Jack White comes in from the Musical Cold

So the other night I found myself in a dilemma. Spend the last few hours with my girlfriend Emily before she left for Las Vegas for a week, or listen to Jack White's new record Blunderbuss. Well she didn't take me with her to Sin City so I chose the album. I made the right choice.

I've been waiting on this puppy for some time. I'm as big a White Stripes fan as they come and I adore The Raconteurs but The Dead Weather was a bit of a tough sell. The songs just didn't come together the way that Jack White III's other groups songs did.

Jack also went out of his way to torture White Stripes fans by releasing a great little documentary and the first official White Stripes live records ever while he was off dicking around with The Dead Weather and all it did was make fans clamor for more of the musical duo. Jack and Meg put out a press release not long after that officially stated the band was finally kaput. Though it was all but said already, I'm sure I shed a few tears when I actually read the notice.

We got a brief glimpse at what Jack was up to when the documentary It Might Get Loud came out in 2008. A pretty rad single was actually cut from the film and released as Jack White's first official solo release, Fly Farm Blues.



The song was killer and its got Jack's style all over it. But after that all to brief sample of Jack's solo work he went silent for four years.

The first sample I got of Blunderbuss was when he played to tracks from it on SNL a few weeks back.

The first was a mellow ballad which we've seen Jack do before but not quite in this vain. Its a lovely little song with some nice harmonies. (and who could say no to an all girl band?)



His second performance sounded like a track from any Stripes record. Its hard. Its fast. And its great. A solid rocker.



So from that performance, I still really had no idea what to expect from Jack's upcoming record. The result is...well......everything I couldn've wanted from it.

Even on the first listen Blunderbuss sounds a lot like Bad as Me by Tom Waits did when I first gave that a listen last year. It felt familiar. It felt warm. It felt good. Nothing on the album is stale or rehashed. It just feels like you've known these songs all your life. Like they were recorded out of time like only the greatest artists seem to be able to do. I watched a radio interview (yes, watched) today with Jack White and the reviewer ended up saying the same thing so I know I'm not nuts.

I think the reason is that we've all been listening to Jack for so long that even though he continues to wow us with what he can do we've grown to know him like a lover. We know his ticks. We know what gets him off. And as far as I'm concerned, I've got a lot of the same feelings Jack's got.

The songs are mainly riff based which is typical for Mr. White. But he pulls away to allow some killer piano and organ driven tracks. There's some great harmonies and backing vocals. Jack explained in the radio interview that he managed to record almost every song with a different set of people just to keep the energy moving throughout the recording process. I think it was a good move.

Jack's lyrics are right where we want them too. Songs about love that leave a sinister grin on your face when you actually pay attention to the words. Songs about being young, being in school, and having the worst crush possible. Jack also manages to really keep his songs very catchy. Even the deeper cuts on the record had me snapping my fingers and bobbing my head. Being catchy is far from the sure sign of a good record but here its just another pro on a long list that's fairly devoid of cons.

In fact the more I think about it, theres nothing on this record that I'd even call a con. Sure, I'm not madly in love with every track but so rarely does that actually happen on a record. Even the bands that put out these albums don't absolutely love every song (though this is actually a problem since they should. It'd probably make the damn thing more listenable).

I'll stop harping on over here and just say that when this record comes out, I advise you to go out and buy it. I will as well and I'll be doing so at the tiniest record store I can find. Digital albums are a wonderful convenience and an eventuality these days but knowing Jack, I think that having this record to hold will be worth your while.

See what I did there? I snuck in a "support record stores" thing right at the end. Do it. It'll make you a better person.

Better Late Than Never: A Latecomer's Season by Season look at The Sopranos

Season 4
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Fans of the series find season 4 to be incredibly uneventful. While it is a slow season, so is every other season of this show so far. What Sopranos does right this time is it puts the comedy in the back seat and really makes you care about the drama unfolding instead. They put most of the pain in the ass characters in the back seat as well. The 4th season manages to plant a lot of seeds early on and then very VERY, almost achingly slowly grow them into living things.

You spend A LOT of time with Carmella this season which pissed people off, but her arc is so tragic that you simply can't turn away.

Carmella truly proves herself as the first real “anti hero's wife”. Even though their husbands are off committing atrocities in one way or another the fans of the show often end up placing hatred and frustration on them. See Betty Draper from Mad Men, Skyler White from Breaking Bad, or Anna Gunn's other less detested wife character, Martha Bullock from Deadwood.

Carmella has spend the last two seasons in love with Tony's soldier Furio and Furio loves her back. But tragically they never even get to tell one another. Furio is forced to leave for Italy and Carmella is left totally alone as far as her love life is concerned. Its a terrible truth that in life so many potentially wonderful things just end and its awesome to see The Sopranos embrace this hard fact.

Tony and Carmella finally have it out in a series of fights that put their marriage on the line in biblical fashion. Especially now that Furio is out of the picture. They have 3 huge fight scenes in the finale and even though they're all short as far as run time is concerned, they leave you thinking they lasted for hours. They pack so much history, rage, and catharsis into them and they leave only destruction in their wake.

Whitecaps, the season 4 finale, is the definition of a slow burn series episode. So many things are said and happen that only work because you've got 4 seasons of history to back them up. Its brilliant.

The reason this is my favorite season so far is because they finally just come out and say that the mob story is a distraction to Tony's home life. All of season 4 prepares the viewer for the final showdown between Tony's crime family and a New York based one. Right up until seemingly the last minute you expect blood to fill the streets or at the very least for certain key players to get whacked. And none of it occurs. The matter is resolved (almost peacefully). What the season was actually ramping up to the entire time was Carmella and Tony's showdown. And its more hard hitting then any mob execution could be. And when its all over Carmella does the unthinkable. She kicks Tony the fuck out.

The true beauty of the finale comes from the the titular sequence. Even with all the awful shit slinging that occurs between Tony and Carm, there is a truly beautiful sequence in which the two dance in from of white caps on the water. In one episode we see a couple at their best and their worst. Thats good writing.

As silly at it might be to compare all this to a later piece of work I can't help but think of a wonderful sequence in the first season of Game of Thrones where Cersei and her husband Robert have what might be the only honest conversation they ever have. No matter how much two people hate each other they'll still have a bedrock that relates them, even if that bedrock is mutual resentment. It powers their scenes together and makes for some beautiful set pieces.

Chris has gone through a lot this season as well. His heroin addiction led to an intervention and rehab. I still really don't care for his character much but he seems to finally have made some progress and is clean as the season concludes.

Above all, Season 4 plays with every expectation an fan of the show could ever have. Carmella and Tony separate. The big mob violence comes two thirds of the way through the season where Tony kills a man on his own team over the death of Pie-o-My the race horse that Tony had fallen in love with. Tony's relationship with the horse is one of the most moving arcs the show ever managed to pull off. Like the ducks that Tony love so much in the first season, the show relies on the power and innocence of animals to show who a person as troubled and conflicted as Tony Soprano really is. And the biggest one of all. Tony fires Dr. Melfi. And not at the end of the season either. After all the fallout with Carmella he gives her a call but doesn't have the courage to speak and quickly hangs up the phone.

Tony also suffers some very intense dream sequences that I hear pay off in the final season so I won't go into them here. Needless to say thats great forward thinking so I hope it pays off well.

In a dark and twisted word this could actually be the end of The Sopranos. Its not. And thats great. I've never been more ready to delve back into the world this show has created than I am with the 4^th season under my belt. Its powerful stuff and I can't wait for more.

Andrew Stanton of Earth: A Plea for Cinema's Future

There's a very specific reason I'm writing this. I'm angry. I'm angry because I believe that people are making gigantic cultural mistakes that are dooming our cultural future. I'm writing in defense of John Carter. I know there are better films, less well-known films, and films far more deserving of my time and attention but I have a tremendous bone to pick with everyone who didn't see it or doesn't like it because by rejecting this movie, you're fucking directors everywhere out of a future in creative control of works that truly do need studio money. I know, I know, I know. I know Andrew Stanton isn't exactly Nuri Bilge Ceylan. I know this sounds melodramatic. I know you don't care because you probably didn't care enough to see the movie. Which is why we're here in the first place. I know the fault lies partially with Disney's marketing people who failed to make the film appealing. Which...fucking, really? You've been at this how long and you can't make people want to see a movie that does the Star Wars thing better than Star Wars? You fucked up and I hope you're apologizing to Stanton profusely everytime you fucking see him. But that's not what you're doing, is it?

Let me offer my defense of the film itself. It's a blast. It's a lot of fun, it's thrilling, it's kinda sexy and it's beautiful. Stanton created a film with a visual language at once distinct and rich in history. The thing I like most about it is that it's rich in cinema grammar from many different ages. It's got the feel of an old fashioned victorian sci-fi adventure, and I don't just mean because it's written by someone who was Jules Verne and H.G. Wells most prominent pulp successor, along with Robert E. Howard. I mean that it approaches an alien civilization with the same pedantic eye, but never feels like it's talking down to anyone and never feels less than exciting. George Pal's The Time Machine, the films of Byron Haskins and Ray Harryhausen films like First Men In The Moon and The Three Worlds of Gulliver. Working for Disney, Stanton is the latest in a long line of craftsmen out to sketch adventure that will age gracefully and he's more than achieved that. He's got a firm grasp on comedy, action and sci-fi conventions, he's a skilled director of actors and a confident world-builder. And I hate that so much of the criticism I read about this film was about A. How much money was spent and B. plot elements taken from the source novel, which for once, no one bothered to read. Everyone's read Dragon Tattoo and Hunger Games, but if the jacket collects dust, nobody wants it, evidently. Yeah, I sound like a petulant asshole, but I don't have time for populism when it's fucking us this badly. But back to it's critical reception; people seemed offended at the notion that 120 million dollars was spent on a movie. You know what? Doesn't matter. It's good, so, to me, the money's worth it. It's all on screen and not in a "let's explore Rivendell for a few pointless minutes" kinda way. There are no moneyshots, it's all about the moment and moving the plot along, so the film doesn't have the endlessly proud of itself feel of something like Avatar. Which was far and away the masturbatory film among the two. Money not an issue. I get that we're in a recession, but if you all constantly talk about the money spent on a movie, and refuse to talk about the cash forked over to movies that are actively bad. How much did American Reunion cost? Does that explain why it's pathetically written and indifferent directed? So get off that particular high horse, because it carries no water when you whip it out selectively and not for bullshit like Avatar. A diversion: someone look me in the face and tell me that John Carter isn't better than Avatar or any of the last four Star Wars films or the remake of Clash of the Titans or Ghost Rider or Green Lantern or any of the Avengers prequels (which are films I enjoy) or even The Hunger Games or The Adventures of Tintin, films I liked. And tell me so reasonably, don't give me a fanboy/girl grunt in the direction of this setpiece or that. Or for that matter, illustrate what about Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, another spectacle driven action film made by a former pixar animator makes it a better film than John Carter. And don't tell me about the individual set pieces, don't simply draw me the building. I can understand that Brad Bird does a dazzling job with suspense and highwire theatrics and I admit to being really very impressed with a lot of what I saw in Ghost Protocol. One thing I didn't do was care about anyone beyond what their cultural baggage brought with them. I liked Simon Pegg because I like Simon Pegg, not because he was delivering the most sparkling dialogue ever written. Frankly, I didn't even really enjoy Paula Patton's performance/character and Jeremy Renner, one of the most talented actors working today, has been a whole hell of a lot better. Bird didn't know what to do with his actors. Stanton does. No one phones it in, no one looks lost, no one strikes a false note. And if it needed saying, Mission is a sequel we didn't need. As for the other criticism, I've read reviews by people who don't like that the story starts in the old west or incorporates Victorian England into its backstory. Well guess the fuck what? It's in the book. Read it and shut the fuck up. I read a review in which someone complained that the man who reads the story-within-the-story's name is Edgar Rice Burroughs. He actually wrote the phrase "Eye roll." Like he's some goddamned unprofessional punkass blogger. I could write Eye Roll cause no one gives a tinker's damn about me. I can swear up and down and no one cares because It doesn't say Film Critic under my name. I don't write Eye Roll because I'm not an adolescent jagoff. If you're being paid to write film criticism, try not to act like a stupid motherfucker, do your fucking research, don't be obnoxious and don't be such a tremendous fucking knowitall.

I could say this about a lot of people, so why is it important that people recognize Stanton and John Carter? Because of the amount of money he was handed to make this thoroughly entertaining film. My issue isn't that I like something and other people don't; I'm not just a professional sore loser. My issue is that viewers are writing cinema history for the next ten years. By not seeing John Carter, what viewers are saying is that they don't want people with vision great enough to take this much time and resources that came from a childhood desire to see a beloved story come to life in the best fashion possible to do it. Because Stanton made Carter into the best possible film imaginable. Projects of larger scope and more complex narrative have derailed more talented filmmakers than Stanton and that the movie not only makes sense but soars in its best moments, is a true feet. The film defeated the likes of Robert Clampett and Ray Harryhausen, but he goddamn did it. Read the book and then watch the movie and tell me he didn't. So what people are saying is that they don't care when an artist wants to tell a story in the most amazing way he can. They'd rather have Hollywood remake whatever the fuck they want, James Cameron mercilessly steal from every third film ever made and Michael Bay jerk off all over our knees while making films about kid's toys that apparently suffered from a dearth of fake tan and women bending over. John Carter isn't objectionable, it didn't steal from anything but it's source novel, and it's not a remake. Everyone complaining about John Carter, especially those who didn't see it or are judging it based on a book they didn't read, are casting a vote for Transformers 4 and Avatar 2. Films that had no heart or soul to begin with. You're giving Hollywood the power to say "people don't want to watch movies like this, with ambition. They want Transformers. Let's just make that."

I had the same set of complaints with a different slant when everyone gave Anonymous a critical blanket party last year. Most of those fucking people were judging it based on a hypothesis they found offensive because they felt that it was a classist statement, that someone who was poor and illiterate couldn't have written something so brilliant. Granted, if I thought Roland Emmerich was paying to have schools tell us that poor people can't be geniuses, I'd have been concerned. But it was fiction and no one buys history lessons from the man who made 2012. But the thing is, Anonymous is one of the most beautifully made films in recent memory. I goddamned loved it and I could find no one (but Tucker) to judge it on its own terms instead of letting bias dictate a pre-judgment and then writing off the rest. And I saw better films last year than Anonymous, but I'd still go to bat for it. It's fucking poetry, as much a living painting as Lech Majewski's The Mill & The Cross. I've seen better films than John Carter this year. To return to Ceylan, his Once Upon A Time in Anatolia may be a career high for a truly unique artist. Terrence Davies has made his best film since The Long Day Closes, which is perfect, so it's not exactly small praise to say it's almost as good. Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights does an admirable job returning a classic to the earth that spawned it, besting Cary Fukunaga's excellent Jane Eyre. Rafi Pitts' The Hunter gets under your skin and stays there. And Agnieszka Holland's In Darkness only lost the oscar to A Separation because that film is a fucking miracle and Iran's political cinema needs the spotlight desperately (FREE JAFAR PANAHI!!!). The difference is that films of quality will always be made outside the mainstream. They are not guaranteed when they're made by a major studio. I want to enjoy big budget spectacle as much as I do introverted arthouse masterworks. I know that a film like John Carter will be a little too busy building worlds and swashbuckling to tug at my heartstrings with the efficacy of a film by someone like Terence Davies, who has made efficacious heartstring tugging his goal in life, but goddamnit all it tries and it works, if not as well. I want quality from the mainstream and by voting with your wallets for movies without heart, then you fuck us all. You doom us to decades of movies with no emotional center and no concern for your intelligence or empathy. I don't want to look at the nearest marquee and notice that it's half-full of shit I don't fucking care about and that doesn't fucking care about me. Because Michael Bay and James Cameron don't care about you. They care about your money and about expanding their sandbox and recycling ideas. I resent that attitude, I resent their indifferently made tripe, I resent their fake concern for the artform, I resent the fact that they work in the medium I love. Please consider the future of the art before you pay to watch just whatever's out there. I'd recommend you buy or download a film in a language you don't speak before I'd tell you to watch something produced by Adam Sandler or Michael Bay. These people and their horrible ideas will never die if we don't kill them. Speak before your voice is taken.

Better Late Than Never: A Latecomer's Season by Season look at The Sopranos

Season 3

I got really busy over the Easter weekend. I finished two seasons of this show in a matter of days. Season 2 was a bit of a push for me but as you'll read in this article, season 3 really gave me something to enjoy watching.

Season 3 begins about as strangely as possible. The entire premiere is told from the FBI's perspective. The full hour shows the feds attempting to bug Tony Soprano's basement since they know that he occasionally talks business down there. The Feds are fairly caught up on the comings and goings of Tony and his crew so right from the get go you know how much they know about the deaths at the end of last season. Tony's daughter Meadow is in college and is dealing with roommate issues but apart from these scenes the episode is almost entirely comedy. A major bummer is that Tony brought back a new enforcer named Furio from his trip to Italy last season and the man has accomplished nothing of note yet. As of now he's basically T Dog from The Walking Dead, though considerably less annoying. Tony's son AJ is a skateboard punk and an incredible dumb ass but thats really nothing new either. The Feds finally manage to secure a wire tap in the basement but all they manage to hear is Tony discussing his water heater with his Polish housekeeper's husband. Ultimately a complete waste of 49 minutes.

The 2^nd episode of the season seems like the “real” premiere. Tony's mother dies rather unceremoniously and that gives way to the rest of the episode focusing on the funeral and the after party. But once the episode is over, Livia Soprano is forgotten and as far as I'm concerned, it's a great decision.

Joe Pantoliano shows up this season playing a new antagonist named Ralph Cifaretto. He's a great villain character because unlike the other evils the show has portrayed, Ralph is far more driven by ambition than by hatred for Tony. He doesn't even want Tony removed. He just wants to have his own place in Tony's crime family. Ralph also ends up being connected to the real troublemaker of the third season, Jackie Aprile Jr.. The now-dead mob boss' son wants to make a name for himself and in what seems to be a trend for the youthful characters of the series, goes about it the stupidest ways possible. And though Ralph is very tightly connected to Jackie's mother, decides he's too much of a problem and has Jackie Jr. killed. It was a big season of me throwing my hands in the air in triumph as awful characters were forcibly removed from Tony's plate.

The other real difference that Ralph has to contend with, versus what other villains have to, is that he survives the season. And he gets promoted to the position he wanted despite a lot of bad blood between himself and Tony Soprano. This leaves me really wondering where their relationship will go in the next season and that's probably the first time I've really wanted something out of carry over from a previous season.

Tony remains very much Tony in this season which isn't a bad thing. In the back third of the season he begins an affair with one of Dr. Melfi's patients. Its a pretty insane affair but doesn't really change much. Tony continue's his sessions with Melfi regularly until out of nowhere, she is raped while leaving her office late one evening. This is easily the most serious moment on the show so far and they do an incredible job of portraying the event in as horrifying a way as possible. There aren't any cut aways. You're there for everything.

Tony sees Dr. Melfi soon after and the show defies all expectation. Melfi doesn't ask Tony for revenge. She keeps it to herself and lives with the horror of the act.

This is a shorter one but I've got a lot less complaints about this season. The show seems to have finally found a groove. Not necessarily their groove, but a groove nonetheless. For the first time I'm left eagerly awaiting the next season. I'm beginning to see why The Sopranos is so revered. I just hope they don't drop the ball.

Better Late Than Never: A Latecomer's Season by Season look at The Sopranos

Season 2

Season 2 marks a serious step down for The Soprano's. David and I were just talking about the reworking that Game of Thrones is going through in it's second season. The Soprano's managed to do something similar but has failed where GoT seems to be succeeding.

With a new season of a show to work with, writers have a whole new list of opportunities. They've got new story lines to work with. They've got new characters to introduce. They have a chance to expand the world that they spent the entire first season setting up. They fail on almost all of these in the second season of this series.

The story follows a logical progression. Tony is now running the show as far as the crime element is concerned. These sequences are some of the best of the season. James Gandolfini is incredibly watchable as the central anti hero of the series. In the second season we finally manage to see him take control of something he's been vying for his whole life. And he's a solid leader. Very rarely does he make a bad decision and a viewer can take pride in watching this man (even if he is a magnificent dirt bag much of the time) run his crew. One of the best episodes of the season has Tony travel to Italy to meet up with the homeland leaders of La Cosa Nostra. In a great curve ball, the acting organization leader is woman and a powerful one at that. Though the show is filled with strong female characters, the majority of them are strong in their homes and no where else. It was nice to see a woman truly wearing the pants even if it was only for an episode. Its actually funny how similar to Game of Thrones' second outing this season is. The brother of the deceased mob boss from the first season appears in the second season's premiere and causes problems for Tony the whole way through. Though there aren't as many men struggling to take the crown in The Soprano's as there are in GoT, there is still a great little war going on within this second season that makes for some great television.

The trouble though is that it really doesn't come to a head. Several episodes of the season veer off from Tony Soprano's operatic reign of his crew and instead focus on Tony's idiot nephew Christopher who spends his time this season doing heroin and trying to write a mob movie screenplay. The sequences end up going for funny but don't really pay off. Instead I just found myself wishing I was watching Tony keep things together. There are plenty of serious scenes involving Chris too but because he's such a jag wagon I just never cared.

The violence that does occur in the story arc is much more necessary this season than the last. Tony doesn't send gun men after trouble makers this season. Instead he finds himself trapped. The violence happens to those he truly cares about and carries a lot more weight and consequence.

Tony's mother ends up pretty out of the picture this season since she's stuck in the hospital for most of it. This is good. She's a terrific villain for Tony but I think the writers lost control of her in season 1 and I think it was the right idea to tone her down a tad. But out with the old and in with the new. Richie Aprile the new man trying for Tony's crown plays one villain, and Tony's sister Janice plays another. There are now villains in both sides of Tony's life and they definitely give Tony's mother a run for her antagonistic money. The trouble is both these new villains' are basically unwatchable. They're annoying. They're schemers. They're liars. The Soprano's initial success came from how grounded in reality the series was. Unfortunately this creates a problem for this season's arc. The two new villains are definitely a problem but because they aren't super genius' they really don't cause super serious problems for Tony. They really just boil down to being a pain in both my and Tony's ass. If you don't care about the villain you don't care about the conflict.

The season begins without any real interaction between Tony and Dr. Melfi. Luckily this is fixed quickly and they do see each other enough to keep things going across the season. They still end up being the best scenes in the show. The intelligence in the writing really comes out here and Tony's true self is able to be glimpsed if not fully seen.

The season wraps itself up pretty well. All the main story arcs are covered and the show could end there though it'd be in the running for one of the worst series endings in history. Luckily the show's got 4 more seasons to work with.

Season 2 left me almost totally unimpressed. The dialogue is still great. The acting is still killer. But the production value hasn't gone up and I find myself watching almost every sequence with violence through gritted teeth because it ends up looking terrible.

I think the show has plenty to work on for season 3.

• A stronger over arching plot with Tony as a central focus. If they build up new characters it'd be fine to bring them in but as of now Tony is the only really interesting person on the show as far as the mob is concerned.
• More scenes with Carmella Soprano. Edie Falco does an inhumanly great job of playing Tony's wife and I'm always psyched when she comes on screen.
• Less comedy more drama. Life is funny. Okay I get it. That doesn't mean this show needs to be. Mainly because all the humor is really simple and doesn't at all match up with the rest of the intelligence inherent in the show's writing. All the humor ends up doing is underselling characters and turning them into parodies.
• A better antagonist. They really need to create a scary villain. Someone who's threatening and not just annoying. They could also go the GoT's route and show the bad guy's home life so they seem like more of a character rather than just somebody who appears once an episode as a reminder that Tony Soprano has problems.

This show still has a lot of work to do to live up to the legend. I'll be back for season 3 and I hope that I'll have better news.

Blinded with Science

I'd like very much to go around calling myself a director, but the sad, shameful truth is that I work at a record store. Which is just as well because even if I were a rich and famous anything, I'd still be a record store geek. I'd debate the merits of proper hip-hop production (as I did just hours ago on Facebook with a friend who was bringing up a very funny point, not trying to start a fucking debate about goddamn hip-hop integrity), I'd sneer when people explained why I need to make room in my brain for whatever dubstep is (ed: this piece will be obsolete in six months. See, I'm doing it again!). If I discover something, I want it to be a proper discovery, not something some of my equally unhip friends know about and passed to me as cultural shrapnel, because if there's something worth knowing, no one will tell you about it. That's the Catch 22 of doing what I do. Incidentally, I'm not unhappy about working at a record store, but I did undergo a process of curbing my contempt for mass, split second culture. If someone asks if you like Amos Lee, I merely smile and admit that he's not for me. That's what a polite person does, or anyway, I think that's what a polite person might do. I have colleagues who'd do a little more or a little less. If I snorted derisively and rolled my eyes, I'd run the risk of being a giant, jobless asshole. So, instead I simply try to see things their way and ignore that my brain is a voracious knowledge monster with an impossibly fierce, snide and picky doorman. It's not fair to everyone else if I stand behind the counter and impose my tastes on customers for the seven seconds I have to perform a service for them that though I'm uniquely qualified for, can easily be taught to someone who is less mean-spirited and impatient than I am. I try to tell myself that in my defense I do seriously believe that consuming mediocre culture because it's around results in more of it. But I can't tell myself that people honestly don't like the music they buy, even if I try to justify that. We sell a lot of Gotye here. I don't know what he sounds like, but the bigger he gets the harder it is to convince myself it's worth listening to because the general impression I get from people buying it is that they have other places to be and this is something that has become mandatory to own and be able to talk about, so just sell it to me, already. But this is wildly unfair to the artist and his fanbase. I'm so far inside the world of labels and side projects and distribution and bands that broke up after one album released before I was conceived, that it's tough to remember that normal people don't care about that and just want to hear songs they like. They don't want to hear that the other side of me not liking something because it's famous is critics and listeners patting themselves on the back for choosing to ignore a band until a particular moment, before which they'd entertained me immensely.

All this brings me to a days-long project where I was asked to alphabetize our DVDs. For the sake of the children, I put the horror, cult and sexploitation films in one section high above the ground because I wanted it that way, and also because I didn't want kids to be able to look at the lurid covers of Suspiria and Friday The 13th, Part V and be scarred for life. Ok, maybe I do want that, but I also want to preserve some of the mystery. Plus, kids don't buy that shit. Next to horror is my newly minted Nicholas Cage section; small but growing. I put the TV and classics at a little below eye level so senior citizens have neither to crane their necks or bend over to reach it. Our meager Criterion section shares a shelf with the few foreign films we've accrued. Children's films are at kid height near the floor. Sports, exercise and documentary come after the large TV section stops. And then the other rack has everything else. I was going to put drama and comedy in separate sections, but why bother? They're utilitarian genres and if you put the comedy together, the combination of pinks and whites and sparkles hurts your eyes. Plus, how many of those films are actually funny? See why I keep all this to myself? Anyway, I didn't care about mixing drama with action or comedy because they all have mass appeal and it's easier to have them together where I can easily keep track of what we don't have. These used to be sections, but putting cards in to delineate doesn't make as much sense as we don't have the shelf space for it anymore. The one thing that gave me pause was Sci-fi.

What I discovered was that my definition of Sci-Fi clearly didn't match the store's previous definition based on everything that used to go in that section. I, Robot, Dark City, Aliens, Star Wars, The Matrix, etc. Ask anyone and they'll probably agree that this is normal, and as a blanket term, I took for granted that these films, whose DVD cases share dark background colors, sleek fonts and people striking fierce poses, earned the distinction of being called Science Fiction. And then I took the phrase apart. What exactly was the science in Aliens? Now, I love Aliens, but beyond the technology, which no one explains except where fire power is concerned, there's no science in this film. All of James Cameron's best known entrees into the genre are all noticably lacking in hard science. The Terminator writes it off with a line of dialogue. Avatar, which would probably be saved in most stores by the fact that Sci-Fi often shares a backslash with the word fantasy, is based in a scientific principle that no one bothers explaining except to say it's too technical and don't fucking worry about it, dipshit, just enjoy the scenery. Well, fine, but you don't deserve the Science Fiction mantle.

Science Fiction got the name because there used to be people with something like an understanding of the way the world worked. Granted there was far less to know back then, but you get my meaning. Paul F. Tompkins likes to joke that Jules Verne's writing is 99% science and 1% fiction. Fair point. The point is that the science needs to drive your plot, not simply inform it. H.G. Wells explains the mechanics behind his time machine, then fuses its inherent moral conundrums to the protagonist as he uses the device to learn things about himself and the way the world works. Verne's science is window-dressing; he's asking moral questions. The technology of the Nautilus or the fact that the center of the earth holds many wonders doesn't really do much more than give his characters something to bicker over. But it's fanciful, anyway, and one could and I assume that people frequently do argue that without a submarine capable of doing what no craft could do at the time could, the stories wouldn't have been written. My qualm with Sci-fi starts, but doesn't end, here.

To call Verne science fiction, nine times out of ten, is being rather more generous than I'm willing to be. If 20,000 Leagues was about specifically which mad scientist had been splicing genes to create the giant squid, and the lifelong process by which he achieved his goal, I doubt we'd be here. Not only because that wouldn't have entertained victorians worth a goddamn, but it would have been scientific. Nemo may be a scientist in Verne's backstory, but he's little more than Robin Hood with the power of a modern army at his command in action. Look at the many different cinematic interpretations of the character and you see what people remember; a sort of hard-nosed adventurer. His research is a means, not an end. Which is much more in line with the mad science that would reign supreme in horror films post-Frankenstein. Everyone had their reasons (ending world hunger, world domination), but the point was they'd used science to create a giant-ass insect or an astro zombie. Or invert that. An alien visits and it's sci-fi because there's a scientist present who pleads of the men of action to "Think of what we could learn!" before they destroy it. Could being the operative word. And that's science as most screenwriters know it. But eventually the science was overwhelmed. The Invisible Man the Wells story is called sci-fi. But there's a reason you could only find the DVD as part of the Universal Monster collection for many years. It was a horror film, or anyway, it was treated like one. The question I have is what criteria are people using to categorize something as Science Fiction? Because in the film adaptation of The Invisible Man, science takes a goddamn hike in favor of Claude Rains' world domination plot. He derails trains, robs people, and behaves rudely. We don't learn a single goddamn ingredient of his invisibility serum, do we? It might as well be The Horrors of Spider Island (a sleazy, sleazy film rightly placed in Horror, that nevertheless is fueled by scientific anomaly) for all the attention it pays to the details of its implausible plot. To further extrapolate; make your protagonist visible and what do you have? Basically The Public Enemy or White Heat. Take a look at The Amazing Transparent Man, which is a way-late-in-the-game Invisible Man rip-off, which is nothing more than a dime store heist movie with sci-fi trappings, placed there with contempt by ever-slumming genius Edgar Ulmer. It's a crime film by any other name, radium or not. The science is bullshit, and furthermore it's borrowed, and never leaves the lab, and could have been replaced with document forging. The point of the movie is to be a potboiler, and to warn about the dangers of fascism (long story). And there's the problem. Take the "science" away from so many of these films and you find another genre film is cheap masquerade. Star Wars was in the science fiction section of every video store I've ever gone into (sadly they've all but vanished), but where the fuck is the science? Put it on Earth and it's Kurosawa's shallowest post-war film in English, if you're feeling generous. If Lucas had an explanation for what makes up the fuel of an X Wing, that can propel a craft so small through the atmosphere of a planet... I assume the planets in those galaxies have atmospheres? Again, all questions we could have been addressing instead of trade routes and taxes. Take out space travel and I imagine you have something very much like Red Tails, a poorly written action-adventure movie with a facile understanding of history that Lucas produced to middling reviews earlier this year. Star Wars has zero interest in what makes it possible for these people to go from Hoth to Endor. Again, I get that that doesn't make for the most interesting viewing. What they used to call Hard Sci-Fi died because once you've been to space and dealt with the mundane truth of the matter, there isn't much left to do. Hence why films like Destination Moon and Riders to the Stars were replaced with The Angry Red Planet and Red Planet Mars, but even creature features and space operas eventually gave way to soberer fare like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien because of the infinite possibilities space travel presents for looking at the human condition under an advanced microscope. Leave it to the makers of Hard Sci-fi to tell us the how and the why, Ib Melchior and Sid Pink were going to show us fucking monsters and explore ideological problems. So, there's nothing like fact in Lucas' films (he can't even get the whole space is a vacuum thing right), but we forgive it because we want to. The spectacle is doubled (not only explosions, but on another planet) and so people get much more willing to forgive a film's core emptiness. It's so shallow it doesn't even match the philosophical content of something like Journey to the Seventh Planet, which is largely a vessel for blonde women and brain monsters. It is entirely what's in front of your face and there's nothing beneath it, at least nothing you couldn't get from a Commando Cody serial, which flies in the face of the idea of Science or Speculative Fiction. There ain't a fucking question when you leave Star Wars. Or I, Robot. Or Journey to the Center of the Earth. At least none that it's creators felt the need to pose themselves. James Mason or Will Smith will make some offhand comment about why X is Y, but it's an excuse to watch robots fight people or lizards fight each other. Speculative fiction is a much better term for the genre because a good 50% of the major films called Science Fiction don't have a care in the goddamn world for science, hard or otherwise.

And I can be forgiving up to a point. 2001: A Space Odyssey isn't really science fiction, when you get right down to it. It's much more interested in the idea of the coldness of space and of what technology affords rather than how that technology operates. When Keir Dullea disarms Hal, what exactly is he turning off? We get that there's memory in there, but what the hell are all of those things he's pulling out of the computer's hard-drive? No, Kubrick is much more interested in the chicken and egg question of inspiration and our never ending quest for technological advancement. It starts with a tool for hunting, but when we put our lives in the hands of machines, have we gone too far? Machines aren't programmed to reason like humans are. This is fascinating, even if its philosophical first and only scientific to a point. And furthermore I give him a pass because he gets the minutiae of space travel so perfectly. Look at the rules for the zero gravity toilet and tell me he doesn't have the makers of Destination Moon in his heart. He's using space travel to get at enormous philosophical questions, but at least he's not ignoring the facts. Ridley Scott's Alien gets the same pass. It asks so many questions in simply setting up the fact of interplanetary travel that I don't mind that it's a proto-slasher film at heart, Halloween or Jaws with a built in phallic death implement on the face of its killer. Alien makes you think without ever stopping you and asking you to do so. It's also one of the best films ever made, so don't think I'm setting the bar here simply to qualify as Sci-Fi. Though, frankly, look at The Day the Earth Stood Still; it's just The Next Voice You Hear inside out. Robert Wise is excused because, again, the ideas are there and it doesn't matter that this is basically a movie about a dictator holding the world hostage, and also he made one of the last hard sci-fi movies, The Andromeda Strain. But my point is, you don't have to be the most tactful or subtle artist to make what I'd call Science Fiction. Doug Trumbull's Silent Running or Saul Bass' Phase IV (both imperfect films) may be about fusing a hippie mentality to space travel and the mutant insect and asking whether one can actually live and let live when life has lost most of its meaning, but they at least try to get the facts straight. But does entry into the mean bug or space territory automatically grant you entry into the genre? What about The Beginning of the End or Assault on Dome 4? The former has large bugs and the latter is set in space and if you learned anything, you were paying much more careful attention than me. Why can't we see past generic trappings and see genre conventions? I don't think that simply happening in space means that a film should be called goddamn Science, especially because, in case you've forgotten, we haven't really made a lot of headway up there. Anyone living on fucking mars, yet? Anyone smoking a cigarette in a button down shirt up there, or polishing a shotgun or whatever the fuck? I didn't think so. If anything, they want audiences to take all of it for granted because not only do they not care about explaining it to you, but once you figure out that it has nothing to do with the plot, you're going to realize they took a boilerplate action movie and just threw it in space to get more money out of your wallet. And furthermore, it sells some films short. Dune is thought of as sci-fi, but that's more poly-sci. John Carter is a topnotch adventure yarn. Where exactly is the science in a man touching a magic stone and winding up on Mars? Calling it such cripples everyone's understanding of the film, which is based on a novel by someone who was much more interested in anthropology anyway (you don't write Tarzan without at least a passing interest in it), and whose grammar is much more aligned with the silly Verne and Wells adaptations from the 50s and 60s. Logic is gleefully thrown aside so that the film can soar on its own terms. Scientific this is not.

So what about Solaris? Or the films of Duncan Jones? Films that are grounded in scientifically sound situations (Space station? Legit. Human life support in whole buildings on the moon? Not impossible.) and use them to ask questions about our humanity. I have no problem with a film like Moon because though the science is fanciful and largely unexplained, it uses the cushion provided by the trappings of sci-fi to examine humanity in a way you can't down here, today, right now. Cloning and robots are funhouse mirrors, and if we have to define ourselves based on what we're not, then what are we left with? That's where the meat is. That's something you can sink your goddamn teeth into. Is it science? Only faintly. The science got us into the room and while there's no way a screenwriter in the early 70s or even now is going to have anything like the technical know-how to explain cloning or space travel, they don't push the boundaries of existing scientific knowledge any more than their predecessors. Other films and books have asked us to buy clones, so there's no need to do it in Moon. But that really only makes them heirs to the mantle of sci-fi in as much as the films that established the conventions deserved it. Moon leans on 2001, it becomes Science Fiction, so we don't look at the fact that the science, such as it is, isn't even remotely important to the questions posed. Yet, it takes place in space, so it's Science. I call bullshit. What the best science fiction comes down to, based on both my definition and the mainstream acceptance of the genre is whether it makes you think or whether it entertains you with spectacle not possible in the realms of the real. To put this in microcosm: A lot of people called Another Earth sci-fi, but no one calls Melancholia sci-fi. Another Earth is a widgety, twee nightmare over which hangs the idea of an idea. No one speaks for ten seconds about the mathematical probability of a planet that mirrors ours existing, let alone entering our fucking orbit (yeah, that's what I want to know about, how in Christ's Dick does a planet that's EXACTLY LIKE OURS just leave it's fucking orbit when our planet has never done that? Did they all goddamn panic when their planet just leapt out of its galaxy and ambled on over here? Screenwriters? Nothing?). Melancholia uses the same idea in a way that cuts down on improbability and amps ups its metaphor, by making its rogue planet an almost malevolent, empty rock, a much more potent reflection of earth, if you ask me. But the movie itself is about depression. The thing I love about Melancholia is that Lars Von Trier (who, in case you don't know, don't give a fuck) fills his film with scientific speculation, it just all happens to be wrong. And it's probably going to wind up in the drama section of the imaginary video store in my head because it's about people first and gets those details 100% right (this is if said fake video store doesn't have a Lars Von Trier section). Like Kubrick and Tarkovsky before him, he had other shit on his mind than what goes on in space, but paid lip service to actual fact, anyway. This is what real filmmakers do.

Look at any major publication's list of the best science fiction films of all time (fuck it, any blogger) and you'll probably run into a lot of the same titles. Total Film's list makes me furious not only because they consistently put terrible films above great ones but because there's nothing remotely scientific about the worst of them. First of all, don't tell me that Robocop is a better film than Solaris (scratch that; first of all, don't compare them), and do not tell me Robocop's about the fucking science. It's called cocksucking ROBOCOP!!! It's about spectacle, and if you're a Verhoeven apologist, it's about satirically skewering corporate greed and the line between the public's approval of violence and its understanding of violence. If you want to be generous, it's dumbly violent because it's "about" dumb violence. I'd buy that if Verhoeven hadn't made Total Recall, which strips the science out of its source story by Philip K. Dick, to make one of the dumbest, most violent movies ever made (which, incidentally, also called sci-fi despite someone surviving on Mars despite having no helmet for...what, a minute and a half? Two minutes? I forget, because it's one of many scientific snafus in that very stupid movie still called Science Fiction). But anyway, the point of Verhoeven's films, at least his so called Sci-fi films, isn't the science, but the opportunity it grants him to poke fun at some aspect of American culture (and Fuck you, by the way, man; we've got problems but we don't need advice from the guy who made Showgirls, thanks. You contribute to the problem, you don't get to point fingers). Ditto The Matrix. There's only the dimmest scientific thought at work in that obscenely violent film. It's all about world-building and asking if...like...this is the real world...and shit. I'm being condescending because I hate that movie and don't find it entertaining or morally sound, but, anyone can tell you it's about consciousness, not physics, even if its the film's bending of physical reality that grants it its visual potency. The problem with arguing over its scientific relevance is that it ditches reality almost immediately. And yet there it is on the Science Fiction films list, next to 2001 and The Fly. Most of the films generally called great sci-fi, in fact, don't really belong here. Empire Strikes Back? Nope. Inception? Fucking hardly. Aliens? Would you stop. Entertaining films that can't exist in our modern reality, yes. Scientific? In what sense, I'd like to know. And I'd like to make it abundantly clear that I like those three films a good deal, Inception especially, but not because of the way they use the scientific method. Speculative Fiction is the better term for films like this, but we also need a corrective for a film like Aliens or The Deadly Mantis. You could call them horror films, but they want to be war films. Godzilla is a science fiction film. Its sequels are just monster movies. In the meantime we need a term that covers everything from Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing people's arms off on Mars to Mothra destroying Tokyo, because simply going to or coming from space does not qualify as scientific. It's just lazy writing. Furthermore, they're only scientific as long as the equation is new. An alien gets here, and yeah we'd study their anatomy, but then it becomes about anthropology. What is their culture like, how they perceive our lifestyles, etc. And after that, it's just Star Trek. Other planets exist and we can visit them, but soon it's just going to be about interstellar warfare.

I sincerely don't think this is a question of my being too inside of a particular argument. It's simple enough. If you watch a film and goddamn learned something scientific, I'd hear arguments for it being considered Sci-Fi. But my problem is that I think people think they're learning more than they are, which means they're being denied something more than what's out there. And this takes me back to working at the record store. Yeah, it's pretentious and mean-spirited of me to make fun of someone in my head when they ask if we carry One Direction, but only because I've seen just how truly brilliant music can be, and I know that it can be the most profound art and can alter your perception of what's possible in the medium and if you settle for what's on the radio or television, you are denying yourself the pleasure that can come from the greatest music and letting a few people decide your preferences for you. You aren't questioning, you aren't learning, and to my way of thinking, you're limiting how happy you can be. We can call any film that takes place in space Science, but we're limiting ourselves hugely. Break the limit, ask questions, don't believe something just because it's been told to you. It could just be fiction.

Better Late Than Never: A Latecomer's Season by Season look at The Sopranos

Season 1



I grew up without HBO. The first time I ever really learned about the possible quality of what the network had to offer was in college when I was introduced to both The Sopranos and Deadwood (the latter of which I devoured in about the exact runtime of the show played nonstop until its conclusion).

But The Sopranos eluded me. And I don't exactly know why. The show was a bit of a juggernaut as far as critics go and I'm not one to stay away from something related to the mafia. It was a bit daunting since it had finished its 6 season run (the final season is 21 episodes) and I was looking at about 86 hours of television to put myself through. At that point I really wasn't a big TV watcher anyway and had spent most of my time trying to catch up on as many films as humanly possible.

But late in my college career I discovered Mad Men, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, rediscovered Deadwood, and suddenly realized that though its an extreme case, television can occasionally be an art form. And after becoming an avid reader of The AV Club I came to realize that The Sopranos sits right on top of the hierarchy of quality television. All that in mind, I decided to give it a go.

The first season of most TV shows has a lot of work to do. They need to introduce a universe, and their characters. The universe is New Jersey so that's easily done. The characters, and Sopranos has a ton, was a bit more complicated. Watching the first season about 13 years after it premiered makes a lot of fashion choices on the show extremely laughable. Not because the wardrobe choices are bad but because they're true to form. We actually used to dress that way, and what's worse, a lot of people still do.

The actors that portray all the main characters are brilliant and as far as I'm concerned they're really the only thing that keeps the first season afloat. The storyline is good, not great. And the technical side of things is mediocre at best. Nothing about the show ever smacks of quality but apart from the extreme believability of the performances I don't know if I could've ever predicted the show would become the critical and cultural juggernaut it's become.

As far as the writing is concerned, David Chase the show's creator winds up doing the majority of the work which is typical for a first season. He writes well. His characters are believable and their motivations even more so. There is a familiarity to a lot of what occurs in the series so either he did his research or he's got a lot of experience with italian families. Most of the crime side of things ends up being a lot less interesting than Tony Soprano's home life or his sessions with his psychiatrist. Tony's cronies (rhymed....unintentional) are generally just there for comedic effect and the drama that arises out of Tony's nephew Christopher's attempt to rise to power takes the backseat to how much of an idiot he is.

The show survived and got renewed, as far as I'm concerned, because of Tony's sessions with Dr. Melfi, his psychiatrist. The real written power of the show emerges here. The themes, the metaphors, and the true vision of a lot of the show is hidden in these often too short sequences. Tony Soprano's obsession with a small family of ducks that live in his pool is the first real inkling the series gives you toward its true intentions and moreover I think its the reason that critics went gaga over the show from day 1. Tony Soprano is an anti-hero and no mistake and a great one at that. You won't always like him but you'll always like to watch him. And unlike a lot of attempts to create such characters in any art form, The Sopranos gives you a real shot at looking into the man's mind. Doing so keeps me watching this season.

At the end of the first season I'd give the show a pretty average score. I don't resent it at this stage in its development but based on what I've seen its still got a long way to go to become the show that so many call one of the greatest series of all time.

You know what luck is? Luck is believing you're lucky

“Don't be afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of everything that can be."

In mid December of 2011 HBO, in their infinite wisdom decided to air a sneak peak of their upcoming series Luck. The show featured Dustin Hoffman making an extremely rare appearance on television and script that had been agonized over by David Milch, one of the few true TV auteurs. “Splitting the Atom” by Massive Attack opened an extremely slow burning pilot directed by Michael Mann. The whole episode reeked of cool. From the opening credit sequence, to Stuart Dryburgh's razor sharp horse race cinematography, to the killer dialogue that drove some incredibly developed characters (remember it's only been an hour by the time the closing credits rolled). HBO had given David Milch another shot and it had paid off in a big way. A beautiful way. A truly cool way. The show wouldn't officially air for another month and a half.

I was not happy about this.

I had been weighed. I had been measured. And I had been found wanting. Luckily the time passed quickly and I found myself ready to hunker down and enjoy another show that took real time and energy to watch. Not because its in any way bad, but because it's written with such poise that taking the time to really understand the themes and ideas being presented will ultimately make you (or in this case, Me) a better human being.

I know I know. Thats quite a bit of hyperbole for the second paragraph. But hear me out. David Milch understands a lot more about humanity than his often inaccessible writing lets on. Without going into too many details about the show, the viewer is faced with a cast of about thirteen characters to keep track of. And except for a the pair that is Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Farina, and the foursome of actors that play a strangely lucky group of gamblers, the characters are islands that rarely drift near one another. For those who are fans of Deadwood (and what I mean by this is, if you haven't watched the show by now, please please do so) you'll know that this is a similar formula to the beginnings of Milch's three season masterwork. The binding agent in both Luck and Deadwood is the setting. The titular town is a character in of itself as is the Santa Anita racetrack in Deadwood. Watching people pass by one another in such tangental manner is so much more telling of real life interaction than most television series, or films for that manner, dare to tread.

As the series progresses these characters do end up running into one another, though there is never a “wash up on the island” moment like Lost where suddenly everyone is thrown together.

What this ends up meaning is there is far more pressure put on the writers of the series. There's a storyline for seemingly every character so they need to be interesting. Now I'm talking like we're in some high stakes game here where if you don't earn your fans respect you lose. That's not the case. Not too many people watched Luck but thats from the get go. They never hemorrhaged viewers. They had a small and dedicated fan base and I think Deadwood was the same (though all the critical love since the show's cancellation has brought many more to the ill fated South Dakota camp).

Though Milch writes in a language all his own this show should've garnered more fans from the onset than Deadwood in my opinion. It boasted a few more familiar faces and was written in modern day vernacular. Deadwood was like Shakespeare. Spend enough time with it and you're golden but for virgin ears it took a bit to get into the rhythm of things. But aside from all that the show was very formulaic. Every episode represented a day and followed a slow rise to a climax represented by a horse race and then the come down as all the characters ended their respective days. And at the end of everyday the soothe sayer that quickly became Nick Nolte's character would deliver many a soliloquy in true Milch fashion to round up all the ideas that had been tossed around in the episode. These were nice bits as they helped organize my thoughts as a viewer and more importantly they showcase Nolte's true ability to act.

The show is called Luck for a very clear reason. Sure there's a quartet of gamblers who win enough prize money to win a race horse that ends up being an incredible animal right in the pilot. And one of those gamblers finds himself playing a lot of really good poker hands. But moving past those characters you learn the true nature of luck. You learn David Milch's definition of the word. I excerpted a quote at the beginning of this article that demonstrates what I mean perfectly. Ace Berstein (Dustin Hoffman) is let out of jail in the first scene. He then proceeds to methodically exact his revenge on those who put him there for a number of years. He does all this from box seats at the race track, the back of a beautiful Mercedes, or from the terrace of an incredible condo. This man made his luck years before going to prison and now that he's out he's going to do it again.

This is where the “making you a better person” angle comes in. Milch never traps any of his characters. One of his jockey characters is a hardline drug addict. In and out of rehab and such (a place Milch has been himself). But even a character who would be doomed in another series, especially because of his secondary nature to the rest of the show's cast, is given the chance to regain who he once was. Thats the real message behind Luck for me. Every person has a chance to make their life better. And the point that Milch really hits home with is this. If you were born with no chance at all, there is still time to try. And the beauty of luck is that you find it in the strangest places.

Luck was an idea very close to David Milch's heart. He's expressed a deep love for horses because of their power and grace. Even in the pilot, Milch makes it a point to have his horse trainer characters take the riding crop out of the racer's hands. He hates the mistreatment of these horses because he loves them. Its a true shame the show ended the way it did. Make whatever jokes you want to make about the title of the show versus what happened but what I said stands.

Deadwood was the first television show that I really sat down and payed attention to who was directing the episodes. I did this because Milch and his writing team were giving these filmmakers absolute gold to shoot. The same applies to Luck. Even more so actually because all the episodes were set up the same way so directors were really given a chance to express themselves and leave their mark on each episode. The horse races became the real showcase of vision for a lot of the auteurs who worked on the show's 9 episodes. Some were good. Some were incredible. Two of the races in particular ended up bringing just a hint of water to my eyes because of both their beauty and because of my amazement that they got some of the coverage they managed to get. I was quite nervous at first because Michael Mann left such a stamp on the pilot I wasn't sure the show would work without his touch. Luckily for me I was wrong and every episode has it's own spark to it.

I was really going to provide more photos of some of the horse races but its really a waste. You don't get the full effect from stills.

So it was good while it lasted. And I know its only tv but

“I’m going to miss the optimistic little smile on Dustin Hoffman’s face as he watches his horse on his webcam. I’m going to miss that little goat wandering around the stable, nuts the size of pumpkins. I’ll miss Escalante murmuring advice from the stands and Walter sitting in the stable, wondering about seeing a goat from the front, a horse from the rear, and a man from all sides. I’ll even miss the bit players, like Claire or Mike or Joey, people who weren’t in the main action but were just off to the side, informing what the others did and giving us a sense of who they were as people. And I’ll miss that horse the episode ends on, craning its neck over the stall, staring off into the distance at something we don’t see, its eyes both warm and weird to us. It’s a fellow living being, yet we’ll never really understand it, much as we try. But that’s true of people, too, and still we keep trying. That's where I'll leave the show: a place where we try to keep finding understanding and keep coming up short. Yet we keep plugging away because we must.”

- Todd VanDerWerff

Thanks for reading, gang.

-Fox

In Defense of the Procedural

In the past few weeks, New York Mag has decided to take on the hefty job of determining the best TV drama of the last 25 years. Their approach, albeit nonsensical, is quite entertaining. They've set it up like a tournament, pitting one against another, then having the winner advance to the next round. This ridiculous system has led to a lot of silly match ups like "My So-called Life vs. The Wire" or "Breaking Bad vs. Friday Night Lights." It has also led to a giant fucking travesty.

http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/the-best-tv-drama-of-the-last-25-years.html

The fact is that everyone's a critic, and everyone has their opinions. And to be honest, there's literally no real-world impact of some guy saying Twin Peaks is better than Battlestar Galactica. Not to mention, no agreed definition of the word "best." No, my problem is not in what they picked (they're not done yet, though I have my suspicion), it's with how they picked them. They're on round 3 and we have, let's see, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos. All the shows have one thing in common: they are all examples of long-form TV story structures. Shows like The X-files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer get tossed to the side when pitted against long-form juggernauts and while sometimes it is an example of one show being a boundary breaking, heart-stoppingly good show, sometimes it's just bias.

For whatever reason, we've all fallen in love with long-form Television lately. And while, I'll be the first to admit there are certain stories you could only tell with long-form (Homeland being the first that comes to mind), I'm becoming increasingly aggravated with the pervading assumption that long-form=quality.

Let's talk examples: Mad Men is coming back to our living rooms this week, and with it, the customary parade of critical fellatio. Mad Men is, in my opinion, one of the most irritating long-form Dramas on TV. It has some of the worst actors I can imagine (January Jones, Vincent Kartheiser), side-plots worthy of the CW (no offense to my boys at Supernatural) that occasionally pop up and take over the show (most of these side plots involve January Jones and Vincent Kartheiser), and the constant need to punch you in the face with the 1960s. It always seems like the writers are afraid that if they don't constantly remind you what decade it is, you might forget. As if the indoor smoking wasn't enough. The show occasionally replaces plot points with long pensive shots of people smoking and staring at nothing (this happens, literally every episode), and constantly undercuts it's own characters by forcing them into archetypes so the writers can bring up some social issue (usually about sexism). Now, I want to stress that I don't hate Mad Men. Sometimes, the show manages to be really goddamn interesting and fun to watch. I just want to point out that the show has some serious problems. Problems that are so often overlooked because no one wants to be the one critic in the room not getting on his knees and facing Mad Men Mecca.

Now let's talk about the procedural. In the advent of this long-form boon, there's been two major responses I've noticed from the world of procedural TV. First, you have the unsuccessful (though one more immediately than the other) Play Boy Club, and Pan-Am. These two shows pitifully attempted to grasp on to whatever makes Mad Men so popular and cram it all into a procedural structure. Unfortunately, they both wound up listless messes because when you invite the comparison to an established AMC flagship, you might as well shoot yourself in the foot.

But there are other procedurals that perfectly merge the long-form season arc while also giving solid individual stories every episode. Shows like Justified, Luther, Doctor Who, The Good Wife, and (the late) Terriers. Shows that manage(d) to tell compelling and dynamic stories with only 45 minutes of screen time to tell them. It is an art form, and a difficult one at that, to tell a concise story. As any writer will tell you, a short story is often far more difficult than a novel. And while we're at the comparison, let's go down the Rushdie road and talk about the TV-Book comparison. A lot of popular novel writers are discovering that, to avoid the hatchet job most movies will give them, the best solution is to get a TV adaptation. The wildly popular (and increasingly annoying) True Blood, and the very big budget (and shining bastion of all that is good fantasy) Game of Thrones both stand as testaments to why any novelist worth their best-seller status should be taking their words to TV. But if a season is a book and a chapter is an episode then since when is a chapter better than a short story? This is my point, really. TV critics seem to be in the business of excusing poorly paced, or badly written moments, as long as they're leading somewhere, yet never give the proper credit to the shows that don't hide behind their ending climax, and instead just give you a brilliant episode of television with no aspirations of building towards a series finale.

Before I wrap up, I want to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer as I so often do. This whole tirade really began with Buffy losing to Mad Men so I guess I should at least explain why that pissed me off. Buffy is campy. It's sometimes woefully soapy, badly acted, horribly choreographed, and usually a little annoying. BUT, Buffy the Vampire Slayer produced some of television's most shining moments. The episode "The Body" took a stark and realistic look at death. And not monster caused death, just aneurysm caused death. The episode has no score, and only four scenes. The show ignored conventions to the point of being almost experimental. There's a great moment when Xander Harris punches a plaster wall out of anger, and then can't get his hand out. This constant finger pointed at the conventional while also rejecting the cliche is what makes Buffy one of my favorite shows ever. I would also gesture emphatically towards episodes like "Hush" where Whedon threw out his signature snappy dialogue in favor of a totally silent and often terrifying episode. Or "The Zeppo" which is a great dissection of being cool in high school, from sex to popularity to rebellion. Plus, the episode serves an example of Buffy making fun of itself by constantly having Xander on the sidelines, only barely involved with a fight to save the world from an apocalypse. All in 45 minutes. No pieces were set up in the previous episode to get us there. We were given the beginning middle and end of a great goddamn story that grabbed our hearts, or tickled our brains, or totally redefined what TV was and we didn't need a "previously on" to enjoy it.

So, I guess, fuck you NY Mag.