A Series of Endings Pt. 1: Introduction

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Andrew

 
When I really think about it, it’s sad.

The characters in our favorite books, movies, and television shows are not really our friends. Their journeys–the times that they’ve struggled, succeeded, tripped, and triumphed–are events that we have, at most, witnessed, rather than participated in. Those people and their adventures do not exist. They never did, they never can, and they never will. Our having experienced those events vicariously does not make them truly belong to us. No matter how genuine those stories feel to us, no matter how much time we may have “spent” with these individuals, they are all mere reflections, tricks of light and stage and pen that create the illusion of something real, even when that illusion is earnestly felt.

But we, or at least I, cannot help but feel that kind of connection to these characters and their stories. When critics talk about the world of a book feeling “lived in,” they’re underscoring that sense of truth that can pervade a work. When they talk about an emotional moment feeling “earned,” they mean that there’s been some build, some understanding between creator and audience that has been established over time, that makes a scene or a speech or a character feel real. That’s what the best works are able to do–make their audiences feel a connection to something that’s not really there.

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Dallas Cowboys 2013 NFL Draft: A Failure in Triage

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Andrew


A professor of mine once gave a firm warning on the importance of triage. He explained, “Every year, I tell my class that each exam question is worth the same amount. And yet every year, I read the exams of students who wrote near-perfect and exhaustive answers to the first question, but who clearly did not leave enough time to answer the other two. It’s the product of an inherently flawed thought process: ‘If I just make the one answer perfect enough, it will make up for the others, despite the fact that they’re worth an equal number of points.’ Well, it won’t; it can’t, and at the end of the day, you’ll do poorly.”

This warning was stuck in my head as I watched the Dallas Cowboys’ 2013 draft, a draft that seemed as focused on perfecting the areas where the team already excels, rather than improving on the team’s glaring weaknesses.

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The Simpsons and the Division of Al Jean Pt. 1: Little Girl in the Big Ten (S13E20)

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Andrew

 
It’s fairly easy to divide up the first twelve years of the The Simpsons, into different eras based on who served as the showrunner for each season. Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon established the show in its first two seasons. Al Jean and Mike Reiss took the series to new heights in Seasons 3 and 4. David Mirkin brought a more joke-heavy style in Seasons 5 and 6. Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein ran the show with a more experimental bent in its seventh and eighth seasons. And finally, Mike Scully presided over the series’ creative decline in Seasons 9-12. Each period within this time frame has its own style and sensibility that can be traced back to the individuals in charge.

After that, however, things get tricky. Al Jean returned as showrunner for Season 13, and  instead of the usual two-to-three year tour of duty on the job, he has proceeded to hang onto that title for over twelve years, producing more than 250 episodes in that time.

That’s nearly half of the show’s run, and it’s much more difficult to chop up those seasons up into discrete eras. Some of the show’s most ardent fans have thrown around terms like “Early Jean,” “Late Jean,” and “the HD era.” Some have tried to use The Simpsons Movie as a dividing line during Jean’s tenure. But it’s much harder to classify the gradual, sometimes rocky, evolution of the show under a single individual than it is to note the sharp changes in direction that came when different showrunners each brought their distinct visions for the series to the table.

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Laughing at Sincerity: The Room, Tommy Wiseau, and The Earnest Failure

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Andrew


The Room has quickly become one of my favorite movies. I cannot, and could not, begin to call it a good film, but it is enjoyably and transcendently inept. The movie’s premise is a love triangle between Johnny, a well-meaning banker, Lisa, his fiancée, and Mark, his best friend. But that basic description does not begin to capture all that is The Room.

The internet has exhaustively documented the film’s numerous flaws and the insanity going on behind the scenes, but in brief, Tommy Wiseau, the film’s writer, director, star, and overall creative visionary, produced the perfect storm of terrible movies. The writing is embarrassing; the acting is weak and wooden, and the dialogue is quotable for all the wrong reasons. Plots are picked up and dropped seemingly at random; characters emerge and disappear for no reason, and the film is so poorly directed and edited that it could be considered avant-garde if people believed it were a deliberate departure from the norm.

I’ve watched this unintentional masterpiece five times. I have shared it with my fiancée, with my parents, and with multiple groups of friends, because it’s one of the movies that just has to be seen to be believed. It’s the type of film that you would never expect to actually come to fruition. Its vision is too singular. Making a movie involves too much effort from too many people for one individual to be able to create something so unique and so awful. In short, The Room is a cinematic train wreck that is as breathtaking as it is bewildering.

But recently, a comment about the movie’s questionable notoriety gave me pause. Greg Sestero, one of the film’s “stars,” is writing a new book about the film. In an article about the book’s release, one online commenter complained about Sestero capitalizing on Wiseau and the movie’s infamy, arguing that,“at some point it feels like he’s exploiting a man who’s not all there.” It made me wonder if there’s something wrong about the joy I derive from The Room.

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Welcome to Jason Garrett’s Last Year as Head Coach of the Dallas Cowboys

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Andrew


Welcome to Jason Garrett’s last year as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

Today is the first official day of the new league year in the NFL. And it will be Garrett’s last one in the Cowboys organization. I realize that’s a fairly bold prediction to make before a single snap in the 2013 NFL season. But I implore my fellow Cowboys fans to be honest with themselves as we all look forward to next season. We know this story. We’ve seen it before. And we know how it ends.

I admit that I was not terribly hopeful when Garrett took over. I was not enamored with the offense under his tutelage. I was not encouraged by his run as interim head coach. I was not enthused at the prospect of continuing the culture in the clubhouse that had existed under Wade Phillips. But I was still hopeful that the Cowboys’ new head coach would prove doubters like me wrong and lead Dallas to glory.

Suffice it to say, Jason Garrett has not obliged. Instead, his regime has carried on the mediocrity of his predecessor: Two full seasons as head coach. Two 8-8 finishes. Two games over .500 in his overall record as HC. Two third place finishes in the division. Two more years of missed opportunities and disappointing endings. Two more losses in end-of-season elimination games with a playoff berth and the division on the line.

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An Unpopular Opinion: Seth MacFarlane was a Great Oscar Host

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Andrew


Fans of The Simpsons are not prone to liking Seth MacFarlane.

Among the Springfield faithful, MacFarlane’s Family Guy is chastised for having borrowed, referenced, or outright stolen a great deal from the denizens of Springfield. He’s criticized among the diehard fans of the show for being tasteless, lazy, and self-indulgent. Suffice it to say, as an avowed Simpsons nerd, he’s not my favorite person in the world.

But he was a great Oscar host.

A good Oscar host can make the room a little uncomfortable. A good Oscar host can laugh at himself. A good Oscar host is versatile. A good Oscar host knows how to put on a show. A good Oscar host knows how to deliver a comic aside. A good Oscar host can bring something unexpected.

And Seth MacFarlane’s ability to do all of those things is why he was great at the Academy Awards. He threw out a fair share of  barbs while surrounded by Tinseltown’s elite. He channeled the clever, if raunchy, feistiness, that gave Family Guy its initial cult following. He harnessed his love for Old Hollywood with his crooning, vaudeville-style repartee, and song and dance routines. He tempered it all with healthy doses of self-effacement to soften the blows in both directions.

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Would You Recommend Battlestar Galactica to a Friend? Reflecting on the Series Through the Lens of its Finale

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Andrew


Would you recommend Battlestar Galactica to a friend?

That depends. Would you encourage them to cheer for a sports team who you knew would succeed all season long, only to suffer a heartbreaking loss in the championship game? Would you tell them to eat a restaurant where most of the meal will be great, but the last course will be practically inedible? Would you have them vote for a candidate who’ll prove a dedicated public servant for most of their years in office, only to tarnish all of their past accomplishments at the very end of their term?

Such is the dilemma of the Battlestar Galactica fan. Rarely has a series produced such a strong, complex, and compelling body of work that results in such an ill-conceived, poorly thought out, and above all unsatisfying ending. How do you encourage someone to start a journey that will feature tremendous highs, exhilarating adventures, and gripping emotional moments, but that you know will end in severe disappointment?

The answer is – with serious reservations.

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The Martyr

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Andrew


Today is the day that I will die.

And I am okay with that. I’m scared. I can’t lie about that fact, but I’m okay. The fear in my heart swells, but then it fades. It invades my thoughts in the few quiet moments I have to myself, but dulls and winnows in the times that should be the most daunting.

That’s what bothers me. They sell it you as this straight line. They tell you that everything in you will rise and rise and rise until the big moment. That you’ll just keep going up and up and up. But it doesn’t, and you don’t. It rises and falls, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, never so focused or so direct, even when it feels like you’re headed in the right direction.

But I will be a martyr.

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Can Greatness Just Be Funny? – The Simpsons and “Marge on the Lam” (s05e06)

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Andrew

 

Mike Scully is, however unfairly, the bête noire of The Simpsons in the eyes of the show’s most ardent fans. Scully was the series’ showrunner for seasons 9-12, and he shoulders much of the blame for the show’s decline. One of the most frequent criticisms leveled against Scully is that he had no mind for story or character. Instead, the episodes under his watch have been slammed as nothing more than joke after joke with no deeper grounding in storytelling or consistent characterization to add color or depth to the comedy.

But Mike Scully was hired by a man who has both faced similar criticisms and presided over some of the show’s peak years. David Mirkin joined The Simpsons as the series’ showrunner for seasons 5 and 6. He brought with him a brand new staff, including Mike Scully, after the departure of most of the show’s stalwart writers from the first four seasons.

Mirkin was known for having few concerns about realism in The Simpsons. His only writing credit on the show is for “Deep Space Homer” an outlandish (and subsequently lampshaded) tale where Homer’s angry crank calls somehow lead to him joining N.A.S.A. and launching into space with Buzz Aldrin. While the show’s most devoted fans look back on Mirkin’s tenure fondly, some of those same diehards point to this lack of grounding and diminish him in comparison to other showrunners from the series history. In fact, a recurring criticism of David Mirkin is that he was merely “Mike Scully with better jokes.”

“Marge on the Lam” was the first episode produced under his watch, and it does little to contradict this narrative of Mirkin leading a “nothing but gags” administration. The episode is jam-packed with jokes, many of them pretty outrageous, and story and heart clearly take a backseat to the humor.

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It’s Still a (Reasonably) Wonderful Life

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Andrew

 

Classic films tend to evoke a decidedly mixed response from me at first blush. On the one hand, I’m drawn to them. I find myself enticed to not only find out what all the fuss is about, but to consume one more piece of our national zeitgeist. Seeing a film that’s as sewn into fabric of our popular culture as It’s a Wonderful Life gives me a connection both to the scores of other people who’ve seen the film and to the America that only exists in Norman Rockwell paintings.

That connection creates a yearning for an idyllic past that never existed beyond the original celluloid. It’s perpetuated annually as families gather ’round for another holiday rebroadcast. I don’t mean this as a knock against the film. In harmony with the story of the movie itself, the viewer can see something that might have been, but never was, and use it to gain a bit of perspective. It creates a connection to the myriad individuals who find themselves reaching for that same popular myth — real people united by a shared, imaginary reference point.

Despite this, and perhaps because of this, I also watch these films with an unavoidable air of skepticism. We live in an age that thrives on and revels in the slaughter of sacred cows. Irony, sarcasm, and cynicism are the order of the day, and I am hard-pressed to resist. I do my best to keep an open mind going into these movies, but there’s a part of me that invariably has to be tamped down — a part that’s perpetually prepared to ask, “what’s the big deal?”

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