Jesse Jackson wants Terry Schiavo kept alive. I must confess a certain bleak curiosity; will those on the left who excoriated Ralph Nader hold Jesse to the same standard?
Author: Bryant
I finished the second season of Gilmore Girls this weekend, and feel relatively well-qualified to comment: to discuss. Lots to talk about. (Does that mean there’ll be more of these lengthy posts? Maybe! Obsessive now.)
But mostly… I’m thinking the Nip/Tuck boys need to stand down, and our favorite morticians should get accustomed to being second-best. Lorelei Gilmore (elder) has got to be the most messed up, fascinating, conflicted character on my television screen. (Vic Mackey lost his edge somewhere in the third season.) What a total piece of work she is.
And I can’t figure out if it’s intentional on the part of the writers or not. On the face of it, she’s a simple sympathetic character. There’s a DVD extra on the second season set, all about translating the show into other languages. Amy Sherman-Palladino, the show’s creator, throws a cute little fit about people messing up her precious jokes. Too cute by half, really — I kind of wondered why, if it was such a big deal, she didn’t look into the situation herself? The answer, of course, is that she knew full well that the rapid-fire pop culture references weren’t going to translate exactly, but thought it would be fun to throw a cute little fit on the DVD extra anyhow. So we all know how committed she is to her funnies. Um. I digress.
Anyhow, in the course of the extra, she says that she thinks the show has international appeal because it’s about the universal topic of the pure love of a mother for her daughter. Possibly that’s another thing she’s just saying for effect, but I kinda thought she believed it. I think she thinks she’s writing a show about the best mother-daughter relationship ever, and just about anything Lorelei does is justifed by the purity of her love for Rory (aka Lorelei younger).
Lauren Graham gets it, though. I’d bet on it. You can see it in her eyes every time Lorelei has to decide whether or not to rant. She puts the deliberation right out there on her face, each time, right before Lorelei goes into Luke’s diner or the headmaster’s office at Chilton. Lorelei knows that she’s beautiful and impressive and she knows — this is the thing that lifts her above the rest of television’s conflicted characters — that she is smart. She knows she can out-talk people. She uses her brilliance as a weapon.
Which is not to say she doesn’t use her brain for things other than banter. You know how — maybe in college, maybe in high school — you used to just blaze through term papers at the last minute, because you were smart enough to get a B+ or an A- even if you wrote the paper at 2 AM the morning it was due? Yeah, you, there in the back. Lorelei doesn’t do that. She’s going to business school, she runs an inn more or less by herself: all very impressive.
When it comes to human interactions, though, it’s all emotion and flattery and flirtation. She doesn’t much try to talk to people; she doesn’t much try to explain things. Even when she’s dealing with Rory, her putative best friend, it’s either whimsical back and forth or “I am your mother and that’s all there is to it.”
It’s a natural and unsurprising outgrowth of her relationship with her parents. Her mother has never been upfront with her once that I’ve noticed; it’s all games and emotional appeals and putdowns. (Hm. Maybe the writers know what’s going on after all.) Lorelei has clearly learned that lesson and uses her skills ruthlessly when interacting with others.
So OK; how does this make her more interesting than other flawed characters?
Welp, I’ve watched two seasons and I haven’t actually seen many signs of, you know, growth. Rory’s growing up and changing. Lorelei’s parents, Emily and Richard, they’re learning things about themselves. Or anyhow Richard is. Lorelei hasn’t yet been forced to confront her issues, because she’s so damned smart and attractive that she can dance circles around anyone who might press the issue. “Mom, Luke’s in love with you.” “Oh, you’re just my daughter, who I am not currently thinking of as my best friend because I don’t want to hear that.” (Not a direct quote.)
It’s a weird setup for a dramatic show, this basic lack of change. Two years in and she’s still single, still working at the same job, having the same issues with her parents. It works because she’s the axis around which everyone else revolves — she’s the Bronze, if you will, or perhaps more accurately she’s the basic cosmological fact that the Slayer is threatened by vampires. I’m gonna wind up watching third season and everything! Will! Change forever! — I’m sure of it — but right now, man, she’s got really solid walls protecting her from any alterations.
I don’t know that I’d want to hang out with her. It’d be an interesting ride, but I can’t imagine trusting deep emotional interactions with someone like that.
Still no government.
If del.icio.us was a calendar, it might look like Upcoming.org. Intriguing stuff. I keep thinking about writing a script to screenscrape movie showtimes and turn ‘em into an RSS feed; if I did that, I could also feed (say) the Brattle and the Coolidge schedules into Upcoming.
Hm.
Paul Thomas Anderson just announced his next movie. (Link will age out eventually.) It’ll be an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil, a book I know nothing about. I’m still excited. California, corruption, sprawling story — sounds perfect.
She was:
- Working next to me
- A rare thing
- Fine as:
- a bee’s wing
- so fine a breath of air might blow her away
- A lost child
- Running wild
- Sleeping rough back on the Derby beat
- Even married once, to a man named Romany Brown
I was:
- Nineteen when I came to town
- In love with a laundry girl
We:
- Busked around the market square
- Picked fruit down in Kent
- Could tinker lamps and pots and knives wherever we went
- Was camping down the Gower
- Was drinking more in those days
They were:
- Burning babies
- Burning flags
- Calling it the Summer of Love
- Hawks and doves
She said:
- “As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay”
- “You wouldn’t want me any other way”
- “Young man, oh can’t you see I’m not the factory kind”
- “If you don’t take me out of here I’ll surely lose my mind”
- “Oh man, you foolish man, it surely sounds like hell”
- “You might be lord of half the world, you’ll not own me as well”
I said:
- “We might settle down, get a few acres dug”
- “Fire burning in the hearth and babies on the rug”
If I could:
- Just taste all of her wildness now
- Hold her in my arms today
I wouldn’t:
- Want her any other way
Look, people are either likely to see The Big Sleep if they get the chance or not, right? But there are going to be some people with good intentions who never get around to it. To those people I say this: go see the damned thing if you ever get a chance. That’s what movie theaters are for, after all.
The plot makes little sense. Somewhere in the transition from Chandler to Faulkner (who wrote the screenplay) by way of Leigh Brackett (who wrote an earlier version of the screenplay, and who much later wrote the first version of The Empire Strikes Back), some of the connective tissue of the novel vanished. No harm, as they say, and no foul. It’s not so much the plot that matters; if you’re seeing this movie, you ought to be seeing it for the lushness of the women and the dialogue and the violence. Virulent violence, really. There’s nothing like a thug.
Lush really is the word. I mean, you can watch the actors just wallowing in the words. Doesn’t hurt that Bogart and Bacall were falling madly in love, but Martha Vickers doesn’t have that excuse and she was just as reckless with her verbiage as the rest. Ditto Dorothy Malone, but more so; ditto Regis Toomey and Elisha Cook, Jr. If Bob Steel isn’t the model for every psychotic henchman ever filmed subsequently, I’ll eat my hat.
Anyhow, go see the damned thing. It’s good to be reminded where Sorkin and Whedon and all those other snappy dialogue young turks learned how to write like that.
“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners, I don’t like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.”
Snap!
This struck me as just a stupid loudmouth.
This made me relieved that the people getting violent are ineffectual.
This has me worried. I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s that the third time is a charm, or perhaps it’s that Hal Turner has an audience. Maybe it’s because Jeb Bush nearly sent armed men in. Hopefully it’s just a publicity stunt to boost Turner’s ratings; hopefully none of his listeners take it as an indication that they should join him.
James Lileks thinks we should keep Terri alive because Christopher Pike was a hero. That has nothing to do with the above, but I’ve spent all week staring at it while I try to avoid Schiavo posts. Now that I’ve finally made one, I figured I’d shoehorn it in.
Mostly, at this point, I feel sorry for her parents. People keep lying to them. It sucks.
The Brattle begins their LA Noir film series tonight with Los Angeles Plays Itself. It’s a documentary/clip show about the way LA has been portrayed in film over the decades. In a weird kind of a way, it sounds like Ackroyd’s London in cinematic form; Los Angeles is a character in this movie, not just a subject.
Also showing over the course of the next week or so: Chinatown (Jack), Criss Cross (not the boy band), This Gun For Hire (Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd), Point Blank (Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson), Collateral (Tom Cruise), and To Live And Die In L.A. (everybody Wang Chung tonight). Sweet lineup. Must viewing.
Paul Shirley graduated from Iowa State in 2001; now he plays basketball for the Phoenix Suns, a team which is arguably the best basketball team on the planet right now. He’s the 12th man on a 12 man team, so he doesn’t actually play very much. This means, apparently, that he has time to blog.
And man, someone needs to sign this guy to a book deal, unless he’s ghostwritten. I hope he isn’t. I’m surprised this stuff is getting onto NBA.com — he’s unrelentingly blunt about the opposition, life as a 12th man, all that fun stuff.
We started off like a ball of fire, making up for our errant shots in Atlanta several fold. The Bobcats, on the other hand, were flailing away at the exact opposite end of the spectrum. They looked like a CBA team —fitting, since their arena and fans fit that mold. In the early going, Charlotte was nearly as inept as the Hawks were the night before. Jason Kapono started off on about a 1 for 10 tear and it appeared that the rout was on. I began considering the possibility that there could very well be a bit of playing time in the offing and started paying at least cursory attention to what was going on in timeouts, in case Coach D’Antoni said something like, “From now on tonight, everyone will be shooting with his left hand. Deviation from this plan of attack will result in castration immediately following the game.” I would really hate to miss one of those instructions, come out firing, and because of my own mental lapse, ruin the rest of my life.
The style’s rough enough so that I kinda think it really is him writing it. Good for him.