Empty Bookshelf Reviews

Category: Reviews

  • The Last 200 Years of Human Creative Output

    I hope that I’ll be able to post with some more frequency in the next coming while. Look for some smaller reviews in the next couple days.

    Humanity, I’m calling you out.

    I was doing some thinking the other day about what we’d do if aliens showed up. Obviously, the first course of action would probably be to make sure they’re not going to kill us and eat the delicious delicacy between our ears, but all things considered, these aliens had the means to make the trip from their home planet one (or two) bazillion miles away to Earth, so I’m not sure we’d be able to do too much to stop whatever their plan for us would be, evil or friendly. So, assuming their first step of their visit isn’t “killing them humans good”, they’d probably want to see the pinnacle of what we’ve accomplished as a planet during our shared, human history.

    voyager
    If part of your skimming of our reviews involves looking at the picture and reading the caption, hoping it will be funny, you’re all out of luck this time.

    They wouldn’t be impressed with our technology, so anything we’d mention about that would go as such:
    Us: And here’s a bridge that spans a whole mile!
    Them: A bridge… as in it spans, uh, water?
    Us: Yeah, isn’t it a great testament to our ingenuity?
    Them: Oh yeah, that’s really great. We just flew millions of light years to get here, and you’re trying to impress us with something that’s designed to keep your ground-based transportation from getting wet.

    As an aside, I could see Apple running a TV ad where aliens are given the tour and they’re not impressed by anything, then they use an Apple and are transfixed. The Apple logo is shown, then we see the aliens replacing the computers on their spaceship (running Windows, of course) with Apples. You heard it here first.

    With our comparatively puny technology, we’d be left to show them our artistic achievements. We sort of did this already on a much more limited scale with the golden records sent on the Voyager probes, but odds are, those aliens probably aren’t going to figure out how to make them work. Not because they’re not smart enough, but for the same reason that if cave men would have thought to leave a message for the future, we’d struggle decoding it. I hesitate to sound unnecessarily profound, but there’s something to be said about technological context. In 200 years, the concept of an optical disc will be foreign to us; imagine 2,000 years or 200,000 years. Now imagine that we’re aliens whose definition of “visible light” might be completely different than ours.

    Anyway, we’re giving a tour of humanity to these apparently friendly aliens. Technology’s out, human history has just become insignificant (and not just because the aliens won’t care), as from the moment the ship is seen for the first time, everything will be measured as being either “before” or “after” that moment. This all means that the only thing left for us to show off and be proud of would be our art. First things first, we’ll investigate what we’ll consider “art.”

    • Paintings? – Sure. Let’s just remember how easy it is to create absolutely awful paintings though…
    • Music? – That, too
    • Sculpture? – Eh, paintings do the same in a more portable medium. Sorry.
    • Architecture? – Hmm. Tough call. I’ll take the easy way out and say that it’s more of an engineering discipline than anything else, that it doesn’t count. Besides, aliens would have different ergonomic needs than we do. If the aliens rolling on the ground and slept hovering in mid-air, our architecture wouldn’t do too much for them.
    • Photography – Too new of an artform, and most successful “photos as art” are more “neat” than transcendent unless they’re pictures of landscapes. Hmm… maybe we’ll use those photos to convince the aliens not to raze our planet and turn it into some sort of intergalactic parking lot. The biggest thing against photography is the fact that its most affecting imagery is usually more journalistic than artistic.
    • Literature – Sorry, you’re cut: aliens don’t know Earth languages, and reading requires too much of a time commitment
    • Movies/TV/Video – eh, too much context in those media (discussed later)
    • Food/Culinary? – Nope. Aliens wouldn’t appreciate the same tastes. Heck, our food might even kill them.
    • Video Games? – HA!
    • “Performance Art” – Hey aliens, I’ve heard they have delicious brains!

    So that leaves painting and music. Thinking on both of those forms, what would we include? For music, we have any one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (among countless other things of his that could be included – one of the Brandenburg Concertos was included on the Voyager records, so let’s consider it the example for Bach), we have a selections of “Beethovens”: Fur Elise, the Moonlight Sonata, and excerpts from the 5th, 9th, and even 7th symphonies to choose from. Handel has Music for the Royal Fireworks, but after that, the remaining selections get a bit thin. The 1812 Overture is quite an achievement, but remembering what I had said before about context and how aliens wouldn’t care about history, it’s not detached from its context (the Napoleonic wars — As Americans we don’t care about them, and aliens would care even less); when someone listens to it, they invariably say it sounds like fighting music. So it (and most any other event/history-inspired piece of music-think Finlandia, The Ring Cycle, etc.) is out of contention because it doesn’t transcend its context. The Brandenburg Concerto has the name of a place in it, yet as music, it’s completely detached from its namesake. Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks also has a very context-heavy title, but what in it evokes a fireworks display without talking in artsy-fartsy “painting with music” terms or even explicitly calls out the “royal” aspect of it?

    I’ve just looked into baroque, classical, and romantic music, and anything made before those three was made primitive by Bach’s baroque – and for music of the 20th century, well, let’s take a look. Aaron Copland wrote some nice music, unfortunately, it’s not alien-worthy. There’s some sort of experimental or even reactionary sense to it, purposefully having instruments out of tune for effect and having some intangible “American” sound, sometimes taking existing folk songs and incorporating them into some larger work. That’s great and all, but aliens don’t deserve experimental music in any capacity. We should be proud of what we’ve figured out, not the steps it took to get there.

    Looking at less academic music, there’s jazz, blues, swing, etc., etc. of the pre-Rock times, and all of those are out — if the music has little significance today, it’ll have even less in the future. Now, the Beatles are probably the most significant popular music artifact of the 20th century, but as Nate implicitly said, the music didn’t get very interesting until they started with the drugs. Nothing against the Beatles, but I’m not sure drug users make the best musical ambassadors. (Yeah, Bach, etc. probably used snuff or whatever was popular, but no one says, “Wow, he must’ve been high when he wrote this.” John Lennon, I’m looking through at you.) Also, the Beatles music has words, and as much as I’d like English to be Earth’s language there are two issues: 1) I don’t want the Queen‘s English to be the official one and probably more importantly 2) aliens don’t know English, the Queen’s or otherwise, much less any Earth language.

    The other musical heavy hitters of the 20th century? Led Zeppelin – drugs; Pink Floyd – more drugs; Michael Jackson – yeah, that’d be a good idea; (I hate to admit it) Garth Brooks – I don’t even need to provide a reason. Yanni’s quite popular in his own weird way, and he has the language thing taken care of, but his music is too generic for representing human-kind. Yeah, there’s the non-Western World’s music, but let’s be honest: they’re all wishing that they were us by enjoying our pop music scraps we give to them years after their popularity here. It’s the Western way or the highway.

    Conclusion: Nothing musical that’s alien-worthy after Beethoven. He died in 1827. Way to go humanity.

    On to artwork: Well, the most well-regarded of today’s artists (by art-critics/snobs) is Matthew Barney. Take a look around at that link, and you’ll see that not only is his “work” not alien-worthy, it’s barely human-worthy. Like music, a lot of the more notable recent-ish artists had drug problems (Picasso) which directly influenced their art, “great” or not. Van Gogh wasn’t the most stable (cutting his ear off and all), and Dali – well, his stuff is interesting only because we view it as humans and react to it because of what we expect or don’t expect of what we consider “art.” Aliens have no reason to react in that same way. Also, implicit pictures of male genitalia might not be the best thing to be showcasing to otherworldly visitors. I certainly don’t want the aliens to know where the sensitive bits are when they begin their mass exterminations.

    There have been some other relatively recent and notable artists, but they suffer from that same time/place/context issue as detailed in the music section. Mary Cassatt did the whole impressionism thing in an American way, and Georgia O’Keefe did for “innies” what Dali did for “outies.” In all actuality, though it may be hanging on so many dorm room walls, The Starry Night would make the 200 year cut, but again, the latent (and not so latent) craziness of Van Gogh precludes its inclusion.

    Just like with the music, we end up looking back to the “masters:” Rembrandt, the Ninja Turtles (whose work doesn’t really need introduction – except for maybe Donatello, that underachieving I-talian), Vermeer, the locally contentious Bosch and so on. Needless to say, all a long time ago.

    Again, I’ve only mentioned Western art, but like I said before, it’s the Western Way or the highway.

    *

    The Last 200 Years of Human Creative Output is given one disappointing star due to its absolute lack of providing anything we’d give to alien ambassadors as the pinnacle of human achievement. Beyond that, because there have undoubtedly been enjoyable snippets since then, we, as fans and humans, can only be distressed once we realize that it/they can’t hold a candle to the previous work. Now, let me prefend (come on people, it means defending yourself before someone has put you in a defensive position) myself here: I am a loud opponent of the “it was first, so it’s absolutely significant and ‘good’” mentality. Beowulf, The Ramones, Sex Pistols, Elvis, Sputnik, The Wright Flyer, and on and on – all overrated in any sense other than “first ~.” None of my picks were real “firsts” (except for Bosch and Bach – and Bach only sort of – but he was not the only game in town for that time of music when he was around), so I’m good to go, principles intact. Please, leave suggestions for the alien art and music presentation below.

  • Other People Stealing Your Ideas Without Ever Having Met You or Knowing that They Stole Something

    Longest. Title. Ever.


    If only they could save the baseball team from utter annihilation.

    I’ll try not to make this like Dan’s “Half-Inventing Stuff” review, even though there are some thematic similarities.

    What spawned the idea for this topic was actually two events hat occurred in the past month, both of which involved people doing things that I had already done. Chances are that both of these events might turn into “Nate Stories”, and since I don’t believe in editing for content, other than adding to it, just be warned.

    So I got a disturbing call a few weeks ago. Nothing’s wrong, and it wasn’t sickening or anything… just upsetting. You see, my sister was at a Philadelphia Phillies baseball game. The fans (the few, the proud), the ones who don’t like to throw batteries that is, (although maybe if J.D. Drew was around), have started a sort of tradition over the past ten years. Groups of people would come and buy seats in the wide expanse of the Veteran’s stadium 700 level… that’s right, back when stadiums had 700 levels. Up there they found the space to spread out, dress up in costume, and display large signs usually featuring the group’s made-up name. This might sound a trifle confusing, so I’ll give you the most prominent example, and probably the one that started the fad. Randy Wolf had just made his MLB debut and a group of fans were looking to come out to support the first of the crop of minor league pitchers that would eventually be considered the saviors of the franchise. (Over the next 6 years, through the ranks came Brandon Duckworth, Brett Meyers, Gavin Floyd, and Cole Hammels. This was supposed to be the rotation of the future, but Duckworth was a minor bust and was shipped off to Texas or somewhere, never to be heard from again…. update, he just started pitching for the Royals I believe and didn’t do so well, and Floyd is back in the minors.) A group of fans looking to show support for Wolf showed up wearing wolf masks, with a huge sign that said “Wolf Pack“. Whenever Randy struck someone out they all did a dance in unison that kinda looks like the lawnmower-starting dance. Eventually other groups began to crop up. What else was there to keep you interested in the upper deck and following a losing team? There was the Duck Pond (for Duckworth), the (Vincente) Padilla Flotilla (a group of guys in sombreros with oars pretending they were in a boat. Whenever he got a strikeout they began to row), once there was (Pat) “Burrell’s Girls”, and the most recent high profile incident was two competing groups out to support backup catcher Sal Fasano… yes a backup catcher. The groups paint their faces to match his trademark moustache and call themselves, “Sal’s Pals” and “Fasano’s Pizanos”. Incidentally, Sal was apparently so overwhelmed with the cheering section that he once ordered them all pizzas.

    What this has to do with anything is this: When my sister called me on the phone, she told me of the newest group of supporters, “Flash’s Friends” or something like that. The Flash that they speak of is the new closing pitcher, Tom Gordon. How do they get the Flash from that? Well, he’s nicknamed from the 1930s sci-fi serial character, Flash Gordon. But these “friends” didn’t realize that, or I guess they thought that nobody would get it if they dressed up like Flash Gordon and his friends, because they decided to take it one step even further and dress up like the superhero The Flash, and his other superhero friends. It would be enough for me to say it was stupid that there are two jumps in logic to get from The Flash to Tom Gordon, and that people who aren’t from the area probably wouldn’t understand…. but my major problem with this is that WE DID IT THREE YEARS AGO. There is video and photographic evidence (see above) that not only did we use this gimmick first, but we used it better.

    The people in this group had really shoddy costumes, most of them partially storebought, and there were people in the group that weren’t even superheroes. So they did the costume thing poorly, the sign wasn’t as good as ours was… and they didn’t dance after strikeouts, but the biggest problem was that they didn’t think their plan through enough. In order for the pitcher that they were supporting to actually be involved in the game, the team would have to be winning by less than four runs going into the final inning… lucky for them it happened and he came in, but by that time, most of them were tired of standing around in their costumes, and were partly disrobed by the ninth inning anyway. When they finally got on TV, they just like a bunch of half dressed-hooligans, not following through with the bit.

    So all of these things led me to being not as affected by it. I suppose that my main issue with this scenario is how it made us look in hindsight. Not only was that experience very important for us, sort of serving as the capstone achievement of my high school friends buffoonery, but we were proud of both the fact that we were the first ones that we had ever heard of doing this, and the fact that we actually followed through with one of our hair-brained ideas… and were mentioned by the TV coverage as the “Fans of the Game”. This gimmick infringement would’ve definitely sullied the memory and sapped all of the originality from it.

    As far as the second incident goes, a little more than a year ago, my friend Adam and I completed our senior video project. Capping off this twenty-six minute opus, was a perfect final sequence/shot, that when seen for the first time with the song that Adam had found, literally gave me chills (literally!), and made me want to watch it over and over and over. I knew that if nothing else in the entire thing worked, that this last part would win people over. You can see for yourself here… it’ll probably give you a better idea as to what I’m talking about. The song is by a group called Thirteen Senses, titled “Into the Fire”.

    Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that song coming out of my TV a few months later, in the long-form ads for FX’s second season of “Rescue Me“, a show about firefighters. The song fit even more perfectly in that than it did in our project, mostly because of the lyrical contents talking about walking into the fire and such. Also, the ad came and went without much fanfare, and I’m sure that it won’t be remembered in years to come.

    Just a few weeks ago, a friend of mine was asking me for names of songs that she might like, and I passed along this title. Little did I know that hours later I would hear the song used in a montage of Jim Carrey’s dramatic moments at the MTV movie awards, a show seen by millions of people per year, and aired about the same amount of times. I hastened to the internets to email my friend to say “THEY STOLE MY SONG!!!1!” The next day, I decided it wasn’t a big deal, and pretty much let the whole thing go…. until about two days after that. I came home late and decided to catch a replay of the season premiere of The 4400, a summer show on USA that that somehow was the most watched basic cable series of last year (or at least last summer?). It was two hours long and started at midnight, and by the end was half asleep, when suddenly, I hear familiar piano chords. Chords I’ve heard hundreds of times. I couldn’t believe it! They were pulling out the end-of-the-episode-montage, and using the song! I was impressed that they actually used the entire thing, and put it to good use, but it was probably the absolute strangest timing ever. Recently, I also found out that the song was used in the pilot of “Grey’s Anatomy”, a show that I’ve never watched, and probably never will, but is watched by millions and millions nonetheless. I guess I should just be glad they didn’t use it on American Idol

    It reminds me of how way back in 2002-2003, the new Coldplay CD came out, and the WWE/F was the first that I had seen to use a little-known song called “Clocks” to do an absolutely great film/video montage about one of their wrestlers, and my olympic hero, Kurt Angle getting a very dangerous neck surgery and training to come back for the fans and for his family. Soon enough, the song was EVERYWHERE, including the trailer for the movie Peter Pan and a sound-alike version for the New Jersey travel bureau, mostly because they couldn’t afford the rights due to how much they suck. When I showed people the video, all impact was lost because the audience had no idea when this thing was made. The use of the song went from “completely innovative and perfect”, to “completely trite, cliche, and therefore worthless”. The entire impression of how great the video was tarnished by the fact that other people used the song after them, rendering it completely useless as any sort of art or entertainment. By that time people had gotten so sick of the song that they probably wouldn’t even watch it just because of the musical selection alone.

    What I’m getting at is that now I’m put in this position. This song stands poised to be the next “Clocks”, used in every video that people can put it in, make its way to the radio and soon enough, be so engrained into our public consciousness that you wouldn’t ever want to hear it again. In the event that I would show this video to someone in the future, the striking effect of the song is gone, because it devolves from “That’s a cool song that I’ve never heard, but fits great”, to “I see you jumped on the bandwagon too; way to be original, lame-o“. Without having done anything, the value of the piece is decreased tenfold. Sure, you can say “We made this before the song got popular, scuzz-wad”, but that’s like telling a jury to forget a court outburst that’s been stricken from the record via objection. You’ve already seen it, so there’s no letting it go.

    You could make the case that every person/group that uses the song in the same manner from now on is just copying off of a set television precedent and therefore should be subject to the same criticisms that I’d get, but it doesn’t matter to them. The song is nowhere near its peak popularity, nor even into the public’s SUB-conscious, and neither do the companies/groups care. If they continue to use the song, what is people saying “that’s already been done before, dill-wad” going to do to them? They’re in a position where if it fits, go for it, because it’s not like the CSI audience is really going to stop watching or feel less inclined to see a Jerry Bruckheimer movie/show.

    The people who would be watching my video would be people whom I know, or maybe people I just recently met, but in any case, probably people I want to impress, or at least show that I didn’t go to Hollywood Upstairs Medical College. Having the most impressive part of the video be undermined because of a collective overexposure to the song is something that I would rather do without.

    Of course, I could be totally overreacting, and in two years the song could be less remembered than Fastball‘s second single. I also suppose that I could always go back and change what song we used, but that would be like re-doing the end of “Return of the Jedi”, a whole lot of work for something that wouldn’t serve much of a purpose.

    How does this relate back to the baseball game? Well, if these people/groups can use this song without knowing that I’d used it previously, and if these Flash’s friends can go dressed like superheroes, what’s to say that our attempt at 30 seconds of JumboTron fame hadn’t been tried before, and done better? What if we were inadvertently copying off of some other group even though we didn’t know them, and had never seen what they’d done? That would just ruin the whole event for us, and the uniqueness of it.

    Personally, I think we should fight these so-called “Flash’s Friends”, because three Frankensteins and a Spongebob are no match for teh Hulk, Superman, Flash, Wolverine, ummm.. Thor, and some girl with an exposed midriff.

    Other People Stealing Your Ideas Without Ever Having Met You or Knowing that They Stole Something gets zero stars. It is something that will happen over and over in life, and it’s best just not to notice it. The problem is that it gets to you when you no longer can honestly take credit for an idea you had and did, even though there’s evidence you did it before the other person. Rather than feeling good about yourself that somebody else in a higher position than you thought of the same thing that you did, and feeling good about the fact that you’re “on the level”, you tend to feel like you’ve been devalued. The trick is to keep going and come up with something even newer because then you can just show that off to other people instead. Other People Stealing Your Ideas Without Ever Having Met You or Knowing that They Stole Something also makes us look inside of ourselves to determine whether we at any point were guilty of this, and if so make the necessary reparations to those we offended. I encourage all of you to think about this and what it means to you. Until then, Goodnight, and Good Luck, and take care of yourselves, and each other. I’m Andy Rooney… Jon?

  • the voice of mona lisa


    Looks like somebody beat me to it. I bet if she could talk though, she’d be telling us all about her favorite soda.

    So recently I read this article. I understand that you all might be in a hurry, but you might want to at least peruse the article, because the entire review is sort of based on it.

    Or…. I’ll summarize. It seems that some forensic scientist in Japan, for whatever reason, was commissioned to determine what the person who was the model for the Mona Lisa would’ve sounded like.

    Probably having spent at the very least hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this, apparently for no other reason than to say “We did it! BOOYA JIM!” even though nobody really ever questioned their ability, this seems like the most colossal waste of time since I sat through “Big Bully“.

    Maybe it was all a publicity stunt for the Da Vinci Code, considering the article doesn’t actually say who approached the Japanese, or maybe it just was a pull for the scientists to win another “Ig Nobel” Prize, awarded for research that “makes people laugh, then think”. Just the idea of an award like that sort of makes me a little upset. I bet by looking at the list of past winners, you’d be able to see some of the biggest misuses of resources possible. I mean, just look at what these Japanese people won the award for doing a previous time:”for promoting harmony between species by inventing the Bow-Lingual, a dog-to-human interpretation device”.

    I really don’t know what’s worse, that somebody actually spent money on a scientific process to create something that can never be proven or disproven, or that the people in charge actually thought that the public would care enough for it to not be a waste of time. Granted, I don’t know much about modern Japanese culture, and I’m not a renaissance art enthusiast, and those are probably the people that it would be aimed at the most (hence the reason why nobody here in the U.S. has made a huge deal over this “breakthrough”), so I could just be missing the boat. I suppose there is the whole “science for the sake of science” thing, like trying to determine if there ever was life on Mars, but there are some things that are more weighty than others.

    To me though, something like this has little to no easily accessible evidence to prove that it’s actually correct. Sure, these scienticians can make all sorts of claims about how big her vocal chords were and what her voice-related anatomy was like, but there are so many “X-Factors” at work here, like “what if she was deaf?”, or “what if she smoked?” (although that’s probably highly unlikely, but some sort of outside force on her voice could be possible), “what if she was from some other area not in Italy and was visiting, and didn’t even speak Italian?” Or, here’s one to make you think, “what if she wasn’t a real person at all?” Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I don’t see the point in hypothesizing about a topic that is so insignificant to our everyday lives and can’t be shown to be fact anyway. That’s like saying that if Bagwell or Biggio hadn’t hit that game-winning ninth inning home run against the Phillies last year that Philadelphia would’ve made the playoffs, and gone to the World Series, or if Roethlisberger hadn’t made that tackle at the end of the Indy-Pittsburgh game last year that Manning would be wearing a Superbowl ring right now. These events are in the past, and, at least with the first one, highly unlikely. In addition, it’s all speculation and therefore useless to those of us but the dreamers. When zombies roam the earth and Mona Lisa wakes up from her grave, maybe then we’ll get a better insight into how she speaks, but even then, she’ll probably only moan, “ZOMMMMBIIEEEE“, probably in her mystery Italian dialect, and we’ll still be as clueless as we are now.

    But really, who am I to argue with the people who mastered the canine language?

    *

    I’ll give them one whole star for the amount of work that they put in, but I view it as a wasted effort, because there’ll never be any way to prove that they’re right, and nobody will ever care.

  • LOST: Season 2

    ULTRA-MEGA REVIEW!!!

    Note: This review was mostly written before Dan decided to call me out, which is kinda coincidental, but in which case will read less like I’m defending myself (which he pre-assumed I’d be writing in response), and more like a straightforward and attemptedly (yes, I said “attemptedly”) unbiased review. I’ve also written it before the airing of the season finale, which may be unfair (due to possible “wrapping up” of plots, or paying off of loose ends from earlier), but may in actuality be more fair due to the fact that I’m not blinded by my opinion of the single episode, keeping me honest about the rest of the season. Also, I apologize for the extreme longwindedness.


    I wonder if their island Abercrombie takes American Express.
    I guess I should just be happy that they’re all looking in the same direction in this group shot.

    With Dan’s take on “the current TV landscape” overtly lacking any mention of the rise of drama and fall of comedy (only 13 hours a week among the five networks devoted to comedies for next fall, as opposed to 47 for dramas… of course that’s counting Desperate Housewives as a drama), I thought I’d focus on a few hour-long shows in my next set of reviews.

    First and foremost, my current favorite drama, and the winner of last year’s Emmy and Golden Globe in the category. LOST’s Season 2 managed to expand the world of the show enormously, but still keep viewers in the dark as to the overall picture, and wanting more answers, sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing.

    For those of you who haven’t watched any of the show at all, it’s probably best for you to start at the beginning, partly because there’s so much going on, and partly just because the first season is a lot better. The show revolves around the survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island. There’s a huge cast of characters, including the doctor, the Korean couple, the fugitive, the con-man, the ex-druggie rock star, the pregnant Australian girl, the rich brother and sister, the mysterious and wise bald man, the black guy and his estranged son, the Iraqi military man, and of course, the fat guy….. Whew, I think that’s all of them. There apparently were 38 total survivors, but these are the only ones we spend any real time with. The other 24 people are usually just random extras walking around in the background, who somehow never have anything interesting to do in the way of advancing the story. While learning how to get along and how to survive together, they encounter various different strange things, including some sort of monster that uproots trees and kills people, some polar bears, a strange French radio transmission that says “it killed them all”, and has been playing for sixteen years… and that’s only in the first two hours.

    Whereas the first season included events that seemed strange, and you could just say, “They’re on a strange island”, season 2 tried to give vague answers to the questions about the oddities, and at the same time, keep viewers intrigued by keeping them in the dark, revealing the story little by little. Of course with each “answer” comes at least 3 more questions. It’s this dragging on of the answers that drives most people to keep watching. There are those, however, who are frustrated by the whole thing, and are too cynical, or just would rather watch shows that wrap up nicely every episode. Personally, I’m a fan of the shows with huge overarching stories and cliffhangers meant to keep me tuned in. It means the characters must be well-developed and we feel an attachment to them more than if we just see them solving a case or healing someone. I also enjoy those types of shows, because while adhering to the serialized nature of old-time movies (the ones your grandparents tell you about seeing for a nickel every Saturday), they tend to be the ones challenging the rules and format of television shows, breaking new ground and taking us places we’ve never been. I tend to shy away from cop shows and hospital shows, because in essence, Grey’s Anatomy is Chicago Hope is St. Elsewhere, and it’s been done to death, usually by the same people (cough cough, Steven Bochco, David E. Kelly). Lastly, I’ll just admit that usually when I’m interested in an episode of something and it ends in a cliffhanger, I will be the sucker that P.T. Barnum was talking about, and I will desire to see a suspenseful moment come to its conclusion, whether it be a week later, or after a commercial break. That’s why once you start watching an episode of Law and Order you can’t stop until its over, but you could care less about watching another one.

    Getting back to pushing the (for lack of a better phrase) “grammar of the medium” in new directions, the first season was so gripping because all of the characters were interesting and new. Also, it employed a completely unique way of introducing us to their personalities, using intermittent flashbacks that focused on one character each week, and one particular story from that person’s past. Usually, these stories are picked/written to reflect what that person is going through on the island, and to inform the viewer of why he/she is acting a certain way, or making a tough decision.

    Oftentimes, and what made the show so intriguing from the get-go, was how they played with the expectations created by our first impressions of characters. They’d go back and show us that certain people led completely different lives than they want others to assume, the lives that they’ve left behind, so that they can start with a clean slate. Also, many of the people had strange instances in their past, and occasionally if you looked closely, you’d see another of the people from the island in someone else’s flashback, or at least a connection to the other person. People (the internet obsessives… I don’t consider myself one, but I’ll look at the evidence they have to offer) started to obsess over why certain characters were appearing in others’ flashbacks and if everyone who was on the plane had some sort of “six degrees”-style connection to each other. Of course, since nobody ever talks about their past either (in addition to not talking about island discoveries), nobody ever realizes, “Hey, that guy in that picture’s your dad? I took a trip to Australia with him and he was wasted. I was gonna offer him some help, but I had to get somewhere. How’s he doing?” “Oh he ended up dead from alcohol poisoning in a gutter in Sydney. That’s actually where I was flying from, when the plane crashed into this island hell. Thanks a lot for ruining my entire existence, you jackass.” One big question that nobody ever really touches on, though: are these flashbacks specifically intended for the viewer, and therefore completely the facts, or are we seeing the thoughts and memories of the specific characters, allowing them to eventually somehow be discredited, i.e. could they be using the faces of people from the island to replace background people from events in their past, just because they can’t remember what those random people looked like, or possibly had their memories tampered with?

    While it is perfectly feasible to fill 24 hours of television (with commercials) this way, at some point it’s going to get old, and the flashbacks are going to become insignificant or boring. That’s my first complaint about the second season (over 1000 words in!). While most of the stories in the characters’ pasts were relevant to their present motives and actions, many of them were just plain boring or possibly irrelevant to the big picture. Sure, I can’t expect every one of everyone’s flashbacks to involve something paranormal, but watching the con-man pull off a pretty normal con job, that has nothing of relevance to do with his overall story-arc, and is completely predictable, isn’t the most interesting thing to me… especially if it’s slow-moving. The same goes with watching the blonde rich girl try to get over the fact that she’s “useless”, or the bald guy trying to come to terms with his estranged and ungrateful father, or the rockstar trying to help his junkie brother get clean. I understand the reasons that they were put there in terms of what the characters were going through in the present, but if I want to watch boring melodrama about a whiny teenage rich girl who wasn’t allowed a shot at her dream because her dad left all her money to her stepmother who won’t give her a cent, I’ll go watch The O.C. At least there I’ll learn what “Indie” (the genre) music is hip nowadays. Even WB shows are at least more entertaining than that.


    After exhaustive research, I’ve determined the location of the LOST island. It’s the one that looks like a pie.

    In the second season they’ve moved away from stories about the survivors trying to get off of the island (save for one episode where one guy justly decides to create a giant SOS sign, and nobody wants to help for some reason), or fighting over food and medical supplies (mysterious food drops keep them supplied, in addition to the island’s staggering amount of mangoes), and basically all of the necessity-type issues, and onto the bigger things at hand. You see, it’s not themselves that they should be fighting with (although that proves difficult due to the incredible amount of stubbornness each character possesses), it’s the group of people on the other side of the island, who were there before the plane crashed and who want something from the survivors but won’t tell them what, instead opting to threaten them, and kidnap some of them. Of course, like with everyone else on the island, I’m sure if they all just talked it out, and thought about things before doing them, all of the conflict and issues with each other would be solved. But this isn’t a show about problem solving. It’s a show about characters acting, usually, stupidly or irrationally, with the only reason being to keep the plot going. After all, if there was no conflict, we’d be watching Gilligan’s Island, and who wants to watch that? In fact, I guess in the simplest terms, the problem is that the show went from having the characters drive the plot forward in the first season to having the plot drive the characters in the second season. Rather than being about what the survivors find, or what choices they make, it becomes about the things on the island that affect the characters, and the “mythology” of the place… how it affects the characters, and not how they affect each other.

    Of course, what second season would be complete without a group of new characters? In addition to the mysterious people on the other side of the island, (who may or may not be running some sort of scientific experiment on the crash survivors), there was a second group of survivors who were in the tail section of the plane (affectionately referred to by the online community as “talies”), that eventually got whittled down due to attacks and kidnappings by the mysterious “others”. These characters were greeted by fans with mixed reactions, some becoming quick favorites and good additions, and others being grating and just seeming like dead weight meant to stir conflict, but not really serving their purpose. By now, there’s only a few left, due to some high profile offings of characters.

    This brings me to my second (or is it third? or fourth?) complaint. This season (not just on this show, as I’ll explain if I write something about 24 season 5) has been filled with the killing off of popular characters, or at least medium-sized ones. If it’s done for a story purpose on occasion I don’t have too much of a problem with letting go of characters. The problem comes when a show does it mainly for ratings and once it’s over things don’t change as much as they should, or characters don’t react as dramatically as they should for as long as they should. There was one major death in the first season, and it was used to advance characters’ reasonings, heighten drama, and make a statement to the audience that people are expendable… that “anything” can happen. Then in the second season, with as much advertising hoopla as in the first season, there was another death. This was done in a way that should have heightened tensions within the group and drove the plot for upcoming episodes. Unfortunately, I believe this was mishandled and after 2 episodes (about 2 days time on the show) everyone had pretty much gotten over the fact that she died. The producers contend that they had nowhere to advance the character to, but she had just started two new minor storylines. Near the end of the season they had at least one more major death, and this one finally did what it needed to do, served as a motivation to advance the story in a major way, promising payoffs in this finale, which the producers have sworn will be more revealing than last year’s (generally considered) underwhelming finale, and yet at the same time also leave us with a huge cliffhanger that will set up next season’s major conflict.

    Which brings me to a topic that I don’t know how I feel about. Certain TV shows like to set up a goal that characters are attempting to achieve, and with that, payoffs and conclusions to plots for us at the end of the season. Season 1 of Lost had the bald guy attempting to crack open a metal door that he had found in the ground, but lacked a handle or latch, and the black guy, the Korean guy, and the con-man building a raft in an attempt to escape. The finale had each of these characters succeed at each of their goals, only to meet an obstacle afterward, thus setting up the second season. The problem with this season is for the bulk of it, there wasn’t much driving it forward. The characters realized that there’s more to this island than they thought, but they’re not freaked out about it, or anxious to actively pursue escape. They’re not actively seeking anything, for the most part. Sure the first half of the season had the people from the raft journeying back to their own side of the island, and the end seems to have a group ready to attack the other side of the island to get back one of their own, but in between everything was kinda fly-by-the-seat-of-your pants. That’s not to say that there isn’t an overall plan for the show. I believe that the people in charge have an endgame, and a few planned stops on the way. This season, however, it just seemed like the middle was trying to be filler to get to this season’s “stop” and big reveal.

    Why I say that I don’t know how I feel about that is because, really, we’re pretty much in the same position as all the people on the island, trying to understand the surroundings as we go along. We know as much as all of the survivors combined (at least regarding the island… not about their pasts), but we don’t know more than that. We hope for them to share information with each other, but know it’s not going to happen. And while this leads to a lack of action, I think I’d rather not know the secrets until the heroes discover them. There are no scenes of the villains in their secret lair planning their scheme, filling the audience in and making us cringe when we know that the choices the heroes make are wrong. We’re in this with them, and if they make a wrong choice, we won’t know it until they do, and I think I’d rather have it that way. In fact, on a positive note, the season MVP had to be the person who was caught in the jungle… Henry Gale. Why this is important to this topic is that the characters suspected him of being one of the “hostiles” or “others”, when he insisted (through pain of torture) that he crashed on the island in a balloon. We didn’t know if he was lying, just as the other characters didn’t. We found out the truth just as they did, and we didn’t know if we could trust him, just as they didn’t. Every scene that he is in is absolutely gripping, because we know so little about him, and every single word that comes out of his mouth could be a lie to manipulate people, or he could say it knowing the people would think that he’s lying… or he could just be telling the truth in general, with no ulterior motive. This performance and character alone make the second half of season two worth watching, and it’s all because we don’t see his side of the story.

    The other thing that was an issue (and not just with me, but with every person who watches every week), which wasn’t the show’s fault, but the network’s fault, was that they would run a string of new episodes for a few weeks, and then a long span of repeats. Viewers had a hard time knowing when new episodes were on, were bored with repeats, and were impatiently waiting for the wrapping up of cliffhangers from weeks previous, usually only to find that they wouldn’t wrap up until a few episodes later anyway. The network has decided to fix things next year by running a few months of uninterrupted episodes in the fall, taking a few months off to debut a new show, and then coming back in February with the rest of the season. After getting the DVDs of the first season, and watching them, I realized that if I had the patience, I’d much rather wait the extra nine months, and just buy the season set, because watching weekly, or however often it’s on, is quite grueling, and usually very manipulative.

    With all of these negatives, you would wonder why I claimed that this was my favorite drama on TV. (now comes the part where I justify myself) First of all, I don’t think that this year it was the best drama on TV. It may have been my favorite, but I can’t ignore the huge logic holes, and the few procrastination episodes in the middle. As a whole however, I think it’s the most engaging drama, due to the sheer amount of story and history that not only are contained in the island itself, but in the characters as well.


    Just because I thought you deserved a break from reading.

    I think that the story and the characters are more realized and well-rounded than most shows are. By allowing us to see the people’s backstories (albeit selectively), we can understand where people are coming from without being bored by endless cheesily-spouted exposition. You can understand each character’s drive and reasoning, oftentimes before he/she takes action, because we know where s/he’s been. Not only that, but their stories are usually more interesting than normal drama fare. It’s not often that you one of your main characters is an overweight man who spent time in a mental hospital where he met a patient who compulsively repeated a set of six numbers that the character eventually used to win the lottery, only to be marred with immense amounts of bad luck for the rest of his life.

    I believe that in addition, it is the most creative, engaging, and unique television show I’ve ever seen. Sure, there are those television history enthusiasts out there who’ll tell me that a weird island has been done before on “The Prisoner”, but never with a group of characters this large and diverse, never with a mythology that is expanding to Asia-sized proportions, and never as evenly managed. Some people will say that there’s definitely a few lead characters, and I agree. But this is the largest ensemble show I’ve ever seen where every character is given at least one hour to be fleshed out, and where every character is checked in on on a weekly basis. All this, and they manage to keep the mythology-obsessed people generally happy.

    Think about it this way. The X-Files had two characters, and justly used “monster of the week” self-contained episodes to flesh out a season that usually bookended, and possibly “middled” with episodes dealing with that show’s over-arching storyline. There was very little character progression, mainly Scully coming to realize that things aren’t always easily answered, and that didn’t come until like the sixth season… this after having seen all that creepy weird stuff. Yet the first five seasons of that show are considered some of the best of the 1990s, and most people who watched the show continuously are more interested in the conspiracy/aliens story than they are with the repetitive self-contained eps. LOST succeeds at taking that mythology and upping by at least 5 times. There are seven times as many main characters, and they change their perceptions of the events just as we do. The one thing that the X-Files did much better was the self-contained stories, and while I concede that LOST is more about the overall picture, there are a handful of episodes that work rather effectively by themselves.

    Overall, the show has its faults and I acknowledge them, specifically the leading us on little by little, but the general scope and size of the undertaking, and the skill with which it is pulled off amaze me week after week. There may be better shows out there, (at least this year), but LOST’s labyrinthine story has had me hooked since the day the pilot aired.

    ***½
    LOST’s second season gets a slightly disappointing 3.5 stars. Mostly because of the major issues I dealt with in the first half, i.e. some boring episodes, some plotlines that went nowhere (at least as of now), some frustrations over not getting the answers (but like those adventure-puzzle games, the journey is usually more interesting than the destination), the rather soap-opera-style killings of major characters during sweeps weeks to get ratings and not serve the story, and of course the problem of the repeats, which will be solved next year, or by watching the episodes on DVD. The reason it doesn’t get less stars (those are a lot of complaints) is because of the usually deft handling of the many, many characters (including ones I didn’t mention way, wayyyy back when this review began in the Byzantine era), the extreme creativity of the story, the way they’ve managed to keep the idea of a group of people on an island fresh after two seasons, the way they’re taking their time in giving us what we want, so that they don’t blow it all in one shot, and the way that they pay off minor events or things that they know don’t make sense. They even had a voice for all of the background extras for a few episodes until they exploded him randomly and without warning. That’s right. He exploded, chunks and all. It was great, and is just one of the many reasons why I love this show.

  • The Current TV Landscape (The Office, Scrubs, and the Ghost of Arrested Development) – Part 3

    Part 3 – Scrubs

    Keeping the TV theme: a long time ago, I predicted that the Taylor guy would get super far on American Idol, but “America” would never vote for him when he’d be against a pretty girl….well, I haven’t watched since then, but I have it on in the background, and they haven’t announced a winner yet tonight (it’s 9:44 at the moment)…..let’s see if I was right.Uhh..I never said that.

    MEGA-REVIEW! (forewarning, it looks like our corner of the internet will be TV-centric for the next while. For those that skim our reviews so that they can say “of course I still read the website,” you’ve got a whole bunch of skimming coming up…)

    I’ve realized that I haven’t really discussed “the current TV landscape” in the first two reviews in this series; instead, I’ve just looked through a microscope at individual shows. So, let’s talk a bit about the “current TV landscape.” First and foremost, the fact that I call out only three shows while referring to that “landscape” doesn’t mean there aren’t necessarily other notable shows to be included. Of course I greatly enjoy the three shows listed in the title, but there are some (I’d hesitate to say “plenty”) of shows that I catch either sporadically (House ” probably the best pure “formula show” on TV ” I’m not judging, the show practically addresses the fact that it’s all formula) or never (Scrubs ” before I started watching it ” I guess that doesn’t count). A most notable absentee from this list is LOST (their caps, not mine). I’ll let Nate defend it, then belittle both it and him in the comments.

    The three shows I’ve focused on are all critical favorites, but suffer a bit (or a lot) in terms of popular appeal. Arrested Development was canceled/not renewed because of low viewership, The Office gets around 8 million viewers each week (American Idol gets in the mid 20 million), and Scrubs hovers at that same 7-8 million mark, low enough for the show to have been considered “on the bubble” until just a few weeks before the networks announced their 2006-2007 lineups last week. You can’t draw the most profound conclusions from the viewership numbers alone, but in the most general of terms (“single camera,” no laugh-track sitcoms), there’s probably sizable overlap among the viewer groups. (Arrested Development sort of attracted the “martyr fan” ” fans that secretly wanted the network to cancel it so they could say how stupid everyone in America is. The Office gets the hipsters ” notice all the iPod commercials. And Scrubs probably gets the most women of the three, what with the “emotional moment” on/off switch that gets flipped around minute 25 of each broadcast ” not necessarily a bad thing; more about that later). I guess this should’ve been included in The Office review, but The Office won’t last more than four or so seasons; Steve Carell is a movie-caliber star, and considering the ratings the show gets, he won’t be able to get a Seinfeldian movie-caliber paycheck for his work on the show, and just as importantly, being attached to a 22 episode TV show for ¾ of the year doesn’t leave much time for movies. I doubt his leaving (and the end of the show’s run) would end up being an ugly sort of situation considering the ratings and also considering that they ended the second season by moving the ever-present conflict between Jim and Pam (well, it’s not a conflict, per se) in the direction of conclusion.

    scrubs
    Old Man teeth scare me.

    The significance of the three shows is that they don’t exist in that same world in which other TV shows exist. Supposedly the Simpsons was the first show to do it, and like the Simpsons, these three shows exist somewhere between the real world and the “TV world.” Stay with me here. In the most obvious sense, around season 6 or 7, The Simpsons started to make jokes that existed only because it was a TV show, making fun of stereotypical TV camera moves, TV archetypes, and so on (ahh, metahumor). Heck, part of the dynamic of The Office is that the characters know they’re on a show. Arrested Development avoided the cheeky, “it’s funny because we’re on TV” types of jokes which are currently ruining Family Guy (and to be fair, The Office doesn’t point it out more than necessary, and Scrubs walks the razor thin line between self-awareness and self-consciousness quite well.

    On the three shows I’ve written up, characters watch TV, and talk about things that “real people” would talk about: last night’s episode of such-and-such, a CD, etc”.in other words, pop culture without it being just product placement. The Simpsons did it first (supposedly”I think Seinfeld probably pushed the concept farther), Family Guy now exists solely because of it, and these shows use it to be better. The characters on The OC namedrop “indie” (the genre) bands, and I do know the creator is a fan of the music, but it’s not the way people talk about it. (Zach Braff ” as positive as my impression of Garden State is, Natalie Portman’s characters “thing” with The Shins is presented like it would be on The OC.) And it’s not just what they’re talking about, but how they’re talking about it. Like real people. Now, for Scrubs, one might say “but that’s too wacky, this that and the other thing,” but considering that I’ve encouraged someone who was in front of a crowd to show off “the bullets” because the people needed to know what “the guns” shot, it’s not really all that out there. Other popular shows have “TV” dialog. People on The West Wing and Gilmore Girls speak entirely too perfectly, the characters on Will & Grace were too “fast” with thinking of jokes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s characters spoke like comic book characters (no, that’s not and will never be a good thing), the only impression I get from Hugh Laurie on House is that I really need a writer, and even successful traditional sitcoms showcase characters (not actors””I’m talking about the world within the show) who seemingly wakeup with outlines of what will happen in their day and what potential setup lines will be tossed up to them in conversation. I don’t hold that against those shows (sort of ” with Arrested Development, I realized shows didn’t need to exist in “TV world”). Is this because I want to relate to the characters, a concept I derided in the first of this series? I don’t know; I guess I’d just rather not have my media completely detached from reality (and yet I watch professional wrestling”regularly). Free Ride attempted to take the “talk like real people” to an extreme, featuring almost wholly improvised dialog, but the only thing that it got was canceled and decidedly unreal (hold on tight as I invent yet another word) “improvspeak,” where the actors (not the characters) forget that there are actual pauses in conversation, and just babble like crazy, each line louder than the previous as they try to “play” off of each other. I hate to allude to wrestling, and as much as he’s one of my favorites because of his legendary microphone work, but The Rock suffers from acute improvspeak when he makes his random appearances at WWE broadcasts, saying nothing, but taking a whole lot of time to say it.

    You’ll notice I’m completely glossing over the Laws & Orderseses, CSI’s, and other crime shows as well as ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and their accompanying medical-related programs (I’m not sure I’d include Scrubs in there). I’ll act like I’m not lumping all those shows into one giant “current TV landscape” category, but I just did. These shows are all practically interchangeable. Writers make medical or crime shows because plots are Easy with a capitol E. Doctors and people in the field of justice (ha!) potentially lead interesting lives just because of their jobs. Interesting things will happen to them before the writers even decide which one will be the divorced loner, the bright-eyed, naïve beginner, the jaded veteran, and the sex-crazed comic relief. People get out of jail and go after the cop that put them in there, doctors are exposed to unknown pathogens, you name it. The plots are Easy. It’s just about this simple: men like watching bad guys get their butts kicked by police officers, women like watching good, but sick people get cured by attractive doctors. What makes the show compelling (or not) is how well the writers handle the 20% of the story that doesn’t have to do with the characters’ occupations. Grey’s Anatomy is a medical show because the writers needed somewhere to place a female-centric love mess, and suburbia had already been taken. House stays pretty close to the medical-centric thing, but most fans’ favorite episodes involve big revelations about the main character. These shows are all fine, but as complicated as the plots might be, there’s really not much to them at the end of the day. They’re doctors, nurses, police officers, prosecutors, and that’s about it. The better shows, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, the first seasons of ER raised the bar, and there are still “better” examples of this genre (the hospital/crime genre) on the air, but in the end, it’s all about how successfully the writers twist the formula. Look at Nip/Tuck: it combines the “helping people” of the hospital shows with the “hurting people” of the crime shows; that math would make it practically perfect. In fact, come to think of it, I guess one could consider CSI and its children and imitators to mix crime-solving with medical know-how. Darn you Jerry Bruckheimer, ripping off my half-invented idea!

    All this, and I still haven’t talked about Scrubs. Well, I warned you at the beginning there’d be a sidetrack.

    I fell into Scrubs similarly to how I fell into The Office. No less than three people had recommended the show to me since its debut in 2001 because it seemed like the “wacky” sort of thing I’d like (well, the USA Today critic didn’t tell me personally that it’d be the type of show I like, but close enough), and each time, I watched the show (I even watched it twice for one of them), I just didn’t get anything out of it. It was a bit too “out there,” and I didn’t like the ambitious emotional montage with navel-gazing that seemingly ended each episode. The most recent of recommenders was friend of the Bookshelf and noted ginger ale enthusiast Josh Calloway. I include that if only because he likes to see his name in print”spelled incorrectly. We happened to be in a social setting and a group of us watched it the next time it was on, but I still wasn’t “getting” the appeal. I saw why and how other people would like it, but it didn’t sit well with me. Fast-forward about two weeks and I happened to be flipping on a Tuesday night and I landed on Scrubs and decided to give it another try. It was pure awesome. I wish I remember which episode it was, but suddenly it all just fit together and became “appointment TV.” Needless to say, bittorrent and a lot of free time later, I’ve seen all of them.

    It’s really like a live action version of Family Guy. Of course fans from both camps would probably be offended by that comparison, but they both are very close to pop culture and showcase usually successful throw-away gags. Of course, Family Guy relies on them to the point of failure while Scrubs merely uses them to embellish the existing, coherent story (and yes, I believed this before South Park went after Family Guy under almost that exact same reasoning).

    The casting is perfect; I feel bad for all of the actors as, even including previous work, they are the characters as far as I’m concerned. I saw an ad for a movie (Hoot, maybe) featuring Janitor (who cares what the actor’s name is), and all I could think was: Man, I hope he gives JD a hard time in that movie. Really, for the younger actors, it’s probably all downhill after Scrubs is done, and for the older actors, this is the “sweet role” that you’ve worked for all those years in low profile “projects.”

    At the risk of gushing, let me get the negative out of the way: Scrubs really isn’t the be and end all of TV comedy. There aren’t many TV comedies left, and “internet” fans of Scrubs love to point out that it’s because the sitcom was/is dead and viewers are looking for something else. I’m not sure people are moving from comedy to drama, but that the sitcom crop is particularly weak at the moment. Case in point: one of “internet” Scrubs fans’ favorite episodes is from season 4, entitled “My Life in Four Cameras.” At one point, the ever-present narrator reacts to a messy situation saying something like “wouldn’t it be cool if real-life were like a sitcom.” Suddenly, the lighting, camera angles, and style of writing changes (as well as the characters costumes and the introduction of a laugh track) as the Scrubs world becomes a sitcom. They hit all of the stereotypes, including an audience reaction for the janitor’s entrance that would rival any of Al Bundy’s or Kramer’s during the darker days of Seinfeld. Of course this is all “with” funny; we’re laughing with the writers as they go right after what’s wrong with most sitcoms by pretending to be one. Fans will talk about how the episode completely trashed sitcoms, and how Scrubs is so much better than any show like that (even the successful, good ones: Friends, etc.) but when Zach Braff’s character says, “but we don’t live in a sitcom; there are no quick solutions or easy answers…” and the show returns to its normal style of presentation as an “indierock” song fades in and the figurative montage button behind-the-scenes is pressed, it shows how Scrubs owes everything to “the sitcom.” It’s all formula, but that’s not a bad thing. There’s some sort of predictably ambiguous conflict, Dr. Cox comes in (calling JD a girl’s name), rants about something, the janitor harasses JD, conflict gets mostly resolved, and ends with JD narrating over a montage and appropriately moody music. But I’m not complaining. The show is consistently hilarious, inventive in its approach to “the sitcom,” and has created likable, interesting characters out of normal TV archetypes. It’s not above its genre; it’s just at the top of it. All that, and that wasn’t even a “negative.”

    I’ll nitpick: as much as Dr. Cox is the typical “frazzled veteran,” he’s one of the most entertaining characters on a show filled with them. After the first two seasons established him as 90% evil, 10% heart of gold, he was presented as someone who just plain old wouldn’t have any friends. Then, wham, in season 3, they show him and Carla having “friend moments.” Being that they established that he had a thing for her in the past, that’s completely ignored; she just laughs at what he says, and not in a flirty way either. I guess the writers got tired of all the teenaged girls writing angry letters because “Dr. Cox harasses JD in every episode! Gawd!” and needed a different wall for the character to talk at. In light of the “it’s still a sitcom at the end of the day” argument, Turk and Carla’s relationship, being the most lasting and normal-ish of the relationships on the show is leaned on to create most of the typical sitcom stories. The writers can’t base a normal story on Cox and Jordan; it’s just not believable that they’d have relatable “couple-problems.” They’ve relied on every stage of Turk and Carla’s relationship for plots, if not longer reaching story-lines (in this order): flirting problems, dating problems, long-term relationship problems, engagement problems, engaged problems, wedding problems, marriage problems, conception problems, pregnancy problems and soon, baby problems.

    Ahh, well, I think that’s the negative off my chest. It’s frustrating to like something so much but find it so much easier to complain about. Considering that the section of this review that actually deals with the show is taken up more by these complaints, I feel like I’m giving it the short end of the stick by having a rather brief “overwhelmingly positive” section. So here goes.

    Scrubs is significant not because it has great moments, but because it has perfect moments. Times when you watch and just say “wow.” Watch the episode, “My Screw Up” from season 3, and realize how perfect the moment where Dr. Cox admits his brother-in-law is dead on the way to his funeral and wonder how poorly almost any other show would handle it. I don’t mean to turn it this into a bulleted list of those moments, but I’d be doing future viewers a disservice to not mention how JD’s break-up with Kylie was edited together, every scene with Tara Reid, most anything with Todd, “are you sure you don’t have a dead cat in there?,” Turk’s dancing, Elliot’s (a girl) latent bi-curiousness, Dr. Acula, Janitor and Dr. Cox bonding over a shared hatred of JD, most of Michael J. Fox’s two episodes, Dr. Cox’s illogical hatred of Hugh Jackman and on and on.

    Guest-casting, some sitcoms’ downfall, is used perfectly on Scrubs because the producers don’t focus on getting a “name” on the show, but getting actors that will create a (here’s that word again) perfect character. The most notable example of this is Tom Cavanaugh as Dan, JD’s (Zach Braff) brother. JD is all about quirks: conversational, physical, you name it. If this were a lesser show, someone like David Duchovny (nothing against the DD thank you very much) would simply mimic Zach Braff, “Hey, they’re brothers. I’ll just copy him.” But Tom Cavanaugh puts his own spin on it, simultaneously creating someone who’s obviously related to JD, but also an entirely different character. I’ll include a note here that John Ritter was equally amazing as JD’s down-on-his-luck, sort-of-estranged father, and for my own selfish reasons, I’ll say that it’s a real shame he died before appearing in more than just that one episode in the first season.

    ****½

    Scrubs receives four-and-a-half stars due to the sheer quality of each and every episode. Casting, guest casting, all of the minor roles, most all of the writing, the attention to detail: it’s all perfect. The show has absolutely perfect moments, as I incompletely detailed above. But that’s why it also gets docked half a star; the show has those perfect moments, but there aren’t perfect episodes. Where Arrested Development had multiple perfect episodes, Scrubs has had five seasons and hasn’t done it yet. They will one day, but it will probably the last episode. There aren’t many seasons left for the show; aside from the fact that its ratings aren’t the best, January 2007 will mark the beginning of the sixth season. Seven or eight years is about the maximum for any TV show; the viewers have matured into a different age bracket, the writers “aren’t where they were” when they started, and actors begin to get antsy. Friends lasted to ten seasons, though 8 and 9 were considered the weakest seasons and pure cash is what kept the cast from leaving. And The Simpsons…well, let’s not even look at that one (but let’s remember that season 9 is the first one where the bad episodes outnumber the good). The next season of Scrubs will be a pretty “busy” one, with JD having decided he was looking to settle down (and probably becoming a father-to-be), Jordan is pregnant (again), and Turk and Carla are about to add “baby problems” to that list I made above. I’ll predict that Jordan and Dr. Cox’s pregnancy will end in a miscarriage, if only because they haven’t done that yet on the show, and the writers aren’t afraid to pull emotional punches (does everyone remember when they had JD and Elliot [that’s a girl] “finally” get together, only to have him universally decide it wouldn’t work not even two episodes later). With Arrested Development gone, that leaves The Office and Scrubs to stand for “the current TV landscape.” Steve Carell’s “brink-of-superstardom” position makes it so The Office will probably last two more seasons at most. In fact, assuming Scrubs gets to seven seasons, that brings it to a close at about the same time. But this is all negative stuff; these are the best shows on TV. TV shows are a lot like dogs; you get attached to them, and when everything’s good you forget that you’ll be around a lot longer than they will. It’s always sad to think of the end when everything’s still good.

  • The Concept of The Da Vinci Code The Video Game


    I think the picture speaks for itself.

    So as I was walking into the movie theatre yesterday, on my way to see what I think will be the summer’s biggest-selling movie (despite the terrible reviews), The Da Vinci Code, and I was handed a coupon for Best Buy. SWEET! Except that it was only good for a video game… you guessed it, The Da Vinci Code, for Playstation and X-box.

    I couldn’t help but laugh at how preposterous this was. I was reminded of the scene in Spaceballs where Mel Brooks was showing off all of the Spaceballs product tie-ins. I had the notion of Star-Wars-like fast food restaurants giving out cryptexes in happy meals, or “The Da Vinci Coke” littering store shelves.

    But the more I thought about it, I wondered what kind of video game this would be? I mean, video games have to be exciting and engaging, or else the player realizes he’s just sitting around doing nothing productive. That’s why most of the video games that are based on movies are made from action movies. Seriously, would you want to play a game based on Brokeback Mountain? Think of all of the things you and your player 2 can do together… like herding cattle!

    What kind of format could this game take? Would it be like Grand Theft Auto, with Tom Hanks and the french chick driving around, stealing people’s cars by boring them to death with lectures about where the swastika came from? Or maybe he could choke people with his long, flowing locks of hair.

    Could it be a fighting game where you play as Silas and try to get past the Priory members? You’d then advance to nuns (hint: hit them with stone slabs), and aging, crippled Grail scholars (watch out for the crutches!). Of course after every victory, the bonus round includes self-flagellation.

    Personally, I’d love to see a whole line of games. The DaVinciKart, where the characters race around Paris, in small european cars, throwing out things like Silas’ spike strip, and the Madonna of the Rocks painting, to make other players swerve. There could be a soccer game, or a baseball game. There could even be a Mario-like game, where Tom Hanks has to save Sophie from the evil “Frogs” by jumping on them.

    All joking aside, I really have no idea how they’d make a straightforward game out of this movie. I’m sure it would involve a ton of cut-scene videos of people talking and explaining all sorts of things about the holy grail and the Priory of Sion.
    The only thing I can imagine it being, honestly, is in the style of a puzzle-adventure game like the old LucasArts games that were so beloved. Even that though, is a stretch, because anyone who’s seen the movie or read the book knows all the answers to the riddles, all the intense “history”, where the characters should go next, and ultimately, where the resting place of the Grail “is” anyway. There’s no point in going through the entire journey if you already know the answers, because the fun of adventure games is figuring out the solutions.

    There is no possible way that this game could both fit into an existing video game model and be interesting. It’s interesting as a book and a movie because you’re engaged in following the characters along, passively. Once you’re actively controlling the characters, there’s nothing interesting about what they do, only what happens to them, and video games aren’t about being passive.

    ½

    .5 stars, for allowing me to imagine all of the humorous possibilities.

  • The Degree Navigator Class Registration System


    They kinda look like the Azores.

    With the one-year anniversary of my college graduation taking place on May 16th, I figured I’d write something about my college experience, something that the few of you who read this that went to Ithaca would be able to relate to and feel nostalgic about. I decided early however, that I wasn’t just going to do a review on my college experience, as that would seem too “Dear Diary” for me. I wasn’t going to complain about the “food” in the Campus Center Dining hall ad nauseam, because I’m sure that’s been done to death… and most people move off campus or to the Circle Apartments and don’t deal with the “Double C” for their last year or two. I wasn’t going to complain about the curriculum, mostly because those issues have been dealt with, starting with the class after me, and they’re much better off for it. Lastly, I wasn’t going to offer warm and fuzzy memories of how great all my friends were, the teachers were, the facilities were, and my extracurricular opportunities and the semester in L.A. were.

    What else could there be to complain about/praise? Well if you haven’t guessed by reading the title, I’ll put it bluntly: The method of registering for classes that we used.

    Let me preface this all by saying that before computers were used, I have absolutely no idea how a class registration system could be fair. I can assume that people wrote down on a piece of paper the classes that they needed, and the classes that they wanted and turned it in and waited for the results… sort of like in high school, where your guidance counselor spent 25 minutes convincing you to take a bunch of extra classes that you didn’t come in wanting, (of course, taking some time out in the middle of the meeting to take a call from his real estate side-job) only to find that when your schedule arrived weeks later, you weren’t enrolled in any of the classes anyway. Maybe that was just me. But by handing in forms that said what you wanted your schedule to look like, how were students to be guaranteed that those were the classes they were going to get? What if classes were filled? What if new sections that students were switched into conflicted with other classes the student wanted to take? How did the administration decide what order to take individual registrations? Obviously by credit amount, but what about students who were at the same grade level, with the same amount of credits?

    In any case, it seems like as an incoming freshman, they had just recently implemented a computerized system by which all the students would register for their next semester’s classes, presumably to solve all of these problems. The program, “The Degree Navigator”, itself wasn’t that terribly hard to understand. There were multiple tabs to take you to different views. The most important three (as i can’t remember what the other two were) were the class selection tab, the schedule tab, (i’m sure they were standard on registration software for everyone at every school), and the strange “island” view, which conveniently showed you what your different requirements were (as in communications, non-comm, liberal arts [a phrase whose meaning still eludes me], and the various requirements within each major) shown in the form of colorful islands floating on a bright blue background. When you rolled your mouse over them, it showed what you had completed and what you were still required to take. I believe that those might’ve been shown in pie chart form, but I could be wrong.

    You would go to the registrar’s website, and there would be a link to register for classes. Clicking on it would open the application, as sort of an advanced pop-up window with forms. This was the degree navigator. You’d go over to the selection tab, type the course number into the spot for it, and hit enter. The course description and section times would come up, and you were allowed to add the classes to your schedule. You would then have to go over to the side where all the selected classes were and individually finalize the registration for each class. If there were time conflicts between sections, the program would tell you, but in an unhelpful and very computer-like way, by course number. I wouldn’t expect the program to give me the course name, so I’m not really complaining about that. In fact, once you used the program the first time, you realized it was actually a pretty easy application to navigate around… provided you could understand the whole “island” thing, which was more for telling you what classes you had done and what you needed to do, rather than for registering.

    The problem was in the actual method by which the whole student body was meant to register. It happened during the course of a week and a half every semester. A different group registered every day, starting with students in the honors program (i don’t know that i ever met any of them), then freshmen, then seniors (yes freshmen got to register before seniors), juniors, and sophomores… of course all of those were divided up into first and second semester students, via credits. So each day of registering saw students within about a 12-18 credit window signing up at the same time. Not too huge of a problem. We weren’t a terribly large school, so it wasn’t like there were more than a few thousand people registering per day. There was no breakdown however, within each day, and so you had a couple thousand people trying to get on the system at the exact same time. That shouldn’t’ve been a problem… after all, there’s at least four times that amount that use the internet at one time, any other time of day or year. The problem however, was that our residential computer network was incredibly unstable to begin with (blamed by the people in charge on the proliferation of computer viruses on the network…. cause I’m sure that other schools don’t have to deal with viruses, and they manage to be fully operational), complete with fits of shutting down at the most inopportune times (a subject for an entirely different review, and someone more knowledgeable in the area of computer networking than I am). That coupled with the fact that everyone was going to the same site and trying to open the same web-based application proved not the best way to handle things. Rather than giving us a program that we could install on our computers, bundled with the initial netware software that we had to use to be able to use the network, and the antivirus stuff, they figured that opening it from the registrar site would be the most viable option. Of course they were completely wrong.

    It was an epic disaster. The residential network just couldn’t handle the sheer number of people attempting to log on (if you managed to open the program prior to the start time you could open the application, just not log on to actually register). And of course rather than just telling us that we couldn’t be logged on because something somewhere along the line was too busy, it just kept trying to log everyone on. Of course, in the best possible scenario of it not working, the program froze. In the worst, it caused people’s computers to crash, freeze, and quite possibly be thrown out of windows in fits of frustration.

    In fact, only serving to exacerbate things more was the registration time. Because classes started at 8 a.m., and the people in charge wanted to make sure that everyone had the same opportunity to get to classes before the seats were filled, the registration window opened at the extremely early 7 a.m. That’s right. Imagine thousands of frustrated college students pissed off at the idea of being shut out of classes and screwed over by the system, dealing with a program that isn’t going to work correctly, having to reboot their computer numerous times, and on top of that, having to get up before 7. At least we had the opportunity to register from the comfort of our own computers, if we could ever get this demon program to operate correctly.

    The worst year that I remember was the second semester of my freshman year, registering for sophomore year. It was early April probably, and it was also probably really cold and rainy outside. I just remember sitting at my computer, my comforter draped over me, waiting, complaining to neighbors across the hall and next door. I sat there, knowing I was going to miss my 8 a.m. class. Everyone that I had recently added to my AIM buddy list was in the same boat as I was. People had away messages up about how much they hated the degree navigator, how they wished it would die, and how they were so tired and pissed off in general. Having just gone through a phase of creating new screennames and harassing people with them, I saw this as an opportunity to pose as the Degree Navigator through IM, asking people why they hated me so much. I was THAT bored and pissed off. People who managed to log on were offering to register other people for classes via phone, but others were skeptical about giving out their registration password for fear that their schedule might be tampered with. It wasn’t until 10:15 that I was able to log on and register, making me late for my 10:25 class. Of course, I got the bottom of the barrel when it came to classes that weren’t course requirements. I can’t remember what I had, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t anywhere near what I had in mind the night before.

    The following semesters were much of the same, but not taking as long, as more people in my class (year) decided to move off campus, or use the computer labs, which were on a different network, to do their registration. Knowing that I’d probably have to wait in line to use a computer for as long as it would actually take me to register from my room, and not wanting to get dressed at 6:50, and instead go back to bed when I was done, I decided for next few semesters to just ride out the storm in my room. Unlike the people in New Orleans, my decision wasn’t really all that detrimental to my health. Sure it took forever to get logged on, but none of the future attempts took more than an hour. Still, the away messages were up, the people were complaining across the hall, and there was a feeling of bonding.

    Without a popular sports team to rally behind (save the one game a year where the entire school went crazy for the football team, mostly because it was an excuse to get drunk at 8 a.m.), or, fortunately, some tragic event that effected everyone at the school (save the September 11th stuff), the universal hatred of the degree navigator registration system brought everyone together. In fact, I’d wager that had somebody decided to sell T-shirts that said “I survived Registration ’02”, they’d probably make enough money for the school to fix the actual problem. To prove my point even more, I typed in “Degree Navigator”+sucks in google, and these are the first two pages it came up with: here and here.

    Of course, what this 7 a.m. east coast registration time meant for me when I was in L.A. was that I had to register at 4 a.m. Pacific Time….and we didn’t have the internet in our apartment. I’m not sure how we got around that, but I know I didn’t walk 3 blocks at 4 a.m. to register at the Ithaca L.A. student center.

    The Degree Navigator was a good system in theory, but they say the same thing about communism. There were bigger problems that everyone pretty much blamed on the Navigator, giving it a bad rap.

    ***½
    The Degree Navigator program itself gets three and a half stars. It was mostly easy to navigate, and I’m sure it was a bit more fair and, yes, less of a hassle, than however they did it before it was done by computer. It was pretty much the scapegoat for the entire student body’s issues with registration, and served to bring them together with something unified to complain about.

    *
    The actual process of class registration gets one star for not having the foresight to see, especially after it happened numerous times before, that the network would get log-jammed by allowing so many people on at once; for not allowing people to get into classes that they needed; and for intruding on the sleep of thousands of students who schedule their earliest class at 11 a.m. for a reason.

  • The Current TV Landscape (The Office, Scrubs, and the Ghost of Arrested Development) – Part 2

    Just in time for the second season’s final. Also, look for part 3 of this series of reviews “soon.” It will look into Scrubs and address the actual “current TV landscape.”

    Part 2

    As I alluded to in the previous entry, the length of time between Arrested Development’s last regular airing and its finale of four episodes in two hours opened a door in my TV watching schedule. Not a door in terms of having that time to watch new shows, but looking for other shows to watch now that whatever my subconscious limit for TV was unmet. I had “heard” the “buzz” about the British version of The Office, tracked down an episode online, and was thoroughly unimpressed. It wasn’t that I had an issue with the writing, the casting, the presentation style, etc., but just that I couldn’t understand what those crazy British people were saying. With respect to the mass of people proclaiming how great it was, when the American version first aired, I set aside time to watch it. And I didn’t like it. I really didn’t like it.
    The Office

    I still hate the internet.

    I couldn’t (and can’t) put my finger on exactly why I didn’t like the pilot, but I never gave the next week’s episode a chance. TV shows generally get one chance with me. Of course, The Office and (as you’ll learn later) Scrubs are the reason I now include the “generally” in that statement. A random Thursday night of flipping almost a year later landed me at NBC once again. (Actually, I think it might not’ve been the most random flipping. If I remember correctly, friend of the Bookshelf and all-around-good-guy Josh CallOway insisted on putting it on. This time it was HI-larious. I later learned from an …can’t think of a condescending adjective man that the pilot of the American series was identical to the British pilot, and in both cases, the show picked up and was no longer teh suck.

    Arrested Development wasn’t the first mockumentary-type TV show (or was it? I don’t know, and I’m too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia). It also wasn’t the first comedy to not have a laugh track, but on both of those counts, I’ll say that it was one of the highest profile examples in terms of TV critics pointing it out. That’s related to The Office because its presentation emphasizes the documentary part, with snippets of the characters talking to an unseen interviewer laced between the filmed action. Arrested Development’s characters never acknowledged the cameramen, but on The Office, the characters make faces “for” the cameras, knowing they’ll be seen. The only aspect other than “shaky-camera” and a breaking of the traditional TV sitcom and drama grammar that pulled viewers into “I’m sort of watching a documentary” was that the camera people sometimes made their presence known (being kicked out of the courtroom, a most notable example). (See, I like Arrested Development so much that I even talk about it when I’m specifically reviewing something else).

    Simply, The Office offers much of what Arrested Development didn’t. There’s something more there. Every character (except for Dwight, maybe) has shown vulnerability, and for the ladies (and lady-men), there is a complicated and disturbingly accurate sort of love story between two of the more likable characters, and for the jackasses, there’s an accurately disturbing romance between the two least likable characters. The show is really awkwardness on the screen for 22 minutes at a time. It’s like watching George Michael Bluth for an entire episode. Every character is either awkward or are so out of touch that the other characters are forced to be awkward around them. There’s nuance in the show that, my limited TV watching habits aside, is lacking in most shows (except Six Feet Under, of course — no, I’ve never seen it, but I’m working on being more pretentious).

    Case in point: watch the second season’s Halloween episode. Michael (Steve Carell), who is normally presented as a completely out-of-touch doof, tries to play tough guy all day about having to fire someone for budgetary reasons (well, he actually tries passing off the responsibility to someone else), but is completely torn apart at having to fire someone he considers a friend. (The genius of the show is that none of the workers want him as a friend (except Dwight, and ironically, Michael thinks he’s too cool to be Dwight’s friend).) At the end of the work day, Michael quietly removes the pumpkin the fire-ee smashed on his windshield and drives home, trying to keep up the tough guy persona. As established earlier in the episode, Halloween is Michael’s favorite holiday, but as the episode ends we see Michael sitting in his condo just starting at the floor, still affected by the firing. The doorbell rings, he walks to the front door, and is greeted by trick-or-treaters. In a very real way, you can see just how this is exactly the thing that whatever the character’s “real” self (meaning not the “cool boss” that he thinks he is in the office) needed to get himself out of drowning in the feelings of having to fire someone. It’s all a very “real” moment. The type of emotional moment that Arrested Development would make an inside joke about, then reference two seasons later. To top it all off, the whole sequence was obviously filmed with heavy zoom, giving the impression that the “documentary crew” isn’t allowed inside his house, so they’re filming from across the street. It’s attention to detail that makes the show “work.” There are rarely any huge, obvious punchlines (critics said the same of Arrested Development), and Steve Carell’s schtick would get old if that’s all it had going for it. Which reminds me… the Emmy’s have this habit of giving Best Actor/Actress awards to actors that play completely off-the-wall characters. I’m thinking how John Lithgow won three (3!) of them for bouncing around like a moron on 3rd Rock from the Sun (no, it doesn’t deserve a link). Steve Carell won 2006’s for six episodes of The Office. He won the award before I had seen any episodes, and I figured it was more of the same: actor plays completely unrealistic, “zany” character and whoever gives out the Emmy’s awards him annually, and this was year one for Carell. But if Jason Bateman hadn’t been nominated , Carell deserved it. And he deserves it next year, too.

    ****½

    The Office receives four-and-a-half stars due to its receiving of the mantle of “awesome TV” from Arrested Development and completely trashing its British forebears. It loses half a star due to how it sometimes relies on sitcom norms to keep the viewers interested: the intern claiming his “voicemail’s been spotty” after his non-mutual sort of girlfriend says he never returns his calls – comic gold, feeling sorry for alcoholics instead of laughing at them – sounds like something I’d see on Frasier…if I had watched it (I’m serious about that whole pretentious thing). But hey, I can’t complain too much about a show where one of the characters considers it a real honor to be sworn in as a member of the office building’s previously one-bored-man security team, and really believes that there is an oath required to take the made-up job.

    iwry

  • Ben Folds – “Songs For Silverman”

    songsforsilverman.jpg
    I should take some photography lessons from this guy. Every time I try to take a picture of myself in the mirror with a forlorn look on my face, all that shows up is a bright light.

    I’ve got a bit of a dilemma. I’m a huuuge Ben Folds/Ben Folds Five fan…. as I’m sure most of you already know. If you asked me to put the albums in order of my favorites, I’d probably be able to do it. The problem is that it wouldn’t be the same order that I would rank the overall album quality. “Songs for Silverman“, his first solo full-length album in at least 3 years, has such a high concentration of songs that I would deem “best he’s ever recorded”, that I would put it just slightly ahead of “Whatever and Ever Amen”, on my favorites, however, there are a few songs that are weaker than anything on the earlier Ben Folds Five release, dropping the actual star rating below WAEA.

    While WAEA was a collection of good songs, varying fast and slow, deep and shallow, “Songs for Silverman” is more uniform, and at the risk of sounding like a press release, more “mature”. The songs are for the most part slower, have more instrumentation and vocals, more thoughtful lyrics… and just overall, more ambition. To understand a bit better, a brief history, that will probably turn into a bit longer than I intended.

    Ben Folds Five was founded as a “fun” piano-electric(usually) bass-drums trio that specialized in “punk rock for wusses” as it was put. The first album was filled with mostly fast, piano-driven songs that were pretty light and enjoyable, with mostly good melodies and a fairly sloppy production quality that had a feeling of spontaneity. The second album, WAEA, had more of a polished feel, with more strings, some slower songs, a “mouth keyboard” of sorts in some of the songs, and more complex three-part backing vocals. The band moved forward even more with the third album, “The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner“, a “concept album” that used mainly slower, even more introspective songs, more experimental instrumentation, and a definite album cohesiveness, including lyrical and musical ideas that were carried over into multiple tracks.

    The progress stalled though, when the band broke up, and Folds went solo. His next album, “Rocking the Suburbs” seemed to basically be a sequel to WAEA in style and substance, in fact including a sequel song to one on the first album. He played all the instruments on the album, even though some songs sounded like they had electronic drums in places. The problem though, was that he was touring without a backup band or singers, and so he was writing songs that he could play without backing vocals (actually many of the tracks on the album had overdubbed Folds vocal tracks in the background) or extensive instrumentation.

    Back to the present, and he now has a more-than-capable drummer and bassist duo behind him. With this in mind, the album at times has a feeling like it might be where the original band could’ve eventually progressed to, but that’s a moot point. What’s important is that with the exception of a few weak tracks in the middle, this album is filled with jam-packed songs that range from jazz and blues riffs to pop to classical-style, sometimes in the same song. The songs are dense, and for the most part under five minutes, yet some of them I’d say are epic. I would especially say this of “Jesusland”, and the last track “Prison Food”, a song that’s moved up to my number two favorite, with an ending that is built up so much and has so much going on between the furious drumming and bass playing, pulsing piano part, the too-many-to-guess-part harmonies going on, and the mood-setting steel guitar, which brings me to my next point.

    When this album came out the online Ben Folds community didn’t accept it right away… to tell you the truth it took a few listens for me to get to like it. The songs and tone of the entire album (we’ll get to individual songs in a minute), were completely different than anything that came before, even including concerts the previous summer and the 3 EPs released the year before. The biggest issue for a lot of people was the guitar. Yes, for the first time in any of the tracks that I can remember, there’s a non-bass guitar. In fact one song has a regular acoustic guitar, but another has a 12-string, and two have lap-steel guitars in them, enhancing the fullness of the sound that much more.

    Many of the songs borrow short musical ideas, or tones (in the English class sense of the word, not the musical one), from previous songs… including “Jesusland” borrowing an opening from “The Ascent of Stan”, and the tempo and drum styling from “Mess”; “Landed” borrowing the main piano riff from “Philosophy” and turning it inside out; “Give Judy My Notice”, upgrading a solo-piano version from one of the EPs (adding backing vocals, steel guitar, drums, etc.); “Sentimental Guy”, borrowing the bluesiness (is that a word?) of “All U Can Eat” from another of the EPs; “Time” sounding eerily similar to, but a bit more somber than a song called “Bruised” that he recorded with Ben Lee and Ben Kweller; and “Prison Food”‘s main piano part coming from a superfan community favorite that was released on a collection of rarities, “Emaline”. I know that’s a long list, but I sincerely believe that the songs as a whole are different enough, and in most cases, completely better than the songs containing the borrowed ideas. “Landed”‘s been featured as the theme for the kennel club dog show, and now on the Hilton ads, “Judy” was slow and kinda empty without the added music and faster pace, and “Jesusland”, “Time”, and especially “Prison Food” are among the best on the album, if not the best he’s ever recorded.

    For the most part, these songs include what could possibly be considered the most difficult piano parts he’s written (especially the first four), and a large number (every one excluding “You to Thank”; “Gracie“, and “Sentimental Guy”) having what might be his most complicated backing vocals to date.

    Overall the album is very intriguing and complex, and grows on you the more you listen to it, as long as you don’t get bogged down by a few slower songs in the middle, and the sappy, yet completely understandable, “Gracie”.

    ****½

    “Songs for Silverman” gets four and a half stars, as it’s more complicated and pleasing to listen to than most every pop recording you can find these days, a few of the songs stand out among my top favorites (which is enough to counteract the sub-par ones), and it has a cohesiveness to it, with only “Gracie” feeling awkward and out of place.

    In case you’re wondering, I’d rate the rest of them, in order of my favorites: “WAEA”- Five Stars; “Rocking the Suburbs”- Four Stars; “TUBORM”- Three and a half stars; and “Ben Folds Five”- Three stars. Not included in those are “Fear of Pop: Volume One“, “Ben Folds Live“, “Naked Baby Photos“, “William Shatner: Has Been“, or any of the EPs.

  • American Dreamz

    This review might be rendered irrelevant by now, considering the extremely poor showing of the movie financially, and its inevitable disappearance from theatres within the next two weeks. In fact, after being totally overwhelmed with the ubiquitous advertising campaign, I’ve heard nothing about it in the past few weeks. I’m sure by now you probably don’t care about this movie, or have totally forgotten about it. I’ve written it though, and you’re going to read it.


    Now imagine a comedy that was funny. That’s right keep imagining.

    Coming off of seeing “Thank You for Smoking” the week before, I was hoping that “Hollywood” would be two for two in the satire game. I was thoroughly disappointed. I should’ve known better after looking at other people’s reviews, but I’ve been known to not agree with most critics sometimes, see “Good night and Good Luck”, “Matchpoint”, and that terrible Robert Altman murder-mystery, “Gosford Park”. But I hate it when they’re right and I don’t listen to them. I mean seriously, how could it fail? It’s got a great premise (a president who’s losing face with the country is booked to be a guest judge on a fake american idol show, and terrorists, seeing an opportunity to come face to face with the POTUS, have one of their own attempt to make the finals in order to blow him up), the director of some good movies, including “About a Boy” and “In Good Company“, and it’s got a great cast. AND NY1‘s own Neil Rosen gave it a big four out of four apples!!

    I have a confession to make that’s kinda off subject. I like Hugh Grant. I think he’s entertaining and enjoyable in pretty much every movie I’ve seen him in. I do like him better in non-romantic comedy movies, and I know he’s got a limited range, but he’s good at what he does. Having him play a Simon Cowell character here is absolutely brilliant, as I can’t think of anyone who could pull it off better. The rest of the cast is stacked as well, with 3 academy award nominees. The direction is fine, and the acting passable, Grant, Mandy Moore, Seth Meyers, and the Arab performer are the standouts, with everyone else kinda coasting along with not much to do except play bland cookie-cutter stereotypes. I think the reason that both of these aspects come across as mediocre, however, is because the writing is just below the quality it should be. Sure the idea and the story are interesting and relevant, but somehow, it’s not funny. There’s no jokes. No punchlines, no pratfalls, no double entendres or mistaken identities, and only a few asinine situations. The humor in a satire is supposed to come from exaggerating reality the point of ridiculousness to show our foibles. Most of this movie, however, just goes for imitation and not exaggeration. The President story is actually the least interesting, as instead of trying to come up with completely outlandish politician generalizations (dr. strangelove perfectly showed this, without having to resort to cheap imitations), they go for the tired bush/cheney imitation, with nothing new or funny to say about either. It’s as if they were conflicted between making fun of the president and humanizing him. He’s not completely stupid, just sheltered by his chief of staff, and a bit socially awkward, and he barely says anything that would remotely be considered a bush-ism.

    The Mandy Moore story is good, until they attempt to make a dramatic turn with her and Hugh Grant, which would actually work well in any other movie, but doesn’t seem to fit here. It’s as if they can’t decide between sweeping generalization and dedicated character examination. In fact, these are the only two characters in the entire thing that don’t play as stereotypes and have any sort of internal conflict (outside of the arab contestant, whose conscience seems entirely motivated by having us feel sympathetic for him for plot reasons).

    The most interesting aspect of the entire movie, and the only one that actually could qualify as satire and not just imitation, is the show itself. The caricatures are spot on, from the sassy black woman, to the Clay Aiken pretty-boy and the rocker (one of which was played by trey parker, but with as little screen time as they got, I couldn’t tell which one it was), whose song pretty much consists of variations of the phrases “I’m a rockin man”, “I like to rock”, and “I’m the real thing”. In addition, the other two finalists (aside from Mandy Moore) consist of the aforementioned arab, who’s often hilarious in his on-stage performances, and a hasidic jew who sings about getting down with the ladies. The only time that the movie really goes for a straightforward joke, it nails it. After a huge disaster happens at the show’s finale, and the technical difficulties sign comes up, it says, “The voting lines are now open”. We are shown images of people all over the world watching in shock at the events, but then picking up their phones simultaneously to vote, including the terrorists who vote via satellite phone.

    Basically that’s it. The movie had promise, but without a better script it just came across as boring and for the most part, unfunny. Oh yeah, and there’s a gay arab choreographer. If something like that doesn’t get on your nerves after five minutes, this may be the movie for you. I wanted to like it, there just weren’t enough good things for me to justify myself liking it.

    *½

    American Dreamz gets one and a half stars for being a movie that set itself up well, but opted not to go for many punchlines at all. The cast was game, and the direction a little confused at times, but most of that confusion falls on the writers. I was bored for at least half of it, and without any characters to root for, (because the only ones that weren’t poorly realized caricatures were too self-loathing) you kinda just find yourself hoping that the movie will end soon. In “Thank You for Smoking”, the main character is more self-indifferent than self-loathing, and that’s why it’s easier to root for him, and that movie as a whole. I highly suggest that movie over this one, as it’s much smarter, deeper, and more biting.