Girl in a Cage

Simpsons Movie Spoilers: Dr. Nick, Irony Dead

The family saw The Simpsons Movie on Friday, and I've been trying to figure out what to say about it ever since. I guess most of it has already been said--it's good, but not as good as the best episodes, though it does contain the best-ever Itchy and Scratchy sequence.

Also, not enough Burns, Smithers....well, fill in your secondary character of choice here. Only Flanders gets significant screen time, which I think is a mistake. One of the reasons the show's been able to stay on for so long is their ability to keep mining comic gold from Burns, Apu, Krusty, Skinner, Moe, etc., and with over an hour to fill, I think they could have had more of Springfield involved.

I guess what I keep thinking about was how very dark the whole thing was. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's funny and everything, but it was really really dark. Not Treehouse of Horror Dark, but certainly Homer's Triple Bypass dark. Actually, maybe darker than that.

I almost wonder if the movie is a kind of cry of frustration on the part of the creators. For eighteen years they've been the keenest satirists we have, and, environmentally and politically, we're worse off than we've ever been. We're befouling our planet and too stupid to see or care about the warning signs. (We have met Homer, and he is us.) And our government is controlled by people who are either evil or stupid or both.

It's as though the Simpsons writers are mad at us for not listening. Why else have Homer stand up from the audience of the Itchy and Scratchy Movie (And, my inner Comic Book Guy must point out, why is Bart in the audience for that movie, when we all know he doesn't get to see the Itchy and Scratchy movie until he becomes Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a position he achieves despite his earlier career as failed rocker and ne'er do well brother of President Lisa?) and denounce the audience as idiots? It's a kind of funny breaking the fourth wall joke, but I think what's behind it is resentment that all these years of satire haven't caused us to change our ways even a little bit. In most respects, we're in far worse shape than we were in 1989.

Maybe, in the end, satire just isn't very powerful. After all, the theocrats and kleptocrats have been humorlessly, unironically taking over the country while the rest of us watch the Simpsons and Jon Stewart and think that our laughter is the same as doing something. They've lost the culture war and gained the country. Who's laughing now?

Duuuuude.

I've always been interested in the fact that language allows you to create sentences that are unique in the history of human existence. For example, I believe I am the only person in history to ever utter the sentence, "That poor guy came here to listen to Zep, and all he can hear is you calling your sister a butthole!" Yes, the whole family went to the planetarium for Laser Zeppelin.
No, none of us were high. In fact, there was a surprising lack of cannabis odor from the other patrons as well. Anyway, the show was a fantastic combination of cool and cheesy. It was pretty much like staring at a really cool screen saver for an hour while gettin' the Led out. (I have to say I think the whole thing could have been louder, though. I could hear myself think, which is usually a good thing, but I think the experience would have been a little better if my bones had been rattled a little bit.)

One song had a spaceship theme (can't remember which one), "The Immigrant Song" featured Viking imagery, though the opening ahhh-ahhhh-ahhhh--AH! appeared to be screeched by a crow, which sent us all into hysterics, as did the image of the woman in cowboy boots and stetson doing country line dancing during "Livin' Lovin' Maid." (Or is that "Live-in, Love-in Maid?" Do you think that song might be about Alice from the Brady Bunch? I'm just wondering.)

The kids had a great time pointing out what the abstract and non-abstract squiggles were. Thus when the round hills appeared above us at the end of "Over the Hills and Far Away," the other patrons delighted as our kids said, "It's a butt!" (It really did look like a butt. Not sure if that's intentional or not.)

A good time was had by all, except for the other patrons, who probably wanted to kill us.

Blockbuster Roundup

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix--I always hate when reviews compare a movie to the book, because it doesn't really matter if the movie is as good as the book. What matters is if the movie stands up on its own. And, sadly, I have to report that this one doesn't. The performances are great, but I just feel like they haven't really made a movie here--they've made visual Cliff's Notes for the book. Whereas the last two movies really hung together as movies, this one totally doesn't. Plot elements are chucked in quickly and then disappear before we can really process them--so we have to have Grawp, because he's instrumental in getting rid of Umbridge, but we only meet him for about a minute before that. I guess the bottom line is that you can't make a 2 and a half hour movie out of an 870 page book. Just as a point of comparison, Peter Jackson took eleven hours to translate just over 1000 pages of Lord of the Rings to the screen. And he cut out Tom Bombadil and most of the singing! I hate to say it, but this movie is an incoherent mess. (qualification--I did see this movie at a drive-in, which is an inherently distracting experience, so this may have intensified my feelings that the movie just wasn't hanging together.)

Ratatouille--A really good movie with a thoughtful, intelligent script that just happens to be family friendly. I really liked it. I especially liked the way the movie avoids most family movie cliches and formulas. Thus, no dead parents (well, some parents are dead, but it's more of a background fact than a big event), and no wisecracking sidekicks. Ahh, refreshing. And there are some really breathtaking sequences of Remy the rat running through various tight spaces. Also Brad Bird, who also did the Incredibles, seems to have tamed his Ayn Rand fascination for this one. There's still a slight sense of a super-talented elect, but this time around he's much kinder to the herd than he was in The Incredibles. If I may step up on my soapbox for a moment, though (and I need to, since I'm barely 5'5''), once again we have a villain whose physical shortness is a lazy metaphor for small-mindedness. We got this in The Incredibles where the contemptible pint-sized boss voiced by Wallace Shawn oppressed the huge Mr. Incredible, and here, once again, a tiny man tries to wreck things. I mean, Brad. Next time why not stretch a little and instead of falling back on a tired visual metaphor , make the really small-minded, petty characters...oh, I don't know, let's say black or Asian or something. No, wait, it would be wrong to use ethnic characteristics to signal character deficiencies. Okay, keep pickin' on the short guys, then! That's a quibble, though, with what is otherwise a really good movie. And it's a testament to how good it is that I really liked a movie that features the completely revolting image of rats swarming through a restaurant kitchen and doing all the cooking. I nearly barfed.

Transformers-- Robots in disguise! More than meets the eye! Oh, the cynical adult in me tried to surface a couple of times during this movie. "I think they could have trimmed the running time if they cut out the completely superfluous ridiculously hot girl," he said. Or, "Holy shit, the fate of the earth is resting on a handful of cars made by GM! We're freaking doomed! Why the hell couldn't they transform into Toyotas or something?" But he was completely overruled by my inner ten-year-old, who sat there going, "cool!" One touch I really liked is that all the transformers are really agile--not the stiff, lumbering giant robots you've come to expect. Anyway, the boy and I saw this together--that is to say, my actual ten-year-old, not my inner ten-year-old, and we had a fantastic time. The hours flew by and we just enjoyed the hell out of a great summer movie spectacle where lots of stuff blows up. If you are or ever have been a ten year old boy, I think you need to see this movie. On the political tip, I thought it was interesting that the government is represented by the Secretary of Defense, a cool, competent Jon Voight, and our one glimpse of the president is of a sock-footed simpleton asking for snack cakes in the midst of a national crisis. Stick around for the credits, as there's a straight-faced bit of incredibly biting political commentary that I really can't believe they let them leave in.

Cambridge Lets its Freak Flag Fly

So last night being the last time there will ever be a big pre-release Harry Potter party, we took the kids over to Harvard Square, which had renamed itself Hogwart's Square for the evening.

In some respects, it was quite cool. As someone who writes books, it was just really cool to see all these people milling around who felt inspired by a book. Lots and lots of people were in costume--these ranged from pretty half-assed lightning scars to the full-on Death Eater regalia--well, that guy was actually wearing flip-flops under his Death Eater robe. I saw at least three women costumed as male authority figures from the Potter universe. (two Dumbledores and a Lucius Malfoy.) It was enough to make me wonder if this is some kind of subculture trend I had previously been blissfully unaware of. What I really enjoyed about the whole thing was people just lettin' their freak flags fly--grownups walking around in silly costumes, lining up to buy a book, and just not caring about how silly they looked. Or, rather, reveling in how silly they looked. Because irony is so '90's, I liked the way people were unashamed to reveal to the world how much a bunch of books about a kid wizard had moved them.

It was kinda poignant too seeing all these kids who were like 18. I was haunted by this line in Stephen King's column about how young adults who've been reading these books for the last ten years are now closing the book on their childhood.

Unfortunately nobody had really done anything decoration-wise to try to bring the whole Hogwarts/Diagon Alley thing to life.

We went into the Yard to see the "wizard rock" as provided by Harry and the Potters. The idea is inherently cheesy, but I have to say I really enjoyed their performance. Especially after the painfully earnest, excessively-long intro by some kid talking about how people who love Harry Potter can raise awareness about Darfur and save the world through the power of love. I must say that my embrace of sincerity and rejection of irony was sorely tested by this bit. Anyway, as for Harry and the Potters, they've definitely mastered rock and roll showmanship, and their songs are mostly two-minute guitar pop rockers about Potter-related material. I'm a whore for guitar pop, and I loved the fact that the songs were so short that you couldn't get sick of them. Having said that, though, every other member of my family absolutely hated them. I don't know what to make of the fact that I liked Harry Potter related rock a lot more than my 10 and 9 year olds.

And we haven't bought the book yet because there was no way we were staying out till midnight to buy a book. I do have my limits.

Party Like a Rock Star!

When you have kids, live music is one of the first things to go. Because even if you do get a sitter, the kids are going to be up at the butt crack of dawn anyway, and you're going to feel like hell for at least a day, and there are very few bands worth that.

But last night, there was a perfect musical storm. The Mooney Suzuki, a band who made one of my favorite albums of the 00's (Alive and Amplified) and whose new album is getting rave reviews, were playing a club show in Boston. And all our kids are out of town! So let's rock!

Well, rocking did not occur, and it's forced me to confront an ugly truth-- it's not that I can't do stuff like this anymore because of the kids. It's that I don't actually want to.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I wanted to see this band, but they were playing in Allston, a student/musician ghetto where it is literally impossible to park. And where it's an hour on public transportation from my house. (Do I sound old yet? It's gonna get worse)

And then it was one of these doors at 8, music at 9:30 deals with three opening bands. And odds are that most of the opening bands would suck, because they usually do. (If your band opened for the Mooney Suzuki at Harper's Ferry last night, I'm sure you were great. But I bet the other two sucked.). So the band I wanted to see wasn't going to be on until at least midnight. And even with the kids out of town, I just have no desire to be doing anything in Allston after midnight.

So we went out for frozen yogurt at nine o'clock! Yeah! Cause that's how we roll! Parrrrrrtay!

Oh, I'm old.

Darn You, Jodi Picoult!

Okay, first I have to admit that I've never read one of Jodi Picoult's novels. There are a few reasons for this: 1.) She doesn't tend to write the kind of novels where there are vampires or things exploding 2.)She is everything that I, as a writer, am not, which is to say, female, a bestselling success, and critically respected. (I have had a modicum of success with one of my novels, and I've gotten some good reviews, but I don't pull the kind of numbers Jodi does and I don't get the volume of critical praise that she does. Basically I find myself in the odd position of being a writer of popular fiction that isn't all that popular. I'm working on a theory as to why this is, which I'll share soon. (hint: the world doesn't appreciate my genius!) (Well, that's true, but that's not actually my theory.)

But I digress. Anyway, I like to hate on other writers who are more successful than me because I'm petty like that. And one way I do this is by thinking that novelists just don't make very good comic book writers. (I should state for the record that I'm also jealous of the fact that these people get to write comics.) So, for example, while I worship Charlie Huston's novels (really. He's insanely talented. Go buy several today. You'll be glad you did.), his work on Moon Knight has been, to my way of thinking, dull and repetitive. Neil Gaiman has, in my opininion, lost his comic book mojo since he turned most of his attention to writing novels. I loved Neverwhere, and Coraline is simply one of the best books ever, but 1602 was an overly-complicated and surprisingly uninteresting execution of a really cool idea, and the Eternals was an overly-complicated and surprisingly uninteresting execution of an overly complicated, uninteresting idea.

And so we come to Jodi Picoult's work on Wonder Woman. Even though she was hobbled by having to participate in some crossover thing and the fact that the issues before her arrival were kind of messy, plot-wise, she managed to put together a witty, fun, and ultimately kind of affecting story. In issue ten , she manged to work a lot of interesting stuff about mothers and daughters and how to become your own person in, and after reading it, I actually felt like I had read something with a little bit of weight to it. And yeah, I know that there are probably hundreds of novels on my local bookstore's shelf about mothers and daughters and how to become your own person, but this stuff is just a lot easier for me to take if it's coming from a raven-haired beauty weilding a sword and spilling out of her top. What can I say, I'm male.

So there you have it. Jodi Picoult, critically-acclaimed bestselling author also wrote a good comic under bad circumstances. Darn her!

Wear Your Hat: Headgear as Cultural Signifier

I used to wear baseball caps on occasion. And then I went through a long phase where I thought, "I'm a grownass man! I can't be wearing baseball caps around like some kid!" During this phase, my cheeks got sunburned a lot. (even with the spf 2 million glop that I slathered on my face!) And then my friend had some precancerous stuff on his nose and cheeks burned off with some nasty chemical and it was apparently quite painful and it looked rather alarming for a few weeks. So now I'm wearing baseball hats in the sun a lot.

But my old Sox hat shrunk so badly that wearing it is like putting my head in a vise. So I bought a new Sox hat. In line to buy my Sox hat, I was behind four guys, each of whom were buying several hats in several colors, presumably to match different outfits. (There's really a shocking variety of hats available. You're no longer constrained by team colors. You can get a hat with your team logo on it in any color and a number of other designs. When I was at the store, they were pushing the hats with a plaid panel.)

When I wore my hat to walk the dog, one of the other people I walk dogs with said, "that hat looks too new! You need to take it off and stomp on it in the dirt or something!" She kindly offered to perform this service for me, but I declined.

I know that the city is a crossroads of culture and stuff, which is one of the reasons I like living here. But I was really struck by how the same object can have such different meanings, sometimes to people who live next door to each other. (Or, for that matter, in the same house). For the people in the park, who are mostly white, the Sox hat needs to be weatherbeaten and possibly a little frayed to show that you've been with the team through their ups and downs. The older and more beaten up your hat is, the cooler it is. (This is why they now sell pre-frayed hats. No, seriously.) Also, you wear the team colors no matter what the rest of your outfit looks like.

Whereas for many other people who use the park and live near the park, most of whom are not white (but some are--my son is definitely in this category), you simply would not wear a hat that gets dirty or frayed. Once the hat stops looking just-purchased, you stop wearing it. The brim needs to stay perfectly flat and should preferably have the New Era sticker on the bottom, and the color needs to match the rest of your outfit.

As for me, I'm just trying to keep the sun off my cheeks.

So Much Crap, So Little Time

When it comes to any art form, I've long believed the assertion that 80% of everything is crap. Given that, wading through the 20% of everything that's not crap would still take a really long time.

But what if you like the crap, too? How could you ever possibly take everything in? This is the situation in which I find myself this summer. My DVR has been humming more or less constantly, picking up not only such timeless classics as Disorderlies (Starring Ralph Bellamy and the Fat Boys! RIP Human Beat Box, we hardly knew ye!),
Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, and some other Godzilla movie I can't remember right now. (Somebody had a Godzilla marathon the other day. God bless 'em) Last night I tried to watch Disorderlies, remembering that I laughed a lot when I first saw it in 1987. O God, it's every bit as horrible as you'd think a movie starring the Fat Boys would be. And yet, I sat and watched a good 45 minutes of it. I'm trying to figure out how I can squeeze both Godzilla movies in today.

And it's not just movies--whilst in New York recently (where we had one of the best meals of my life at Devi. If you like Indian food and you're in Manhattan, you should definitely go. Ridiculously expensive but just amazing), we went to the Strand Annex, where I meandered through the aisles for a really long time until I finally wound up at the dollar table. I ended up getting 5 or 6 books for a buck each, including Pretty Young Things a novella about lesbian vampires that was not painfully badly written but also failed to deliver on the most lurid elements promised by the cover (yes, I just complained that a lesbian vampire book wasn't lurid enough.), and Coffee, Tea, or Me, a memoir of being a slutty stewardess in the '70's.

Oh, when will I ever find the time to read and watch all this stuff? There simply aren't enough hours in the day!

Who'd a thunk it?

Well, two of the most genuinely moving things I've seen on televison recently happened to be on VH1 of all places.

I was not surprised to find myself moved by the first one--I was just surprised anybody made this at all, much less showed it on VH1. Bling'd: Blood, Diamonds, and Hip-Hop is a really stunning documentary that I just happened to record on what I think was the only showing. It's an amazing piece of work that they really should be showing more often. They took Raekwon, Paul Wall, and Some Reggaeton Star I'd Never Heard Of to Sierra Leone to learn about where diamonds come from and the civil war there, etc. It's so powerful that I can only stand to watch it in ten or fifteen minute segments, but it's so compelling that I keep turning it back on. Yesterday I watched as these guys could barely get out of the bus at the amputee camp. What I don't know, because I haven't reached the end, is whether the trip had any effect on how these guys think about diamonds. There's one terribly embarrassing moment near the beginning where Raekwon is trying to explain the hip hop fascination with diamonds, and he's saying, "When I was growing up, we didn't have much, my Mom couldn't afford to buy us new clothes, and now that I have something, I want to show it off." He says this to a room full of guys in Sierra Leone who clearly know a lot more about having nothing than Raekwon ever has. Still, I give the guys a lot of credit for making the trip and seeing all this stuff first hand, and I give VH1 a lot of credit for financing this and making it. It really is an incredible eye-opener. I don't get why they show "Morons Make Unfunny Jokes About Stuff" fourteen hundred times a day, and they've only run this once, as far as I can tell.

I was really shocked to find myself moved by the season finale of Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School. The show has been a guilty pleasure of mine for weeks, but I always felt it had a little bit of an exploitative quality about it. That is to say, while it's nominally about teaching these women to show a modicum of class, you really watch it for the catfights and backstabbing. I thought a lot of the challenges they did were kind of silly in terms of actually teaching them anything, but, lo and behold, I was wrong wrong wrong.

When I used to belong to the gym, there would sometimes be this show called Starting Over playing, and I was always too nervous to ask the lady on the next machine if I could please change the channel so I could ogle Kelly Ripa for a few minutes instead, so I ended up seeing way more of this creepy show than I ever wanted to. Basically they took a bunch of women who had screwed up their lives and threw them in a house together with a couple of scary "life coaches" who infantilized them and controlled their lives until such time that they deemed that they'd learned their lesson. It was supposedly about empowerment, but it always seemed cultish and disempowering to me. Like, the way to get your life back on track is to sign over your decision making power to some scary authority figure. I never took the Kool-Aid on that one.

Whereas on Charm School, they had stupid lessons and challenges and stuff that seemed designed only to get the women to do some camera-friendly fighting and complaining, but at the end, everyone actually did seem to learn something and make their lives better. Becky, Saaphyri, and Leilene all made these really powerful, heartfelt speeches about what they'd learned, and I really bought it. Because, let's face it, you don't go on Flavor of Love in the first place if you have even a shred of self-esteem, and having these women stand there and talk about how this show had actually shown them that they were worthwhile was genuinely moving. And there were few dry eyes in our house as Saaphyri talked about being homeless and what winning would mean to her.

It was just such a weird thing to sit down and watch this show I felt slightly guilty about watching and find that it actually did some good.