Category: consumable media

Posted on

doomy

Hell, as that single searing jaunt through the Mojave Desert in the middle of July in a Renault Le Car sans AC attested, would be hot.

Under general heat advisory, Floyd and I hunker down inside next to the single chugging window unit. We maintain a cooler distance than usual, minimizing unnecessary activity. Larger mass of water consumption is notable on both our parts.

Lesson of the day: when the hot, grim, viral apocalypse descends, warlord kings will command access to clean, fresh water.

Which only makes the entire sold-out state of Michigan’s surrounding lakes so doom-drenched. Our largest Great Lake, so deeply voluminous and stormy clear– expendable in the name of commerce and industry.

Whee.

I have American History X out from Netflix. I’ve ordered it for some reason (Ed Norton), having recalled it (Ed Norton) as brilliant (Ed Norton) if nigh-unbearably grim, which today I think perhaps I should forego, for all the (sigh) Ed Norton.

Posted on

Julian Fellowes

Julian Fellowes interview

I love his thoughts about Highclere Castle’s architectural/political history (nice too how he intertwines the two aspects).

On writing characters: “You …build on emotional predicaments you have witnessed.”
You take their problem with their mother, whatever it is… It’s only ever a lifting-off point.”

On the period chosen for the story:
“Both Gareth and I were very keen that although these people were leading a life that in some ways is like something on the moon, we wanted to make it a recognizable life. By 1912– I mean, my grandmother was pregnant with my father at the date we open this series. He was born in the following July, and this is my father– it’s not my great-great-great-grandfather– this now. He only died in 1999. It’s not that long ago. It gives us cars and trains, they have a telephone and electricity and all that. When people are watching–obviously I don’t mean they relate to the way of life, because they don’t live like that–lots of them didn’t live like that then– but they understand the life… It looks like these are kind of modern people in a sort of modern world– as opposed to when you do something about the Civil War, it’s miles away.”

On what he wants viewers to take away:
“We examine different human predicaments. We examine relationships with your parents and disappointment and sibling rivalry and failed love– these things go through the series whether or not they’re servants or family. I think that the way managing this world emotionally– and people knew the rules. I mean they could be friendly, certainly– I mean handling that kind of television cliche when everyone’s horrible to their servants is unrealistic. There were lots of jobs, they didn’t have to stay. The average length of time a footman in London stayed in service was 18 months. The old thing that everyone stayed forever is all nonsense. .”

Posted on

The Nields

I {heart} Nerissa and Katryna Nields.

Been a longtime fan of their music and somehow, in the odd connectedness of Facebook, I wound up, utterly charmed, reading Katryna’s daily doings with gutters and kids and whatnot posted to “friends” for a little while there (I think she’s reined it back a bit in that forum, or closed down who gets to read her patter, fair enough).

Not long ago the Northampton, MA-based duo visited Chicago for a kids’ show literally a 15 minute walk from my apartment at Old Town School of Folk– and I was gonna go, I really was. Had it emblazoned with smileyfaces and stars and exclamation points on the calendar. And I don’t know what happened. Blame it on the lurking agoraphobia I’m prone to, but somehow I just ended up staying home that Sunday morning– and I missed it. Just kills me. I missed it, and they don’t get back this way to play very often. Blah and blah and blah.

Anyway– color me all the happier to discover the sisters’ collaborative blog:

Singing in the Kitchen

So, so good.

And here’s a nice, thoughtfully reflective interview with Nerissa in our local rag:

Individuality and the Art of Endurance: An Interview with Nerissa Nields

Posted on

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

It’s not often these days that I find myself eagerly awaiting a film’s release– a few too many hype-amplified disappointments over the years. Part of me is in fact hesitant to invest too much emotionally in the expectation of an hour and half’s spectatorship, regardless ultimately of even liking the film or not– but the truth is, I’m hooked here, frankly. I’m barbed and wriggling and gluttonous for the sharpest tang in my gut, and come August 26, by golly, I’ll be hitting the multiplex to take in this summer’s release of Guillermo Del Toro’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.

Once upon a time I was a little sister– that is, a-lot-littler younger sibling to a couple of big brothers and one older sister, all of whom I gazed wide-eyed upon as very local celebrities.

The brothers early on marched off long-haired and guitar-playing to boarding school (an institution whose distance was marked indelibly by the elder, a cyclist of some long distance repute, who spent one endless summer vacation riding home across the states, sleeping in ditches en route).

The sister ohso-far-outpaced me in knowledge of grownup things, as evidenced by her flaunting of simultaneous 9th grade boyfriends, the dreamy dueling Dirk and Doug, unseen but imagined during eavesdropped telephone conversations from our parents’ bedroom phone extension (the trick of mute by pressing diagonal buttons gleaned off an elementary schoolmate with her own older sister).

These siblings ultimately served for me as the factotums of fashion, opinion, and an entire scope of worldly reference I could only most laggingly and hazily begin to grasp from five years’ trailing shadow.

My sister of the shiny silky turquoise-and-rust landscape-printed disco shirts with long pointy collars and pearlized buttons halfway-fastened typically ruled the central broadcast medium, a squat, olive-green-screened solid state megalith whose channels switched with an audible ker-thunk and before which I’d sit cross-legged afternoons after school, soaking up episodes of I Love Lucy and Gilligan’s Island. This same sophisticated sister was occasionally left in outright charge in the event of unavailable adult supervision–so it was doubtless under this babysitting regime that in the Halloween month of 1973 my psyche encountered and was forevermore seared by demons in the basement who target a family’s little daughter and drag her to hell in the middle of the night.


I must date to this cinematic event my lingering distaste for cellars. Sent on occasion by my mom to fetch some dinner fixin’ from the basement meat locker, I’d stand at the head of the stairs, switch on the overhead bulb via its stiff punch-button wallplate forged in a manual era, and teeter on the brink of descending those wooden steps so spookily illuminated, bracing myself. Finally, taking a long and fortifying breath, I’d plunge and clatter down, speedwalk across the green-glazed cement-floored laundry room, fumble for the slippery freezer key where it twisted on its hook, fit it into place with many mutters, casting all the while rapid glances toward the webby recesses of furnace gloom, grapple out whatever packet of peas or chops was required, re-lock the thing as fast as trembling digits would allow, and turn and race back up the stairs, convinced a hoard of dark-spawned demons trailed in swift pursuit.

Worse, my childhood bedroom featured a small storage closet beneath the eaves, which, due to some fluke of old house settling or cross-draft, tended to inch open incrementally in the night, however firmly I’d shut the thing at bedtime. Convinced small monsters had architected a secret passageway up from the basement through it, I finally thieved a minuscule padlock from my dad’s workbench and fastened it locked shut, empty and echoing my full panorama of fertile nightmares.

Why in the name of all things salutary, you may well ask, would I wish now to revisit the seed of all these lurking terrors? Some perversity no doubt compels me without rationality toward this newest installment of terror, wrought on the current occasion by a most devious wizard who gave us Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. In point of fact and on closer inspection I notice that Guillermo Del Toro’s film credit leaves out directing, is strictly for writing and producing, so I half expect the result to be some B-grade Katie Holmes goth grotesquerie– but if the possibility of revisiting the root of gripping childhood terror exists, I’m bound for the theater come August and may find there a final resting place for creeping, fabricated specters of a kid’s imagination. Or maybe I’ll only succeed in renewing my age-old fear of basements.

Posted on

The Unusuals

there’s this odd phenomenon that springs from only watching tv streaming via netflix or hulu or veetle or or or… where you, with great glee and zero fanfare, “discover” shows that have already spent whatever brief heyday they may have enjoyed in live network time and now sit relegated, for marketing or ratings or budgetary reasons, to the sarcofagi of video archiving.

just as I arrived late to the fandom party for dollhouse (how in the name of all that’s awesome have I NOT made a dollhouse post?? must amend this oversight pronto…) and terminator: the sarah connor chronicles, so have I just added the unusuals— like an extinct star still beaming to the eye via the perpetual present of netflix– to my running list of video favorites.

if you, like me, are a fan of quirks and oddity, check out this ensemble, offbeat cop show– what little got shot before the marketeers canceled its delicioulsy off-kilter run.

Posted on

Easy A

this fun a literary/pop culture mashup is streaming now on netflix. it’s a wittily scripted riff on high school ethics sprouting from an assigned reading (dvd watching) of hawthorne and double-stepping across the screen with quippily literary repartee and an essentially humane dynamic of individual dilemma, decision, and resolution.

revelatory lead emma stone (appearing in more and more films right now, and apparently enjoying her very well deserved place in the sun at the moment) smokes and boasts a neat set of pipes to boot.

nyt dismissed it as ultimately puritanical and second to clueless, but that’s kind of movie review overkill. plus it has cool trompe l’oeil titles.

Posted on

Grey’s Anatomy rocks my little heart

The truth is I wish life were as legible and constructed as an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

The emotional order of its scripting and plotting, sailing near (surely, to some, plumb over) the edge of cheeze in pursuit of a fine fiction fraught with artificially induced emotional truths a viewer might temporarily embrace, the release of soap operatic scale. Escapist, indeed. I’m a little behind the 8 ball on weighing in on this one, but– the Grey’s Anatomy Music Event was, in my opinion, splendid.

chasing cars

how to save a life

running on sunshine

universe and u

the story

 

Posted on

Californication

My better half and I have a difference of opinion regarding our media consumption, one case being Californication– which I’ve gobbled up gluttonously via Netflix and love for its scripted twists and turns and which I suspect he finds smug and smarmy.

In all fairness, it is definitively smarmy– slinky, sexy smarminess being its veritable modus operandi. smug to be sure, set in self-satisfied L.A.

In point of fact it gets me with its brand of smuttiness– witty, wordy, misadventurous– makes me think: if there is an ego and a superego, surely there must be a superid– which would be Hank Moody.

Posted on

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I can’t say I ever watched this Fox show while it aired a couple years ago (downsides to being an all-web, no commercial cable or satellite t.v. kind of gal)– in point of fact I think I thought it would be silly. I loved the first Terminator movie, largely because of the Sarah Connor/Kyle Reese romance. The next movie was box office-exciting, and thoroughly less heart-gripping than the first, the Terminator brand writ slick all-action.

Ensconced in recent bouts of streaming Netflix, I decided to give this broody subsequent project* of James Cameron’s a whirl– and have been sucked into its ethos of mythic drama, its questioning the ethics implicit in nexuses (nexi?) of technology and humanity, and some sweet scripted moments– a few examples of which here follow.

*image borrowed from Den of Geek, wherein the astute summary: “Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of network”; and this: “The Terminator franchise suggests explosions, robot fights and balls-out, backs against the wall carnage. The series offered these things grudgingly, and quite often as the culmination of five episodes worth of navel gazing. God, Terminator loved a bit of navel gazing.” Ha! Well, NavelGazer loves it back.

**
Bits– on the quippy side:
Sarah Connor, behind the wheel of the jeep after school: “Field trip.
John Connor, climbing into the front seat: “I call shotgun.”
“Sister” cyborg Cameron, climbing into the back: “I call nine millimeter.”
**
Sarah, at the wheel of the car, driving towards or away from some fresh emergency: “If you knew what was going on with the girl, why didn’t you say something?”
Cameron: “To you?”
Sarah: “To me, to him, to somebody.”
Cameron (whose understanding of her position as John’s protector typically results in dead bodies): “I’ve always made my position on security very clear. [pause, glance] No one likes a nag.”

**

It’s fraught with grey-area humanity struggles and uncertainties for both the humans in the cast (Sarah, Riley– John Connor, the narrative Christ figure is of course most unerringly human of all) and the nonhumans (Cameron, John Henry, Weaver). The “bad” humans and the “good” cyborgs, and vice versa.

Sarah: I’m not John’s problem.
Cameron: John is John’s problem. Humans are the problem. There’s only one way for him to be safe– that’s to be alone.
Sarah: What kind of life is that?
Cameron: John’s life– someday.

**

A.I. John Henry: Mr. Ellison?
Ellison, painting one of John Henry’s action figurines: Yes.
John Henry: Does this make us friends?
Ellison: …

**

 

This show has moments that are achingly bittersweet-beautiful– like the montage at the end of “Adam Raised a Cain” where the voiceover of A.I. John Henry and child Savannah sing in duet her dead father’s comical yet minor key song, overlain atop video of the sacrifice of Sarah Connor and Derek’s ashes being buried under a marker bearing only the stamp of the current year on the same graveyard hillside as his brother Kyle’s “1985”.

**

Sarah Connor’s voiceover at the close of the episode “Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep,” while she drives through the night away from her torturer, whom she’s evidently killed:

A spirit sits on a man’s chest. She is strong, beautiful. She is here to steal his children. She is here to steal his future. He is paralyzed. The terror in him will burst his heart if he cannot control it. She is a nightmare, a demon woman, the oldest and most enduring story told. The witching hour is controlled by witches.

Sarah Connor brings the van to a stop, a coyote (encountered in the nighttime earlier in the eposode and also used imagistically as a character’s tatoo) standing looking back in the headlights. Voiceover:

She is a bad dream. She is a bad bitch.

**

I especially admire the teetery morality the script imbues its different characters with as they err in one direction or another. The plotline is a chessfield battleground with an unnamed number of invisible pieces with hidden and marvelous capabilities and dimensions, revealed one by one.

Random minor notes:

I completely didn’t recognize Summer Glau/Cameron as evil genius Bennett Halverson from Dollhouse.

I love how James Ellison’s car bears no actual brand insignia, only a circle.