Category: Culture

I’m not a big reality show guy, although I watched the first couple seasons of Tough Enough. However, my TiVo enables all kinds of degenerate behavior, including reality TV addiction, so I figured I’d watch a couple of episodes of The Apprentice. The basic setup is simple; Donald Trump brings in 8 men and 8 women to compete for a job with him. They split up into two teams, men versus women, and every week they have a different competition. At the end of each show, Trump fires someone from the losing team.

The first week’s competition was selling lemonade. Both teams were fairly pathetic. The women were exceedingly disorganized, but managed good sales by selling lemonade at five bucks a shot with a helping of sex appeal on the side. Seriously. One of ‘em was hawking her phone number along with the lemonade. The men were fairly well organized but hampered by the inherent difficulty of selling lemonade when you’re wearing a tie.

If you figure it by sales volume, assuming the startup costs were around $50 and the guys were selling lemonade at $1.50 per glass on average, the men and the women both sold around 200 glasses based on the final asset figures quoted at the end of the show. I’d call it a tie, but that’s me. It’s pretty reasonable to set up uneven competitions, which I figure is what was going on, even if Trump didn’t acknowledge that he was doing it.

What really disappointed me is that nobody got clever. Trying to sell a glass of lemonade for a thousand bucks doesn’t count as clever, it counts as stupid. You don’t need a full team of eight people to sell lemonade; either split the teams so you’ve got two teams of four at good locations, or put four people on individual lemonade sales and put four people at figuring out some way to sell en masse. Sell lemonade on the subway. Get creative. You aren’t competing for a sales job, you’re competing for an executive job, so act like executives instead of competing on individual sales ability.

The men looked terrible in the segment where Trump chose his victim, anyhow. If I’m managing a team, and Trump asks me “who’s the weakest guy on your team?” I’m gonna say “Sir, I’m not going to damage the cohesion of this team by criticizing one person in front of everyone else. I’d be happy to express those criticisms with you and the person in question in private, but I’m not going to do it in public.” I’d say something similar as a rank and file team member, for that matter. It’s better business and it’s better reality TV show strategy.

That’s probably going to be the main failing of the show, though; it’d take some pretty amazing management style to get through a competitive process like this while still displaying good team leadership qualities. Troy, who got stuck with the management role this time, was very rough on Sam in front of everyone else. He clearly thought Sam was going to be fired, but Sam’s going to be there with him for at least a little while longer. Ooops.

I suppose it’s a test of who can work well together despite personal feelings. Still, once you’ve said you don’t trust someone on a business level, how do you explain why you’re delegating to them next time around?

And yes; this is my Mr. Sterling for this year.

Whoops, let’s add one to the Best of the Rest list: Down With Love, easily the best romantic comedy of the year. (I thought Intolerable Cruelty suffered from being written by people who were not the Coen brothers, despite being a fun trifle.) Witty and charming and full of banter, plus it took itself (and its genre) exactly seriously enough.

I’d been thinking it wasn’t a great year in film, but looking back on it I was dead wrong. It was, in fact, a superb year in film. The disappointments of the Matrix sequels and The Hulk (which I liked, but it should have been so much more) kind of cast a pall on the summer for me, I think. And I wanted Demonlover and Bubba Ho-Tep to be excellent, and neither of them really made me get up and dance. Metaphorically speaking.

So I started putting together my favorite movies of 2003 list. I wound up this kind of decent list, but I wasn’t all that excited about it, and then I went back to look at my reviews from the blog. That reminded me of what I said in February and what I said in August and I got a lot more cheerful.

This is the list of my ten favorite movies of 2003. I didn’t see every movie I wanted to see, so I can’t claim it’s the ten best movies of 2003. I’m also being a little liberal about foreign flicks; if it was made in 2002 but was released in the US in 2003, or if it hasn’t been released in the US yet but I saw it in 2003, I’ll count it as a 2003 movie. Foreign movies from 2001 and earlier don’t make the cut, though. (Apologies, thus, to Vidocq, Battle Royale and Audition.)

Enough preamble; on to the lists. It’s my personal favorite ten movies, plus other movies I thought were really worthwhile but not quite good enough to crack the top ten, plus some movies I wish I’d seen but missed.

I finished up the Firefly DVDs yesterday. Overall I liked the show quite a bit. Nice snappy Whedon dialogue, potentially interesting universe, characters with secrets and conflicts, and a decent enough plot.

I say potentially interesting, because despite Whedon’s claims that “Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany,” he didn’t show any good in the Alliance during the first season. Mal may be an antihero, but in the short space of 11 episodes he’s never wrong. I’m willing to take Whedon at his word, and assume that the shades of grey would have shown up later. They just didn’t show up yet, and so the interesting elements of the Firefly universe remain potential.

The framework is good, though. You’ve got enough tension and questions and so forth on that little ship to keep a good story running for a few seasons, and so it’s very sad that it got cut off halfway through the first. Me, I don’t blame Fox. I blame Joss Whedon.

Because, look: Fox was right. The pilot episode was slow and clunky. It’s almost purely an introduction to the characters, which is really not the right way to get a series underway. Go back to the first episode of Buffy. The opening sequence sets the stage clearly and succinctly, and the rest of the episode manages to introduce the characters while telling a story.

The opening sequence of Firefly is an action sequence — good — but it’s got nothing to do with the rest of the episode except that it introduces the main characters. It doesn’t set up a damned thing in the context of the next two hours. Total loss.

Then you get a lot of introductions, and a linear plotline without very much dramatic tension. Problems arise, and problems are solved. There’s one plot point which lasts for more than a few minutes, and it’s not all that threatening. If I were a television executive, I’d have been pretty dubious about that pilot as well.

So then Whedon complains that he had to write a new pilot which, shockingly, forced him to introduce all the characters again. It’s episodic television. You should never be writing an episode which will be incoherent to new viewers, particularly during the first season when you’re trying to build your audience.

Yeah, Fox did a lousy job sequencing the episodes and it’s a shame they didn’t give the show longer to build, but I don’t think Joss Whedon is completely blameless here.

Enough ranting: the show was still pretty darned satisfying, and I recommend it. I liked the characters, I liked the plots, and I wish there was going to be another season. I hope the rumored movie happens, and I hope Joss writes a kickass screenplay and some network gives the show another chance after the movie is a huge hit. If only because I want to know what’s up with Book.

About Cheaper by the Dozen: Roger Ebert is wrong, and pretty clearly wasn’t paying close attention to the movie anyhow, since he has a couple of factual errors in his review. So, no, it’s not a three star movie. 1.5 stars, maybe. Not funny, not charming, kind of depressing. Me, I like my cheerful uplifting Christmas movies to be about success rather than failure.

I saw The Last Samurai on Tuesday — the new one, not the 1990 one, although I gotta say that one looks interesting. John Saxon and Lance Henriksen together again! But I digress.

Not particularly to my shame, I am a Tom Cruise fan about fifty percent of the time. I think he can be a superb actor; I also think that he spends at least half his movies chewing scenery. You just never know. This time around, he bothers to act rather than over-emoting, and that means that a fairly typical movie about Americans encountering a different culture gets to be better than it should be. That, plus Ken Watanabe, who makes a huge difference as a credible intelligent rebel lord.

Now, the end of the movie sucks big fat rocks. Seriously, do yourself a favor and walk out after the clear emotional climax. You’ll be happier that way. But up till then it’s a really solid understated movie that I liked a whole lot.