Girl in a Cage

Matt, Leo, Jack, and Pete

Tired again from staying up late watching a movie, but at least this time it was a good one. Yes, my lovely wife and I are the last people in America to see The Departed. It's especially disgraceful that it took us this long because our friend Pete is in the damn thing. In a speaking role, yet! Yeah, he's got one line, but how many lines do you have in a Scorcese movie? That's what I thought! (Pete is the "IRA Motherfucker" in Costello's bar about half an hour into the movie.)

I loved this movie. It was just so good to see a well-written, tightly-plotted, well-acted movie. Normally I complain when a movie exceeds the two hour mark, but at about two hours and forty-minutes, this one felt at least an hour shorter than Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End. But most of all, it was, at heart, a briskly-paced and violent thriller. This is really my favorite kind of popular art--something that is enjoyable just as entertainment but still gives you a lot of ideas to chew on and doesn't make you hate yourself for enjoying the ride. A day after seeing it, I'm still thinking about a lot of the scenes and ideas. I even liked Jack Nicholson, whose work I usually hate--he usually gives these mugging, scenery-chewing, over-the-top performances, and here he kind of tries to do that, but he's reined in just enough that his normal schtick actually feels appropriate for his preening, amoral character.

I didn't see too many reviews of this movie that said it "transcends its genre." Which is funny--that's the backhanded compliment that people give to good crime novels, or science fiction novels, or whatever. I wonder why it is that so many more people are willing to accept a genre movie as a legitimate work of art than a genre novel.

This Post Brought To You By Dear Catastrophe Waitress, a Brendan Halpin Novel Published by Villard Books.

The Closer is one of my favorite shows. And not just, as my wife believes, because I think Kyra Sedgewick is adorable. She is, but she's no Lauren Graham, in that I can watch her on television without sighing audibly. (My incessant sighing always made me miss about half the rapid-fire dialogue in any given episode of Gilmore Girls.) But I digress. It's a great show with really good acting and terrific writing, interesting characters, etc. etc.

But I'm not under any illusions here. Television shows exist in order to deliver revenue to the networks. Any quality or entertainment that happens in the meantime is incidental as far as the networks are concerned. (I'm sure there are lots of shows staffed by people who care about putting a quality show on the air, but quality is not the concern of the networks.) But still, last night's episode of the Closer featured the most egregious product placement I have ever seen on a non-reality show. I mean, we expect that the Apprentice or whatever is going to have all these commercials woven into the fabric of the show, but I guess I don't expect it to such a degree on a scripted drama. First, Brenda is snacking, as she usually does, and the camera lingers lovingly on the little packet of Keebler cookies she's eating, just to make sure we can read the entire label. (They had rainbow chips!). Then, later, her phone rings, and it rings with that T-Mobile ringtone. sure enough, later we see that Keebler and T-Mobile are sponsors.

I mean, I guess this is what they have to do to make sure we get the commercials in the age of Tivo, but both things were really distracting from the show. It's one thing if everybody on the show is driving Fords (or whatever), but to pull us out of the action of the show with these in-show commercials...well, again, I'm not naive enough to say it cheapens the whole thing, because it's all a moneymaking business anyway, but it distracts from and lowers the quality of one of the best shows on television.

If this is what the Tivo world is going to do to TV, I'd rather just sit through the commercials.

I Walked With a Zombie

O, I'm an idiot. Today I'm tired as hell because I stayed up late watching Rob Zombie's second cinematic opus, The Devil's Rejects.

I know, I know, I complained not long ago about how House of 1000 Corpses was pretty shitty, so what the hell was I doing? All I can say is that there was enough interesting stuff going on in House of 1000 Corpses that I thought perhaps Mr. Zombie is a filmmaker to watch, so I'd give him another chance.

I mean, there aren't that many people whose ambition is to make a really great horror movie. Rob Zombie, whatever his flaws (about which more later) clearly respects and reveres the genre. He's not using the horror movie as a stepping stone to follow his passion to make a talky indie relationship drama--he's bringing all of his creativity to bear on making a great horror movie.

With this one, he's failed to make a great horror movie. Again. But this one is light years beyond House of 1000 Corpses. The opening credits sequence is just masterful--I watched it twice, and it is seriously some of the coolest filmmaking I've ever seen. Throughout the movie, he composes great, disturbing images, and his use of music in this movie is incredibly skilled. He still has the Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider" stuck in my brain. And I hate the Allman Brothers. Though not as much as I hate White Zombie. Who would have thought that ol' Rob knew how to use music that's actually listenable?

Anyway, my conclusion after watching this is that Rob Zombie is actually a very talented director. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's one of the most talented directors working today. So why isn't this a better movie?

I think it's because Rob Zombie the shockingly talented director is working with a really subpar screenwriter: Rob Zombie. Firstly, I really hope he's paying Tobe Hooper royalites on this shit, because, as he did in House of 1000 Corpses, he's ripping off Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 to an almost actionable degree. It's true that he's toned down the Otis character here so he's no longer a complete ripoff of the "Lick My Plate" guy from TCM2. But in this movie we have the deranged religious fanatic sheriff hunting down the family of sociopaths. Haven't we seen this before? Yes we have--Dennis Hopper as the deranged religious fanatic sheriff in TCM2. Woman made to wear the skin of her dead husband? I believe our heroine is put into a similar skin mask in TCM2. Fortunately, Mr. Zombie is ripping off a variety of sources here: Band of homicidal psychos roaming and terrorizing the countryside? Tip o' the hat to Near Dark! (Nothing in here as good as the bar scene in Near Dark, and speaking of which, what's Kathryn Bigelow up to these days? Haven't heard of her since Strange Days.) Woman trapped in room at a dusty motel with a psycho who may or may not be about to rape her? I saw that in Wild at Heart! It's funny--he has that black guy from the original Dawn of the Dead here (who does not appear to have aged a day since 1978. Amazing.) , as well as the funny-looking guy from the original The Hills Have Eyes. So if, like Rob, you're a horror aficionado, you recognize these guys and get a kick out of their presence. But if you know who these guys are, you probably also know enough about horror movies to realize how derivative this one is. Curious.

You know you're in trouble when any character in a movie says, "Bring in that movie critic!" (How does he work a movie critic into a movie about a deranged sheriff hunting deranged killers? Not very skillfully.) So we get about five minutes of Rob Zombie the director showing how movie critics are prissy assholes. Stuff like this just always makes the filmmaker look bad. I mean, for a guy who's made a career out of being deliberately offensive, Rob Zombie seems a little thin-skinned about the critical shellacking his first movie took. Rob, nut up and take the abuse! It's part of the job!

I did not like the focus on torture here. This is really a trend in horror movies that I hate. Don't ask me why, but I can cackle with glee at monstrous decapitations or zombies separating a biker in a blood pressure machine from his arm and then ripping out and consuming his entrails (sigh. Good, good times....), but watching people subjected to torture just doesn't seem entertaining or fun to me. It's just gross, and this movie revels in it for long stretches.

Forgive me for a moment while I try to attract lots of pervy googlers to my page: Rob has all these characters talking about what a sweet piece of ass his wife is, but then we never get to see Sheri Moon Zombie naked. Yes, I'll bet a lot of people would like to see nude pix of Sheri Moon Zombie.

The biggest problem for me is the movie's fundamental nihilism. Which may sound like a funny critique of a horror movie, but one of the reasons I've always liked horror movies is that the best of them are profoundly life-affirming. They're about how ordinary people, suddenly thrust into situations of extreme horror, rise to the occasion and overcome. Ash saying "Swallow this" as he raises the boomstick to the head of the ghoul threatening to swallow his soul; the guy taking the gun out of his mouth at the end of Dawn of the Dead and running for the helicopter, gun blazing; Jamie Lee Curtis poking the coat hanger into her brother's eye in Halloween--these are the moments I watch horror movies for--yeah, I like the violence and the cheap thrills, but what I really like is the suggestion that some people have it in them to face down the worst that this world or the next can throw at them and emerge victorious. (One of the reasons that TCM2 is such a good, and profoundly moral movie is that it shows that the cost of becoming as violent as you need to be to survive in such a situation is madness.)

And yet, here, Rob Zombie's sympathies are clearly with the sociopathic rapist/torturer/murderers, and if they don't achieve complete victory here like they did in House of 1000 Corpses, they get the slow-motion, guns-blazin' heroic death of the 70's antihero. Of course, the villains are always the most interesting characters in horror movies, but it's odd that the one horror movie convention Rob Zombie doesn't throw into his ripoff machine is the audience's need to vicariously triumph over the bad guys.

Whew. I'm spent. I see that John Carpenter is given the co-writing credit on Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, so maybe that will be the horror masterpiece that I think Rob Zombie has in him. Either that or it'll be a complete piece of crap.

I Prophesy...

One thing I like in the otherwise pretty crappy Shakespeare History plays (except Henry IV, part 1, which rules) is the way that random characters will occasionally go "I prophesy..." and then predict something that happens two plays later or something.

I mention this because I'm feeling prophetic today. In 2003, while I was writing Long Way Back (coming soon in paperback! With inexplicable sexy woman on the cover! Not that I'm complaining!), I wrote it from the point of view of an older sister of a man whose wife dies. This was in large part because my wife had just died and I really wished I had an older sister to take care of me at that point. In the same book, said widowed dude joins a band that sounds like the early Who and Kinks. I created this band because I really wanted such a band to exist.

Well, I still don't have a sister, but I'm pleased to announce that the band I imagined has come to exist--the Len Price 3. I know, it sounds like it should be an accounting firm, but it's really a band that absolutely tears it up, early Who and Kinks style. I've been listening to their new record, Rentacrowd, over and over again. I can't get enough of that sound! The title track, Doctor Gee, Julia Jones, and Sailors Sweetheart are the standout tracks, but really, it's worth getting the whole record. If you like that kind of thing. And if you don't, are you sure you like rock and roll at all? Dig the Richard-Lesteresque video for Sailor's Sweetheart:

I suppose I ought to be a little troubled by the whole Little Steven empire. I first heard the Len Price 3 on Little Steven's radio station, Sirius 25, the Underground Garage, which is the best radio station ever, etc. etc. The Len Price 3 are on Wicked Cool records, which is Little Steven's record label. So he's got this radio station which is serving as the main promotional outlet for his record company. I guess the whole thing would bug me more if the music wasn't so damn good. I'm sure corporate radio is in bed with a lot of record companies conspiring to shove horrible crap down our throats, so if this stuff is going on, I think it's great that there's at least one mogul with really good taste who's using the radio-record company connection to get the word out about music that doesn't suck. Maybe Little Steven will become like the hip Rupert Murdoch. We could do worse.

Of Fat Celebs and Stopped Clocks

Celebrity Fit Club ended last night, and it was everything you hope for--the fat-to-thin morphs, the tears (there were some moist eyes in our house as Cledus faced his fear of flying to go see his daughter in Phoenix), and, of course, some Screech-induced drama. Overall, I have to say this was the best season of Fit Club ever. And could Maureen McCormick be any more adorable? Marcia's still got it! (I nearly fainted when she was doing her pillow fight workout and said, "I like the submissive position." Whew!)

The whole Dustin Diamond on Fit Club phenomenon is pretty interesting to me. I mean, let's be clear--the guy is complete tool. But he does have that stopped clock phenomenon going on. That is to say, the fact that he's a jerk doesn't mean everything he says is wrong. He said from day one that he was there to get some publicity for his career. Not like I ever go see standup comedy, but I wouldn't get within a mile of a comedy club he was performing in now, because he's revealed that he's not actually funny. But still, the idea that you should go on a tv show to get some exposure for your career is not really as outrageous as everybody else on the show seemed to feel it was. It was interesting, because everyone on camera clearly hated him, and everyone behind the cameras clearly loved him. That's why the producers made sure to show every nasty thing he said about anybody--because they wanted to see some fights, because conflict makes good tv. And this season it made great tv. In some ways I think the heartwarming success of everybody else was that much more compelling because they all united against a common enemy.

Other things he was right about: Dr. Ian certainly wants to sell books. Also, there is some hypocrisy there when they say, "This show is all about living a healthy lifestyle" while they have the celebs compete for who lost the most weight. He lost 13 pounds in two weeks, which has to be incredibly unhealthy, and yet you can win the competition that way. Also, he was a complete idiot to think Cledus wouldn't be mad when he made fun of his sentimentality, but he was correct that he wasn't making fun of Cledus' daughter. He was making fun of Cledus talking about his daughter. Which was a nasty, stupid thing to do, but not really making fun of the kid.

Best line of the season came from Da Brat about Dustin: "If I see him on the street, I'm a whup his ass. Well. No, I can't whup his ass 'cause I got a case pending. But I'll get somebody to whup his ass."

In the future, everyone will bore the shit out of you for fifteen minutes

So one of my myspace "friends", a director whose work I admire, has a podcast. I admire this person's work, and so I downloaded his podcast, thinking that the qualities that attract me to his work might also be present in his podcast.

O, God, it was the most boring thing I ever heard. Two guys sitting around shooting the shit. I suppose this might be entertaining if you were one of the people involved, but otherwise, who the hell wants to hear this? I guess this is the problem with all the power that the internet puts in the hands of individual users. Any one of us is free to beam our most mundane thoughts around the globe.
(Aside--I'm not oblivious to the irony here. I can't sell my cranky opinions about pop culture, so I give them away here. But I get 60 or 70 hits a day, only about 50 of which are people on a misguided hunt for nude pix of fat female celebrities.)
And, I mean, it's fine if you don't want to listen to somebody's podcast or read their blog or whatever, but who's going to sort out the worthwhile from the crap? Hell, there was actually some worthwhile stuff in this podcast--like when they discussed what they thought of Grindhouse. Even though they mistakenly liked the Quentin Tarantino half of the movie, at least this is a director I like talking about movies. When he started talking about how much he paid for his dog, well, let's just say that was significantly less interesting. But absent any kind of editor, who's gonna tell people what to cut in their blogs or podcast or whatever?

I'm being coy about the name of the director (hint--he appears in many of his movies as a character who rarely speaks and spends all his time with a tall thin guy with logorrhea. Also, his first movie was a black and white comedy about two guys who work in stores in New Jersey.) because I know from reading his myspace blog that he is a relentless auto-googler. I am too, but I thought someone with that much more popular success than I've had would not be interested in what random people are saying about him on the internet. But apparently he is. And he's not the only one. Lisa Yee stopped by with a comment when I mentioned her book Millicent Min, Girl Genius. (Hi Lisa! We finished it! It was great! Can't wait to read Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time!) And of course I look for every word anybody writes that has anything to do with me, and I suspect lots of other authors and musicians and artists of all stripes do too, because I think we're all fundamentally kind of insecure.

So should this affect what I, or anybody else writes about their work? I've always been happy making nasty comments about other people's work because I thought they wouldn't ever see it and would therefore not get their feelings hurt. (Except that Frank McCourt. I was hoping against hope that he'd raise my profile by going after me after I wrote a review in the Boston Globe in which I said that Teacher Man sucked total ass. Frank, if you're auto googling, Teacher Man is a complete pile of doodoo. And yes, I am jealous that it outsold my own teaching memoir, Losing My Faculties, by probably ten to one. But this doesn't change the fact that your book sucks.). But now, knowing that so many people are tuning in at all times to see what's being said about them, do I have an obligation to be kind? Does anybody? I mean, it's fun to read stuff where people are being nasty and snarky. Unless you're the one someone's being snarky about.

Not sure what conclusion I'm leading to here, and I have no editor to tell me that I have to have an ending before I publish it.

Discrimination Defeated

Okay, a little break from the popular culture soapbox here for a second. (Though, really, it is tangentially related to popular culture, because where would popular culture be without gays and lesbians?)

Here in Massachusetts, where it's legal for any two adults to marry each other, a bunch of misguided souls have devoted a lot of time and energy into trying to make sure that certain kinds of families are denied legal protection. And yesterday, the attempt to codify discrimination in our state constitution was defeated, which is fantastic for both moral and practical reasons. The moral reason is simply that there are a lot of gay and lesbian families that just want the same legal rights as everybody else, and denying equal rights in the state constitution is just wrong. And from a practical standpoint, instead of gearing up for some big ballot question where we vote on people's civil rights (sorry, there's morality creeping in again), our state government can turn its attention to stuff they should be spending their time on, like crumbling bridges and stuff.

I am a straight married father of three, and I am just bursting with pride to be living in the first state in this country to allow anybody to marry anybody they love.

There's a nice article in today's Globe all about why defeating the anti-gay amendment was the right thing to do. Find it here.

Ride Around on My Bicycle Like a Pony

I was riding my bike today, and I was thinking about how it's a really great way to get around, and I started wondering why biking isn't more popular. And then I realized one major problem: there are simply no good songs about biking. Good songs about driving are legion, but biking has yet to find its "Roadrunner" or "Little GTO". In fact, I could only think of three songs about biking: Queen's "Bicycle Race", That Really Annoying Luka Bloom Song I Don't Remember The Name Of Where He Goes Pedal On Pedal On Pedal On, and arguably the Pixies' "Tony's Theme." (I mean, that one, as near as I can tell, is about a kid on his bike pretending to be a superhero, which might not count.) I really like "Tony's Theme", but Frank Black has singled it out as an example of bad songwriting. And yet when I saw the Pixies a couple of years ago, the execrable "Crackity Jones" was on the set list. Go figure.

Part of the problem, of course, is that you can't really listen to music while biking. Well, you can, but it only in 2 bad ways: one is with headphones/earbuds, which is potentially lethal. In fact, I was driving my car and nearly killed some lady riding with her ipod on the other day because she went zooming into the street without looking or listening. People, if you have a death wish, I suppose that's your business, but don't try to involve innocent motorists in your demise. Go jump into a body of water or something. The second way to listen to music while biking is to be that weird guy who pedals around really slowly with the ancient boom box turned up to distorted volume strapped to the front of the bike. Though these guys, in my experience, are often listening to sermonizing on religious radio, so maybe that doesn't count either.

Anyway, musicians, take heed--you are part of the solution to the global warming crisis. Write some cool songs about biking and do some good! If you write a cool song about biking, people on bikes can feel cool. While there are some definite drawbacks to biking--exposure to the elements, difficulty in carrying groceries, inability to pick up cuties--there are lots of good things too: strange feeling of machismo that comes from exposure to the elements, ability to move more freely in an urban environment than anybody else, what it does for your calves, and, of course, the ability to whiz past even those smug Prius owners feeling superior. "My vehicle runs on Grape Nuts, bitch!" I taunted a Prius owner just this very morning. Okay, not really. But I did think it.

And not just musicians, but all pop culture artists--you can help make it cool to be eco-friendly. Right now characters who care about this stuff are still usually freaks or whiny pains in the ass. I think Quicksilver is the only movie I can think of where it's kind of cool that adults are biking. I mean, for example, in The 40-year-old Virgin, the guy commuting to work on his bike is like this visual shorthand for "he's a loser!" I mean, yeah, what kind of guy commutes to work on a bicycle in a city that's totally flat where it's 75 degrees and sunny every day? What a freak!

Filmmakers, musicians, get on this, people! We need you!

Best Beach Book of 2007!

We've all been there. You're at the beach, so you don't want to hook up with a book that makes a lot of demands on you. You want a quick fling with a book that's good-looking, and, let's face it, easy.

Maybe you've had a few drinks when you hit the bookstore, and you start pawing covers indiscriminately until you find one that looks good. "Just right for a quick, beachy fling," you say. Nobody ever has to know--you'll probably ditch the book before you leave the beach, and nobody will ever be the wiser.

So you've gotten the book, but now you have to actually spend time with it. And the trouble begins. The dialogue sounds phony, the story seems cribbed from a thousand other books, and if you're especially unlucky, there's a tone-deaf sex scene that appears to have been penned by a seventh grade boy under the influence of Penthouse Forum. And now you have a choice. Do you throw that book across the room (or the beach) and hate yourself for the money and time you wasted, or do you plow through till the end and hate yourself for spending so much of your precious vacation in the imagination of an insufferable dullard?

Well, my friends, help is at hand. I give you the best beach book of 2007: Dear Catastrophe Waitress, by Brendan Halpin.
It's a love story. It's a rock and roll story. The writing will not make you cringe. People tell me the sex is hot. In short, it's everything you want from a beach book--a very readable page-turner of a story with humor, heart, and sex.

Buy it here (or at any of the fine bookstores that have hosted me in the past: Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, MA; Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA; Jabberwocky books in Newburyport, MA; R.J. Julia Books in, um, Connecticut; Baker Books in Dartmouth, MA; Newton Corner books in Newton, MA; Barnes and Noble in Framingham, MA; Barbara's Books in Oak Park, IL; Borders in Center City Philadelphia, PA; and Joseph-Beth books in Cincinnati, OH) and say goodbye to beach hookup shame!

ps--don't just take my word for it. Check out what people I don't even know are saying here and here!

The End.

Well, for me this weekend was all about the series finale of The Greatest Show Ever on Television. Yes, Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide ended on Friday night. And no, it's not really the greatest show ever on television. But come on, neither is The Sopranos. I mean, I watched one season, and it was good, but I never felt compelled to watch any more. And most of the stuff I've read about how the Sopranos is the Greatest Show Ever suggests that it's been sucking for a couple of seasons.

But I was speaking of Ned's. While people wring their hands about the state of tv comedy, over on Nickelodeon they've been cranking out this show with good performances, sharp, funny, writing and more laughs per minute than most shows. I think it's the best live-action comedy show since Get a Life. Well, okay, Arrested Development was probably the best live action comedy since Get a Life. And their series finale was good too.

Series finales are always a dicey business. The Newhart one where he woke up next to Suzanne Pleshette and it all turned out to be a dream was funny. M*A*S*H* was maudlin and laugh-free. Seinfeld's was the second worst failure of tone in the whole series (Susan's death by envelope being the first). St. Elsewhere...what, it was all some kid's snow globe or something, right?

So here we have a show about middle school, and the kids are nominal eighth graders (though they are obviously getting to late high school age in real life, and if the show continued into high school, they'd all have that Stockard-Channing-in-Grease thing going on.), so it's time for the show, fine as it's been, to end. So we get a whiz-bang hour-long episode packed with laffs (Cookie as the Steel Eagle killed me every time) in which all the loose ends are tied up just as we'd like them to be (well, I still think Cookie and Evelyn are meant for each other, but if he likes Lisa, well, okay). And the will-they-or-won't-they become more than friends tension between Ned and Moze is finally resolved with a heartwarming kiss, and now we don't have to watch the show painfully flounder after it's resolved this central conflict. Remember Northern Exposure after Joel and Maggie finally got together? Me neither! I stopped watching! Remember Moonlighting after they finally did it? Me neither! I stopped watching!

Anyway, the people behind this show seemed to understand that for the end of the show, we just want more of what made us love it in the first place. And it's not some big serious deal, so don't try to make a maudlin goodbye. This one ends with Ned, Moze, and Cookie strolling out of school together after proclaiming that they'll all live happily ever after. And the weasel had baby weasels! My only complaint is that Cookie, who's black, appears to have finally won Lisa, who's white, back (she really was impressed by his new identity as the Steel Eagle! At last one of Cookie's harebrained schemes paid off!), but they don't get a kiss. I mean, at least they didn't completely neuter the black character, but it's 2007, people. We can freakin' handle it. The show has been very cool about race not being a big deal throughout its run, and I feel like they just kind of chickened out on this point.

All the same, we all really enjoyed the show, and it's a shame that this really top-notch sitcom hasn't gotten much attention outside of the kids' tv ghetto.