Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE ... for snacks.

Yeah, okay: The Avengers is one of the better superhero movies out recently. This is faint praise, though, kids, so let’s stop acting like the fact that a movie starring Thor of all things is somehow fantastic just because it’s made with a bit of verve and cleverness. It is clever, and I did enjoy it, but it’s just a good movie. If someone hands you hundreds of millions of dollars, Robert Downey Jr, and Scarlett Johansson’s ass and you can’t even make a good movie, you are Fail on two legs, my friend.

So, here’s a few things I liked and a few things I disliked about this movie. Disclaimer: I do not read comics and barely know who any of these people are.

LIKED: The character bits. Whedon did make me feel like all of the characters were actual beings with motivations and personalities, and not just HEROES with POWERS, SHOUTING all the time! Even Thor, who is a ridiculous character on a good day, is distinct from the other folks. Even Hawkeye, who, as written in the movie has very little to do aside from glower and shoot arrows, comes out at the end with something resembling a personality. The result is that the final climatic battle, whatever other flaws it has, at least has the Avengers acting as a coherent unit in ways that make sense, whereas most blockbuster movies just have the heroes fighting the villains in chaotic, loud ways. The Avengers have a captain (Captain America, naturally) who is trained in military tactics and techniques, so it makes sense that he takes charge of organizing the team. They put the flying heroes in the air, the guy with the superhuman marksman’s eye on top of a building for aerial intelligence, and the Hulk is used the only way he can be: As heavy armor. They work together in ways that make sense.

LIKED: The way Whedon got past the fact that all these folks are, after all, superhuman. In most superhero movies the heroes are just too powerful; it’s difficult to drum up any drama. When Superman shows up, after all, how can he be defeated? Usually they solve this problem by making the villain(s) just as powerful, but this reduces the final fights to exaggerated brawls and that’s always kinda boring. In The Avengers, however, they solve this neatly: The villains are never portrayed as the equals of The Avengers. Loki is a cowering fool who’s no match for anyone in a fight, and his mooks from another dimension are easily torn up even by the Black Widow, who’s using nothing more than a handgun, martial arts, and her bosoms. But here’s the genius: The bad guys just keep coming. Whedon does a good job of showing each Avenger being worn down over the course of the final battle. Sure, they keep slaughtering the alien army, but the alien army just keeps coming. Whedon makes a point of showing each Avenger being pushed to their limit by sheer exhaustion: Even The Hulk ends up cornered by a dozen of the aliens, who pour fire on him, slowly adapting their tactics. Captain America is bleeding and panting. Black Widow is bleeding and barely able to stand. Even Thor is winded and bleeding. Iron Man is low on power and his suit of armor is dented and torn up. These guys just can’t go on forever, and that’s exactly how long they would have to. This is a clever way to surmount the fact that your characters are demigods.

LIKED: The Hulk. They made him the funniest part of the film, and that was absolutely a genius call.

DISLIKED: The endless middle part on the helicarrier. MY GOD. It was about six lifetimes long, and if Whedon used that endless tract of nothing to deepen the characters and illuminate their relationships, I still died a little inside waiting for something to happen. Could have trimmed it significantly without too much loss.

DISLIKED: The fact that there are two visually-identical Hulks in this movie. Did I miss something, or wasn’t the whole point of the middle section on the helicarrier that Bruce Banner cannot be trusted, and that if he turns Hulk he will SMASH them ALL into PIECES? And then he does turn Hulk and indeed he SMASHES everything to PIECES, including Boobs Widow. Who has a nice bit of PTSD afterwards, which is a nice touch. But then! At the very end, after falling out of the sky, Bruce Banner shows up at the final battle and all of a sudden he’s totally in control, yo, and can Hulk any time he wants. And when he does Hulk, he is totally still himself and can make jokes and punch Thor just to be funny, and save people, and makes no move at all to SMASH Boobs Widow. Strange, that. Also: Bad writing.

DISLIKED: The villains. The villains were awful. Loki and Thor’s innate ridiculousness aside (which is tough, because the ridiculous nature of those characters is huge and awesome in nature), Loki was a slightly stupid and very smug guy who never seemed to be in control in any real sense, and whose petulance reduced him to comic fodder by the end. The aliens were sort of dull. We knew nothing about them, learned nothing about them, and have no idea what in fuck they were. Is it asking too much for one villain, who gets just enough screen time to be fleshed out and made hateful? Apparently, yes. I think filmmakers should be forced to watch The Dark Knight and take notes on the character of The Joker when writing their villain characters.

Overall, though, the humor and deftness of the script won the day. Captain America saying “There’s only one God, Ma’am, and I don’t think he looks like that” (paraphrase) to Boobs Widow should have been a corny line that hit the floor with a clunk, but it works. They have six main characters but it never felt crowded, and none of the Avengers feels useless. The plot makes no fucking sense at all, of course (or, better said, the plot makes whatever sense you want it to because the MacGuffin at the center of it is vaguely magical and can do anything), but that is almost Standard Operating Procedure now, so why complain? Downey charms, Johansson spends the whole movie in a skintight outfit, and Mark Ruffalo gets the Best Line of Dialogue Written for a Hulk, ever:

HULK is kinda irritable.

What’s not to love?

Jeff Approves.

Creatively Dead, but Don Draper Still Fills Out a Suit Well

Writing about Mad Men is almost a blogging cliché; it’s one of those shows that only the people who love it watch, thus every write up is either filled with praise or disappointment on a grand scale. It’s as close to a cultural event as we have these days; shows don’t draw 30 million viewers a week any more, so a show like Mad Men that has a certain sheen of class gets attention even if its viewership means it would have been canceled after five episodes in, say, 1982.

I love reading recaps of Mad Men episodes because the collective hive mind of the Internet often finds little details that I missed, details I can then regurgitate and use to seem smart at cocktail parties. Although, come to think of it, I never get invited to cocktail parties, so perhaps my strategery is not working as planned. Put a pin in that. Because as I read everyone’s recaps of the 5/27/12 episode The Other Woman, I am convinced The Internet is getting it wrong.

Specifically, I’m referring to the Don/Joan dynamic in this episode. If you don’t watch Mad Men and don’t give a shit about Don Draper, please, please stop reading before I bore you to death.

In The Other Woman, Joan is asked to sleep with a Jaguar representative in order to guarantee his vote for SCDP to take on Jaguar’s account. It’s a heinous and disgusting request, and Joan is horrified, but also tempted, especially when Lane suggests (for his own heinous reasons) that she hold out for a 5% partnership in the company in exchange. 5% of a growing ad agency about to land a major car account would set Joan and her son up relatively well for the future, especially since she makes about $12,500  a year, which would be about $70,000 today. Not a bad salary, but throw in a kid to raise and 5% of the profits on top of that and it’s pretty tempting.

Let’s put aside the interesting fact that we now know Don owns %25 of SCDP. Or maybe we already knew that. At any rate, I wonder if Joan’s 5% is going to come into play someday.

Anyway, Don is the only partner who votes against even asking Joan to sleep with the rep. When he finds out about the partnership offer (made without his knowledge) he even goes to Joan’s apartment to talk her out of it. Everyone seems to think he does this out of a sense of protective affection for Joan, or moral outrage.

He does not.

He doesn’t want Joan to sleep with the rep because he wants to win the Jaguar account solely with his creative team’s genius and his own power of personality doing the pitch.

The week before, Don made a stirring speech about winning the Jaguar account. He wants to get back to the old Don, the genius who came up with fantastic ideas and who then almost willed clients to buy them. The guy who was so powerful purely in his creative forces that an entire agency coalesced around him. No one else could have created SCDP. Don Draper was the key ingredient.

Since then, Don’s life has faded. He got divorced, then remarried, his best friend died, and he almost drank himself to death. But what’s really gone, truly gone, is his creative spark. Season 5 of Mad Men has been about Don’s creative death. He hasn’t had a good idea in a very, very long time (at least an entire year). When he stayed up all night to come up with an idea for the Snoballs account, he was barely able to squirt out a decent, perfectly usable idea. Nothing genius. He saw the Jaguar account as a away to get himself back, to stay in the office all the time and force himself to be the old Don. I think he would have preferred to come up with the genius idea himself, but he was satisfied to at least be the captain of the team that managed it.

Some people have noted that his Jaguar pitch was staged to be as dramatic and powerful as the “carousel” pitch to Kodak in an earlier season, but was disappointing. I believe that’s on purpose. The pitch was perfectly fine, but not genius, and it reflects where Don is today. He’s a pro. He has the moves. He can pitch anything with the smooth oil of a seasoned ad man. But he no longer has the ability to write something like the carousel pitch, does he? And he’s just starting to figure that out.

Then he finds out that at least 1/3 of the reason they got the account was because Joan Harris slept with one of the reps, and he is ruined by the thought. He thought the old Draper magic was coming back. Now he finds out it was an even older magic, and he’s sick about it.

This show is like a goddamn Russian novel.

Friends, I like me some Mad Men. It’s one of the many television shows I ignored at first, smug in my resistance to marketing and hype, then watched in a marathon On Demand a few months after the first season ended, initially out of bored curiosity, then out of sincere excitement. It is an excellent show, written well and delivering subtle pleasures so consistently it’s hard to remember that the show is written and acted, and not just naturally generated from imagination, sunlight, and liquor.

Full disclosure: The show’s love affair with whiskey usually inspires me to drink a fifth of Rye during every episode, so my opinion of the show is … colored.

Anyways, I just watched episode “Lady Lazarus”, which I won’t bother summing up here because, why would I do that? Go watch it, you lazy bastards. Or find the eleventy-billion recaps out there waiting for your greedy eyes. This obsession with recapping the plots of TV episodes has got to stop. You know what’s really interesting about this episode? The fact that every single review or write-up about the episode I’ve seen mentions how much they paid to license Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles for it ($250,000).

Now, I’m a huge fan of Tomorrow Never Knows. It is a kick-ass song and is on a short list of songs that I think should never be seriously covered or re-imagined, because it is pretty much Awesome in musical form. And I think it was used wisely in the show, demonstrating to us that Don is not young and hip any more, and then demonstrating to us that he has no interest in being so any more. It’s important, I think, because Don is forty years old. In today’s age, forty is not so old any more. Forty year-old men today can be found at the same rock concerts as their kids. But back in 1966, friends, forty was fucking old. I’m sure there were some hip forty year-olds, but Don is certainly not one of them, and they used this song as a perfect way to demonstrate that: First of all, he can’t even tell a Beatles song from some horrible knock-off, and secondly, when he does give it a listen, he switches it off after a minute, disinterested.

All well and good, but for so many people, the big news was that they paid the whopping quarter-of-a-million bucks to use the song. Which is a lot of money. But why do we care so much? In today’s media-saturated world, it’s not so much that we’re so used to looking behind the curtain, there is no goddamn curtain any more.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s just interesting. Writers and other creative folks making these books and shows and movies are basically flim-flam artists. We fool you, we con you. We make you feel for imaginary people. We get you outraged at imagined atrocities. We trick you, over and over again. So it’s disturbing to realize how many tricks are no longer, strictly speaking, tricks any more, since y’all seem to know all about them.

It’s a challenging time. You know how you read books or see TV shows from 50 years ago, and they seem kind of simplistic and dumb and you know how they’re going to end like on page 2? Yup, because the audience is smarter now. Not in a general-IQ kind of way. In a media way. The tricks don’t work as well as they used to. These days, you buy a license to use a famous pop song from the ’60s and not only does everyone comment on your choice of music and what it means to the narrative, they also know exactly how the business works. They know you have to pay for that song, they know the song is expensive because of who wrote it, and they kow that as a result it was chosen very carefully.

I mean: Fuck. Where’s the mystery?

Of course, in a novel I can reference songs all I want, as long as I don’t print the lyrics. Titles can’t be copyrighted, so I can have my narrator cue as many damn songs as I like and hope the reader just hums along. Assuming they know the song. If they don’t, it goes awry – although, in the age of Spotify, that really isn’t a problem. In fact, if you’re writing a novel with a lot of song references, why not put together a playlist and be all 21st century and shit? Why not. Your readers will figure it out anyway.

Friends, I saw The Cabin in the Woods over the weekend. It’s rare these days that I actually buy into hype and get excited about a movie, but this one grabbed me. It just looked mysterious and cool, like that kid at a high school party smoking weed right out in the open, wearing sunglasses, and you’re fifteen and you see him and think, shit, if I could just hang out with that dude I’d be set for life.

So, this isn’t a review. I liked the movie a great deal, but everyone in the universe is reviewing it and breathlessly praising/criticizing the twists and turns and the premise, which is so huge and ungainly it either works for you or doesn’t, frankly. It worked for me. Enough said.

No, what I’m most excited about is the five minute sequence towards the end of the film where everything goes batshit insane. I think of this moment as the Natural Batshit Moment. Warning, I’m a gonna spoil the heck out of this movie.

The Natural Batshit Moment in a story is when you come to a point in the plot where something you’ve set up long before is sprung into action and the pace of the story goes into overdrive for a bit, careening off into complete joyous insanity – but it feels natural, like a piece clicking into place instead of a desperate attempt at injecting life into your moribund plot. Towards the end of The Cabin in the Woods, our two surviving sacrifices make their way down into the corporate offices. On the way they encounter a selection of the supernatural horrors kept in cages for use in their ritual sacrifice to the Elder Gods – it being revealed earlier that the evil they summon to destroy them all are trucked up in an elevator – and when pinned down by a cleanup SWAT team of sorts, they notice a huge, candy-like PURGE SYSTEM button. So they press it, releasing the horrors hidden under the cabin in waves, delivered promptly every few minutes by the dinging elevators.

Put aside the silliness of a PURGE SYSTEM button like that – we’re talking a universe where giant spiders and Pinhead-knockoffs are kept in glass cages to be delivered unto unsuspecting, drugged teenagers. Forget the silliness, and just sit back and enjoy the insane spectacle of the buttoned-down corporate environs being invaded by the nightmare creatures they’ve been serving upstairs as part of their jobs. This is batshit territory, but the story earned it. One, we’re shown how subdued and corporate the basement areas are – these fucks are killing innocent teens as part of their jobs. Two, we pretty much know the creatures are selected and delivered already, so the “storage system” isn’t too much of a stretch. Three, it doevtails nicely with the protagonists being pinned down with no way to fight back – except to purge the system.

The sequence that follows is fantastic. The quick shots of nightmare fuel killing the salarymen and women are quick and creepy. The throwaway scenes of people committing suicide rather than be taken by their worst nightmares are brutal and done with the right touch of blank affectlessness. The chaos, the panic – it all feels right. These people might work for some ginormous conspiratorial nightmare factory, but they woke up that morning, drank some coffee, went to their day job, and started making plans for diner. And then someone released the monsters, and the place became a massacre.

The rest of the movie is OK. Better than most, worse than others. This one sequence, however, will always raise The Cabin in the Woods up beyond the mediocre for me. When structuring plots it’s always hard to come up with a Natural Batshit Moment. You always want that crazy moment of freefall, that exhilarating sequence where plot points come together and send the reader/viewer on a brief gravity-free mission to fuck yeah. But it’s hard to pull off. The Cabin in the Woods pulls it off, and for a few minutes there every time the elevators dinged I almost cheered.

So there.