I used to feature all my writing only in this here spot, but that will no longer be the case. In the last few months, I’ve turned into a film critic/columnist at www.TheFilmStage.com and will soon bring my “I’ll Never Get Tired Of…” column style over there.

On top of that, I’m excited to announce that I will also be starting and’ for lack of a better term, be the editor-in-vhief at a new writing-based web magazine called The Inclusive, which will be found at www.TheInclusive.net. As of now we are collecting a number of great writers for our staff and will always be on the lookout for guest contributors. The site’s nomenclature is also its mission statement: it’s a site for us, all of us, to write for. I’m terribly excited for it to begin. High, high hopes for that one.

So what, then, comes of this space?

The Inclusive will get at least two columns from me (if not more) so this space will be a catch-all for anything I write. Sometimes it will feature a link to let you know of a new review posted on The Film Stage or a new humor column on The Inclusive, but it can also be a place for writing that doesn’t fit in either box. If I rant about Charlie Sheen, for example, it might not be able to fit in The Inclusive’s box schedule, so it’ll go here. Or I have a funny li’l three paragrpah story, this will be its home.

Exciting things are happening, folks. Keep up with all my doings here, at ooooolllll’ Mike-Anton.com.

Or keep gawking at photos of Brooke Baldwin. Whatever floats your boat.

I distinctly remember the first time I watched South Park. Bundled up in my bed at around 10:10 on a Saturday night, I flipped on Comedy Central to see this bizarre, low-res animation show featuring a fat, angry child who wanted to be abducted by aliens. I was confused but obviously intrigued. After watching wide-eyed for a few minutes, I started screaming for my mom to come into the room and share in the fun. Odd, isn’t it? While this was the same woman who refused to let me play Mortal Kombat or watch Beavis and Butthead, she also gave me my first good taste of comedy, sitting me down for Marx Brothers movies, I Love Lucy, and her reluctant acceptance of my love for The Simpsons. I wasn’t looking for approval as a parent, but rather as a lover of comedy.

She rushed in, sat on my bed next to me, and watched. Seeing her vacillate between abject horror and gut-busting laughter made me question what was more entertaining: her reactions or the show itself. While I was dying at every joke, she was still on the fence (both as a parent and a consumer of comedy, I’m sure). Then Kyle asked Ike to do his impression of David Caruso’s career. She nearly fall off the bed. I sat there, confused. It was that moment that cemented South Park as must-see television. Sure, there were great, funny jokes, but it also had stuff that went over my head, things I had to search out to understand. Comedy Central ran the next three episodes of the first season in a mini-marathon and we both watched, enthralled. My mom kept reiterating that she should leave, but never made a move for the door. Her better judgment keeping her where she needed to be.

It is my most indelible memory of sixth grade.

Since that time, I’ve gone into and through middle school, entered high school, got my license, decided I wanted to become a filmmaker (no doubt through the influence of shows as brilliant as this one), graduated, attended Boston University, fell in love with a girl, dated her for two years, broke up, turned 21, graduated college, and am currently in New York trying to become a TV writer myself at 25, nearly the same age as when Matt Stone and Trey Parker made their animated Christmas card “The Spirit of Christmas” for producer Brian Graden, which led to this very show. Looking back, that’s a staggering amount of time for me.

Imagine what it must feel like for Matt and Trey.

Last night’s episode, “You’re Old Now,” wasn’t just the best of a mediocre season. It was truly one of the best the series’ long run. Heartfelt yet low-brow, meta and moving, it was a perfect encapsulation of what I love so much about the show. In an episode about growing up, it made me look back at all the points when South Park truly dotted my life path. I remember racing home from the D.A.R.E.-sponsored Devils game as the bus full of my classmates anxiously checked out digital watches and endlessly debated who Cartman’s father would be, only to get an April Fools joke in “Not Without My Anus. Even then, I took to heart that you shouldn’t take a silly TV show’s plot lines so seriously (note: I enjoyed the episode then as much as now, and I’m incredibly proud of that fact).

Sitting down to watch the “shit” episode as the oddly groundbreaking event it truly was while taking to heart the lesson that having too much of a good thing could ruin its meaning. How “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants” comforted me in my post-9/11 head space as every other program tried to either scare the shit out of me or keep me in some lasting depression. I remember when I truly recognized the power of television and artistry when they kept Tom Cruise and John Travolta in the closet with barely any blow back from anyone, or when I realized that corporations will always kowtow in the face of fear when Viacom abjectly refused to show Muhammad, even in an animated costume, on multiple occasions (regardless of the fact that they’d been airing a version of him in their opening title sequence for years from a an appearance in an earlier episode, no less).

I’ve always viewed the show as one with great jokes, an incredible mix of low- and highbrow comedy, but most importantly, a show with a heart that always cared for its characters paramount. No matter what silly bullshit was going on on screen (and god knows that there has been a staggering amount of that), it always came down to the hopes, dreams, and feelings of some little boys in Colorado, trying to make sense of the crazy, mixed-up, ridiculous world that they inhabit. One that was only a bit more crazy, mixed-up, and ridiculous than the one the viewers exist in.

To most, however, South Park is not about the kids, but the prism through which the show’s creators see our culture and insert that into the South Park sandbox. The gift and the curse that this show survives on is its insane production schedule. If you’re blissfully unaware (although at this point I find it hard to imagine as it’s nearly as famous as the show itself), they create the show in a literal week; from breaking the plot, through writing the script, animating, recording all the voice work, adding sound effects, writing music, and editing it into a polished product literally just in time to air it on Wednesday. And they’ve never once missed a deadline.

In many ways, this overshadows the show that they’re trying to accomplish; the audience becoming fixated by the process as its own three-act circus rather than focusing on the story they show is trying to tell. This sense has only increased as the show moves forward in age. They make a great episode about “Christmas in Canada”, but all anyone remembers is when the Mounties reached into a hole and pulled out Sadam Hussein, who had recently been discovered in a very similar fashion by US troops earlier in the week. The entire episode “About Last Night…” was a great parody of heist movies like Oceans 11, but all anyone could talk about was the herculean effort it took to put that show together a mere 24 hours after Barrack Obama won the presidential election. Make no mistake, it’s an insane thing to do and is a remarkable effort, but the effort begets a great show that you’re too enjoy first and foremost.

More recently, the boys finished an episode that parodied the cultural response to “The Jersey Shore” by having the US team-up with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda to fly passenger jets into throngs of American citizens…but all anyone could talk about the next day was how they ruthlessly went after Snooki. It has gotten so routine that any big event that takes place in our news or culture gets met with an expectation on how South Park will send it up this week (or, for the cynical among us, react with an eye roll about how they know what the show will be). What started as a fun add-on turned into an expectation and then a creative burden.

This brings us to last night’s episode, “You’re Old Now,” another episode in the long South Park tradition of righteously striking down that in the culture that which Trey and Matt do not approve. For the duration of the show, they have steadfastly stood on one side of the line and pointed out exactly what stands on the other. Paris Hilton is Wrong, the boyband craze is Wrong, Michael Bay is Wrong, the way we treat Britney Spears is Wrong, NAMBLA is Wrong, doing steroids is Wrong, and they all sit on the same clear, basic, black and white moral plane. Making these kinds of stands have also caused the two to be accused of being “holier than thou,” which is what made the moral of the episode so damn interesting, because, shockingly, they turn the gun on themselves.

The show begins with a missive on how shitty Tween Wave music, but does so in a strikingly similar fashion to how they dealt with the boy band craze in “Fingerbang,” reapplying the axiom “if it’s so shitty, anyone can do it” with Randy instead of the boys. They once again go after shitty, bland movies that are just “reheated turds,” such as The Zookeeper, Mr. Potter’s Penguins, and whatever shitty movie Adam Sandler is going to put out, echoing their stance on people coming to see the same shit over and over without a care in the world. This idea–even its execution–harkens back to the classic put-down of Rob Schneider movies (“THE STAPLER!”) from seasons before. The fact that this idea is voiced by Stan, who is usually a proxy for Trey (and Kyle for Stone) makes it all the more apparent that this is beyond meta; it’s oddly personal.

This idea reaches its climax in the extremely pointed conversation between Sharon, one of South Park’s most–only?–grounded characters and her husband Randy, clearly the most insane man in town. They discuss how upset they are with how things are going, listing the litany of crazy stuff Randy has gotten into. He says it’s all to shake things up and have fun while Sharon is disappointed Sharon in the notion that he has to go to such crazy lengths (highlighted by the two old guys saving the “britches” that Randy had been farting into as a Teenwave musician that acted as a ridiculous c-story). The characters talk about specific plot lines that Randy’s character has gotten into but, in the same time, notice how every week it’s just the same old, same old, repeating ad nauseum, as Randy gets more and more ridiculous going further and further out.

There’s only so much one can do with a character before he or she becomes some sort of parody of itself (think Homer Simpson, Michael Scott, The Fonz). When it hits that point, it’s no longer about the person inside the character; what they think, how they feel, how their actions affect others around them. As mentioned in the show, Randy’s drunken fighting in “The Losing Edge” worked because it was funny on its own and worked as a story against his son and wife. Counter to that, a recent episode was based around how Randy was angry because his penis is small, eventually manifesting into taking control of a FedEx store. Yes, it was a method of trying to explain everything from the Birther movement to wigger teenagers, but that was all. His arc existed only to answer the question, “WHAT CUH-RAAAAAZY STUFF CAN RANDY DO THIS TIME?!” and that is the definition of “diminishing returns.”

First and foremost, Matt and Trey are storytellers. It’s evident in everything they do, especially in the work they have done largely outside of the South Park world. Before the show started, they made a live-action comedy (Orgasmo) and a musical (Hannibal:  The Musical). They took the opportunity of doing a South Park movie to make a mash-up of Disney animated films and Broadway standards, creating South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, what Stephen Sondheim–he of West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, and Company to name a few–called one of the best musicals of the last twenty years. They created a live-action sitcom (That’s My Bush!) and a Michael Bay-style action movie with marionette puppets (Team America:  World Police). They starred in their own Zucker movie (BASEketball) and created The Book Of Mormon, which has garnered 14 Tony nominations and has been the hottest ticket in New York for months now.

In the strictest sense, they don’t need South Park the way we do.

We depend on South Park. We know that every Wendesday at 10 PM there will be an episode on, be it old or new. It’s a crutch, a stabilizing point in our lives that are always too chaotic and move too fast for us to really get a grip on, no matter our age or profession. It doesn’t matter what happens in our week: who passes away in our family, what wars go on outside our borders, if we’re presently single, married, divorce, or widowed, there will be a South Park for us to turn on and laugh at. Like all good shows, what started out as a gift and has since become a promise, and a comfort that we don’t want to lose.

But Matt and Trey have more stories to tell, more sandcastles to build, more characters to create and grow and play around with. They’ve maxed out in South Park. Look at the character of Kenny, who went from a two-joke character (he mumbles curses and sexual thoughts into his parka and dies every episode) to being written off of the show for a year or two only to return with a simple “oh hey Kenny.” Now, thanks to a three-part episode arc, we know his death/rebirth comes from a pact his mother made with a cult that prays to a dark hell-beast and that he uses this power to become a superhero, Mysterion, who watches over South Park at night. (…What?) And this is on top of a work schedule (working day and night for eight straight weeks, twice a year) that was gruelling as guys in their late twenties, let alone men in their early forties who now have families to spend time with.

I take comfort from the fact that if we lose South Park, we won’t be losing Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They seem like two guys who you couldn’t keep from expressing their worldview, be it through songs or movies or something we haven’t even seen yet. I give South Park the show far too much credit. A good portion of that should be reserved for those two men at the helm and the gaggle of talented people at South Park Studios who have imparted lessons to me both as a person and a writer. I truly don’t know if I’d be where I am today without the product that they create together.

Luckily, there is one more lesson that they can impart to me: how and when to bow out gracefully. I cannot wait.

Crowds gathered last night outside of the White House and the former site of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in jubilation, echoing other famous military-based fetes throughout our history.  I’m sure people of an older generation saw the photos in their newspaper today (cause god knows they weren’t awake or on twitter late last night to get the news as it happened) and were reminded of V-J Day, when throngs of war-weary Americans took to Times Square to celebrate victory over the Japanese and the conclusion to World War II.  Brian Williams saw all of the kids flooding college campuses across the nation as an inverted callback to the anti-war protests against involvement in Vietnam during the 60s and 70s.  To me, the footage of all those young kids in large groups reminded me of baseball.

My freshman year at Boston University coincided with the first Red Sox World Series victory in 86 years.  But before they slayed that historical demon, they first had to get past their hated rivals–my favorite team–the New York Yankees.  The Sox did so in grand, historic fashion, coming back from a 3-0 deficit to win four straight games, take the seven game series, and head to an eventual World Series win.  For many kids–a good number from the New England area–this was a huge, epic event in their lives, one their grandparents had waited their entire lives to see.  They took to Kenmore Square, a busy intersection just outside Fenway Park, to celebrate en mass.

But for a good deal of others, it was merely an excuse to go outside and riot.  And yes, the key term was “riot.”  Upon returning (I did not go out; I was in mourning) my friends, both fans of the Sox and of destruction, regaled me of stories of people breaking glass everywhere, climbing street lamps and falling onto heaps of people, and how one tear gas capsule actually hit one of them in the foot!  All of this was captured on their digital cameras, a digital replica of their involvement in the Great Riots that they could proudly show off to their grandchildren some decades after they showed off on facebook.

A similar scene occurred last night as scores of college kids emptied out of their dorms to congregate outside the White House and near Ground Zero, looking to quite literally dance on the man’s grave. It was a striking visual, all of those people out there celebrating the death of another, mirroring the footage of people from an Arab country that I cannot for the life of me remember (but, for these purposes, does not exactly matter) celebrating the attacks on 9/11 by dancing in the streets.  It was one of those indelible images that, like the second tower getting hit in profile or the stanchion for one of the towers barely left standing, that sticks in my craw to this very day.  Thinking about it right now gets me raw all over again.

In years since, the veracity of that specific piece of footage has been challenged, but someone was happy that America was attacked.  And it wasn’t because they hate our democracy or our constitution or our freedom but specifically they hate our culture; our sex-crazed, binge-drinking, Jersey Shore-loving, godless culture.  And we’re not content to leave that culture, with our Coca-Colas and sinful delights and all, on our side of the world.  No, we’re a monolithic social and political machine that batters down all other cultures through military or financial measures to push these edicts of debauchery-as-freedom on others regardless of how they feel about it.  We mistook Osama declaring war on “America” as our country.  Instead, he called for a jihad on all that America stands for culturally: a godless cesspool who hold nothing sacred.

Our reactions last night did little to eschew this idea to his followers.

Around two o’clock AM, MSNBC threw to a live remote at Ground Zero, the hallowed area that has the blood of  nearly 3,000 people, from civilians to firefighters, EMTs, and police officers who died while fulfilling their civic duty.  And on that ground had gathered a large group of people, mostly college aged, to congregate at the site of the attacks and celebrate the death of the man responsible.  Wonderfully apropos.  The reporter decided that it was a good time to interview some of the revelers (and that is a very apt term for this gaggle of girls).

The video can be found here, but I’ll describe.  The shot goes live as people behind the reporter scream.  He tries to explain the atmosphere which is shockingly ebullient considering the location.  As he tries to find the proper words to describe what’s going on, he stumbles out “it’s really a very…an unusual night that’s…that’s that’s very bizarre for Ground Zero.”  He turns to address the crowd, asking, “you’re all students, right?” and they, in unison, cheer “YEEEAAAAHHHH!” as if they were tweens waiting outside a Justin Bieber concert.  As he turns to interview one specific girl, the crowd cheers and “WHOOOOOOs” their little hearts out. He turns to one girl, adorned in a Pace University sweatshirt (they have to love that), as various others try to crowd the shot.

The girl is asked, “how do you feel about what’s happened here?” evidently making light of the actions at Ground Zero, not about Osama bin Laden’s death.  But no matter.  With her arms gesticulating up and down (a cell phone in her right hand, no doubt warning friends and family members to turn on MSNBC in 3…2…1…) she responds, “I feel GREAT right now!” sounding like many a drunken college girl I’ve encountered on any given weekend, let alone early Monday morning during finals week.  Someone bum rushes the mic and offers, “America needs this!” as the reporter asks a simple follow up of, “Why [do you feel great right now]?”  She gives a perplexed look, as she somehow did not see this obvious follow-up question coming, and with her arms all akimbo, says, “…It’s AMERICA!  It’s time to party right now!  He’s DEEEEEAD!” before lifting her arms and letting loose with yet another “WHOOOO!!!” as the crowd joins in.

The display actively disgusted me, and here I am a kid from New Jersey who is sympathetic to the American cause.  One can only imagine how clips like those, how newspaper headlines like this, how giddy, rapturous dance songs like this one, or reactions to being among the revelers like this wearing shirts like this will be digested across the world, specifically amongst those most in line with bin Laden’s perverse teachings and views.  This goes beyond fodder; it actually confirms to them that they’re right.  If we can’t treat Ground Zero like the hallowed ground it is, what the hell can we respect?

*     *     *

Last night was a celebration, and for the life of me, I can’t think what it was for.  It seemed like we were at a victory parade, as if killing one prominent member of one specific terror group that still has thousands upon thousands of active members wins the “war on terror.”  It seemed like justice had been served, but the towers are still gone and families are still torn asunder.  It seemed like vanquishing a boogieman, as Obama claims “that the world is a safer place,” even though I’m infinitely more scared now than I did 18 hours ago, hell, then in the last couple of years combined.   It seemed like a triumph, that we had somehow drawn even, the scoreboard reading US 1 – 1 TER, as if the cycle won’t start anew.

But that score does not matter compared to other numbers, like the roughly 3,000 people who perished in the attacks on September 11th.  1,500 US service men and women have been killed overseas fighting to avenge those deaths and in doing so have taken the lives of some 30,000 Afghanis, a mix of innocents, maniacs, women, and children.  After last night’s events, add four more men and one women to the count.  Oh, and the war drum to go into Pakistan was being beaten as of 2 AM last night, as their government was harboring known terrorists, much like the Taliban were in Afghanistan.  Not to mention the potential world-wide response to bin Laden’s death.

Now I know what we’re celebrating: a larger pile of bodies.

Malcolm Gladwell’s novel Blink proposes that we don’t nearly give our gut instinct the proper amount of credit.  After seeing something over and over again our brains become conditioned to almost instantaneously figure out a conclusion.  This explains why seasoned baseball fans stay in their seats while others jump up at the sight of a fly ball; they know what a home run ball looks like right off the bat, why drivers can tell which cars are angling to cut them off, and why we watch movies and criticize computer-generated imagery as being fake, because we have a lifetime of experience of seeing things that are real.  In nanoseconds, we can suss out real versus fake, danger versus safety.

But if that’s the case, and we are a consumer base that has watched an incredible amount of “reality” television, how can we not tell what’s real or what’s fake?  Why can’t we differentiate between “Charlie Sheen,”  the wacky character and Charlie Sheen, the broken-down addict?

In order to understand our elastic view of the world through the television screen, we have to go back to the origins of the genre, where there were seven strangers, picked to live in a house, challenged to stop being “fake” and start being “real.”  The Real World premiered in 1992 with a simple premise:  put seven young people on the precipice of adulthood who come from varying backgrounds, ethnicities, and religious beliefs and see how they interact.  It sounds like some sort of egalitarian sociology experiment, and, in some ways, it was.  We watched as these people, essentially picked to be our doppelgangers, figure out if their preconceived notions on black people, homosexuals, and gender roles hold up or fall apart over a few months living directly with the thing they are ignorant about.  In many ways it dealt with societal issues in a small area; a veritable microcosm of society thrown together to see if we could all survive.

Since the onset of The Real World, the seminal reality TV series that pitted seven strangers to live in a house…I’ll let you finish the tag line.  The gimmick was to see what would happen when people from different backgrounds and ways of thinking were pushed together and confront their biases and previously-held beliefs.  The reason to watch this show is to see people like you (or, in most cases, people older than you who you thought you were just like), see their reactions, and then gauge what your own would be in that situation, usually with you feeling like you would take the moral high ground.

The show took off as a cultural phenomenon with its third season, set in San Francisco, that was both its most explosive and most educational.  The producers, now aware of what kind of a show they have on their hands, put together just the right amount of differing ethnicities (one Asian, two hispanic, one black, the rest white), political backgrounds (Rachel a conservative Republican, which is always fun) and social issues (what do you do after college is over? how do you deal with no longer being ‘number one’ if everything you do? how do you live a life in the arts? how do you live in America with HIV? how do you live with HIV, period?)

This particular cast is well-known for three reasons:  the character Puck in a vacuum (a nickname written in the stars), Puck putting his scabby hand in the jar of peanut butter (with the cast’s reaction), and Pedro’s entire entire journey, including how he dealt with this terrifying disease we were only still rationalizing, his marriage to his partner, through the eventual (inevitable) decline of his health culminating in his death just after the final show had aired.  The show had relatable people with relatable problems, even if we had to watch a series of TV to understand just how relatable HIV truly was.  It was a show that dealt with real people in real situations, and we took it as such, and it was presented as such. In actuality, it is no such thing.

The misnomer of “reality shows” is that they are inherently “real.”  From early on, nothing about it is true to the day-to-day experiences that goes on in these people’s lives.  The producers have the cast members sit down for confessionals goad them into answering leading questions that will lead to the one sentence (or enough of a quote) to motivate the stories that the producers and editors will create from the ungodly amount of footage that is accrued when you videotape seven people with no outside distractions for hours a day for months on end.  The way things happen on TV is rarely how they went down, chronologically or otherwise.

Do you ever hear someone in your office or in your group of friends take a moment and say, “man, they should REALLY tape us!  That would be one hell of a show!”  It wouldn’t.  It would be terribly, horribly boring.  How would you know?  Following the monumental season in San Francisco, the producers decided to wing on over to London and set-up a show there with people from various countries, including Germany, Australia, the UK, and the United States.  Despite their geographical differences, they truly seemed to enjoy each other, the city, and the experience.  It was lovely. And terribly, horribly boring.  Well, there was this one time when one cast member, Neil, had his tongue bitten off, like Tyson bit off Holyfield’s ear.  The other high point is that someone got a dog and they weren’t properly house broken.  …Then the season ended.

In many ways, the show had reached its fitting conclusion, well-earned by the previous seasons.  They put people with differences in a house together, they understood each others issues, accepted them as friends, and lived a wonderfully peaceful, judgment-free life.  The sociological experiment was a success.  The problem, though, is that this most importantly entertainment.  We need protagonists to root for, we need antagonists to hate.  One can’t help but wonder if the producers realized that Puck was not an anomaly, but a necessary force in the house.  Without an antagonist, an unreasonable, unmovable rock, where is the conflict?  The drama?  If there isn’t a lot of depravity, how can the viewers watch it and not feel morally higher than the people on the show?

As the years progressed, the casts always had a cast member or two that made the audience go, “uh oh, that guy’s gonna be trouble!”  And we would sit and watch the depravity.  Looking back on previous seasons now, what do we remember of them?  Miami is memorable for cast members trying to watch other cast members having sex and breaking windows in order to do it.  Boston is memorable for two cast members almost coming to blows over a sexual issue in front of the young children they are tasked to watch.  Seattle is memorable for one male cast member smacking a female cast member and throwing her prized plush animal off their dock and into the water.  Increasingly the show became less about when they would learn to get past their differences and when they’d start fucking and fighting.

The high watermark occurred when the show went to Vegas in season 12.  Taking the fame and notoriety of personalities like Puck to its natural conclusion, this season is remembered for sex and violence because the show only featured sex and violence.  Seriously, check out the “season highlights” as listed on wikipedia:

• During a visit by Arissa’s boyfriend, they attend a nightclub, where Arissa gets into a physical altercation with another female patron who calls her “bitch.”

• Trishelle and Steven have an on-again-off again sexual relationship (even though Steven was in the middle of a divorce), which at one point resulted in a pregnancy scare for Trishelle. Trishelle later posed for Playboy after the show.

• On the castmates’ third day in the suite, three of them (Steven, Trishelle and Brynn) have a threesome.

• Alton and Irulan begin a romantic relationship, which results in the break up of Irulan and her long-distance boyfriend Gabe. Alton and Irulan were still together when they appeared in their first season of the spin-off show Real World/Road Rules Challenge, but later broke up.

• Arissa has difficulty trusting her roommates, and at times exhibits a temper. She also has a strained relationship with her family, including her mother and her uncle who frequently call and upset her. Arissa posed for Playboy magazine after the show.

• Brynn experiences emotional outbursts, including one in which she throws a fork at Steven. This incident sparks major controversy in the suite, and Steven is adamant about having Brynn thrown out until they have a heart to heart discussion; showing Steven that Brynn is just like him when he was younger.

• Frank searches for love while in Las Vegas, starting with Trishelle, though this ends quickly after Trishelle makes out with Steven in front of him. He later dates a girl from out of town, but he admits cheating on her over the telephone. Frank also applies to USC and is accepted.

The show became self-aware.  The more you stood out, the more havoc you raised, the more sexual you were, the more likely you were to be remembered.  This show stopped being about “real” people in “real” situations and became a springboard into further entertainment (as they obviously knew they already had a foot in the door being cast on this show).  It was “personal branding” before the term existed.  If you’re of a certain age, and you hear the name “Ruthie,” don’t you immediately think of the alcoholic girl who cleaned her life up in Hawaii?  When you hear of Mormons and their rituals, doesn’t Julie from New Orleans immediately spring to mind?

With that said, did I, speaking from some sort of moral high ground at present, watch every single second of this show?  Yup!  Did I sit incredulously thinking, “oh my god do they realize they’re on TV?”  Yup!  Did I go in to high school the next day and pour over every single crazy, ridiculous detail of the previous night’s show, aghast and flabbergasted and dumbfounded but ever so interested?  Absolutely.  NASCAR drivers know that people tune in to watch them crash , but they have enough sense to not drive into the corners.  Real World cast members get rewarded the more times they crash and bail.

The ratings were massive, and when something is a success in the industry, it is fit to be copied.  It signaled the cusp of the reality show boom, as the idea headed to the networks with Survivor, a show that was clever enough to mix mind games, physical changes, and the ability to watch people sickly disintegrate for a million dollars.  It was a cultural phenomenon.  Fox took it the next logical step and got as filthy as possible, from My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance to Temptation Island and The Swan shows based around people debasing themselves for money, all for the entertainment of the populous.  This created a logical scheme for the networks:  invest a small amount of money for a pliable set (or exotic locale), only pay a few on-camera talent, and let people disparage themselves to the delight of the masses huddled around their TV sets.  It worked.  In spades.

Naturally, after a while, people began to tire of the “contest” version of this spectacle (possibly after the 50th animal testicle ingested by a contestant on Fear Factor).  Luckily for them, MTV decided to bail them out again by having a camera crew follow around The Osbourne family, headed by Ozzy and Sharon, who were incredibly entertaining as a family on “The Howard Stern Show.”  The shtick there was that you couldn’t believe how normal and pedestrian the life and responsibilities of the “Prince of Fucking Darkness” were.  Sure, they had a lot of money, but isn’t that a bit of the wish fulfillment?   Even a burnt out rock star deals with the same problems that we all do/we could be just like them if we bit the heads off of bats and practically invented heavy metal!

Soon, every star wanted their own TV show…and nearly everyone was granted one.  The producers learned early on (let’s call it the London lesson) that not every family would be naturally entertaining.  Most people think they can be stars simply because they are who they are (case in point: every cast member of Real Housewives that has ever been filmed).  No matter how rich you get, you can’t buy charisma.  So the producers cheat.

When Snoop Dogg and his family couldn’t carry his own show, they have producers think up hilaaaarious situations to mimic with a family would go through on a sitcom.  All of a sudden, “reality” meant people acting poorly giving delivery to button lines that were poorly written, jazzed up with constant music beds, sound effects, and CUH-RAAAA-ZY camera work to let the audience know “yes, this is supposed to be funny” or “uh oh, he really screwed up now, didn’t he?!”  You know the beats that are supposed to happen on a show intrinsically; you watch enough of it, your brain starts to understand the pattern.  All they did was just put people in their natural places and we eat it up.

The line between “show” and “reality” is never more blurred–and, frankly, more sad–than on Jersey Shore.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel bad for any cast member on that show.  At all.  The show is as “real” as JWoww’s breasts.  They know exactly what they’re doing, which is abundantly clear on this season’s iteration, where they go back to the Shore after flying to Miami for the winter to shoot season two.  They know they’re on TV and everyone in the bar knows they’re on TV and they know that they’re a gateway to getting on TV, for fame or infamy; it washes out the same in the shower the next day.

They’ve embraced their nicknames, leading to Mike “the Situation” putting his tag line in every confessional possible (and yes, he tried to trademark that along with “GTL”).  They’ve embraced their roles, with Snooki getting flat-out drunk and stumbling about the beaches of Seaside as throngs and throngs of people look on, both in the moment and later on television.    They’re giving the public exactly what they crave, leading to this season’s premiere getting the highest ratings in the history of MTV’s original programming.  And for what?  Debauchery, sex, and booze, and lots of it.  Still, we come crawling back for more, like rubes walking the midway on that same Jersey Shore boardwalk, looking at each other and saying, “I can’t believe they’re doing that!” without actually believing it.

The next level of fame or infamy comes in the logical extension of a show like Jersey Shore:  people with actual health problems.  Celebrities get a career bump by trying to work out their drug and alcohol addictions in front of Loveline‘s Dr. Drew and a starved nation.  We get to watch common folk (who don’t have the star power, but definitely have some very deep issues) mired in their addictions before being confronted about it by family, friends, a councilor, and a small film crew on Intervention.  And if that’s a bit too much for you, there’s always Hoarders, where you see people living in filth and squalor who have forever vanquished the cutesy “pack-rat” from our collective lexicon.  And if Hoarders is too focused on the disaster these people live in and not the people themselves, you can watch TLC’s version, Hoarders:  Buried Alive.

With all of these different variations on the same theme–reality–it’s led the culture unable to distinguish any difference.  And, more dangerously, it blurs the line to the point where you can still point and go “this is just TV” and be numbed, even exonerated, from treating these people like anything but figments of television’s colorful imagination.  According to wikipedia, three people featured on the show Intervention have died, including one via suicide.  Not that anyone that watches the show minds much.  I’m sure if you watch that show continuously you saw that note and, in a detached way, went “whatever, most of those people are too far gone anyway.”

This brings us to the current case that drastically blurs the line even further, the downward spiral of Charlie Sheen.  You know him!  The lovable scamp who is showing up on each and every talk show platform that will have him (regardless of what medium it’s broadcast on) to talk about his tiger blood, curing his addiction disease (which is what it is) with his mind, and informing us that the only drug he’s on, himself, if given to anyone else, would make their faces would melt.  And, of course, you can’t be a cultural phenomenon without a usable twitter hashtag meme.  So Charlie tells us that through all of this, he’s winning.

And, really, why wouldn’t he be winning?  This is all unfolding on television, the same medium where he stars in the highest rated comedy (if not show) on the air.  On Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen plays “Charlie,” a misogynistic drunk who stumbles about making funny quips and bedding as many incredibly attractive women as he can in a 22-minute span.  In some bizarre homage to Last Action Hero, he has come through the screen and, in many ways, beaten out his demographic.  My friends and I never watch his television program for various reasons (most specifically, it’s quality, and its lack thereof) but he has now crossed over more fully into the mainstream.

Even with the tremendous success he had on that show (including being the highest paid person to ever appear on a recurring television show at an outrageous $2 million an episode) he personally never had this much exposure.  His twitter account reached one million followers faster than anyone else in the history of the medium (yes, twitter is a medium).  I don’t even have to follow him, someone will always retweet what he’s saying allowing me to bask in the glory that is Charlie Sheen.  We’re eating it up.  He’s loving it.  Winning.

It’s obvious that on strictly moral grounds there is no reason to make this man a hero, as highlighted in this wonderful article by Anna Holmes in today’s New York Times.  If this man was your uncle, you would be concerned.  Incredibly concerned.  Just look at him!  He more closely resembles a homeless man on the street that we all work past every day nary giving a look down at than a television star.  Is not being fit to take care of your children winning?  Is degrading the creator of the show which, regardless of quality, gave him the pile of “fuck you” money he’s currently sitting on winning?  Is his aforementioned repeated history of abusing women in so many ways winning?

In a more traditional time, there is no doubt that he would be able to carry this momentum to another high-priced job.  His fame and notoriety make a wonderful mix.  Sheen seems to be on the same path of Lindsay Lohan, an actress who is famous because her various medical and financial problems get in the way of acting.  Instead, she’s on a constant loop between her house, the courts, and the bar, unable to profit off of her craft, and almost entirely unemployable.  It’s very possible that Sheen could walk on to that set for Two and a Half Men, get his blocking, remember his lines, and never break character the minute he walks on the stage to the minute he gets off.  I’m sure that someone will give him a platform to do…whatever the hell he’s doing now for a paying audience and, if they strike while the iron’s hot, I’m sure that it will do huge numbers.

But already we’re seeing a backlash to the incredible head of steam this story has gained over the last few weeks.  And by no means is this tiring based out of some idea of morality.  No, people are just getting tired of hearing “winning” everywhere they turn.  They’re tired of hearing the inexhaustible rants of a man who is either on drugs or just plain crazy.  The shtick is already growing old.  “Alright, we get it, he says crazy shit.  So?”  Just how crazy can one person go?  Just how much entertainment can be gleaned from the same crazy well?  Eventually he’s going to run out of ammo, right?  And when he’s done, when that bucket is empty, we’ll toss him aside, moving along in our continual move through the freak show, looking for another anomaly to point and laugh at until we fully get our rocks off.

We used to worry about violence on television.  At a certain point, children around the world would see enough Looney Toons or bits of “Itchy and Scratchy” on The Simpsons and lose touch with the world, beating and killing everything in our path without thinking of others as people.  That hasn’t been the case.  Thankfully, we can very easily differentiate between cartoons and reality, keeping our violent natures in tact.  With reality television, we’ve only lost our empathy.

Imagine what bit of humanity we lose next season.

It’s nigh blasphemous to run a TV/Film blog and not have a post about Inception.  At least it feels that way.  The cerebral blockbuster, which ended the year as the fifth-highest grossing film of 2010, made the leap from “big movie” to required viewing; you had to see it just to be in on the discussion.  And what a wide-ranging and ridiculous conversation it was (and, hopefully, continues to be, fingers crossed).  While everyone was talking, no one could quite agree on exactly what they had seen; conversations were led around corners and into dead ends like the puzzling sets and set-ups from the film.  But the fact that people were talking at all is a wondrous event on its own.

For whatever reason, we Americans think more highly of a story’s end than its journey, and we’re especially sore when it comes to open-ended climaxes.  Take the ending of the Sopranos (which, if you’ve been catatonic for the last few years, was left open to interpretation).  Watching it with my mom, I saw the entire range of emotions that went on throughout the country.  She went through confusion (“did the cable go out?”) to derision (“THAT was IT?!”) to anger (“I’m going on the internet boards and I’m going to tell them that that was awful!”) to resignation (“I can’t sign on this internet thing”) to some sort of gradual coming to terms (“I understand what they did.  I still think it’s stupid.”)  There are people who won’t even recommend a show like The Sopranos or Lost because the ending didn’t live up to what they believed it should be, somehow deciding that the last hour wipes away the value of the previous hundred.

Christopher Nolan is really doing the Lord’s work here.  He creates a big time action film that is predicated on the precious notions of the brain.  For all of the big effects shots, the world tumbling, the twisting hotel room fights, the film eventually comes down to one top and two choices:  it falls, or it doesn’t.  That might be the reason why this sort of ending was easier to stomach.  There aren’t a million possibilities here.  He’s in a dream or he isn’t.  The fun comes when you try to explain your version of the story as you and your friend use the same plot points to strengthen your diametrically opposed outcomes.  Nolan packed this film with so much thought and threw on top of it so much action and fun that it’s impossible to resist.  He made a big, consumer-driven, fan-friendly film that will live on long past its summer expiration date.  That’s really his most noble work of all of this:  the fact that this movie even exists.

While it’s nice to talk about the movie at large, it’s not really an Inception discussion without supplying my version of this “find your own adventure” film, now is it?  The rest of this post will be dedicated to my belief that this film is a critique on how we watch movies, what we’ve grown to accept, and how we will always dream in the language of film.

Of all the genres of film, the one that can continually get away with the most crimes against logic are action films.  This is partially by design.  We don’t go to see an action film because it has an enthralling, MacBeth-like story of treachery and wordplay.  We go to see cool shit blow up and blow up gooood.  Every now and then there’s an action flick that throws us a bone and gives us a story to grasp on to (The Bourne Ultimatum), characters who actually develop (Terminator 2), or the rare combination of an incredible story that’s punctuated by incredible action (the once-in-a-lifetime Seven Samurai).  Most of the time, though, action films are like Commando.  And that’s not a terrible thing; I love Commando!  But I love it for what it is:  completely mindless, stupid, ridiculous action that involves people getting killed in incredibly ridiculous ways at the feet of the greatest human ever created that wasn’t the son of God.

Our collective expectations for these types of movies skew more towards Commando than Seven Samurai.  A move like Transformers II is, by any measure, a terrible film.  Its plot starts an hour and a half into the film, it’s bloated, scenes go nowhere, the logic is all over the place, they expect you to care just because it’s a movie and give you no real provocation to actually care…but there was enough big CGI battles and enough patented Michael Bay Explostions ™ to be a huge money maker.  In the end, the majority of people watch these films as an escape from everything–including logic–just to see the hero win out in the end, no matter how improbably.

Inception takes this idea and runs with it in a very unique and wonderful way.  The film is essentially a critique on the way that action movies are made and, most importantly, the way that we accept information in an action film.  We are libel to coast on the fuzzy logic as long as we’re entertained.  The irony of Inception is that most of the faults that people have with it (how quickly things move forward, the insistence on setting up so many “rules” that dreams apparently live by, how it feels like a generic heist movie) is actually its greatest strength. More importantly, it’s the point.

The entire film is a dream that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is still stuck in.  When his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) drops from their hotel suite onto the ground, she is brought back into the real world.  Unseen throughout this film, she sits by her husband, asleep, unable to shake him from the allure of this dream, from the starring role in his own heist film.  The ability for people to jump into someone’s dreams are real, a basis from an unseen world that is never tackled in this actual film.  Everything you see on screen is the constructed movie that Cobb makes in his head based on other movies that he has seen.

Inception is a film that is completely built around Cobb.  In your own dreams, you’re not some schlub who is relegated tot he background.  You’re the person who wins, who loses, who fails, or who watches others succeed.  No matter what, you’re always the focal point of your own dreams, the epicenter of the world your mind creates.  The same is true in this film.  When characters have questions about how things work, Cobb answers them, in a medium-close-up or close-up, looking like a hero.  When his team needs a plan, he’s the one who sets it up, and when the plan goes awry, it’s Cobb who rights the ship.  Everything flows through him and everyone autmoatically looks to him.

In this dream, Cobb is the head of a team like the head of a team in an action movie:  he’s flawless.  Cobb can run through Saito’s lair, silently killing henchmen, catching his bullet casings, then catching the falling bodies.  This happens three times.  He can escape scores of faceless hordes who just can’t shoot him, no matter how close they are (and how supposedly well-trained).  He is “the best extractor in the world” and, just to top it all off, he’s the only person who can run inception.  His timing is always impeccable:  notice how he gets the first bath tub kick just in time to save his team from Saito (Ken Wanatabe).  Notice how he always kills the bad guys with one shot but we never see the bullet.  This powers are normal to us in this environment, but aren’t they a bit…suspect?

This dovetails nicely into the overall convenience of the movie and its construction through editing.  This film does not move on what one would consider a linear path.  Technically, our “present” begins with an old Saito and a very tired and hungry Cobb eating some oatmeal or something.  This gives way to a movie-long flashback that starts exactly where the two characters start now, but they revert immediately back to their first meeting, in this same space, as younger men.  But I don’t think that “flashback” ever actually occurs.  The only way to actually express how time moves properly in this film is to follow the edits.  The pace is relentless and it only gains momentum the further down we drop in Cobb’s conscious, resulting in more and more jump cuts.  Therefore, like a dream itself, everything molds together, irrespective of a set “plot” or time.  Scenes flow in and out of each other at a staggering pace.  The unimportant bits are left on the cutting room floor of Cobb’s mind.

For example, the logic in the scene after he and his team leave Saito on the train is in-congruent in an actual reality.  We see Cobb sitting around in a hotel room (?), spinning his totem pole top, with seemingly not a care in the world (other than his own reality, I guess).  The top spins.  A second after he’s satisfied with the result, the phone immediately rings with his kids.  How did they get his number?  Where is he?  Is he allowed to call home to his kids if he’s being tracked as a murderer?  Doesn’t that seem like a boneheaded move?  He talks to the kids in a very exposition-based way.  We get to learn a bit (thanks, Nolan).

As soon as his mother-in-law hangs the phone up for the kid, there’s a knock at the door.  It’s Arthur, and they resume making a hasty getaway, even though there was no real anticipation in Cobb before Arthur entered.  Of course, as Cobb leaves on his way to Buenos Aires (because that’s where bad-ass movie heroes would wing to when they’re in a tough spot) he mentions that they have “to disappear.”  Then why were you just lazing around in this incredibly swanky space?

When they are both taken hostage by Saito, they have to lose their architect, because every heist movie needs one early sacrifice to add a new member to the team.  As Saito describes the inception job, Cobb says he wants out.  The helicopter immediately lands and he just hops out, even though the sprawling wide shot of the helicopter and surrounding buildings didn’t offer a landing pad for such a quick exit.  It’s at this time that Saito gives Cobb the motivation to take his “one last, crazy, dangerous job” where “the stakes couldn’t be higher” by telling him that he can exonerate him with one simple phone call.  Who could you even call to make that happen?  The attorney general?  The President?  I don’t think fascist dictators have that kind of swift authority.

Cobb and Arthur discuss the possibilities offered by this plan and agree that Cobb is the best person to ever do anything and it’s a-ok to take this case. They land in Paris seconds after the conversation ends and Cobb glances out the window.  As soon as he looks down at “Paris” he is not only grounded, but he’s already entering the college where his father-in-law works, who just so happens to be in a barren lecture hall doing work at the exact time that Cobb wanders in to the room.  Luckily this nondescript Parisian college features British professors and American students and a mysterious back room where Extraction 101 is taught (as Michael Caine’s character taught Cobb “everything he knows”).  Wouldn’t you know it, not only does this man have a student better than Cobb, she’s directly outside the door, coming down the steps in the college, and runs right into Cobb and her professor at the exact time they need her to!  For a man with such bad luck he’s on quite the streak.

It’s not that none of this is explained, and it’s not that everything here is essentially non-pertinent in a two-and-a-half-hour-long film.  It’s the fact that details like this are aggressively not brought up, because they don’t matter.  In a dream, you don’t sit around packing suits in a luggage, you’re too busy doing crazy stuff like riding a unicorn into a sun made of Cheese-its.  The small, ordinary details are set aside for the large, sweeping ones.  Similarly, with the way that the action unfolds with cut after cut after cut, it’s made to give you the impression that all of this follows directly after the other.  Even though it seems a bit off, given the dream logic here, it’s hard to accept this as any other way but as one long, continuous dream that makes up its own logic as we move forward.

Ah, the logic.  There are a few rules that Cobb painstakingly throws down to show what makes up a dream and what doesn’t.  When he teaches his new architect Ariadne (Ellen Page) the rules on the power of the subconscious, it’s effectively Nolan saying “HINT HINT” to the audience.  One of the first is that you don’t remember how you got into a dream, you are just are suddenly there.  Cobb asks Ariadne to recount how they got to the cafe in Paris where they are sitting presently, and she can’t for the life of her figure it out.  Well, neither can the audience, cause it never happened (remember – nothing happens between the cuts).  This is true for the bits presented above:  he’s in Tokyo…then Paris…then Mumbassa…all without much in the way of the how.  And, just for the sticklers out there, all of these things happen in what he calls his “reality.”

If the person who is dreaming gets to be self-aware, then the people inside the dream space will figure it out, first by staring at the subject and, if they continue to get too close, by physically attacking them.  We see it curiously pop up with Cobb throughout the film.  As Cobb talks to Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) at the bar and starts to unravel that they’re living in a dream, no one looks directly at Fischer.  The background actors all turn and stare at Cobb, which indicates that this is all his dream.  In scenes with Mal involved, notice the face on his right-hand man, Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt).  He stares directly at Cobb with an increasingly worried look.

Then there is this shot, when Ariadne remakes a bridge from, essentially, one of Cobb’s memories.  He begins to question what’s going on, keying off this shot by saying, “this has nothing to do with me!”  His subconscious turns on him, going after Ariadne because she was starting to help him unravel that none of this was real.  More to the point, notice the eye line from where these people are staring.  I read somewhere that Ellen Page is a tiny girl (3’4″ or so) so there’s no way they’re looking at her.  They’re staring down Cobb.  He knows too much.

The people inside of a dream are merely the visions of whatever the dreamer thinks these people are.  The best example of this law in action is when Robert Fischer confronts his godfather, Peter Browning (that’s Tom Berenger?!?).  The assembled team hopes that Robert accepts whatever prompt he was given by Eames (Tom Hardy) when he was wearing his Browning suit.  In order to find that out, they have to see what demeanor and thoughts Robert gives this Browning facsimile.  If he takes on the attitude that they have planted, then congratulations, they’ve successfully tricked him.

If we are to expand on that, then everyone on Cobb’s team is there as a reflection of Cobb on top of the duality that these are characters filling the necessary roles in a heist film.  Arthur is his trusted confident, the second-best extractor (which is hammered down by Eames’ description) who always looks out for Cobb and never truly calls him out when he’s wrong (even when Arthur knows that he is).  Naturally, Arthur feuds with the slicker, more risky Eames, because isn’t that what they would do?  There aren’t that many differences in personality between the two, but Eames always has it out for him (until the end, when they can mutually agree that the other did a bang-up job).  Ariadne is the newcomer who constantly calls out Cobb when he’s doing something that can jeopardize the crew, which is usually what the woman does.  She is also, in some way, responsible for Cobb going back into his memories elevator, allowing himself a mechanism to relive all those times with Mal.

Ah, Mal.  The crucial piece in all of this.  If everything that occurs is controlled by Cobb’s mind, and all the characters are the interpretations of what he wants and/or needs these people to be, then Mal is the personification of his unconscious mind and that tricky idea that “none of this is real.”  It picks the perfect vehicle.  She is the most tempting of all the devices that his brain could use.  But, if you were living out the life that Cobb is, if you were the star of your own movie over and over and over again, wouldn’t you want to stay as well?  That’s why Mal is employed to constantly fowl up play time and try to smack some sense into him.

She isn’t the only personification of doubt that creeps in to this picture.  The most obvious is the use of the train that flies through the beginning of the car chase in the first level of the inception project.  Cobb sees this tear through the streets, knocking out the front of the car he’s riding in, blaming the architect who swears she didn’t lay down train tracks in the middle of the street.  She didn’t need to.  It’s his subconscious reminding him that nothing here is real, like, here’s a train that isn’t on tracks just barreling through your “reality” that’s similar to the one you and your wife used to fall back another level.  When they first meet the chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a creepy little man walks up to Cobb and says, “the dream has become their reality.  Who are you to say otherwise?”  Cobb immediately changes the subject and the follow does the same.  It’s reminiscent of earlier when Ariadne began to question the morality of extraction, but the film jumpcuts to another question, with her and Cobb on a different street in Paris, as if a record skipped.  There is no explanation.  Cobb doesn’t need to give one.

Cobb controls his entire universe.  This is why he can set down rules (don’t use memories, don’t use real places) and then break them at his leisure.  If he thinks too hard about memories, he’ll notice the fine details that are missing between the bridge he remembers and the bridge that exists (even if it’s in a dream under Ariadne’s construction).  But he will feel free to return to those memories when he feels lonely or when he longs to return to those circumstances.  To him, if all of it is real, then in this dream space, his memories are real.  If Cobb wants hordes of “security” members to get in his way to reek havoc but be so inept that they can’t shoot Arthur with five shots when they’re literally six steps away from him, then there they are.  An opportune chance to make it feel like there is danger when they are nothing more than fodder (Saito getting shot is the exception, but doesn’t the man who holds the key to everything and is ill-equipped to go on this kind of mission have to get fatally wounded?) is needed to show that there is some sense of “danger” or “mounting conflict.”  This lack of logic gets exacerbated the deeper we go in this dream scape.  When Cobb and company hijack the cab, they tell the cab driver to “walk away” and he vanishes from all the wide shots.  In order to knock out Fischer, they drop the sedative from an eye dropper onto the top of his burlap head sack (Nolan loves making Cillian Murphy hide his face in fabric – wonder if he’s insulted by now) and magically he passes right out.  That really is one hell of a sedative.

The entire siege of the snow control tower (straight out of N64′s Goldeneye) is straight-up ridiculous.  They collectively start out miles away from the compound, then, when needed, Cobb and Ariadne tell Eames that he has to get to the control room as fast as possible.  He simply falls off his snow mobile and enters, even though they make it seem like he’s miles away and needs to hurry.  And, wouldn’t you know it, at that same time that he enters the room, he greets Cobb and Ariadne who jog their way in as well!  Why was it so imperative to get him in the room when thge two can show up at the exact same time?  Because, as I was taught in film school, it’s better to get all your characters in the room.  The kicker (literally and figuratively) comes when they decide after a minute of Fischer being lifeless that they can shock him back to life as the rest of the kicks, four layers of dreams in all, work flawlessly to pull nearly everyone back.  It’s beyond coincidental; it’s fated by the hand of the creator.

The only time that this logic gets fuzzy is when Mal reappears deep in the dream.  Suddenly her tune changes.  She questions everything that has been going on up above:  the generic giant company that can make miracles come true with a simple phone call, the entire mission itself, etc.  But in a change of heart, she doesn’t implore Cobb to wake up and come back to her and their children.  This Mal, this deep-down Mal, asks of him to stay with her, down here, forever.  The alluring figure of Mal now personifies Cobb’s willingness to never awaken from the dream.

And here comes the tragedy:  Cobb gets it about 80% right.  He shows some sense of self-awareness with Mal; how she’s only a shade of the woman he knew, the woman he loved, that she doesn’t exist.  He owns up to the fact that everything in this dream space down here is a lie.  A tempting lie, but a lie none the less.  He cannot stay with her because he has to move past her.  She took the wrong choice (whether or not it was his fault, I’d rather not get into) and now he must persevere without her.  He finds Saito and is able to miraculously wake up just as the pilot on the flight lets them know that they will land in Los Angeles in twenty minutes.  He’s able to return to the United States thanks to a single phone call that, again, takes place twenty minutes before he lands (man, Homeland Security’s computers update quickly!).  He reunites first with his father-in-law who just so happens to be in the States awaiting his arrival, and runs into the kids at nearly the same age as when he left them.  Cobb was so close to getting out of this dream.  So, so close.

Then, there’s the spinning totem.  It’s funny, the only rule that Cobb does not throw down in this world is that of the totem.  That exposition is left for Arthur to give to Ariadne.  If Cobb is the sole constructor of this world, then the rule of the totem, as it wasn’t given by Cobb himself, should be tossed out, yes?  Even further toppling the edict is the fact that Cobb first touched his wife’s totem in the dream world, buried in the house she grew up in.  If the whole point is that only one person is allowed to touch the totem and it was, therefore, the only thing that kept you aware of what plane of reality you were in, then this is already flawed.  Further, where the hell is his totem?  If he uses hers and he touches hers first in the dream world…then it doesn’t really matter whether the top spins or doesn’t.

But that’s a battle I’m not going to take up in the final paragraph.  The top spins, and it will spin for as long as Cobb keeps willing it to.  For now, he seems happy.  He finally gets to see his children, gets exonerated for a crime he didn’t commit, and is able to find some peace.  And that’s good for him.  But all I can think about is the image of Mal, sitting desperately aside her husband, waiting for him to come out of the coma as their kids slowly grow up behind her.  Guess that’s why we buy into the dream instead of the reality.

This colorful Christmas-themed banner was created by Matt Lubchansky. Read his excellent web comic The Adam! and follow him on twitter, if you’d be so kind. You can click the image above to see the rest of the films in the series.

Story.  Story.  Story.  It’s the one that thing was drilled in to my head from countless screenwriting classes.  Story was the most important element in any film.  It was the reason someone watched and, more importantly, the reason people kept watching.  Even if you have interesting characters that the audience cares about, unless they’re doing something, anything, then your story is not worth telling and your screenplay is not worth being made.  If your screenplay didn’t have characters that pushed the narrative forward or did not directly relate to the overall structure, then you had failed.  In the years since graduation, I’d taken the lesson to heart, both in criticism and in practice in making my own stories.  It was simple.  I was happy.  And then, you watch something like Animal Crackers, and it all gets shot to hell.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a story in Animal Crackers.  There is a very definite story that follows a traditional two-act play structure (as it was adapted from a George S. Kaufman “musical play”) and it starts immediately following the credits.  There is a close-up on the front page of a newspaper, featuring a large photo to the side (showing the setting) and two sub-headlines that handle the majority of the plot.  A socialite is having a party and its guest of honor is Captain Spaulding, an explorer who has recently returned from a trip to Africa and to mark the occasion, the unveiling of a famous work of art will be shown.  It doesn’t take much watching this in hindsight to see just who this Spaulding will be as the first scene features a butler, flanked by his subservient servants, each more stodgy and straight laced than the last, singing about how they must do their best to serve on this evening.  They brace for a man like a king.  They’re like a row of bowling pins and Groucho is the ball.

We meet the main cast of characters.  The host of the party is Mrs. Rittenhouse, played by the seemingly unflappable Margaret Dumont, who greets Mr. Chanlder (Louis Sorin) and his expensive painting (even pointedly saying that he’s bringing his new “$100,000 painting”) and seamlessly introduces Arabella Rittenhouse (Lillian Roth), the precocious daughter who is entangled with John Parker (Hal Thompson) in some way or form.  It’s at this point that Captain Spaulding arrives.

And where I completely stop caring about the plot in any way, shape, or form.

It’s not Kaufman and Co’s fault, really.  The man can certainly write a story or two (his resume defends that point quite nicely).  An anarchic tribe known as the Marx Brothers takes this story in their grasps and never lets go.  The moment Groucho arrives, apparently carried from Africa like a pharaoh (carried exclusively by black actors, making their only appearance) everything gets shot to hell.  He enters and begins to sing “Hello, I must be going,” which is the perfect foil for the film and the Marx’s involvement.

Everything about the song is a contradiction.  It’s an introduction and, upon seeing the people with whom Spaulding will spend an extended amount of time with, he immediately sings about his retreat.  One can guess that animals are a more welcoming host than the depression-era Aristocrats that flank all around him.  He sings that he’ll “do anything you say…except stay,” a gag that he continues throughout this movie and the rest of his career.  Then he dances like a loon in front of this mass of people who are all reduced to scenery.  Those actors should get used to the feeling.

Groucho’s attacks on this foolish aristocratic class are sharp, pointed, and directed straight at the faces of those he is mocking.  His berating of Miss Rittenhouse comes early and often, with each barb either going over her head (as she’s an idiot) or because she is far too proper to try and stop the man (which also means she’s an idiot, really).  The irony is that the same mechanism that makes them mock these people is also the reason why they’re so consistently allowed to.  Like good hosts, they give way to the Marx Brothers to do as they please, and they run all over this piece.

Essentially, every time you see Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, or Groucho, the movie effectively comes to a halt and they are allowed to run their bits, keeping in tune with the “everything that is, is not” vibe.  Groucho doesn’t have an actual mustache, Chico is a musician who is so bad he’d paid to not play (don’t even ask what it’ll cost to have him not rehearse), the professor (Harpo) is a mute who chases women around like a predator that Spaulding saw in the jungle…or at least is purported to have seen, since the very sight of a caterpillar sends him into hysterics.

Each scene stands as a chance or the brothers to perform.  Groucho gets to faux-propose not only to Miss Rittenhouse, but her friend as well, dabbling in polygamy before dumping both of them like bad habits.  Chico and Harpo both get to show off their musical talents, Chico tickling the ivories as Harpo expands upon piano playing and goes to the harp, again, as the actors play like the audience, standing in marvel of their talents.

The counter argument could stand that some pieces of the plot do affect, such as when Harpo and Chico are going to steal and switch out the painting with a duplicate, but that section amounts to an extended bit where Chico continually asks for a “flash” through his heavy Italian accent and Harpo pulls everything out of his jacket but the wanted flash light.  This, like the scene between Groucho and Chico where they “solve the crime” starts at a point that has to do with what’s going on, but almost never ends there.  Towards the second half of the film, they have to resort to waiting for the Marx Brothers to leave before they shoe-horn in about four lines of plot from two characters you barely remember and certainly don’t care about.

That might be the most salient point.  After a while, when the plot does come in to play, it’s the most tedious, boring thing possible.  Within minutes, you won’t care a lick about the young couple in love, or the spiteful bitches who try to be curmudgeons, to the point where their very existence is annoying.  Only the Marx Brothers could be so funny, so well-timed, so incredibly talented, that normal conventions, feel as stodgy and old as the aristocrats they send up.

Because copyright laws sometimes work in our favor, you can view the entire movie for free on Google Video by clicking this li’l link right here.

This colorful Christmas-themed banner was created by Matt Lubchansky. Read his excellent web comic The Adam! and follow him on twitter, if you’d be so kind. You can click the image above to see the rest of the films in the series.

Kevin Smith has been attacked as a director almost as much as his films have been attacked for lacking morality.  The easiest attack levied at him was that he didn’t have much visual style as a director.  Writing is most certainly his forte and was the calling card for his breakthrough, the seminal 1994 Sundance darling Clerks.  That film was focused entirely on the banter between the two clerks and how they navigated the misanthropic paradise of a central Jersey convenience store.  The movie was almost exclusively a collection of static oners, with some shots lasting well into the five minute range with few cuts in between and little to no camera movement (which makes the choice to go hand-held during the roof hockey game feel like something out of Cloverfield).  Smith himself has taken this criticism to heart, and eventually latched on to the idea of having a “no style-style” as some sort of coping mechanism.  I believe he even copped to as much in the first “Evening With Kevin Smith,” with the notion that if you say it first, then the insult loses its power.  So everyone–including Smith himself–has come to the conclusion that he doesn’t have a visual style.

And to that, I call bullshit.

Smith has a definitive style and it matches both his dialogue and his subjects well.  Smith is a hometown Jersey guy.  He mentions it on his twitter bio, mentioning how his body might be in LA, but his mind is always in the garden state.  During the press for Clerks II, a film that ends with the idyllic notion of the two desk jockeys owning the store that was once an existential bottomless pit a decade-plus ago into the place they were always meant to be.  During the press for the film, Smith discussed how happy he would be if he never left that store, which is not exactly how I read his relationship with the store to be (as in, Dante’s commercial, cigarette-infused, salsa-shark-infested hell).  But the Quik-Stop is always greener from the other coast.

Smith’s an extrovert, certainly, constantly sharing all of his inner thoughts (and the things he does to his wife’s innards) in as many places as will allow him a voice:  speaking in large swaths on twitter, his popular stand-up gigs that are masked as a Q&A sessions, and the extended podcast network he’s featured prominently on.  But we shouldn’t confuse that with someone who seeks the spotlight.  Hell, he’s supposedly going to refuse to do press for his new film, Red State, deciding instead to essentially control what he puts out, dictating the questions he’d like to be asked of his stars about the process of making the film and letting the press just pick and choose whatever bits they’d like to form their stories.  In the excellent documentary “The Snowball Effect” from the “Clerks X” DVD set that follows the process of “Kevin Smith, suburban boy” into “Kevin Smith, filmmaker,” his mom recounts the hours that would go by as Kevin sat in his room, endlessly typing away.  He’s a man who has a big voice but prefers to sound it out of the window of his small room.

This is reflected explicitly in what was then nicknamed “the Jersey Trilogy,” (the aforementioned Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy) an interconnected series of films that occurred in, or had characters from, the tri-town area where he grew up.  His stories were of small time folk who had interesting, kooky shit happen to them that warranted mention to the public at large.  What he focused on was small, natural, the odd turns of life that he happened to capture.  The films feel the same.  Mallrats, of course, is the one exception, as that was set up at Gramercy (a long-dissolved former subsidiary of Universal) and is a really adorable, quaint vision of what a “studio” movie could be for Smith at that time.  Now, if you take away the Batman-esque grappling hook and the dating game TV show that seems to exist solely because they had the money to build the set, shoot it in 16mm, and you’ve got a movie that’s tonally, and stylistically, right in line with Clerks.  Then, add a growth of maturity as both a writer and a man, and you have his small town epic (as well as his best film), Chasing Amy.

Everything about the film could be considered “small” or “basic” but that’s dismissing the very nature of the story as a naturalistic, everyday sort of event.  The star of the film, Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck), is a somewhat of a star himself, as he and his roommate Banky (Jason Lee) are co-creators of a big indie comic named “37” that gets popular and allows them to have a big, action-packed superhero movie starring Jay and Silent Bob, clearly mirroring Smith’s life at that time.  It’s not a shock to read that Smith considers this (or at least considered it at the time of the DVD pressing) his most personal film.  It’s easy to see why.

Their careers move from getting local press in the Asbury Park Press to getting their creation on the cover of Wizard, which is like getting the front page spread of the New York Times Magazine but, y’know, for comics.  They even get their own table at a Comic-Con as Holden gets to live out what we can only assume is the then-daily life of Kevin Smith.  He has people yelling at him such brilliant observations as, “they’re like Bill & Ted meet Cheech & Chong,” while he feels intellectually inferior to the point of name dropping a combination of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern meet Vladamir and Estrogon.  Ah, the artist who strives for more, but isn’t sure if the amount wanted is credibility or money.

The problems that the characters deal with in this film aren’t massive; Affleck is spared another trip to a meteor the size of Texas.  Instead, he has to go through a series of relationship-related issues with Joey Lauren Adam’s seemingly everyday girl, Alyssa Jones.  Instantly he falls for her and has to try to win her over.  Then, to make the climb just a tad bit steeper, it turns out that she’s a lesbian, so now he has to try to win her over and potentially cross-up her sexual wiring.  Once that’s accomplished (and holy shit does that piss off her lesbian, instantly-former, friends) then he has to deal with a whole bevy of other sexual issues that deal with his own perceived sexual inadequacy, climaxing with a clumsy attempt to kill two birds with one three way that is handled like an immature teenager; he’ll literally fuck his problems away.

It fits the mold of what was then considered an “indie” film; a personal story told that would not get made unless someone made it themselves.  In terms of plot, tone, and camera placement, how radically far off is this from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, or Cassavette’s Shadows?  His forte is that of personal struggles and his mise en scene reflects that.  His characters aren’t decked out by designers, but in LL Bean and browns and earth tones.  They dress to impress the people they’re talking to, not the audiences across the country they don’t even see.  The apartment Banky and Holden share isn’t something off the set of “Friends,” even though they apparently make a good amount of cash, yet they can’t afford a separate office and place of living.

A good deal of the action comes about in turns of the tongue (bad word choice in a lesbian story?), which might not be the most visually stimulating of film choices, but it’s certainly the most true-to-life.  People deride this film as a series of two shots, just some people talking to each other in the frame and not much else.   But in that way, aren’t our lives always a series of two-shots?  I know that I never attended the college that Michael Bay presented in Transfomers II; my life didn’t necessitate wobbly, turning, tilting shots when I stepped foot on the quad.  This story I can relate to.  If you’re reading this post, then I’d imagine you yourself revel in the talks and ideas you bandy about with your friends.  In this world and ours, conversation is a currency toward buying time with others, romantically or otherwise.

When Holden is first hitting on Alyssa and lands a good joke, he gets a compliment.  He then immediately screws the pooch by following it up with a long, unfunny follow-up that clearly doesn’t land.  They both sit, her now turned outwardly, he looking down at the table in a way that I know all too well in these situations.  In that beat there is that crucial make-or-break moment where the other person can try to engage you further or shuns you forever.  Both characters know it, just as both understand what it means when Alyssa asks him to play some darts, giving him more opportunity to ingratiate himself (or, conversely, more rope to hang himself).

Alyssa Jones herself is a testament to how this movie is made and how her character is handled.  Amy came out in 1997, at a time where being gay would be the point of a movie.  The frank conversations that are featured here about lesbianism, such as the one where she and Banky bond over various sexual scars (only physical), have an honesty that feels like guys in a locker room.  There are no snap-zooms, or cuts to “she’s a WHAAAAAA???!?!?!” reactions.  When Banky finds out, he gets a bewildered look on his face not because she’s gay insofar as the character realizes that not only can he not have the girl he’s falling for, he can more than likely never have her.  The film goes a long way to explain what being a lesbian is, what the choice was like for her character, how one makes love, what is considered “making love,” and so on and so forth.  The almost banal shooting of this section helps alleviate the “IMPORTANT MESSAGE” that the first half of the movie quietly slips in.

Now, in the same way that this whole idea would be a shock to suburbia, it would be a non-issue in most urban, forward-thinking cities.  That’s what makes the film click so.  Alyssa is a star, a rebel, a wild child because of where she was brought up, and it’s all reflected in the decisions made by Holden.  Notice how Smith shoots the scene where Alyssa sings at the club.  It’s a woman dedicating a garage rock ditty, all dirty, sweaty, and sensual, in this great close-up.  This is her star moment, at least to Holden, and it’s all within the comfortable confines of some lower east side dive.  There’s also the fun, almost-meta moment when it’s revealed that the girl who was awkwardly placed in all the shots of Holden’s reactions wasn’t clumsy filmmaking in order to make the room bigger…it’s actually the girl who was being sung to.  The alarms blare, loud and pronounced, as we focus in on the cavalcade of emotions that awash Holden.  The world doesn’t stop around him; everything moves on without him, like it has and will continue to.  (There’s also the great moment of realization from Banky, after seeing a number of shots of women making out, that when a couple of women are talking, that triggers the fact that they are at a gay bar and that Alyssa is, in fact, just a regular patron.)

The film, like the dialogue that it’s based upon, all adheres to a strict rhythm.  All of the scenes of big conflict explode out in fits of rage, disappointment, fear, and other emotions that are forced to come out externally in large blasts.  It’s what the story hinges on and what dictates the camera work.  Putting in push-zooms and crane shots wouldn’t effect this movie in the slightest.  In fact, it might detract from it, distracting the viewer from the story its trying to tell.  There’s a difference between lazily setting up a camera and hitting “go” and letting a scene play itself out in wide shots.

A great example from this film is the culmination of Banky and Holden’s argument over Alyssa’s state in their friendship and business that explodes with Holden yelling his love for her.  Smith has followed a directive that many other directors have to let the actors fill the space in with their performance.  The reactions and the real, in-the-moment tension of the scene would be disrupted by cuts and could feel manipulative if it’s just a continuing set of ever-getting-closer close-ups.    That’s not to say it always works.  When your cousin is running out of breath trying to get out all of his dialogue without passing out, then it comes off less of an homage to Do The Right Thing and more of a clunky minute and a half of film with distracting camera movement.  Now, if that same style is employed with two great (yeah, I said it) actors–including Adams who got a Golden Globe nomination in the role–then a simple medium close-ups of one man bearing his soul as we watch the others’ reaction is gripping.

The story is essentially the story of Smith’s own maturation, but with it came the death of his intimate style, both in writing as well as direction.  He made Dogma, a script that pre-dates Clerks, then the slapsticky, Looney Tunes-esque Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (aka, “Holy Shit How Did We Actually Get $30 Million To Make This, Seriously”) both of which rachetted up the image quality and depth (and both had DPs that weren’t named Dave Klein who helmed the first three flicks).  Everyone criticized him for his lack of visual style and tried to make him into a more standard-issue director, plucked from a hermetically-sealed bag, and placed on a soundstage in Burbank.

With Amy, he makes his own epic, a story with cursory mentions of various characters that spans his previous two movies, weaving together everything into one cogent story of people in a town, the same way stories and legends were passed along as he was growing up.  In my section of suburban Jersey, we passed around stuff like this one kid [name redacted] who mistook an overweight girl’s stomach roll for her vagina, or how the twins escaped a party that was broken up by the cops by hopping out a window and off a roof, then having a girl try the same escape, ends up falling and breaking her ankle, yet they still carry her out like they were headed to a medi-vac while in enemy territory.

It’s that small town mentality where the shared stories are traded like comodities of the times and places that you existed, almost like a living landmark, something to share with other people as you sit around the local bars when you’re back from college break, or just hanging after work at your now-favorite dive.  There is a shared connection through these experiences, and it enriches this story in the same way.  Smith somehow managed to translate that onto a big screen, allowing others to share in the bigness that exists in a small-town set-up.  As he moves forward with Red State, his new horror film, people have raved about the evocative visuals and off-kilter tone.  In the Amy, Smith, through his proxy Holden, mentions how he won’t have a personal story to tell until it happens to him.  I just hope he, and more filmmakers like him, have more personal stories to give.  We can never have enough.

This colorful Christmas-themed banner was created by Matt Lubchansky. Read his excellent web comic The Adam! and follow him on twitter, if you’d be so kind. You can click the image above to see the rest of the films in the series.

Working creatively is a tricky, fickle prospect.  Hell, I’ve already re-written this piece four times in the last 20 hours.  Creating that art, or music, or film in general is tough, let alone when it becomes a commodity.  The pressures to make something that you’re proud of gets exacerbated by reviewers, the press in general, your family’s well-being and financial stability, and the all-powerful corporation that, if you’re lucky, backs you.  The story of Wilco’s 2002 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot holds a wide array of hope, joy, pain, misery, depression, and triumph, featuring many different facets and shades.  While Sam Jones’ documentary on the recording and release of that album, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart covers all of that, it’s main focus is on the changing of relationships and falling out of love.  The title of the film is not just a coy reference to the first track off of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but a threat, a promise, and a rallying cry.

The sessions for YHF start off idyllic.  Sure, there’s a new drummer, Glenn Kotche, who has to shake some dynamic of the group up, but they’re in a good place.  Physically, they get to record this album in their own loft in Chicago with the entire band sitting in a large, open room, recording on the fly, pushing themselves artistically at every step.  This record follows in the footsteps of 1999′s Summerteeth, which found the band more willing to test out how far their sound could travel, be it sonically (“A Shot In The Arm”) or emotionally (“via Chiago,”) or both (“She’s A Jar”).  Feeling loose and frisky, the band has come to the conclusion that they created these songs and can destroy them all they want.  The goal is “to attack it from as many different places as possible,” as multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach states.  Jeff Tweedy, lead singer, guitarist, and main lyricist, is excited about the million different possibilities that are available in this process.  An outtake from the film, listen to how the demo of “Cars Can’t Escape” evolves:

As exciting as it is creatively, it also brings up its own problems.  There are a million different ways to hone the song, but it only gets one pressing onto the final version of the album.  That means there will be 999,999 ways that it’s “wrong,” leaving the possibility for just as many resentments from other members of the band.  Taking on the role of antagonist is the now-deceased Jay Bennett.  Bennett, a fellow guitarist and co-writer, has been given most of the credit in expanding the “sonic landscapes” on Summerteeth (at least according to Greg Kot’s excellent book on the band, “Learning How To Die”) and looked forward to the creative challenge coming up on the new album.  Notice how he beams when he gets to share with the camera that he and Jeff are sharing writing duties more on this record.  He’s like a girl in the cafeteria telling her friends that the school’s quarterback asked her out.

This giddiness does not last long.  In any creative relationship, someone needs to have the final say.  As the recording process moves ahead, the relationship between Tweedy and Bennett dissolves, but not over the music.  The film captures one extended discussion over editing a cut of the song “Heavy Metal Drummer.”  Like any fight between a long-term couple, what is at hand has less to do with the hostility than what lies beneath.  It quickly moves from “where should we start the edit” into Jay saying that he wants to clarify himself to Jeff, essentially making their communication the focal point of the discussion.  Tweedy counters with, “I don’t have to understand you all the time.  It’s ok!” to which Jay responds, “Why couldn’t you just say, ‘I understand what you’re saying?’ “  Exasperated, Tweedy exclaims, “I did!” as the rest of the band and studio tech slowly make their way out of the room.

This personal rupture, this inability to separate the self from the whole, leads to Bennett being relieved of his Wilco duties.  In a sort of exit interview, he recounts that “Jeff wanted his band back,” making a failure to communicate into a power struggle.  We leave him on a tiny stage with an acoustic guitar in front of a sparse audience.  He was sent out to start anew, alone, echoing how he recently passed away.

As the dynamics changed within the band the way they were viewed by their label shifted.  As the new millennium began, most of the major labels were owned by giant conglomerates who viewed musicians not as artists but one line in a 90-page budget.  There has always been a healthy distrust between labels and artists as they are not looking for the same thing.  Artists look for personal satisfaction while labels look for a return on their investment of studio time, recording time, the pressing of CDs, ad campaigns, music videos, so on and so forth.  Wilco wasn’t a band to the executives of Reprise, the band’s label and a subsidiary of Warner Bros, they were a commodity.  On one hand, they were given $80,000 to record as they pleased in their loft, but the expectation was for a commercial hit.  That should not come as a surprise as the band was forced back into the studio to give Summerteeth a radio-friendly Alt-Rock hit (“Can’t Stand It”).

Wilco delivered the album to the brass of Reprise and they responded with notes on how to change the record to suit their needs.  Tweedy and co. refused to change a bit of the record that took so much out of the band to create (let alone two of its members).  Wilco did everything they could to create the album that they wanted, but by that time, the internet was stealing all of the recording industry’s money.  In the blind panic, they decided to throw out anything that wasn’t bolted down, in this case, artists that made a good deal of money.  Wilco, like many other bands in this situation, were tossed aside.  Reprise thought so little of the album, in blind commercial standards, that they sold the band the masters, letting them take it to whoever was dumb enough to sign them.

It wasn’t the first time, and certainly not the last, but this specific instance riled music fans.  As music became more and more homogenized to reach larger markets and, therefore, generate more sales, enthusiasts continually turned away from what these corporations were selling.  If I’m making this sound like a grand political stand, forgive me.  It’s a very simple relationship:  people love music and will get it any way they can.  When Wilco streamed the full “rejected” album on their website, they went from a pitiable case of getting caught in the profit margins into (literal) folk heroes with songs that became rallying cries.  As they toured around and played songs off of their not-released album, there were throngs of people singing along, knowing every word.

It’s easy to see now, after Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have re-conceptualized the way we view the music industry, that the record label only got in the way.  There is an implicit love affair between the audience and a band.  Their songs, their words, inform the way we live in a tangible way.  As I discussed in my Almost Famous review, there is a strong connection created through music.  All the industry bullshit just clogs it up.  David Fricke, the Rolling Stone writer, puts the lessons learned from this ordeal to better words than I could attempt (notice how he gets paid to write for RS and I’m writing in my basement):

Music is not limited to what happens in a business quarter.  This (he picks up a cd) is a record, ok?  This is something that probably someone will buy, they’ll pay 15, 16 whatever bucks for it, and that’s cool.  But, what’s encoded somewhere in the bottom of this thing, of this dopey little disc, y’know, that’s what matters.  This, the artifact, the actual object, is not.  What’s encoded in here, if it’s any good, you’ll hear it.  And you’ll either get it, or you won’t.  And just as a writer, as a fan, as a guy who listens to music a lot, if you don’t get it, y’know…that’s kind of too bad.

For this band, and for this record, I get it, and I appreciate every bit of pain and suffering that the band had to go through in order to let it inform my life.  For as many relationships that I have in my life that fail, or change, or succeed beyond my wildest imagination, I know that this record and I can never get into a fight or disagree with.  It will always be there for me, and fuck, do I love it.

This colorful Christmas-themed banner was created by Matt Lubchansky. Read his excellent web comic The Adam! and follow him on twitter, if you’d be so kind. You can click the image above to see the rest of the films in the series.

All of the characters in Cameron Crowe’s mostly-autobiographical film share one of the opinions above.  For William Miller, the Crowe-approximation performed by Patrick Fugit, it’s a special pull.  As an aspiring journalist, it’s a topic to cover.  The existence of records, concerts, and bands lead to assignments, bylines, and checks.  But that is a more mature way to look at it.  As a teenager, especially one who is ostracized for being two years younger than his peers, these artists are more than musicians; they’re gods that meander down from Mount Olympus to strum a couple tunes.  Being linked in any way to a group of people who have adoring crowds coming out to see them every night is a powerful, romantic image.

It’s a vision shared by members of Stillwater, the band that William covers for the duration of this film, especially the lead singer Jeff Bebe (Jason Lee) and lead guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup).  They had the whole thing planned out, especially Jeff.  They know how to play the game, they know the mold of what a great rock band should be, and they’ll be damned if they let anyone get in the way of them and their fans (and the power and validation that comes along with it).  Then there’s Penny Lane, a breathtaking Kate Hudson, who is not out on the road to be Sycophant Barbie.  She’s here because of the music.  She aspires to be less of a groupie and more of a muse, contributing back, in some small way, to a culture she adores so.

If only rock reciprocated the love of its admirers.

Our fresh-faced protagonist, the fifteen-year-old William Miller (he has a name that begs to be used in full) clearly has talent and ambition; you don’t write-in submissions to “Creem” if you’re terrible and unmotivated.  He has a problem that is not unlike most athletes, wherein he just hasn’t gotten the right amount of reps with top-tier talent.  Sure, he’s written about albums and interviewed local San Diego bands who never escape the medium-sized bar, but the people he adores?  The faces that hang on his wall in poster form?  That’s a whole different ballgame.

Luckily for William (Miller…I’m trying), he has two people who look out for him, who, ironically, couldn’t be more dissimilar.  One is his mother, Elaine (as played by Frances McDormand), a righteous woman who sees popular music as a dead-end both intellectually and otherwise.  She is a strong enough parent to let her son go out on this wacky field trip but enough of a mother to worry incessantly about him (and to continually remind him of the dangers of drugs all around the country).  She trusts her son but hates the environment.  Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a music journalism veteran, looks at William and sees a hundred other eager kids who, through a variety of failings, have fallen by the wayside.  Lester not only extends himself as a mentor, he tells William exactly what is going to happen to him.  They’re going to want to be your friend, you’re going to feel cool, you’re going to buy into it, it’s the worst thing you can do, don’t be their friend, just be a journalist, be honest and savage, and, it can’t be stressed enough, really:  never be their friend.

It’s all well and good to think one thing, but it’s completely different in the situation.  It must be an intoxicating feeling to not only be accepted by a group–any group, really–but Stillwater?  The band whom he already knows by name and his rapid-fire personalized critiques ready for?  How could he be expected to not give in to this temptation?  Add in all the different rings in their traveling circus (the hotel rooms, the huge bills that someone else gets to pay, the women, the women, the women) and his mother has no need to worry about his son getting hooked on any drugs; he’s already hooked on “the life.”  Somewhere, Lester Bangs shakes his head.

Jeff Bebe is supposed to be looked at the way he looks at himself.  When he talks to William about rock in these big, broad strokes, he’s less a musician and more an actor playing the role of “lead singer.”  He goes on in great lengths about what his job is, including turning on (and, naturally, “getting off”) various members of the crowd, even the ones who couldn’t be bothered.  He says how much he loves the music, and how it’s all about the music, but when the slightest vain issue pops up, it crushes him like a locked gate hit by a tour bus.  Russell uses his time on the bus to write music, Bebe uses it to seethe.  Their first t-shirts arrive and Jeff is pushed to the back.  The radio DJ can’t pronounce his name.  The kid chooses to interview Russell first.  His defense isn’t based on merit, but simple positioning.  He’s the lead singer for fuck’s sake!  He’s Van Zant!  Plant!  Daltrey!  Jagger!  There’s an order to this.  He and Russell sat down and agreed that Bebe was the lead singer and Russell was the guitarist with mystique.  When does everyone else get the memo?

Russell is an odd spot.  He is beholden to the band that he’s come up with, but don’t confuse that with being humble.  Russell has read his own press and he expects a certain amount of the glory that comes with his position.  As this “Almost Famous” tour continues, and as his band becomes increasingly just “famous,” you can see Russell furthering the advantage he takes.  Why shouldn’t he get to have a wife back home and a girl on the road?  Why shouldn’t he be able to push off the interview with The Enemy to whenever he wants, his plans be damned?  Why wouldn’t he want to go to find something “real” and end up on a roof in front of nearly a hundred adoring young teens and scream out he’s “a golden god!”?  And why should he have to care that he’s putting the rest of the band in the lurch?  He’s affixed himself above the normal mortal coil; why should he be beholden to any of the decency expected of the commoners when he’s a star?

Intrinsically linked to Russell is the lady known as Penny Lane.  Everything about her is seemingly idyllic:  the clever, Beatles-based name, her popularity amongst the famous musicians, the position she holds over the other groupies/band aids/girls….  There must be some validity to her claims that she’s a part of the circus for the music, as she beams like a spotlight when the band is on stage from her spot just adjacent.  In many ways she bridges the gap between William and the band members, as she can be a fan and have access to these people she adores so with some hold over her own credibility.  She’s even smart enough to realize that the land she plays in is fantasy, a wonderful distraction from the “real world,” living under the protective edict that if you always have fun, you can’t get hurt.  Unfortunately, she’s not smart enough to give the conceit that no matter where you are, if you feel it, it’s real.

And it is reality that befalls all the characters, turning their lives upside-down.  The band gets a new, corporate manager, effectively turning their rock operation into a cog in a corporate conglomerate.  If they want to make a living at this, to live the dream they aspired to when they were young, then gigs become obligations.  They don’t play for fun, they play to keep the lights in their mansions on.  After this whirlwind ride, William ends up in his room, beaten, jaded, alone.  All of that time, all of that experience, and he failed at the task that he was sent out to do when all he did was fulfill that task.  In the middle of that experience and disillusion is Russell’s ambivalent tossing aside of Penny and her genuine, soul-crushing response.  A lot of the romance in rock n’ roll–at least, a good deal of the poetry–is embodied by Penny, and man did she not look good as a tube was forced down her throat in that posh hotel room (although William seemed to enjoy it a bit).

At the heart of this film, though, is Russell and his character arc.  He is someone we never see out of the context of the rock star life.  The only hint we get is when he is assaulted over the phone by the power of Elaine, but plays as another part in a running gag.  For the man who says he wants something “real,” he never gets a good dose of it.  The terrifying, near-death experience on the plane was, sadly, a commonplace thing among acts of the era, and most of the issues he brings up are band-related.  But at the end, as he walks through a normal person’s house on a normal afternoon passed a normal girl who is more perplexed by his presence as a person than as THE Russell Hammond, he finally gets a sense of it.  There, sprawled out on the bed, is an exhausted William Miller, the kid he subtly took advantage of (“just make us look cool”) and then tossed aside, much like Penny.

Here he is, finally sitting down for the interview that he’d promised William the last time they were both in San Diego, and William finally gets to ask the burning question that he’s been waiting on.  He turns on the recorder and asks, “what do you love about music?”  After a second, Russell responds, “everything.”  Inherently, that’s the same joy that informs the entire film.  This is a movie with flawed people who are put on pedestals when they’re clearly not there for their moral standings.  It’s a complex that we as an audience must shoulder some of the blame for.  To a certain extent, it’s our fault for Jeff Bebe’s outgrown ego, for Russell’s shocking lack of decency, and for William and Penny’s warped views of these men as anything but mortal.

But for all of the bad things that occur in this film, professionally, personally, or otherwise, I’m sure there’s only one scene that pops into your head when you think of “Almost Famous,” and that’s the “Tiny Dancer” bus sing-a-long.  That’s the glue.  It’s the music that brings these musicians back together, it’s the music that drives every frame of this film, and it’s the music that keeps us coming back for more.  For all of humanity’s weaknesses, sometimes, we can create something transcendent.

This colorful Christmas-themed banner was created by Matt Lubchansky. Read his excellent web comic The Adam! and follow him on twitter, if you’d be so kind. You can click the banner to see the rest of the films in the series.

War has always been waged in the terms of Us against Them.  Back in ye oldern days, the style of fighting was very upfront and, for lack of a better term, gentlemanly.  One group of men would stand in a long line against another line of men, stretched wide across a valley, shooting at each other until there was no one left to shoot back.  A victor was declared, camp was set up, and you’d await another line to step up on the other side of some sleep.  In time, war has changed, devolving rather than evolving.  Instead of a line of men, we’ve moved further and further into smaller, individualistic battles that constitute small parts of a larger, more complete “war.”  The way we wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan bares little resemblance to our common idea of how World War II was fought (even the title “Band Of Brothers” evokes a different time).  The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s best-picture winning film, shows that the war in Iraq is beyond unwinable for the US, its very nature is untenable for humanity.

The Hurt Locker follows a team of three men who are charged with detonating IEDs, or “improvised explosive devices,” which have become the currency of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The set-up is like that of any other war movie you can think of, with our heroes all forming a cohesive team with different views and ideals who, because they’re in a war, are thrown together.  Specialist Owen Eldridge, played by Brian Geraghty, is the youngest and most inexperienced member of the group.  He questions the futility of the war and his part in it early and often.  This character gets to fail everyone at first with an inability to pull the trigger but finds redemption (and heroism) later on.  Anthony Mackie’s Sgt. JT Sanborn is the no-nonsense soldier who sticks to protocol like glue and has friction with our protagonist, SFC Will James, the “renegade soldier who doesn’t play by the rules, but dammit, he gets results,” played brilliantly by Jeremy Renner.

These characters might be fairly stock, but their environment is not.   They will not have to band together to outsmart the enemy or retrofit a tank to take out a base.  Hell, as they say in the film, a tank in this war is like a hulking death trap.  IEDs have completely changed the dynamic of how we attack, or, more appropriately how we are attacked.  They could be placed anywhere:  a broken-down car along the road, a building thought to be abandoned, or simply in a hole covered over with sand.  War zones aren’t relegated to the clearings outside of the main population of every-day, urban Iraq.  As our boys try to respond to a bomb call, their Humvee get stuck in traffic like they’re trying to cross the George Washington Bridge at rush hour.  It’s somehow beyond guerrilla warfare; it’s residential.

In the opening scene, the device used to kill wasn’t a gun or a rocket launcher, but a cellphone retrofitted to be a detonator.  The man responsible wasn’t wearing a uniform, but normal, everyday clothes.  The enemy could be anyone, the danger could come from anywhere, and you could be dead at anytime.  A cab driver makes a left turn and ends up in what is an ever-moving front line, and if you don’t speak the language of the man pointing the gun at you (in this case, SPC James), your life is over (from a gunshot or your new classification as an “insurgent”).  It’s not even guaranteed that you’ll recognize your allies, as our troops meet up with the English and couldn’t tell them from the enemy.  Us vs. Them is thrown completely to the wayside.

These new “norms” are reflected through our three explosive experts.  Spc. Eldridge has trouble coping with the immediacy of war.  On two different occasions he sees people he knows, talks to, confides in, dematerialize in a blink of an eye.  First, his squad leader (in a cameo by Guy Pearce) gets blown away while wearing his giant, sweat-inducing, cumbersome explosive suit that seems to do little good than keep all of the body parts in one place if something goes wrong.  Then his psychologist, the one that Eldridge sees and tells that he “doesn’t understand” what he’s going through, tries to reason with a group of people to move for their own safety and ends up being melded permanently with the surrounding sand.  It’s no wonder Eldridge spends some downtime playing the shooting game Gears of War on Xbox:  at least he can figure out who he’s supposed to shoot and how to dispatch of them quickly.  And I’m sure the idea of getting “another life” after you’re killed doesn’t hurt.

Sgt. Sanborn is the most “normal” of our soldiers.  He’s the one who has spent years previous working in intelligence, giving him experience in both strategy and, now, execution.  I have not been in the army, or any war outside of MySpace vs. Facebook, but from my experience reading about and seeing movies based on conflicts, the prevailing thought is that if you’re on the ground, don’t think.  Thinking gets you killed.  Your reactions, culled by your training in the proper protocol, is what will keep you alive.  Sanborn wholly gives himself to this relatively simple bit of advice:  if you do what they tell you to, you’ll survive.  But as the film moves along, as the battles continually get smaller and more divisive, is that the best course of action?  Mainly, is the protocol correct?

If you ask SFC James, then the answer is a definitive, “no.”  He’s the only character who seems to understand the dire stakes at hand and the inability to reason with it.  A lot of Sanborn’s actions are measured.  If this, then that.  It’s how he’s been programmed.  James, however, sees the cruel joke that belies that structure.  When he takes off his protective suit to defuse one car bomb, Eldridge and Sanborn look at him like he’s nuts.  But isn’t it more crazy to believe that the suit serves any protection?  If that bomb goes off, he’s dead even if he’s wearing a suit of steel; the human body is too frail for such endeavors.  So what’s the point of the protocol?

James has figured out that this isn’t a fair battle:  it’s a spectacle.  Over his career, he has detonated over 870 bombs.  More than 870 times, he has outsmarted a bomb maker whose only goal was to destroy someone like James and/or anyone who comes across the bomb’s path.  As the rest of his team worries about the number of spectators that come out to watch the bomb explode or dud, James almost relishes in it.  There is very little difference between the Iraqis looking onward from on high and the Romans watching the Christians fight lions.  The task seems impossible–at the very least, improbable–but you watch to see if he’ll beat the odds.  And, considering how ingrained the war has become to that society and over an extended time, it’s hard to think that this wouldn’t become entertainment.  This is what a reality show looks like when death and destruction are a part of your every day life.

It takes a special kind of mentality to excel in this arena, and it’s something that only James seems to possess.    Eldridge’s feelings are well-known throughout the film, but we only get a sobered look at Sanborn towards the conclusion.  He’s seen the escalation that is featured in this film.  Bombs have moved swiftly from inanimate objects to dead bodies to an Iraqi family man, just traveling on the streets, who gets kidnapped and is turned into a walking instrument of death.  Sanborn, the man built on reason, can’t find any in this situation.  And it’s hard to blame him.  How can one find any sense of “normalcy” when this is normal?

As Sanborn and Eldridge break, for whatever reason, James does not.  The character doesn’t even know why he is the way he is.  In some way, you could read the reactions of Eldridge and Sanborn as the building blocks that James himself once dealt with in order to attain his current level of war zone zen.  A theory:  some time ago, James grappled with the situation like Eldridge did, then some time after, he morphed into the same feelings that Sanborn has, and fought through that as well.  As he kindly waited for death, it never showed up.  So, in a moment of exasperation, he just decided to slowly kill himself off.  He accepted that he will die, alone in the dirt, and that no one will care about him.  For Sanburn, it’s a condemnation, a horror.  When he confronts with this knowledge, James’ reaction is almost null.  It’s as commonplace as asking if the sun will rise tomorrow.

Upon my first viewing of the film, when James returns to his simple life–featuring a wide array of excitement like cleaning the gutters and choosing from a truly dizzying selection of cereal–I thought he missed the action and excitement of Iraq, specifically the “I’m better than you” nature of his work in particular.  But this past viewing, I felt the character shift from selfish to selfless.  The closer James gets to the outside world, to “home,” to the family that he has waiting for him, the bigger the fallout will be when he inevitably meets his bomb-making match.  He keeps all of those trinkets of past bombs under his bed as a reminder that he is short for this world and to not think otherwise.  Instead of waiting for the final shoe to drop, he willfully starts building up towards the shoe, trying to make the wait less agonizing, he does reckless, possibly stupid things.  Because he could not wait for death, he chased after it.

In the same way, if he never sees his family, if he doesn’t give his son a father to miss when he dies, then they receive less pain, or in the parlance, when he explodes, his family won’t get hit with as much shrapnel.  The example for this comes in his dealings with Beckham, the street-rat child who sells bootleg DVDs to the troops.  James has a few chance meetings with him, shooting the shit, playing some soccer, and generally taking the time out of his day to hang out with him.  When James thinks that the boy had been murdered and that his body would be used as an explosive device, something snapped, sending him so far as to trek around Iraq as a civilian trying to find who’s responsible for this.  It turns out that it was all a false alarm as Beckham turns up a day or two after, looking for his buddy, James.  James coldly ignores the kid, not making eye contact, not giving an explanation why he and Beckham can’t be friends anymore.  Beckham, hurt, walks away while James stares dead-ahead in the truck, waiting to get away from him.

The saddest thing is that this man, so damaged psychologically, is the best person at his job, and absolutely should be the best with his skill set and demeanor.  But by the time James does meet his end, you shouldn’t worry about him.  If he keeps up on his work, I doubt he’ll be able to feel a thing.

Picture Note:  I couldn’t grab screenshots personally this time ’round, so thank you to DarkRealmFox.com and, specifically, this post for doing the heavy lifting.

This colorful Christmas-themed banner was created by Matt Lubchansky. Read his excellent web comic The Adam! and follow him on twitter, if you’d be so kind. You can click the banner to see the rest of the films in the series.