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This Week In Terrifying Hybrids
5 December 2008 4:07 AM, PST
This Week In Terrifying Hybrids 1. Food Network + the cannibalized carcass of Top Chef - even the pretense of originality + Ted Allen = Chopped Yes, cheap imitations of successful shows are a television tradition. And, no, Top Chef didn't invent food competition shows. In fact, Food Network was built on the shaky sugar foundations of food sculpture contests. But, come on. In this promo for Chopped, the editing, the music, even the idea of having one bald judge all seem as if they were lifted directly from Top Chef, run through a mediocritizer, and then put on the air. Ted Allen, you should be ashamed of yourself. (Well, more ashamed than usual.) If there is no integrity in reality competition show production then what will be our moral compass? Besides, of course, VH1. Speaking of which.. 2....
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William Friedkin
4 December 2008 9:01 PM, PST
William Friedkin was a 34-year-old director best known for television and documentaries when he was asked to helm the movie adaptation of Mart Crowley's off-Broadway sensation The Boys In The Band, which was one of the first plays to deal openly with the angst and aspirations of gay men. Friedkin brought his skills as a documentarian to bear, turning a chatty play into a vibrant movie drama that evokes New York in 1970 as much as it captures the pain of living as an outsider. With The Boys In The Band now out on DVD, Friedkin spoke with The A.V. Club about adapting theater to film, dealing with a controversial subject, and the legacy of Crowley's play. The A.V. Club: The Boys In The Band doesn't really feel like a "filmed play," even though it all takes place in one apartment over the course of one evening....
Noel Murray
The Killers
4 December 2008 1:04 PM, PST
When it comes to how people feel about The Killers, it's hard to find anyone on the fence, and barring a major shift in sound, it's unlikely that the Vegas outfit will ever do anything to change that. After courting as many lovers as haters with the neo-new-wave masterpiece Hot Fuss, The Killers lost a bunch of the former with Sam's Town, an overly serious, ambitious record without the skills and vision to make good on Brandon Flowers' promise to deliver the best album since the mid-'80s. (And, in simpler terms, it didn't have a "Mr. Brightside," though "When You Were Young" came pretty close.) Two years later, The Killers have returned more ambitious than ever with Day & Age, but this time around, Flowers set the buzz bar a little lower, stating that it's the...
Marc Hawthorne
Cadillac Records
4 December 2008 9:11 AM, PST
The release of Cadillac Records (and the existence of the still-unreleased Who Do You Love) underscores the oversight that's kept filmmakers away from Chicago's Chess Records for so long. Home to artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Chuck Berry, and Willie Dixon in their mid-century prime, the Chess roster teems with characters whose lives could provide the fodder for many remarkable movies. Or they could be carelessly piled into one movie that leaves no life-of-the-artist cliché untouched, like Cadillac Records does. Adopting the once-over-the-most-famous-moments-lightly approach favored by the sort of movies and retrospectives that VH1 Classic airs on a loop, Cadillac Records plays more like a collection of costumed episodes than a cohesive film. Adrien Brody plays Leonard Chess who, with his brother Phil (barely a character here), uses an eye for talent to expand a nightclub business into a successful studio....
Keith Phipps
Dust
4 December 2008 9:06 AM, PST
It was only a matter of time before documentarians started borrowing the "how one small item affects everything" model from the non-fiction bestseller list. Hartmut Bitomsky's Dust makes a pensive study of the title particulate, considering the way we wage a never-ending battle with the tiny specks that gather around us. Bitomsky interviews art-restorers who clean the dust off antique sculptures, dealing with the sick feeling that their efforts are altering the art ever so slightly. He talks to a Dust Bowl historian, and a housewife who's fanatical about cleaning. And he even lets the dust-lovers have their say, hearing out one woman who collects dust bunnies, because she's fascinated by the idea that dust creates its own mini-sculptures out of what we shed. ("The dust in our home is like an archive," she says with a twinkle.) Though Dust relies on the standard documentary mix of talking heads.
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Noel Murray
FrostNixon
4 December 2008 8:58 AM, PST
In Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen each play men aching for redemption. Langella's Richard Nixon longs to rehabilitate his public image after the long national nightmare of Watergate and a tidal wave of bad press and public derision. Sheen's David Frost, in turn, wants to prove to a snickering world that he's more than just a blow-dried entertainer, at home chatting with starlets and celebrities, but woefully out of his league conducting a makeshift prosecution of a former president of prodigious intellectual gifts and ferocious intensity. Ron Howard directed the film, but its auteur is undoubtedly playwright-screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Deal, The Last King Of Scotland), who continues his ongoing exploration of the 20th century as filtered through crucial interpersonal relationships. Frost/Nixon dramatizes a legendary series of interviews between Langella's disgraced former president and Sheen's globetrotting international playboy, who wears his megawatt smile like armor.
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Nathan Rabin
Nobel Son
4 December 2008 8:50 AM, PST
Randall Miller's obnoxious new thriller Nobel Son is a cringe-inducing throwback to the bad old days of the mid-'90s, when video-store shelves overflowed with gleefully profane, self-consciously hip, proudly transgressive thrillers that worshipped at the Church Of Quentin Tarantino, yet were blessed with none of their deity's gifts, and all of his weaknesses. Filled with freeze-frames and set to a deafening techno score, the film isn't populated by human beings, but by random, half-assed assemblages of writerly quirks. For example, Danny DeVito's character is an ex-mental patient defined entirely by his obsessive-compulsive disorder; those who don't find Ocd inherently hilarious are in for a long haul. Bryan Greenberg, the giant slab of beefcake from Prime and HBO's Unscripted, stars as a grad student who struggles to get by while his hotshot professor dad Alan Rickman cheats his way to the Nobel Prize in chemistry. When Rickman wins the big.
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Nathan Rabin
How The Ugly Truth Came To Be
4 December 2008 3:49 AM, PST
Kirsten "Kiwi" Smith peeled her face off of the waterproof cushion of her poolside deck chair, and squinted at the early morning sun steadily rising over her sprawling backyard. She hadn't meant to pass out here next to her pool/office/super-fun, girls-night-in-atorium, but she learned a long time ago not to fight her muse, and right now Kiwi's muse was pounding the inside of her head like a mechanic hammering out the chassis of a badly dented car. Only the best ideas come from hangovers. Kiwi and her writing partner Karen even had a name for them: Ow-deas. Cute, right? Sooo cute. Last week, Kiwi and Karen sold an animated series to the Disney Channel called "Ow-deas" based on that word alone. In the pool, Karen was still sleeping on the raft she'd passed out on several hours earlier, her arms folded tightly around a yellow legal pad with.
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"Today Show: Rocco Dispirito"
3 December 2008 9:53 PM, PST
First off, many thanks to Noel Murray for covering the fake Thanksgiving episode while I was off having actual Thanksgiving in San Francisco, the city where Top Chef started. Between the Swanson and Butterball plugs, and the spit-covered banana s’mores, the episode probably would have put me off my dinner anyway. (Though the Foo Fighters were their usual likable selves in the guest spot.) This week, alas, we have our first real dud of the season. While I understand and appreciate that the contestants on Top Chef have to twist and contort themselves around challenges that take them out of their comfort zones, tonight’s Elimination Challenge crossed a line for me. It’s one thing to ask them to package an Italian pasta dinner to withstand a Bertolli-like frozen bag treatment—just to name another of gifted shill Rocco Dispirito’s episodes—but to ask them to yap about it in a.
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Wes Anderson
3 December 2008 9:03 PM, PST
In 1996, a 26-year-old filmmaker from Houston named Wes Anderson—working with his best friend Owen Wilson and Owen's brother Luke—finished his debut feature film, Bottle Rocket, a stylish, laconic story about crime and sentimentality. Though it initially received mixed reviews, Bottle Rocket has gone on to be recognized as one of the most significant debut films of the '90s, and Anderson has become one of the most recognized names in contemporary American cinema, even though his films—The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Rushmore—annoy as many people as they delight. As The Criterion Collection prepares to make Bottle Rocket part of its first wave of Blu-Ray releases, Anderson spoke with The A.V. Club about on-the-job training, being despised, and what debut films he admires most. The A.V. Club: Have you watched the documentary about the making of Bottle Rocket on the.
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Noel Murray
A Mercy
3 December 2008 9:02 PM, PST
There is no action without consequence, no cause without effect. In bad fiction, those effects fall upon each other like poorly laid dominoes, resulting in tedious plotting. Better writers can make predictable results seem fresh through cleverness and sincerity, but great writers tell stories that refuse the easy answers of inevitability. The choices made by the characters in Toni Morrison's A Mercy, are often hardly choices at all, and the consequences are impossible to see to their ends, but by its final pages, Morrison's novel is as unexpected as it is richly rewarding. Set in America in the late 17th century, Mercy follows the lives and miseries of a farmer named Jacob Vaark, his wife Rebekka, their servant Lina, a half-crazed young woman named Sorrow, and a girl named Florens, a slave's daughter with an affection for fancy shoes. Jacob takes Florens from her original master as payment for.
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Zack Handlen
The New Cult Canon: Fallen Angels
3 December 2008 9:01 PM, PST
"Forget him, and it's like forgetting everything. All sense of direction seems lost, like losing oneself. Forget him, and it's like forgetting the joy of life. It's like a stab in the heart, bleeding and in agony." —Voiceover, Fallen Angels Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels almost plays better in the memory than onscreen, which isn't meant as an insult. I've seen the film three times now, and every time, it slips through my consciousness like a beautiful vapor, not unlike the tracks of neon blur that pass its characters by as they zip through the urban nightscape on fast-moving trains and motorcycles. There's very little tangible narrative architecture; true to Wong's jazz-like improvisational style, he doesn't seem to know where he's going until he riffs his way there, and he expects his audience to live similarly in the moment. Storytelling means virtually nothing to him—connecting...
Scott Tobias
Passionate Uprisings
3 December 2008 9:01 PM, PST
Early in Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution, an Iranian woman tells Iranian-American anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi that growing up in Iran isn't really any different from the U.S.: "When you go to your parents' house you speak Persian and wear proper clothes, and when you go out with your friends, there you speak English and wear sexy clothes, right? Well, for us it's the same; it's like drinking water." Mahdavi's book underlines how life in one of the most repressive Islamic republics in the world marks its residents, particularly the urban Tehrani women who allowed her incredible access into their private lives. In spite of Iran's public face, its young population (70 percent of which is under 30) is frustrated over the government's emphasis in cracking down on their behavior through the komite, or morality police. The underemployed, financially stable children of the middle and upper classes flout sharia-influenced...
Ellen Wernecke
"Game Of The Week"
3 December 2008 7:52 PM, PST
First things first, my DVR messed up and didn’t group this episode in with my season pass, which seems to be a common complaint. So I hopped in on the credits, apparently missing Billy breaking up with his fiancée and Coach Eric being hard on Saracen. (Or at least that’s what I pieced together.) I’m taping the rerun on Friday and will post an update to this entry at the end. So, men, huh? What are they good for? This week we had three break-ups and three attempts at reconciliations. One, Cash, deservedly got left in the dust (literally). Another, Billy, got taken back, almost assuredly undeservedly. The third, Tim, screws up royally and then works his way back into Lyla’s good graces by becoming the first Riggins to go to college. Actually “work” might be too strong a word for it. With a less persistent recruiter.
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"Comfort Food"
3 December 2008 7:07 PM, PST
So, do you think if enough of us got together, put on our little pie-shaped hats, and stormed the ABC offices bearing lemon icebox pie and belting out old Bangles hits that the network might be convinced to let Kristen Chenoweth continue to do… something… anything in prime time, even once Daisies is done? I do believe I could watch that little sprite give the weather report and be absolutely delighted, but tonight she was far and away the most stupendous part of this particularly stupendous episode. There were a couple of gasp-worthy moments in terms of the major plotlines tonight, but let’s get this out of the way first: The murder mystery was lacking. Cute, yes, and a brilliant display of costuming, set design, and makeup—chicken-fried face will haunt my dreams tonight—but not nearly as twisty as usual. The two characters who basically screamed “I did.
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The Failure Of Rosie Live! Is A Huge Loss
3 December 2008 11:01 AM, PST
A week ago, on Thanksgiving Eve, Rosie O'Donnell dug up the grave of olde-tyme TV variety shows hoping to reanimate the long-dead corpse of the genre lying within. The only problem was Nick Lachey & Jessica Simpson had already done just that back in 2004 with Nick & Jessica's Make It Stop Hour, so all that was left in the coffin was the faint scent of decay and a few stray fingernails. Nevertheless, Rosie gathered these items, baked them into a pie to throw into Conan O'Brien's face, and went ahead with her variety special Rosie Live! on NBC. I didn't see Rosie Live!, but by all accounts it was like pouring quick-dry cement directly onto meninges of the American public, and NBC has done all that it can to scrub evidence of the show's existence from the Internet. There is just one...
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Spectacle: Elvis Costello With...: "Elton John"
3 December 2008 5:16 AM, PST
I’ve been a fan of Elvis Costello ever since I found a copy of This Year’s Model in the “Nice Price” bin when I was 14. My first three years of Costello fandom happened in a big rush: I'd buy a new album out of the budget rack roughly every month, and read whatever I could find about Costello in rock history books and old issues of Rolling Stone, and eventually I even got to see Costello live with Nick Lowe at Vanderbilt University, in 1987. Through it all, despite some flashes of brightness like the “Everyday I Write The Book” video and his stage banter at the Vandy show, I had a vision in my head of Costello as an angry man, fueled by alcohol and spite. In the years since—really starting with the Spike album, some of which Costello previewed at Vanderbilt—Costello has seemed much more.
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Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
2 December 2008 9:02 PM, PST
Arthur Russell's voice is simultaneously otherworldly and achingly human. The same is true of the man himself: Russell floats through Matt Wolf's touching, moody documentary Wild Combination like a ghost who seems to belong on a more ethereal plane. Like Superman, Russell was an alien creature incongruously raised in the farmlands of the Midwest—he was an acne-scarred loner with an almost preternatural gift for the cello. A pot-smoking homosexual from a loving but conventional family, Russell left the Midwest for a more outsider-friendly commune in San Francisco, where he collaborated with Allen Ginsberg. In the '70s, he moved to New York, immersing himself in a downtown scene that blurred the line between straight and gay, black and white, artistic weirdness and pop. Russell was a contemporary of Philip Glass and David Byrne, even playing on an early take of "Psycho Killer." He then made a sharp detour from artier,
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Nathan Rabin
Population: 1
2 December 2008 9:01 PM, PST
Like fellow Dutchmen Paul Verhoeven and Jan De Bont, Rene Daalder was drafted by Hollywood to make genre films, though his inclinations ran a little artier. Daalder achieved some cult success with the 1976 drive-in classic Massacre At Central High; then Russ Meyer asked him to work on the star-crossed Sex Pistols movie Who Killed Bambi? Newly infatuated with punk rock, Daalder struck up a friendship with Tomata Du Plenty, leader of the theatrical L.A. synth-punk act The Screamers. Throughout the first half of the '80s, Daalder and Du Plenty tried and failed to get multiple music-video projects off the ground, until in 1986, they finally released Population: 1, a quasi-science-fiction art-punk musical cobbled together from pieces of footage Daalder shot with Du Plenty over the years, cleverly layered with the help of state-of-the-art image-manipulation effects. Population: 1 stars Du Plenty as a man who survives a nuclear holocaust...
Noel Murray
"Let Them Eat Cake"
2 December 2008 7:03 PM, PST
Here's what Noel said back at the end of season 4: "But as always, House is ultimately about House, and how he lives with himself. In a callback to the season-opener’s “go into the light” business, House imagines himself bathed in luminescence, telling the now-dead Amber that there’s no justice if he survives a bus crash and she doesn’t. Is this the prelude to a Season Five where House is chastened and—once again—on the verge of change?" I think it's safe to say we have our answer; there's plenty of space left in the current season for things to go in a different direction, but as of "Let Them Eat Cake," we have a House who's kinder, gentler, and most surprisingly all, actually capable of growing up. Tonight had another iteration in the on-going Chuddy Adventures, with Cuddy commandeering House's office in light of last week's enforced re-decorating; the.
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