Oh boy. I really don’t know where to begin.  The Twilight series of books and now accompanying films are a genuine global phenomenon, and it is almost enough to make me give up on the world altogether.  Okay, that’s unfair, as there are plenty of cultural touch points that are just as bad and befuddling in their popularity (Dan Brown, Transformers, and The Hills come to mind).  Still, there’s something insidious about the enterprise that just feels worse in some way.  The writing in the books (of what little I have read, anyway) is appalling, and I can’t help but feel that an entire generation is getting dumber for reading them.  At least with Dan Brown and Nicholas Sparks it’s a more adult demographic, meaning that an awful lot of people are already lost.  Stephanie Meyer’s series is directed at tweens and teens, however, and I worry that it might stunt their growth.  Only time will tell, and that’s literature anyway, which isn’t my area in the first place.  Based on the two films so far, however, I wonder if they’re not just feeding a generation of emotional idiots, but actually creating them.

To recap the first in the series, boring, annoying, drippy Bella (played by a comatose Kristen Stewart) moves to a small, foggy town.  She’s something of an outsider and has to negotiate the difficulties of adjusting to a new life in a new school, which isn’t easy for her.  After all, it takes about ten minutes into her first day for a group of loving, really friendly peers to take her into her group, after which she’s forced to fight the eternal struggle to be as callous, condescending, and dismissive of them as possible.  It is not an easy trick to pull off, as they find no fault with her and are continually supportive through everything.  High School is never a cakewalk.  She becomes obsessed with a family of pale-faced loners, and one in particular:  the intense(ly bland) Edward Cullen, played by Robert Pattinson as a humourless, self-important bore.  They begin an epic romance that can only be had by people who are entirely without personalities and interests.  That’s basically it, really, as the first film is a meandering and structureless mess, directed with professional indifference by Catherine Hardwicke.

New Moon picks up where Twilight left off, with Bella and Edward still in the most boring ‘epic’ romance of all time.  Every time they kiss they moan and grumble in either orgasmic delight or terrifying sadness, I can’t tell which.  They cannot consummate their love, of course, because in Twilightland, ever man is an uncontrollable beast who will ravish you if you don’t push them away fast enough.  Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile, presumably in under two seconds given their speed.  Instead of passionate lovemaking, they’ve decided to fill their time disproving Schopenhauer by demonstrating that the fulfillment of desire does not lead to boredom, but that it is the desire itself that is boredom.  I hope the third part consists of them writing down their findings and then climaxing with a blood-curdling peer-review process, but I digress.  So the two lovebirds continue on, never really asking about each other’s days but rather greeting each other with some variation on ‘Hey!  If I’m not with you, I’ll KILL myself!’ because that is just how epic their love is.  A problem arises when one of Edward’s brother’s tries to eat Bella, and instead of working this out like normal people, Edward dumps Bella and runs off to be alone.  Now, you’d expect a piece of horror fantasy to exploit this post-breakup situation by using the tropes of a well loved genre to metaphorically explore the emotional fallout, the Buffy did or the way even these films do to advance their abhorrent, backwards morality.  Something along those lines would be far too interesting and entertaining for New Moon, which instead just shows Bella sitting in a chair catatonic for months, her depression occasionally punctuated by laughable night terrors.  She briefly becomes an adrenaline junkie before attempting to move on with Jacob (Taylor Lautner, who at least attempts a smile on occasion, thus giving him the lead-character charisma award), an old friend and eventual werewolf who builds motorcycles.  The film trundles forward as we watch Bella shamelessly use the poor kid for his affection, as her approximation-of-a-heart lies elsewhere, and thus the love triangle consists of a line segment and a sad, pathetic dot hovering off to the side.

Chris Weitz, responsible for my much-beloved About a Boy and the mediocre mess that was The Golden Compass (based on an infinitely greater book series for teens, I should add) is slightly more interested in the material than his predecessor, helped in no small part by a significantly larger budget.  Still, very little can be done with the wretched source material, and the screenplay itself is so dull it’s hard to truly blame the performers for being unable to infuse their parts with anything approaching humanity, even if they are the undead.  In fairness to Weitz, there is a fairly entertaining sequence involving a Thom Yorke song and a chase through the woods, which is well shot and cut together, and helped in no small part by its utter lack of dialogue.  Beyond that, the film lies on the screen as lifeless as its love interest.  It opens with a cheap framing device that should pique the viewer’s interest in what happens, but only serves to remind us that, ninety minutes in, we still have another act to go.

All in all, it is a terrible viewing experience.  Boring when it’s not outrageously cringeworthy, it is a film that only exists because of its brand popularity.  The appeal of the love story must be in its dumbfounded nothingness, allowing teenagers to put themselves in the empty space that is Bella and be swept away by a powerful force of nothing.  Edward is not challenging in any way, for what might give him personality might take away his mythic mystique, and the appeal is not for an actual romance but rather a superbeing choosing an average girl and raising her to the level of special by association.  You can blame the success of a lot of numbskull blockbusters on 13-year-old boys, but in so doing you must blame the success of The Twilight Saga on 13-year-old girls.  Neither assessment is particularly fair, however.  Shit, after all, is not gender specific.

-M

Poor Roland Emmerich.  The man is in a war of escalation with himself, and I think he might just have ended it, destroying himself in the process.  He, along with his ex-partner Dean Devlin, revitalized the disaster picture with Independence Day, a film that in some ways gave birth to the mega-blockbuster summer period we’re still in today.  After some moderate successes and downright failures, he split with Devlin and came out with his best movie to date, The Day After Tomorrow, one of my favourite boneheaded blockbusters of the decade.  As Mr. Emmerich has tapped into that natural desire to see everything you know completely destroyed in a 9/11-would-have-been-so-awesome-if-it-wasn’t-real way, the next logical step after destroying major cities, and then a healthy chunk of every continent, was the entire world itself.  He must be preparing to follow it up with a CERN-made black hole that is eating up the entire solar system as a scrappy band of survivors make their way to Alpha Centauri and deal with their family issues along the way.

So yes, 2012 deals with effectively the destruction of the entire planet.  The Mayan prediction is mentioned, but it isn’t some supernatural force, but solar flares creating a new particle in the earth that melts the blah diddy blah blah blah.  Trust me, it doesn’t matter; I just wish that somebody had told Emmerich and his co-writer Harald Kloser (who has made that inevitable leap from film composing to screenwriting, presumably after somebody read his spec script for Chubby Rain II).  The set up is so perfunctory you can imagine an entire audience willing the earth to part to swallow up the thirty minutes of exposition and character sketches that are neither entertaining nor interesting.  I can imagine the cast thinking the same thing, considering how they had little else on their mind than the paycheck.  John Cusack plays what I assume to be a terrible writer whose divorced wife (Amanda Peet) has moved on with a plastic surgeon (Tom McCarthy, who truly deserves the money based on his work elsewhere) and his kids don’t have much interest in him and everything is terrible into the world falls apart.  Leave it to a writer to see the end of the world as an opportunity to get his family back together.  There are a host of other characters, from the President (an earnest Danny Glover), his chief scientist (an earnest Chiwetel Ejiofor), the President’s daughter (an earnest Thandie Newton), and so on.  Oliver Platt is the only one who seems to be having any fun here, except for maybe Woody Harrelson, but only in that way that stoners are having a great time stoned while everyone around them is bored and slightly embarrassed.  There are a slew of others off in their own little movies, occasionally popping up to take our heroes from point A to B or to just simply die.

Thankless as such roles seem, their deaths cost a lot of money.  Let’s face it, anybody going to this film is there to see wholesale destruction and that’s about it.  The special effects on display are pretty fantastic, sure, but it isn’t long before they become just plain tedious.  The single moment of real awe for the beauty of the end of the world is given over to the creation of a supervolcano at a national park, and even that is quickly forgotten in favour of the eighth narrow escape in a twenty-minute time span.  All credit to the effects team, they love their attention to detail, but at some point it becomes dull and then, even worse, it flips over into nausea.  There’s a moment when a character looks out his side window and sees a torn open office building with people dangling from ledges, struggling against gravity to survive.  There’s a fetishistic glee to the horrible and hopeless ends billions of people meet, and without anything particularly fun or amusing to occupy ourselves with, we’re stuck reflecting on the sheer ugliness of the CGI sheen.

The bleakness aside, the film continues to trundle on for what seems like years, wasting our time with ham-fisted dialogue while we wait to work out where the next, and hopefully more fun, sequence is coming from.  The beauty of The Day After Tomorrow comes from the joy you can take from the contrived B/C/D/E/F/G plots.  For instance, the main character there, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal)’s mother, played by Sela Ward, is a nurse taking care of dying children in a hospital.  One child isn’t evacuated, so she decides to stay with him until an ambulance can take him away.  There is virtually no tension in these scenes, and the whole subplot sputters out into nothing in no time at all, but you have to howl with laughter at the fact that the dying cancer kid is reading Peter Pan, only he can’t actually read but he really likes the pictures.  Even without the snarky enjoyment of B-movie cheese, the central Sam and his love interest and Sam and his father arcs are, although simplistic and a little clumsy, are enjoyable enough. No such anchor in 2012, where the dull problems of these dull people are addressed in the dullest way possible, until some horrendous Russian Oligarch cliché comes barreling into the scene and somehow makes everything worse.

And so it goes on for almost 2 hours and 40 minutes.  Boring, boring, kind of interesting effects, now kind of depressing, boring ad infinitum.  The big climax involves a moral choice that’s meant to be hopeful but by this point it’s too late for anybody in charge to make amends for the billions they left behind.  Oh, and there’s also an action climax that is so poor that one pines for the days of Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon remake.  One can’t expect it to live up to The Day After Tomorrow, a film so classical in style that it adhered to that old maxim, “if a CGI wolf appears in the first act, it will attack Jake Gyllenhaal in the third”, and was all the better for it.  In 2012, that wolf would have either died a depressing drowning death or defecated on Amanda Peet’s head.  Okay, maybe the latter wouldn’t have been so bad.

-M

By this point, you’re either with Wes Anderson or you’re against him.  Some will say he peaked with Rushmore, and everything after has been a succession of diminishing returns.  Others, myself included, whilst recognizing that Rushmore just might be his masterpiece, have found a lot to love in his recent work.  Royal Tenenbaums is pretty wonderful, and I can’t really understand whatever criticisms people might throw at it.  Life Aquatic is deeply unfocused, and yet it’s entertaining and interesting and the finale never fails to bring a tear to my eye.  I even admire Darjeeling Limited, which benefited a great deal from a second and third viewing.  If you can handle his somewhat precious aesthetic, and accept that this is his style and he probably won’t change it, there’s a lot of good to be found in his work.  On the other hand, if you find yourself unable to take his style, Anderson has absolutely no interest in helping you out.  With that understanding, let us press on with his newest feature, the stop-motion animated Roald Dahl adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I’m unfamiliar with the source material, so how close the film follows it is beyond me, though I suspect Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach hijacked the original story for their own purposes.  Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and his wife (Meryl Streep) were once thieves, sneaking into farmer’s squab pens and making off with the food.  She reveals she is pregnant, he becomes a journalist, and they have a son, Ash (Jason Schwartzmann).  Fox tires of living underground, so he buys a prime piece of tree real estate and, before long, sets about his old ways by raiding the nearby farming conglomerates, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean.  This lands him into some trouble as the vicious farmers work to rid themselves of their Fox problem, landing the entire animal community underground and on the run.  Also involved is a nephew of Fox’s, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), how is athletic and intelligent in ways Ash can only hope to be.  The themes explored are pretty basic (banal?).  Fox must accept his life as it is with his family and give up his old ways, Ash wants to prove himself to his father, and everyone must embrace their wild animal instincts.  The first two are fine and dealt with in a pretty standard manner, and represent perhaps the only real concessions (condescension) to the child market a stop-motion feature has.  The third theme, however, is more of a mess.  In a way, it’s the most interesting idea, but it’s handled rather sloppily, and when the film shuts down for a few minutes in the midst of the climactic getaway, Fox has an interlude with a wolf that feels shoehorned in and completely out of place.

Those underwhelming aspects/failures aside, there’s the visual aspect to be addressed.  He’s made a stop-motion feature without really knowing how to make one, but with a strong desire to make one in an old-fashioned style.  Detractors will point out that this is just a twee/precious affectation that is indicative of all of Anderson’s faults, and they’d be partly right.  Using antiquated techniques to make smoke and water effects, he’s intentionally drawing attention to the process of the filmmaking, probably in an attempt to create a retro vibe that harks back to the films of his youth.  It is, admittedly, annoying at times, especially in the close-ups during emotional scenes where the figures (puppets?  What’s the correct word here?) fail to provide an adequate range of expression.  Furthermore, some of the action is stilted and awkward, again drawing conspicuous attention to the form.  There are reasons in some films to draw attention to the form itself, but here they seem only to be to point out the old-school style he’s gone for, and isn’t that cute?  Well it isn’t.  Whatever his reasons, it tends to draw the viewer out of the film, and that’s not a good thing in this case.  On the flipside, some of that retro-technique works fairly well, especially in the dancing sequences of what I’ll call the revenge montage.  The awkward nature of the animation gives a jubilant, goofy vibe to the scenes that I appreciated.  Also, the human figures (especially Boggis, Bunce, and Bean) are gorgeous in their gnarled grotesqueness, and they’re enhanced in every scene by the splendid cinematography.  That cinematography is also the best visual component to the film.  Tristan Oliver, who previously showed his immeasurable skill on Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, bathes everything in a warm, autumnal palette.  The scene in the cider cellar is absolutely astonishing in the way it utilizes the orange liquids and the glass to filter the lighting, made all the more prominent when juxtaposed with the moment the harsh fluorescent light is turned on.  Boggis, Bunce, and Bean are sometimes shrouded in darkness and shadows, with the burning end of a cigarette and the gleam of a pistol highlighting their skewed silhouettes.  For all the roughness of the animation, there’s real beauty to counterbalance it.

The other visual component is all Anderson, and that comes through the meticulous shot composition of every frame.  If there’s something about this project that really excited him, it was probably the chance to set up every shot of a film in the kind of framing he can’t get away with all the time in live action (though he most certainly does try).  Characters are often looking directly at the camera, placed just so that it looks like a posed picture, highlighting the staged aspect of a film.  There is an awful lot of Anderson’s idiosyncratic aesthetic style here, including the extreme-close-up inserts of props, the use of cutaway sets, and titles partitioning each chapter of the story.  The writing sticks to his (and Baumbach’s) personal taste as well, with a lot of the humour coming from the juxtaposition of the fantastical situations and settings and modern, mundane concerns (for instance, there are gags about mortgages and credit ratings).  It should be noted that this film is actually very funny, and there were moments where I really couldn’t stop laughing (the convoluted rules for Whack-Bat probably got me some awkward stares from everyone else in the theater).  In fact, there isn’t much in the way of obvious humour for the kids, which leads to the nagging question:  just who is this film for, anyway?

There’s very little pandering to the young here.  The rat wields a switchblade (a much bigger deal in Britain than in the US, but still), swearing is replaced by ‘cuss’ and variations thereof that never truly hide what is actually being said, the animals kill other animals for food (begging the question of which animals are sentient in this universe and which aren’t), and of course the aforementioned adult humour.  There is a lot here that only the adults will truly understand, but it’s still a stop-motion animation film, traditionally a kids/family medium, and the themes are simple enough for the youngsters to understand but not complex enough for adults to appreciate on an interesting level.  It just doesn’t balance either side well enough to be considered a truly ‘family film’.  So just who is the target audience?  For me, the answer seems simple.  Wes Anderson has made a film for Wes Anderson.  If you like it, you like it.  If you don’t, then too bad.

-M

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 4, which features numbers 5-1.  Part 1 can be found here.   Part 2 can be found here.  Part 3 can be found here.

5.  Adam Curtis Documentaries – The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, and The Trap.

The nominations from which this list has been pulled from regarded each of these three documentary series as individual options, but for me it seems any pick of one over the other would be an arbitrary choice at best.  I submitted The Power of Nightmares, as I think that would most likely garner points from other voters, it was the first of his that I saw, and in some ways it is the most concise and structured of the three.   In the end, however, these three series are all made in the same indelible Adam Curtis manner, and they all cover the same basic themes:  the ways in which government/companies/powers subtly and not so subtly manipulate the masses for a variety of gains but inevitably end in the erosion of freedom.

Not to say each programme is just a retread of the others, some overlaps aside (when the neo-cons turn up in The Trap, it was reminiscent of the Daleks floating out of the void ship during the Cyberman invasion).  The Century of Self tracks the use of Freud, started by his nephew, in advertising and how the practice developed and turned on itself to create the consumerist culture of the present.  The Power of Nightmares presents the oddly similar development of Islamic fundamentalism and the neo-conservative movement and their use of similar tactics to gain and retain power.  The Trap shows influence on the paranoia of the Cold War and the subsequent creation of Game Theory by noted schizophrenic John Nash, and how free market theorists and politicians have used to create a narrow idea of freedom that has resulted in increased inequalities in both the U.S. and the U.K.  In each case, Curtis casts a wide net on sources and evidence to develop a very convincing narrative for his arguments.  Make no mistake, these are his arguments, and although they are credibly supported by events, facts, and even interviews with some of the larger figures in certain areas, he makes no bones about the subjective prism within which they’re presented.  What differentiates his work from the plethora of other political documentaries made this decade (and there have been a lot of those) is not only the sweeping nature of the subjects and their influence, but the form with which they are presented.

Curtis might be the best visual collage artist working today.  His series are mostly composed of footage he’s pulled from the extensive BBC archives, as well as contemporary films and TV shows that are carefully selected to make a point, whether it’s a scene from The Thief of Baghdad used to wittily represent American fears of a Middle-Eastern menace or the explicitly stated influence of shows like Gunsmoke and Perry Mason on neo-conservative ideology.  The images he pulls illustrate his points brilliantly, but they also build an aesthetic atmosphere that, along with his canny use of Another Green World-era Eno and Yo La Tengo amongst others, suggests the kind of paranoia the subjects sought to sow in the people as well as the implicit paranoia of the documentary itself.  He also uses stock footage of adverts and programmes from the 1950’s and 60’s to great effect, playing on their coded implication of simplicity and moral idealism and, to some extent, gullibility, whilst also subverting them with music, narration, and interviews.  If form is content, then these are some of the most richly argued documentaries produced in the last ten years.

Recent times, borne out of the controversial and divisive politics of the day, have seen a resurgence in the popularity of non-fiction programming, both theatrically and on television.  While the biggest of those amounts to Al Gore and a power point presentation and Michael Moore’s mostly-right-but-still-annoying-as-hell agitprop, these three series push the form in an exciting visual and thoughtful direction.  Curtis is deadly serious about his worries about the state of the world today, but he doesn’t rely on solemn sentimentality to get his point across.  You can’t help but think that, at the end of the day, he finds the humor in the irony of his subjects.  Flawed beliefs, stubborn faith, and good intentions are a dangerous mix, but you can’t look at how wrong it all turned out without a wry smile.  The Power of Nightmares was screened at film festivals in the US, and despite critical plaudits and a healthy armful of awards, every television station in the country refused to air it, with even HBO deciding the subject matter was too sensitive and controversial to broadcast.  Oh, the irony indeed.

4.  Mad Men

The early-to-mid 00’s saw what must be a Golden Age in television drama.  There was a depth and quality to scripted programming that had never really been seen before on such a large scale.  I’m not sure exactly why it happened.  Did the rise of reality television spurn the screenwriters to up their game?  Was there some sudden trust in viewer intelligence that allowed for the deeper, more complex narratives?  Was it all down to the surprise success of The Sopranos, leading every network to scramble for some hard-hitting, edgy show to ride the zeitgeist?  Perhaps it was all of these, or maybe none.  Either way, the latter part of the decade has seen a drop in quality as everybody tried their luck and flamed out, or didn’t produce the quality they might have hoped for.  The American Movie Classics basic cable channel, which was once a repository for commercial-free, genuinely classic Hollywood cinema, had long brought in the ad-men and the popular fare of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s to boost itself, so you couldn’t be faulted for initially blowing off its first foray into original programming.  A show about hard drinking, smoking ad men set in the 60’s just reeked of nostalgia badness, possibly a pastiche of the screwball or the melodrama, maybe a poorly executed wander into noir territory.  Much to my surprise, it didn’t fall into any of those traps, and what’s produced is the best show on television at the moment.

Not that this was entirely evident from the first episode.  It looked great, of course, and I’m still shocked at what they pull off in that department with such a miniscule budget.  It had the hard drinking, chain smoking, dashing men in their suits and the pretty secretaries, and many (too many, really) jokes that winked to the audience about the time period (Ha!  The misogyny!  Ha!  They don’t know smoking is bad for them! Etc…).  They also had what seemed to be stock characters.  Don was the lead, cool and handsome, and he pulls off a sales pitch in the nick of time with his incredible creative ability.  Pete was a wormy young accounts man who was selfish and reprehensible.  The curvaceous Joan filled the role of the bitchy office bombshell.  There was Sal, whose obvious homosexuality was played for a joke in what veers too close the limp-wristed cliché, and then there were the bumbling creative men, who existed as nervous comic relief.  What become apparent a few episodes in, however, is that these aren’t just ciphers for period stereotypes or stock television supporting players.  Virtually every character introduced in the first episode is fleshed out in an intelligent manner over the course of the series.  Sal’s homosexuality becomes a heartbreaking identity issue, Pete is a bastard but he’s got family issues as well as being a sad remnant of an old elite, and Joan finds herself trapped as the queen of a very limited realm.  Then there’s Don, whose issues are too numerous to even begin to parse here.

The creator and show runner, Matthew Weiner, had worked previously as a writer under David Chase on The Sopranos, and the influence of that experience is evident in the character development, style, and structure of Mad Men.  The pace is relatively slow, and the ‘big events’ are few and far between.  There’s an austere stillness to the framing and the camerawork, with push-ins and skewed angles used for very specific purposes.  It’s a world of unspoken subtlety, where a glance or a phrasing says more about what’s going on than the literal interpretation of the words being spoken.  Beyond just the deftness in portraying excellent characters and their stories, the show achieves something larger than that.  There are themes running through the series, as well as individual episodes (many are structure around a specific one, i.e. “Maidenform”), that deal with the seismic shifts in culture and politics (both national and individual) in a personal manner not often seen in modern takes on the decade.  It’s a show about people looking out from a small perspective, and the change percolates slowly rather than exploding in sudden bursts.  The ad agency Sterling Cooper is a microcosm of an America struggling to (re)define itself, especially in the current season which contrasts it with the Old World, empire mentality of the British.

Identity is at the heart of the show, and is fittingly best exemplified by the three leads of Don, Peggy, and Betty.  Peggy is not only struggling to assert herself as a woman in a man’s world, she also grapples with her femininity as a conservative in the world of changing morals.  Betty’s self-realization finds her increasingly dissatisfied with the life of a suburban housewife, and finds her ingrained views on family challenged.  Then there’s Don, the living example of the overused but no less relevant “no second acts in American lives” Fitzgerald maxim.  America’s firmly held belief that you can be anything or anyone you want to be is embodied by Don’s climb up the ladder from impoverished whore-child Dick Whitman to creative genius Draper, and yet he’s forever haunted by his past, finding it something impossible to leave fully behind no matter how much he wants to.  He’s achieved the American Dream of money, the wife, the kids, the house, et al, but is still unsatisfied.  He’s desperate to cling on to this self-made life while simultaneously struggles to resist the urge to leave it all behind and walk away.   It’s easy to be taken in by the nice dresses, the immaculate suits, the fine foods, the stiff drinks and the loving drag of the cigarette, but stick with it and it’s a lot more complicated than that.

3. Arrested Development

What you might notice a lot of the shows on this list have in common is the intensely serialized nature of the narratives and character arcs.  It’s something I think has been done better in the past decade in the U.S. than it had been in previous times, whether it be story-intense (The Sopranos, Mad Men) or on a smaller scale, still allowing for an episodic nature (much more common in previous days, true, but done with more care than previously).  I remember reading something about Buffy in which the writer claimed that the key to the show was that it had a memory.  There were larger arcs every season but the week-to-week was dominated by episodic encounters with a monster or a problem, but there were nuggets of information packed away in every episode that would come back later, and even a joke that was repeated throughout the entire series.  With dramas it is more obviously prevalent, but the sitcom is another story.  Even the name ‘sitcom’ suggests an ever-present state, a ‘situation’ and the comedy that flows forth from it, a concept that is most easily satisfied by pressing the reset button at the end of every episode.  There were narrative threads for sure (Ross/Rachel, Niles/Daphne), but rarely were the gags dependent on previous viewership.  Then comes Arrested Development.

Seemingly coming from nowhere (I shamefully ignored the first season until a friend foisted a copy of the DVD into my uninterested hands), Arrested Development assembled and, more importantly, utilized one of the best ensemble casts in comedy.  The straight man surrounded by insanity has rarely been done this well.  Beyond the plaudits already foisted upon the stellar cast, what really sets the show apart is the number and complexity of the gags.  With its one-liners, visual and verbal puns, broad slapstick, meta-references, and healthy dose of pop culture parody, it casts its net wide and it’s a minor miracle how well it pulls almost every one of them off, often at the same time.  This is not to say it requires a deep knowledge of any particular area, including the show itself, to find it funny, but there’s so much going on in every episode that its much more rewarding to really pay attention (just take the entire Bob Loblaw character as an example).  AD also manages the Herculean feat of rivaling Seinfeld when it comes to bringing disparate narrative threads together.  An FBI sting operation, George Michael’s birthday, visiting Japanese investors, a train set, a model home, an aspiring acting career, and a failed George Sr. escape attempt all come together in one of the funniest moments of television I’ve ever seen.

The qualities of the show were noticed by the critics and the Emmys, but unfortunately not by audiences.  The ratings were never terribly good start with, and the downside of having such a continuity-dependent show is that picking up new fans is a difficult task.  Couple that Fox’s notorious mistreatment of the misunderstood and the show was axed after three progressively shorter seasons.  It was devastating at the time, especially considering the depth and brilliance that the writers managed to churn out week after week with no signs of letting up, but today we have what feels like a complete work anyway.

2.  The Wire

What else is there to say about The Wire that hasn’t been said already?  I suppose it’s still undervalued in the US, but in the past three years the UK has taken it to its bosom with an almost suffocating clench.  Everyone who watches it seems to be converted by the end of the first season, but we’ve now hit the backlash stage where people just want everyone to SHUT UP ABOUT THE WIRE.  I can sympathize, if only because I was a Wire bore for several years.  At the end of the day, however, it’s a show that truly deserves its rabid fanbase, and then some.

What started as a cops v inner city drug dealers battle quickly became an epic polemic against the injustices of modern day, free market America.  The Wire’s five seasons were each based around a central theme, them being institutions, the death of work, reform, education, and the media.  The show established a nightmare Baltimore that was so realistic that it’s no wonder a good deal of the storylines and dialogue were taken from real life.  It’s the show only a journalist and an ex-cop/ex-teacher who saw this world day to day could make.  That journalistic zeal to represent the truth gave the series an air of authenticity that makes its damning political statements all the more affecting.  Alone, that would make an interesting and, some might say ‘important’, show, but what really elevates it to great television, nay, art, is the incredible writing, direction, production, and acting.  By taking more than just a nugget of truth and setting it down with love, wit, and all the other elements that makes fiction great, David Simon and Ed Burns have created something entertaining, engaging, and thought-provoking.

The first season establishes the rotting corpse of modern American government (but NOT, it should be said, in a libertarian fashion) as the institutions are infested with the maggots of politics in the world of the free market.  Progress in the war on crime must be quantified to show viable improvements to voters, and the resultant ineffective policing leads to dying youths and crumbling communities.  For all the sketchy dealings and murderous impulses, there’s the pall of a system that has let everyone down hanging over them, and it becomes increasingly difficult to paint characters as good and evil.  As the series moves forward it sprawls, introducing us to the politics of the city, which leads to the collapse of the educational system, and all of which ends (perhaps not as successfully) with the failing local media.  Even if the final season comes close to overreaching the show’s grasp (I’m still convinced it was merely a pacing problem with the shorter season, but I digress), it’s a hugely impressive achievement to expand the scope so much and yet retain such a focused, humanist drama.

And the ‘humanist’ element is probably the most important for the show.  Simon has discussed his desire to leave behind the Shakespearean behind and make a Greek Tragedy.  Instead of the foibles of the characters causing their own doom, it was up to the gods to arbitrarily decide everyone’s fate.  The central anger of the show is caused by the hopelessness of the situation for all concerned.  Good police work is not rewarded, but rather it banishes you to the worst posts on the force.  Reforming your gang into a viable business is nigh impossible because of the culture of the street.  Children are let down because the schools need results and the people are let down because the media wants sensation.  The second season is often touted as the least of all of them by fans, mostly because it shifts the story away from the streets to dock workers, but in it lay the seeds of the terrifying economic truth that has now been realized in the US in that it is essentially the story of workers struggling to make their way in a country that doesn’t make anything anymore.  The poor and the working classes have been left behind by a society that loathes them, and it’s an uncomfortable truth that American television’s obsession with glossy, aspirational programming tends to ignore.  The Wire is that rare television series that is not only relevant, it is genuinely important.

1.  Deadwood

The story of the origins of Deadwood has been repeated many times, but it’s worth the repetition here because I think it plays a crucial role in understanding the series.  Creator David Milch went to HBO to pitch a show based in Rome, beginning with Paul’s epileptic fit on the road to Damascus but mostly centering around two soldiers in the time of Nero.  Their concerns would intersect with the rise of the Christian Church and the creation of the cross as a holy symbol.  Told that the network already had a show about Rome in development, he augmented the idea to take place in the frontier camp of Deadwood in the 1870’s.  The particulars would basically all be changed, but the basic premise would remain:  the development of a community because of a symbol, and a symbol that would work to release the energies of the human spirit at that.  That symbol would be gold, something with no real intrinsic value but the lie agreed upon (a favourite phrase of Milch’s) is that it is worth a great deal, and around it humans will organize.  Like the cross and Christianity two millennia ago, money and prosperity has motivated humanity, and more specifically, America, to develop and grow into what it is today.

Such lofty concerns aren’t evident upon first watch, but what is there is astounding all on its own.  As the series begins, we think we’re being thrust into the standard Western good versus evil conflict in the guise of Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen.  As it moves forward, we realize Al’s nefarious purposes are always in line with that of the community, and the real trouble is forever coming from outside the camp, from people who have no investment in Deadwood and thus do not realize how the needs of the individual can coalesce so well with those of the whole.  Even beyond that, the basic narrative is a thrilling watch, filled as it is with political power plays, frontier justice, romance, and loss.  The characters are three-dimensional, always evolving, and beautifully played by an extraordinary cast living the character actor’s dream.  On top of all of that, you have that dialogue, which is so beautiful and coarse and wonderful you want to live in it.  Consisting of the eloquence of Victorian writing and harsh (but hugely inventive) profanity, the dialogue stretches out and falls back in on itself, making the complex simple and the simple complex.  It’s also devastatingly funny.

The character development is honest and natural, but done in the most interesting ways.  Milch has an extraordinary understanding of the power and truth of storytelling, and he applies it beautifully through a series of blow jobs that are repeated each season.  Each year, Al gets fellated while giving a monologue about his youth and his experience with his mother and at an orphanage, and each year the story shifts to reflect his state of mind and how it has been influenced by the events and troubles that surround him.  Elsewhere you have Seth Bullock, ostensibly the hero of the piece, and who is revealed to harbor a crippling violent streak to rival that of Al’s, but in a completely different manner.  The opposites are the same, and through such understandings a collection of people with vastly differing moral codes and views can come together and work towards the greater good.

I had a whole outline of things to go through with regards to Deadwood, but honestly it would take a whole essay on its own to properly convey how good the show really is.  It’s complicated, deep, and affecting.  It has a view on people, America, and the human race as a whole.  And it’s damn entertaining television.

-M

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 3, which features numbers 10-6.  Part 1 can be found here.   Part 2 can be found here.  I apologize for the lateness of this entry.  The final part will be posted this week.  I promise.

10.  Battlestar Galactica

Anybody who was aware of the Sci-Fi Channel’s output from its inception until 2003 can’t be judged for dismissing Battlestar Galactica out of hand.  It was an appalling network by anyone’s standards, given to bad B-movie shlock and even worse original programming (Stargate SG-1, anyone?).  There’s something astonishing, then, that out of this minor-cable channel, we got possibly the best science fiction of the decade.  The genre is always at its best when it’s holding up a skewed but provocative mirror up to our own world, and there are few finer examples than this series.  I hasten to add that when I say ‘sci-fi’, I don’t mean the space opera romp of a Star Wars, though BSG is certainly using that as a jumping off point.  The mini-series was much more interesting than even I gave it credit for at the time, but there was nothing in it that indicated the intelligence and intensity of the first episode proper, “33”.  It was a loud proclamation of what the series would be about, and it wasn’t glitzy spaceship dogfights and constant battles with robots (though there were plenty of those to go around).  I hate to invoke 9/11, but it can’t be helped in this case:  there really wasn’t a better show to deal with the post-disaster climate quite like it.  There was a thin thread of unity based on a lie, a constant struggle between the needs of the military versus the good of the civilians, and the slow humanization of the enemy (it always eschewed simplistic Manichean representations of good and evil).  It presented the heroes as the occupied force, and the desperate and pointless rationale of turning them into suicide bombers.  And there was always religion.  Beyond the larger political themes, there were also the characters, who were oftentimes genre clichés elevated into something more complex.  Starbuck, the hotshot pilot with so-crazy-it-just-might-work stunts of derring-do, was psychologically broken and suicidal.  The straight-man Apollo was utterly lost at times when his adherence to a code was challenged by murky moral quandaries.  And there was Gaius Baltar, the conflicted, self-serving bastard who was never presented as a straight villain or a victim of circumstance.  There were some truly bad episodes (“Black Market” features a refreshingly honest commentary about how one could go so wrong), and large disappointments as the series reached its conclusion, but the great moments far outshine the poor.  It was exciting in its battles, intelligent in its politics, and bleak as hell in its drama.  It was about as good as serial sci-fi gets.

9.  Friday Night Lights

NBC is at its lowest ebb.  Relegated to the ratings cellar for half a decade, the channel has struggled to compete with the reality shows and the procedurals offered up by CBS and FOX and the comedies and soapy dramas of ABC.  Despite producing some of the highest honoured and most critically acclaimed shows, it has had a hell of a time converting that into advertising bonanzas, which has led us to the sad venture that is The Jay Leno Show.  Despite that development, and what it portends for the future of scripted television, the problems of the company have led to some of the smartest and best shows on network television, including the rating-challenged Friday Night Lights.  A strong first season did not translate into viewers, and a strike-hampered second season didn’t help.  It is a small miracle, then, that the fourth season is due to begin in a matter of weeks, and a fifth has already been promised.  They are shortened to 13 episodes now, something that I see as a blessing, and they premiere on a satellite-only channel that is responsible for ponying up a healthy portion of its meager budget, but nonetheless, it marches on, and if the third season is anything to go by, it deserves as many episodes as it can get.  In some ways, the premise is a marketing no-brainer:  it’s a high school drama centered around America’s most popular sport with a young, attractive cast.  Then again, you watch one episode, and you realize the massive flaw in the execution:  the concept seems to dumb for the discerning viewer, and yet the show is possibly too smart to attract the young, middle America crowd.  There’s just no winning for Friday Night Lights.  Not so for the fictional town of Dillon, who begin the show as the best team in the state with the best quarterback in the country.  He’s quickly paralyzed from the neck down, and we’re already plunged into two storylines to invest in.  You’ve got the young second-string QB who is thrust into the spotlight with the weight of the entire town on his shoulders, and you’ve got the former high school hero, crippled and struggling with adjusting to his new life as an invalid.  This might be enough, but it’s no time before the agonies of the coach, the head cheerleader, the white trash girl, the geeky friend, etc… are all dealt with in their turn.  In Gossip Girl, when a girl is branded a slut by the gossips, she must formulate an elaborate revenge plot to get back to being the Queen Bee.  In FNL, she can do absolutely nothing but suck it up, because it’s different for girls.  That’s just one of the many, many ways in which this show revitalizes the creatively inert high school drama, but there’s even more to it than that.  The adults are just as interesting as the teens, as is their world of petty school board wrangling and small town politics.  It also gives us what is possibly the best married couple on television in the form of Coach Taylor and his wife Tami.  Utterly believable in their moments of affection as well as their quibbles, they form a backbone of mutual respect and differences that guide the show even when its other storylines are veering off into soap territory (season 2 has some real problems, it has to be said).  All that aside, the visual component works together with the everything else in a way you don’t often see in television.  The on-location shooting helps this a lot, but that along with the mostly handheld camera do far more than create an air of authenticity.  Peter Berg set the visual style in his film version, but it’s greatly expanded here, often owing more to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and the work of cinematographer Tim Orr.  The grainy stock is combined with a predilection for the wide, big sky background.  This is more than just an aesthetically pleasing choice in that it emphasizes the way the world is always threatening to swallow its characters, whether it be in the smallness of their lives in their rural town or the way the way that rural town puts an unhealthy amount of pressure on the young lives of the players and their coach.  In the end, the town of Dillon is the cohesive thread that runs through the series.  This is post-industrial America, and these people live in a world abandoned by an economy.  The shrewd product placement of the Applebees restaurant is apt, because this is the kind of place where that establishment is as it good as it gets for a night out.  These characters live in decrepit homes and grim public housing amongst deserted strip malls, sometimes envying the gaudy blandness of the developments inhabited by the upper-middle class.  Neither judging nor romanticizing this setting, the show depicts a side of America rarely seen on network television, and allows us to consider the implications of what it means.  There’s brilliant and honest drama here, and it earns every Camera Obscura-scored montage it gives us.

8.  Freaks and Geeks

It’s the show that launched a thousand careers.  No matter what you think of the output of Apatow, Rogen, Feig, Cardinelli, Franco, Starr, Segal, et al since, there’s no denying these eighteen episodes their place in the pantheon of great entertainment.  Criminally ignored by the viewing public (me included), it has since gained a massive cult following, but I don’t want this show to be confused with a Firefly (itself very good, of course, but that rabid fanbase is looking for one thing, and this delivers another).  There’s genuine quality here, so it is not to be confused with a hokey nostalgia-fest like The Wonder Years.  But anyway, let’s tick off a few of the many great points about Freaks and Geeks, shall we?

1.) The Geeks:  Casting children on an American series must be one of the most difficult tasks in the industry.  Americans love to ham it up (there was, ironically, a Brady Bunch episode all about this), so finding John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, and Martin Starr was either the cleverest move or the luckiest break in the industry.  Each one could have fallen into the stereotypes, but the actors are strong enough to deal with the difficult arcs they’re given in the script.  Neal’s smart alec attitude is played out as a subconscious defense mechanism, Sam is genuinely confused by pretty much everything never in a cheap or unbelievable way, and for all of Bill’s extreme geekness, he seems weirdly comfortable in his acceptance of what he is.  When Bill gets to make out with Vicki in the closet, it’s both satisfying and earned.

2.) The Period:  I don’t mean this in the “this is how it was” way, because I don’t know how it was.  It certainly rings of truth in its lack of excess, but really what I mean is that it completely sidesteps the easy period gags.  Unlike something like, say, The Wedding Singer, the ‘humour’ of which derives mostly from ‘lol guys look at the 80s’ gags, Freaks just represents the time as a matter of fact.  There’s nothing particularly funny about it because these people are only aware of their own present.  Certain trends and clothing play a part, of course, but never as a mockery of the society as a whole.  When Nick embraces disco for a girl in the finale, it’s a drastic change in his character arc (both a mature departure from his loyalties to rock and a continuation of his lovesick neediness), and there’s subsequently an air of sadness when Ken is told the disco is shutting in a week.

3.) The Music:  Following on from that, the music selection is particularly good in that it never uses it as a dating method.  Rather, the songs are chosen for tone and meaning relevant to the scenes in which they’re used.

4.) The Parents:  Harold Weir is overprotective and, to the kids, something of a square, but he’s not two-dimensional.  Neil’s garage door revelation is absolutely heartbreaking, but nowhere near as shattering as his mother’s response to his confrontation.  Even Nick’s father is represented with care and understanding.

I could go on and on and on, but you get the picture.  If there’s a filmic corollary, I’d say it was the televisual version of Dazed and Confused; it’s genuine and loving and created by people who can remember fondly without editing out the horrors of adolescence.  If you need further proof of how good this show is, all you need to know is that it makes me want to listen to the Grateful Dead (not that I ever follow through.  It’s still only a TV show).

7.  Lost

I’ve never understood the clout that comes with the J.J. Abrams name.  Two cultish but not terribly successful series under his belt and he gets to make the third Mission: Impossible movie, which itself isn’t much of a moneymaker.  He produced the minor hit Cloverfield, but that was after his name brought him the funds to make it.  All signs, then, point to Lost, and credit where credit is due, he co-developed the concept when the network wanted a drama to capitalize on the wild success of Survivor.  However, while I’m sure he checks in from time to time, there’s no doubt in my mind that this mind-bending, sci-fi/fantasy juggernaut is the baby of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, two of the most savvy showrunners out there.  Because we’ve lived with it for five years, and the ratings have dropped (though not precipitously as it is still one of the most popular shows around), the non-hardcore fans have written it off as a brief oddity that lost its way after a year.  The difficult of such a heavily serialized network drama to hold its audience is nothing new.  Twin Peaks was wildly popular for its brief first season, but people stopped caring during the hiatus and then we were given a swift resolution to the central mystery, an extended run of awful episodes, and then (only when it was cancelled), a balls-out ridiculous Lynch finale.  The success of Lost’s first season could have led to a similar outcome.  The problems of the second and third seasons were mostly due to the network demanding the original five-year-plan be stretched out to however long it was maintained its ratings bonanza.  Consequently we were met with episodes about Jack getting a tattoo, and the network saw reason and agreed to a limited number of remaining episodes and a definite end date.  Since that switch, the show has fired on all cylinders, and the cynics who thought they were just making it up as they went along are made to look like fools.  As intense and interesting as the first season was, it doesn’t even begin to compare with everything that’s happened since the final eight episodes of season three.  But outside of the insane goings-on that have dominated the show recently, we should recognize just how astonishing an achievement, in a narrative sense, the show really is.  A high concept fantasy doesn’t have much place in the procedural obsessed American audience, so the fact that Lost has managed to maintain an audience beyond a minor but rabid niche is truly impressive.  It asks a lot of the viewer, so much that even I forget important tid-bits that have popped up in the past and have to have them explained to me as they come up again.  An interesting (but eventually) tired flashback structure led to the mind-boggling flashfoward era that has recently given way to many of the major characters becoming unstuck in time.  The fact that all this ridiculousness works so damn well is a testament to the writers and their clarity of vision.  The show hasn’t offered up much of anything truly profound to say about the human condition or even its characters beyond some pretty decently drawn sketches, but even if the last finale and its possible turn to an epic of (literally) Biblical proportions doesn’t come through, I don’t mind.  There’s only one season of seventeen episodes left, and it might be a total and utter failure.  I personally can’t see how they can wrap everything up in a satisfying manner, but it’s been one hell of a ride so far.

6.  The Sopranos

Along with Buffy, The Sopranos is probably the most influential show of the decade.  It’s a juggernaut, really, and it’s been discussed to death.  Still, it can’t be avoided, nor can its greatness be denied.  It set the template for smart, layered adult dramas, taking advantage of its place on a cable channel to go further than networks could ever dream, and it proved such a hit that every other channel dreamed of making a show this good.  The initial draw must have been the inherent sexiness of the mafia drama, a genre that has proved exceedingly popular since the days of James Cagney.  What was unexpected was how it used that trope to comment on the larger issue of modern day America, and how the Old World (in both the geographical and the temporal sense) deals with the changing times.  Tony Soprano is a complex character, tied to the notions of respect that governed his world in the old days and the consumerist present of the Self that was showing up in his underlings and his own family.  That word, “family”, is really at the heart of the show.  His mafia family was treated as such, but it so often came into conflict with the pragmatic necessities of any corporation.  His actual family was forever at loggerheads with the changing social mores, whether it was A.J. wearing make-up in his goth period or Meadow dating an African-American.  Early seasons treated these issues with a subtlety that allowed the more straight-forward narrative concerns to continue unabated, but what I find to be equally impressive was when the creator David Chase really let himself go as the series went on when it came to exploring the characters and their situations.  Episodes like “The Test Dream” have proven to be divisive amongst fans, but for me they’re audaciousness elevate the show to another level.  The oft-derided sixth season, when Tony is shot by his Uncle Junior (a betrayal of family loyalty while also deflating his rose-coloured view of the old guard), is actually a favourite of mine.  Several episodes are given to his coma dreams, and soon after he reassesses what’s important in life, vowing to do things differently, only to have his rebirth hammered down by both his families.  The willingness to tease us with redemption for the characters, then snatching it away, paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity.  Your average story has a character (or in this case, characters) have an epiphany that leads them to change their life for the better.  In The Sopranos, those life changes are short lived, because living itself is mundane and everyone is governed by their own personality, which in this world proves maddeningly difficult to escape.  Chase’s views on psychology, therapy, and people prove out to be pretty damn bleak, but we can’t fault his honesty.  There are a plethora of other things that make this show great, and entire books have been written to explore them, so if you so desire you can go read them or just watch it all (again) for yourself.  In any case, the show was a game-changer, and it deserves every accolade it receives.

-M

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 2, which features numbers 20-11.  Part 1 can be found here.  Part 3 can be found here.

20.  Skins

The adverts promised teen party mayhem, and when you tuned in to the first episode of Skins, that’s what you got.  A cocksure twat ringing up his mates and girlfriend on his mobile phone, strutting about like he owned the place, and everybody just fawned all over him.  There was a rager at a posh girl’s, the aforementioned twat Tony stickin’ it to his lame-ass parents, his nerdy best friend Sid, dippy space cadet Cassie, the pill-popping Chris and so on.  It was all bright colours, fast editing, hip soundtrack, and everything else you’d expect in an E4 drama that pandered to the wildest excesses of the edgy youth.  Basically, it was awful.  Then you watch the second episode, centred on the ditzy blonde Cassie and her eating disorder, and the structure becomes clear.  The plot would progress, but often in the background while the episode would focus on one character and their particular plight.  Cassie seemed obnoxious in the pilot, but when her motivations and troubles are fleshed out, she becomes a figure of sympathy.  Eventually, some of the annoying aspects fell away, or at least became charming, such as the cartoonish exploits of almost every adult figure (never particularly funny, but the series is firmly entrenched in the kids point of view, and thus the John Hughes exception applies).  As the first series progresses, that annoying twat Tony is taken through the ringer as he’s slowly abandoned by his friends and girlfriend when they clue in to how awful he is.  It was hit and miss all around, but for every bizarre sojourn to Russia there was Chris and his brother, or Sid and his dad.  It was everything it was advertised as, but much, much smarter.

19. How I Met Your Mother

Once Frasier ended, and the Arrested Developments and the Scrubs of the world came to the fore, I was hopeful that we had reached the end of the multi-camera sitcom forever.  Much to my chagrin, Two and a Half Men rolls on (and incredibly successfully at that), but How I Met Your Mother at least holds out as a solid example of how the should-be-dead format might yet flourish.  Of course, it does so by using narrative twisting techniques that might be better served as a single-camera (it jumps around timelines and perspectives and memories with wild abandon), but something tells me it wouldn’t be the same.  It’s still your standard sitcom, with your standard sitcom set-ups and pay-offs, but it’s warm enough and funny enough to get past the clichés, at least most of the time.  It gets tired at points (Ted is still a bit of a drag, Lily can be pretty annoying sometimes), and it is in serious danger of not being able to pull out of the relationship jumping between the leads, but the fact that that’s only a problem now, five seasons in, says something.  It’s been thoroughly enjoyable so far, and if it isn’t always great, it still produced “Slap Bet”, one of the funniest half-hours of television this decade.

18. Veronica Mars

On paper, it sounds like a gaudy update of Nancy Drew for the Buffy set, and in some ways, I suppose it is.  A high school girl works as a private detective for her fellow students, solving cases and punishing criminals through her wit, charm, and intelligence.  It seems nice and cute and whatever, but it’s not long before the season mystery arc comes into play:  Veronica’s been raped and her best friend murdered, and she needs to find out who is responsible.  Dripping in pop culture references and witty repartee far beyond the skills of most American teenagers, it makes sense that it was touted as the natural successor to Buffy, but what’s most impressive is just how close it comes to living up to the banner.  Veronica is likeable, smart, and vulnerable, and it helps that Kirsten Bell is a much better actress than Sarah Michelle Gellar ever hoped to be.  The city of Neptune is beautifully established as the most economically stratified suburb on television, and it’s not long before you realize the bright greens and neon pinks that drench the frame are a day-glo update of the dark shadows and misty greys of the noir classics of old.  When the spoiled rich kid asshole Logan (Jason Dohring, destined to be undervalued in everything he’d do subsequently) is forced by his father to choose the belt with which he’ll be whipped for hurting a PR opportunity, you know it’s something more than just a high school romp.

17.  The Thick of It

I’ve already discussed the feature adaptation of this show, In the Loop, so there isn’t much need to go beyond that.  Where the West Wing is staffed by idealistic public servants who just want to do what’s right, The Thick of It is populated by weasely politicians that, if not totally recognizable as the real thing, are a damn sight closer to what we imagine them to be.

16.  The Office (US)

All credit to Greg Daniels.  He’s taken one of the most acclaimed comedies of all time and imported it to the US, and done it well.  That really isn’t an easy task.  The original Office was awkward and difficult, and retained a harsh sense of humour that most Americans find unpalatable.  Upon viewing the first episode of the US version, I was agog at how awful it was.  The script was virtually verbatim from the original, which was awkward enough, and yet it still seemed watered down.  I’m glad I gave it a second chance because, in the second season, it really came into its own.  There’s still awkwardness aplenty, of course, but it is watered down, both for the audience and out of practicality.  After all, you can just about justify David Brent’s position for twelve episodes, but Michael Scott’s got to be around for a lot longer than that.  The turning point, I think, came with the episode in which Scott (Steve Carell) and his boss Jan (Melora Hardin) had to take a potential client (Tim Meadows) out for dinner, and what seems like a typical Michael disaster turns positive, and you understand that this man knows sales, and his promotion to boss actually makes sense.  The Office is as much about the supporting characters as it is the leads, however, and over the course of five seasons, Stanley, Creed, Oscar, Kelly, et al have really come into their own as a source of endless comedy either in the background or front and centre.  Bonus points for the Jim/Pam relationship which has been, so far, dealt with far better than you might expect considering the checkered past of the will-they-won’t-they routine.  It’s impressive work, and when a beat doesn’t hit quite right, it’s usually because we know the characters well enough to understand what makes sense for them and what doesn’t.  There were some down spots over the last few years, but it’s still remarkably strong and, more often than not, very funny.

15.  The West Wing

Oh it’s corny as hell, but dammit if it isn’t stirring.  Sorkin’s departure after the fourth season marked a notable drop in quality, though in fairness to John Wells and co, the seventh and final season was solid enough.  Still, the Sorkin years, especially the first two, are a masterclass in storytelling, dialogue, direction, and cinematography.  The second season episode “Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail” is a perfect hour of television in all those areas, and probably deserves an entry all its own.  The series made the struggle to get votes to pass a bill was more intense and exciting than any gunshot wound victim rolling into the E.R., and that’s one of its greatest virtues:  it made politics exciting.  As the decade trundled on and the real life White House became rife with mismanagement and difficulty, it felt more and more like the escapist, aspirational fantasy it was, but as comfort food goes, it didn’t get much better.

14.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer

You’d expect this to be much higher, and probably should be, but there are two reasons it might be here at number 14.  One would be this list doesn’t include the first three seasons, which was when the show was really exploding genre conventions on a weekly basis and paving the way for a hundred rip-offs of varying degrees of quality.  Another might just be burnout.  It says a lot about how much I’ve watched it and read about it that I simply don’t have much interest in revisiting it anytime soon, but that’s really a compliment.  I’m actually a defender of the latter seasons, especially six, where I think it was exploring its characters and its themes much more interestingly than it is given credit.  It created a rabid and sometimes annoying fanbase, it made supernatural teen dramas cool, and it has given television studies academics enough material to coast on well into the next decade.  I look forward to watching it all again some years down the line, but for now, I’d like to just leave it where it is.

13.  Doctor Who

One such show that Buffy made room for was the Russel T. Davies’ Doctor Who revival.  The series was left for dead for a while, especially after the failure to revitalize interest in the 1996 TV movie, but the BBC saw the time was right and it delivered.  The mostly standalone format meant there are some misses (I never want to see the Doctor running with the Olympic Torch again), but when it gets it right, it’s some of the best science fiction around.  The brilliant “Blink”, the moving “Girl in the Fireplace”, the depressingly hopeful “Doctor Dances” (anything by Stephen Moffett, really) are all some of the best hours of drama produced in any genre and for any audience.  It’s remarkably smart and dark for a family show, but I love that they’re not afraid to challenge the kids and their parents as well as the nerdy single 20-something fans.  The destructive nature of the Doctor is explored throughout, never forgetting that his essence as a force for good and hope still leaves a trail of collateral damage behind.  It can be pretty hokey, the series finales never quite live up to the epic sweep of the build-up, and Davies is a little too obsessed with the Doctor-as-Christ imagery, but it’s still better than it has any right to be.  It’s fitting that Davies and Tennant (who must be in the top two or three Doctors of all time) are leaving as 2010 approaches, because it’s current incarnation has carried the BBC through the decade, and in the UK, it really is event television at its finest.

12.  The Office (UK)

I really can’t add anymore to what’s already been said (mostly by the creators in the years since, to be honest) but re-watching the first series a few months back, it still holds up.  There’s a rigid adherence to the docu-soap formula that’s really impressive.  David Brent is still horrible, it’s still moving when he gets sacked, Tim and Dawn are still heartbreaking, and Gareth is still a tosser.  Ignore the hype, the accolades, and the self-congratulatory retrospective.  It’s still excellent.

11.  30 Rock

‘The powerful bread lobby won’t let me continue my research.’ ‘I’m Larry Braverman.’  ‘Let me be Michelle Pfeiffer to your angry black kid who needs to learn that rapping is just another form of poetry.’  ‘blerg.’  ‘Muffin Top.’  ‘I don’t see why they’re mutually exclusive.’  ‘Four score and seven beers ago.’  ‘Here comes the Fun Cooker!’  ‘This place is gonna get raw like sushi, so haters to the left.’  ‘What do you sit down and look at?’  ‘Am I wrong or is he in a meeting?’  ‘I’m not.  I want to, but I’m not.’  ‘Kaaaraaate.  Kaaaaarrrrate.’  ‘Oh my God it’s like a barrel of snakes.’  ‘I have two ears and a heart, don’t I?’  ‘Pos-mens.’  ‘Hall or Billingham?’  ‘I’m a huge Kevin Grisham fan.’  ‘I wear Tiger Orgasm.’  ‘Remember that time I asked that black guy if he’d ever seen Sideways?’  ‘so present, so graceful.’  ‘and you must be…Melissa?’  ‘Don’t Menendez me!’  ‘cajun style.’  ‘here’s your john legend CD.’  ‘the middle class will be renting forever.’  ‘Never go with a hippy to a second location.’  Werewolf Bah Mitzvah.  ‘Shut it down.’  ‘I want to go to there.’  ‘Oooh, you ate the foil.’  ‘She said she was 16, but I could tell she was 22.’  ‘BFF.’  ‘uhh…diabetes repair I guess?’  ‘I once told a tribunal I was God.’

-M

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  I’ll address a show not available, then a few honourable mentions (my initial pass through yielded a top 47), and then onto the main event.  This is Part 1.  Part 2 can be found here.  Part 3 can be found here.

John From Cincinnati

David Milch’s noble failure was doomed from the beginning.  After unceremoniously axing Deadwood, HBO asked him to make a show about surfing.  To quote the man himself, ‘what were they expecting?’  It was premiered right after the Sopranos finale, and it’s no shock after the way that ended that there was a massive ratings drop off.  Given the content of Cincinnati, I can’t even begin to grasp what HBO thought they would get out of it.  It concerns three generations of surfing prodigies living in Imperial Beach, California.  Mitch has a blown knee, his son Butchie is a heroin addict, and his son is just starting out on the circuit.  They are visited by a supernatural being that mostly just parrots what everyone else says save a few key phrases he repeats over and over.  Oh, and he can produce anything he wants from his trouser pockets.  There were problems galore with the ten episode first and only season, (it was one of the most maddeningly obtuse shows, for one) but there was something special about it’s ambitious oddness.  In the end, it was meant to be about spirituality, community, family, and the prevention of genocide through mercantilism.  It achieved some of those aims, and set the ball rolling on others, but was too short-lived to reach its potential.  Still, raise a glass to the ambitious insanity of it all.

Honourable Mentions

The O.C.

The show that revitalized the prime-time teen soap opera, it is largely responsible for a glut of awful rip-offs as well as the most horrendous reality series imaginable (Laguna Beach and The Hills, take a bow).  Pop-culture, irony, and constant self-awareness made it hip, its attractive young cast and luxurious setting made it aspirational, and its sometimes smart, sometimes-ridiculous plotlines made it mostly unmissable.  Dire second and third seasons caused a ratings crash, but it freed up the writers to run with a redeeming and fun fourth and final season.  And that was the key to its best moments – it was a lot of fun.

The Gilmore Girls

The second-best thing to come out of the mostly abhorrent WB, The Gilmore Girls gave us the wholesome family drama that was the mantra of that upstart network, but with the wit and attention to character that set far above the likes of 7^th Heaven.  It created an idyllic world of pleasant and quirky people, and it gently sent them up without ever hiding the love it had for them.  It was anchored by some excellent performances and believable relationships, and even if the story got shaky towards the end and the barrage of pop culture references and quips became a bit awkward and tired after a while, it was a pleasant and surprisingly moving world that shows just how American family dramas should be done.

The Colbert Report

The decade saw the rise of the news pundit in the US, and it might be the worse thing to happen to the country in that time in its own way.  Egomaniacal wack jobs spewing the worst kind of unproven gossip and sometimes downright lies, they signal another nail in the already hammered-to-hell journalism coffin.  They were ripe for parody, and Stephen Colbert has done an immaculate job of providing it.  A friend of mine argued that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are bad, providing an easy mocking of bad politics that works as an outlet for the rage so many disenchanted Americans have for the state of things (I might be misrepresenting his argument there, but nevermind).  He’s probably right, but it’s still damn entertaining.

The Top 25

25.  Top Chef

Reality competitions are not my thing generally, but they run wild both in the UK and the US.  In preparation for a move back to the States, I decided to look in on the state of the format by watching Hell’s Kitchen and Top Chef.  I like my food, and I like my cooking shows, so I figured these would give me a pretty good idea of what I was in for.  The former is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.  The drama and competition is hacked to death with awful editing, music, and narration.  Most damning of all, there is absolutely no attention paid to the food at all.  Top Chef was altogether different.  Yes, the editing was a bit much (though not as bad), the music was overbearing, and the product placement was laughable, but you could tell it was first and foremost about the food.  These were real professionals who could come up with ingenious dishes to meet the challenges presented, and they were judged by credible chefs and critics.  It isn’t a bunch of yokels fumbling around a kitchen trying to outdo one another, it’s a group of talented people working under difficult conditions to produce something impressive.  And it is very impressive indeed.

24.  South Park

The original controversy surrounding South Park mostly died down this decade, but people blowing a fuse over the harsh language, un-PC storylines, and the general gross-out nature of some of the comedy were missing the point anyway.  It can be shocking for the sake of it, but it rarely is.  At its best, it produces some of the finest, most scathing satire on the ridiculous issues of the day, whether it’s illegal immigration or the celebrity obsessed tabloids.  The genius of the show is how well it skewers both sides of every argument.  The moral centre of the show, Stan, is shown up as foolish or downright wrong just as often as the selfish, egotistical Cartman.  It also has a keen eye for the details (their version of the Supernanny theme song is a minor gem) that shows just how savvy Trey Parker and Matt Stone really are.  There will be few better time capsules for the popular and political zeitgeist for any year than a season of South Park.

23.  A History of Britain

The bias here is pretty simple:  I was a history major at university, and my favourite area was medieval Europe.  Simon Schama’s A History of Britain is probably the finest history documentary of the decade, and I think I could say that even if I wasn’t such a keen fan of the subject, and there are several reasons for this.  Schama understands how history works, for one, so much so that the article in the title is pointedly purposeful.  History is all down to interpretation, and this is his interpretation, though he understands that it is one of many, and none of them are definitive.  That basic understanding is missing from most historical documentary programs, but that’s just the beginning of what makes the series special.  Most modern programmes of this sort rely on on corny re-enactments and gaudy CGI and bombastic narration, presumably because the makers think the only way to get people interested is to bash them over the head with violence and spectacle.  Schama’s narration and writing can be dramatic, but it’s also reasonable and downplayed.  He chooses themes that run through each episode to create a classic narrative to hold onto, and highlights the importance of events like the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt beyond their intrinsic horror and excitement.  Thrilling or interesting events on their own to be sure, but they were just small pieces to a larger puzzle.  History is a confluence of events more than a direct chain, after all.  All of this is accompanied by gorgeous settings and period artwork, thankfully sparing us a bearded actor yelling at a Thomas Becket cosplay fanatic.  It’s the high water mark for the BBC and the History Channel, and I hope one day they’ll tackle the past in such an intelligent way again.

22.  Rome

The post-Gladiator sword-and-sandals revival would prove to be short-lived, but while it was alive, it produced Rome. A couple of hundred million for 22 episodes and the largest permanent set on earth meant one thing was to be sure:  HBO weren’t going to do this by half-measures.  However, a massive budget for only a moderate success (both critically and ratings-wise) meant it was doomed for the chop pretty fast.  The breakneck speed of the second season indicates that the creators knew it, but it didn’t take away from the thrilling and lush drama.  For all the epic sweep, the political intrigue, the bloody violence and the graphic sex, the real joy was in the details (the soldier that rolls his eyes when he’s told to take down a cross he’s just erected, a blind man lets copulating couples know the hour so they’re aware of how much their room is costing).  It was the little things that built their world, and it was one that was both strangely familiar and completely alien.  It was a thoroughly modern show (the drama was always more Shakespearean than Greek), it had a canny sense of humour (the civil war is started because of Pullo’s gambling debt; Marc Antony’s justification for suicide as a cure for his hangover), and it created in Pullo and Vorenus one of the best bromances of the decade.  It never rose too far beyond the genre, but it was a shining example of how good that genre can be.

21.  Big Brother (UK)

Lowest Common Denominator television it may be, but dammit if I haven’t given over an awful lot of my life to this show.  It’s in its death throes now, having just come off a poorly rated and little covered tenth season, but once upon a time it was a cultural powerhouse.  But let’s leave aside the arguments about the Warholian 15 minutes, the controversy of the racist taunting, or the rise and fall and death of Jade Goody.  Really, that’s all been covered to death, so I’d rather draw attention to just how damn well this show is made.  The editing has such a subtle wit that even the most seemingly boring events can be funny or illuminating.  The tasks, when they’re good, can be ludicrous, self-aware, and/or downright ingenious.  We’re bound to get attached to people when we spend an hour a day with them for four months straight, and while there’s always an editorial emphasis on romances (shut up, Davina) and the ‘journey’ (usually from thick but decent kid to personable but still thick but decent kid),  some people who seemed horrible will be humanized if not exactly redeemed (Aisleyne!).  There are, of course, others that make you want to scream in their face how bloody stupid and annoying they are, but that’s half the fun.  The evictions shows have turned into a coliseum of unearned boos, but when 91% of the public recognizes that Sezer is a massive tool, my faith in humanity is restored for a little while and I’ll forgive the crowd.  There have been duff seasons (4, 6, and 8 come to mind as BB seems to have reverse Star Trek syndrome), but when it’s good, it’s Fight Night.

-M

Rom-coms that centre around adult women tend to be about unbelievably gorgeous career woman who just haven’t found the right man, and that right man is almost always a well-built, clever, and extremely handsome man.  He probably lacks a heart-on-his-sleeve sensitive side, but the woman need only scratch beyond the bickering and the brusque exterior to find it.  Perhaps this is true of teen movies that centre around girls as well.  After all, Molly Ringwald ends up with Jake and Blane, not the Geek or Duckie.  In whatever circumstance (yes, Ringwald was the outsider in both those films), you rarely see a film in the genre where the athlete is the star.  Oh, there are exceptions, but even in She’s All That, it’s Rachel Leigh Cook that goes on a journey, not Freddie Prinze Jr.  So perhaps the makeshift rule that should be completely disregarded after reading is that if a film is targeted at women, the guy can be hunky and awesome, but targeted at men, the guy will often be an awkward outsider, maybe even a loser (the exception here is Say Anything, in which Lloyd Dobler is much-beloved, an athlete, but still sensitive and culturally savvy enough to be considered outside the ‘conformist mainstream’, if that’s what it is).  I suspect, to go further and narrower, this happens a lot in films about teens/young adults because the (typically) male director was himself a sensitive, artistic sort, and their own nostalgia might be wrapped up in the story enough to the point that they identify with the underdog protagonist.  The boys in these stories, through disconnection with the mainstream popular kids and through a lack of experience with the opposite sex, have a tendency to construct idealized notions of women, and in many cases, a particular one.  The three films herein discussed all deal with boys who do just that to varying degrees of success.

‘Success’ might have been a strong word, considering the first of the films, Chris Columbus’ abomination I Love You, Beth Cooper, certainly a candidate for worst film of the year.  The only positive I can draw from it is that it reaffirms my ability to feel sympathy, sat as I did squirming in my seat and looking away, feeling thoroughly embarrassed for everyone who had a hand in making it.  It’s a dead film, with scene after scene just lying there on the screen doing nothing despite trying to do everything.

Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust) is a high school senior and class valedictorian who, during his graduation day speech, proclaims his love for the head cheerleader Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere), whom he’s never actually spoken to, and then proceeds to encourage everyone to be honest with one another by pointing out the perceived secrets of several members of the audience.  Included here are his best friend Jack (Rick Munsch), whom he believes to be gay, and Kevin (Shawn Roberts), Beth’s graduated boyfriend who is now in the military.  After the ceremony, he invites Beth to a party at his, gets assaulted by her boyfriend Kevin, and the ball starts rolling on a long night of ‘self-discovery’, a term I use loosely because I’m not convinced these characters have a self to discover, and if they did, they might just want to leave it alone.

To even attempt to discuss everything wrong with this film would require a shot by shot viewing followed by a tedious thesis on each and every scene to point out exactly how terrible it all is, so we’re going to have to boil it down to a few major flaws.  First off is the tone, which is wildly erratic.  It veers from shallow, soppy sentimentality to ludicrously over-the-top slapstick to gross humiliation throughout, oftentimes hitting all notes in a single scene.  For instance, Beth, her two friends, Denis and Rich are all riding in a car.  Beth notices Denis’s shirt smells bad, so he takes it off (he’s already lost his trousers by this point) and holds it out the window to try.  It slips out of her hands and they turn around to get it.  Story-wise, this comes virtually out of nowhere, and is indicative of the extraordinarily weak gag set-ups that run throughout.  He gets out, but he’s only in his underwear, which happens to be his lucky (and juvenile) Spider-man pair, and everyone points and laughs.  Beth gets out and walks with him, leading to an awkwardly false heart-to-heart about her life that doesn’t hit a single believable or sympathetic note.  They find the shirt, only to be confronted with a raccoon that seems sweet but SURPRISE, it’s not as cute as they think and its little CGI face snarls and they run away scared.  There is nothing about this that is funny, nothing about this that is unexpected, and nothing about this that is remotely moving.  It’s just dead, and its predictability only adds to the stench of rotting celluloid flesh.  This is the kind of film that draws attention to the gags, even dropping in pointless flashbacks that are clearly meant to be funny and yet never provide any comedy.  Not every gag will work in every film, but it’s very painful to sit through something so obvious fall flat on its face again and again and again.

Secondly, there are the supporting characters, who are treated as walking clichés, i.e. the ‘ditzy but slutty’ friend, the other friend who is a bit more intentional but still played as ‘slutty’ for the jokes, the one-note villain in the form of Kevin, who can hurl a microwave across a room and into a wall with ease due to the tossed off explanation that he’s on some combination of cocaine and steroids, and who is flanked by two well-choreographed army buddies who can leap off a roof with the precision of synchronized divers.  The main problem is Rich, a possibly rich character searching for a better understanding of his own sexuality, here turned into an extremely annoying nerd who, when they can’t think of anything better do, the writer and director get chased by a group of angry cattle that disappear as soon as they arrive (affording them a dung gag, of course).  He serves up every gay stereotype possible (limp wrists, love of theatre and art) before finally realizing what everyone else knew, oh wait, I mean ending up in a threesome with Beth’s two friends because HAW, we can get a premature ejaculation joke out of it.

Finally, there’s Denis himself.  Credit to the filmmakers for casting a genuinely unattractive (or at least not handsome) lead, but take away said credit for creating a character so unsympathetic and annoying that you actually think the bullies might have been on to something.  One can imagine an outtake where a school ruffian speaks to his friends that giving Denis a wedgie is for his own good, as he’s so completely clueless when it comes to social interaction that you’d think he was mentally disabled.  This is in part because of the slapstick violence he’s made to endure, but the performance and the writing share most of the blame.  When he and Rich are on screen, you just want them to go away, and when they’re not on screen, you’re wishing that everyone else would go away as well.  He loves Beth Cooper even though he’s never spoken to her, and he’s built up an idealistic image of her based on her looks alone.  He utters the phrase, ‘You’re not Beth Cooper’ at one point in the film, thus signaling the shattering of his illusion, and in reality should have led to Beth Cooper yelling at him for being such a dick as to be disappointed that she’s not the one-dimensional creature his stalker brain cooked up.  His realisation comes because she kisses a convenient store clerk to buy beer, an act so slutty and self-degrading to him that he’s lost all faith in what he believed in.  This is somehow much, much worse than going out with a homicidal maniac strung out on cocaine and steroids, a fact that really should have clued him in that his dreams may not reflect reality.  Of course she turns out to have more depths than his idiot mind could have originally conceived, but nothing beyond your standard Prom Queen Problems stuff (nervous about future, etc…).

I Love You, Beth Cooper trudges on from stupid set piece to stupid set piece, occasionally stopping for an uninvolving heart-to-heart that only a moron would find moving.  One imagines Chris Columbus wanting to emulate the angsty but amusing teen dramas of the past, whilst surfing through the recent hits to see what kind of comedy sells.  It’s soulless filmmaking at its most depressing, and the viewing experience is nothing less than agonizing.  If anything positive can come out of this, it might work as an educational tool.  I suggest parents screen this for their adolescent children in preparation for the rocky, hormonal, and terrifying high school years.  ‘The coming four years will be rough’, they’ll say, ‘but it isn’t nearly as painful as watching this.’

The high school nerd in love with the unattainable head cheerleader formula doesn’t work once the outsider hits college and beyond.  The fantasy fulfillment girl most often on screen for the outsider boy these days is the Manic Pixies Girl, who is quirky, beautiful, and available just for you.  She’s artistic, independent, and she’ll use your charm and sensibility to set you on the path to happiness.  Recent examples of this phenomena can be seen in Garden State, Elizabethtown, and The Yes Man, just to name a few.  The best and possibly only good example can be seen in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film that deconstructs the type to reveal how that free-spirited nature has a cruel edge for the introspective, low self-esteem man-child.  Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer does not seek to fulfill any fantasy with its own version of the Manic Pixie Girl, nor does it wish to deconstruct her persona.  Instead, it rips apart the boy who idealizes her, and it does so to great effect.

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, again proving his inestimable worth to counteract Zach Braff) is such a boy, which the narrator helpfully tells us had his view of the world shaped by ‘exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie The Graduate’.  He is, in effect, the ultimate post-modern indie kid.  I imagine him retreating into pop culture at an early age to escape reality, and then staying there hoping the dizzying emotional highs and lows would materialize in the real world, because why else would they write these songs and make these movies?  He’s a romantic idealist, and the film is about how his fantasy is chipped away and ultimately stamped on by his experiences with a girl named Summer (Zooey Deschanel, perhaps the best casting choice of the year if not for her actual performance than for the meta-commentary on her own place in pop culture).

Tom works for a greeting cards company, where Summer starts as a secretary.  The timeline jumps around, moving between the post-break-up depression to the early days of the relationship and back again.  There are so many keenly observed scenes, especially in the early crush phase, that to juxtapose them with the depressed Tom gives us a better and more fluid understanding of just who he is and how he thinks and feels to more than justify what would often be merely a gimmick to keep us interested.  He’s a narrow-minded fool, you see, and watching his experience in chronological order wouldn’t give us the understanding of just how much of one he is otherwise.  He fancies her the moment he sees her, and the scene in the elevator where she talks to him about the Smiths (so cringe-inducing in the trailer for its tweeness) causes him to fall in love and us to understand everything about him.  He’s a Smiths fan and she’s hitting all the right notes for one, and even though he barely knows her, every subsequent interaction until that first kiss is a massive drama.  He sees the world through the pop culture he’s absorbed, and the film deals with this both through his imagination (the Hall & Oates musical number) and, even more impressively, through his reality.  The latter can be summed up in the scene where he’s watching her from across the office get up and walk across the room.  As she gets up, he turns to his computer and plays ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ on iTunes as she’s walking by.  In the absence of a soundtrack for the scene, he creates one on his own to add the significance to the moment a film might do (no coincidence that song was featured in Pretty in Pink).  This doesn’t exactly follow with how the rest of the film proceeds, as it often plays with the form using animation and split-screen to understand his thinking, and he does explain it as a chance for her to make a move (being as he’s unsurprisingly the kind of guy who can’t do anything about it on his own, nor does he want to), but it perfectly encapsulates him anyway.

Summer is, for her part, not terribly complex, but that’s only because this whole relationship is viewed from his perspective.  He sees her idiosyncrasies as cute and adorable until she breaks up with him, where those same idiosyncrasies are derided as annoying.  He remembers the movie-like moments of romance:  drawing on her arm, running through IKEA, etc…  In his mind, she’s an ideal, and when she dumps him, he’s shattered.  He calls her a slut and the passive misogyny of this character type comes out as he reverts to outdated gender-specific slander because he can’t cope that his vision of a one-dimensional woman doesn’t fit with the actual person.  Re-evaluating a past relationship as good at one point and bad at another is nothing new, and recently you can see this in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and, in general, the themes covered here are done in High Fidelity as well.  But in those films I don’t think we get nearly the level of character dissection as we do here.  This does leave the problem that we’re basically deconstructing a fairly unlikable character, but because he is depicted in such an (horrifyingly, at times) identifiable way, there’s great merit to the endeavour.  There’s a great split-screen sequence where we get his hopes and the reality when he attends a party she’s hosting in which he hopes for a meaningful hug and hours of conversation but gets what any ex-flame would:   solitary standing on the edges of party where he’s just a guest like any other; the former lover that is seen as nothing more than a friend.

Not everything works, unfortunately, as his friends are pretty one-dimensional comedy characters, and it does wheel out the younger sister who is infinitely wiser trope.  Also, the ‘art film’ sequence betrays the intelligence shown elsewhere by reverting to the standard cliché that one imagines Tom would know better than to dream up.  It also loses its way a bit towards the latter part of the film, mostly in the resolution of the Summer character which struck me as too clean.    Though some might complain about the ending, I think it gives a nod to the already mentioned Graduate in its ambiguity and the sense that Tom has learned absolutely nothing.  One suspects he will always prefer the dream that will never work to the reality that might.

In the end, (500) Days of Summer is a sharply observed character piece.  It has been promoted to raise the interest of romantic indie kids, and it boasts a soundtrack that suits the fanbase perfectly.  It’s got emotional but pretty indie classics from the Smiths, new ‘favourites’ from Feist and Regina Spektor, and even the reappropriation of 80’s cheese in Hall and Oates.  It understands its audience all too well, and it feels no compunction in ripping the shreds out of them, even if it admits to being one of them itself

It probably says a lot about me that I just celebrated a movie that ripped apart its hopelessly romantic lead and I am now going to praise exactly the kind of film Tom would love.  Greg Mottola’s Adventureland is sweet, awkward, romantic, and nostalgic, exactly how Tom would have wanted it, and it is also one of the best films of the year.

The plot is simple.  James (Jesse Eisenberg) has just graduated university, and he’s meant to go on a European vacation before starting his post-graduate studies at Columbia.  His father gets demoted and suddenly the money he was relying on dries up, so he moves back to Pennsylvania and is forced to get a summer job at the low-rent amusement park Adventureland, where he’s relegated to operating the crooked games where people hope to win cheap stuffed animals.  As his dream plans for his future evaporate before his eyes, he meets Em (Kristen Stewart) and falls for her, though unbeknownst to him she’s having affair the older and married Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds).  As I said, pretty simple, and you can imagine he grows up a lot during the course of the summer.

These types of films are a subjective experience more so than most.  We can hopefully all watch certain movies and gain a better understanding of the larger human experience, but in some cases one comes along that seems to tailor made to a particular type of person that it defies wholly objective analysis.  (500) Days of Summer hits closer to home for me than it might others, and in that same way, Adventureland seems to have been tailor-made for me.  It opens with a Replacements song, huge significance is placed on the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, and when James first gets into Em’s car, she’s listening to Husker Du, and if that isn’t shorthand for awesomeness for me, than I don’t know what is.  However, I’ll try to explain why, objectively, this film is still very good even if you don’t have a penchant for classic indie rock.

Just like Summer, it is a beautifully observed film.  The plot is there, but it is more about a series of significant moments (yes, the same kind Tom hoped would be reproduced).  The awkward, outsider boy isn’t totally hapless or deluded.  He gets on well with people, and his relationship with Em doesn’t stem from the needs of the story, but rather it makes sense because he’s actually a pretty interesting guy.  He’s no social maverick, but he’s got enough inside him to let people know he’s worth talking to, and we can see why girls like him, even if he doesn’t.  James goes through a realistic growth, and we’re with him every step of the way because we can both identify and sympathise with what he’s going through.  He’s a nice, likeable guy, unlike Denis in Beth Cooper and he’s not nearly as narcissistic as Summer’s Tom.  When he hits it off with the park hottie, Lisa P (Margarita Levieva), we know it isn’t just a plot device.  He’s a decent guy and she’s a decent girl and we understand why they might get on.  Likewise, Em is not just a Manic Pixie Girl, rather she’s a seemingly cool, laid-back girl that is trying to sort through her own rebellion against her parents and resultant feelings of inadequacy.  She does things she knows she shouldn’t, but we understand why.

The acting is super all around.  Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are dependably funny as the couple that manages the park.  Ryan Reynolds plays Mike not as a lecherous creep like you might expect, but as a pathetic older man who never made it the way he wanted to and is secretly desperate to hold onto his youth.  Martin Starr as employee and friend Joel deserves special props for slowly revealing his contempt and depression.  He seems like a goofy sidekick, but he’s aware of his affectations and is deeply frustrated that, despite his intelligence, he can’t achieve what he knows he’s capable of.  There is a noteworthy scene, when James tells him about making out with Em, where he tries to play it cool but is visibly upset.  His character makes sense throughout, and when he doles out the advice, it doesn’t feel like he’s serving the needs of the main guy, but instead is genuinely annoyed enough to tell James what he needs to hear.  Jesse Eisenberg has had his performance downgraded by people presuming the role was meant for Michael Cera, but I think no matter what the original casting choice may or may not have been, he makes it his own. He isn’t playing the typical Cera character.  He infuses James with just the right amount of youthful awkwardness and intelligent self-awareness to make everything believable.  Finally, we get to Kristen Stewart, hardly my favourite actress working these days, but it’s a testament to the film that I really liked her here.  In some ways she’s playing the same drippy, emo chick she specializes in, but there’s an uncertainty and confusion she manages to pull out of that persona that works here better than it does in anything else I’ve seen her in recently.

Adventureland takes place in the 80’s, but much to its credit, it doesn’t go for the Wedding Singer period laughs.  There are instances of 80’s fashion around, but it’s never overbearing.  Indeed, the uniforms the workers are meant to wear seem like the exact type of shirt modern day indie kids might wear (before Urban Outfitters reproduced them en masse, of course).  The film does take place in the 80’s, however, and the nostalgia is present.  It is a very personal film to the director, who based a lot of it on his experiences working in a similar theme park.  None of this detracts from the film, however, because the genuine affection for the period, the characters, and the story shines through in every scene.  It has the intensity at times of how it must have felt for the early 20’s protagonist, but it is depicted with the ease and affection only someone who lived through it can give.  No matter what everyone else thinks, I do love this movie.  There’s a great scene where James, Em, and Joel are sitting around on July 4^th, mocking the holiday naturally, when ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ comes on through the loudspeakers and the fireworks start.  Everything slows down and the characters are swept away by the emotions of the moment, and it is at this point that I realized how smart this film really was.  It understands a basic fact about the universe:  that Crowded House song can cut through anything and produce a great moment.

-M

Back in the mid-90’s, I recall a critic (possibly Ebert, but I can’t positively remember who it really was) saying that watching Pulp Fiction was to watch a kid let loose in a toy store.  The kid was, of course, the film’s co-writer and director Quentin Tarantino, and he wanted to play with everything.  It was pop art nonsense at it’s most explosive, vibrant, and shallow (and I mean that in the best way possible).  It released a slew of imitators and rip-offs, but the original excitement has never really dulled.  A critical darling for a time, Tarantino now finds himself, 15 years later, sometimes still praised, oftentimes derided.  Claims that he’s not what he used to be are based on his 21^st Century output, which admittedly contains the lackluster Death Proof, and that he’s given himself over to fanboy self-indulgence.  Granted, nothing since (and including Basterds, we’re only talking about four films here, also assuming you believe Kill Bill to be two separate entities) has reached the emotional and character heights reached by Jackie Brown, his most (only?) mature film. Indulgence is certainly an issue, but Death Proof’s best moments came when he was fully embracing his exploitation B-movie love, providing a thrilling and tense finale, while Kill Bill popped with a visual inventiveness rarely seen in action films whilst also providing some fantastic Tarantino trademarked dialogue scenes.  So how does his latest opus, Inglourious Basterds, fare?  The short answer is ‘quite well, all in all.’

The long answer is more complicated.  First of all, in a formalist sense, this film is dizzyingly exciting and yet also something of a let down.  To deal with the exciting aspect first, we should consider the first (and probably best) scene.  Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a French farmhouse looking for a family of Jewish dairy farmers that are unaccounted for.  He sits down with the owner of the farm, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), and begins discussing the matter as though it were merely a formal exercise.  A classic two-shot setup is employed here for the most part, until the camera moves down through the floorboards to reveal the terrified missing family hiding beneath.  The Tarantino dialogue is in full force here, with Landa toying with the nervous LaPadite while explaining his title of “Jew Hunter” as well as the difference between rats and squirrels.  Landa’s charm and good humour only adds to the menace, and it doesn’t take long before you realize why Waltz took the acting prize at Cannes.  It’s aping the tension of Leone (this sequence is entitled “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France”) brilliantly, and as the conversation comes to a head, the camera is now an omniscient, brooding overhead spectator, and the eventual release is both horrifying and a relief.  It is a wonderfully constructed scene, full of humour and dread, and it fully justifies its 25 or so minute running time.  It takes its time to ratchet up the tension, as does much of the rest of the film, and as a result, it’s a thrilling ride.

The larger formal problem, however, is the overall structure.  Tarantino likes to cut up his films into individual sequences, and it works here until the end.  Glenn Kenny has already provided an exellent breakdown (http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2009/08/tarantinos-minimalist-maximalism.html#more) of the film’s peculiar structure, and I won’t add much to that other than to say that much of it works very well.  The first four chapters never really involve crosscutting between the different stories unless those characters are interacting with each other.  The Basterds are over here, and they’re contained in that chapter.  Landa and Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) are being developed and they’ll interact, so they’re in chapter three, and so forth.  This all gives the film a strange momentum – it is both slow enough to allow the characters to breathe in the world Tarantino created, but also tense enough to propel the narrative forward.  The disunity actually works to create a unified whole, moving us towards what a climax in which all the characters will clash and all the strands will intertwine.  As that plot (both the larger film’s and the specific one generated by the characters), our expectations build, and herein the problem lies:  Tarantino fails to respect the story he’s been building.  I’ll try not to spoil too much, but if you want to know nothing, stop reading now.  Two sets of characters are hatching plans to achieve the same goal; meanwhile the antagonist is only working towards stopping one of those plans.  One might not work, but we’re almost positive the other one will no matter what, and if the tension of a covert plan has been carrying the picture, then the defusing of that expectation allows us to relax just when we should be at the edge of our seats.  The finale is clearly meant to be thrilling in a way something like Ocean’s 11 is, although Tarantino clearly wants it to be slightly more farcical.

Beyond that problem, you have the issue of the Basterds themselves.  He might have set out to write a Dirty Dozen-esque WWII action caper, but in the process he discovered the other characters (Landa, Shoshanna, even Diane Kruger’s Bridget von Hammersmark) were far more interesting, leaving the Basterds severely underwritten, sometimes comically stupid, and worst of all almost irrelevant.  Not only does it not matter whether their plan succeeds, I don’t think I would have cared if it did or didn’t.  They are amusing, of course, and Pitt’s Italian accent probably gets the biggest laugh of the film, but it’s a let down that when they’re on screen, virtually nothing of interest happens.  Arguments can be made that they, as the violent American soldiers, are just as much one-dimensional ciphers as most of the Nazis (a point which itself is something of a reflexive nod to the way they are portrayed as the go-to-baddies in dozens of Hollywood pictures), but the Nazis still get Landa.  It feels more likely that he was simply sidetracked, and just continued down the rabbit hole.

The complaint that Tarantino is a geekboy who would rather pay homage to B-movies and make cool shit happen instead of making a proper movie is generally, I think, an unfair one.  His movies are far too smart for such a simplistic reading, even when they’re mining the schlock genres he loves so much (watch Planet Terror and Death Proof back to back and you can see the difference, however much a failure the latter picture was).  The complaint really should be his lack of discipline.  He wants his goofy, over-the-top ending, and he’s going to get it whether it fits or not.  Nobody in this world is acting out of the ordinary, but there is a disjunct between the build and the finale.  It is fun once you adjust to it, and there are some glorious moments in it, it just doesn’t live up to what came before.

I don’t mean to sound too harsh on Basterds.  It is thoroughly enjoyable, and the disappointment of the final chapter is far overshadowed by the pleasure and excitement of what came before.  Honestly, I really am nitpicking here.  It’s difficult not to get caught up in the geekboy criticism hullaballoo, and I want to stress that by citing formalist problems, I only mean to highlight how extraordinary his skill and natural talents are in evidence in the rest of the picture.  There’s more going on here than just revenge fantasy schlock, but it will take several more viewings to come to grips with that.  He makes no attempt to recreate any semblance of reality, and with that I have absolutely no problem.  The fact that the diegesis exists solely (and often reflexively) in the world of cinema does not necessarily make the film shallow or disposable, but I’ll leave the sludge into the Baudrillardian nightmare for someone else.  For now, despite some reservations, it really is an excellent film, and he’s done his previous efforts no disservice.

-M

Kathryn Bigelow is no stranger to the macho adrenaline junkie.  Point Break and Strange Days are all about the rush, whether it is surfing, robbing banks, or feeling someone else’s experience.  The Hurt Locker is no different, this time setting the action around a staff sergeant in a bomb disposal unit in Iraq.  I’ve mentioned the failings of Iraq War based film ventures before, and Bigelow wisely sidesteps the issue completely.  This is not a political film, but neither is it a straightforward action picture.  It’s thrilling at times to be sure, containing some of the best suspense sequences this year, but it’s more interested in the characters and how they function in such a high-pressure environment.

An opening sequence nicely establishes the procedures and apparatus with which the unit should work, but after member of the team is claimed in an explosion and his replacement is William James (Jeremy Renner), a veteran of Afghanistan and something of an enigma to his new unit.  That unit consists of the tough, professional Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and the young, destined-for-PTSD Eldridge (Brian Geraghty).  A lesser film would follow the standard arc of mistrust of the new guy, followed by bonding through combat, followed by difficult decisions and a melodramatic depiction of the cruelties of war.  This is not, however, a lesser film, and while there are certain amounts of the standard Band of Brothers camaraderie, they don’t develop in the expected way.  Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down was explicitly about the men on the ground, and how it isn’t about why you’re fighting or where, whether it is Somalia or Iraq, but it’s about the man next to you.  In a lot of ways, The Hurt Locker is about the man next to you, but instead of comfort and protection, you’ve got a liability.

The film is structurally very episodic.  We follow the unit on the final thirty days of their rotation, as they deal with a bomb in a car or in some rubble, or come across a crew of British contractors out to nab high-ranking Iraqi officials for the reward money.  As each chapter goes by, we learn more and more about James – he’s fearless to the point of insanity, he’s reckless, he’s more curious than frightened, he takes care of the younger Eldridge when he needs encouragement.  He even forms a (not entirely convincing, admittedly) friendship with a local Iraqi boy at the base, the consequences of which give us a better understanding of why he is the way he is.  Perhaps the best moment comes during a night of music and drinking the three men have (this is also a contender for most homoerotic scene of the year), where friendly displays of masculinity always threaten to veer into deadly violence.

James’ unpredictable nature gives the already almost-unbearably tense bomb-defusing sequences an extra air of menace.  I’m tempted to say that it must be impossible to make a film about a bomb squad that isn’t chock-full of suspense, but even if that’s true one can’t deny the visceral, almost queasy, thrill of these scenes.  There’s no ‘which wire to cut’ nonsense to hamper the film with cliché; James is exceptional at what he does, it’s just a matter of working out how the bomb works.  His reckless bravado when kicking the boot of a car full of explosives is dangerous enough, but there is added danger and paranoia as his unit covers him, watching as Iraqis film the scene with a camcorder and communicate via hand signals to men perched ominously on a minaret.  The menace is a tightly wound coil that threatens to spring into mayhem at any given moment, and for that reason it towers above almost all the summer blockbusters had to offer.

For all the good, there are some bum notes.  The aforementioned Iraqi kid relationship doesn’t completely convince, for one.  There is also a tendency to explain what’s going on with the characters when the acting is good enough that we don’t need it in the first place.  Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal should trust us to understand what we’re seeing, but there are a few scenes where the dialogue is so on the nose that we’re left jarred by the clunkiness.  In particular, a scene with Eldridge and the staff psychologist as well as the completely unnecessary penultimate scenes.

Those problems aside, it is really an excellent piece of work.  The characters inform the action, and the action reveals the characters.  The problems with the war are around, in the nooks and crannies of the demolished town and in the faces of harassed and broken people, but by largely ignoring the politics, we get a refreshing approach to the conflict.  The toll taken on the lives of the main characters are mostly self-inflicted wounds.  For some, it just might be that the excitement of war is just as damaging as the horror.  James is not suicidal, but he teeters on the edge, fully embracing his death drive, unable to suppress the rush of the job for the safety of those he’s responsible for or, indeed, the family back home he’d probably rather ignore.  He’s not a wild man or a sociopath; he’s just an addict.

-MH