fine whine

I've got something of an entertainment buzz going. Now that Nano's over and my vacation hold at the library is off (despite only writing four or five days last month I never turned my hold off) the good stuff is just rolling in.

I've been cracking up flipping through Interior desecrations by the very funny Jim Lileks. It's possible that I'm just tired but some of that stuff is side-splitting. Check out this book if you have any sense at all of taste or humour.

Last night I watched Suddenly, a thriller from 1955 that is more known for having Frank Sinatra as a villain than for being a pretty good movie that gives far more screen time to Sterling Hayden than it does to ol' blue eyes. This is not to say that Frankie doesn't turn in a good performance. He turns out to be a pretty decent psycho killer out to make a cool half mil to off the president, but pretty much everybody is good. I haven't seen the other film on the DVD, ostensibly with Frank again as a heroin addict or something like that, but Suddenly is well worth watching. Then again, I like to watch Sterling Hayden. If you have no idea who he is, go out now and track down The killing (one of Stanley Kubrick's forgotten early films about which I have written previously). It's a darn good movie and you shouldn't regret watching it. I don't.

I'm also happy to have finally stumbled across the excellent drama The Wire that HBO's been showing for a couple seasons now. Though it treads on the same turf as Homicide: life on the streets it's a different beast altogether. It's dense, clever, well-written, dark, gritty, and even funny at times, and I'm enjoying it immensely. Altogether I've done well to have waited and had all of these hit me at once.

Harshing the buzz considerably though is the continued stupidity of HBO's DVD people who cannot seem to consistently stick a chapter stop at the end of the opening credits. Why is this so difficult? I cannot be the only person in the world who does not want to sit through the entire theme song every fifty minutes when I'm devouring these shows. I am enjoying this show so much but when I watch five episodes in one night that means I need to fast forward four times (I did want to hear it all the way through, once) and tomorrow night I'll likely need to do it eight more times too if I know the way that I watch these things.

Then again I didn't pay for this (thank you Columbus Metropolitan Library) but I was thinking that I would probably be willing to pay an extra dollar or two (not more than two though) when I do buy discs of a show if it had chapter stops after the opening credits. At least until everybody figures out what the producers of M*A*S*H seem to already know. DVD makers, just put a chapter stop after the opening credits, please, damnit. This just gets to me for some reason.

On the upside, though, now I have a challenge. 'Roundabout the end of episode three ("The buys") I heard a familiar tune, albeit in an unfamiliar fashion. The song was one that I first encountered on the highly underrated soundtrack album for Batman forever called "The hunter gets captured by the game" and as far as I had known until today the song was done first by Tracy Thorn backed up by Massive Attack.

How wrong I was. Though that album is no stranger to cover tunes (Lou Reed's "Passenger" done by INXS's Michael Hutchence comes to mind) I'd never considered this song, one of my favorites of all time, to be one. Well, the one in the show sure didn't sound like Massive Attack and I immediately (and correctly) inferred that the version I knew and loved was likely a cover, but this one could well be also.

So I went out on the web, and I'm still not sure what I heard. Unfortunately "The Wire" is too common to help out on a search, and the HBO forums don't have a good enough search either. I'm pretty sure nobody else has asked about the song on there, and I moved my search over to the good old allmusic guide instead. There I discovered that the song was written by none other than Smokey Robinson and it was probably first performed by the Marvelettes. Unfortunately it's also been done by another five or six artists, too. So now the hunt begins.

I enjoy the hunt.

Intent is three quarters of something or other. I've been meaning to mention this for at least two months but haven't done so for no good reason.

I've renewed Lee Goldberg's book of Unsold TV pilots at least twice. It was one of the shows that caught my eye, and only now do I share it with you.

But before I do that, let's see what you can recall. I found the story of a pilot about a former astronaut who had become super intelligent by way of some solar happenstance.

Heat vision and Jack, you say. Not so, I say. What follows is the unfiltered truth (i.e. the exact entry. Please don't sue me!)

55. Northstar. ABC 8/10/86. 90 minutes. Phillips/Grodnick Productions and Warner Bros. Television. Director: Peter Levin. Executive Producers: Clyde Phillips and Dan Grodnick. Producer/Writer: Howard Lakin. Music: Brad Fiedel.

Originally titled The Einstein Man, this stars Greg Evignan as an astronaut who, while on a walk outside the spaceship, is zapped by a solar disturbance. When he gets back to earth, he has superhuman powers--and a superhuman mind--that's triggered by sunlight. But if he gets too much direct sunlight--without the protection of special sunglasses--he'll literally explode from overload. So, like his predecessor "The six million dollar man," he becomes a secret agent. Mitchell Ryan is his boss, Deborah Wakeman is the scientist who works with him.

Cast: Greg Evigan (as Major Jack North), Deborah Wakeman (Dr. Allison Taylor), Mitchell Ryan (Col. Evan Marshall), Mason Adams (Dr. Karl Janss), David Hayward (Bill Harlow), Sonny Landham (Becker), Robin Curtiss (Jane Harlow), Richard Garrison (Agent), Steven Williams (Agent), Ken Foree (Astronaut).

So yeah, Ben Stiller and Jack Black might not have been as original as they thought. So what?

The book's an interesting read albeit an out of date one. I've had a lot of experience with failed pilots and misunderstood shows, having seen everything from the failed Journey to the center of the earth to the Charming family thing and shows about robot girls and fathers from space.

Heck, I was even part of a focus group/feedback thing once wherein I watched bits of TV shows and then answered phone questions about them. It devolved to a screenshot, a pitch and a bunch of smilie faces and I was supposed to say which face represented my reaction.

I mainly went with the "face that is neither happy nor sad".

Hey, I was seven or eight at the time.

(for posterity, this is)

Jarlsberg? Great stuff.

It's a good cheese for crackers.

Seriously, though, why is it that wherever I turn I run into a homage to Casablanca? This probably all started last weekend with a shotgun showing of Overdrawn at the memory bank, as seen on MST3K. That video's a pretty direct rip of the Bogie classic, and even starts up the film in a couple places, WB logo and all. Yesterday I watched Neil Simon's Cheap detective, billed by Blockbuster as a follow-up to Murder by death (about which I have previously written. The only connection I see between the two Neil Simon films is Peter Falk as Sam Spade. Well, that and the messy ending -- neither movie seems able to end cleanly. So many plots and characters pass through the proceedings that a conclusion without a big mess is just about impossible.

The last Neil Simon movie I saw with a decent denouement was The Sunshine boys, but that could be due to the cast of characters numbering in the single digits. But I digress.

Cheap detective takes a bunch of bits out of the old Warner movies (not like Dead men don't wear plaid does, literally) and turns it into a clever spoof of the whole Sam Spade/Dashiell Hammett oeuvre. It makes them its own, though, and I think I'm sure to recognize more bits here and there as I watch more old films.

But that's not the end of it. I've been watching series at a time of the BBC sci-fi show Red dwarf, and the very first episode of the fourth series lifts a great bit of the ending, wholesale. Sure, they say "we'll always have Parrots" but it's there, somewhere.

The "Parrots" bit really is brilliant, I must say.

So, you find yourself not asking, what have I been watching, DVD-wise, lately? Let me tell you.

• Conspiracy code: For a film that bandies about words such as "keyless encryption" and "cryptography" in the way a Mamet film uses the f-word, there is surprisingly no computer usage shown on screen. At all. The occasional back of a monitor or laptop is shown, and a character mentions clicking and files, but that's about it, interface-wise. I'm assuming it's due to a small budget and a canny sense that the computer screens, more than anything else, date a movie (cf. Aliens). It's a fair movie, but nothing spectacular. It's intelligent but not particularly smart or engaging. David Warner, though, looks awesome in a scraggly beard.
• Chappelle's show (first season): Dave Chappelle is a funny guy, and much of this show is funny, but I don't think all of it is. Though this is uncensored (which is odd to say since some musical guests have been expurgated from the shows) there still seems to be a modicum of restraint. Some jokes are drawn out far too long, as in the Tyrese/Dave-as-a-crack-addict segments, and others a merely sloppy (the opening faux Mitsubishi Eclipse commercials feature Dave and a passenger in a Nissan 350Z, not a Mitsu). Complaints aside, I enjoyed it and will seek out the second season at the library if for nothing else but to see, firsthand, the much-touted Wayne Brady/Training day spoof.
• Red Dwarf II (second series, as it were): I remember catching bits of this show on PBS over the years, but I'm not sure how funny I thought it was. My understanding of the whole BBC series system was sorely lacking then, as it seemed odd that things changed after only a handful of episodes (consistently) and a several-year marathon fit nicely into a weekend. Much of the humo(u)r was wasted on me then, as well. So I wasn't bowled over completely then, to say the least, but I was intrigued. Well, now that I've been watching them in rapid succession (III and IV are due to show up any day now in my reserves at the library) I can see that I'm not going to be bowled over this time around. The show's interesting, but they're trying to cram too many things into each set of six episodes. I'm not convinced that they'd do better to have done it American style with thirteen to twenty-six episodes (cf. Homeboys in outer space) but somehow it comes across as equally laid-back and overworked. It too has BBC stamped all over it, though I cannot for the life of me say what I mean by that except for a slight against their film stock and production values. Maybe it's the lighting.
• Ladykillers (Coen brothers remake with Tom Hanks, not the Alec Guinness/Ealing studios original mentioned before): It made me laugh but not the way a good Coen brothers film should. Too much of it felt somehow constricting, as though they'd traded in their usual grand scale, wide shots, and vast vistas for a cheap soundstage. Tom Hanks acts well, but distractingly so and such that it's nearly impossible to discern if he is acting or his character is supposed to be doing it. The supporting players manage to separate themselves much better than those of the Guinness original, but with the extra characterization comes extra padding as well. The inclusion of a tedious in-helmet-cam football game scene is equally drawn out and technically impressive, but a bit more of the former. Like the rest of the movie, really.

I was going to watch A man, a woman and a bank but the disc I received was cracked halfway through, so no dice. Two days ago I'd never heard of the movie, and now I'm crushed that I need to wait another several days to watch the thing.

I've been disappointed by two books recently, and oddly enough they're both connected in some form to Comedy Central's Daily show. The first was Jon Stewart's Naked pictures of famous people, and the second was the much older book of sets of five questions asked every guest when Craig Killborn hosted the show.

Both books were, well, not funny. The latter one was a slapdash affair, padding out perhaps ten pages worth of material with bad television screen captures and other feats of bad layout. Moreover, most of it isn't really funny. The interviews on television might've been amusing, but they don't translate well to the written word. These, unlike a book of Dave Letterman's Top Ten lists, do not work in print. What a waste of paper.

Jon Stewart's book is connected to the Show only because he hosts it; it might've been published anyway but not nearly as widely. You see, it's not all that funny either. Jon's a funny guy with a great breadth of knowledge upon which to draw to make jokes, but he's pulling at straws here while I think he's shooting at fish in a barrel.

There's a chance that Dennis Miller would read this and roll on the floor laughing, but it sure didn't work for me. Far too many pages were spent on intricate but laborious jokes (such as the opening diary of a kennedy houseguest) that become tedious before getting a chuckle. Skip these books.

Sometime along the posting forward and posting backward this last week or so I was able to free up some prime DVD watching time. I spent most of watching television shows, so it was prime time indeed, ha ha ha. This time I focused (inadvertently, really) on the end of two series, Fox's Family guy and the BBC's Black Adder. Though both are comedies, the similarities pretty much end there.

Family guy is both hilarious and misguided. It's misguided in that almost every single episode (perhaps all of them, I cannot be sure without watching them again) included at least one musical number. I'm okay with the occasional musical number, but so many in such a short span of time (I watched the entire third season in under a week) started to wear on me, and eventually even grate. The writing's great and the animation's fantastic, but I'm not so much a fan of showtoons or Busby Berkeley or whoever to really need to see that sort of thing every time I hit fast-forward on the remote.

Yes, fast-forward. The damn theme song's not all that great, and I'm really not a fan of Lois's singing. Moreover, as I have been tired lately, the song's been bouncing around in my head more than I'd like. I could complain about this sort of thing much longer but for the fact that there is an incredibly simple fix -- all the DVD producers needed to do was put a chapter stop in right after the opening titles. They almost always put one in just before the end credits, damnit. I'd wager more people want to skip through the same thirty seconds of tripe than want to find out who did the celebrity voices or key grip or whatnot.

I for one, despite having watched several hundred DVDs and laserdiscs in my life, cannot recall a single time wherein I skipped right to the end credits, TV show or otherwise.

Maybe I'm just being picky. Or a snob. I know the M*A*S*H discs I've watched let me skip "Suicide is painless" every time, though there they didn't let me watch all of the episodes in sequence without two or three button presses between each episodes. What is it going to take to get simple navigation on every DVD? Don't people want people to be able to watch these things?

But watch them I did, and Family guy was friggin' hilarious. The high point, I think, was a couple second throwaway gag taken from Monty Python's Meaning of life, namely the "modern art" tuxedo-ed guy asking about the fish. You'd know it if you saw it, I'd think. This, after all, is a show that takes parody to ludicrous extremes with several minutes to nearly entire episodes devoted to Logan's run or Dukes of Hazzard.

Less laugh-out-loud funny but not much less of a farce is the classic BBC series of Black Adder, with Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Tim McInnery, Brian Blessed, Tony Robinson and more. The humo(u)r's a lot more focused on this show, with each of the four series done in a different era of Britain's past, from the days of Richard III to the trenches of WWI.

Alas, in this case also the titles were not quite skippable. That said, since this was a BBC series I only sat through the theme music six times, not twenty-some. And it's much catchier, too, and more interesting as well to listen to the differences between the seasons.

They're all at your library, check 'em out. And if you happen to be a DVD producer, put in some better chapter stops. Please.