Christopher East

Some random viewing notes from the past several days:

I didn’t exactly dislike the pilot for FlashForward, but I wasn’t all that impressed either.  Could it be any more derivative of Lost?  It’s mostly well made and not without promise conceptually, but in terms of its time-travelling genre content, it failed to surprise at every turn.  And for crying out loud, ABC, we’re not idiots!  “Remember the kangaroo…it may be important.”  No shit, sherlock!  You’d think the viewing world at large hadn’t learned anything over the past ten years…

The much, much better pilot I saw was Modern Family.  Funny, funny stuff about three unconventional, connected families.  Ty Burrell steals the show as the “cool dad.”  The faux-documentary style is definitely right out of a Christopher Guest movie or the original Office, of course, but that’s hardly a bad thing.  We’re season-passing this one.

After its terrific pilot, I had high expectations for Glee, but so far it hasn’t really found its feet.  Episode three was painful…and the music, for me, is always painful.  In the service of subversive humor, I’ll put up with anything, but so far the first hour’s nicely balanced tonal disconnect has skewed too far into the afterschool special department.  Jury’s still out, here.

Finally, we caught up with the unaired first season Dollhouse closer “Epitaph One” online, in preparation for the season two opener, “Vows.” All I can say about “Epitaph One” is:  wow.  By far the most interesting, complicated, and compelling Dollhouse ever done.   On the other hand, I don’t think you need to watch it to go on to season two; in fact, it struck me as a brilliant series finale for a show that, weirdly, hasn’t ended yet.  At the end of the this show’s improbable run, do we get a complementary “Epitaph Two?”  As for “Vows,” once again the mission-of-the-week didn’t thrill me much, but the lore continues to get more interesting–and the scene between Amy Acker and Fran Kranz (whose Topher Brink gets more fascinating with every line of dialogue) was one of the show’s best moments so far.  I hope Acker sticks around but I’m guessing she’s not. On the other hand, nice to see another Angel alum onboard–welcome Alexis Denisof!  Just a cameo so far, but I’m guessing Joss Whedon has no intention of wasting him on a bit part.

If Alexander C. Irvine’s Buyout (2009) isn’t the best science fiction novel I’ve read this year, it’s certainly my favorite.  You might even make that the past several years.   Irvine, a versatile talent who thrives in multiple genres, sets his sights on near future Los Angeles in this one, and he hits the bullseye squarely, turning out both a gripping cinematic thriller and an impressive work of detailed near-future speculation.  Confronting a multitude of the world’s imminent problems and concerns, Buyout is hard-hitting, topical science fiction, and I think one of the most important SF novels to come out in years.

Buyout follows the journey of one Martin Kindred, an idealistic numbers man working an undistinguished career in the insurance industry, whose prospects take an unexpected turn when his firm is bought out. The new owners are in the prison business, and the company bigwigs are pushing a radical new initiative:  the buyout program, a system whereby life-term inmates can “buy out” their sentences by allowing themselves to be put to death.  In return, the inmates will receive financial settlments  based on a percentage of the money presumably “saved” by their deaths.  The money can be distributed however the inmate wishes.  It’s a win-win for everyone, or so it seems:  prison populations are lowered, the company becomes more liquid, and — best of all — the life-termers are able to make amends by turning their crimes into good:  providing for their victims, affected family members, charities, or organizations of their choice.  Martin’s new bosses want him to be the figurehead of the program, knowing his basic decency and idealism will get the controversial new program off on the right foot.  And at first it appears that way, as Martin’s efforts help to legitimize buyouts and also make him a minor public figure.  But soon enough, unexpected events mire him in a web of intrigue, and he’s forced to come to terms with the fallout of his actions.

On the story level, the novel is just a cracking good read, moving along briskly from page one.  It’s populated with believable, well developed characters moving through a convincingly rendered future California.  Although marketed as a thriller, it’s really not conventionally structured as such; whereas thrillers are generally about maintaining or restoring a comfortable status quo, Buyout is decidedly about change, in particular the gradual, inexorable change of the sociopolitical landscape of the United States.  Even so, it certainly possesses thriller-like components sure to please fans of the genre — villains both individual and organizational, mysteries and conspiracies, clashing motives and ideals, cops and crooks and a protagonist caught in the middle of it all.  Adapted shrewdly, it would make a killer movie.

But that’s just considering story, and there’s also the science fictional level, which elevates the novel even further.  Irvine’s near future feels just as  messy and complicated and unpredictable as our present, but adds a layer of well crafted and realistic SFnal modding.  From its surveillance society to its smart traffic, its augmented and virtual realities, its Hollywood avatars and hologram computer servants, its ubiquitous networking and “Wi-Free” subcultures, Buyout is rife with compelling future-building, all painted against a convincingly progressed backdrop reflecting potential shifts in politics, culture, sociology, climate, and more.  The book’s SFnal side is enhanced immeasurably by chapter-break interludes featuring the voice of an anonymous audio-blogger, Walt Dangerfield, whose rants inform both the surface story and the larger world of the book.  These sections provide some of the novel’s most eloquent and powerful moments.

Irvine covers a lot of angles in this one, and the inherent philosophical arguments of this changed world — and of the buyout program in particular — are well considered and even-handedly presented.  The inner struggles of the characters, in the face of the world’s daunting challenges,  lead to a number of beautifull written, insightful moments.

Buyout may not be the book for you, if you’re looking for answers and a neat-and-tidy resolution.  But if you’re interested in a gripping SF novel that confronts challenging questions, about the world we’re making and an individual’s place in it, I can’t recommend this novel highly enough.

It’s tempting to call Nothing But the Truth (2008) an ironically titled film.  I mean, technically it’s not the truth — it’s rather a fictional reimagination of the real-life Judith Miller-Valerie Plame controversy, in which Miller was jailed for contempt of court for failing to reveal the source by which she learned that Plame was a CIA officer.  The film takes this reality, manufactures a fictionally similar scenario, applies leftish politics, and ultimately makes rather murky points.

In the alternate universe of this film, an assassination attempt on the president has led to a retaliatory U.S. military response against Venezuela.  But was Venezuela responsible, or was the assassination attempt merely a convenient pretext for invasion and, presumably, regime-change?  (Sound familiar?)  Ambitious young journalist Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) is convinced it’s the latter, and writes a controversial story to prove it — she has learned that CIA operative Erica Van Doren (the superb Vera Farmiga) has delivered a report to the White House disproving any connection between Venezuela and the assassination attempt.  Her story calls into question any justification for the U.S. invasion, and creates quite a stir — but also runs her afoul of ruthless federal prosecutor Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon), who is determined to force Armstrong to reveal the identity of her source, presumably in the interest of national security.  Armstrong refuses, to considerable consequence, embarking on a long personal battle during which she weighs the importance of journalistic integrity against the personal effects of what she’s done.

With most of the elements of an important, hard-hitting political drama in place, it’s disappointing that Nothing But the Truth can’t quite organize them into a successful movie.  It’s fairly well produced, and uniformly well performed by a veteran cast that includes Alan Alda, Angela Bassett, David Schwimmer, and Noah Wyle, all of whom are effective.  But it somehow also manages to be both clumsily blunt in its political tone and indecisive about whether to really deliver it.  By that I mean that it’s impossible not to see the film as a thinly veiled rejection of the Bush administration, right down to Dillon’s good-old-boy southern accent, and the infuriating whiffs of McCarthyism its villainous government thugs invoke. But it also manages to portray the heroic Armstrong as something of a reckless opportunist, who is “learning her lesson” for her actions, suggesting that had she simply been more responsible, horrible things wouldn’t have happened and lives wouldn’t have been negatively impacted.  Put more simply, it feels like the political message is muddied by the personal story.

In a more forgiving mood, I’d laud the film for wrestling with these sticky issues, at least, for sticky they are — but in general I’d bemoan its lack of a more coherent artistic point, which in this case would have required more political eloquence than the script can muster.  (It comes close, during a well articulated courtroom argument delivered by Alda, but the strength of that moment is sadly undercut by later missteps.)

The film is worthwhile chiefly for the performance of Farmiga, who is steely and dynamic as the outed CIA operative, and outshines the rest of an able cast by, in my opinion, an order of magnitude. And the movie also serves, perhaps, as a useful snapshot of American frustration with corrupt government in the wake of the invasion of Iraq.  But ultimately, Nothing But the Truth, with all its potential, doesn’t bring many new insights to the issues, and fails to deliver a satisfying story.

I generally can’t stomach awards shows.   I mean, they’re usually self-congratulatory, and gaudy, and uncomfortable, and full of tiresome speeches — but hey, that’s not all that different than watching reality, is it?  (Badump-chink!  I’m here all week, folks!)

But this year I kept half an eye on the Emmy ceremonies during a Sunday night WoW session, which may have mitigated the usual effect — which is to say, I found it less painful than usual to watch.  I have to admit, though, that overall they did a pretty good job this year.

Some stray thoughts on the ceremony:

• When did Neil Patrick Harris get so cool?  I mean, one minute he’s Doogie Howser, and next I’m like, “Neil Patrick Harris!”  (Okay, so maybe that was like twenty years.)  I think Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle may have been a turning point.  He was a good emcee, and the opening musical number was pretty funny.
• Kudos to the comedy actress nominees for hamming it up as their names were being read.  Kristin Wiig wins my Emmy for Best Use of Site Gag Props During the Ceremony award.
• Nice to see Kristen Chenoweth take an Emmy for a show that died before its time…you don’t see canceled shows win very often, do you?  (And how appropriate that it should be Pushing Daisies!)  Her acceptance speech, when decipherable, was cute.
• The Dr. Horrible musical interruption was just a smidge too short for my taste.
• I read somewhere that Michael Emerson of Lost gave a creepy acceptance speech.  But from where I was listening, it seemed pretty classy.
• I sure hope Michael C. Hall gets an Emmy win eventually….from Six Feet Under to Dexter, he’s pretty much been award-caliber in ever season of TV he’s ever done.

Anyway, a pretty decent ceremony all things considered.  After the fact, though, I got a little depressed.  It might have been the 28-hour headache I was recovering from at the time, but I also think it was an aspect of award shows I never liked that, until now, I’d failed to detect:  I don’t seem to be very good at watching other people achieve their dreams.  Even when I’m not entirely sure what, exactly, my own dream is any more.  So there, I’ve said it…

I guess writing this post, then, is an attempt to motivate myself to be a bigger person.  Knowing is half the battle, et cetera.  So, congrats to the Emmy winners!  (You bastards!)

Hors de Prix (2006) pits the man-killing charms of Audrey Tautou against the subdued comic timing of Gad Elmaleh, to generally good effect, in a romantic comedy that’s both cynical and sentimental.  Evidently I have a stronger stomach for Hollywood endings when they’re done in French…

Irene (Tautou) is a gold-digging con artist on the make, shamelessly using needy, wealthy gentleman to cater to her expensive tastes.  When she mistakes haplessly servile bartender Jean (Elmaleh) for a rich resident, she sees an easy mark…and much to his own surprise, Jean finds himself playing along to exacerbate her mistake.  It’s hardly an original set-up, and what follows is fairly predictable light comedy, but it’s still pretty charming.  The plot is pure Three’s Company miscommunication, while the feel is more along the lines of Blake Edwards gloss…okay, that actually makes it sound kind of nauseating.  But underneath the frothy glamour there’s just enough cynicism to mitigate the gooeyness, and if it’s making a pretty simple point, it makes it pretty well.  Crucically, the unlikely romance works, thanks to genuine chemistry from the leads.  Hardly a must-see, but pretty enjoyable for its type.

Random, recent observations…

• I half-watched I Love You, Man (2009) from across the room last weekend while playing WoW, and laughed enough that I felt like I should have been paying more attention.  The premise is paper-thin, but Jason Segal and especially Paul Rudd are pretty funny in it.  (The whole “slappin’ the bass” thing was killing me…)
• Evidently I’m the only Southern Californian who fears getting run over when accessing my car while street-parking.  Everyone else here just seems to assume that the world will get out of their way.
• I still believe reality television is fundamentally bad for you.  That said, uh, congrats to Antonio…
• If Dean Lombardi trades Alexander Frolov, I will personally kick him in the nads.
• Blog posts I keep meaning to write:  “Los Angeles vs. Iowa City,” “My Dream Supergroup,” “10 TV Characters Who, for Good or Ill, Have Contributed to My Behavior”
• I’m going to start calling Facebook “Guiltbook.”  Please don’t take it personally if I don’t download your aps, people…there’s only so much time in the day!

And speaking of Facebook, Oslo is now a proud member of Catbook…here he is chilling on the piece of cat furniture we’ve taken to calling “the Lounge.”

Ozzie in the Lounge

My latest Netflix rental:  Tell No One (2006), a moody French thriller that does just about everything one would want or expect from a moody French thriller.  It’s the story of Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet), a happily married pediatrician whose wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) is murdered under mysterious circumstances during a romantic country getaway.  Eight years later, a chance discovery leads the police to reopen the case, just as Alexandre receives a cryptic e-mail that hints that his supposedly dead wife may in fact still be alive.

What follows is a lengthy, occasionally slow, but generally well constructed mystery filled with convoluted tangles, tense moments, and stricken expressions.  Running just over two hours and including numerous side plots, the film may be a bit more involved than is good for it, and ultimately it resorts to a villainous infodump to pull all the pieces together.  But overall it’s a well produced, nicely cast suspense film, nothing spectacular or all that memorable, but an enjoyable diversion.

Real life is rarely well structured enough to make a good film, but dual-tracked biopic Julie & Julia (2009) avoids this issue, by paralleling the lives of two women across time, and focusing on theme rather than event.  The result is an engrossing film about women searching for meaning and fulfillment through cooking and the written word.

The characters of the title are Julia Child (Meryl Streep), the famous cookbook writer and television personality, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a Gen-X blogger who, in the early 2000s, undertook to make every recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook over the course of a year.  The film alternates viewpoints, balancing the two stories throughout, following Julia and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) across Europe in the late forties and fifties as she builds her skills and develops her career, and then shifting to Julie and her husband Eric (Chris Messina) in contemporary New York as the blogging project strains her marriage before eventually becoming an unexpected phenomenon.  How the film ties these connected, but ultimately quite different, storylines together without overplaying one or the other is quite a trick — it’s easy to think that the Julia scenes, boosted by Streep’s brilliant, award-caliber performance, steal the show, but the Julie scenes hold their own, and provide an an effective, contemporary window through which to view the past.

The film’s strengths are many, beginning with the acting, of course.  Streep is spectacular as Julia in what is sure to be another Oscar performance, and Amy Adams is characteristically winning as Julie (perhaps moreso than her real-life character warranted, or so I’ve heard); both are ably supported by their respective beta husbands, Tucci and Messina.  The film also provides an excellent view into the struggles of the creative process, and does a great job of recapturing each represented era.  But for all its historical interest and thespic firepower, the film is also a comedy through and through, really quite funny throughout. And probably its biggest, and most unique, strength is that it actually gets women.  So few Hollywood productions do that, it just leaps out at you here.  It has the feel of a romantic comedy, but both female protagonists aren’t looking for love — they already have strong relationships.  Instead, they’re seeking fulfillment in something other than men!   (If you see it for no other reason, see it for this; Hollywood could certainly stand to get the message that there’s more to life than Matthew McConaughey.)   I’m finding it hard to find much bad to say about this one — a very good, enjoyable film!  (And if a week ago, you’d told me I’d like it more than District 9, I probably would have rolled my eyes!)

My chief regret in watching District 9 (2009) was sitting too close to the screen.  A frenetic, gritty, messy, and graphic science fiction adventure, District 9 does a lot of things really, really well, and I’m glad I saw it, but it also drops the ball in some important ways, and ultimately overstays its welcome.

Beginning in a realistic documentary format, the film sets a familiar science fiction stage in compelling fashion:  a huge alien mothership arrives, hovering Childhood’s End-like over Johannesburg, South Africa.  Soon the scientists and officials investigating the situation discover that the ship is filled with impoverished, humanoid aliens living in squalid conditions.  An aid camp is established below the ship, but quickly degenerates into a slum, and its presence in the middle of the city becomes a new source of racial friction.  To alleviate the problem, an independent military outfit called Multi National United, represented by agreeable-seeming but ultimately repugnant Wikus van der Merwe (the impressive Sharlto Copley), moves into the camp to “relocate” the aliens to District 10 — essentially a concentration camp in the middle of nowhere.  The “prawns” (the aliens have shrimp-like faces) aren’t anxious to leave their trash-heap homes, and what follows is a chaotic, relentless, noisy adventure as Wikus morphs from a callous, smiling bureaucrat into…well, a number of things, really.

It’s a visually stunning film, and the early-going documentary sequences are highly compelling as the mysteries of the scenario are elaborated.    Wikus makes for a uniquely hateful protagonist, the ultimate distillation of mean-spirited human self interest, and as the crisis escalates, his truly despicable character is put through a stomach-turning ringer.  The special effects are uniformly outstanding throughout, the CGI aliens seamlessly rendered, the action sequences for the most part powerfully executed.

But oh, the plot.  With all the distracting visuals and impressive film-making technique, it’s easy to forgive the illogic of the early stages, but late in the film — when it morphs from a uniquely grim science fiction fake-documentary into a standard eyeball-bludgeoning action film — the plot goes right off the rails, truly a spectacular trainwreck.  Suddenly those early lapses, relatively inconspicuous and in service to the film’s theme, are joined by a relentless sequence of illogical human decisions, all tailored for maximum carnage.  And, to be fair, also to illustrate the utter awfulness of humanity, the film’s rather ham-fisted theme, and a point long since made, much more effectively, in the film’s first thirty minutes.  These early stretches are already visually exhausting, but feel worth the effort of gripping your armrests and squinting your eyes; the second half of the film, though, is pure overkill — dramatically, graphically, and (worst of all) thematically.

Had it plugged more of its plotholes, and — more importantly — made more interesting points, I would have come out of the theater wowed by its superior technique and effects.  And really, it’s a hard film not to appreciate on many levels as an impressive visual, stylistic achievement, with a truly unforgettable and peculiar anti-hero at its core.  But in the end, I staggered out feeling like the survivor of an assault, dazzled and dazed by its skillful hugger-mugger, perhaps, but without the profound insights the film seems to think it possesses, and feeling somewhat hollow and defeated.

Mary Rosenblum’s The Drylands (1993) is an impressively prescient novel centered around imminent worldwide water shortage.  In the author’s foreward to her collection Water Rites (in which The Drylands is reprinted in full, along with three related stories), Rosenblum notes that the global warming research she did in the early nineties for this series  projected the world’s water problems would really hit home forty years into the future, but that reality has already started to outrace those predictions.  If you’re looking for escapist SF, then, head elsewhere; The Drylands is effective cautionary SF that is more topical now than when it was originally published.

Set in Oregon in the near-future, The Drylands posits a world in which severe water shortages have led to a general breakdown in society.  The peace is kept, barely, by the Corps — a transformed and more powerful Army Corps of Engineers, in this scenario — whose job it is to protect the enormous water pipelines that feed from Canada down into the U.S. and Mexico.  The larger issue is illustrated on the local level, in a political clash between the Corps and the locals — represented by two main protagonists.  Colonel Carter Voltaire, a Corps officer recently transferred after a previous command went wrong in Chicago, is a man in the middle, attempting to accommodate the needs and demands of his superiors, the powerful Water Policy officials who control water distirbution, and the desperate local elements.  Meanwhile Nita Montoya, a new mother with a strange empathic ability, becomes entangled in the local politics, witnessing events from the ground.  The two of them become central figures in the struggle to keep the peace between opposing forces that seem hellbent on starting a war over the flow of water.

It’s a grim, dystopian vision to be sure, and all too plausible — the passage of time has not at all blunted its cautionary edge.  The plot starts slowly, but escalates nicely in its second half as the protagonists unravel a series of mysteries to get to the truth at the political realities underlying their situation.  I wasn’t all that enamored of the need for mutation-related super powers in some of its characters, such as Nita’s empath abilities; to me this it seemed an incongruous fantastical element in an otherwise heavily realistic speculation.  But overall I found it  an enjoyable, message-driven novel, and I’ll definitely be seeking more of the author’s work.