Saalon Muyo

A few months ago, I met Mere Smith on Twitter.

Last year, at a Jolie Holland concert, I very nearly spun directly into Ms. Holland herself. In doing so, I almost knocked a drink out of her hand. I stammered, realized who I’d almost run over, stammered even more, then walked away without a single, complete English word.  Faced with someone who I knew only through her work – work I really liked - my mental train hopped the rails, grew wings, and flew directly into the nearest mountain.

Then, a few months ago, I met Mere Smith on Twitter. It’s gone better than that. It helps that she doesn’t drink, because if she did, I’d find a way to knock it out of her hands through Twitter.  It also helps that she’s a hilarious, kind and insane person who spends her time on Twitter talking to a rowdy bunch of nerds like we’re just a bunch of mates down at the pub.  Only she calls it an Asylum, because, as I said: Insane.

I’m about to talk about something that I rarely discuss with her: writing. There are two reasons why I don’t.  The first is obvious: The last thing any writer, especially a professional writer, wants from new friends is for them to be up their butt with writing talk. “Oh, you’re a writer! You wrote for Angel!! Let me tell you about this awesome novel I wrote!”  That? That’s the last thing someone wants to hear.  The other, less important reason is because I’m avoiding it. If you can’t figure out why, you have a serve underestimation of my self-consciousness and anxiety reflex.  Either way, with the exception of a comment here and there, and a few chats about an episode of hers I re-watched, we talk about everything but. It’s not, in any way, a problem.

Today’s a fun day, because I get to talk a bit about her writing, and she asked for it.  Maybe you know her work primarily from Angel or Rome, but Mere’s actually got a talent for prose that, if you ask me (and you have, because you’re reading my blog, sucker), needs to get a lot more attention.  Today, she posted a bit of the opening of her novel, The Devil’s Gospel, and she’s hoping you’ll read it.  She’s also hoping you can give her a little nudge to keep writing, because writing a novel is a long and winding road.  So go and read. And nudge. And, if you like it, say nice things, because it’ll make her uncomfortable.

After all the abuse she’s given me, she deserves it.

I was worried this was going to be a sad and weak month of Movie Education. Little did I know I’d have a short story to run from for the last week of October. Avoidance is motivation. Should have written the short story, though. Hrm. Anyway.

Rambo: First Blood

Interesting primarily for the fact that it spawned a franchise with which it shares almost nothing in common. It’s one of those slightly annoying action movies where everything hinges on closed-minded, mean-spirited small town folk doing closed-minded, mean-spirited things.  An unstable Vietnam War vet tries to walk through town, gets arrested, tormented and abused until he snaps, and then spends the rest of the movie killing people. It’s not terribly written or directed, but it never became more than an excuse for Stallone to look ripped and be tough. Viewed in context, it does touch interestingly upon the lingering trauma of Vietnam, but it’s not a good enough film to get that across out of its own time.

Hannah and her Sisters

If I let myself, I’d write an entire month of these things on nothing but Woody Allen movies. I’ve tried to hold onto a few of the movies viewed as his classics, and I fear I may have reached the end of them with Hannah and Her Sisters. What makes Allen such a wonderful director is the way his films work in aggregate.  One Woody Allen movie is good. Each successive film you see, though, is both a departure and an expansion upon his rhythms and themes.  Hannah itself is like his work in microcosm: a series of vignettes that add up to something more before you realize what the film is doing.  There’s a story near the end, involving a character’s attempted suicide, that’s a perfect encapsulation of Allen’s view of the world.  Also: Michael Caine is awesome in it.

Throne of Blood

How I purchased a Kurosawa adaptation of Macbeth and let it sit on my shelf, unwatched, for almost a year will forever remain a mystery to me. This is one of Kurosawa’s two takes on Shakespeare – the other being Ran, which is an amalgam of King Lear and a traditional Japanese work – and it’s as fantastic as I could have hoped. Toshiro Mifune is Washizu, a successful general who receives a prophecy from a forest spirit that leads first to his triumph, then his destruction.  If you know Macbeth, the story will be familiar, but what delights are the many ways Kurosawa integrates the story into its Feudal Japanese setting.  Kurosawa has so defined modern filmmaking that his style still feels fresh, but it never ceases to impress me just how polished his movies are. Throne of Blood (which is actually titled Spider Web Castle) isn’t his best film, but it’s very, very good.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Boy, this movie had to have created an awful lot of unrealistic fantasies for women. A very competently made films that was just not made for me. Holly Golightly is a terror to me; the perfect, Audrey Hepburn-clad apparition of a half-dozen women I pointlessly and foolishly coveted before learning my lesson. She’s selfish and vain, and if the movie didn’t force her to come around in the final minutes, she’d have been a realistic fantasy-girl monster. The girl throws a cat out into the rain mere minutes before the swooning final kiss! George Peppard is great, and Henry Mancini (native of my own home town) wrote a memorable and beautiful score.  I can see why people like this, but I was not its target audience. Also: Hoo boy, was that some racist caricature or what?

The Long Goodbye

Robert Altman’s adaptation and modernization of one of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective novels. It takes the post-war noir setting into the post-hippie 70′s. What’s amazing is the way the movie still feels sort-of authentically Chandler while feeling equally sort-of authentically Altman.  The film’s opening is worth the movie, as Marlowe wakes to find his hungry cat without its favorite brand of food and wanders into the night on behalf of his feline master.  The story was a touch thin, but Elliot Gould makes such a dry and witty Marlowe – and one very different than most other film adaptations – that the movie never stops being fun.  It’s hard to dislike an Altman film (says the guy who, just last month, crapped out a third of the way through Nashville), and this was definitely one of his good ones.

Closely Watched Trains

A Czechoslovakian film from the 60′s about the country’s Nazi occupation (ironically filmed during the subsequent Communist occupation), I chose this movie for one reason: It was assigned to me in a film class a decade ago, and I totally blew off watching it. I always felt badly about that. I liked my teacher and he picked good movies. Some movies I watch are definitely For Film Nerds Only, and this was one. There’s a roughness to the film, the kind you see in movies with a less developed film industry, and it’s mixed with the brand of melancholy you only find in post-WWII European cinema. This is not an era of filmmaking from which I take much enjoyment, but despite that, I found Trains to be an generally gentle and honest coming of age film, and am always fascinated by the art that slips through the cracks of an oppressive regime. Where else will you see the stamping of a woman’s butt with official Nazi rubber stamps used not only for sexual foreplay, but for a running subplot?

(Not the show. I like the show but this isn’t about the show. If you came to read about the show, here’s your Certificate of Disappointment.)

Not to beat a dead horse, but boy are we screwed up when it comes to our preference for violence over sex in our entertainment. Shoot a dude in the face and you can probably CGI-wipe enough of the blood to swing a PG-13 rating. Flash a boob and we’re already into R. Show some wang? Woah doggie, you tryin’ to make porn or what?

This always comes up when a show or a movie uses a lot of “gratuitous” nudity and sex and people want to show their intellectual bona fides. It’s sexist, it’s not sexist, it’s better than violence, it would be better than violence if it was justified–

–actually, let’s stop right there. Justified. I don’t want to rehash a lot of stuff about whether nudity should be justified or not. Same goes for violence.  This justified question makes me a little itchy. Like when that giant eyeball asked the Doctor if the human race was important and he asked, “Important? What does that mean, important? Six billion people, is that important?”

On second thought, maybe that quote doesn’t apply.  Cool quote, though, right?  Anyway, back to justification.

It’s kind of bunk, this justification thing, isn’t it? What justifies a naked boob, or a gunshot to the head, or Frank Langella’s balls shot in close up from behind and underneath? Is there ever a narrative reason for me to wach Frank Langella’s balls flapping all over the place? When he was about to sit on that piano bench, did we need to drop the camera to bench level for when he flapped that robe back so we could catch one more glimpse of the guy’s sack?

Maybe asking if nudity or violence is justified is the just asking the wrong question. But before we get there, let’s note – once again, for fun and giggles – what a double standard we have on the topics of sex and violence.  Culturally, we are totally, happily, gleefully fine with using violence purely for entertainment. Dude punches dude in face, girl engages in motorcycle kung-fu, Stephen Segal slowly breaks the bones of his attackers one at at time; we’re fine with all of it. I’m fine with all of it. I like watching people beat the crap out of each other. I saw a trailer for this Indonesian movie called The Raid where this guy wrestles another guy to the ground before sticking  gun to his head and shooting him multiple times and made giggly happy noises. I am going to see this movie specifically so that I can see as much well-staged gratuitous violence as possible.

Now. Let’s imagine a trailer filled with an equal amount of genitalia (Except for Frank Langella’s balls. Don’t think of Frank Langella’s balls!). Think the movie that trailer is selling is getting into as many theaters as the one with violent cranial trauma? (You’re totally thinking of Langella’s balls, aren’t you?)  You think if it was semen and not squib-blood splattering onto people’s faces,  you’d even be able to see that movie in that failing indie theater in the middle of nowhere?

But we know all of this, right? We realize we’re cuckoo for violence and terrified of sex. That’s not news. But I think it bears interestingly on this fallacy of justification.  Because you don’t justify sex or violence in a story any differently than you justify any actions a character takes.  Robert Parker spends a lot of time describing Spenser cooking, eating and drinking. How is that justified? Spenser likes to eat and drink. The guy can cook and enjoys it. We see it because it says something about Spenser and how he lives his life.  You should be “justifying” everything you do in a story, but really that means the story needs to justify itself.  If a character has a well drawn reason to want to screw someone, the sex is justified.

There are a lot of other things you can ask, if you’re interested in getting further into this. Does it move the story along? What would the story feel like without it? What was the scene supposed to make the audience think and feel?  All good questions, but they’re essentially the same things you’d be asking about a twenty page dinner scene or the end of 2001.  My point is that I don’t see how sex and nudity require special justification outside of the way you’d decide what else did or did not make a movie better.

Having said that…

What’s with the boob to penis ratio? I don’t argue this on my own behalf, but really, what’s the deal with guys freaking out every time they see a penis on screen? Have you imparted that much mystical strength into your own member that you think they have the power to turn you gay on the spot? Do they have Medusa like powers when you gaze too long at them?  Is that why the only times we see a penis on screen is when it’s attached to guys like Harvey Keitel and Gerard Depardieu, so that guys can freak out about the rest of what they’re seeing, too?

I mean this seriously, though. It bothers me that, once we’ve decided it’s OK to have some sexy time in a movie, we still have boundaries around whose nudity is ok to see.  You want to justify that topless girl? Show some man flesh, too.  Roger Ebert has written that erotica was one of the first uses of motion photography, and thus erotica is a valid genre of its own. I agree, but that needs to swing both ways. Almost all of the problems I have with nudity in film (and, let’s be honest, I don’t have that many) come back to the inequality of nudity.  If men felt as pressured to drop trou as women did to take off their bras, life in Hollywood would be a better place.  If we were more concerned with presenting people with a full and realistic portrait of sex than with the nonsense notion that sex requires special intellectual justification, we’d all be a little happier.

If justifying naughty time in film is that important to you, let’s start here.  Tell your partner that the next time you’re really ready to go, that they are not to oblige you until you justify why you want to have sex and what it will do to push you forward as a person. Have them demand an essay on the topic. If the justification is insufficiently complex, you’ll be forced to make do with Frank Langella’s balls and a sex toy of your choice.  Let me know how that works out for you.

I post a nauseating amount of crap about Doctor Who on my Twitter feed, don’t I? Don’t worry. If you’re not sick of it yet, I promise: I’ll get you over the hump.  There isn’t a thing in the world I can’t make people sick of if I put my mind to it.

Before you get there, though, maybe I should try to explain what went wrong in my brain, and why.

I never intended to watch Doctor Who. I’d seen a few episodes – my friend Brent brought over a handful of classic serials once – but though I didn’t have anything against it, it just didn’t seem like it was worth any real effort. It was neat, sure. Time traveler who changes faces and personalities when he dies?  What a cool way around actors leaving a popular part.  You never need a reboot of Doctor Who, and you never need to do the comic book thing and keep a character around and unchanged forever and ever.  The concept has charm.  But charm isn’t everything, and it came in a basket with cheap sets, inconsistant writing and often terrible guest acting.  Sure, the reboot had Christopher Eccleston (what, you haven’t been all over him since Shallow Grave?), but did a shinier, newer package really matter that much?

There was an entire season of Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Channel that followed its airing of Doctor Who, and over the course of the year I saw the last two minutes of every episode of its second season.  Cybermen crashing through a window, Queen Victoria knighting, then banishing the Doctor…I saw it all.  What I got out of it was that Billie Piper looked a bit like a porn star and the show looked higher budgeted, but just as cheesy.

You can blame the change of heart on Netflix Instant Watch. There it was. The whole series, available to watch with a click.  The great thing about Instant Watch is that you don’t feel at all bad ignoring something that sucks, and it gives a bit of background distraction for when you really want an excuse to look away from the three sentences you’ve been rewriting for the past hour.  I could give the show a look, quit when I wanted, and earn the right to an opinion on it for the next time my friends started in about how I should give it a try.

I didn’t fall in love all at once. I got a childlike smile in the first episode, when the Doctor says he’ll defeat the living mannequins with “anti-plastic”, and I found myself really liking the energy and fun that pulsed through everything.  But love? Nah. It was a good show, but flawed, and not great.  Still, by the end of the first season I was enjoying myself more than I guessed. I didn’t need to keep watching, but I did want to.

It went like that for four seasons.  Eccleston left, and Tennant took the role of the Doctor.  I liked Eccleston, but Tennant was something new to me. I’d call it a man-crush, but that would be entirely too honest.  Companions came and went, the Daleks returned ad nauseam, and the show hummed along at a fun but unremarkable clip

With two exceptions.  This is where Eric falls in love with Steven Moffat.

I always tell people not to do what I did.  Don’t watch the whole series, not until you feel like you get the vibe of Doctor Who enough to get through the early flaws.  No, what you want to do is slam your face directly into Steven Moffat’s brian. Find season 3 and watch ”Blink”.  You don’t even need to know anything about the Doctor, except that he’s a time traveler. Even that they basically explain to you. “Blink” is one of those episodes of television that makes you giddy and scared and excited all at once. It’s 40-some minutes of pure, unfiltered excellence.  As soon as I watched it, I made Erin sit down and watch it with me.  But it was a blip, a great episode in a sea of mediocre-to-good ones.  Then, in the next season, Moffat returned with the baseball bat and slammed his best work yet into my head: “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”.  Again, an unexpected jolt of wonderful, unblemished writing.

This. This was the show I wanted to watch 13 episodes a season of.

Somewhere during all of this, I learned that the fourth season was Russell T. Davies’ final one as show runner, and that Steven Moffat was taking over.  Awesome!, I thought. But there was a concern: who was the guy taking over for David Tennant? Matt Smith?  Boy, he’s kind of odd looking, isn’t he? Like, super-duper British looking.  When season 5 rolled around, I wondered if I was going to love the writing only to hate the new Doctor.

I shouldn’t have been worried.  ”The Eleventh Hour”, the first episode of Moffat’s tenure on the show, works both as a soft reboot of the series and as a perfect transition for long-time watchers.  It’s everything that I loved about the more mixed early seasons, but with a class and confidence the previous series lacked.  Even my concerns about Matt Smith were gone.

The real sign that something had changed was Erin. She watched bits and pieces of the show before, but she didn’t miss a moment of the new era.  We tore through the fifth season, all the way to the brilliant, twisty, timey-wimey finale, “The Pandoria Opens”/”The Big Bang”.  We were sold. Hooked. Obsessed. We rewatched episodes.  A lot.  We texted each other quotes. It’s embarrassing, I know. But it’s true.

I didn’t start out as a Doctor Who fan. Even when I started to turn, I saw it as a guilty pleasure. Something to chat about with other fans, but not to be suggested to any but the most welcoming of friends. Moffat’s run changed that.  And the amazing thing about it is that it’s totally, completely faithful the series’ spirit and sense of fun.  The reason Moffat’s writing on the show is so damned good is because he crystalized everything that made the show what it was, and finally found a structure that grew up the narrative without sacrificing the childlike joy.

On the commentary for “The Eleventh Hour”, Moffat talks about the Doctor’s relationship with his companions – the people he takes with him on his adventures – and said something that totally captures what makes Doctor Who so wonderful at its best.  The Doctor and his companion isn’t the story of a man and a woman, or of friends adventuring together.  It’s about a child and a magic man from space.  It’s that feeling, the wonder of a child and a magic, time-traveling spaceman, that forms the heart of the show.  The humor, terror and joy all flow directly from that.

And now? Now I’m a slobbering fanboy. Doctor Who, at least the last two seasons, is the perfect mixture of hilarity and fear, of sadness and wonder.  There are episodes where you won’t stop laughing, and ones where you’ll catch yourself tearing up before you look unmanly in front of your wife.  There are even episodes where it all happens at once.  So, yeah, I’m a little over the moon for it.

Before I make you puke from the endless, overpowering wave of quotes and youtube clips, go find the third season on Netflix or wherever you grab stuff to watch, and sit down with “Blink”.  If that’s all you ever see of it, it’ll have been worth it.  Don’t believe me? Listen to Neil Gaiman. He gives the best introduction you could ask for to the show.

There’s a blue box, it’s bigger on the inside, it can go anywhere in space and time, sometimes even where it’s supposed to. There’s a bloke in the box, he’s called ‘The Doctor’ and when he gets where he’s going there’s going to be a problem and he’ll try to solve it and he’ll probably succeed because he’s awesome. Now shut up and go watch ‘Blink.’

I guess I have relationships on the brain, since I’m cherry picking a quote from an AV Club article about Vonnegut.  But like almost everything he’s written, it’s hard to say it better than this:

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’”

How did I get by before Brennen made me read John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books?

A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind.  With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit.  Many marriages are between acquaintances.  You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.

There are great television shows. Not many – there aren’t many great anythings, and television is still relatively new – but you can find them. There are great episodes of television; perfect short pieces of fiction that prove how flexible the medium can be. But what doesn’t get the attention they deserve are the truly perfect seasons of television.

A season of television is like a novel. They’re not always self contained, but the good ones are all able to be judged on their own.  With television episodes, there are some amazing hours that only work in context of their surrounding chapters. That makes lists of the best episodes a bit wonky.  How do you compare a stand alone, nearly detached horror piece like Doctor Who‘s “Blink” to an amazing plot payoff  like Angel‘s “Not Fade Away” and judge them against each other?  But seasons, seasons can be compared fairly. A good season of television, regardless of genre, stands equal with its peers, even if the show around it never really paid off.

So, here we are, my top 5 favorite seasons of American television:

5. Babylon 5, Season 3

There are lots of reasons you might try to watch Babylon 5 and bounce off of it. The first season is almost entirely awful. The production values suck, the acting is more miss than hit and the attempts at humor are often embarrassing.  Stick it out, though, and you’ll get the kind of payoff plot fetishists like me only dream of.  There are moments in the following seasons that are brilliant, but there has never been a season of television so carefully constructed to pay off viewers as the third season of Babylon 5.

Whatever you thought the show as to that point, wherever you thought it was going, you were wrong. I’m not sure a show ever, to that point, had so purposefully yet completely upended its status quo. American television has always been adverse to change. Shows had done their best to buck that, but it was Babylon 5 that first showed that a show could made radical changes to what it was about yet do so as part of a carefully planned plot arc. This is a season that has its main characters rebel against their own government midway, and it was written at a time when Star Trek was so afraid of plot progression that writers were forbidden to create any lasting change in their episodes. It’s a relentless season of television, and it finishes with one of the greatest cliffhanger buildups of all time.

And to top it off? Every single episode was scripted by one writer.

4. Millennium, Season 2

As shows go, there few whose bags are quite as mixed as Millennium.  The first post X-Files show by Chris Carter, Millennium had an intriguing premise but little idea of how to execute it.  Its first season was promising, but often empty and directionless. Its third was a sad attempt to mutate it into something more closely resembling its more popular cousin.  But for one season, it became one of the most unique and incredible pieces of television you’re likely to find.

Glen Morgan and James Wong, creators of the most underrated science fiction show of the 90′s – Space: Above and Beyond - took over after that show was cancelled.  Before season 2, Millenium seemed unsure how much of Frank Black’s profiling gift was supernatural and how much was just brain power.  Season 2 dove headlong into a strange and mythical world, and in doing so created something unlike anything else I’ve seen.  Everything about the construction of the second season works, from Frank’s separation from his family to his new partner and her visions of angels to Frank’s concern that his daughter is plagued with the same visions that’ve been his gift and curse.

This is a brand of fantasy you rarely find done well in any medium, a subtly spiritual fantasy, as influenced by the religious as the arcane.  And it has a dark and tragic ending that the third season basically had to handwave away, which means you can watch this and only this season and imagine you’ve seen the true and proper ending for Frank Black and the Millennium Group.

3. Angel, Season 5

I love almost everything Joss Whedon has produced, but nothing more than Angel. And I love nothing more in Angel than its stupendous 5th season. I was worried when this season began. After the very serialized and very dark 4th season, there were reports of a more episodic direction for its future.  But the thing I liked about the previous seasons of Angel were how much plottier they were than Buffy.

And when the season opener hit, those concerns rose. There was something weird about the show, and not just because they’d flipped the show on its head at the end of its 4th season.  The heroes had joined their archenemy, the demonic law firm Wolfram & Hart and taken over its L.A. branch.  That was change I could believe in. But stylistically something seemed funky, and I was worried the things that had show great had been abandoned to buy renewal.

That worry evaporated quickly.  In fact, I think the early episodes of season 5 were made to throw the network off their scent, because it wasn’t long before they were in the middle of the most compelling plot of their run.  Every season dealt with Angel’s struggle to balance the monster within him against the hero he desperately wanted to be.  Season 5 took that to its extreme, with the heroes struggling to remain uncorrupted by the power they’d been given and the growing price of maintaining it. Many of the show’s best individual episodes came in its 5th season, including the hilarious “Smile Time” and the show’s brilliant series finale “Not Fade Away.”  What’s incredible about the show’s final season is that, though it was never intended to close the show, it does it so well that I’m a little glad the show didn’t continue. Had Buffy ended with its 5th season, my feelings about that show as a whole might be very different.

Angel was always an example of a sub-genre I love but is always poorly done: the dark, urban detective fantasy. Angel is the best filmed example you can find, and season 5 is its brightest moment.  It’s the best season of television Joss Whedon produced, by far.

2. Battlestar Galactica, Season 1

It starts with the most intense episode of television I’ve ever seen, 33, and never lets up from there.  The show was strong for its entire run, but it was never as perfectly tight as it was in its first season.  A remake of a crappy science fiction show that started with a good but not amazing miniseries, I never guessed the show had a season like this in it.

This is a season that not only gets everything right with its characters and plot, but perfected a realistic and immediate style that science fiction spent most of its filmed existence avoiding.  It’s so good that people spend a lot of time saying that the show lost something after it.  I don’t think that’s true, but I do think that the show never got it right as often as they did through its first 13 episodes.  It even manages to weave in a completely separate plot with two characters on the run without feeling schizophrenic or forced.

It’s relentless, and it builds to one of the all time great season finales, juggling both religious revelations and sudden betrayals and kicking the audience so hard it made the year wait between the first and second seasons excruciating.  I always suspected Ron Moore had something great in him after his work on Deep Space Nine, but I never believed he’d get it so right so soon.

1. The Wire, Season 4

In The Wire, the penultimate episode was always the barnburner, the one where people died and plots came to a head, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the penultimate season feels like the real climax of the show.  A lot of people criticize season 5, but I think that’s unfair, and based largely on the fact what season 4 does for the show as a whole. Season 5 is denouement. Season 4 is the climax. (You could argue, I suppose, that in Shakespearean fashion, it’s season 3 that’s the climax, but that’s an argument for another day). Yet, amazingly, with the focus on the students of Edward Tilghman Middle School,season 4 stands almost entirely on its own.

Everything that makes The Wire great is even greater here.  The show was always about the inexorable destructiveness of our institutions, but it took most of the show to get to the point when we could see how every piece of that system grinds people between them.  The students of Tilghman Middle School – Namond, Michael, Randy and Dukie – are the purest victims of that system that the show could give us.  The brilliance of the season is the way every other piece of the show crushes down on those four kids, and how in the end the only an individual act of altruism saves one of them.  The rest, well, even that’s not enough.

The greatest season of possibly the greatest show television has produced.

Blockbuster season is basically over, and for once I found myself at the theater for quite a few of them.  As Big, Dumb and Loud movies go, this summer has been better than most, but there wasn’t one, single movie that kicked me in the face like, say, Inception did last year.

• Thor - Maybe the first superhero movie that Erin came out of giggling and happy.  When I heard Kenneth Branagh was directing, I knew I’d get some Shakespearean overtones.  What I wasn’t expecting was how funny the movie would be. It had a big, bold mythological feel and a romance that was sweet, if a little thin. And it was funny!  Maybe the best Marvel Studios movie so far.
• X-Men: First Class - X-men plus the Cuban missile crisis? Was this movie made just for me? It had a kind of rushed, cheap feel (since the movie was rushed, and probably a little cheap) but it had the guts to make Xavier legitimately wrong and make us feel for Magneto’s side of things in a way I’ve never seen.  But, hey. X-men plus Cuban missile crisis!
• Bridesmaids - Awesome, awesome, awesome. Funny and vulgar, no pretenses of fitting into some kind of girl movie cliche and just a perfect movie for what it wanted to be.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 - Anyone else feel like every single one of these movies got like 90% right, and then made some weird change that actually made the movie less big and exciting? Like in Half Blood Prince  where they removed the battle at Hogwarts and made the whole ending empty and boring? Well they did that again, here.  It was good enough, I guess.
• Captain America - Hey, look. It’s a period, Indiana Jones-ish superhero film by the guy who directed Rocketeer.  (The rocka-who?).  You’re going to get exactly what you expect.  I could have done with more Stanley Tucci, but who couldn’t? Chris Evans is the real deal. Can’t wait to see him in Whedon’s hands for The Avengers.
• Fright Night 3D - Take a flawed original movie, fix some of its flaws and create some new ones.  If you want to see the lamest, slowest car chase of all time, look no further. But hey, David Tennant, right?

This summer really could have used an Inception after all, huh?

Even my hardcore meme-avoidance can’t stop me from ranking the Coen Brothers’ films. There’s one movie missing off the list below, and it’s Intolerable Cruelty. It’s the only Coen film I haven’t seen. Considering people’s opinions on it, I doubt it would crack the list in any meaningful way.

1. Miller’s Crossing
2. The Big Lebowski
3. A Serious Man
4. True Grit
5. Fargo
6. The Hudsucker Proxy
7. No Country For Old Men
8. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
9. Barton Fink
10. Raising Arizona
11. Burn After Reading
12. Blood Simple
13. The Ladykillers
14. The Man Who Wasn’t There

Yeah, yeah, I didn’t like The Man Who Wasn’t There at all.  It might be a better movie in a lot of ways than The Ladykillers, but I really didn’t enjoy Man Who Wasn’t There at all and at least I was distracted by The Ladykillers.  I’ve only seen each of them once, so in the end, neither are in good shape.

And yeah, I also like The Hudsucker Proxy more than a whole bunch of other films, like No Country and Raising Arizona. When it comes to No Country, I think A Serious Man dealt with the same themes in a better and more Coen-y way, and for whatever reason I’ve never warmed to Raising Arizona.  I can watch Hudsucker pretty much any day of the week. Sure, sure, I mean it.

I’ve never had much of a cause to purposely drop websites off my reading list.  Back before I started pulling everything into Google Reader, I either kept reading or drifted away naturally, one day realizing something had fallen so far off my radar that I hadn’t read it in months.  Thinking back, the few times I got so fed up with something that I stopped came riding giant waves of wrath.  Even things I still gripe about losing their way, like Megatokyo, I still drifted slowly, slowly away from until I stopped caring enough to reload the page.

Now, the annoyances wait in a queue.  There’s no simple failure to load a page up for a week or two.  If you don’t want to read something you’ve got to see the little bold name of the blog in the sidebar, click a button to mark it as read.  Even that button is making you lie about what you’re doing; I ain’t marking it read. I’m saying I never will.

When that goes on for a few weeks, you start asking yourself why you can’t even be bothered to scan over a post or two a day without getting ticked off.  A month or two longer and your relationship with a blogger has become the effort it takes you every day to throw their work in the trash. Blog junk mail, building up on a coffee table.

So now I have to start hitting the unsubscribe button, an explicit statement of Never Again I apparently feel more uncomfortable with that I’d have guessed.  Why else are there a half dozen heads on the chopping block that I haven’t even glanced at for two months? Hell, I haven’t read Paul Krugman for almost a year, and he’s still on there, eating up twenty or thirty seconds a day. I don’t know what I’m afraid of missing eternally that I haven’t missed for months.

Oh, hey, there’s a psychological black hole I don’t want to step into. My inability to step away from something when I should.  My history of sticking with something I long ago came to hate, until I have just enough resentment built up to say something nasty and slam the door.

Yeah, let’s not look at that too closely just yet.