(500) Days of Summer

Hello and welcome back to the blog! (Said mostly for myself) It's been a long three months since I posted something on this site, and what a coincidence, it's been three months since I started my job. It's amazing what a job and a commute to go with it will do to your free-time and your eagerness to share opinions with strangers.

But, despite a currently, and hopefully continually, out of date title, the blog might as well go on. I've recently started up a Netflix account again and try to read on the bus, so it's just a matter of finding the requisite time and energy to put my thoughts down in this space.

It's been too long a break to go back and let you know what I've been reading/watching, but quickly: Mad Men is pretty much what it's cracked up to be. Lolita was great but would've been even better if the stupid annotations (not Nabokov's) hadn't ruined the suspense. John Irving's latest novel Last Night in Twisted River was an appealing look at how fiction writers blend autobiography and creativity. Wes Anderson is a pretty damn good director, and Royal Tenenbaums might be the best Gene Hackman performance I've ever seen. Children of Men the book took a great idea and ran it right into the ground, where Alfonso Cuaron picked it up and turned it into one of the best movies of the decade.

There's more, but let's get on to the principal review:

(500) Days of Summer is not a movie driven by plot. The story is really your standard developing relationship story propped by a number of amusing gimmicks such as playing with the timeline and self-conciously shattering the illusion that what you're seeing on screen is something that is really happening. Rather, the movie is sustained by its knowledge of human emotions and vulnerabilities. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom is an Everyman, who finds what he believes is a singular woman, Zooey Deschanel's Summer Finn, and is alternately driven to ecstasy and despair by her seemingly inconsistent position on their relationship and love in general.

The movie gets so many things right about the inherent awkwardness of any relationship between two people, each of whom have their own goals, motivations, and ideas of what their relationship should be. Summer wants to keep their relationship fun and avoid any semblance of a serious relationship, while Tom is so entranced by this girl that he figures it must be heading that way no matter what she has to say about it.

There's a scene in a bar, when Tom and Summer's relationship is already deteriorating, when a creep starts hitting on Summer and, once rejected, begins mocking Tom along the lines of "this guy's your boyfriend?" After Tom punches the guy (and gets knocked out in return) he tries to tell Summer that he did it for her, but the truth is obvious: he was upset that Summer wouldn't use the word "boyfriend" to describe him.

The supporting cast is truly secondary in this two-person show, but Tom's two best friends are there for some comic relief, as is his spunky, romance-wise tween sister, an allowable cliche who provides Tom with maybe the best advice any liberal arts grad could ever be given. When Tom tells his sister how he and Summer both love The Smiths and J.D. Salinger's story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", she says, "Just because a girl loves the same bizarro crap that you do doesn't mean she's the one." Really, I think that should be the tagline for the movie, and maybe engraved on marble somewhere for large numbers of people to see.

Some critics complained about Summer's "underdeveloped" personality, but I think that misses the point. By the end of the movie it's clear that Tom never really had any idea who Summer was or what she was thinking or feeling. He took one look at her and said "dreamgirl" and never went deeper than that. This is something the movie claims is universal: a very funny bit shows Summer improving record sales by quoting a song in her yearbook and causing immense profits at the ice cream parlor where she worked. Deschanel is thus perfectly cast, she is either extremely adept at playing, to quote The Sound of Music, "an empty page, which men will want to write on" or she has no personality whatsoever, and was genetically designed to give hipster doofuses and English majors heart palpitations.

I've read many complaints about the ending of the movie, but as I was watching it the ending that occurs seemed like the only possible way to end the movie. I won't spoil it here, but suffice it to say that the ending is neither as saccharine sweet nor as much of a cop-out as its detractors seem to think. It seems to this observer that the film ends by stating the relatively simple premise that relationships begin and end, begin and end many times, and some times they suck and sometimes only one person thinks they suck and that, well, sucks for the other person, but there's really only one thing you can do, isn't there? (Short of the movie turning much darker than it was intended to be, of course.)

(500) Days of Summer is something that you don't seem to find much these days, a romantic comedy that attempts to appeal to both men and women and that deals with relationships in a way that normal human beings might actually recognize from their daily lives. That alone makes it a refreshing departure from a tired genre. On top of that it includes two fine performances at its center, some witty gadgets and gimmicks (my favorite being a split-screen between Tom's expectations of what will happen at a party and what really happens), a few musical numbers, and the chance to look at Zooey Deschanel for 90 minutes. For all that it gets 8.8 out of 10.

Next? Well, I've got Inglourious Basterds at home, and I'm reading another Michael Chabon book, Gentlemen of the Road.

ABC Wednesday

I feel a little guilty for having watched two hours of ABC programming last night, and not just because a quarter of that time was spent viewing something called "Cougar Town". When ABC made the decision to cancel Pushing Daisies I realized that it meant I would have no reason to turn on the channel for the foreseeable future. (I've never gotten into LOST and besides that, tell me exactly when a reasonable male would turn on the network that depends on Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives for its few ratings successes?)

But I never formally launched a boycott, because I'm emotionally mature enough (just enough) to know that such a course of action would have no practical impact. And so when I heard all the advance buzz for Modern Family I decided to give ABC another shot at taking over my Wednesday nights. And then due to inertia I wound up watching Cougar Town and Eastwick as well. Some thoughts:

Modern Family showed great promise. The show follows three branches of a "modern American family" whatever that is. Ed O'Neill is the patriarch Jay Pritchett, and is newly married to a much younger Colombian woman. She's played by Sofia Vergara with a little bit hackneyed Latina fire, but she delivers some of the best lines, and it's more than possible that her character is intended as a parody more than a cliche. Jay's daughter Claire (played by Julie Bowen of "Ed" fame)is part of a supposedly more typical family, married for 16 years and with three kids. Her husband Phil is trying too hard to be cool, and she worries that her daughters will make the same mistakes she did. Speaking of the older daughter she says, "If she never wakes up half-naked on a beach in Florida, I'll have done my job."

The third branch is a gay couple who at episode's open are returning from Vietnam with an adopted baby in tow, a baby Mitchell Pritchett has yet to tell the rest of his family about. I was impressed with the way Modern Family treated its gay characters. There wasn't as much boosterism or kid-gloves treatment of them. In fact the only political moment arises when Mitchell launches into a speech about the many shapes of love after a woman says "look at that baby with those cream puffs" (the baby was actually holding cream puffs.)

Modern Family seems to be a reaction to years of rigid family archetypes on television. With it's broad cast of characters it makes the point that families encompass a lot more than just a Mom, a Dad, and two or three kids. I'm curious how it will handle it's large ensemble in future episodes.

The best part of Modern Family may have been the children. Jay's stepson Manny a prematurely passionate boy who is in love with a 16-year old mall kiosk worker. He is constantly picking flowers and writing love poems, to Jay's consternation and his mother's delight. Of his rejection, Manny says, "I gave her my heart, and she gave me a drawing of myself as an Old West sheriff." Phil and Claire's children are very funny as well, especially the easily exasperated middle daughter, who delights in wondering what the family would do if her older sister got pregnant. ("Would you pretend she has mono and hold her out of school for a few months, and then claim the baby was yours?")

I highly recommend giving Modern Family a chance. Comparisons to Arrested Development are perhaps overblown and based more on the single-camera style than objective reality but this is a worthwhile attempt at reimagining the family sitcom.

Cougar Town is a watchable sitcom, and if you watch Modern Family you're kind of stuck since everything else from 9-10 are hour long shows. (This assumes other options, like reading or something, are out of the question.) Courteney Cox is a game comedienne, willing to go pretty far for a laugh. She gets quite a few in the pilot, but the premise of this show seems so thin that it's hard to imagine it lasting. The show is also fairly vulgar, with clear implications of fellatio and other sex acts. This wouldn't be so potentially disturbing except for the candid discussions between Cox's character and her teenage son, who is tortured by having a hot Mom out on the prowl. The show is better than its atrocious title, but not by much.

Eastwick is kind of a mess. It feels a lot like a lot of other shows, only worse. It's a little bit Charmed, mixed with the female bonhomie of something like Sex and the City. It's based on the movie The Witches of Eastwick, from the John Updike book of the same name, and centers on three women granted magical powers through the intervention of a mysterious male benefactor. I'm not usually one to criticize entertainment on a political basis, but the sexual politics of this show are just absurdly inaccurate and presumably offensive to any thinking woman. The idea that women can only fully realize their potential by becoming more like men is disturbing and just plain wrong. The performances of the three main leads range all the way from pedestrian to middling, and the writing is pretty terrible in places. (One character's evil husband is cartoonish, and a scene where a previously kind boyfriend turns rapist within 90 seconds means this show officially hates men and women alike.)

This is not an original thought, but Eastwick really does feel like something that even the executives at the CW would pass on. The three female leads are pretty to look at, but that's about all this show offers.

So, ABC, you're going to get my eyeballs for about half-an-hour to an hour a week again (depending on my level of lethargy.) Sorry, but I don't have a Nielsen box.

That Old Cape Magic

Richard Russo is a novelist with a immense knowledge of people. His fictional characters come equipped with the resentments, entanglements, unwanted obligations and tortured memories of real human beings. This gift for creating round characters is how Russo is able to create such memorable fiction out of the lives of ordinary men and women. He gets at the universal nature of unhappiness and portrays with stunning insight and sympathy.

Russo's newest novel, That Old Cape Magic, utilizes this knowledge of human folly further than any of his other works. There is also a greater sense of bitterness and sorrow than ever before. At times That Old Cape Magic feels like its holding up a mirror to all the ugliness in the reader's soul. Everyone can recognize themselves in Russo's Jack Griffin, a married man who often knows he is about to say the wrong thing and says it anyway, sometimes intending to inflict the damage he causes.

The novel breaks neatly into two sections, each surrounding a wedding. In between the two Jack and his wife of thirty years separate, and both show up to their daughter's wedding with dates. Russo somberly traces the dissolution of their marriage, as they fail to deal with the emotional problems facing them and instead lash out at each other.

As always, family, especially parents, play a huge role in the tension. Jack hates his parents, snobbish English professors consigned to mediocrity in the "Mid-fucking-west" with their only escape a yearly vacation to Cape Cod, even though he is more like them than he cares to admit. The way Jack most resembles his parents is in his petty dislike of his wife's family and their Protestant values.

Russo's command of the story is as impressive as always, and the number of characters and memorable set pieces he manages to include is rather amazing considering the books brevity and breeziness. Despite being at times rather uncomfortable to read, a trainwreck on paper, if you will, That Old Cape Magic is, in its own way, an enjoyable read.

Politics in the Novel

There are many reasons to write a novel. Among the worst are to prove a point or settle a score. Philip Roth tries to do both with I Married A Communist, a lengthy, invective-loaded tirade published under the guise of a novel.

I Married A Communist takes place during the peak of the McCarthy era, and concerns itself primarily with the treacherous, life-ruining betrayals of that time. This is not exactly new territory. American writers have been beating this time-period and its ills to death since the immediate aftermath of the hearings and blacklists. Some of these efforts are intelligent rebuttals to a time of madness, but Roth seems to be using the era as an excuse to proudly exclaim his own radicalism and to slander his ex-wife.

The story centers on radio actor Ira Ringold (Iron Rinn to his fans) and his openly secret allegiance to Marxian economics. Roth's narrator/alterego is the reclusive novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who is talking over the tragedy of Ira Ringold with Ira's brother and Nathan's former teacher Murray, over forty years later. This frame-story device has a distancing effect and causes the story to meander and drag needlessly. There is less focus on events and chronology than there should be. Also, the age of the two interlocutors causes the reader to find their perfect memories of names, dates, and even whole conversations incredulous.

Ira Ringold is a surprisingly one-note character. Roth is rightly regarded as an American master, but here he supplies his protagonist with little more than an overgrown child's sense of fairness and geopolitics. Ira's political rants are so repetitive that the reader loses the capacity to feel sympathy for him.

The novel follows Ira's story as he marries Eve Frame, an American actress on the downside of her career, and navigates the increasingly conspicuous relationship between his wife and her daughter. This is where the novel starts to run off the rails of literary work and into the territory of personal vendetta. At the time of this novel's publication Roth had just endured his own divorce, followed by his ex-wife's tell-all in which she described him as a petty tyrant and a vindictive psychopath. In the novel, Ira's life is ruined by a dishonest tell-all memoir written by his wife. Roth makes Eve a pathetic cartoon of self-loathing, anti-Semitism, and unrequited mother love that it is hard to keep reading passage after passage of his obvious contempt for the character representing his own former wife.

The idea of Roth, one of the foremost authors of our time, writing about an incredibly interesting, if over-covered, period of American history, was a thrilling prospect. It is indeed unfortunate that his personal troubles and need to prove himself right got in the way of what could have been an interesting novel.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

My father has a history major's appreciation of chronology. This extends even into his reading in fiction. He does not like to read novels out of order, whether or not the books are serial or not. After reading Michael Chabon's first novel, written as his MFA thesis and published when the author was 24 years old, I have realized the true wisdom of my father's seemingly capricious stance.

Great first novels are so mythologized, i.e. To Kill A Mockingbird and A Confederacy of Dunces, that it can often be forgotten that authors, like other professionals, can and do get better with experience. This certainly hold true with Chabon, whose other novels, even Wonder Boys, which I disliked, far outpace The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in terms of plotting, complexity and character development.

There is, naturally, ample evidence of the author's talent on display. Chabon writes sentences with apparent effortless grace, an enviable ability. He has a talent for creating memorable moments and distinguishing features. And if one makes allowances for age and inexperience the novel can truly be said to be almost annoyingly well-written.

Still there is a lot wanting in this story of one summer in the life of a gangster's son, a summer spent carousing, and sleeping with, an unsavory assortment of delinquents and airily artificial college graduates. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the novel is that this assortment of partners includes members of both genders. Here Chabon seems to go astray, narrator Art Bechstein's vacillation between women and men never seems either authentic or sympathetic, but then I've never been sympathetic to literary characters who intentionally subvert their romantic relationships, especially to female characters as appealing as Phlox, the French major and film-buff Bechstein deserts.

I wonder especially what gay readers of the novel think of Chabon's treatment in this novel. Bechstein's male lover Arthur Lecomte comes across as a sort of homosexual Svengali, manipulating our hero into wayward sex. In a somewhat bold authorial move Chabon has Phlox, a more or less sympathetic character, display a pathological homophobia. It is my understanding that Chabon had at this age already been romantically involved with both men and women, so the lack of authenticity I perceived is surprising, unless I am just so unfamiliar as to be unable to be perceptive.

Chabon raises some interesting possibilities with the intriguing backstory of Bechstein's family life. His father is a money-man for the mafia and his mother was assassinated in message killing, and her death seems to haunt the sensitive, lachrymose Bechstein, but Chabon denies, whether through intent or lack of developed skill, his readers any moment of revelation or insight. The novel's down-note ending leaves the reader unssatisfied and curiously unmoved by the plight of the main characters.

If you've read and enjoyed other novels by Michael Chabon, including the wonderful Pulitzer winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, perhaps you would be better off consigning The Mysteries of Pittsburgh to the bin of rough drafts or promising debuts. As a novel to be read it is unsatisfactory.

The End of the Affair

The problem with having a reputation as a Catholic novelist is that inevitably your novels will be judged on a basis greater than literary. Whether or not the story works or holds together takes a back seat to whether the novel presents an appealing and workable version of Catholicism. Catholic readers want their faith upheld for its virtues while religious skeptics may be looking for the author to make the case for the existence of God.

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is considered a classic of Catholic literature, but for the life of me I don't understand why. This may be a personal shortcoming but to me the version of religious belief presented by Greene is a scary and false perversion of what Christianity should be.

The End of the Affair centers on a love triangle, which becomes a square when God enters the picture. Novelist Maurice Bendrix has a passionate affair with Sarah, who is married to Henry Miles. Henry's stodginess and prudishness drive Sarah to Maurice's arms, and she loves him despite his jealous nature. During a bombing (the setting is WWII London) Maurice is trapped under rubble and Sarah, thinking him dead, prays to God, promising to leave Maurice if God will let him live.

Of course, Maurice isn't dead and is perplexed when Sarah leaves him with no explanation. Convinced there is another man, he hires a detective to follow Sarah, eventually learning of her pledge when the private eye steals her diary.

The novel then follows Maurice's attempts to get Sarah back, and her refusals due to her new-found religious belief.

As a story the novel is slightly above average. Greene is good at establishing characters, and though the plot is thin even for such a short novel it is well-constructed.

But as a work of Catholicism is inherently flawed. Sarah's reason for believing, despite the fact that she desperately wants Maurice back, is a shallow and insupportable faith. The novel establishes the shallowness as a virtue in the last few pages, when several inexplicable miracles occur, ostensibly due to Sarah's belief in God.

I don't feel like getting into it, but this kind of thing upsets me, and I believe that it should upset thinking Catholics as well. It's tough to grade the novel, as it's not clear to me whether or not Greene intended his book to be representative of a true Catholicism or whether that has just been ascribed to him. Overall, I'm just having trouble imagining who I would recommend this book to.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Redux)

When Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was in its initial run on ABC it quickly became a family ritual in the Everett household. I remember watching it down in my Nana's room with her and my father, even when it was on four nights a week and fewer and fewer people were tuning in. I remember my father dialing in to try and get a spot at an audition. I remember my father being upset that the first million-dollar winner did so on what he considered a remarkably easy question. (Who wouldn't know that Richard Nixon did Laugh-In? he complained.) The show was something I always enjoyed, and those nights watching the show have a special place in my memory.

I watch the syndicated version of Millionaire occasionally (I am unemployed, after all.) But it's just not the same. Meredith Viera isn't half the host Regis was, and no one has won the big prize in quite a while. So I was ecstatic when I heard a few months ago that Regis was coming back for a limited run in prime-time.

However the 10th Anniversary Edition premiered Sunday night to such little fanfare that I forget to watch it. Back during the show's original run, this was something that never happened. Disappointed with myself, I made sure to watch the second night of the limited run, and it is with heavy heart that I report that this revival is a pretty sad affair.

For one thing, they are using the inferior daytime version's new rules, and that is clearly confusing Regis, and who can blame him? He's 78 and hasn't done this in ten years, and on top of all that you're going to switch all the rules around? Last night on a $100 question Regis clearly forget that the contestant is on a clock. He started chatting and laughing during the question, using up almost the whole 15 seconds. The contestant didn't realize the clock had started and she only barely got out her answer.

That incident clearly shook Regis, and for the rest of the show he was speeding through the questions and answers until he was nearly unintelligible. Now, I hate it when Meredith talks to the contestants on the syndicated version, but that's because she's a terrible host and the contestants, who don't have to answer a fastest-finger, are generally dumber than the general population. Regis is, or at least was, a great game-show host, and it used to be fun to watch him gently mock contestants while they thought out their answers.

The worst part of the show was the arbitrary shoe-horning of celebrities into the telecast. Last night at 7:46 central, a contestant had just won $25,000. This is when the show generally gets really interesting, but no, tonight this contestant was shuffled off until the next broadcast so that ABC could promote Ugly Betty by bringing out Vanessa Williams to play for charity. Then they went to a six-minute commercial break (seriously, six minutes) and gave Vanessa one question to answer, for $50,000 to give to her charity, guaranteeing her $25,000 even if she missed. The worst part is that they didn't put a clock on Vanessa, who tried to think out a question that she didn't know (and which could not possibly be "thought out") for the rest of the show before miraculously picking the right answer. It was unexciting, awful television.

Tonight the celebrity guest is Sherri Shepherd of The View, who once admitted to a national television audience that she wasn't sure whether the world is flat or not. Thanks for crapping on my memories ABC.