Another Form of Relief

I can’t remember the last time I loved a film as much as (500) Days of Summer. Granted, it was a pretty easy sell to me in the first place. Quirky indie romances with credible leads make up a good portion of my DVD collection. This one towers over all of the others though. No one factor causes this, but everything about it seems to work. A non-linear structure, coming through on the promise that “this isn’t a love story” and boldly ditching a female perspective altogether help. Rattling off a few things like that doesn’t put across just how well this film works though. It even managed to get me back into a cinema for a second watch, which hardly ever happens.

Which leads us to She & Him, the band made of M.Ward and Zooey Deschanel. I’m not sure if I’m using the film as an excuse to post the band or the band as an excuse to praise the film. Either way, both are worthy of being explored. The crossover between the two is muddied somewhat by the video above. It’s the video for Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?, but it’s also directed by 500 Days director Mark Webb and stars Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It doesn’t really tie into the film beyond those elements, but it makes for a nice little aside. And just as the film proved, any opportunity for an over the top, slightly silly dance number is always worth taking.

I guess it’s kind of obvious by now that I’m something of a music fan. I mean, the fact I’m writing a music blog might be something of a hint on that one. More than that though, I’m something of a media junkie in general. Films are a big thing to me, I read a reasonable amount of books (but not as many as I’d like) and spend a lot of time with television shows. Now while this may all point to some underlying psychological condition that stops me from doing anything useful with my time, that isn’t what we’re going to talk about today. Today, it’s all about the television.

Why am I writing about this now, particularly given we’re between television seasons and absolutely nothing is on the air? Mostly because for a television fan with an internet connection and no moral qualms, this time of the year is something akin to Christmas. Around June, the television networks start sending out the pilot episodes of new shows to various critics and other media related figues, and by July, they nearly all turn up online. In the same way you can listen to the new Mountain Goats, M. Ward or Sufjan record before it ever reaches a store, you can watch the pilot of a show months before it even airs. Which again brings us to this post. Since 2003, I’ve been writing up my thoughts on these shows as they become available, and this year is no different. The only difference is that a whole different set of people will be reading (hopefully) as this is now my primary place to write rather than a personal blog that was frequented by pretty much nobody.

This is the first batch of shows that I’ve watched. There will be at least a second set of these in the future. As a disclaimer, any comments about the shows stated here may not be representitive of what finally airs. Shows often get reshot, changed, have actors replaced and various other changes before the show makes it air. Hell, some of them probably won’t even make it to air. Oh yeah, most of them are that bad.

The Angriest Man In Suburbia (CBS // Day, Date TBA)
CBS have really gone all out when it comes to comedies this year, producing a whole batch of them, even if they don’t have a place for them on the schedule. ‘The Angriest Man In Suburbia’ is one of these without a home, and if there is any justice in the world (yes, I know there isn’t), it’ll remain that way. The show follows the life of a family who have just moved to a dull suburb, and the father is pretty tetchy about just about everything. Now while this is all well and good as a premise, the execution of it is pretty awful, mostly because the characters are extremely unlikable. Sure, we all get annoyed by someone holding up a line while on a mobile phone. That’s hardly a good reason for our “hero” to destroy said phone. The episode basically plays out a series of these incidents that become less and less justified as time goes on. Add into this a “hilarious” plotline where the father’s GPS system talks to him which is straight out of ‘Swingers’ and we’re off to a great start to the years shows.

The Class (CBS // Mondays, Date TBA)
Oh good, it’s another CBS comedy. Thankfully, this one isn’t anywhere near as bad, but it’s still not particularly funny. Ethan (Josh Ritter) organises a reunion of his third grade class twenty years on. Thus we have a comedy of assembled misfits, who will no doubt go to be the best of ‘Friends’ as the show progresses. ‘The Class’ also suffers from character unlikability syndrome. This time it isn’t because the characters are bad, just that they are bland. Mostly this is because trying to shoehorn something like ten regulars into a twenty minute pilot just doesn’t allow any development, so everyone has one joke that they revolve around. Richie wants to kill himself, Kat hates everyone, Duncan still lives with his mother and so on. All of which are reasonable enough starts, but they just get repeated ad nauseum. It’s not absolutely awful, and could even be mildly amusing given a little work, but I don’t see it getting past six episodes.

Jericho (CBS // Wednesdays, Date TBA)
Finally, something that isn’t a comedy, and something that actually seemed interesting before I watched. Jericho is the name of a small town in Kansas. Jake (Skeet Ulrich) has returned home to deal with some family business. His homecoming is hardly welcomed (something bad happened in the past), and he leaves town again, only to see a nuclear explosion in the distance as he does so. This causes the entire town to be thrown into chaos as the locals try and figure out what to do with the prospect that the outside world has been destroyed. The creators of ‘Jericho’ have obviously been watching a lot of ‘Lost’. From it’s simple, white on black title screen to it’s story of a bunch of people trying to survive while cut off from the outside world to the mysteries of it’s characters, everything seems a little familiar. The plot also depends far too much on coincidence and the characters having just the right knowlege for whatever bind they find themselves in, which gets annoying rather quickly. Other than that, it’s actually rather good, but whether it stays that way will depend on how quickly it’s moves past it’s mysteries. We can’t wait a season just to find out where Jake has been (he tells people different things), or two years just to discover how bad the attack on the outside world is. While these are things that should be built up and solved over a little time, playing them out ‘Lost’ style would just become far too irritating. Also, as the characters are only aware that Denver and Atlanta have suffered explosions, wouldn’t it make logical sense for them to venture out to any surrounding towns and cities? Granted it’s a risk, but it seems unlikely that the entire country except Jericho would have been attacked. Still, it’ll probably one of the few shows I’ll keep watching this year anyway.

Our Thirties (ABC // Day, Date TBA)
ABCs turn to jump on the comedy wagon. Unfortunately, this one was so bad that I can’t actually remember a great deal about it. I remember a bunch of couples wondering how to handle their thirties (guess where the title comes from!) but beyond that, it was all pretty uninvolving. With a laugh track that made me want to throw up.

Rules of Engagement (CBS // Day, Date TBA)
It may surprise you to learn that I actually rather liked this CBS comedy focusing on two couples; one married for fifteen years and the other who have just gotten engaged. All of this is entirely down to Patrick Warburton (the voice of Joe on ‘Family Guy’). His jaded, cynical and dead-pan delivery of a man stuck in a marriage that is going nowhere is flat out hilarious. While all of the other characters are easily forgettable, Warburton’s Jeff steals the whole show, single handedly raising it something that can be very funny. While it is far from great (it crawls to a halt when Jeff isn’t around), it’s about the best of the new comedies to surface so far this year.

Runaway (The CW // Mondays, Sep 25)
I had a strong inclination to really dislike ‘Runaway’, largely because it’ll be stealing the timeslot of my beloved ‘Everwood’ next year. While The CW was able to find room for a bunch of new shows, including this one, it couldn’t find a place for one of the finest written dramas of recent years anyway. Which instantly put it as a disadvantage in my eyes. Somehow though, during the course of it’s 45 minutes, it managed to win me over. Not entirely, because I don’t think the premise can work over the long term, but enough to make me intrigued to see more. ‘Runaway’ follows a father (Donnie Wahlberg) who goes on the run after apparently being framed by someone for murder. So far, so ho hum, but the caveat here is that he’s doing it with his wife and kids in tow. They all move to the small town of Bridgewater, Iowa and try and make a home for themselves without letting slip they aren’t who they are pretending to be, while the father tries to find a way to clear his name. Obviously obstacles get in the way (mother gets pulled over by cops, the neighbour works from home so sees what they do, son tries to phone girlfriend back home etc) which are handled reasonably enough. The problem here is that it’ll be impossible for them to keep doing this week after week. Given how useless they are at keeping their cover in the pilot, it’s only a matter of time before they would realistically slip up. If the creators run with that, and we see them move from town to town, it could be pretty interesting, but given the establishment of local characters, I don’t see that happening, given the show a life span of a year at best.

Shark (CBS // Thursdays, Date TBA)
If you’re familiar with ‘House’, you’re already familiar with ‘Shark’ if you just move the setting to a court room. Sebastian “Shark” Stark (James Woods) is a brutal defence lawyer who will do anything to make sure his clients win. This is until he suffers a crisis of conscious after one of those clients kills someone after he gets them off. He goes to work as a prosecutor for the government, and this is where everything turns into ‘House 2′. He’s assigned a bunch of new lawyers as his team, all of whom seem to dislike him, but respect his ability. Hell, even their characters are like the motley bunch on ‘House’. There’s the District Attorney woman (Jeri Ryan) who spends her time antagonising Shark, and Shark himself comes off just like House. He’s tetchy and unlikable. Until you get to understand him that is. That said, much like ‘House’, it’s pretty good at what it does. While I imagine “case of the week” episodes will get boring pretty quickly much like that show did, Woods’ performance as Shark is fantastic. If this isn’t one of the big hits of this television season, I’ll be very surprised. It’s good, simple entertaining television.

That’s all for now, although I imagine a fresh batch of shows will be coming up in a few days. Until then, more of those music orientated posts will be appearing once again from this evening. Oh, and seeing as music is the focus here, here’s a rather apt song:

MP3 Desaparecidos – What’s New For Fall (expired)

Note: This post will contain spoilers for both X-Men: The Last Stand and Hard Candy. If you haven’t seen one or both of those films and want to keep their content a surprise, it’s probably best you stop reading now.

Thanks to the joys of the Cineworld Unlimited card, I’ve been getting to the cinema a lot more than I used to lately. In the past few days alone I’ve seen both X-Men: The Last Stand and Hard Candy. I was going to go for a third and see Thank You For Smoking too, but that was quite a drive away and I got lazy. Something struck me on watching the two former films though: Morality in films is a very strange thing.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to be some Mary Whitehouse-esque rant about film is corrupting our children and the such. Quite the opposite. I’m entirely opposed to any kind of censorship whatsoever, and find cases that cite media influence on crimes to be frankly laughable. As such, nothing in the following piece should be seen as a criticism of the content of these films, rather an observation.

We’ll deal with X-Men first as that’s the simplest example. I don’t know how it struck most people, but even while watching the film, I couldn’t get out of my head just how backward the whole exercise is. In the film, a corporation creates a “cure” for the mutant gene, which would theoretically allow all mutants that took it to live out ‘normal’ lives. Going into this, I would have expected this to have been seen as the villian of the film, but the actual setup was completely different. As the story progresses, the government makes the cure available for anyone that wants it, and we see scenes with mutants queuing to take it while others protest outside. Obviously this is designed to invoke images of abortion clinics and the such, but it never quite pulls it off.

This is mostly because through all of this, Magneto (the film’s actual “villian”) is leading a crusade against the “cure”, arguing that mutants are perfectly acceptable the way they are. As the story continues, he begins to take direct action against the corporation behind the cure, which is when the X-Men step in and rather than aid their fellow mutants, defend the corporation from Magneto’s attack. Now all of this would be all well and good if Magneto was just a paranoid old man who felt that this was the end of his “race”. While the cure is never made compulsary during the film, one gets the impression that this will eventually come, the government quickly going back on their word and using the cure as a weapon against mutants. All of which leaves us in a position where Magneto was actually correct all of the way through, and while his methods may be morally wrong, his entire motive is to save his race. To put it another way, if this were a Holocaust film where an ethnic or social group were being wiped out, the military that marches in and puts a stop to it would be seen as the heroes. In this film, he and his group are the enemies, leading us to a dangerous situation where the X-Men seemingly trust the actions of the government. You’d think after seeing the first two films, they would know far better than to do that.

Our second film with interesting morality, but one that pulls it off far better, is Hard Candy. It’s not a pleasant film, but it is one that made me think, and that’s the main thing I want from any film. In the film, we see Jeff, a 32 year old man, meet Hayley, a 14 year old girl, after they chatted for a while on the internet. At this point in the film, it’s clear who the villian is. Even though neither character seems particularly dislikable at this stage, more misguided, it’s obvious that Jeff should know far better, and he knows full well what he is doing is wrong.

The film challenges the audience far more once Hayley returns to Jeff’s house though. It slowly dawns that she is manipulating him just as much as he is she, and after a brief period, she manages to drug him. He wakes up tied to a chair, and the following hour or so consists of Hayley torturing him, both psychologically and physically. She claims to be doing this because she thinks he murdered another girl. Did he? The film remains pretty vague on this. He was associated in some way, certainly, but if he was just a helpless observer as he claims, is what is happening right? So in all of this, who is the bad guy? The rug has been pulled out from underneath us entirely. Is Jeff still the bad guy when he’s the one being tortured in front of us? He’s unquestionably done bad things, but does he deserve this? And what of Hayley? We’re presumably supposed to feel sorry for her in the early scenes, but it’s hard to sympathise with anyone who could do that kind of harm to another person. The film itself seems to remain entirely neutral on this point, and that’s what works to it’s favour. It allows us to just observe the proceedings, without ever really taking sides, and that is what leaves us feeling uncomfortable. We’re used to film telling us what to think that when left to ourselves, we have no idea.

It’s been more than a day since I sat through Hard Candy. I still can’t shift it from head, and I still can’t form an opinion on what I saw. As a film, it’s incredibly well made, save for a lacklustre final sequence that relies too much on chance. Did I enjoy it though? Probably not. Yet part of me wants to go back and watch it again. There aren’t many films that can cause that kind of conflict, and I’m glad it doesn’t fall back on easy answers. Unlike X-Men, which told me exactly what to believe, even if on closer examination, it’s a massively flawed argument.

So which of these is a better film? I guess it depends on what you want from a film. X-Men was the more immediate and entertaining of the two. Hard Candy was better made and more thought provoking. Even though I still don’t know what to think about it, it at least made me think, and I’ll take that on any day.