Category: Television

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Uneducated Comedians

I have a theory that a college education is not an asset to a comedian.  Some comedians, including Woody Allen, ridicule pretty well all education.   Their teachers were stupid.  They were smarter than their teachers.  Schools suppressed their creativity and imagination.  Most of what they learned is irrelevant to their lives.

They are right that the education system needs to be improved but I wonder what they think would be a good alternative.  I suppose, better teachers.   Hollywood loves movies about inspirational teachers who are attacked and repressed by soul-less repressive authority figures.  If the movie is based on a true story, I guarantee you that the enemy of the inspirational teacher is fiction– audiences need a villain.

The comedian– in today’s comedy– thrives on the “arrested thought” (my term).

If you make a joke that is subtle or complex, you risk a dud in front of a live audience which may not ever get it.

George Carlin, bless his soul, regularly does take this chance. But he is exceptional. And I am disturbed by the fact that he is now widely honored, even revered. I’ll bet he worries about it too.  When the establishment falls over itself to hand you awards (Kennedy Centre honors), you have obviously become part of … the establishment.

For example, it’s funnier to mock abstract art if you don’t quite process the real thing. If you don’t get into the question of shape or color or visualization or composition, or how hard it is to actually create an abstract painting (try it, if you don’t believe me). If you process it that far, it’s not funny anymore. It’s plausible that there might be something to abstract art–and that the criteria for judging it might be different than, say, for figurative art– and that is the joke’s death. It’s funnier to describe a painting as a bunch of splatters and lines and say, “I’m supposed to be amazed by this?” The young high-school educated working class males in the audience respond enthusiastically because they don’t get it either and they hate feeling stupid.

Louis C. K., a comedian I like very much, recently appeared on David Letterman to mock the Common Core. I’m not sure about Common Core. I haven’t studied it carefully. It may well be a very significant, important, and effective reform. But Louis C. K., with his high school diploma gets to describe Common Core math as “Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London.” London, of course. There is something, to the working-class male, foreign about this Common Core. Elitist. Fucking Common Core. Hilarious. Drink up.

Where is the joke? The joke is half of fourth graders in the U.S. can’t read a thermometer accurately. The joke is that American adults rank in the bottom 20% in math skills among 20 developed nations. The joke is that A&W’s 1/3 pound burger bombed in the U.S. because most customers thought it was smaller than the quarter-pounder at McDonald’s. The joke is that Americans are the worst at math in the entire world and Louis C. K. yuks it up because any attempt to improve math scores involves challenging, intellectually demanding effort, and you can’t seriously expect an American man to give a shit about anything other than beer, football, and large breasts. And if you think otherwise, it’s because you’re an elitist snob who thinks he’s better than us.

The joke should have been, Louis C. K. makes an appointment to see the teacher but can’t find the room for the meeting because it has more than two digits in the number.

Mitch Hedberg died on April Fools Day, 2005. That’s why it took so long for people to realize he was really dead. That’s no joke.

Bob Hope was actually pretty witty and funny and charming. I never liked him because for me, growing up in the 1960’s, he was the quintessential establishment comedian: he used writers and cue cards instead of creating and memorizing his own material; and he was white, safe, homogenized, and a classic Republican Chicken Hawk: a passionate supporter of the Viet Nam War who– of course!– never got within a hundred miles of actually serving in a war, though I’m sure he felt very brave doing comedy at a military base somewhere near the location of actual warfare.

Also like a classic Republican, Hope carried on several affairs while married, including a long-term one with actress Marilyn Maxwell. Why is this so inevitable?

When Hope was honoured by Queen Elizabeth with an honorary knighthood, he quipped, “I’m speechless. 70 years of ad lib material and I’m speechless”. Well, no. Seventy years of cue cards, Mr. Hope. But an interesting line. I’m quite sure he doesn’t mind most of fans believing that he writes his own quips or thinks of them on the fly.

Great comedy really is a mark of genius, and the best comedians around today like Louis C. K., Stephen Wright, Doug Stanhope and others might be among the smartest people in the entertainment business.

That doesn’t make them the smartest people.  Just from that select group.  But the sad trend among comedians to ridicule education at every opportunity sounds to me like musicians dumping on music critics.  Did you forget why a lot of people started listening to your music and bought your albums?  Because they read a review somewhere.

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The Elusive Appeal of Muppets

I have never, ever understood the alleged charm and appeal of the Muppets or the alleged genius and imagination of Jim Henson. Who the hell thinks “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (1984) is interesting at any level? Or “The Muppet Christmas Carol” (1992)? It’s not. But great for kids? Only if you also like feeding your kids raw sugar and Twinkies.

Let’s start with the Muppets themselves. They are cloth dolls– sock puppets, really– with a very, very limited range of expression. In fact, the range is one. The designs are not remotely interesting– and I absolutely deny that this is a characteristic of products intended to appeal to children. Like I said, only if you think sugar is nutritious. Or that Barbie dolls encourage the child’s imagination.

I remember being a child. I remember that a lot of TV programming was like junk food: it gratified the immediate desire for entertainment with slap-dash action shorts, but the impression was neither deep nor lasting. But I insist that certain cartoons and short films I saw as a child made a deep impression on me and when I later viewed the same products as an adult, I was not betrayed. These cartoons and short films really were fresh, original, and imaginative, in a way that Hanna-Barbara cartoons were not, most of the time, and the Muppets are not ever. Don’t believe me? Look up the cartoon version of “Justice in the Jungle”. Oh wait– I cannot locate it anywhere. Not a trace. But another great children’s movie, “Skinny and Fatty” is available.

Kermit is a dweeb in the true sense of the word, which is a lot less of an interesting thing to be than you might think. He is bland and not particularly curious about anything. He never expresses insight or a playful imagination. He never does anything really funny or mischievous or daring. In that sense, he is a true reflection of the mind of Jim Henson, his doppelganger. In “The Muppets Take Manhattan”, he helps create a Broadway show about– wait for it– wait for it– wait for it– come on– what do you think a really creative writer or artist would come up with as a theme for a movie about Muppets creating a Broadway show? Right: never, ever the theme of creating a Broadway show. And becoming famous. Becoming a star. Living your dream. In other words, the most exhausted, empty, flavorless clichés left on the bottom shelf of the idea closet in some alcoholic Hollywood producer’s toilet.

There’s nothing artistic in the Muppets. It’s all just material production, including the utterly pedestrian musical numbers in “The Muppets Take Manhattan”. Instantly forgettable. Dull. Lifeless. Lots of puppets mugging and swaying and going up and down and that’s about it. This is what we offer our children instead of real stop-motion animation?

The reason is simple. People saw the Muppets and immediately rose up as one and demanded more Muppets? No. The TV network saw Muppets and realized: cheap production costs! Have you seen what it cost to do hand-drawn animation? Or stop-motion? Even those crappy, repetitive Saturday morning cartoons are not cheap.

Let’s promote them like crazy and see if the suckers will bite. And they did.

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The Terrifying Ebullience of Smart Women

I hate when people in a bar or at a party find out I’m majoring in physics. The minute they find out, I can see the guys turn away.” Yet another went on about how even at Yale the men didn’t want to date a physics major, and how she was worried she’d go through four years there without a date.

Why the hell would she care? Why would she want to date a man who felt that intelligence was not an asset for a woman?

I wondered if this woman was unattractive. I know that women generally don’t get what makes them attractive to men. A woman with large breasts sometimes believes she is irresistible and maybe she is to a certain kind of man but never has been to me.

This is from a young woman studying physics at Yale University. She is upset and feels that she is being discriminated against because some young men at Yale appear– to her– to be uninterested in dating a smart woman.

Another complains that she was “underappreciated”. I tried to connect to that. Would I have ever complained that my professors did not “appreciate” me enough when I was at college? Did they owe me appreciation?

“Big Bang Theory” is proffered as an illustration of persisting discriminations and stereotyping (the characters of Amy and Bernadette).

The problem with “Big Bang Theory” isn’t sexism: it’s that it is a cliché-ridden, mediocre show with a horrible laugh-track.

 

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“Breaking Bad” Goes off the Rails

The last few episodes of “Breaking Bad” betray a sense that the show has gone off the rails. They are trying to strong-arm the plot into setting up various confrontations that might prove more visually exciting but drain away plausibility. I am not convinced Jesse would find Hank any less repugnant than Walt, and that he wouldn’t find himself even more repugnant for betraying a man who actually treated him pretty well. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. I’m saying that it is a dramatic challenge to make it believable, and Gilligan completely failed that challenge.

The same goes for Hank’s senseless decision to keep his suspicions of Walt private, including chasing him out to where they think he hid the money without backups, and with Jesse in the car. This is so obviously intended to provide a motivation for Walt to kill Hank and Jesse (what would the point be if Hank’s colleagues had the information) that it would be laughable if it weren’t so lame. It’s just not believable on any level at all.

Nor was it believable that Walt would be so stupid as to fall for Jesse’s trick phone call. But it was the height of ridiculousness to have Walt confess most of his murders to Jesse on the phone while screaming at him on his way to check on his money, not suspecting for one moment that it was being recorded or monitored. This is a huge lapse of sanity on Walt’s part and there is no dramatic groundwork for it. They couldn’t do better than that to set up the confrontation that they wanted? Or that Huell Babineaux would so readily believe Hank about having been betrayed by Saul Goodman. Sure, he’s a fool– but fool’s are just as likely to disbelieve the truth as they are to fall for a lie. Just how many implausible events and coincidences had to occur to get to this scene, in the dessert? The credibility and the tension sap away, which is a shame, because it was so good up to the last season.

“The Wire”, on the other hand, ended without a single false note– gracefully.  “The Wire” ranks among the best TV series ever, and much higher than “Breaking Bad”.

Skyler’s Complaint

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Skyler’s Complaint

In a baffling op-ed piece in the New York Times, August 23, 2013, the actress Anna Gunn complains about what she perceives to be a double standard: the main male character of the TV series “Breaking Bad”, Walt White, seems to be regarded as a kind of lovable rogue, who’s just trying to take care of his family while selling methamphetamine to pathetic addicts who have faded further and further into the background of the series. Her character, Skyler White, who, she says, lives a relatively faultless life, is vilified. Why? It’s because, she says, Skyler is a woman. It’s a double standard. Skyler has become “a measure of our attitude towards gender”. And that measure indicates rage and hypocrisy towards women who don’t stand by their man. At least, that’s Anna Gunn’s take on it.

Guilty. I’ll admit it: I found the character of Skyler White repugnant.

Is she arguing that Skyler should be admired? She says Skyler “has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, non-submissive, ill-treated women”. Ill-treated? If, I suppose, you buy one of the fundamental conceits of “Breaking Bad”, which is, that there really is something admirable about Walt White’s desire to support his family, even if it means destroying hundreds of other lives. Then Skyler is ill-treated, I suppose, by Walt’s dishonesty. But Skyler had the opportunity to walk away and didn’t take it. Walt provides for her, desires her, and wants to sustain their marriage. How is that “ill treated”?

But what if you didn’t even buy the first part: that Walt is admirable in some way, because, after all, he is taking care of his family. Americans seem to be complete suckers for family: you can commit any atrocity, as long as it is to protect your family.

Well, in my view, Walt is a psychopathic criminal and a cold-blooded killer. In my view, anyone who would harm another man’s family to protect his own is not admirable: he’s selfish. Just as a mother who brags about her overweening love for her children can be suffering from “overflowing self-infatuation”. I don’t admire either of them. Am I off the hook?

The brains behind the program, Vince Gilligan, claims that “Breaking Bad” is about how far a man will go to take care of his family. If he is a psychopath.

Skyler wants it both ways, and it’s not unusual for audiences to find hypocrisy more repellent than mischief or even murder. Walt is repellent but he really doesn’t hide the fact that he doesn’t have any morals other than the desire to provide for his family, which isn’t really a moral. It’s a motive. And it doesn’t, in my view, make him admirable. His family really isn’t “other”. It isn’t someone other than himself who benefits from his criminal activity. And his passion for his family, as dramatized in “Breaking Bad”, is fundamentally unbelievable. In real life, that is something put on, a charade. In real life, people like Walt White are fundamentally psychotic and narcissistic.

Why does Vince Gilligan make this a central trope in “Breaking Bad”?  So the viewer can enjoy Walt’s shenanigans without feeling repulsion.  After all, he’s just taking care of his family.

Skyler doesn’t walk away. She doesn’t turn him in. She accepts the money. She cheats on Walt. She helps her employer cheat. Just what does Anna Gunn believe is admirable about her? That she is “strong”? But not strong enough, apparently, to walk away.

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Charlton Heston’s Naked Butt

I was watching “Planet of the Apes” on PBS the other night and there was that famous shot of Charlton Heston being presented to the ape officials for disposal, naked, from behind.

I have seen this movie at least three times, on television. I have never before seen Charlton Heston’s naked buttocks blurred out. But here it was, on PBS, the “enlightened” network, blurred out, just like Stewy’s naked butt on “Family Guy”.

What the hell? Has PBS joined the hoards of frigid hysterical puritans who have decided that the moral life of the nation is threatened by the back view of a man’s naked buttocks? In a country that enjoys dismemberment, explosions, bikinis, gratuitous sex and violence, and Fox News? Spare us.

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Oscars 2013

Jennifer Lawrence at the Oscars: was this a put on?

I think it was. And I think she will get away with it because she is young and bit dorky and funny. But it could not be helped: she has slimmed down, after complaining, last year, about how Hollywood wants everyone to look anorexic. Yes, they do, and you do. Whether she becomes even more successful depends on lot on how she chooses her next films. She could be the next Sally Field. Or she could be the next Sally Field.

Or the next Amy Adams, who must have the worst luck of any actress in Hollywood: she is one of a handful of really interesting actors around, but hasn’t yet found the break-out role that will define her career.

Poor Anne Hathaway: I doubt she’ll ever again, for sheer artistic interest, match the moment in “Brokeback Mountain” where she told Ennis, on the phone, what had happened to Jack, and made it beautifully ambiguous: did she know what was really up or not?

It’s pretty clear she did know– but it was wonderfully done.

No one gave a better performance in any film this year than Amy Adams did in “Junebug”.  I know for a fact you have never seen it: do so, now.

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“No One Cares About These People”

Mr. Keane, in his Chronicle article, offered two major reasons the police lie so much. First, because they can. Police officers “know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer.” At worst, the case will be dismissed, but the officer is free to continue business as usual. Second, criminal defendants are typically poor and uneducated, often belong to a racial minority, and often have a criminal record. “Police know that no one cares about these people,” Mr. Keane explained (NY Times, 2012-02-03)

And, I suspect, neither do you and I.

If you did, you would speak up, make your voice heard, vote for the progressive reformer, not the tough-on-crime conservative. But we don’t care about those people. Unless they are played by Morgan Freeman or Tim Robbins in a movie. Then we care a whole lot, because we really are good, decent people, and so is Morgan Freeman, and the fact that I just love him shows that I am not biased or bigoted. I judge people by what they actually do, not by which actor they look like.

And if the police lie in order to lock them up for a particular crime, it doesn’t really matter if they didn’t commit that particular crime: the important thing is that someone has been locked up for something.

Agencies receive cash rewards for arresting high numbers of people for drug offenses, no matter how minor the offenses or how weak the evidence. (NY Times, 2012-02-03)

How small a minority are we now, those who think “these people” do matter? That they have souls and feelings and inner lives? We’re not popular, that’s for sure. We are an affront to the overjoyed multitudes who love punishment because they really feel that that is the only way to keep people from taking our stuff or hurting us. This conversation takes place at one level and they either hurt us or we hurt them and if you help them you are hurting us.

My wife and I are watching “The Wire” right now. It’s a gritty, realistic police drama set in Baltimore. The police in “The Wire” cover all shades of humanity, from the obese thoughtless bureaucrat to the passionate honest street cop. The behavior of the cops on this show– and their physical appearance (as on “Hill Street Blues”, another of a handful of credible police dramas) strikes me as consonant with detailed news stories about crime and justice. Deals are struck. The really bad guys, with smarter lawyers, get the light sentences while the poor loyal schmuck who served them bears the brunt of the criminal justice system. And the police, in “The Wire”, lie. Sometimes for personal gain or to cover up incompetence or corruption. Sometimes in a well-meaning effort to put the bad guys behind bars.

Noted

Yes, the police have a tough job. So do criminal lawyers, and farmers and miners and lumberjacks, and doctors and teachers, and those kids who pick through the trash heaps in India. Cry me a river. If you don’t want to be a cop because somebody thinks you should actually be required to obey the law, or control your temper, or risk your life to try to disarm a suicidal homeless man… then get out and do something else.

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Breaking Bad: The Read-Ahead Actor

In a scene from “Breaking Bad”, Year 3, Episode 10, Walt and Skyler are having a conversation about laundering money. Skyler offers to manage a car wash Walt is considering buying for that purpose. He has to buy it because, he says, the manager has to be in on the scam, and the only way to control the manager is to own it.

Somehow the conversation turns to their divorce and Walt says to her something like “but we’re divorced?”.

Skyler has been after him to sign the papers for several episodes. She has been resolute that there is no future in their relationship because of his chronic lying. In a previous episode, in a moment of moral clarity, he finally did sign, with a flourish.

Now, “Breaking Bad” is a brilliant TV series, exceptional in almost every respect. But I was not as happy with this episode as I had been with the earlier ones and this scene was emblematic of a problem beginning to creep in. (Maybe it stops here, maybe it gets worse: I don’t know). Walt reads his line as if there is some question about whether or not they actually are divorced. He almost makes it a question: “we’re divorced?”. “Right?” “Aren’t we?” But in this story line, we find out that Skyler never filed the paperwork after Walt signed it. She notes that married couples can’t be forced to testify against each other. This is important because Walt makes methamphetamine.

In my opinion, Bryan Cranston gave away a plot element in his reading of this line. The character, Walt, has no reason to believe that Skyler had changed her mind about the divorce, and every reason to believe she would have rushed out the minute he signed the documents and filed it with the court. He should have said, “but we are divorced” as if it was final, settled fact. But the actor, Bryan Cranston, knew what was coming next. He tried to set it up, perhaps unconsciously.

Fans of the show and of Bryan Cranston’s otherwise impeccable work on it might argue that Walt may well have suspected that Skyler hadn’t filed the paperwork. Maybe, maybe not. And if it had been the only instance of read-ahead acting in this episode, I would have ignored it. However it was, by my count, the fourth and maybe fifth time in this episode that a character had reacted to knowledge held only by the audience, or a secret known only to the character they were talking to. The conversation between Jesse and Walt about the night Jane died was utterly portentous because of this flaw: Jesse was filmed as if he was about to receive a piece of shocking information, though he could not possibly know that there was anything shocking or even important about Walt’s nattering. He should have continued his tasks (cleaning the equipment) without paying much attention to what Walt was saying at all.

In real life, in fact, we often don’t even hear information that we don’t expect to hear.

These are quibbles, relatively minor quibbles. I just don’t like to see flaws like that creep into what is a very, very good TV series.

There is one other problem I have: it is clear that the series has become invested in the actors playing the major roles. None of them are going to die any time soon. I know it and they know it. This does deflate the drama of some of the tension that should be there. I have long believed that good dramas should plan to kill off major characters along the way just to make sure that the audience doesn’t come to the sedate feeling that no matter what crisis confronts our heroes, they are going to live. They are under contract.

It diminishes the effect.

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Roy Orbison: “A Black and White Night”

Roy Orbison has one of the three or four truly great voices of rock’n’roll. In 1988, just a year or so before he died of a heart attack at 52 (December 6, 1988), he recorded a tribute concert to himself called “A Black and White Night”.

You may wonder, what on earth do I mean by “to himself”. I mean that the project was financed, managed, and controlled by Orbison’s production company. It was “directed” by Tony Mitchell, a gentleman from my home town, Kitchener, Ontario. But Orbison had final cut and control of the film.

This is not the same kind of film as the one we got when Marty Scorcese directed the greatest rock’n’roll film of all time “The Last Waltz” with The Band (some would argue “Stop Making Sense” with the Talking Heads).

There is no rational artistic reason why it’s in black and white, and this video is a poster child for why some people believe in the principle of artistic economy, which is, if you don’t have any ideas at all about what you are doing with the camera (or mic, or paintbrush, or keyboard), replace artistry with volume or quantity. Go up to 11. Or, In this case, have the camera swoop back and forth and up and down and left and right and in and out, for no reason whatsoever other than to make it appear that you are doing something with the camera to make this production visually interesting.

There are moments when the musicians appear to be out of sync. There are even moments where they appear to be hamming it up. Could be that an editor dumped in a few shots taken out of sequence just for effect. Or there were dubs.

“A Black & White Night” is well recorded. Too well-recorded. I am convinced it was dubbed, though every effort appears to have been made to make it appear to be a live recording. You would think that nowadays it would be easy to find out the truth: it’s not. I’ve been searching the internet and all I can find it indirect references to it and drippy, adoring reviews by slavish worshippers of Roy Orbison.

Let’s keep that straight: I am an admirer of Orbison but here it is: Orbison is a truly great but one-dimensional romanticist whose work has limited importance. He was the master of the paranoid, masochistic, break-up song, in which the pain of the loss is elevated to a near hysterical embrace of spiritual and emotional suffering.

You might be surprised that this mode can only go so far.

Only the lonely
Know the way I feel tonight

Yes, those opening lines, the black suit, the sunglasses– truly magnificent.

But a lot of his early success may well have been due to arranger Fred Foster at Monument Records (where Orbison recorded from 1959 to 1965). After Foster left, Orbison rarely charted, until his return during the nostalgia craze in the 1980’s.

But, like Elvis and Michael Jackson, he was a pop star, and never more than that, and he doesn’t belong in the category of the truly visionary, brilliant minds that made rock music worth paying attention to, and made it more relevant and interesting than any other musical style in the past fifty years.

People who tell you the contrary just want to believe that a facile adoration of the sound of a voice is just as valid as an intelligent grasp of the fundamentals of music and idiom and lyric and melody and arrangement in terms of judging a musical performance.

Obscure note: like Elvis, Roy Orbison died on the toilet.

You really should see the performance of “Crying”, in Spanish, in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”.

The handful of truly great voices in rock’n’roll:

Roy Orbison
Judith Durham (The Seekers)
Jim Morrison (The Doors)
Jennifer Warnes
Aretha Franklin
Janis Joplin
Van Morrison

And a bigger handful of extraordinary voices:

Judy Collins
Elvis Presley
Art Garfunkel
Tom Waits
Susan Jacks
Reverend Al Green
James Brown
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Over-rated Voices:

Freddie Mercury
Kate Bush
Roger Daltry
Burton Cummings
Linda Ronstadt
K. D. Lang

Why over-rated?

A great singer puts his or her voice into the service of the music, not into the service of the singer’s ego, K.D. Lang.  Roger Daltry has a big voice, but he’s not really a particularly good singer. Linda Ronstadt: ditto: she gets louder and softer and louder again. Kate Bush is a diva: fabulous voice, and a show-off. Cummings has a great voice and he can sing, but never covered anything really super interesting. One imagines that if he did, the limitations would reveal themselves. Freddie Mercury can never be forgiven for “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Don’t even get me started:

Whitney Houston (whine)
Michael Jackson (grunt)

Great Songwriters and their voices

Bob Dylan is actually a pretty good vocalist on his earlier albums, up to “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire”. Around “Saved” his voice went into the tank and I don’t think any one around him every summoned the courage to tell him the truth.

I more I hear Springsteen the less I think of him as a vocalist. Now, even when I go back to “Born to Run”, I find it harder and harder to overlook his limitations. His voice is not really much prettier than early Dylan’s, but Dylan is far more interesting, in phrasing, intonation; sometimes a good sneer can come in handy.