| Thursday, February 4th, 2010, 10:00 pm
Dollhouse: The End
Having finally gotten up the nerve to watch Epitaph Two last night, I've finished all the Dollhouse there'll ever be. (Well, except that I never saw Epitaph One. I own the DVDs, but I lent them to Austen, and she hasn't watched them or given them back, so I just had to bypass that one.) Endings have a way of getting to me in any case, and Joss Whedon's finales don't shy away from darkness and pain, so you'll forgive me if I'm still feeling a little emotional about the whole thing. (A quick note: I will speak freely here, without regard to plot points or anything else. Don't read further if, somehow, you're even further behind on watching the last episodes than I was.)
In the end, Dollhouse was a failed show, much as it pains me to write that. The first five episodes were really not good. The standalone stories were so standalone as to have no resonance, and the main critique that cropped up before the show even aired (as unfair as that kind of "analysis" is) came true: why would we care about Echo if she's almost never Echo? Further, the criticism that Eliza Dushku has no range as an actor turned out to be, sadly, spot on. She has a comfort zone, and she's very watchable in that zone: as Faith in Buffy is, of course, still what she's most known for, and late in the Dollhouse's run, when she becomes Echo with all her various abilities and the angst that comes with it (I've seen this before ...), she tapped into some of that Faith mojo. It just took a long time to get there.
Fox seems to have exacerbated the difficulty by ordering Joss Whedon to kick the show off with that bunch of standalone episodes, only lightly seeded with a larger overall story. In a thirteen-episode season, shouldn't we know before the end of the fourth episode who the Big Bad is? Shouldn't we have some more information about him earlier so that he/we can get a full arc? Information about Alpha was leaked out in dribs and drabs, and it felt clunky and added on to the standalone stories early in the show's run (which it likely was).
Think also about how Fox marketed these episodes: "Echo is blind!"; "Echo loses her mind during a big art heist!"; "Echo is hunted!" The universe of Whedonite loyalists plus people who might watch a Whedon show because their friends all told them the excellence of Firefly is not huge, contrary to Whedonite assertions that "everyone loves Joss Whedon". Dollhouse's pilot garnered 4.715 million viewers. That's respectable if that's your consistent audience on Friday night, but you can't afford to lose much off of that and still have a viable program. Thus, you needed to start the show off with a bang, not a whimper, because the group of truly hardcore Whedonites, who were going to watch regardless of how bad the show was in the early going (ahem), is really not very big. Fox apparently had the idea that they were going to leach off the millions watching Supernanny and Flashpoint (ABC and CBS's entries for the Dollhouse timeslot at the time of the premiere). In hindight, it's blindingly obviously how dumb this was. But even at the time, Fox was criticized, because the show very obviously wasn't working, and the audience was not responding. If you let Joss be Joss right from the start, and, say, start with "Man on the Street", then maybe I'm not writing this post today. (Maybe I still am writing it because maybe the number of people who kept watching Dollhouse even after those first five episodes is the same as the number of people who'd have watched if the show had started a different way. Or maybe I'd have written this post six months ago after the show was canceled after just six episodes. It's hard to say.)
Back in reality, the show was basically in a full death spiral by the time "Man on the Street" aired -- some people had abandoned the show because they didn't like the first few episodes, some stuck around but still didn't love the show when it picked up in the second half of the first season, and some left because they didn't want to get invested in a show that was surely headed for cancellation anyway. Rumors of cancellation were swirling in all the usual places. All of this left Season 2 (frankly, it's a miracle Season 2 exists, given the above litany of difficulties) with generally low-two-million-viewer numbers, though those stats became meaningless once the show was cancelled. Fox decided to air the rest of the episodes (bless them for that, at least, especially since it's not clear that reruns of The Family Guy or something wouldn't have done better), but crammed six of them into three nights in December to make sure the whole run was burned off before we hit the midseason premiere point.
All of that is business, not writers-room stuff, though business of course affects creativity: the first five episodes of the first season, for instance, are different from what we'd have seen otherwise; or the fact that the writers couldn't assume that the audience had seen "Epitaph One", since Fox chose not to air it; or the completely rushed pace the show took on over its last six or eight episodes, pushing revelation after revelation out the door, killing characters like there was no tomorrow, and so forth. Also, I noticed a lot of complaint about Boyd as the founder of Rossum, and I firmly believe that if that had been a Season 3 (or even later?) revelation, it could have been built to. Or maybe the audience could have gotten the reveal before the characters. Remember, now-famous Dollhouse lore is that Joss Whedon had a five-year plan right from the start -- it doesn't seem to me that Boyd-as-Rossum-head was just pulled out of the writers' asses sometime in October, 2009.
So far, I've put all my blame for the show's demise on Fox for dicking around, but the writers share plenty of blame as well. After all, just because Fox tells you to write five episodes that you didn't really anticipate having to write doesn't mean you should make bad TV. You still have to put high-quality product on the air, and "The Target", "Stage Fright", "Gray Hour", and "True Believer" were not high-quality television. When the network gives you the lemon of saying "we need these episodes to be standalone adventure stories to give the audience, which is mostly dumb sheep with no capacity for intellectual reasoning, time to adjust", you have to make lemonade by (a) (and this really is (a), as in it is the most important factor there is) making good adventure stories; (b) getting us to care about the characters who don't have that inherent disability of constant change. As to (b), Ballard was the only strong character in the first half of the first season. Boyd was sort of a generically troubled (or should I say "troubled"?) new handler, Topher cracked wise a lot, DeWitt kept a firm hand, and Dominic was a hardass. Over the course of five episodes, since we're not going to get to care about Echo, you have to make us care about some of those other characters. And we didn't. (I did eventually end up caring about all of them, but it took the massive leap forward to Season 2 to get there. Topher got scruples, Adelle got severely tested by her overlords, Boyd took over security, Ballard joined the team, and Dominic got to be the hero of The Attic.)
Even on this front, though, I'm not sure I can blame the writers for the whole business. After all, imagine being in the room, plotting your season, planning arcs, etc., when suddenly the network passes on just a wee note: "We hate everything you're doing, change it all." You've got less time to pull together those first episodes than you did before, because you're kind of back to square one when it comes to figuring out how your seasonal arcs are going to run, what your tone is going to be, and so forth. And don't forget that those orders from the network are on top of having had to shoot two pilots because the network rejected the first one after audience testing. Of course, maybe the original pilot would have been terrible and gotten the show off to an even worse start, but that's not really the point -- the point is about time, energy, direction, and so forth.
I called Dollhouse a "failed show", but I don't want to denigrate what Joss Whedon et al. did accomplish, which was a hell of a lot. The show raised all sorts of moral quandaries about science and technology, issues of the philosophy of self, questions about sex and violence and their role in our culture, ideas about the nature of entertainment and the boundaries between real and fantasy. All of this in 28 episodes, only 26 of which actually aired.
Further, as I said above, by the end of the show, there were a number of characters I genuinely cared about, Topher most notably. (Fran Kranz's excellent work in the role really ought to be recognized.) Also, it's really interesting how much the show became his -- think about how at the end of the series, in order to restore humanity, it is Topher, not Echo, who makes the Christ-like ultimate sacrifice to rescue all of us. (If you don't like the Christ analogy, how about him being the deus in the deus ex machina that his little pulse bomb represented?) Hell, at the end of "Epitaph Two", Adelle seemingly has more to do than Echo, as she has to get out into the world and help people recover. Echo just gets to sit in the Dollhouse and dream with her memories of Paul. (I realize that's oversimplifying, but remember Adelle's line to Echo: "It's not your fight.")
So Joss, I say once and for all: get thee to cable! Put a show like Dollhouse on Syfy and it's considered a huge hit, even though you don't get all that money to build that gorgeous Dollhouse set. You also don't get Eliza Dushku, for whatever that's worth. (I don't want to be mean to her, since I follow her on Twitter, but she really was part of the problem in the early going of the series, and while things got better later on, I'm not sure she was ever actively part of the solution so much as she was just not that bad.) But what you do get is one to two million people watching every week, plus more on DVR, plus more on Hulu, and Syfy is completely overjoyed with you because, come on, what else does it have? Warehouse 13? Sanctuary? I've seen those shows, and I'll tell you: they're no Dollhouse. (Ok, Battlestar Galactica was still on, but it was in its final run, set to end three months after Dollhouse premiered.)
One last shot across the bow, this one a little more meta: I saw far too many reviewers, bloggers, etc., talking about how icky the sex-slave aspect of the show was. That was the point! If you believe that Joss Whedon, writer of Alien: Resurrection, creator of Buffy, brainchild behind one of the more interesting prostitute characters on TV (Inara on Firefly), isn't addressing these issues head-on, completely intentionally, I think you're missing something. Yes, the show engaged in a certain amount of fanservice (Eliza Dushku was in various states of undress a lot), but I would even give Joss credit for doing that intentionally. Remember, the Dollhouse is about satisfying desires and creating entertainment through semi-scripted fantasy. It's not crazy to think that Joss was turning the lens on us as well, is it? That we're meant not only to say "wow, Eliza really does have a fantastic rack", but to also be creeped out by ourselves, our sexism, our objectification? In short, aren't we supposed to reflect on our own attitudes toward sex, violence, fantasy, and gratification by being forced into the same pleasure-oriented position as the (sleazy, creepy, even dangerous) clients of the Dollhouse? Maybe that's a gross over-reading. But I think the larger point stands: very little in the show was unthinking or gratuitous or legitimately objectionable.
| Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010, 7:05 pm Oscar picks
Because you care, here are my picks for the Oscars, not who I think will win, but who I want to win. I'm going to go ahead and pick every award even when I don't know a damn thing about it. What's a blog for?
Picture: District 9 is still the number one movie in my top ten, so I see no reason why I wouldn't root for it here. As a solid section option, I will root for "not Avatar". I don't think The Blind Side was the best movie of the year by any stretch, but I'd much (much much) rather see it win than Avatar.
Director: I'd love for Kathryn Bigelow to take this one just to strike a blow for equality, but I can't actually root for the movie because I haven't seen it. (It's still on Long Wait here from Netflix. If it stays that way all the way up to the Oscars, I'll just have to Redbox it.) I don't really want to see him make a speech, but the sheer visual balls of Inglourious Basterds means that I'd applaud Quentin Tarantino if he took this one home.
Actor: This is a rough category for me because I've actually only seen one of the movies. From the perspective of "always the bridesmaid" + "should give a good speech", then, I'm rooting for Jeff Bridges.
Actress: Having not seen Precious, I'm rooting for Carey Mulligan at the moment. Meryl Streep is always great, but she doesn't need another award to tell us that. Share the wealth, Meryl.
Supporting Actor: Stanley Tucci was the best part of The Lovely Bones. Everyone loved Christoph Waltz in Basterds, of course, and I enjoyed his performance as well, but I can't shake the feeling that the character was more juicy than the performance. Tucci was the epitome of the creepy child molester without being a stereotype. It's a difficult line to walk.
Supporting Actress: Vera Farmiga is smokin'.
Animated Feature: Up by the barest of noses over Mr. Fox.
This is really difficult. Both movies were beautiful and wonderfully voiced. I'm taking Up on the strength of just being a bit tighter, story-wise. I'd be ok with a tie, though.
Original Screenplay: To call Tarantino's script a script is to demean the efforts of screenwriters who write actual movies. It was revenge porn: a bunch of arousing scenes thrown together with little in the way of glue to keep them together. Because I put Up ahead of Mr. Fox on the strength of its screenplay, then, I'll root for it here.
Adapted Screenplay: I think I have to go with District 9 here, if only so people can complain all over again (completely wrongly) that it turned from an interesting character movie into Transformers: South Africa.
Documentary Feature: I haven't seen any of these yet, sadly, so I'll root for The Cove on the strength of social message and real-world effect combined with the sheer balls it took to get the footage they got.
Original Score: I can't really say I remember any of these. Mr.
Fox's score was done by Alexandre Desplat, though, and I like
French people, so I'll root for that.
Original Song: I didn't like "Down in New Orleans" and I don't remember which song "Almost There" was from The Princess and the Frog, so: go go T Bone Burnett!
Film Editing: I'll go Basterds here even though the shots that have stayed with me are one-takes. I certainly can't explain why, but I'll go with the theory that it's not just framing and lighting that give a film such a strong visual mood, so I bet Basterds probably had great editing as well. How's that?
Cinematography: Basterds again.
Visual Effects: Avatar, I guess. I think James Cameron's visual imagination was sort of stunted -- he didn't manage to invent anything on Pandora that felt entirely new. Everything had an Earth analogue. But the world was visually impressive nonethelesss, as much as I prefer the gritty realism of District 9's effects, I suppose we should acknowledge the advances Avatar brought about.
Sound Editing: Um? Up! Just 'cause.
Sound Mixing: Star Trek. Same reason.
Live Action Short: I don't care as long as English is not the first language of whoever goes up to accept the award.
Animated Short: Same, with preference for Fabrice O. Jourbert. For reasons mentioned above.
Foreign Film: France!
| Sunday, January 24th, 2010, 6:10 pm Tim Dickinson on Lisa Jackson of the EPA
As much as Obama and his administration have been a disappointment to people
like me, it's good to recognize when he and his do things well, as Tim
Dickinson does in Rolling Stone, writing about the job Lisa Jackson has done
while heading up the EPA.
| Friday, January 15th, 2010, 9:50 pm Sin Nombre
(Update: sorry, you're going to see this twice, but I'm testing my ability to make an ampersand character that will actually appear in the RSS feed.)
I'm not going to go into great depth except to say that I really liked Sin
Nombre as a movie about doomed friendship, the immigrant experience, the
cycles of violence, and the ways that love does not always conquer all. Cary
Fukunaga, an American, made a big splash with this movie at Sundance in 2009,
which has given him real traction in Hollywood. He's slated to direct 2011's
Jane Eyre with Mia Wasikowska (who is set to break in Tim Burton's
Alice in Wonderland) and Michael Fassbender (who you might remember most
recently as the British film critic-turned-paratrooper in Inglourious
Basterds).
I think my favorite thing about Sin Nombre is that it manages to move
slowly without wandering. Everything that happens matters, but you never feel
rushed. Shots and scenes linger without overstaying their welcome.
Since I've really got nothing but praise for the film, it is jumping into my
2009 top ten, all the way at seven. Julie & Julia, I liked you, but
at this point, you're eleventh. Sorry.
Thursday, January 14th, 2010, 10:45 am The Blind Side
As I tweeted this morning, I liked The Blind Side more than I thought I
would. It's not a great movie by any means, and I thought the third act was
weak (the fight at the drug dealer's house? Really?), but overall, as bad
sports movies / bad "based on a true story" uplifting movies go, it wasn't
actually, well, bad.
As someone who read Michael Lewis's book, the places where I thought the movie
went most off the rails were the liberties the film took with what actually
happened (or at least with what Lewis reported). The aforementioned fight
(leading to Sandra Bullock's ludicrous threat to the drug dealer the next
morning, a scene used in every single commercial for the movie) was one. The
bigger issue I have in re: liberties is that the movie paints the Tuohy family
in a much more positive light than the book in one key respect: their
motivations for adopting Michael Oher. Sean Tuohy, you'll recall, saw Michael,
this enormous young man, playing basketball and noticed that he wasn't just
big, he was an athlete too. Thus the seed is planted: when the family ends up
taking him in, what percentage of their charity is pure and Christian and what
percentage is motivated by their love of Ole Miss? The film doesn't show Sean
knowing anything about Michael's athletic ability. Thus the later accusation
by the NCAA compliance officer, that the Tuohys had improper motivations and
violated recruiting rules, doesn't land with the force it needs. All we're
shown is what's finally concluded: that they treated him like a son of their
own and thus naturally pushed him toward the school they went to, but "he's our
son" came clearly before "he's our left tackle".
That's obviously a pretty big hole chopped right out of the story, especially
since the filmmakers actually did want to go there. It's not like they
simply wanted to tell Michael's uplifting story and leave all the moral
quandaries of football-based motivations alone. They wanted the movie to
address both issues. Thus, by slanting the story so far in the direction of
purity, a part of the movie simply fails.
But like I said, I liked it anyway. The cheesy training montage (you've seen
sports movies before) was amusing as S.J., the small son, puts Michael through
his workouts. Quinton Aaron as Michael Oher was touching and, I thought, got a
key point right: Michael is no dummy. Pulling off the "refuses to talk and has
been utterly failed in terms of schooling" without just seeming mentally
retarded is hard, but I think the screenplay, direction, and Aaron's acting did
a nice job with this. (Although I could have done with one or two fewer
expository "he's no dummy" comments. But I've started to accept that Hollywood
just isn't one for subtlety.)
| Tuesday, January 12th, 2010, 9:50 pm It's Complicated
It's Complicated was pretty much what I expected it to be, and I liked
it about as much as I thought I would (two stars of five, and again, that's
purely subjective, but I'll get into that below). Briefly: Jane (Meryl
Streep), ten years divorced from Jake (Alec Baldin, and what a time people must
have had reading Nancy Meyers's screenplay with Jane and Jake getting every
other line -- then again, since she wrote and directed, maybe nobody else
needed to read it), suddenly finds things rekindled with him at the same time
that she starts falling for Adam, the architect responsible for building
additions on her house. Add three grown kids (including Hunter Parrish, who plays
Silas on Weeds, and don't think that didn't distract me all movie long)
and you've got ... well, you've got a movie.
Things were as unsentimental as I hoped, the jokes were often solid (John
Krasinski, as the fiance of the oldest daughter, gets a memorable scene having
lunch at a hotel where Jane and Jake are liaising), and the story was told with
little wasted motion, but in the end, I wonder if this is one of those movies
where I legitimately suffered from not being in the target audience. After
all, someone loved it -- the picture was nominated for Best Comedy or
Musical at the Golden Globes, and Meyers's screenplay also took a nomination.
(Meryl Streep was nominated too, but she could wander around midtown Manhattan
in a paper sack and get a nomination for it at this point. It's almost pro
forma. Not that I'm complaining, really, because she fully inhabits every
character she plays despite basically being the only woman of her age that
Hollywood can turn to on these matters. She's remarkable, really.) Having no
experience being divorced, having no experience being old, having no experience
with the onset of the empty nest, perhaps I just couldn't identify with Jane
and Jake. I'd like to say that the movie should have drawn me in anyway, that
I find ways to get involved with lots of characters who are nothing like me,
but maybe in this kind of movie, it's forgiveable.
I guess in part I'm being wary of leveling too much criticism at Meyers, who
is, after all, the only person in Hollywood who does what she does. Movies
don't shoot for the 40+ female demographic (or the 40+ demographic at all, for
that matter), and as someone who hopes to be 40+ someday, and hopes to be
married to a 40+ female at the time, I'd like to think that when I get there,
there will be movies made for me.
I don't know. It's a debate for me whether it was really me being half Alec
Baldwin's age that made me fail to identify with Jake or whether it was
actually Meyers's screenplay and direction and the editing of Joe Hutshing and
David Moritz that took me out of the story. Were there too many distractingly
strange shots (like one of Alec Baldwin about halfway through that suddenly
centered him in the frame and had him deliver his line full-on to the camera,
putting us much more literally in Jane's shoes than anything before or after
asked us to be) or was I easily distracted? Did the editing in the first third
of the movie somehow manage to kill every single joke or was that humor
just not written for me? Was the utter perfection of Jane and Jake's family
(the three adult children are as close as can be, with constant smiles and
chirpy remarks) distracting to everyone or was I just not able to disappear
into the escapist fantasy from my own flawed family life?
If you're not in the generation above mine, if you don't have kids, if you or
your friends aren't divorced, will you like the movie? And does it matter if
you do? Like I said, I don't know.
That's a crummy way to end a blog post, but that's why I'm a blogger and not a
professional.
| Monday, January 11th, 2010, 6:55 pm The Princess and the Frog
I liked The Princess and the Frog a lot more than I thought I would. I
don't begrudge it its place on the list of nominees for the Best Animated Film
Golden Globe. I'm not putting it on my top ten (it's not better than Julie
& Julia), but if I had kids, I'd feel fine about having them watch it
without worrying that I was corroding their little minds with garbage.
I still only gave the movie three stars on Netflix (out of five) because the
story wasn't quite as tight as you find in the best kids' movies, and
some of the songs didn't really land with me. But it earned the three stars in
part with a couple of very good songs, including one gorgeous animated sequence
at the beginning when Tiana, the heroine, sings to her mother about her dreams
of opening a restaurant. In general, the animation was up to Disney's historic
standards, and occasionally (like in the aforementioned musical number)
exceeded those expectations. Also, and I wonder whether the emergence of Pixar
has anything to do with this, I thought there were more seeded moments for the
adults to enjoy than you usually find in classic Disney movies, including one
"throbbing ... heart" joke. Most of the jokes weren't quite that adult,
but there were a number of areas where I chuckled or even giggled when I
wouldn't expect small children to. As an adult sitting alone in a movie
theater (a mother-very-young-daughter team was there as well, but I went
alone is what I mean), I was grateful for these moments. It made me feel less
creepy.
Don't read this if you haven't seen it and actually care what happens to the
characters, but I have to say that I misted up a little bit when Ray the Cajun
firefly actually died after being stepped on by the evil shadowman, Dr.
Facilier.
| Sunday, January 10th, 2010, 9:45 pm (500) Days of Summer
There are some movies that, if you know me at all, you know I'm going to love.
(500) Days of Summer probably falls into that category. It's not as
unconventional as some of the reviews made it seem -- yes, we jump around in
time, but we still proceed more or less chronologically. In a movie that talks
much more about the way we perceive love and life and relationships than
about the actual truth (or lack thereof) of those ideas, the
time-jumping was an elegant wrapper for the film rather than some
ultra-clever device or new form of storytelling.
Don't take that as a criticism, though. Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber,
the screenwriters, conceived of the perfect structure for telling
this kind of story. The key, though, is that the story is what you come
away with, not the structure -- in short, it's not a gimmick.
That story is pretty easy to synopsize: Tom meets Summer (Day 1) and their
"relationship" goes up and down and finally comes to a full conclusion on Day
500. I put "relationship" in quotes because a major feature of their
disconnect is their different ideas about the nature of relationships, labels,
and so forth. Of course, their actual relationship ends long before Day 500,
because this movie is about Tom, not about Tom&Summer -- Day 500 is the day Tom
is finally fully reconciled.
The movie doesn't really take a "let's blow up these ideas about love" approach
-- in fact, the ending, the way Tom resolves himself to the end of
Summer, is fully in tune with Hollywood and greeting-card notions of love.
(Tom, of course, is a greeting-card writer, having declined to chase his dreams
of being an architect. I told you it was pretty conventional in some ways.)
But the way we get there is so pitch-perfect, so heartbreaking and funny, that
you can simply appreciate a well-told story about compelling (yet just
blank enough to project ourselves into) characters. The easy comparison is to
Up in the Air -- another conventional (when looked at on the level of
the outline of the story) love story (although (500) Days, in a
Magritte-ian touch, explicitly states, before the film really begins, that it
is not a love story) that rises above the usual schlock through simple
masterful storytelling.
That isn't really fair to (500) Days's cleverer bits, though, including
a hilarious scene of European film parodies, a beautifully done split-screen of
"Expectations" vs. "Reality" at a party that Summer throws and Tom attends, and
a dance number in a park.
I would be remiss, as well, if I didn't mention the Los Angeles that the movie
takes place in. L.A., for whatever reason, tends not to come off well
on the movies and in TV. This always strikes me as backwards, given that
everyone in the industry lives there, but maybe it's some kind of residual
resentment over being forced to move to pursue their careers in L.A. rather
than any actual animosity for the place itself. Regardless of why, though, New
York stories (like Nick and Norah, even though the teens there lived in
New Jersey), Chicago stories (The Time Traveler's Wife comes to mind),
and stories from almost every other place romanticize those places. While you can
question the decision to locate this story in downtown L.A., where people can
walk to the grocery and to work and can take the subway hither and yon, on the
grounds that it's not a great percentage of the population that lives there,
the city was undoubtedly sketched with tenderness. The L.A. of (500)
Days is an L.A. I'd want to live in; it's an L.A. anyone would want
to live in. The tone set by the place was crucial to the story, and I thought
the filmmakers created a place that fit the story very well.
I hate to spoil the mood I've tried to create with this post with the tawdry
details of a revised 2009 Top Ten, but here it is anyway. This time, I'm
ranking. (Everyone else does.)
Friday, January 8th, 2010, p.m. An Expensive Education, Nick McDonell
An Expensive Education is a sort of spy thriller-cum-campus novel from
Nick McDonell. It's McDonell's third book, beginning with Twelve, which
he wrote at 17. As soon as I say that, you can guess the kind of hype that
surrounded that book, and that has followed McDonell ever since. Twelve
was apparently a "write what you know" novel about a bunch of NYC prep
schoolers. (McDonell went to Buckley and Riverdale Country.) An Expensive
Education is more of the same, as it focuses on Harvard (where McDonell
went) and Africa (where he has done reporting for Time and
Harper's).
The book's epigraph is a quote from Graham Greene's sorta-spy-novel Our Man
in Havana. The quote is supposed to set the tone for the entire novel, but
no more than a quarter of the way through, I realized that it set the tone in
an entirely different way. McDonell's book, purely on its merits, is no match
for Greene. (Sadly, McDonell himself isn't the only one who has made the
comparison -- his wikipedia page says that reviews have compared him to Greene
and John Le Carre. As you'll see, I find this blasphemous.) On the one hand,
I shouldn't penalize McDonell for this, because, really, who is a match
for Greene? On the other, my cynical side sees the quote as a classic elite
move. Rather than actually learning the lessons Greene has to teach a
prospective writer of spy novels, McDonell instead brands his book with the
quote, showing his erudition. It's a "look at me" move no different from any
other kind of name-dropping, but which seems particularly insidious in light of
McDonell's background (a prep school elite) and his subject (the American
aristocracy). It's hard to take McDonell's apparent criticisms of the elite
seriously when he's so obviously integrated the lessons of elitism himself.
The book gives us an ensemble to follow. Teak is the McDonell character, a New
York prep schooler and Harvard graduate who now works in Africa. Where Teak
presumably departs from McDonell is that Teak works for the CIA. Susan Lowell
is a Harvard professor of some kind, most noted for the publication of her
dissertation on an East African revolutionary named Hatashil. Her background
isn't discussed, but she is married to a wealthy banker. Razi is an Iranian
journalist who worked with Lowell in Africa and is currently at Harvard on a
fellowship. He has not been able to follow up his best-known work, a piece on
the nephew of a Saudi intelligence chief who disappeared some time ago. He
drinks. David is a Somalian student at Harvard with some personal knowledge of
Hatashil. He is in one of Lowell's classes. Jane is David's girlfriend, white
and American. She works on Harvard's newspaper.
Ensembles are difficult enough to pull off without the panoply of weaknesses on
display in this book. The major one is that each of these characters is
essentially passive and reactive. About halfway through the book, Teak finally
gets some forward motivation and momentum and begins taking action of his own,
but the vast majority of the book involves things happening to the characters.
Purely passive protagonists are a tough sell, and McDonell didn't sell them
here. I was, frankly, bored. How many scenes of characters sitting around
thinking about acting can one book have? (Answer: way more than you would have
previously thought.) And again, this isn't a contemplative novel, an exercise
in philosophy, a study of the nature of passivity, or anything like that. It's
a spy novel. Your characters have to act.
Closely tied up with this problem is McDonell's insistence on continually
telling instead of showing. He repeatedly gets us in the heads of the
characters and tells us how they're feeling about this or that. There's no way
around this criticism: it's bad writing. I could count on one hand the number
of events or actions in the book that give us insight into the
characters. Like I said, there are only so many scenes of a character sitting
around thinking and feeling that I can take.
Further, McDonell made the very odd choice to not only put us in the heads of
the five main characters listed above, but to give the reader almost complete
omniscience. Every character we encounter, from the class jesters Lucas and
Willy to the CIA recruiter Alan Green to Susan Lowell's nanny, gets the
full-brain-scan treatment. This is doubly problematic -- not only are we,
again, told instead of shown information about these characters, but we also
don't care. I recall Alan Green showing up twice. He's simply too
peripheral to get the treatment usually reserved for a protagonist, but
McDonell gives him that treatment anyway. The resulting whiplash of
perspective is jarring, almost fatally distracting.
One might begin to question McDonell's motivation in this regard, because
the book is not very long (under 300 pages in the hardcover), and the plot is
paper-thin. Spending a paragraph with the motivations and emotions of every
character we meet starts to feel like filler, especially since little
is actually happening through all of this. The novel begins with Teak
narrowly escaping being killed when an attack is launched on Hatashil, who was
(and still is, as far as Teak knows) an American ally. Eventually, after a lot
of thought and following orders, Teak starts to discover some things about who
Hatashil really is and his relation to the U.S. government. That's pretty much
all that happens.
I will give McDonell this. He tried to write a spy novel that says something about the aristocracy, about geopolitics, and about the
relations between those two things. But, in no small part because of the
variety of weaknesses discussed above, the book fails to say much at all. I
suppose McDonell could be seen to argue that the aristocracy should not be
running things because there's nothing so special about them, they're just
drunks and losers and racists who happen to have been born into the right
families. But Teak, Mr. Aristocracy himself, is both a genuinely remarkable
person (smart, athletic, speaks at least five languages) and someone with a
moral code. Other characters represent the aristocracy, but none so much as he
does, and he's a positive representation.
There's also a pretty straightforward critique of the way America dominates
African business and how the power relations there change with the wind,
depending on how the American government feels at any given time about the
various leaders on the continent. This is nothing new, and if McDonell were
writing the book twenty years ago, he'd have set it in Central America. That's
not to say it's not worth saying, especialy in the form of a novel that might
appeal to people who don't read The Nation or even the newspaper. This
point is actually made more powerful, rather than less, by the way David is
manipulated by Alan Green and others, taking advantage of his quest to move
into the American elite himself.
One final point: remarkably, given McDonell's obvious familiarity with the
places and people at the heart of the novel, it has no sense of place
whatsoever. Harvard could have been any random college. Not just any Ivy
League school (or other elite institution), but almost literally any random
college. There are anarchists and pranksters and drunks and a quad and clubs,
all of varying levels of ridiculousness, but none of which he imbues with any
particular sense of Harvardness or even eliteness. Africa, too, manages to
feel remarkably like "Africa", rather than Kenya or Somalia or wherever Teak is
in any given scene. If part of your point is America's treatment of Africa,
then perhaps you shouldn't come off as just another American writing about
Africa, unable to distinguish east from west, coast from center, north from
south.
Given McDonell's apparent lack of storytelling skill, one wonders whether his
previous two books were better than this one, or whether we ought to take the
references to nepotism on his wikipedia page seriously. Both his mother and
father are in publishing, and you might have heard of his dad, Terry McDonell,
the longtime editor-in-chief at Sports Illustrated. His parents, as
you'd expect, have a lot of friends, some of whom publish books, others of whom
are authors who write blurbs on books, others of whom are agents, etc. etc.
The irony of the situation is blinding.
| Tuesday, January 5th, 2010, 7:10 pm The Music of Glee, Season 1, First Half
Since a certain someone who knows me far too well got me both volumes one and
two of the Glee soundtracks for Christmas, I figure I may as well wring
a blog post out of the topic of Glee's music. Mainly, I'm-a tell you my
favorite. Why do you care? You don't. That's why you're reading this blog.
Anyway, as to my standards, like I said, this is about my favorites. I'm not
trying to get at objectivity or trying to adjust for song choice or anything
like that. I'm not even going to attempt to choose my favorite pure vocal
performances. If the choreography really sucked me in during the show, and if
the emotional moment felt exactly like it wass supposed to, I probably liked
the song better overall. Even listening to the soundtrack, one of the ways I
can tell which songs I really like is that I can picture their context in the
show. If I can't remember why or how or where you sang "No Air", that's a sign
that it wasn't very memorable. Which is maybe a bit of a tautology. Whatever,
moving on.
Favorite female performer: Lea Michele (Rachel). Too easy. Sure, I could go
and talk about how I like Amber Riley as Mercedes, and I really do. But come
on, Lea Michele just blows the rest of this cast out of the water. She stood
toe-to-toe with Kristen Chenoweth. Lots of singers have range, but Lea Michele
has a richness that money can't buy. Her first verse on the first song of
soundtrack, "Don't Stop Believin'", just devastates poor Cory Monteith (Finn).
It brings tears to my eyes. I wish I were joking.
Favorite male performer: Kevin McHale (Artie). Monteith just doesn't have that
much going on, vocally. He does noticeably get better as you listen to his
songs through the course of the soundtrack, but it's hard to say whether he's
getting better or whether the songs are just better-chosen for him. I mean,
right from the start, "Don't Stop Believin'" is a tough task for the poor guy.
He does his best, but his voice doesn't have any soar in it. McHale's part on
"Imagine", "Lean on Me", and, of course, his solo "Dancing With Myself" are
just outstanding. I was so excited when the writers finally brought him out of
the background and gave him some featured spots because it turned out that we'd
been missing a whole hell of a lot before his big episode.
I do have a soft spot for Matthew Morrison (Will), and he can really sing,
but two of his songs on the soundtrack were rap (plus he had "Thong Song", not
on the soundtrack), and while I thought he really pulled off "Gold Digger", it
just doesn't hold a candle to "Dancing With Myself".
Favorite song, female lead: I'll just call it a tie between "Bust Your
Windows", and "Smile" (the Lily Allen one). "Bust Your Windows" was Amber
Riley's first big moment, as well as the first "hey, this show is actually a
musical, not just a show about a show choir" moment, and she killed it. And
"Smile" is just a genius song, catchy, light, and filled with loathing and
anger. I like that it gave Lea Michele room to not be so big, and she
proved that she was up to the challenge.
Favorite song, male lead: The aforementioned "Dancing With Myself", and it's
not even close. Partially this is because I don't really love the male
singers, as I alluded to. With Monteith taking most of the leads, that really
eliminated a lot of songs from contention. And I liked "Sweet Caroline", but
Mark Salling (Puck) basically has a voice that's about as interesting as
Monteith's, he just happened to get a great song as his one big performance.
That said, "Sweet Caroline" is a fairly close second, so it's a real joy that
those two songs are back-to-back on the first volume of the soundtrack. (And
they're followed by "Defying Gravity", which doesn't make this list anywhere,
but which I do love -- I'm a showtunes guy, what can I say.)
Songs I wish were on the soundtrack: the mashups, especially "Halo"/"Walking on
Sunshine", but the guys' "It's My Life"/"Confessions Part II" as well. Diana
Agron (Quinn) doesn't get a ton of love from the producers, but I remember
really liking her in this mashup. It's possible my memory is faulty, because I
haven't listened to the song since it was on TV the first time.
Also, for the pure novelty of it, I'd love to have had Matthew Morrison's
"Thong Song", but I'd probably get sick of it. I don't remember it sounding
much different from the original. It was mostly just a kick seeing Morrison
sing it to Jayma Mays (Emma) while he danced around her.
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