June 2007 Archives

Ron Rosenbaum on Tom Junod in Slate:

...And here it is--he begins with the question: "Does 9/11 still have meaning for most Americans? Does it have more meaning than celebrity? Does it have more meaning than the very specific message of meaninglessness contained in the weekly parable of Angelina Jolie's twisted double life? Or have we reached the point where its meaning is somehow inextricable from the meaning of celebrity, as 9/11 recedes into the past and celebrity gives birth to the future?"

I'm not making this up. I'm copying it right out of the pages of a well-known magazine, which (full disclosure) I've written for in the past. But I will be deeply indebted to any Slate reader who can make the slightest bit of sense of this paragraph about meaninglessness. Is it an example of what they used to call at Yale "the fallacy of imitative form," in which in order to write about meaninglessness you have to be meaningless?...

I can think of some other current celeb piffle that might beat this, but Rosenbaum wins extra points for linking to Brendan O'Neil in Spiked:

Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in Langstrand in Western Namibia has been sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. A no-fly zone has been enforced over part of the country. The Westerners have also demanded that the Namibian government severely restrict the movement of journalists into and out of Namibia. The government agreed and, in a move described by one human rights organisation as 'heavy-handed and brutal', banned certain reporters from crossing its borders.

However, this Western security force is not a US or European army plundering Namibia's natural resources or threatening to topple its government. It is the security entourage of one Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the celebrity couple better known for living it up in LA than slumming it in Namibia. They reportedly wanted their first child to be born in Namibia because the country is 'the cradle of human kind' and it would be a 'special' experience (1). And it seems that no security measure is too stringent in the name of making Ms Jolie feel special. Welcome to the new celebrity colonialism....

East India Trading Company Shrub
Two recent movies are blatantly allegorical, but most reviewers blinked. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN opens by hanging a ten-year-old boy in a cruel Gitmo scenario that poses a radical question: with brutes like Cheney in charge, wouldn't you want to sing the other guy's song? Based on Disney's global marketing strategy, how many Americans sense the director is playing to the gallery? The movie doesn't follow these metaphors through, but the Cheney figure does get skull-rape by Bill Nighy, and Kiera Knightley makes a Hillary Clinton presidency plausible (minus the sex appeal). And when the imperialist stooge of a captain, Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), is struck dumb as his crew begs him to change strategies while sinking, it's like a red light flashing "Iraq Iraq Iraq."

Similarly, EVAN ALMIGHTY struck me as a thinly veiled fantasy about holding Washington accountable for hurricane Katrina, complete with aerial shots of houses swept under by flood. The plot's culprit wasn't so much real estate greed as it was CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT. The picture is a dud, but it's weird how so much flies under the radar these days. When I was a kid, George Allen made a more plausible God; it's the kind of movie that starts you meme-ing to yourself: who's more exposed than John Goodman and Morgan Freeman? Fresher talent might have rescued at least some of the tired dialogue.

Somebody let Wanda Sykes host the Oscars.

The Best of the Bad Cops Keeps Walking a Hard Line (NYTimes)
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: June 6, 2007

[In lieu of writing my own big essay on the Shield's finale, I'm going at it through Heffernan's uneven piece...]

...In its six seasons, "The Shield" has won Emmys and Golden Globes but never squandered the stakes or the suspense of that first episode. At the same time, FX, the channel that once seemed beneath an audition from a jovial ABC star, is now home to a variety of film actors, including Denis Leary ("Rescue Me") and Minnie Driver ("The Riches") -- to say nothing of Mr. Chiklis himself, who effortlessly controls his basic-cable dominion as Mackey. He seems positively jubilant with doughnuts and street-cop work.

In his appearances at awards ceremonies -- he won an Emmy for best actor in the first year of the series -- Mr. Chiklis is amused and amazed that circumstances have conspired to let a performer like him, who once appeared headed for clowning or minor roles, help redefine television acting.

We all like to pour hot grease on our favorite shows, but that line needs unpacking: how is Chicklis "better" or more "defining" than Minnie Driver, say? You could argue that his weaknesses actually help make Mackey more sympathetic, and that HURTS the show sometimes. I admire Chicklis greatly, and would not have expected this performance out of him, but sometimes I catch him acting... Just because a show is great doesn't mean its flaws don't count.

Season 6 of "The Shield," the penultimate one, ended last night. It wasn't a knock-the-wind-out-of-you finale, but "The Shield" knows itself -- its strengths, its limits -- and, beginning with Mackey's shooting of the traitorous cop in the pilot, it has a way with unresolved resolutions.

By the time last night's episode wrapped, the heart of "The Shield" was still pumping steadily and hard, though this viewer's stunned and pleasurable sense of being thrown down, which had begun with the murder of Mackey's buddy Curtis Lemansky (Kenny Johnson) in Season 5, had let up. I was on my feet again, and I had mixed feelings about that.

Why? This episode was 90 minutes, and each commercial break brought a wrenching plot twist. Lem's death was gruesome, but the story has spun out from there, especially by turning Shane into a shadow Mackey, the apprentice-turned-competitor, like a virus set loose on Farmington even as he tries to protect Mackey's family. More description of plot intrigue, less vague generalizations about your own "responses."

When Mackey freaked out trying to find Lem's killer -- torturing to death the wrong guy, hiding while his own name was cleared, imprisoning the guy who framed him, pointing the finger idiotically at a fat cat in jail -- his frenzy turned feral, porcine. With his pink dome and deep-set eyes Mr. Chiklis is a weird, wonderful-looking creature. I like watching him run wild much more than squabble with bureaucracies. But I also know he had to confront Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins), the friend who killed Lem, in an astoundingly good episode last month, "Chasing Ghosts."

This was an astounding episode: again, unpack, tell us why. The teetering loyalties that got aired there forced the viewer to pick sides: did you believe Shane when he called Vic a hypocrite? Why or why not? Who behaved more in the interest of the strike team?

The various gangs of Los Angeles have distinct ethnicities on "The Shield": Ecuadorean, Armenian, Mexican and so on. But the cops are black and white, known by nicknames like Vic, Lem, Ronnie, Shane and Dutch that don't especially load the ethnic dice. Neither do the leads here have families -- unlike on that other tough-guy show with a finale coming up. Their dads are blanks. And Los Angeles is not filled with their brothers and uncles and cousins, men they're ready to die for.

Here you simply MUST mention Franka Potente (left), who plays Diro Kesakhian, the Armenian crime boss's daughter, who starts dancing with Shane. Also, there is very little TV writing that assumes this much viewer retention. Shane's wife Maura, played by Michele Hicks (right), had only two episodes this season: first to goad Shane's murder confession, and then to goad Vic's wife. But these scenes played off of everything we knew about her and made her seem like a constant presence in Shane's manouvres. Acting! Writing!

HEFFERNAN: Sure, they have children, and wives to cheat on, but mostly their ties are to other cops. Their loyalty to colleagues is grounded in blackmail: their partners know exactly how they make so many arrests, how few warrants they get, how on the take they are and where all the many, many bodies are buried.

Mr. Ryan says he came up with the idea for "The Shield" when he noticed front-page news about the drop in violent crime in Los Angeles, with news about police brutality and corruption buried in the back pages. He wanted to combine those parts of the newspaper in one man. He was also scheduled to deliver a comedy, and he managed to work lightness into his series -- a back-room "that's not what your wife said" style of hazing -- that keeps the series from becoming too dark and manages (when necessary) to express its utter bleakness. It's an impressive trick.

But everyone involved in the series has also become serious about the theme of protection -- of "shielding." If every episode seems to tighten the noose around Mackey, every episode also hands him a victory. He collars criminals of every description, as other officers look so decisively the other way that they by now are guilty of collusion.

Still, fans of the series, which is often -- make that always -- praised for its "moral ambiguity," root for Mackey. One Web commenter on the first season put it simply: "The thing is, Vic hates criminals and he does care about innocent people and crime victims. I feel like he would protect me. In fact, he and Shane, Lem, and Ronnie can protect me any day!!"

If Mackey is clearing the streets, he is also making criminals of the police, including himself. He creates witnesses, aiders and abettors, blackmailers, liars, kidnappers, addicts, prostitutes, bribers, torturers and corpses. And then, having done all that, he insists that he is the only shield from the danger he himself has created. And the scary thing about "The Shield" -- the terrifying thing -- is that you believe him.

OK, it's an impressive trick, all that impressive bleaness. DIckensian, even. But this still skirts the show's major theme: machismo, and whether cops necessarily get sucked down to the perps' level simply because the system prevents them from doing their job otherwise. The macho code is so well-observed here, from the jockeying for Tina through Aceveda's shame, which leads to him teaming back up with Mackey to turn his political career around. These men need each other in ways they can't remotely express, even as they're profoundly shocked that their manly schemes fall apart around them. Dutch can't stand getting caught crying after the meeting with Miracle Joe's nephew, even though his vulnerability wins him a tender kiss. "Give me a serial killer and I'm fine..." he says.

Best of 2005, 2004, 2004 CLASSICAL, 2004 LIST LINKS, 2003, 2002, 2001, 1990s, Cover Albums, etc

"It was forty years ago today: the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "It's certainly a thrill," the Beatles sang; but listening today, much of the thrill is gone--except for one song. Still, it's easy to remember that day--June 1, 1967--when the first thing we saw was the cover: a collage featuring the Beatles surrounded by cut-out figures of their heroes and other celebrities, including wax figures of themselves two years earlier, when they were the lovable moptops. Rock had never been so smart..." -- Jon Wiener in The Nation

New Hampshire Public Radio:
Most critics and fans agree that The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was one of the most groundbreaking rock 'n' roll albums of all time. We'll explore the record's music and it's place in history.

We'll speak with Tim Riley, author of Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary and editor of the Riley Rock Index.

We'll also hear the inside story of two songs that were slated for the Sgt. Pepper album. Producer Paul Ingles brings us his radio documentary, Strawberry Fields Forever / Penny Lane: Best Single Ever?.