It's Christmas 1964 and the folks at SCDP are cutting back on the expenses of their Christmas party. That is, until Lee Garner Jr. announces that he is coming and is looking forward to the wild parties they are known for. Because Lucky Strike is SCDP's bread and butter, they must bend over backwards and kiss Garner's ass to keep the business intact. The honchos try to plan a much wilder party than they first intended and when Garner drops by, both embarrassment and craziness ensues. At first, I thought he wasn't going to show up, ala Big Night, but the guy did indeed make it to the party. The minute he makes his entrance, the guys and the girls start partying it up with a game of pass the orange and they all partake in a conga line. Yes, this is the wild party the man asked for. No joke, he is having a blast and this is wild for 1964. I'm guessing.
Meanwhile Freddy Rumsen, now a recovering alcoholic, is brought back as a consultant to work with Peggy on a campaign for Pond's cold cream. The two have an argument over the direction they should take. Freddy, neither a woman nor young, has a "by the numbers" approach of trying to market the cream to old ladies. Peggy thinks that a beauty product like Pond's can be made hip and modern by selling it to young women. Freddy grabs onto the young part of her idea but goes on to show what a dinosaur he is by suggesting they scare women into buying Pond's because if they don't take care of their skin, they won't find a man to marry. Peggy calls him out on his archaic way of thinking and he feels both old and hurt by her harsh words.
I was just reading through the AV Club's Buffy recaps and they just got to The Body. I finished watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time a few months ago. I never saw it when it was on TV because well, it looked like some dumb teen show and at the time I was a dumb teen that didn't want to think she was. So I didn't get around to the series until this year.
The Body resides up there with Hush and Once More With Feeling in the Buffy canon but it's an entirely different episode. Where the other two episodes rely on a kind of gimmick to tell a story, The Body is deeply rooted in reality. Maybe that's the gimmick for a show about demons and vampires? I guess that can be argued but it does a fantastic job at presenting us with the many states of grief and the many ways in which we grieve. I always think that when my father dies, who I am very close to, I will lose it and go bat shit crazy. Like I'll jump in with the coffin crazy. That's just how I see it in my head but I may not behave like a wild animal. I may just go quiet and numb or start saying stupid and inappropriate things. You don't know until it happens, I guess.
The most significant death in my life happened 10 years ago when a very close family friend was killed by a drunk driver while he rode to a friend's house on his bike. And when I read about Whedon's ideas behind The Body, I just think about how very true it is. He didn't want to do an episode where someone dies and the ones left living become stronger or learn some warm and fuzzy life lesson that pay's off by the end of the episode. We've seen that kind of trite crap all through television and movies. Entertainment teaches that when people die, we're all supposed to find some kind of value in it. Or even worse, as in my own experience, a murder will be avenged or justice found and all is right in the world. I don't even know what happened to the drunk driver that killed our friend and there was no ghost bike left at his death site to teach other cyclists or drivers a lesson in safety. He died and I had to see him as a badly painted corpse whose bruises and scrapes still peeked through the funeral parlor tricks. And you know what my stupid thought was? I wondered if his severed leg was in the casket with him. Yes, that is what I thought about even weeks after the viewing. I never said it out loud though. That would be too Anya of me.
Whedon gave us an episode about death that is relatable. I'm sure any one of us can think about the grief, the funeral, or those moments when you found out your loved one passed and you can find yourself somewhere in The Body. The quiet of the episode and the tight camera shots add to the heightened state of awareness and grief. The viewer's attention is focused on the characters and nothing else. We are forced to deal with Joyce's death and we're not allowed to escape that reality. Death happens. There is no rhyme or reason and even the strongest of us, like a vampire slayer, can't do anything. Buffy is completely and utterly powerless. There is no demon she can slay or trinket she can save to restore the good in the world again. This is it. She came home and her mother was dead. She passed peacefully, is what the paramedic tells Buffy, but death is never peaceful for the living.
Within the serialized story, Joyce's death is also important because Buffy has to grow up. She is Dawn's sole guardian now and that makes it all the more important to watch for her sister and defeat Glory. Yes, there's the entire world at stake but even more important to Buffy is that Dawn is the only living link to normalcy and family left. She has to care for Dawn as if she were her own daughter and that means she is even prepared to give up her own life to save Dawn's. As we see at the beginning of season 6, Buffy's death is so much harder for her friends to deal with than it was for Buffy to give up. Sometimes I think that I want to die before anyone close to me dies because grief is ineffably agonizing that maybe dying is the easy part.
Buffy's own death a few episodes later wasn't treated with the same kind of honesty and reverence as Joyce's death. And I think that makes The Body a much stronger episode because while Buffy's sacrifice can be read as heroic and fantastic within the supernatural world of the series, Joyce's death is mundane in the sense that death happens every day all around us. It's not some plot in a TV show that can be fixed. It is just a fact of life and I just have to admire Joss so much for being gutsy enough to try this out on a TV show on the freaking WB of all places.
The Body is Buffy's own Hamlet and surely cements the series in the hall of fame of great television.
I have a mountain of movies and TV shows I have never seen and they're all waiting for their chance on my Netflix queue. So I'm starting a section called It's New To Me where I will write reviews of older movies I'm seeing for the first time. First up is Friend Green Tomatoes.
Idgie and Ruth on their picnic date
I don't know how Fried Green Tomatoes passed me up because I have a stepmother who loves to watch all the sisterhood ra ra ra movies. Beaches, Now and Then, The Joy Luck Club, these were classic standards in my household so I don't know why I just got a chance to see this charming movie last night. I read design*sponge daily and they have a section called "Living In" where they take a movie and they find products that feel like that movie. So Fried Green Tomatoes was on there this week and it piqued my interest.
I hope to have more stuff to post in the Fall when the new season starts. I have no interest in what's on broadcast TV during the summer so I'll just post randomly on movies and TV shows I'm catching up with on DVD.
But here are some Fall shows I'm interested in seeing back or seeing for the first time. I'm not sure which I will be recapping.
Returning Faves: How I Met Your Mother
Neil Patrick Harris. That's all that needs to be said. Though, can we finally meet your wife, Ted?
Castle
I have to catch up with the rest of season 2. I missed so many episodes being a good little student but what I love about the show is that it's well written, smart, funny, and I can't get enough of Nathan Fillion. There are so many cop dramas on TV these days and the whole forensic thing bores me. That seems to dominate the cop shows so Castle is a fresh spin on a trite genre.
Gossip Girl
I know what you think if you haven't seen this show but it's actually pretty good and if nothing else, it's a guilty pleasure. What I hope to get from the next season is a solid focus on the characters again. After they graduated high school, the show kind of fell apart. Everyone was doing their own thing, acting out of character, and just being boring. But I know that show that I was embarrassed to like is still somewhere in there so I hope they can fix the weaknesses. And dammit, I don't want to see Jenny Humphrey again. Unless she's in a body bag.
Glee
The musical numbers on this show are always great but the plot isn't always up to par with the songs. Season 2 better be about more than just going to sectionals and the battle against the school for support. That's what the first half AND the second half of season 1 were about. It's a strong show, no doubt, but there is room for improvement.
Modern Family
My goodness this show took me by surprise when it premiered last year. It is consistently hilarious and brilliantly acted. It's done in a mockumentary style ala Arrested Development and it has a similar dead-pan humor. I expect great things from season 2 and you should definitely check it out if you haven't seen it. Don't let the name fool you. It's not a typical sitcom.
Hopeful Newcomers: Running Wilde
This new comedy was created by some folks behind Arrested Development and stars Will Arnett, who you will remember as the magic obsessed idiot brother from AD. It's an odd-couple kind of show about a rich self-obsessed guy and the humanitarian girl he's in love with. Check out the trailer.
Outsourced
I saw the movie Outsourced a few years ago and I remember it being funny but also romantic. I don't know if the show version will have any romance but it does look pretty funny. It's a fish out of water story about an American guy in charge of a call center in India. Some people don't think that a show about outsourcing jobs is funny but you know, this is the reality of our world. We want to complain about the loss of American jobs but we also don't want to pay higher prices for goods and services made and supported in the US. It's the economic trade off so I don't look at a show like Outsourced as something to make us sad or angry. It exposes us, through comedy, to a culture unlike ours and the kind of global economic system that's in place because of our American consumer habits. I mean, c'mon, they're selling novelty crap!
What I don't want to see are the shows that are obviously out trying to take the place of Lost. As a big fan of Lost, I don't think you can recreate something like it or pan handle to the Losties with promises of mysteries and sci-fi. A Lost kind of show needs to happen organically and if you force it, we'll know. Ahem, Flash Forward, how did that work out for you? I'm specifically skeptical of The Event and No Ordinary Family.
I remember watching V: the Original Miniseries and V: the Final Battle when I was a kid. This was years after the original aired so it was in the early 90s. My parents rented the VHS tapes and went through them in one weekend. Overall, it was very fuzzy in my mind and aside from the big V and the reptilian skin, I didn't remember much. When I started to watch the new TV series I wanted to revisit the original but didn't get the chance until recently.
Take me to your dragon lady
What struck me most about V is that despite a few scenes of dated special fx, it looked remarkably good. The pace and energy of the story pulls you so far in that the lame 80s parts of it almost disappear. The scene where Diana eats the guinea pig and the birth of the hand puppet alien baby are really the worst of it. Maybe the hair too. Oh man did I cringe at most of the hair.
The series covered some pretty heavy themes about human history and society. They weren't trying to be subtle in making a direct comparison between Nazi Germany and the Visitors (the aliens). Yet, the characters I found myself hating the most were the humans. Those stupid, stupid, humans. I almost couldn't blame the Visitors for thinking Earth would be an easy target. First, you have Daniel. Hands down one of the most irritating and power hungry jerks to ever grace television. Daniel is a wayward young man with nothing going for him and when the Visitors establish a youth ambassador program to spread their propaganda and might, Daniel signs up. His family is Jewish and his grandfather was a survivor of the holocaust so Daniel is a total disgrace. He aligns himself with the aliens and betrays his own species all for the power. I guess the bigger message is that even with all the atrocities of something like the holocaust, we as humans, never seem to learn from history. We repeat the same mistakes. And if someone like Daniel, whose family was so deeply affected by the holocaust, can fall into line with fascism and injustice, then perhaps our selfish drive is stronger than our memories and sympathy. I really wanted Daniel dead so when he gets his in the end, it's not completely satisfying. I wanted him to pay. I wanted to see him really suffer but we just see him get carted away to become lunch.
OK, so I never did my Mad Men series recap but here is my recap of the first episode of season 4.
Mad Men's back, so is the cancer
The season opens with a man sitting across from identity thief Dick Whitman, better known to the rest of us as Don Draper, asking him who Don Draper is. Is the cat out of the bag? Does everyone know? Nope. Don is being interviewed for a newspaper article on who he is as a creative director and it's supposed to give him a chance to plug the newly formed agency of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (SCDP). I know, what a mouthful. I guess the days of just calling ad agencies "Method" are still decades away. What Don goes on to do through the rest of his interview is basically do what Don does best: act stoic, be a prick, and say as little as possible. For a man who knows how to sell the hell out of mundane crap, he doesn't know a thing about selling his company. I won't attempt to hide my disdain for him. I don't like Don at all.
When the article is released, the rest of SCDP and their clients are miffed because Don failed to dazzle and work the article into an ad for either his agency or their clients. Don is the only one who doesn't see a problem with how he handled the article and even though everyone else kisses his feet in adoration for his creativity, he failed to be an ad man when it really counted. SCDP is a start-up with a few clients but they aren't rolling with accounts the way they were when they were just Sterling Cooper. This was Don's chance to set himself apart from the pack and define SCDP as the kind of trail blazing ad agency that he wants it to be. Instead, he has to deal with moral goodie-two-shoes for the rest of the episode who want a new ad campaign for their non-sexy and non-racy bikini that is made with only moral people in mind.
Elsewhere in the Mad Men world: Betty is remarried to Henry, her daughter Sally is continuing the bitchy attitude we started to see in season 3, her son Bobby likes sweet potatoes, Peggy has a boyfriend (I think), Pete is still slimy, Harry has some kind of sun burn or rash on his face, and Sal might actually be gone because he was neither mentioned nor seen in the season opener. I keep hoping that Sal will come back to the show and the formation of SCDP seems like the perfect way to bring him back.
The episode's title pretty much says what the whole episode is about. It really is about public relations for almost every character. They all want to be seen and accepted in a certain way, possibly divorced from the reality of who they really are. Betty wants to be accepted into the family of her new husband so that when Sally throws a tantrum at the Thanksgiving table, Betty goes into damage control and claims that Sally is "sick". SCDP are in a fancy building and their space is supposed to impress people. yet, they can't even pull it together for a conference table. Be it stunts, damage control, or plugs, public relations exists to mold and shape an attitude and general opinion that is favorable. It's the positive spin on a sex scandal, the philanthropic wing of a crooked company, the happy smile we put on even if we're dying inside.
Just a note that this post will not contain any spoilers.
I saw Inception over the weekend and like many others, I was completely blown away by it. I won't go into a review of the film because there are plenty out there that praise and delve into freudian insights that I can't. The general consensus is a positive one but it's the negative reviews that got me thinking more about Inception and the cognitive hurdles that sci-fi and fantasy have to face in order to be embraced and enjoyed.
Avatar Aang is the last of his people and the savior of the world
I recently got through Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series. I didn't see the movie but after it was universally panned, I was interested in seeing the source material. I kept reading comments from all around that the show was nothing short of perfect so I had to check it out. While I'm very late to the Avatar party, I'm glad I got around to watching it without letting my presumptions ruin it for me.
See, I'm 28 and I don't have kids or cable. So Avatar was not on my radar at all. The only time I heard about the show was when I was in a doctor's office and this little kid was being rowdy and he was talking about making a bomb out of a candle (it's a long story). His mother then threatened that she wouldn't let him watch Avatar anymore if he continues saying violent things like that. So I figured it was just another one of those animated fighting martial arts shows. Not exactly a draw for someone like me.
What I discovered almost immediately after giving the show a chance is that love is central to what the show is about. It's not about all the fighting or the amount of bending power a person can have but the compassion, peace, and love that we are all able to feel and achieve if we let ourselves. The series' main character, Aang, is the most powerful being in the Avatar world because he is the only one that can harness the power of all elements. But it is Aang that is the most peaceful, most centered, and most full of love.
I got around to watching Twilight recently. Yes, I know I'm probably the last person on Earth who didn't get caught up in its magic. Even my dad had seen the first two movies. So I thought it was about time to see what everyone, tweens and adults alike, are obsessing over. In all honesty, I tried to watch it with an open mind and not let some of the sillier aspects (like the special fx) of the movie get in the way of my enjoyment. What ultimately kept my mind buzzing with anguish was the right down misogynistic and abusive tone to the story.
Women have long been subjected to the idea that "love" and "passion" can only be achieved through pain, tragedy, misery, and conflict. I guess stories of a reliable and loving husband who does the dishes and helps with the chores is not sexy. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with all of its dazzling messages of feminism and female empowerment, still managed to put Buffy in bad relationships where she suffered and only fell deeper in love because of tragedy. But unlike BtVS, Twilight does not open the door to criticism when the heroine makes a bone-headed romantic decisions. Instead, the misery and abuse is touted as intense and utterly romantic love.
