thoughts on Smash 5/11/13

So, I hear this show is getting cancelled. I'm very disappointed about that, though they have pulled some major soap opera bullshit the last couple of episodes. Ivy is PREGNANT? And of course it's Derek's. Sigh.

So I've figured out that Tom is the type of character who you hate even when he's technically in the right, and Derek is the type of character that you want to like even when he's being very, very bad. Yeah, Julia probably shouldn't be spending so much time helping out Hit List...but whenever Tom brings this up, he comes away looking like a major douche. And Derek completely and totally sexually harrassed that Daisy girl and then let her blackmail him...and yet when he said that "Oh, of course, you're making this about you," line to Karen, I was like, "Yeah! Shut up, Karen!"

Basically...pretty irritating developments this past episode. I'm still really enjoying it, though.

thoughts on The Great Gatsby

I'll preface this review with this: I know that The Great Gatsby is considered a classic, and I personally know at least a couple of people who consider it one of their favorite books. I personally only read it for the first time about three years ago, and I thought it was just okay. The book is told from the perspective of an outsider, Nick Carraway, and to some extent I understand why that was necessary; the author is trying to build up suspense around the Gatsby character, and it's useful to see the lifestyle depicted from the perspective of someone who, like the audience, is not really part of it. However, the problems with this are that Nick himself is not a particularly compelling character; you don't get to see the Gatsby and Daisy relationship from the perspective of the two people in it, which makes it difficult to care about it as much as we need to for the story to work; and I actually found what was eventually revealed about Gatsby to be fairly anticlimactic.

The movie has the same basic problems, plus the added nonsense that the whole thing is told in flashback by Nick while he is institutionalized, telling his story to the doctor, and eventually writing what will supposedly become The Great Gatsby. It is visually stunning; Baz Luhrmann does a great job with the party scenes, especially, which are decadent and over the top and, well...awesome. He's doing what he does best there. However, I still didn't care all that much about the characters, and-- okay, so I hate Tobey Maguire so much that one of the first comments I made to my friends after the movie was, "I hate Tobey Maguire's stupid face." Later, at dinner, long after we had moved on to other topics of conversation, I continued, "I hate Tobey Maguire's face so much that it's, like, offensive to me that people keep putting him in movies." Basically, the takeaway there is, I didn't care for the character that much in the book, and having him played by an actor I hate did not help one bit. I also-- and yes, I realize I'm nitpicking here-- did not care for Leonardo's speaking voice in this movie.

What it comes down to, I think, is this. Also after the movie, I commented to my friends, "For a movie that included murder, adultery, and that many parties...it was awfully boring." You can have characters doing any number of "exciting" things, but if you don't care about the characters, it's still not going to be interesting. There were aspects of it I liked. I didn't like it overall.

recent thoughts on Smash

1) I'm pissed that they killed Kyle. I know that even the characters on the show see it as shocking and unfair, but from a storytelling perspective, I feel like they did it just to give Jimmy a reason to straighten out and to bring Jimmy and Karen back together, which is shitty. He was worth more than that. How about having JIMMY-- drug addict/former drug dealer/all around shitty guy-- die, and then having Kyle and Karen dealing with their guilt over pushing him away, and Kyle dealing with trying to move forward in his career without him, and Karen turning to Derek for comfort and then realizing that she has just used him? I know that life isn't fair and that sometimes someone who doesn't deserve it at all dies suddenly, but again, from a storytelling perspective alone, wouldn't Jimmy's death create more opportunities for character development than this, when getting fired from Hit List could have been enough to make Jimmy realize that he needs to change, and when Karen had already pretty much realized that she still loves Jimmy even though she doesn't want to? I don't like it one bit. It seems like it gives a lot of characters-- Karen, Jimmy, even Tom and Julia-- an easy out for their recent behavior and their problems, like, "Oh, Kyle's dead, so now we should all come together and forgive each other," even though they've all done things that they need to deal with for real and face the consequences for. Yeah. Hate it.

2) Even though Derek is sometimes pretty oblivious and needs to have the obvious pointed out to him-- like Ivy basically telling him last night, "Okay, Derek. I get that nothing is happening between you and Karen NOW. I'm still hurt and insulted that you're only with me because you can't have her."-- I love that lately, he is the only one who consistently acts like a grown-ass adult. No, Karen, what happened between the two of you was not NOTHING just because you didn't actually have sex. And no, Karen, there is no reason that anyone else on Hit List needs to know anything about it. GOD!

That's all I care about. I still hate Tom.

thoughts on Mud

Basically...this was surprisingly and disappointingly boring for a movie in which Matthew McConaughey plays a character named Mud who has a snake tattoo and hangs out in the woods eating beanie weenies out of a can and insists that while it's fair enough to call him a hobo, he is NOT!!! a bum. (I will admit that I, in the very recent past, have also had a conversation about the difference between a hobo and a bum. I thought it was that hobos ride the rails. According to Mud, hobos work for a living but just travel around a lot and don't have a permanent home. Learn something new every day!)

I walked into this movie a few minutes late, and for a few minutes after I got there, only the sound was working, not the picture. This was fairly disorienting because I hadn't realized I was so late; I thought the previews would still be playing when I got there, and for awhile I was convinced that not only was the picture not working, but they had started the movie in the wrong place. I quickly determined that this was not the case, but the bottom line is, I'm not entirely sure why the main character, a fourteen-year-old boy named Ellis, and his friend, Neckbone, initially head out to the woods and encounter Mud. I think that it has something to do with a boat that is stuck up in a tree, and where they find Mud living. Within a few days of the boys' initial meeting with Mud, the following events occur:

1) Ellis learns that his parents plan to divorce, and that regardless of which parent he chooses to live with, he will likely have to move out of the houseboat that he has lived in all of his life.

2) Ellis punches a high school senior in the face for getting handsy with May Pearl, an older girl who Ellis has a crush on. She is impressed, and tells him to call her if he can find her number.

3) Ellis and Neckbone learn more of Mud's story. Basically, Mud has been in love for years with Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). She has a habit of leaving him for guys who get violent with her, then returning to Mud, who takes her back and then goes and beats the most recent guy up. The most recent time, he actually shot and killed the guy. Now, Mud is wanted by the police and hiding out until he can come up with an escape plan for him and Juniper. He is also being hunted down by the family and friends of the guy he killed. So, Ellis and Neckbone agree to help him get the boat down from the tree and get it running again. Ellis does this because he is all upset about his parents' divorce and is moved by the fact that Mud claims to be doing this for love. Neckbone does it because Mud agrees to give him his gun once they've helped him.

This obviously is all going nowhere good, but it doesn't all go bad in exactly the way you expect. Basically, Ellis's parents' divorce, what ultimately happens between him and May Pearl, and what ultimately happens between Mud and Juniper causes Ellis to lose his faith in love, but then he sort of gets his faith back in humanity because Mud saves him from dying from a snake bite even though it is dangerous for him to do so for a number of reasons. And then after this, which seems to be the resolution of the movie, happens, the movie continues for something like another ten minutes and gets moderately ridiculous.

I feel like this could have used another rewrite, or something. It had potential. McConaughey's character is skeevy and possibly dangerous, which we all know he does well. Witherspoon's character is kind of trashy, which Witherspoon has done before but not for awhile, which could have been interesting. There are two main problems, however:

1) The movie is interesting for as long as Mud's story remains a mystery, and then quickly becomes boring once we learn what's going on. We spend an awful lot of time just watching Mud and the kids fix the boat, and waiting around to see whether Juniper actually sticks around for him, which we don't really care that much about. Mud and Juniper are onscreen together for a grand total of maybe ten seconds in the whole movie. We believe that he loves her; she isn't onscreen enough for us to really know what she's thinking, though a character played by Sam Shepard tells Ellis that she's no good and basically only with Mud when things don't pan out with someone else. This appears to be true, and because unlike Ellis, we don't have some deep personal reason to root for their relationship, we just don't care. I think that the Mud and Juniper characters, and McCounaughey and Witherspoon as actors, could potentially be interesting together, but in this context, they're not. We don't know enough about their relationship and they're almost never onscreen together, so we have no idea whether they even have chemistry.

2) There is all this ridiculous, over the top stuff going on that has the potential to be really wild and fun. The stuff with the snakes, and Mud being hunted down by both the police and some random bad men, and Juniper being somewhat shady...it's all there. And yet, this is mostly Ellis's coming of age story, and most of the other stuff comes to a head in a scene near the end that doesn't really belong. Everything's played too straight, like the director didn't get how over the top and ridiculous a lot of this is and decided to make a serious coming-of-age film that just happened to have all of this other random stuff in it.

I don't know if this movie had the potential to be great. But it had the potential to be entertaining, trashy, and fun, and it wasn't really even those things. Disappointing.

thoughts on the most recent Smash

Well! I always like this show for its soapy goodness, but this episode was actually pretty brilliant-- it effectively tied the Bombshell and Hit List storylines together while advancing the major plotlines in an interesting way. Also...Derek has had his douchey moments in the recent past, but I love how he was RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING in this episode and Jimmy and Karen both wound up looking like arrogant douches for not realizing it. There both of them are, thinking that Derek is just messing with the show to fuck with them, and they both manage to piss off their best friends, and then the show gets a BRILLIANT review and Derek gets to be all, "I was right. And by the way, Karen, your boyfriend's on drugs, I just loaned him a ton of money, Jimmy's not even his real name, and oh, by the way, I'm sleeping with your mortal enemy." ALL OF WHICH IS TRUE! I mean, he even looks like he was right with his whole "Get away from my woman" business, even though at the time I thought he was overstepping his bounds. And Julia was right-- his not being in love with Karen anymore *did* make the show better, because if he still thought he had a shot with her, he never would have given those songs to Ana, which was clearly the right decision. Yeah. Derek redeemed himself this episode, and I am happy about that, because I wanted to like him even when he was being douchey.

Meanwhile, I still hate Tom. Really, the only thing Julia did wrong by helping Hit List was keeping it a secret. I also liked Ivy more than I have in awhile.

Good job, Show!

recent thoughts on Smash

Y'all know how I love shows that make me shout at the TV, right? Well, tonight (as I watched Tuesday's episode via the Internet) what I was shouting was, "DRUGS! DRUGS! DRUGS!"

So...I've started to like Jimmy a little bit more lately, but he's still basicallly a douche, right? I mean, could he have messed up the Karen situation more? First not pursuing her because of Derek...then pursuing her but keeping it a secret from Derek...then borrowing money from Derek but keeping it a secret from Karen. I know he really liked/likes Karen, and I know that Derek really had no right to be all "Get away from my woman" with him, but I just feel like him getting together with Karen under the circumstances-- being reliant on Derek for his job/owing Derek money/still being tangled up in drug shit-- probably wasn't the smartest move ever. Also, the secret came out in such a way that made both Derek and Karen feel stupid. He's just...yeah. A douche. And then Karen finds drugs in his jacket pocket and doesn't say anything? Run away, Karen! Run away!

I really don't care about anyone else on this show besides Derek and Karen. I hope Derek and Ivy don't sleep together (again), but I'm sure they probably will.

thoughts on Admission

Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton. She lives her life in a fairly predictable fashion; she has a long-term live-in boyfriend and has been in admissions at Princeton for sixteen years. Her orderly life begins to unravel, however, when John Pressman (Paul Rudd), who works at an alternative high school, asks her to come talk to his students about Princeton. Most of them are actively opposed to the idea of attending an exclusive, traditional, Ivy League school, but one, Jeremiah, is very interested. John, meanwhile, seems strangely interested in Portia; it's clear that he knows her from somewhere, or wants to tell her something. He lets her know what that "something" is fairly quickly: he thinks that Jeremiah is her son. He knew her roommate in college, he explains, and that roommate borrowed his car to take Portia to the hospital when she went into labor. Jeremiah's birth certificate reveals that he was born in the same hospital at the same time that Portia delivered, and as Portia gets to know Jeremiah as he pursues applying to Princeton, it begins to seem more and more likely that he is her child. Something else also begins to happen: for the first time in perhaps years, Portia actually actively cares about whether a particular student gets in to Princeton or not. She has warned a younger colleague about getting too emotionally invested in any one particular applicant, but she finds that she really wants Jeremiah to get in, and actively fights for him. Meanwhile, her boyfriend leaves her for a Virginia Woolf scholar who is pregnant with his twins, leaving her free to sort of, kind of, maybe start something with John, who has a habit of picking up and moving every few years, much to the dismay of his adopted son, Nelson. Add in a subplot with Portia's eccentric mother (Lily Tomlin), who wants Portia to call her by her first name and stops feeding her dogs because she thinks that animals are too dependent on humans and should learn to hunt for themselves, and you've got yourself a movie.

I've come to really like these "high-strung woman has to learn to deal with unexpected changes in her life" movies. Celeste and Jesse Forever is another recent example. The basic message of such movies is that life doesn't always turn out the way you planned it, but it usually works out okay, which I generally find to be true. I identify fairly strongly with characters like Portia and Celeste, and I find it fairly comforting to see these women completely lose their shit, yet have things still work out in a positive (though less than perfect) way. As far as this particular movie is concerned, I also really liked most of the characters and performances; I generally find Paul Rudd and Tina Fey to be very likeable, and many of the secondary characters are very interesting and different in generally believable ways, which I also really liked.

Despite the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed myself throughout much of the movie, though, there were some holes in the plot. Basically, I feel like the whole movie would never had happened had John, instead of contacting Portia, approached Jeremiah's adoptive parents and said, "I know a woman who gave birth at the same time and in the same hospital where Jeremiah was born. I don't know how you feel about Jeremiah meeting his birth parents, but if you think this is a good idea, I could give you her name and you could contact the adoption agency for advice on how to pursue this." I have no idea whether even that is the appropriate course of action in this situation, but I don't feel like you should just spring this on some woman out of the blue unless you have more proof. I also don't think the woman should then, as Portia eventually does (spoiler alert), approach the child and be like, "I think I'm your mother." I'm just saying; there are ways to find out for sure whether Jeremiah is Portia's or not, so why get people all worked up based on theories?

Also (spoiler alert), Portia eventually goes so far as to actually tamper with records to get Jeremiah into Princeton; she is caught and fired for this. Now, I get that this is meant to show how much Portia has come to care for Jeremiah and also serves to get her out of her rut; she's had the same job for sixteen years. But...if the message of the movie is that life sometimes turns out better when it doesn't go according to plan, then does it really matter that Jeremiah doesn't get into Princeton? Couldn't he be just as happy and successful somewhere else? He would be disappointed, of course, but he would presumably get over it. So much of the movie is spent establishing how worked up students and parents get about getting into Princeton; while it is an interesting twist to have Portia become one of those worked-up parents, wouldn't it have been interesting to then have her realize that this thing (admission to Princeton) that she and her colleagues, along with so many parents and students, spend so much time agonizing over, just doesn't matter that much? The college admissions process is stressful, for sure, and the decision of where to go to school is an important one...but not getting in to one particular school is not the end of the world. Having Jeremiah just plain not get in and watching Portia deal with that would have made more sense and sent a better message, I think, than having her tamper with the outcome.

In spite of this, the performances and characters are strong enough for me to still recommend this movie. The plot just kind of all falls aprt if you start thinking about it too much, though.