Category Archives: TV

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The best things about Downton Abbey

In honor of this coming Sunday’s stateside premier of Season 5 of my new favorite show.

1. It makes cleaning more fun, or at least more exciting.  My heart’s a lot more in making beds and dusting if I pretend I’m a housemaid (preferably a nice one with a happy story, like Gwen) or imagine that Mr. Carson will be inspecting.

2. It gives me an alternate family, co-workers, and social circle.  It’s such a fleshed-out world, crowded with characters–like a Dickens novel or the Harry Potter universe.  So if I get tired of the people I’m around, which occasionally happens, I can just go to Downton.

3. It helps me brush up on my knowledge a period of British history I’ve neglected.  Oh…they had the Roaring Twenties too?

4. It makes me appreciate my sister and my mom.  Not only because I watch the show with them, but also because they’re not Mary, Edith, or Cora.  Thank goodness.

5. It’s got some of the most crush-worthy men on television.  Good-looking, capable, smart, upwardly mobile yet humble.  If only they could all stay alive.*

*This is not a spoiler for those still catching up, because it’s extremely veiled.  Speaking of spoilers, if you’ve already seen Season 5, please be courteous and don’t write any devastating comments.

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My belated Oscar wrap-up

It’s been nearly two months since the Academy Awards aired, but I’ve been mentally reliving the event a bit recently, not only because I’ve finally gotten around to watching several of the Best Picture nominees, but also because I read a brief “news” article yesterday in which Jared Leto said that his Oscar statue is all sticky and gross because his apparently grubby friends have been playing with it. And these are the people we admire and aspire to be like. Anyway, in place of a traditional recap, which would be pointless by now, here is a stream-of-consciousness presentation of some of my thoughts during and after the ceremony.

As I look into Jared Leto’s beautiful yet strangely vacant eyes, I wonder if he’s shown up to the Academy Awards as stoned as the character he won his Oscar for portraying (a person called Rayon, frequently stoned, and appearing for much of Dallas Buyer’s Club in a covetably comfy-looking pink cable-knit bathrobe).  But no, surely not, since he’s accompanied by his mom.  And his acceptance speech is lucid–not brilliant, but lucid, a high compliment indeed on this night.  I mean, the literal kind of “high.”

Thinking about Best Supporting Actor nominees accompanied by their moms turns my thoughts toward Jonah Hill, and I think to myself that someday he is going to be a real contender for this category and not just a person that the presenters make gratuitous comments toward because they feel charitable toward him because he is less sexy than they are.  And he is going to win, and he is going to throw his Oscar in their stupid condescending faces.

Then I wonder why I am throwing so much imaginative energy into my Jonah Hill revenge fantasy, and I realize that it’s because I’m bored, because essentially none of my favorite actors are here.  This has a lot to do with the fact that most of my favorite actors are British and obviously couldn’t make the long trip to Los Angeles.  Or, more likely, they weren’t invited.  If you are an actor from the UK and you want to be made much of at the Oscars, you have to either 1) be Colin Firth, although even that doesn’t work every year, 2) be old enough to be an institution, or just not dye your hair, so that people think you’re old (that’s you, Helen Mirren), 3) always play Americans, like Christian Bale or last year’s Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis, or 4) find your way into a small role in pretty much all of the Best Picture nominees, like Benedict Cumberbatch did this year (okay, I think he was in two of them).

*Long mental digression while I calculate the odds of Martin Freeman ever being an Oscar nominee*

My guests are gasping, and I gradually realize it’s because they think Ellen Degeneres is being “mean.”  And I’m thinking, did you ever see Ricky Gervais host the Golden Globes?  This is like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood in comparison.

Which brings me to the pizza interlude.  There is a lot of debate about how spontaneous, hence “authentic,” this actually was, but that’s not the question that captivates me.  My question is: Do these people actually eat pizza?  On paper plates, no less?  The possibility boggles the mind.  One of the actors we saw ostensibly preparing to eat pizza was Brad Pitt.  It’s true that Brad Pitt is seen constantly eating food in many of his movies (e.g., Meet Joe Black, in which he develops an obsession with peanut butter), but I guess I just assumed he spit it out after the take.  Did Angelina make him spit his pizza out during the commercial break?

These, thank goodness, are not questions that keep me up at night.  However, this is: What in the world was Matthew McConaughey talking about?

 

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My annual Oscar rant

Right on cue, here is my yearly collection of thoughts on the Academy Awards.

  • Gravity is clearly going to win a lot of awards.  One that it seems nearly guaranteed to win is Achievement in Directing for Alfonso Cuarón.  When people like me think of Alfonso Cuarón, we think of his darkly whimsical interpretation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  Do you think he could find a way to work an Azkaban shout-out into his acceptance speech?
  • I was excited when I saw that my favorite movie music composer, Thomas Newman, was nominated for his beautiful score to Saving Mr. Banks.  But I was annoyed when I did my predication research this evening and saw that he isn’t even being mentioned as a possibility to win.  All I can say is that the Academy is going to owe Thomas Newman one massive Lifetime Achievement Award segment.
  • I never thought I’d see the day when a movie called Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa was nominated for an Oscar.  I realize that the category is Achievement in Makeup, and I’m willing to concede that the nominee, Stephen Prouty, did a pretty good job on that guy’s face.  But I’ve vowed never to watch the Oscars again if this movie wins.
  • I have a plan.  The Academy should create some new award categories: Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress in a Genre Film.  That way, the people who do excellent acting work in films that aren’t “literary” (to borrow a term from the book publishing world)–e.g., science fiction, fantasy, and superhero movies; romantic comedies; “children’s” movies that aren’t animated–can be honored.  Because, let’s face it, they’re not going to be nominated in the traditional acting categories, except in very unusual cases like those of Johnny Depp in the first Pirates of the Caribbean (and there was no way he was going to win) or Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight–an extremely unusual case indeed, since he did win.  The only potential problem here is that creating such a category could further marginalize these types of movies and prevent genre-transcending films like The Dark Knight from getting the recognition that the Academy was actually prepared to give them.

So I’m curious: Who would you nominate if we had the Acting in Genre Films categories this year?  And what are your two cents, in general, on the 2014 Oscars?  Do share.

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Scholars with wand collections

I’ve discovered recently that there’s a word for people like me–the people I describe in the title of this post, those of us who see no incongruity between loving a text and studying a text.  The word is aca-fan, and it’s been attributed to media scholar Henry Jenkins, whose blog is called Confessions of an Aca-Fan (henryjenkins.org).  Skim over Confessions and you’ll see basically what I want my blog to be.  Jenkins’s book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), is perhaps the foremost and certainly one of the earliest texts that showed the world that fans aren’t glassy-eyed drooling idiots, and yet somehow I missed out on it while doing my preliminary dissertation research.  (I put in an inter-library loan request for it tonight, and I plan to read passages from it to my Walking Dead fan community next Sunday night.  Just kidding–or am I?)

I also learned tonight that there’s a term for what wizard rock is, except it’s a broader category and existed long before wizard rock (or indeed, Harry Potter) was a thing.  The term is filk, and apparently it comes from a misspelling of folk on a conference program.  (I learned that from Henry Jenkins.)  Essentialy, it refers to nerdy music about fictional characters.  Am I the only person who didn’t know about this?

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The Easter Post: Resurrection vs. Reanimation

This will be a quick post in which I don’t intend to say anything new or profound, except in the sense that the gospel is always profound.  I just think the co-occurrence of The Walking Dead‘s season finale with Easter Sunday is too good an opportunity to pass up.  If you’re a TWD fan, you’ve probably already noticed this conjuncture and have been tweeting little jokes about it all week.  While I can appreciate this subcategory of morbidly irreverent humor, I want to remind us all of a few basic yet important truths.

We often forget that Christ’s resurrection means our resurrection too.  Do a search on occurrences of the term “first-fruits” in the Bible–in the Old Testament, you’ll get instructions about bringing your produce to the temple, but in the New Testament, you’ll find all kinds of good doctrine, most if not all from Paul, about how Christ’s resurrection was only the first in a series of resurrections.  There will indeed be a day when “all who are in the graves will hear his voice and come forth” (John 5:28-29).  It sounds a lot like a Romero-esque scenario in which “the dead will walk the earth,” EXCEPT THAT THEY WON’T BE DEAD.  The difference between reanimation–when corpses become mobile–and resurrection–when formerly dead people live again–couldn’t be more pronounced.

So when you watch The Walking Dead tomorrow night and you see all those rotting bodies stumbling around outside the gate of the prison where our friends are holed up, don’t think for a minute that this is what the Bible means when it talks about the defeat of death.  There won’t be anything creepy about the resurrection, just like there isn’t anything creepy about having an Easter sunrise service in a cemetery (I saw a sign for one of those while driving past Alta Vista, VA, yesterday).  And when you attend a church service tomorrow morning, as I hope you do (whether it’s at sunrise or not), don’t think for a minute that Christ’s resurrection was just a past event that’s nice to remember but that has no effect on the present or future.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” I Corinthians 15:58

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The Hunger Games and exploitation

Everybody already knows that The Hunger Games is, in part, a social commentary on a lot of things: surveillance, reality television, extreme body modification, poverty, governmental power, etc.  The morning after I saw the movie (which is quite good), I tried to think of something new to say about it on my blog.  This came to me while I was blow-drying my hair, an activity which seems to generate many good ideas for me:

The Hunger Games is a commentary on the entertainment industry and how you “break into” it.  The Careers from Districts 1 and 2 are analogous to professional actors: They are, in most cases, born to privilege.  They have trained to be performers their whole lives.  They volunteer because they enjoy doing the kinds of things the Games require them to do.

I haven’t found a good analogy for the people in the middle districts–maybe they’re people who play bit parts in movies and television and don’t really get recognized–but those in the outer districts, 11 and 12, are parallel to those who get dragged into the entertainment industry by exploitative measures.  These tend to be people who either need the little bit of money that temporary notoriety might bring them, or have a personal non-conformity that our society’s Gamemakers judge to be potentially good entertainment.  (In the old days, this latter group would have been in circus freak shows.)  I’m talking about the people who appear in shows as widely ranging in subject matter and in quality as The People’s Court, Hoarders, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, The Biggest Loser, and even the audition weeks of American Idol.  To some extent, also, the casts of recent “redneck” reality shows such as Swamp People and Duck Dynasty are in this category, although they seem to be more self-aware and wry than those on the other shows I mentioned.  I’m not saying that all of these shows are purely exploitative, but I am saying that the reasons many people watch these shows are the same reasons the Capital’s citizens watch The Hunger Games.  The reasons are a complex web including identification, sympathy, curiosity, and the attraction of repulsion.  Cruelty may be part of the web for some people, especially in the Capital, but certainly not everyone.

An example of curiosity about other lifestyles, a curiosity that can become exploitative, is the tradition of dressing the tributes in costumes that stereotypically represent their district’s industry.  The Capital’s citizens can say, “Oh, isn’t that cute (or weird); they’re coal miners!” without really attempting to understand District’s 12’s culture or challenges.  That’s why it’s so important that Cinna gives Peeta and especially Katniss a measure of dignity by designing costumes for them that are truly attractive and represent their district in a subtler way.

I may return to this rather undeveloped post later.  Feel free to chime in.