Gramarye

Shit. We canned the Christmas festivities this year, for the most part, and we just sat around watching movies. Nothing new — all stuff obtainable via cable. (The folks have become enamored of “On Demand” viewing.)

Titles include ??Monster House?? (excellent, if a little creepy), ??Inside Man?? (not bad, but completely predictable), ??Madagascar?? (painfully stupid) ??The Sentinel?? (would have been okay without the Michael Douglas heavy breathing), and Hard Candy.

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things isn’t the same…

??Hard Candy?? was perfect in almost every respect; including things like cinematography that I normally am totally oblivious to. The acting was absolutely compelling, the writing was good, everything. The stock phrase for the emotional experience of the viewer is “edge of your seat,” except that’s not where I was. The actual experience was “how far back into your seat can you sink without actually passing through it like the Silver Surfer in the new Fantastic Four trailer,” because the physical reflex was to get as far away from the action as possible without having to actually stop watching.

The premise, if you aren’t familiar with it, is that a mid-30s photographer picks up a fourteen-year old girl on the internet. They wind up at his place, creepy stuff is implied, but nothing actually happens…until she drugs him, ties him to a chair, and starts interrogating him. And it goes on for quite a while in that direction. It’s a hard movie to watch, although it’s not particularly disturbing; i.e., there’s plenty of creepiness, but the net effect is not to sexualize Ellen Page in the lead role. She doesn’t come off as an object composed for the male gaze; she comes off as absolutely terrifying in a “hide your testicles” sort of way.

So, I’m not at all concerned about having watched it with my little sister. Every high school in America should be doing stage adaptations of this script, or at least screening the film.

In fact, it’s only flaw might be that it’s not clear we can believe Page’s character is as crazy as she claims to be. In ??Death and the Maiden??, which is probably the closest thing I’ve ever seen to this, Sigourney Weaver is pretty seriously unbalanced. Not in a hysterical woman way; in a PTSD way — but it throws the situation into doubt. No one — not the three characters, not the audience — has a strong handle on the truth of the situation until close to the end of the movie. ??Hard Candy?? doesn’t feel that way, because Page’s character isn’t a victim; she’s more in the way of the Greek furies. But I don’t think this is really a flaw, because I don’t think the tension driving the movie is of the “did he do it” variety; I think it’s of the “what do we want to happen next,” variety.

Anyway, it’s not most people’s idea of a holiday film, I’m sure, but it really fit the bill for my family. Which says a lot about us…

??Bones?? is an interesting show. For a long time, I actively avoided watching it, because in my head it was filed in with the police procedurals (of which it may, in fact, be one) and dismissed summarily — which is how I always treat police procedurals, and how I will treat them until Aaron Sorkin writes one.

However, I did occasionally end up watching an episode, either because someone else was watching it or because nothing else was on. And I often found myself enjoying what I saw — and every time, I chalked it up to “this” being a “good one,” rather than to the show being good. This is a perfectly plausible phenomenon — mediocre shows often have the occasional good or even very good episode — but it taxes statistical belief when it happens almost every time you turn the show on.

The initial premise of the show — culture gap between action-oriented field agent and a team of laboratory “squints” — doesn’t stretch very far, but the writers caught on to this pretty fast, and except for the first couple of episodes, it tends to play a very secondary role in the story-telling. What tends to come to the surface are the ideologies — the ethical motivations and moral frameworks and political orientations– of the characters, which are not at all homogeneous — unlike many procedurals, especially the abominable, fascist ??Law and Order?? franchise, which is also known in my idiolect as “The Devil.”

I like that it’s common on ??Bones?? to see debates (ranging from comic to serious) between the straight-laced FBI agent character and the self-proclaimed conspiracy theorist character, and that these debates occur in relation to cases regarding things like civilian massacres in Iraq and the FBI’s checkered history — but the show doesn’t seem to be doing any political grandstanding.

The eponymous character is a forensic anthropologist — by definition, a cultural relativist. But episodes in which she levels pointed criticism against beauty pageants and plastic surgery break her out of the amoral scientist mold; plus, she gets to kick fair quantities of ass. ??Bones??’s musings on gender don’t have the subtlety of, say, ??Buffy??’s, but sometimes what’s called for is a direct statement rather than critical deconstruction.

The supporting characters are also good, once they lose their cookie-cutter status towards the second half of the first season. And while they’ve ramped up some cockamamie romantic subplots, that’s sort of to be expected at this point in a character-driven series, and I’ll forgive them for it as long as they don’t demolish the storytelling.

All of which is by way of saying that the first-season Christmas episode, “The Man in the Fallout Shelter,” is one of my favorite holiday episodes of television of all time. It’s a “bottle” episode (shot using only the main set and the main cast, making it fast and cheap and thus a way to catch up on budget and/or time), but it’s a very, very good bottle episode. It’s also the old-fashioned “someone learns the meaning of Christmas” episode, but it doesn’t leave you with the feeling that you could just as easily have watched “How the Grinch Stole Christmas, as most of those do. Each of the people stuck in the bottle (there’s a biohazard scare to justify that) has a different sort of family and a different personal relationship to the spiritual implications, if any, of the holiday, and those things don’t necessarily change over the course of the episode, and we don’t necessarily want them to. Add some impromptu handmade gifts, some cadavers, and some good Christmas music, and you’ve got full control of _my_ hearstrings…:)

Also, you know I’m always ready to promote the cause of killer carnivorous kangaroos.

Top Ten Creepy Fossil Finds of 2006 at Cryptomundo.com

I’m very much enjoying the fact that Renee et al now have cable. Let me mention some examples from premium-channel television, specifically from Showtime — despite the fact that I strongly disapprove of sticking good shows in the class-delimited cultural ghetto of premium cable. As per ??Studio 60??, “all good things should flow into the boulevard.”

h3. Dexter

??Dexter?? is absolutely genius. It’s very, very creepy, and it gets a little creepier when you watch it with people who have a strong inclination to approve of vigilantism, but it’s still genius. The writing is solid; it’s funny; the entire cast turns in great performances every episode. The gore is mostly within the bounds of storytelling.

h3. Sleeper Cell

Also one of my favorite discoveries, although I’m a little late on this one — I only just finished the first season. Like ??Dexter??, ??Sleeper Cell?? is characterized by consistently strong writing and acting, and it tells stories that would never make it on ??24??. (Not to speak ill of ??24??; it’s another show I only recently discovered, and what I watched of last season consistently impressed me.) The only gripe I have about ??Sleeper Cell?? is the portrayal of left-wing America, like the horny, platitude-spewing academic mother or the Tower Records girl who fucks Ilja because it’s like sticking it to the establishment. There are a lot of loons on the left wing, of all kinds, but are there people who are these particular, comically moronic kinds of stupid? Eh, there probably are.

What I really like is the investigation of the moral spectrum within Islam, ranging from different shades of terrorism — each of which does have a moral context, which may or may not be internally consistent, to mainstream Islam (including anti-terrorist Islamic sentiment), to the militant who trained insurgents to send to Iraq but rejected terrorist attacks against civilian targets. There’s a tendency in America to think of terrorists and/or insurgents and/or Muslims in general as radically evil, and while certainly terrorists commit evil acts, insurgents are our enemies (although we certainly had a hand in making those enemies), and many Muslims around the world are sure pissed off, reducing a complex situation to an artificially simplistic description tends to reduce, rather than enhance, our ability to react effectively as a nation.

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This comes as a surprise to no one.

The Honest Hypocrite: Mad as a hatter

Pushing Daisies coming to ABC - TV Squad

Slap another “supernatural” series on the pile. Heroes writer and executive producer Bryan Fuller is creating a drama pilot for ABC called Pushing Daisies about a man who can bring people to life just by touching them. I’m pretty sure there was a book that used this same idea. Now what was it called? Oh, right, the New Testament.

TV Squad is definitely growing in my affections. I also like the following, in reference to the same show:

iF Magazine quotes the dailies, which are calling the new series a “romance-tinged procedural.” A procedural of what, exactly? Resurrection? Is this a common practice with an actual procedure that must be followed? Are there classes one has to take to learn to raise the dead?

I think they should call it CSI: Thaumaturgy.