives as they try to do their job, and I wanted to see Fiona as she deals with this and tries to work her way through it all. Fiona is the heart of the show, and what happens when she is wounded and adrift. Has she changed more people than just Bryan and how will they be there to pull her out of her despair?

Bryan on the other hand initially seems like a cynical wiseass American and over the course of the season we see that he’s dealing with not just PTSD from his time in Afghanistan, but he was seriously injured in an early incident involving the debris. In the early episodes as he reaches out to Fiona in small ways, like the episode where he teaches her about peeps, he’s doing it in a jokey manner, in a way that makes it clear that he’s trying to make her smile and he sees she’s struggling, but he never lets her in, the way that she lets him in and is open about her feelings. As the season continues, we see him opening up to Fiona, disobeying orders to tell her about her father, which is clearly so difficult for him to do. When Fiona commandeers pieces of debris to try to save people, he pushes against it, but then is clearly in awe of not just of how she could think of it, but of the feeling that was required to do it. And so at the end of "Do You Know Icarus?” when he says that he’s trying to get back to her, all that work has been laid down, but it took an extreme moment to make him say it aloud. I think ti took an extreme moment like that to get him to admit it to himself. And as traumatic as it was having to relive events in Afghanistan, when he and Fiona talk at the end about how the debris is studying them just as they are studying the debris, that’s not a conversation he could have had with her or with anyone before. He is in so many ways the soldier in that story that George referenced, and over the season, we see him in small ways open up. Which requires a lot from Tucker, who is more than up to the challenge. He doesn’t show his hand early on, and keeps his cards hidden, tightly wound and very controlled. He remains a soldier, firmly in a chain of command, and even if just with Fiona and George, he begins to open up. George’s betrayal means less to him, but what it will mean for him and Fiona, for their relationship, and how his experiences with the debris have changed him, will be key going forward. What will he do as he opens up, as he allows himself to feel more. As we begin to see who Bryan really is.

Maddox on the hand is simply the CIA head of this project, an operator, but the show also follows him home, to show his difficult relationship with his wife, and his son, who was injured in a car accident caused by his wife. And in the final episode we see that one of the threads happening throughout the season, as he’s trading with a Russian agent, and trying to get his hands on one piece of debris, isn’t about work. It’s about his son. And it’s startling.

It’s strange to say (in part because he’s a CIA official, and when was the last time anyone could say anything nice about them, fictional or otherwise) but Maddow has a line which is the key to the show. He mentioned offering Bryan a hand in Afghanistan, which he took (though not in one of the parallel worlds), and Bryan said something similar when asked about their relationship, which is clearly much closer than the one that Fiona has with her boss. 

There are a lot of things to explore in a new season. I want to see more about what Influx has planned and how and what they know about the debris, because George makes it clear that he knows much more Fiona. What and how will governments respond to Influx, which positions itself as a group designed to give the technology to people instead of hoarding it. Related to that the ways that they use the technology. Think about the governments storing the debris and trying to reassemble the ship when they’re not trying to reverse engineer it and build weapons to the ways that Influx utilizes the technology, how that relates to trans humanism.

And I want them to explore that. But that central notion, of offering a hand. Which the characters do for each other. Which is how they’re able to grow. The ways how after trauma it’s easier to shut down, from other people, from wonder, from possibility. Bryan clearly has a complicated relationship with his father figure, Maddox. Fiona’s complicated relationship with her biological father has become even more. 

The show is about technology and aliens reawakening possibility and hope. But it’s also about something much simpler. How as people we can save each other.

The final words of the final episode - spoken by a minor recurring character thus far - are “let’s begin” and in some ways it does feel as though what we’ve seen in this season is the prologue setting things up. Especially as they’ve now introduced Otto, played by the great John Noble, who is the show’s big bad. Or one of them, at least.

There are a lot of questions that remain to be answered. How the debris has reshaped geopolitics, there must be groups besides Influx trying to collect debris, exactly what universe re we in, which seems a vital question after the two parter. How much of this is public and how do they sell this to the public as things are getting really crazy? I could go on, but the season has left a lot of threads and stories to explore.

The truth is that I’ve been exhausted and anhedonic since before the pandemic. And watching this in the final months of the pandemic, as I daily tracked vaccination numbers as opposed to the death toll, was in some ways just what I needed. I am the sort of person who would honestly watch a weird science fiction procedural, but Debris was more than I had hoped for. I have no idea what Season 2 of Debris would bring or where it would have gone, but I feel a great loss that we’ll never be able to see it.

Review: Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I love Anthony Horowitz’s work. I’ll get that out of the way at the outset. I’ve been reading and watching his work for years. He’s written Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, and that’s on top of all the TV he’s written. Including creating and writing most of the episodes of what I consider to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time, Foyle’s War.

Having said all that, when I read Horowitz’s novel Magpie Murders in 2017, I thought it was his greatest work. Because it is a greta murder mystery, which kept me guessing and has twists and turns. Structurally speaking the book is genius level plotting as we’re dealing with the murder of an author and the manuscript of his final book, which is missing the last chapter and the identity of the murderer. The writer’s longtime editor tries to sift through the man’s life and uncover who he was and what happened, and in the process manages to capture a lot about how writers write and think and – like magpies – pull names and details and stories from the people and places we encounter and turn them into something else. It captures some of what it means to be caught in the wake of all that and see parts of yourself in fiction. The book manages to convey why it is so many of us love mystery fiction. And also, why so many people hate it.

To be a good mystery and to simultaneously take apart the genre, its writers and its readers is not an easy task. And it is stunning to behold, even on rereading when I’m prepared for what’s coming I’m still impressed with what Hororwitz is able to do.

So this is all prologue to say that when I heard Horowitz had written a sequel to Magpie Murders, I was hesitant. Because I don’t think that books need sequels. And I think almost every crime and mystery series has gone on too long and been diminished in the end by repetition and volume.

I am happy to say that Moonflower Murders is a great mystery novel.

I almost feel like I’m damning it with faint praise. Because I think I enjoyed the book more than I’ve enjoyed almost any book over the past year. I think it’s funny and inventive. It’s smart. And it can be hard to make a good crime novel without people acting dumb or doing stupid a lot of things.

The problem of course is that the first book was genius, I think, and not simply a great mystery novel but so much more than that. By comparison saying that the sequel is a very good mystery novel feels almost insulting, or a bit of a let down.

But in the heart of the novel is also something that I think every writer and maybe a lot of readers see as possible. And that’s the obsessive eye for details. To craft these small shoutouts and references and place them throughout the text, maliciously or otherwise. To spend time obsessively looking for them, because like anything, once you know that they exist, you can’t help but look for them. Again, one of those things that makes a good mystery writer and a good mystery reader. An eye for detail, a look for clues, reading into things. And like anything, when taken to an extreme, it’s bad for one’s health.

Whether there will be another Susan Ryeland book, I don’t know, but Moonflower Murders is another great Anthony Horowitz novel.

Review: Columbo, Seasons 1-3

Over the pandemic, stuck at home, I began watching the 1970s mystery series Columbo. It’s funny because I’m unsure if I ever watched it before. I know Peter Falk, of course, from a variety of roles ranging from The Princess Bride to Wings of Desire to The Great Race to his cameo in The Great Muppet Caper. I knew he was Columbo, but I didn’t know who that was or what that meant.

Admittedly I’ve found it hard to watch a lot of crime fiction and cop stories recently, but there was something relaxing about Falk’s performance, about the show’s rhythms, about watching a lot of smarmy rich people be taken down. Anyway, a few thoughts on the first few seasons, episode by episode.

"Prescription: Murder". It’s inventive, Gene Barry as the murderer is fabulous, Peter Falk has a killer entrance. I also have to say, I get why they made a second pilot because it’s good, but I’m not entirely buying this concept and Columbo as a series. It’s a good plot but the character and the setup doesn’t scream, I definitely want to see more.

"Ransom for a Dead Man". I’m in. Lee Grant as the murderer was brilliantly cold blooded. The way Columbo took her down. And that final scene in the airport as he arrests her is just perfect. Columbo tells her that she has no conscience and that’s her fatal flaw, because she cannot imagine anyone acting any differently. But most people wouldn’t walk away from a murder

"Murder by the Book". The story is excellent, with a script by Steven Bochco, and the direction by a young Steve Spielberg stands out. The acting is a bit hammy and you can tell the show is finding its legs. This is part of the problem of making a regular series. A good idea but nailing the exception, you get good actors but finding the right tone. Making the episodes on a breakneck schedule, sometimes the balance is a little off.

"Death Lends a Hand". Robert Culp and Ray Milland guest star and the result is solid story and a great ending, but overall just okay.

"Dead Weight". I liked how Columbo caught the murderer - that is honestly my favorite part in most episodes, and I would argue the best part of them - but overall it was meh. Characters behaving dumb always pulls me out of the story.

"Suitable for Framing". This is one of my favorites of the season. Fun, inventive, clever on all fronts. Also the first episode written by Jackson Gillis and directed by Hy Averback (I Love You, Alice B. Toklas).

"Lady in Waiting". It was a good episode, plus it featured Leslie Nielsen and Jessie Royce Landis, but overall, kinda forgettable. Not bad, just meh.

"Short Fuse". The episode has a fabulous cast (Roddy McDowell, Ida Lupino, Anne Francis) but it never quite comes together. And the ending on the cable car is well done, but by that point, I mostly shrugged.

"Blueprint for Murder". Good elements, and a very funny scene at Columbo is in city hall and stymied by bureaucracy, but overall it’s just off. Maybe because Falk directed it, his performance was off? Which is a shame because it takes place partially on a massive construction site and was the season finale. They went big but it never quite came together.

"Étude in Black". I loved this episode. In no small part because of John Cassavetes (a good friend and collaborator of Falk) who stars as the murderer and manages to be charming and smarmy, though even if you didn’t watch him do it, you know he’s the murderer. The show also features Blythe Danner, the great Myrna Loy, and in a laugh out loud cameo, Pat Morita as a butler. Also, Columbo gets a dog. Honestly, one of the best single episodes.

"The Greenhouse Jungle". Ray Milland makes this episode. The writing is fine, but Milland brings it all together and even though I could see a lot of the plot twists coming, the entire casts is great and sells it, but Milland is a standout.

"The Most Crucial Game". The episode guest stars Robert Culp and Dean Stockwell and the result is an episode that’s not great but enjoyable. No complaints but after two very good episodes, this one is just fine.

"Dagger of the Mind". Columbo goes to London! And it guest stars the late Honor Blackman. Not a great episode, but it’s a lot fun. Also, the first episode directed by Richard Quine, the director behind films like My Sister Eileen, Bell Book and Candle, and Sex and the Single Girl.

"Requiem for a Falling Star". Not a great episode, though it does feature a cameo by the legendary Edith Head. Honestly I was so amused that the episode stars Anne Baxter as an actor who kills her assistant that that simple fact made me like the episode more than I probably should. (Among Baxter’s many roles, she co-starred in All About Eve opposite Bette Davis). So not a great one, but very watchable.

"A Stitch in Crime". Leonard Nimoy as an obnoxious surgeon. Anne Francis plays a nurse who gets murdered. It’s a great chase, which is hard to do and manages to be thrilling. Great work all around.

"The Most Dangerous Match". Solid episode with Laurence Harvey as a chess grandmaster.

"Double Shock". Martin Landau plays identical twins, one a TV chef who drags Columbo on set during a live broadcast and gives Falk a chance to have some fun. It’s a brilliantly structured piece that’s both thrilling and funny. Also features Julie Newmar. The season ends with a great episode.

"Lovely But Lethal". On the one hand, it stars Vera Miles, Martin Sheen, Vincent Price. On the other hand, it’s just okay with Columbo catching Miles but in a way that felt like a reach.

"Any Old Port in a Storm". Donald Pleasance is great here as the winery owner who murders his brother and stages a scuba diving accident. It also features Julie Harris as his secretary. The character is one who Columbo seems to like, who under other circumstances would be happy to spend time with. How Columbo catches him at the end feels a bit off, though.

"Candidate for Crime". A politician killing his campaign manager made me laugh, but overall, the structure and the case was just fabulous.

"Double Exposure". Robert Culp guest stars yet again and it’s his best so far. Also, clever how Columbo manages to catch him, which definitely is a Hail Mary pass, but he manages to pull it off. Also the episode is written by Stephen J. Cannell!

"Publish or Perish". I really loved this one for a few reasons. One, the murderer is played by Jack Cassidy (who also played the murderer in the publishing themed first episode “Murder by the Book”). The murderer is played by real life mystery writer Mickey Spillane (yes, that Mickey Spillane) here playing a crime writer named Mallory (and I’m guessing that this is where Max Allan Collins got the name for his series about a writer named Mallory). It’s also the first Columbo episode written by Peter S. Fischer, who would go on to create Murder, She Wrote with Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link.

"Mind Over Mayhem". This is another episode where the cast wins me over even if the episode is overall pretty meh. In this case it features Lew Ayres, José Ferrer, Jessica Walter. It also features a boy genius and a robot (played by Robby the Robot from the classic Forbidden Planet). It has clever twists but overall, it’s just not that great.

"Swan Song". I love Johnny Cash so him playing a musician – and performing "Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” throughout - makes this a winner for me. That his wife is played by Ida Lupino, the murder being a plane crash, just make it irresistible. Also I think it definitely benefits from having a murderer who is struggling to live with what he did. Not having a breakdown or being angry he’s caught, but honestly bothered my murder in a wya that a lot of the killers on the show never do.

"A Friend in Deed". Well, the season ends with a bang as a man kills his wife and calls his neighbor for help – except the Deputy LAPD Commissioner helps him cover it up, and then demands the man helps murder his wife. And Richard Kiley is just one of those killers you love to hate.

Review: Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist. Season One.

I really liked Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, and I did so for reasons that I’m unsure translate to other people and that I can explain without giving away a lot of the show. But I think it’s because the show is an effort to be an emotional story and to lean into those emotions.

Jane Levy stars as the titular Zoey and she is amazing. I’ve watched her in different things over the years and interviewed her and she has never been better than she is here. The rest of the cast is uniformly good, from Lauren Graham as the hard edged boss who has a soft spot for Zoey and tries to mentor her in terms of work and in terms of dealing with the death of a parent, to Peter Gallagher as her father to Mary Steenburgen as her mother. Alex Newell as Mo and John Clarence Stewart as Simon are the heart of the show and in a uniformly excellent cast, are exceptional.

The pilot, which was expertly directed by Richard Shepard, bounces between a lot of tones and types of stories and has to find a way to balance them. Which is likely one reason they sought out a director like Separd, whose greatest skill is finding a way to thread the needle as far as tone. Think of his films like The Matador or The Perfection or the pilot to Ugly Betty. Also he manages to pull off the musical numbers and these masterful set pieces in exciting ways.

On the one hand, the show promises something light with lots of singing and dancing, but the entire conceit of the show is that these are “heart songs” as Zoey comes to call them, and are expressing something that the person cannot express in words. Which means that no matter how toe tappingly fun the song might be, it tends to mean that something deep and painful and repressed is behind it.

And that could describe the show in a lot of ways, as well. Because while on the one hand it is a show that is bright and full of color. Zoey and some other cast members work at a dot com company, which means it’s a strange looking set that you know is both a strange office space and yet, so far from a parody of how dot com offices are. But at the heart of the show is pain.

Because the illness of Zoey’s father is always there. And there are episodes where she’s able to hear him sing and she and Peter Gallagher dance around the room, and Jane Levy as Zoey manages to convey the joy of being able to connect with her father in this small way. That grasping at those moments of happiness.

And then when the doctor tells them that the end is near, she falls apart. And she begins to break out in song uncontrollably. In a way that threatens to throw off the balance of the show. But it doesn’t because it leans into the emotional nature of the show and that she is expressing what she can’t say. That she can’t face the news about her father and it’s thrown everything off. Her ability to function normally is off, which is something that people who have dealt with the loss of a loved one can relate to. How everything becomes raw and the struggle to think and filter and process what’s happening.

The way that the show manages to tie that episode and that feeling into the entirety of the show. Zoey is a show about trauma and grieving. And I don’t say that to discourage anyone from watching it, because I think it’s a very fun and enjoyable show. But it’s about how we struggle to deal with these issues as we go through our day to day, finding ways to deal with things that are almost overwhelming.

That episode and the one that follow really showcased the show’s strengths. The following one concerns a deaf character who with the helps of backup dancers performs to Fight Song, which is played without lyrics as the characters aren’t simply dancing, but signing the song lyrics as they dance. It was breathtaking to watch.

Through it all the show also made the point that even though Zoey had this insight into people’s inner lives, that didn’t mean she suddenly understood them or their lives. She’s a coder and has her own issues and biases and she doesn’t always understand what people are doing or what things mean or how best to deal with it. But she finds ways to work through it.

The final episode, which was a bit out of character compared to the rest, was brilliant. And devastating. The sad truth is that before the pilot was over, I knew what was coming. Zoey’s father wasn’t going to stick around for years, it wasn’t going to continue indefinitely. If it did, the show would have ended up being twee. And the show leaned into the feeling. Peter Gallagher and his son and daughter in law sang Lullaby, the Billy Joel song, which was heartbreaking and beautiful. There was a lovely goodbye as Zoey and her father danced, which ended as I expected, and yet that diminish the emotional impact of it.

The final scene of the final episode consisted of a single shot of a single song. The extended cast sang Don McLean’s American Pie. The camera weaved through the house as the cast walked around each talking a line or a few lines at a time, and quickly we see that as the camera moves around the house that time is passing, the song taking place over the wake as a few hours pass and people arrive and leave, as food is eaten and people circulate. Ending with the family together and as Zoey closes the door, she speaks the final line.

The final episode was clearly made by someone who’s lost people, who’s dealt with grief, and it threads that line of being sad and leaning into the pain and the loss without being overwhelmingly tragic or other other side, sappy and maudlin. And perhaps it’s because the show aired during a year where we’ve been surrounded by death. Surrounded by so many deaths at a time when we’re also mourning the loss of our lives and mourning so many things, and we never had a chance to grieve. Not really. I’m not sure that I would call Zoey the best show off the year (though it was one of them) but it was a show about 2020 in a strange way. A show about grief and pain and laughter and joy and finding a way to work through it. The show was not just good, it came out at just the right moment.

Review: Hawaii

Not the 50th state, but the 1966 film, based on a James Michener novel.

George Roy Hill directed the story of a missionary (Max Von Sydow) and his wife (Julie Andrews) who move to Hawaii from New England in 1819. Admittedly as someone from New England, with deep roots in the region, young Puritan ministers who just graduated from Yale may possibly be the worst people to send to the far side of the world as missionaries. But that’s me.

In short, Von Sydow is an uptight Puritan, Andrews is a slightly less uptight Puriatn. I love both of them as actors, but they don’t make an especially believable couple. Having said that, I have met couples where the only sign of affection between them is that they have biological children.

The film is not without its charms. It was filmed in Hawaii and the scenery is spectacular. The supporting cast includes Gene Hackman and John Cullum. But the actors I was most impressed by were the Hawaiian and Polynesian actors like Jocelyn LaGarde and Manu Tupou, who really stole the film.

I will say that the film, which covers about two decades, does manage to portray what happened with some accuracy. This isn’t whitewashed. Sailors take advantage of women. Whites bring disease and we witness a large part of the community including characters we know die in a horrific scene. Von Sydow and others oppose the plans of most missionaries and the white community to buy property and build plantations in the island, which one missionary justifies as their payment for their decades of good work.

And for all that, the film remains distant and aloof from what’s happening. And the final scene which is supposed to be this moving emotional moment has some meaning, but it doesn’t hit like it should. I’m a fan of the director George Roy Hill, who remains best known for The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The World According to Garp. And when he was good - in those and in other films - it was because he was masterful at capturing a certain tone. He had this light touch. Bemused, maybe? His films tend to feature unusual characters in unusual scenarios and trying to muddle their way through. Hawaii has interesting characters, but it has very little humor. Maybe because it’s a historical epic and we have to be serious about such things? Hill’s films tend to be much smaller and maybe he got lost trying to make something this big.

So, Hawaii is not that good. It’s not good and on top of that, the film is nearly three hours long. If it were two hours long, I don’t think that it would have been a better movie, but I would have liked it better.

Review: The Big Bounce

Elmore Leonard is a hard writer to adapt. There was for a while the idea in Hollywood and elsewhere that all filmmakers had to do to make a successful film out of an Elmore Leonard book was just copy the book, dialogue and all, and you’re gold. The truth is a lot more complicated, though. One reason why Hollywood thought that was because some filmmakers made it look easy in a series of films in the nineties (Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight - which to be fair, are as much the sensibility of the directors as they are Leonard’s). Leonard does write good dialogue, but the trick of turning his work into films is complicated because he didn’t care about a three act structure, and had his own ideas about pacing. That’s not a criticism at all, by the way, just an observation.

I thought of this watching The Big Bounce, which was released in 2004. On the surface it has everything going for it. The director was George Armitage, who’s made a number of good noirish and crime films over the years including Grosse Point Blank and Miami Blues that really try to blend genres and tones in interesting ways. Movies that even when they don’t completely succeed, are interesting. And I’m one of those people who would often rather watch an interesting mess than a perfectly made bland film. (I’ve also always liked Armitage cause he was originally from Hartford and always nice to see Connecticut folk do good). It stars Owen Wilson and Sara Foster, with a supporting cast of Morgan Freeman, Gary Sinise, Charlie Sheen, Bebe Neuwirth, Willie Nelson, Harry Dean Stanton. It’s set in Hawaii, where it was shot, so at the very least the scenery is great.

I kept thinking about the film. Not because it was good. It wasn’t even horrible. It was simply…bland. The movie feels like the edited for TV version of a movie. Where all the sex and violence and profanity and a lot of the subtext and character of the film has been edited out. Because a lot of the charm of Elmore Leonard books is his dialogue and though there are good scenes in the film, for the most part it never feels like Elmore Leonard. It doesn’t feel like much of anything.

The film involves a drifter and small time thief (Wilson) who after getting out of jail on an assault charge, gets hired by a local judge to manage his small beachfront resort. Meanwhile he becomes interested in Foster, who’s the mistress of a local developer, who has a plan to rob her boyfriend. And of course as the plan gets developed, there’s a lot more to it.

Apparently during editing Armitage left the film or got fired, so I hold out hope that there is a good version of this film that exists and that someday we may get to see. Because it’s possible to see bits and pieces of it in the film. Wilson and Foster work well together and there are a lot of scenes where the two play off each other in interesting ways. Those small moments, likely a combination of scripted nuance and improvisation, showing how they’re falling for each other even while they’re deeply wary of each other, being able to read each other all too well, and can’t trust each other. Wilson especially leans into the dialogue, which for both is this mix of laidback lightheartedness with this intensity and hostility. The film needed more of those scenes with the two of them.

Similarly think about the scene where Wilson and Charlie Sheen get into a brief fight and after punching him in the nose, Wilson is telling him not to tilt his head back, and how to wash his shirt to get the blood out while sitting in the grass next to him. Sheen saying his wife will know how to get blood out of the shirt. Again, these little funny moments between characters.

The biggest waste of the film is that they had Willie Nelson and Harry Dean Stanton and did almost nothing with them! Seriously what were people thinking?

There is a scene which is Morgan Freeman, Willie Nelson, and Harry Dean Stanton playing dominos. I would watch two hours of the three of them playing dominos. I truly hope that there’s hours of raw footage of the three just improvising in front of the camera. No hyperbole. I think it would be enthralling and hilarious and entertaining as anything. And yet the scene in the film is a blink and you’ll miss it moment.

Maybe that’s the film’s biggest problem. Leonard is good at taking his time. At letting his characters talk long enough to reveal themselves. At following a meandering plot that’s never less than enthralling. The film is uninterested in such moments. Because a movie like this isn’t about the plot, it’s about the characters, the tone, the dialogue, the humor. It’s about the how of the story more than the story itself. The result is a film that’s fine to watch on TV in the middle of the night, where half awake you can enjoy the scenery and follow the plot with casual interest but not have engage with the material deeply. It’s too bad that the filmmakers felt similarly, and didn’t want to spend time with the material and characters and enjoy the experience.

Review: Bonding

The Netflix show created by Rightor Doyle was first released in 2019 and the second season took a while to arrive before coming out last month. The first season had been in the queue, but after the new one dropped, I spent a weekend watching both. It’s striking because the first season was perfectly fine. It was interesting. It was a character piece but it also leaned into the shock of being about a dominatrix.

That’s not to say it was bad, because it was a striking portrait of being closeted and the fear of being oneself. About how one can be close and then push those people away in self-destructive ways. About how we become broken and try to put ourselves back together. That last point is, I know, something problematic as people in the BDSM Community are wary of the idea that trauma leads people to BDSM. It doesn’t. We all have damage and some of those people are into bondage, but of course that’s not how it usually plays out in pop culture.

Having said that, after watching the first season, the second season was better. In every way. It was smarter, funnier, deeper. It introduced new characters and gave existing characters more to do. It brought the central themes of consent and intimacy into sharper focus. And while becoming a bigger show in every sense, it still kept the focus on these two central characters.

The show got heat for not being accurate in the first season and the show took that criticism and found a way to use that. To consider why the character would have behaved that way. How would it have made sense for those characters. And the result is a show that is more accurate but also more thoughtful. Not every show can take the legitimate and important criticism they receive and find a way to see it as valuable, to rethink what they got wrong, to consider how the criticism could make the show better.

Bonding, which in the second season was written by Doyle, Olivia Troy and Nana Mensah, managed to make a second season that was better than the first and they did so by listening to criticism. I don’t know whether there will be a third season, but it ended in a thoughtful and moving place with a lot of potential to become something even more exciting. Here’s hoping they get the chance.

Review: Silent Movie

Sometimes it’s hard to think about how great Mel Brooks was. And how productive he was in a short period of time. In the span of a decade, he co-wrote and directed six movies, created a short lived TV show (When Things Were Rotten). That’s in addition to a new 2000 Year Old Man recording and TV special – the fifth album that he and Carl Reiner had made together. Of those six films, it’s hard not to argue that three of them are among the very best film comedies ever made.

After Mel Brooks made two of the best films of 1974 – Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein – Brooks made Silent Movie, which was released in 1976. There were two risks in this film. One, it was a feature length silent movie. Which is a crazy concept, but if one can do whatever they want, well, swing for the fences. And Brooks did. He also took another risk. Brooks starred in the film himself.

He had acted before. The 200 Year Old Man bits were (and are) hysterical, but today we know Brooks in part as an award-winning actor. Besides his own films he’s acted in films like The Muppet Movie to To Be Or Not To Be to countless animated films to shows like Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But before all that, he starred with Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman, Bernadette Peters and Sid Caesar, and a number of very big celebrity cameos.

What’s striking is how Brooks is, well, the Brooks we all know. Perhaps more impressively because he doesn’t have any spoken dialogue. But when people think of Mel Brooks, he’s right there. Of course by this time he was 50 years old and had been writing and performing for decades, so perhaps not a big shock, but it was startling.

Brooks stars as a washed up recovering alcoholic filmmaker who is trying to put together a new film - A silent film! Which will help to save the studio, which is being targeted by Wall Street vultures. (Who entertainingly pray to a dollar sign, among other amusing gags). That is a funny gag, but it’s also not a complex one. And that is part of the appeal of the film. It’s not complicated and it’s not deep, but it’s entertaining.

The movie lags at points but overall, it worked better than I thought it would. It worked much better than the award winning 2011 film The Artist. There are inter titles with lines of dialogue scattered throughout the movie, but for the most part, the film is made so that it’s easy to follow what’s happening, what the characters are doing. It’s often over the top, but never in a cheesy manner that pulled me out of the film.

There were only two moments that pulled me out of the film. In each scene, Brooks and his two colleagues (DeLuise and Feldman) are celebrating and over the top jumping up and down and hugging each other, and as they do, two old ladies walk by and shout something at the men. The title comes up: “Fags!”

I think it would be worth a new edition of the film which cuts those two titles. In part because, it’s obvious (and I say this as someone who cannot read lips) what they’re saying without the titles. We know. The audience back then knew. We don’t need the word cause it’s not funny. And it was especially disappointing because Brooks in Blazing Saddles was very smart about how language was used. Not so much here.

Silent Movie is funny. I recommend it to people. But we’re talking about Mel Brooks and saying that it’s funny feels like damning him with faint praise. Because it’s not a great film. It’s a good film. I think it’s something people will enjoy.

And while I wrote that the movie isn’t smart about language, it was in some ways. There’s only one word of spoken dialogue in the film. And it’s spoken by the legendary Marcel Marceau.

If Mel Brooks is thinking about a new project, my suggestion: make a musical of Silent Movie. I bet that would be something else. And no one else could do it.

Review: Blade

When Blade was released in 1998, it was an oddity for a lot of reasons. An action film starring Wesley Snipes based on the Marvel Comics character, the action/horror film stood out back then. Today of course a comic book movie is just another Friday.

Director Steve Norrington is known for two films, this and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was, well, bad. So rewatching Blade for the first time since it came out, I was expecting the film to be unimpressive. I mean, Wesley Snipes can be good, but definitely not always, and he is in a lot of mediocre films. So I was surprised to find that Blade was good. The script, the direction, the fight choreography. More than two decades (and lots of superhero movies) later, I’ll put Blade on a list of the best comic book movies.

Admittedly, that’s not a long list.

It’s a Wesley Snipes movie, but it’s also a pretty one note performance - Blade is a very one note kind of character - so a lot of the weight falls on the supporting cast, who manage to balance the film in different ways. The great Kris Kristofferson plays Abraham Whistler, Blade’s grizzled old mentor, who might have been as cold as Blade once upon a time, but now it’s softened by age and his concern for his adopted son. N’Bushe Wright as the doctor who gets caught up in this, and would be the love interest except that, well, Blade isn’t into love or human emotions. Meanwhile Donal Logue offers comic relief as a vampire who can handle a lot of damage and is entertaining as all hell.

Whatever happened to N’Bushe Wright?

The main villain though is played by Stephen Dorff, who is Deacon Frost, a young punk of a vampire who is waging his own war against other vamps. A ruling council composed of the well-dressed accented, monsters we know in films has their own way of doing things, but Frost has his own ideas, from the wild parties, to decoding ancient texts searching for the answers in what others have dismissed as myth. It’s a fascinating character and Dorff enjoys chewing scenery as he kills other vampires and grabs a young child to have a conversation with Blade in the middle off the day. He has his own ideas of how vampires should act and not simply sit in the shadows.

Admittedly I keep thinking the script could have used another draft but those dynamics are there and they work. It’s not a deep movie, but it knows what it’s trying to do. And has a cast that can pull it off.

It is very much a film of the 1990’s. From the rave opening (which is a fabulous scene) to the lighting and the dark shadows. It definitely leans into that goth tone and sensibility of The Crow and other films of that era. It also builds from the vampire and horror stories being written at this time. I found myself enjoying it. Blade is a dark, brutal film and it was enjoyable in a way that a good genre film can be. Managing to both satisfy my expectations and also do something new. But director Norrington and the cinematographer Theo van de Sande manage to do an impressive job.

That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have issues. The ending of the film falls flat. I remember thinking that when I first saw the film. Much of it takes place in Los Angeles, in these dark corners of the city at night. Then we go to the desert nearby where there’s an ancient temple underground. Then the final fight between Blade and Frost is just okay, but it’s not one of the better fights in the film. After the earlier fights as Blade takes on various henchmen, which were much more impressive, this is very much a fight where a guy had other people fight because he couldn’t. Then to conclude a mediocre fight, Frost gets injected with - well, let’s not get into all that - but the result is a CGI explosion, which looked fake when the film came out and looks possibly worse now. But I’m more forgiving of bad CGI today because I know fo the technical limitations. So I don’t take as many points off as I might have once upon a time.

But in this, it’s like most superhero films where they have some interesting ideas and fight scenes and design work and cinematography in the first two acts of the film, but the third act is, well, boring. Because beyond have the hero fight the villain, the filmmakers don’t know have other ideas. Though at least here the plan is straight forward: Stop Deacon Frost and kill everyone. There’s a brutal simplicity to it.

I know that Blade is coming back, this time with Mahershala Ali as Blade. And Ali is a great actor and I hope that they build a good film around him (and that the film is better than Green Book, which isn’t a particularly high hurdle). But I’ve read some of the old comics from Mark Wolfman and Gene Colan, which were similarly genre work that aspired to be more than just another comic. In Tomb of Dracula, the series where Blade and others fought the titular villain, they struggled to kill Dracula time and again. And there’s a way where this could feel like another comic book device where the villain always escapes and never dies, but in that comic they made it feel ominous. That the characters managed to avoid the worst, foil the plot, but the villain and the evil seemed as though they were impossible to defeat. The film manages to capture some of that feeling.

Again, it’s a very nineties movie. But it was fun. And it fairly sure it’s not because I’m feeling slightly nostalgic for the nineties.

Review: Call Your Mother by Barry Sonnenfeld

I feel like everyone reading Barry Sonnenfeld’s memoir will be disappointed.

That’s not the same as saying the book is bad. It’s not. But for people expecting a book filled with behind the scenes stories from Sonnenfeld’s Hollywood career, they’ll likely be a little disappointed. Even as someone who was fine with the book not being a lot of anecdotes, found myself disappointed. After all I am a big fan of his pair of Addams Family movies and would have loved to read more about the making of them, and some of the choices he made (especially considering that David Krumholtz’s character in Addams Family Values seems to have been a younger version of Sonnenfeld). Why he thought Wild Wild West was a good idea (I mean, why anyone thought that was a good idea is beyond me….). More about Men in Black and his friendship with Will Smith. The making of the sadly short-lived The Tick series. Pushing Daisies, the pilot which Sonnenfeld directed, I will argue, is one of the most beautiful episodes of television ever made.

He does have stories about how he got his start, about how he became friends with the Coen Brothers and how they worked together. About how he and Penny Marshall did NOT get along making Big.

The book is ultimately about Sonnenfeld’s life. Which I should note he tells in a very entertaining way. It’s far funnier to read than it was to live. This is a man who argued with Larry David over which one of them is more neurotic. Which should give people a rough idea of the kind of person Sonnenfeld is. I mean, many of us who think we’re neurotic would go, I can’t hold a candle to Larry David. But in reading about Sonnenfeld’s parents and his uncle and his childhood and plane crashes, well, can’t really blame the man.

I said earlier that I wanted more stories of the making of different projects, and I do, but I can also see Sonnenfeld’s interests and fingerprints in his work after reading the book. Some of which may simply be in my own mind. But I suppose it might be too much to ask Sonnenfeld to dissect his own work at length after just dissecting his own life in such depth. Besides, he wrote an entertaining book.

If I ever have a drink with Sonnenfeld, I’ll concede that he’s more neurotic. (And I’m not just saying that so he’ll tell me about The Tick.)

Review: Scream 2

Ah, Scream 2. The first was successful, so of course there has to be a sequel – I mock, but I can relate, having written about the first film HERE – and it arrived roughly a year after the first, bringing the band back together (well, the band that hadn’t been killed off in the first film, at least). Which is to say, only a few people.

The first Scream film was a comment on the genre, saying, yes, we are in a horror movie, but we know the rules of horror movies. But it was also a very 90s movie because it was about The End of History.

In 1989, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama wrote an article by that title, and while its premise is very questionable, it has been interpreted in a number of ways he likely never meant. But at its heart was this idea that all the great challenges in human society were over. Communism had failed. Free market capitalism and Democracy had “won” and there were no more ideological battles to be fought. After the 20th Century which was defined by fascism and communism and great wars over ideas, all that was over.

This idea – that everything is new, the rules have changed, the old order has collapsed – ran through 1990s pop culture in explicit and implicit ways. There are obvious examples were this was part of the plot and discussed (Pierce Brosnan Bond movies, I’m looking at you!) but it can be seen in everything from Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, a revisionist take on a classic western story made by one of the people synonymous with classic westerns, to Pretty Woman, a darker take on the traditional romantic comedy. Some of that change is expressed in different ways. Because of course some of the “this is all new and all different” films which are remaking/recycling are simply the result of generational and technological change (Jurassic Park and T2 making differently looking films, or each generation making a new Robin Hood/Peter Pan/whatever film).

But this is one of the impulses behind Scream. This is a horror movie but it’s not. It’s self-aware and reflective and it’s new! Of course, it wasn’t. It was a horror movie. And watched without the sound, it functions like most horror movies.

The problem with making a sequel to such a movie is that it’s a lose-lose situation. It isn’t new. It can’t be new. People are buying tickets to watch the same thing done a little differently. And how does one make a sequel to the idea that everything is new and different? Well, there’s a reason few good movies get sequels. Because by their nature, they are revisions of the first. So, same basic idea, it will keep you guessing who the killer is, lots of people will die.

The first Scream was about high school kids and this film is set in college. One of the appeals of the first film was that it did a pretty good job of capturing some of the feel of adolescence. This film did a less good job. It’s a much more surface take with some fun moments of dialogue but never as interesting. Much of the geeky self aware dialogue is about sequels.

I suppose what was most annoying was how every time the film made a point of diverging from expectations based on the first one, they almost felt this need to underline it. As if to say, we know what you expected. It’s annoying, but it also points to how the second film is looser than the first film. This seems common in sequels, where the first film has been written and rewritten with a very tightly plotted structure, where the second film is a lot looser, shaggier and more relaxed in different ways (see Ocean’s Twelve, Lethal Weapon II, Aliens, Temple of Doom….and almost all sequels, let’s be honest).

Having just ripped into the script, it must be said that the opening scene is chilling and precise and so well done. After introducing and reintroducing characters, and taking its time, there’s a lengthy scene in a sorority house as one characters is killed that is as well crafted as anything Wes Craven has made.

One of the film’s saving graces is the cast. Which is more impressive than the first film. From the opening scene featuring Omar Epps, Jada Pinckett Smith and Heather Graham, to Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elise Neal, Jerry O’Connell, Timothy Olyphant, Laurie Metcalf, and Portia de Rossi joining the returning actors from the first film. Plus Liev Schreiber’s cameo in the first film is expanded into a bigger role in this film. And David Warner has a small role as a theater professor/director, which I enjoyed.

Courtney Cox’s local newswoman Gale Weathers may have been almost a cliche in the first film, but in the second film, she is part of a much more conscious approach the film takes to the media and how it works and how we relate to it in really interesting ways. This is one of the major thematic concerns of the rest of the films, Fame and the media and what that means. And it’s interesting because of course today there are these serial killers losers who write manifestos and want to be famous, but this came out in 1997 and clearly the filmmakers had a feeling and understanding of this which was far beyond most of us. Because I see that and watching the film today and how Liev Schreiber’s character wants to be famous, how Cox’s character wants to be more important and more famous, and I think there’s something wrong with them.

I suppose that in that respect, I am like Neve Campbell’s Sydney, who simply wants to fade into the background and live an ordinary life and has no desire to be famous. For all the film’s flaws, I can’t help but see that final scene as this almost primal scream into the void that is the future. A future filled with social media influencers and YouTube stars and reality television. And saying, in the midst of death and insanity and all that is happening, I just want to live a quiet life. Of course the nature of this genre is that such a thing is never possible. But I suppose, it’s not really possible in life, either.

Review: Scream

I was exhausted by everything happening in the world, so around Halloween I watched a few “scary” movies because, well, considering I was working on the election, the horror on screen was pretty relaxing compared to what was happening in real life. And so beyond watching a film from 1996 that I haven’t seen since it came out, watching Scream was a chance to re-experience pop culture from my youth, and take a new look at it.

Beyond of course the obvious reaction, which is to throughout the film repeatedly go, I forgot this actor was in this! (And, wow, they look so young)

This is the first time I’ve watched Scream since it came out and I found myself ignoring dialogue for the most part. Or rather, on rewatching, it’s the least interesting aspect of the film. At the time it came out, the self-referential dialogue with its shades of Tarantino-esque postmodernism was one of the appeals. This is what made it more than just another horror movie. The characters were aware of how horror movies worked. (which doesn’t stop most of them from getting killed, of course). The film had that dialogue, but in other aspects, it was another horror movie. Scream helped to establish Kevin Williamson as, well, Kevin Williamson. And I could mock his career, which I admittedly don’t hold in especially high esteem, but at the same time, the man’s created multiple TV shows and written a few movies. Most of his work just isn’t for me (and The Following was bad on many levels), but The Faculty is something of a classic, and I actually liked Glory Days and Wasteland when they came out. (I’m one of the few, it seems)

The film may have been marketed with Williamson, but the movie belongs to director Wes Craven and composer Marco Beltrami. By the time Scream came out, Craven was an old hand and practically synonymous with the horror genre for The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and other films. But he was coming off on two of his more ambitious films (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Vampire in Brooklyn) both of which are much more highly regarded now than they were upon release. His career was on the decline and Scream revitalized his career. What he showed in Scream was how talented he was. Craven was masterful at establishing the geography of spaces in small ways and then utilizing that to help craft drama and tension. He wasn’t a great director of comedy, but he knew how to communicate with actors and give them space for comedy – just as he gave them space to emote – and it’s incredible to watch. Why didn’t Hollywood realize he was so good at this and throw money at him to direct thrillers? Because he was so much better at it than most directors. Plus he was good working with younger and inexperienced actors and coaxing good performances out of them. He directed Red Eye in 2005, but imagine if he was doing that annually? Or if he had the chance to make a few more odd films like the short he wrote and directed for Paris je t’aime? Careers go up and down, obviously, and often for reasons out of individual’s control, but I’m not sure I appreciated how good he was until I rewatched the film. He was really talented and not in the very explicit stylistic ways (think of John Carpenter) that draw a viewer’s attention to the camera. Craven was more invisible than that

By contrast to the mid-career Craven, Beltrami was at the very beginning of his career. He’s currently one of the best film composers currently alive, but his talent was obvious right at the start here, because his score for the film is gorgeous. Seriously, one of the best parts of the film and I say that having just talked about what a skilled craftsman Craven is, but Beltrami brings the film to another level entirely.

And having dismissed Williamson and his script, I will say that what he does well is to capture some of the feeling of being a teenager. And not just the idea of being a teen, or the symbolic idea of it, which is why so many films about kids and teens feel…off, let’s say. The struggle is to capture what it felt like at that age, and at its best, Scream gets that. The anger, the irreverence, the attitude to authority. Being a complete wiseass, which is at the heart of a lot of the dialogue about horror movies and the rules and what it means. That added level of geekiness. The film’s success – and the script’s – is its ability to do many things well. To be a teen movie, to be a geeky self-referential movie, to be a horror movie. It’s not funny (or at least, not as funny as it thinks it is) but that’s not a major problem.

The film was huge and it was huge for the horror genre. In some ways the film can be blamed for a generation of horror movies that featured young casts – I’m thinking about everything from I Know What You Did Last Summer to Final Destination to the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the list goes on. This was…not great, let’s say. But the film launched dozens, if not hundreds of films in its wake. And if in the end, the film wasn’t as influential, didn’t change as much as it was trumpeted to, well, every genre needs to be rebooted and refurbished every now and then. To remind people why it worked, why its great, what it’s capable of being. Scream did that.

Admittedly I was not the biggest fan of much of the cast – then or now. As I said, I was reminded throughout about how I didn’t remember most of the cast was in the film. I did not remember how Drew Barrymore had a small role and was essentially the movie’s big name.

I was never a big David Arquette fan, though he’s fine in the films. In truth I’ve never enjoyed his work as a comedian, but I do wish he’d done some more dramatic roles, some more crime movies and thrillers, because he’s not bad. Courtney Cox was on one of the biggest shows on TV at the time she made Scream, and I was never a big fan of Friends, but she’s good here. The character is annoying for the most part, but Cox plays the character perfectly.

I was reminded how much I like Neve Campbell and how she should have (and is capable of) a much better career than she’s had. But back in the nineties (for all you young ‘uns reading) she was on Party of Five every week and then besides Scream, she was in The Craft and Wild Things. And she had a mixed bag of films after but there was The Company that she co-wrote and produced and starred in, directed by the late great Robert Altman, and films like Investigating Sex, Panic, Last Call, Reefer Madness, Closing the Ring, I Really Hate My Job. She’s worked with good directors and actors. She’s often interesting even if the film isn’t. But I’m guessing most people never saw most of those films.

Also, and this may be showing my age but I can’t help but think about how the film was released in 1996, which is to say, pre-Columbine. And watching the film today it feels completely different than it did to me back then for that reason. I don’t know that it could be made today. And yes, obviously sequels to the film have happened since, but this initial film, and two teenagers going on this kind of killing spree in the film, I really can’t see it being made. And I don’t say that as someone who has a strong opinion one way or the other about that fact. I can’t imagine writing a movie about teenagers on a killing spree through their town. Back when I was in high school, I could have imagined such a film. But Columbine changed that. How does one make a film about that, knowing about the rash of school shootings in the United States? I don’t think making a movie today on that subject would change anything. I just don’t think I could sit through it, let alone make it.

I do think it says something about the talent and the artistry of the film that after that thought popped into my head (it’s been years, I forgot the identity of the killer) I didn’t shut it off and move on with my life.. If it was a bad movie, I wouldn’t have bothered.

There’s a way in which the film manages to deconstruct the genre, at least in its dialogue, but also is essentially a horror/slasher film, and is unabashedly so. Which if I’m honest, I enjoy. It’s a movie that loves the genre, and wants to celebrate it. Not elevate. Just enjoy it. I’m someone who enjoys genre, and I love work that leans into genre, and I think one way that genres grow and change is finding new ideas and avenues. Scream did that. I’m not sure it has a lot of appeal for people not interested in horror, though I think the dialogue brought people in back when it first came out. But Scream stands up. Even after all these years.

Thoughts About Star Trek: Discovery, Season One

Sonequa Martin-Green is so good.

Doug Jones. I don’t think that it’s appreciated just how incredibly talented he is because almost every role he plays involves being under a layer of makeup, playing an alien or a monster. He is a master mime and when I think about some of the actors I have known and their studies of motion and breathing – and how I occasionally mocked such things on some level – Jones shows what an actor who studies behavior and motion is capable of. In Saru he’s doing an incredible job with a new creature and it’s remarkable to watch.

Michelle Yeoh! Michelle freaking Yeoh!

Anthony Rapp is so good and it’s great to see him get to play a role that lets him be dark and intense, to be dramatic and romantic, to be the hero and be an annoyance. To be the genius who isn’t so much humbled, but comes to understand how the rest of this team can help fulfill what he sees as his mission, his project.

It’s always good to see Jayne Brook working. Honestly, it’s been far too long since she had a major role and it’s nice to see her playing an Admiral and getting to sink her teeth into a role that shows what she can do. (Also, as an utterly shallow thought – she looks amazing).

I’m honestly still unsure about the inclusion of Sarek, but James Frain is good.

I had no idea who Mary Wiseman was before watching the show, but she is the heart of the show. She represents what Star Trek is and exemplifies these principles and ideals that the show celebrates. She is incredibly adept at both comedy and drama, and I’m not going to lie, I have a little crush. The only comparison I can think of is Allison Tolman, who came out of nowhere to star in the first season of Fargo

Centering the story on someone who is not the Captain is such a good idea that it’s surprising no one did it before.

The idea of telling the story of the Federation-Klingon war and the creation of the Neutral Zone is an interesting idea. It’s not really the story that the series is interested in telling, though.

Setting the series in the “past” of the Star Trek universe is an interesting idea but it brings up a lot of problems. It’s hard to go where no one has gone before without being anachronistic or changing the timeline or throwing continuity out the window (or at least, throwing it out the window now and then). Using characters that we’ve seen before but in contexts telling all new stories that don’t seem to fit is strange. It feels like fan fiction, and I don’t mean that to be derogatory, but there is a way in which fan service can hinder storytelling.

Discovery seems unsure of what it wants to be. It’s not all new. It’s not fan service. I think the show might actually make more sense to someone who doesn’t have years and decades of knowledge.

The series includes two things I honestly loathe and which constantly annoy me in science fiction – parallel universes and time travel.

I’ve never been a fan of the Mirror Universe. I mean Spock with a goatee is funny and a good meme (back before we used the word) but the universe doesn’t make much sense. It was featured in one episode of the original series. One. Hell, Harry Mudd played a bigger role in the original series. The fact that DS9 had multiple Mirror episodes is probably my least favorite thing about the series. The fact that Voyager didn’t have a Mirror episode is one of the better things I can say about the series. The way that Discovery used the Mirror universe was an interesting idea, maybe a great idea, but it feels odd. More clever than anything.

I miss the serialized nature of Star Trek shows. It would be nice to have an episode or two – or a few, even? – that are just adventures and investigations without each episode being a part of a massive uber plot.

The Terrans in the mirror universe are on the verge of destroying all life in the universe because of their energy source and how they are using it. If one believes in reality, it’s hard not to laugh a little, because of course, they’re talking about us.

Having said that, it’s one sentence in the entire season.

“We do not have the luxury of principle–” “That is ALL we have, Admiral.”

The last episode was meh.

Maybe the fact that the USS Enterprise shows up in the final minutes of the last episode will mean something in season 2. But as it’s presented, it’s not a cliffhanger, there’s nothing dramatic happening. It feels like they run out story and had to put some filler to pad out the last episode.

The theme underlying the first season is fundamentalism. In every episode, in every plot and subplot, it is about fundamentalists seeking to impose this idea of fascistic purity on their society, on the larger universe. It is not unique to any one species. In this universe it is the Klingons who go to war because others are an abomination, in the Mirror universe it is the Terrans. There are Vulcan fundamentalists. There are people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. This doesn’t end when war begins, and it can infect people at war.

There’s a way in which the show was well made. In every way. And I also say this knowing that the first season of Star Trek shows are often mixed. (Hell, the first season of Next Generation was just bad). But there’s also a way that the show didn’t quite feel like Star Trek. The moral conundrums are too easily settled, the commentary is mostly nonexistent. But more to the point, the very fact that an organization and a group of people who signed up for exploration and science were turned into soldiers, their work being turned to make weapons of war, was far too easily glossed over.

This has always been one of the elements of Star Trek that people struggle with - the degree to which this is a military organization and the degree to which it is not. I can’t help but think about what it mean for an organization that for the most part has been about peaceful exploration for decades, generations – since the Romulan war – and suddenly forced to become a very different organization. For the people to lead very different lives. A war so bad that cadets are called up and sent to ships fighting on the front lines.

This is a war on a scale that most of the people alive today are unused to, but we never get that feeling watching the show. It’s one thing to complain that the show never conveys the scale of the war, but it is so isolated and insulated that the result is that it never quite captures just what’s happening. It’s one thing for a ship to be out in space, often days away from other Federation ships, as with other shows, and have this sense of isolation. I haven’t watched DS9 since it aired, but those last few seasons leading up to the finale were intense in a way that Discovery wasn’t – because they captured the brutality and costs of war. Discovery ends far too neatly, far too comfortably.

Just as I mentioned earlier that the people behind Discovery wanted the show to be straddling fan service and having known characters but not be shackled to continuity, I can’t help but think they struggled as far as other aspects of the show. Discovery wants to be a war story (or possible war stories?) but it doesn’t want to be a brutal, intense, gritty realistic kind of war story where people die and even if we win, we sacrifice a lot.

I am reminded of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, which Star Trek veteran Ronald D. Moore developed and how it tried to be brutal and real and topical. I think about The Orville, which is a show that so clearly loves Star Trek and what it means and is made by people who love Star Trek. I keep thinking about how Discovery had many options about what to do and how to approach it, and I don’t think it completely succeeded on its own terms.

What does it mean that so much of our contemporary pop culture is simply retreading familiar ground?

Star Trek Discovery has a lot of good ideas. It has a lot to like. But it is also impossible to love. It’s not bad at all. But I’m not sure that it’s Star Trek.

Which leads back to my concern about continuity. Because I do dislike it when it becomes more of a straight jacket. So I do understand and sympathize with the many producers who worry about what to do and how shows should connect and to what degree they should reference each other. Because there is part of me that feels that a good writer can craft something working within continuity. Every show and every episode has some limits on how to work, what characters can do, financial and technical limits. To a degree, continuity is something that we’ve invented in our own minds and turned into an almost boogeyman-like scale creature. Part of me think sthat making a show set in the past of a show means you’re agreeing to abide by certain rules just because that’s the decision that was made.

I do think back on what first attracted me to Star Trek, and it was the fact that it was meditative and commented on society, and that for all its flaws, it was able to have action and adventure, but those weren’t the moments that ultimately stayed with people. Those models were stunning. They still are. The effects, while not up to today’s standards, could be breathtaking. The creature designs were very good for TV. But what stayed with me were the characters and the stories. It was Kirk feeling old and finally confronting loss and failure in Wrath of Khan, Picard experiencing a whole other life and culture in Inner Light, the unsettlingly alien yet relatable Vulcans and Klingons and Ferengi (oh my). It was Data trying to understand what it means to be human. It was how after two of the best episodes of the series (The Best of Both Wolds), Next generations spent an episode (Family) where there was no action, no science fiction, just characters wrestling with family and their own emotions and the fallout of big events.

Of course if one asks any Star Trek fan, they’ll have a different answer for what “their” Star Trek is and what it means to them, but I fear that the show – like the recent films – has spent a lot less time considering what has always been at the heart of the show. Instead they replace it with something else, and it’s something that feels, well, much more generic. Discovery is a good show, but it’s soul, well, I’m uncertain it’s Star Trek.

The Novels of Joan Hadley

The late Joan Hess wrote more than three dozen books before her death in 2017, most of which were her Claire Malloy mysteries or Maggody mysteries. The two were very different series but both were centered around women, novels that were defined by voice, and were funny.

Early in her writing career Hess also wrote two books of another series. Writing as Joan Hadley she wrote two novels featuring Theo Bloomer, a retired florist who earlier in his life had done something rather hush hush for the government that remained classified. But the truth is that it didn’t much matter.

The Night-Blooming Cereus and The Deadly Acklee were published in 1986 and 1988. In the three years between 1986 and 1988, Hess published nine books by my count. Which I don’t think is a record, but it’s very impressive.

Neither of the Theo Bloomer books are that impressive. They’re not bad books by any stretch, but in her two successful series, Hess’ work was defined by their very distinctive voices, by the humor, by the characters and relationships. The Bloomer books are very eh, in every regard. The main character and none of the characters really pop or are especially exciting. In each of the books, the retired florist is dragged oversees for one reason by his sister because of something involving his niece and namesake Theodora.

There is also what I consider a third Joan Hadley novel, Mummy Dearest, the 17th novel of Joan Hess’ Claire Malloy series. In the book Malloy has just married and she along with her daughter Caron and her friend Inez are in Egypt on a honeymoon which is doubling as cover for her husband working on a terrorism and smuggling case. The events and the backstory were inspired by a trip that Hess took with her friend, the late writer Barbara Mertz (aka Elizabeth Peters).

As a nod to her friend, there is a small role in the novel of Lady Emerson Peabody who does little, but lives off the money from the published journals of her ancestor.

One of the other supporting characters in the book is loud mouthed obnoxious American named Sitterman, who works for the CIA and is just as loud and obnoxious as he was in both Bloomer books two decades earlier.

I wouldn’t categorize the book as one of the better Claire Malloy novels, but I do think it manages to point to why the Theo Bloomer novels never quite took off. The concept is okay. That he was a florist but he also spent some time during and after the war doing something for the government. He’s a waspy old money type and his namesake and niece is entertaining, but a lot of the amusement comes from laughing at her.

By the second book, a lot of the amusement comes form laughing at the people around her, but she still never managed to grow much as a character in the course of the two books. Caron and Inez were entertaining supporting characters, in that sometimes they were simply comic relief, sometimes they gave Claire a headache, sometimes they were off causing trouble on their own (does anyone remember the biology class frogs?), while other times Claire would delegate work to them to assist on the case.

Also Claire’s voice, which has always been the draw and the highlight of those novels shines through. Hess has always been something of an oddity among mystery writers because she is so voice driven. The concepts of her books – Malloy runs a bookshop – is the entire idea behind many cozy mystery series, but they never have the heart or the humor that Hess manages to inject in the character. (Perhaps because some of those writers spent so much time on the concept – mystery-loving bookstore owner dating a police detective – that they forgot to think about the type of people who might populate such a story, much less give them a personality and a voice).

Bloomer, while he was entertaining enough, was never a particularly compelling character. He was never quite comic enough or dramatic enough. It’s one thing to have a mild mannered character who gets dragged into trouble but is able to handle himself as well as anyone, but bringing that idea of a character to life is something much more complex. Joan Hess was able to do a lot of things, and do them well, but that just wasn’t one of them.

Book Review: Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle

Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle

Peter S. Beagle is a writer whose name has become synonymous with modern fantasy. His second novel, The Last Unicorn, has become a classic and has been turned into an animated film, a play and a comic. Over the years he’s written for film and TV, short stories and novels. Of course it’s easy to forget that he wasn’t always thought of in those terms. His first novel was A Fine and Private Place, which todays is considered a modern classic of fantasy, but it was an unusual book that stood out for many reasons both then and now. His second book was I See By My Outfit, a nonfiction account of traveling cross country by scooter. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he overlapped with people like Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry.

Maybe I should admit up front that while I like The Last Unicorn, it’s never been my favorite book of Beagle’s. I don’t say this to be petty, but I was reminded of this fact reading the first chapter of Summerlong. The Last Unicorn is this lovely fable, but the truth is that Beagle’s great talent lies in the fact that he writes fantasy stories that are not fairy tales.

Books like Summerlong, for example.

The book is about Abe and Joanna and her daughter Lily. These are not fable-like characters, they are precisely rendered, quirky and unique individuals with rich full lives, walking contradictions, and struggles. The way that Beagle writes them for chapter after chapter without fantasy intruding – and then for many more chapters with the fantastic at the edges of the action – demonstrate that if he wanted to, he could write a completely realistic novel. He could write a series of realistic novels with complex characters with messy lives and immerse us in the drama of their ordinary but colorful lives. To find and depict the quotidian in new ways, to capture colorful people falling in and out of love, having adventure, struggling to maintain the status quo and abandon what they’ve built. He could probably gain a lot more readers and make a lot more money if he did that.

He’s not interested in writing that book, though.

For Peter S. Beagle, those details, those lives, can also be the foundation of a work of fantasy.

There is so much that I like about the book and these characters that critiquing elements feels almost rude. My biggest complaint is that I could see the twist coming and knew what would happen. Of course when I say that, I’m being disingenuous. I knew who the fantastic figures were and what that meant. I could guess how certain things would play out. I have read a lot of fantasy, a lot of mythology, and so I knew who the characters were before it was explained, and I know that encountering the divine does not leave people unscathed.

When it comes to what would happen to the human beings, to Abe and Joanna and Lily, who we’ve come to know, the truth is that I did not see what would happen. It was surprising but not shocking. Beagle has them acting in character of course. He’s too good a writer to simply throw things at us or have them respond in ways that don’t fit. But there is also the simple fact that the fantastic, the magical, has entered their lives and it changes them. As in classical myth, that doesn’t mean that one’s life improves necessarily, but they cannot simply go back to the way things were before. There is no normal anymore after such an encounter. These vast unchanging figures of myth continue as they have since time immemorial, unchanged, but every time they intersect with the human world and with human beings, they leave wreckage in their wake.

That’s another good example of why his fairy tale stories have left me cold. As I say it’s personal preference, but when Beagle is able to so precisely dissect human relationships as he’s shown he can here, why would I be satisfied with a fairy tale. This is why so much fantasy leaves me cold. Somehow the world they depict is fantastic but it also means so little to characters who are thinly written. The stakes are too low for me to care and be fully invested.

The truth is that the fantasy stories that are impactful, depicted events that changed and reshaped the characters in them. Everything from the legend of King Arthur to Beowulf to Lord of the Rings features characters who change, who die, who are transformed and never the same again. They feature human flaws and human drama, and too often genre fiction is willing to put aside drama and humanity for spectacle. Perhaps that’s modern, or maybe that’s simply American, I don’t know.

But this is why I have read all of Peter Beagle’s work, even if I don’t always manage the month they are released. Because even when I don’t love them, I am affected by them. They are moving and thoughtful stories about people. Beagle’s great skill is how time and again he has found ways for magic and the fantastic to interact with ordinary lives – and find a way to make those things feel both natural, or at least have the effects within the realm of possibility for those outside the direct circle of them, and yet seismic to those who are caught up in it. After all, that is how all the ancient stories and myths worked.

Summerlong is such a precisely drawn, beautifully written book. It was a pleasure to read even after summer has ended and even when the characters behave in wrenching ways. This is a book that doesn’t offer a happy, pat ending. It is a book, though, that was hard to put down. This is no fairy tale; but it is magic.

Review: Alone: A Love Story by Michelle Parise

A few weeks ago I discovered the CBC podcast Alone: A Love Story. I know that I’m late to the party. The podcast wrapped up after three seasons earlier this year, but ever since I discovered it I’ve binged listened to every episode of this brilliant, incisive, heartbreaking, awe-inspiring podcast. Quite frankly the work of Michelle Parise and her story editors and co-producers Veronica Simmonds and Marc Apollonio has been just one of the very best parts of my days in recent weeks. Over three seasons Parise recounts how she met her husband and their marriage, the birth of their daughter, and then, the bomb. After that, Parise rebuilds her life, begins dating again, reconsiders her life all the while putting her daughter first and trying to keep it all together. Throughout the three seasons there were moments where Parise was able to capture such vivid moments of joy, of pain, of longing.

It’s the longing I think that has stayed with me the most. Or maybe that says more about me than her and the series. But it’s those scenes where she’s conveying the overwhelming joy that her daughter brings her even while every other aspect of her life feels in free fall, the walls closing in on her. Those moments of being good at her job, of knowing her daughter is spending time with her father, the ex, and unable to stay alone in her apartment. Of the sheer bliss that comes from those long fun nights of dancing with her friends and then going home with a younger boy, and then pivoting to being a mom with a very different purse. And doing that knowing about what she’s missing out on, what she wants her life to be, what she used to have.

Or that scene in the second season – episode 14, maybe? – where she spend more than a minute listing off all the things she wants from a partner like looking up from her book to see him looking at her, singing in the car, all these small mundane moments. These ordinary things that have brought her such joy in the past, moments that she hopes to find again. That she knows are possible.

It’s the way that she’s able to move between joy and sadness, having built a life that may not have been perfect but meant so much, only to have someone destroy it and having to rebuild. Admittedly I kept thinking of myself at those ages, or where I might be at those ages. Of what was and what might be and what it meant.

I also heard Parise’s surgically incisive takedown of Peter Pans, 30 and 40 something men, and it was hard not to see myself in some of her critique. It was also hard not to argue that she’s right.

I’m not just heaping praise on her because she knows what the best Springsteen album is and thinks it’s obvious. (Seriously, anyone who claims it’s not Darkness is suspect)

Partway through listening to the series I realized that it’s just Parise in front of a microphone talking. Yes, there’s music and sound effects added and woven in, but it’s such a beautiful and simple effect. Not all simplistic, because how hard is it to find one person with a voice (and a voice) who could carry this many hours of radio. But it is something that when listening for it, makes it all the more impressive.

One reason it jumped out at me is because I’m working on a radio piece that’s the same format and I tried for the next day or two to pay more attention and note the ways Alone used music and sound cues for storytelling effect, many of which are so subtle and beautifully done. But for the most part I got lost in the story and I’ll have to listen to it again to catch all those technical elements.

Because I did get lost in the story. Again and again I kept coming back to Parise and pulled through the narrative’s twists and turns, and the ways that she managed to ground the story in so many mundane ways. Over the course of years, not a lot happens. They get married and have a baby, he cheats and the marriage ends, she dates while balancing everything, there are a few vacations, some serious relationships, but very little happens, and it’s so compelling. Maybe because Parise finds that right balance of deep analysis of her own thinking and a casual tone of what happened in her day.

What is it about the narrative that grabbed me? I’m still not entirely sure. Listening to her voice through headphones day after day no doubt was a big part of it. But I don’t tend to read a memoir, even if it’s someone roughly may age or who has had similar experiences, and think, the next time I’m in Toronto, I need to get coffee with the person to see how things are going. I don’t think I’ve ever thought that. But that is what I caught myself thinking the other day, a couple days after listening to the final episode. This combination of missing her voice and her presence in my life. The way there are people I know, who I’m not especially close to or have their numbers, but we’ve spent time together, we know each other, and I care about how they’re doing.

Since the final season dropped, Parise announced that she will have a book published which will cover these events of the bomb and the aftermath. Which I will read, of course. How could I not? I’m curious as well since storytelling on radio functions differently than it does on the page. There was also news that CBC is developing the show into a possible TV show. Which I think could be a great idea. But we’ll see.

“I don’t have a happily ever ending for you. Sorry,” Parise says near the end of the final episode. Maybe it’s my own aloneness speaking, but I didn’t expect that or what that out of the narrative. Though I understand of course that some people would like such a narrative wrapping up. There’s a reason why it’s such a common storytelling device. But this isn’t really a story about relationships, or about love or marriage. I man some of it is in the title – Alone – but this is a story about Michelle Parise. It’s a story about life. It’s a story about hope.

“There’s only the truth about life, which is that it keeps on going. And most days in very boring, regular ways.”

Yes, it does. Which is both a philosophical statement, a pessimistic statement, and a truism. And it is hard fought knowledge to understand that within the context of our lives. Here’s to Michelle Parise and Alone: A Love Story. Here’s to being alone, but not lonely. Not when her voice echoes in our ears. Not when we’re here to remind her that she’s not alone. Not as we walk down the street, both the streets she knows intimately and those she’s never walked, through her city and our cities, listening to her words echo from one corner of the globe to another, filtered through hearts that are bursting with love and broken in pieces and somewhere in between, alone, tethered together by the hope that leads us to the next day.

Review: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

First of all, Sabrina has nothing to do with either witchcraft or Satanism.

It’s always odd to talk about reality in terms of science fiction and fantasy, because of course it’s not real, but it is supposed to feel real. It’s supposed to feel plausible or believable. It’s supposed to make sense in the context of the world that’s presented. This is what “World building” means. Sabrina is trying to be ambitious and stylized, but it also keep failing because it’s unable to simply be its own weird thing, but it also isn’t real.

And if I thought this were intentional and trying to reflect the fact that she’s half-witch, half-human and torn between these two sides, then maybe it would work. But it never feels intentional, with each having a very distinct or planned aesthetic and sensibility and the ways that she struggles to move between, instead it just feels odd.

The series is directly based on the comic book, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who is also the executive producer of the TV show and wrote four and co-wrote two episodes. The comic is a strange and beautiful thing. The artwork from Robert Hack is gorgeous and the story is weird and creepy and strange. If you’re reading after reading the thousands of Sabrina comics stories of the Melissa Joan Hart sitcom, it’s a shock. The cannibalism (the aunts run a funeral parlor but in the comic they sometimes eat “long pig” which for those who don’t know, means human). The murders. The deaths. The cameo from Ann-Margaret. And those aren’t even the weirdest, creepiest parts. It’s a strange hypnotizing spell and I’ll be honest, I didn’t see a lot of the twists and I don’t quite know where the comic is heading. Though at this point, given how infrequently issues have been appearing, I’m unsure if it will ever get there.

The TV show is based on the comic, but it is very much its own thing. Even the opening credits don’t really capture the feel of the comic, though they do look comicbook-y and hand drawn.

I would like the show more if it included the credit “Sabrina the Teenage Witch was created by George Gladir and Dan DeCarlo.” Given that they, you know, created the character.

Of course the show is based on the comic series which Aguirre-Sacasa created which is based on the series that they created, but that feels belittling to not mention them. Both were it should be noted credited for creating the character in the credits of the live action 1990’s sitcom.

It’s also hard not to think that this is an intentional slight to the late DeCarlo. Though he worked for Archie Comics for decades, an argument over Josie and Pussycats when the movie was being made led to a lawsuit over the rights and the company never hired him for the rest of his life. In the history of comics, this is fairly typical.

The comic and the show remind me of Bewitched. Which reminds me of the Jimmy Stewart-Kim Novak film Bell, Book, and Candle. But Sabrina is Bewitched crossed with the teenage comics that Dan DeCarlo had been making for decades, with a witch (which is a heredity thing) living in the mortal world and complications ensue.

This is the same nonsense that’s perpetuated in Harry Potter and elsewhere, that only certain kinds of special people can do magic. Ordinary folk can’t. Which is of course nonsense – and also makes no sense. Because literally the entire reason why so many women were accused of witchcraft – and why it was so terrifying – was that anyone could do magic. That was literally the point.

Smarter and more thoughtful people than I have pointed out how Harry Potter is very much a metaphor for the British class system. That the special kids are sent away to boarding school where they can meet and marry each other, and are taught that the non-magical people in the world are essentially another species. The “bad” people think that ordinary people should be killed or treated like cattle, while the “enlightened” people think that ordinary humans should have a separate but unequal world, as long as the humans don’t get uppity.

This idea of class very much carries over in Sabrina, but it seems unconscious, or at least, there’s no evidence on screen that the writers have in any way interrogated it. There’s a way that the Spellmans represent a certain “old money” sensibility when it comes to both humans and witches, but nothing is done with this idea. They’re property rich and run a funeral home and have a large house filled with books and various odds and ends. On the witch side, Sabrina’s father was a major figure in the church, and both aunts attended elite schools (though only one enjoyed it), but neither has much standing in the church, though that may be because of gender.

They live in Greendale, which is a mining town but there’s one mine and it has a single entrance, which resembles those from old 19th Century frontier towns. (Or movie sets) Then of course there was a reason that mine entrances looked like that. Here the first time it was on screen – and every time afterwards – I keep being pulled out of the scene because it just looks fake. And not Ray Harryhausen creature or guy in a rubber suit Godzilla fake, but just fake.

The show has a similar problem whenever Satan appears on screen.

Also, the owner of the mine is Harvey’s family and they have to work in the mines digging coal? Leaving aside the fact that the grandfather lives somewhere else and the drunk father is supposedly running the operation, he send his sons to work in the mines? It’s weird. I say this because in reality that’s not what mine owners do.

Questions of gender certainly come into play. The hierarchy of the witches and how it plays out never really gets explained in a way that makes much sense. Sabrina’s father ran the coven now Father Blackwood (played by Richard Coyle) does, who talks about passing the leadership role to his newborn son. So how did he become head? Is it based on merit? Is there an aristocracy of sorts? Where does Aunt Hilda fit into this hierarchy?

I suppose my problem with comic books – and by extension comic book movies and TV shows – is that the world building tends to be, well, incomplete let’s say. There’s a certain default to being set in our present moment but at the same time, it’s fantastic and as events pile upon them, then it can no longer be like the world outside our window but so many comics function as though they do. Or some do and some don’t and that creates an uneasy and awkward continuity.

The first part ended where one part would have to end. The whole season (sorry, “part”) was about Sabrina living this divided life – part human and part witch, shuffling between the two worlds. In the final episode of the first part she signs her name in the Devil’s book and turns her back on her friends and the human world.

In the second part Sabrina admits to Aunt Hilda why this was. That she knew that what happened in the finale to part one wasn’t the last bad thing to happen, but a lot more was coming and she shut off her friends because she didn’t want them anywhere near her when it happened. That she was doing it for their protection.

Now admittedly this is the sort of self-sacrifice, I can’t be happy because I have a destiny kind of speech that one hears on just about every cop show, on every big fantasy story, in all those chosen one narratives. So there’s nothing new about it. It is tbh the kind of speech I would have loved to give as a teenager. Angsty and passionate, and maybe it’s because I find it annoying and overwrought when half the cops on half the cop shows in America give that speech, it fell a little flat here. Don’t get me wrong it worked in one sense, and once she admitted it, her aunt said, go. Which is what she needed. To be pushed or prodded into the proper action.

But I think that it also illuminates one of the problems with the show, particularly in the second half. The aunts occupy a role of parent-guide-teacher role to Sabrina but also in the way of stories about teenagers, they’re often tangential to what’s happening. This is Sabrina’s story but she’s busy trying to save the world and things like that. How did a handful of teenagers from some random small town end up in the midst of this? Of course they’re at the center of this because the show is about them, but like my earlier point about world building, it feels odd at times.

The world manages to feel very small, and somehow whenever the story is opened up and references are made to other places (the show never leaves Greendale), there is a strangeness because somehow everything is about this town. Not because people are drawn there, but simply because being there makes them important and capable to be a part of this epic battle.

Of course one way to make this smallness work is to go a little crazy with it. The comic book series on which the show is based is truly insane in a way that the series never even tries to capture. But in the comic everything is happening in this crazy world and we just run with it. Here the setting and the tone is more ordinary and less heightened and so those moments where I think the show sought to be big and melodramatic and operatic so often fall short.

I mean Satan literally walks the earth. There are witches and witch hunters and apocalyptic visions and the romance between Lilith and Satan and then there’s more ordinary things and it never quite finds a way to balance and synthesize all of these elements and tones.

The first part at least has an operational theme. It’s about Sabrina being part of two worlds and the ways that she’s drawn to both. The problem is that the second part starts with her having chosen one, and has nothing to replace that operational theme with except plot. Which is fine, but honestly the internal politics of the coven isn’t especially compelling or interesting. I pointed out how I object to the way that the show (and so much else in pop culture) portrays witches. But one reason that we keep seeing this is because it functions as a great metaphor, as something relatable to so many people. But in the second season we move past that and I don’t think it was clear just what discarding that would do to the show and how important it was.

Because by the end of the second part, she’s back to being a part of the town, she has regained her friends, but it’s more about how circumstances have pulled them together. And of course the witches’ coven is destroyed, the school is no more, and so she’s a part of the human world by default, essentially. For all the ways in which the character is central, she’s at the heart of this battle with the devil and the fate of the world, but then these other aspects aren’t about her at all, it feels off.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of pleasures to be found in the show. The actors are fabulous and the writing gives them the chance to play a wide range showing off both their comedic sides and the darkest sides. (In Lucy Davis’s case, those two moods are disturbingly – but perfectly – close together). I think that Kiernan Shipka could go darker and more dramatic, and she could play the light hearted Sabrina if given one of the old sitcom scripts with equal ease.

Michelle Gomez is amazing. Michelle Gomez is always amazing. The Weird Sisters don’t do very much, but what they do, they do to perfection. Chance Perdomo as cousin Ambrose is fabulous. Lucy Davis is great.

One of the show’s greatest pleasures - the very best thing about the show to my mind - is Miranda Otto. Yes, Éowyn herself, sitting at the kitchen table with her cigarette holder is so perfectly droll, I don’t know what I want to see her in more – a period piece where she plays a matriarch as elegant as she is terrifying, a Sherlockian investigator annoyed at having to solve crimes and deal with people so much less clever than she (I’m picturing a cross between Nero Wolfe and Phryne Fisher), or Morticia Addams. She would be a magnificent Morticia…

The closing moments of the final episode show that the coven is mostly destroyed, the handful who survived now living in the Spellman house and the prospect of Zelda organizing and running a matriarchal coven is an interesting idea with a lot of possibilities. Would they be torn between the structure that Zelda tries to craft and Sabrina’s more chaotic approach? Would they all have to attend public school, which could be interesting.

Of course the final scene of the season makes me think the next season will be all about these elaborate over the top magical adventures about rescuing her boyfriend in hell, so I think I’m done with it. This is one of those shows that I would enjoy a lot more if I were closer to the age of the characters, I think. Then I would see the teenage characters taking charge and playing leading roles, but as an adult, I’m left underwhelmed, and find a lot of the teenage stories to be troubling and uninteresting. Saving the world is all well and good, but I need a little more.

Review: How To Be Alone by Lane Moore

How To Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don’t

by Lane Moore

I feel as though there’s been a new school of memoir/nonfiction written by comedians which have been coming out over the past decade or more. There are other books by comedians which are comedic in nature, extended riffs, whereas these other books are often about the stories behind the comedy and what they talk about on stage. They’re about discussing the roots of what they do, their journey, and in some ways capture that distinction between what Hannah Gadsby in her special Nanette talked about, between jokes and stories. For me Jen Kirkman is just brilliant at this. I’m a big fan of her comedy, but I think both of her books (I Know What I’m Doing: And Other Lies I Tell Myself, especially) are simply excellent, being both laugh out loud funny but also darker, deeper, more intense, and display a different type and approach of storytelling.

Lane Moore is the latest person to do this with her book How To Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don’t. The collection of essays covers a lot of ground by the comedian-writer-actor-musician behind the band It Was Romance, the comedy show Tinder Live and other projects.

Moore had me at the title. I read a lot of books about being alone and what that means for the simple reason that I’m alone. And I use the word as Moore does which is that it’s not about being single which is a temporary relationship status, but instead something more. It’s something that I sometimes use in jest, but it’s not an accidental or casual word choice.

But I do occasionally use it in jest or in a flippant manner, and in her opening chapters Moore slaps the reader across the face by saying, no, do not be fucking flippant about this. Because she talks about her childhood, which was brutal and lonely on levels that a lot of us have never had to deal with. About a childhood that was harder than a lot of us had to deal with and hurts to read about.

There are two aspects though which make this less brutal for those of us who had relatively happy childhoods. One is simply the ways in which she has such great insight into herself and to the people around her. From the dynamics of teenage and pre-teen friendships, to how we make and nurture friendships to parenting and so much more. Also she mentions how the act of writing this book meant that she reached out to her mother and sister to talk about some of these events and it sounds as though writing the book has brought them closer together than they have perhaps ever been.

Moore also writes extensively about one relationship – and the long and messy aftermath. There’s a lot that’s heartbreaking about this relationship. But what’s stayed with me is how insightful Moore is in dissecting both of their behavior. The way that she’s spent a lot of time thinking about it, how this relationship does stand out in so many ways, and what it meant. What it continues to mean. Because for some people there is this one relationship in our lives that didn’t work out, but it was the one that hit us. The one that really affected us. The one that taught us a lot about ourselves. And it didn’t end in this happily ever after way. It ended in this messy way that’s left marks that take us some time to figure out.

There’s a chapter about her adventures in babysitting – both when she was a kid and then in New York as an adult. There’s a New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs piece that covers some of the same ground but in a comedic way, showing off some of her purely comedic voice and approach.

There’s a chapter talking about TV and which mostly consists of her sharing her love for Jim Halpert from The Office and talks about her tendency to ship characters on TV shows which made me go, okay, fine, great, but then she mentioned Jaye and Eric from Wonderfalls as one of those couples she loves. And this is one of those things that I think is a good lesson with people as well as writers which is that one so often encounters in life and in works of art these elements and digressions and aspects of the work which is less than interesting, which doesn’t enthrall us, which makes us go eh. Chapters like this where it’s easy to skim to get to what we want. But what interest us in this person or in this artist is contained within there.

Plus she cited Wonderfalls. I mean Moore is so clearly my people.

Besides which she talks about the obnoxious disgusting bi-phobic bullshit that we find all over the place from all sorts of people. But not much. One could write a book about about being open to so many people but being rejected in such a nasty way by so many. But that’s another story and another book. To be honest I liked the fact that she didn’t make the book about that, though I’m sure some people will react differently.

The final essay in the book is titled “How To Be Alone” and if the earlier chapters in the book veered between scenes I couldn’t relate to and those to which I related so intensely, this chapter made me almost cry a few times. First of all it involves traveling alone, which I love doing and to the point where I struggle sometimes traveling with other people. Some trips have been the best of my life and some have been depressing, but I love traveling alone and any joyous tribute to the people you meet doing that is perfect in my book.

This last chapter is also where she tries to say, embrace being alone. Enjoy sleeping alone. Travel alone. Be weird. Be yourself. Do whatever you want. Encouraging us to see being alone as an opportunity. And as someone who deals with depression, I know what she means, and I also know what it means to be unable to think in those ways. Moore is saying to go and do what you want and find a new way to be. To take exercise classes and be open with your feelings to people. But also what it means to need physical affection when single and how hard that is for so many of us. She writes about getting a dog and how that changed her. She writes about her career triumphs, which are beyond what she ever would have dreamed. She writes honestly about how that doesn’t mean that dealing with depression and longing and sadness doesn’t go away. But that we know that life is hard and depression will return and that being in a relationship won’t solve any of our problems. The only solution is to simply be ourselves and grab at things and do what we love and what we think will bring joy. It’s a knowledge that comes from hard won sadness and depression and loneliness, but that’s the only answer. It’s not necessarily a comfort, but it is the answer.

“You take all that love you keep giving to selfish idiots and try to throw some of it in the general direction of your own heart and you pray even a little bit of it sticks there.”

I don’t know how it’s possible to read the book without falling in love with Moore a little. Without wanting to give her a hug and go drinking together. (Or at least attend the next Tinder Live show she does...more information of which can be found on her website). But if you can’t, then sitting alone in a room with a drink one night, and after turning that last page feel a little bit better, a little more connected, and a little less alone, that’s not bad, either.

Related:

Hard To Love: Essays and Confessions by Briallen Hopper. I interviewed Hopper about her book for The Rumpus which is about friendship and love and life outside of marriage. I feel like Hopper and Moore would be friends. Maybe, maybe not – I don’t know either of them – but I feel pretty certain that their books would be friends and go drinking together.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing. A book about being single and lonely in a new city and through it interrogating art and artists who have been lonely and solitary and how their lives played out and how some of their work tries to visualize this idea of loneliness in very different ways. I love all of Laing’s work but here she really captures in her own story some of the loneliness of living in a new city and she managed to make something from it in a way that’s really thoughtful and inspiring.