Jun

17

Caving

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Right after I finished my last post I immediately felt guilty for not including Lush Life as an obvious candidate for my Best Books list.  So I have to make up for that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading a good deal.  I’m realizing I may exceed my goal of 100 books this year by a lot.  It’s looking like I’ll hit 150.  And if you consider that I was working the first few months this year and reading less, well, it may get higher.  This means that my biggest problem is keeping up a list of things to read.  So far I’ve been doing okay.  I’ve added a couple book blogs to my rounds, though, since the NYTBR is sadly lacking in fiction these days.  And they have one reviewer that I just don’t pay attention to at all.

At the used book store the other day, Eric brought in a few boxes and I got to walk away with The Rainbow and Women in Love for free.  I’d been holding out on The Rainbow because I got a copy at a used book store a couple years ago, but I haven’t been able to find it.  I have finally caved, though, with my goal to read more serious literature.  Lawrence is a good place to start.  I shouldn’t really have been as surprised as I was when I read Sons and Lovers and just about fell over.  I’d always heard it was that good, but for some reason I held Lawrence at bay for a long time.  I have a tendency to do this with many things I end up loving dearly.  (Like my Anne of Green Gables books which sat dormant in my teenage room for a good five or six years until I finally read them and kicked myself for taking so long.)

The thing that struck me most about Lawrence was the way he managed to write about women.  More and more lately I’ve been annoyed at the way men write about women or from their point of view.  They so rarely seem to get it at all.  (A recent example, Night Train by Martin Amis was horrifically off.  I’d think the man had never met a woman, only heard about them in books.  She was also supposed to be American but had no grasp of American-isms at all.  I think Mr. Amis should stick to what he knows.)  I’m looking forward to the two I have, though I don’t know how long it will take me to read them.  I read Sons and Lovers on my lunch breaks for a week or so.  (I should say I devoured it.)  I remember how much I looked forward to shutting my door and propping my feet up with that book.

I also read the quite short Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall, which was interesting and dystopian.  I’m a fan of dystopic novels, but they often seem to miss the point.  I think Hall may have had a bit more going on than I had the strength to really delve into, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless.  Today I had another quick one with Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz, which I found on the new book shelf at the library.  It’s a sequel to The Spellman Files, which I read earlier this year and liked.  She’s so peppy and funny, most authors attempting to be snide and funny don’t really nail it, but she does.  Word is there’s a movie, and I just hope they let her do the screenplay.

I am still trudging through the Sopranos.  Or at least attempting.  Technically I have less than two episodes left.  But it feels like so much work just getting through a single episode anymore.  I expect it to take quite a while.

As for the movies, we’ve been going quite a lot.  A nice extravagance since things are a little less tight money-wise these days.  And both Eric and I enjoy the actual act of going to the theater.  I’ve been letting Eric make our picks, as you can tell from my Movie List link.  (He did NOT accompany me to see Miss Pettigrew.  That was girls only.)  The summer is a rough time for the arthouse patron.  Not much good stuff comes out since they have to squeeze into the multiplexes and are usually shoved out.  So far, none of it has been too terrible, though most of it hasn’t quite been good.  To be fair, Eric was going to see Redbelt with me, the new Mamet film, but we didn’t get a chance to.  Today we wanted a little night out but didn’t want to see any of the big films.  Instead, we went to The Fall, which I’d heard was good but didn’t look much like my thing.  I thought Eric would like it, though, since it looked very visual.  We both liked it more than expected.  I’m usually not much for big visual grandeur movies, I get bored.  But this one managed to get me.  Largely on the strength of the two main characters.  (The little girl got me so bad that now I want all my children to have cute little Russian accents and speak in pidgin English.)  I knew the man’s name right away, I’d looked him up on IMDb for something else and it bugged me the whole movie.  Now I know that it was the guy from Miss Pettigrew, who I found quite charming, and that he was also in Infamous, my preferred Truman Capote movie.  Goodness.  And he’s also the main guy in Pushing Daisies, which everyone has been trying to get me to watch and which I’ve held off on because I’m not much for whimsy, but now I think I’ll have to do it.  He’s quite good.  (His name’s Lee Pace, btw.)

Now I must get back to trudging my way through The Unconsoled, an Ishiguro I’ve meant to read for ages but that’s turning out to be a bit of a slog.

Jun

11

A Milestone

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I finally finished Ada !  One thing I noticed as soon as I started reading it was that I started seeing it referenced all the time, and generally in a negative way.  And yeah, I kind of have to agree.  I could tell Nabokov imagined this whole world, that in his head it was something massive.  But on the page it feels like you keep missing the rest of the story.  Like the whole thing is connected to some other book that you never read, or like Nabokov is in on some joke that the rest of us don’t know.  It, more than any other book of his I’ve read so far, definitely betrayed his style: to plan his books on hundreds and hundreds of index cards.

It’s a sign of how things have gone so far this year that Ada will not make my Top Books of 2008 list.  But one that will is one I just finished, Popco by Scarlett Thomas.  The recommendation came from Bookslut, a book blog I frequent. Sometimes their taste is a bit too obscure for me (the one that comes to mind is The Thin Place, which I read on their recommendation a couple years ago and didn’t like much) but this one was a joy.  It’s like someone sat down and thought of a book that would make me turn my head and go, “Oo, that sounds interesting.”  They had no other purpose, just to make me very involved.  Me, no one else.  Popco is about a woman who works for one of these new-age toy companies and it involves, among other things, codes and ciphers, secret treasure, neat ideas for toys that I would have loved, crazy marketing campaigns, intrigue and secrets galore, and also manages to look really thoroughly about the strangeness of what it’s like to grow up as a girl.  While I think the ending tied things up a bit succinctly, I do have to admire that there’s a bibliography with a bunch of other books to read about codes and such.  I am kind of thinking I may start leaving Eric coded messages now that I know bunches of different ways how, some of which involve rather complicated math.  So far, it is one of the few guaranteed to make my end of year list.  (The only other sure-things are In the Woods and Howard’s End.  Also with a good shot is A Clockwork Orange, which I just read for the first time.  Turned out to be very easy in audio form, I’d never been able to get through the slang otherwise.  But having a reader made it much easier to understand.)

I’m not quite sure which big challenging book I will tackle next.  There are so many to consider.  I may also wait until my next class starts.  Reading Ada in small chunks was helpful.

I am still trudging towards the end of The Sopranos.  I am so looking forward to it being over.  I have 3 episodes left, so I feel like I’m too close to quit now.  But still.  Last episode there was a car accident.  These people have more car accidents than anyone ever.  Whenever things get boring, there’s a car accident.  And then, wait for it, let’s have Tony tripping on peyote for 15 minutes.  What are these people thinking?

I’m about to watch the third Prime Suspect, which I like quite a lot.  I went in search of other Brit tv only to find that 99% of it is mysteries.  There were too many and I eventually quit looking.  Overwhelmed.

I waited for the end of the season to start Gossip Girl, so I could get through it quickly.  Blah.  It has so much potential, but they really blow it.  I expected it to be much more scandalous, but instead it plays out like a teen drama from the suburbs half the time.  So boring.  And then they take plot lines with great potential and drop them flat.  (Hello?  You gave us the reason Nate’s trust fund was drained way too quickly and easily.  Don’t you people know how to really work this stuff?  Goodness.)  I want way more nastiness.  And less adults.  Unless you make them slightly more dimensional.  (Exception was the episode with Blair’s dad and his gay lover.  That one I liked.)  Very disappointed, especially with all the talk I’d heard.

Should be more movies soon.  I’ve got bunches of good ones waiting.

Apr

30

Miscellanea

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I wanted to write another random what-I’m-doing-now post and in considering the title I thought, “I bet miscellanea is a word and if it is, it would be the right title.”  Turns out it is a word with the correct definition.  Love the internet.

I think I’ve referenced a few times that I’ve made efforts to get into The Sopranos and it’s never really worked out.  I finally made it through Season 1 and now I’ve finally settled in.  The first season is pretty slow, there’s not a lot of arc from episode to episode, but near the end stuff actually happened, which was a nice change.  Now I’m on Season 3 and I’ve figured out why people like it so much.  Each season some random new characters enter the show, and it’s up to you to figure out which of them will get whacked and why and when before the season is up.  This doesn’t mean it’s my new favorite show.  It still has many of the same problems.  For example, I still don’t know the name of one of the main characters even though it’s been three seasons.  It took me the whole first season to figure out the other one was named Paulie.  And it only gets worse when they introduce a handful of new mobsters each new season.  Where did these new guys come from?  How come I never saw them before?  Why don’t you just tell me what their names are and how they fit in instead of making me spend all season figuring it out?  At least the FBI has a nice little map with pictures and names, that would be helpful.  I must say, though, one of the recent episodes I watched, Employee of the Month, may possibly be the most affecting hour of television I’ve ever seen.  (Partly because it wasn’t all about the mobsters.)

In reading news, I’m motivated to read more and am going to the library today to pick up some new blood.  And probably to finally drop off a couple I haven’t managed to get through even though it’s been a few months.  Before I go, though, I’ll have to finish Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron, simply because I’m only 20 pages from the end.  I haven’t liked it, though.  I heard that it was one of the great mid-century novels, but I guess I forgot that mid-century novels have this tendency to be all about depression and suicide and melancholy and alcoholism.  And it is.  Very little happens, though a suicide starts the book, and then the main character spends the whole time thinking back to other times in his life, but it turns out he wasn’t happy in any of those times, either.  I got it because I read Sophie’s Choice, also by Styron, a couple years ago and loved it insanely.  But Sophie’s Choice actually had a plot, it wasn’t just about some guy in some kind of existential crisis who then through his misery made everyone else miserable.  But I’m going to finish it because I’ve invested too much time for it not to make my book list.

As for audio books, I recently finished Goodnight, Nobody by Jennifer Weiner.  I have never read any Weiner and it turns out I had a good justification for doing so.  I read this one because it’s a mystery and I thought it may be the kind of fluff that you want in between the big heavy stuff now and then.  Turns out, no.  Definitely fluff.  But fluff usually has a main character who you actually like.  I hated the main character.  She was always way over the top clumsy and awkward, so much so that it made no sense.  I could tell it was just Weiner trying to be “funny.”  Didn’t work.  She was this mother whose husband had moved the family out to Connecticut in one of those rich suburbs.  And she didn’t seem to like her children, didn’t seem to like her husband, and had the most obnoxious best friend ever.  And again, Weiner seemed to think we’d all find this best friend charming and awesome.  Wrong.  She met the main character because they were both taking a proofing test for a job and the friend kept talking and wouldn’t shut up and convinced our heroine to ditch the job interview.  And later after best friend slipped a guest some Ecstasy at our heroine’s big party, instead of our heroine getting really mad at her, she just got upset about how her party was ruined and sat there while her husband yelled at her for ruining the party.  Made no sense.  The husband also seemed like a gigantic jerk who she never should have married in the first place.  I thought, you know, I guess a book can be about anyone, I like books about different kinds of people and there are definitely people with miserable marriages.  However, they don’t belong in fluff.  Save it for the big important books.  It isn’t jaunty enough for the light stuff.

Now that I’m through that, I’m on my last audiobook from this round of library checking out.  It was a risky gamble, but my library doesn’t have many audiobooks and if you don’t reserve any you’re stuck with what’s there.  So I got The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.  Even though I read about a hundred pages a few years ago and hated it.  I have this unnatural hatred for Franzen and I thought finally getting through it would help me either have merit for my hatred or get over it.  The first disc was very tough.  But I think I’ll get through it.  Partly I got it because Dylan Baker was reading it and I know from a previous audiobook that he is an excellent audiobook reader, even when the text is quite complicated and there are many characters.  I’m several discs in now and Franzen has laid off a little bit.  But still.  He’s just so excessive.  He’s overly descriptive and he always sounds condescending, even when read by someone as non-condescending as Baker.  I don’t mind books that use big words I don’t know, Michael Chabon does that often and he’s one of my favorite authors.  But his books are good and I learn from them.  With Franzen I can’t help but feel like he sat there and threw in a bunch of nasty words on purpose to be snobbish instead of because they were the best descriptions.  He seems especially fond of the word “corpuscular” and it never seems to be used in just the right way.  And his similes are really pushing it.  Similes can really bug me in a novel, they’re the reason I hated Memoirs of a Geisha, the narrator would make these crazy similes that didn’t even make sense and were far beyond her experience or education.  The only one that sticks out in my mind from Franzen right now is something like, “She ran her tongue along under her upper lip like a cat beneath blankets.”  What??  This does not give me a more full view of what’s happening.  And I’ve found this to be true of most of his similes.  And then there’s the fact that I hate all the characters.  Again, forgivable, and much more allowable in a big ambitious book.  But still, it’s hard for me to see what this is driving at.  Yes, it’s certainly big, ambitious, and intelligent.  But I think it could have been such a tidier novel.  It’s too big and too intelligent, it is as snobbish as its characters.  I don’t really get why everyone loves it so much.  I’m going to finish it and we’ll see if there’s some masterful ending that finally convinces me to sing its praises, but for now I’ll stay in the minority of anti-Franzen-ites.

My trip to the library is this afternoon and hopefully I’ll stock up on some better stuff.  I need it.  My book list is pitiful and needs some help.

Apr

3

Living Episodically

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I have a lot of time on my hands these days, some would argue too much. And while I had grand schemes (read D.H. Lawrence! watch Bergman films!) so far they have come to naught. Instead I’m watching a lot of television. Not daytime tv, not even stuff that’s on right now, just lots of shows. For some reason I’m having trouble getting through a book. Even a movie is feeling too long. Instead I take things in small doses.

There are the shows I’ve mentioned in prior posts, of course.  Mad Men, Veronica Mars, and Freaks and Geeks.  There was Dexter, too, which had a brief mention back when I was a bit annoyed with it.  I have to give it props, the second season turned out to have many awesome tricks up its sleeve.

The last few days have been practically a Weeds marathon.  I have gone through all 3 seasons in about a week or so.  This is my just desserts because I teased Eric when he went through the whole show in a few days several months ago.  I never got a chance to join in because he stayed home sick for a couple days and watched a whole season without me.  From there it was hopeless catching up.  I thought he was nuts, but now I see how quickly you can get through a 30-minute show.  Really quickly.  Especially when they love to end episodes with these big twists.  I have only tired of it a couple of times, mostly because it’s a very well-written show.  Though I think at times they verge a little heavily towards the madcap.  Still, I tend to feel stressed when things get too difficult, which happens often, so I guess madcap is okay.  I definitely think that if you don’t want middle-class kids dealing pot, they should watch Weeds.  Being a drug dealer is not as cush as you’d expect.  (It’s much worse when you’re not middle class.  Read Clockers for the inside look there.)  Mary-Louise Parker is consistently great.  Kevin Nealon has finally found his niche, even better than his days on SNL.  And I love seeing Justin Kirk with his Angels in America co-star.  I have a craving to watch Angels now, yes, he’s good enough that he makes me want to sit through a six-hour downer-fest.  (It’s not all downers.  Much of it is hilarious.  But it was where I first noticed both Parker and Kirk as well as Patrick Wilson and Jeffrey Wright.  But it’s about AIDS, so even the funny stuff has a downer edge.)

I tried to get into another big cable series with The Sopranos, which I tried to watch years ago but couldn’t get into.  Still can’t get into it.  It didn’t help that I watched Goodfellas the other day and felt like I was already over the gangster thing.  And I’m only 3 episodes in.  Bad sign.

So I’ve netflixed some even older stuff while I’m considering my options.  There’s Prime Suspect, the British miniseries series, with Helen Mirren.  I know they just had the last one on a few months ago and I’ve gone all the way back to the first one in 1991.  It’s weird to see a story revolve almost completely about how none of the men will take a woman seriously.  It would be hard to play that storyline now.  Nice to see it’s changed.  I’m halfway through with another disc to go and if I still feel okay with it I’ll go on to the next one.  Each miniseries has about 4 episodes with its own mystery.  And there are 7 of them over the years.  So far I’m still not sure about it.

The other old one I have is Homicide: Life on the Streets which I regularly hear referred to as an example of really good television.  They’re right.  About 20 times better than any cop show currently on the air and the stuff I’m watching is from 1993.  Very sad that we haven’t learned from their greatness.  I like that the cops aren’t necessarily portrayed as heroes or good guys, just as people trying to get their job done.  They focus more than usual on the relationships between the group.  But the best thing is that there are multiple story lines as you follow the different partnerships of detectives, and you can’t be sure that you’ll solve one in just one episode.  Different cases last as long as they take until they’re solved.  It looks like there are 7 seasons, which I’m very happy about.

As for my queue, there’s not much else.  We’re planning to watch The Wire soon, but we’re going to do it together so I can’t watch during the day.  I’ve got The Singing Detective, another Brit miniseries that I’ve thought about getting for a long time, but nothing else.  I’m sure there’s something else on that’s great that I haven’t gotten around to yet.  But I’m struggling to think of something.

And it’s very likely this is a phase.  I go through book phases and movie phases, maybe TV phases will just get added to the list.  And I’m about to get deprived of it when we go for a trip for a few days without all our shows.  I suppose I’ll finally be forced to spend some time with my books.  We’ll see if it takes.

Mar

27

Mad Men

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Poor Eric.  Last night when I came home from work, instead of sitting back and sharing tales of our days, I just went on and on about how I don’t know what I’m going to do to replace Mad Men in my life.  Mad Men and I didn’t have a very long relationship, it only has one season which is only 13 episodes, but it was a nice one.

I’ve been incredibly lucky when it comes to television during the strike.  I’ve been catching up with series I never got around to seeing and it’s been almost better than having actual new shows.  There was Big Love, Freaks & Geeks (possibly the best show ever), Veronica Mars, Dexter, and now Mad Men.

Mad Men is set in 1960 and centers largely around the employees of an Ad agency in New York City.

I’m sure Mad Men must have been pitched to the big cable networks, HBO and Showtime, and I think they were completely crazy to turn it down.   I was trying to explain to Eric just what it was about the show that pulled me in so completely.  Part of it is the shock of the first few episodes, when you see a pregnant woman drinking and smoking.  There is constant drinking, constant smoking, it’s everywhere.  But much larger is the change in gender roles.  Even though women have entered the workplace, they are there as secretaries, whose job is not just to type and tidy for their bosses, but also to cover up their indiscretions.  They are treated like second class citizens by the men in the office, except for when they’re fresh meat.  Then there are the wives, who don’t seem to know what to do with themselves at all and are completely oblivious to the inner lives of their husbands.

The characters on the show are wonderful, well-drawn with interesting stories.  The ongoing feud between hero Don Draper and scheming Peter Campbell is fascinating.  But nearly every main character has their own place in the herd and watching it all pan out over the season is wonderful.  Not to mention looking at all the costumes.

One notable thing is that it’s not the kind of show where you can relate to the characters in any meaningful way.  I like Peggy, the new secretary, but I don’t see our lives as similar.  Mostly this is because I don’t know what kind of woman I would have been in 1960, whether I’d be one of the wives locked at home or one of the secretaries trying to avoid some junior executive.  None of them feel like any kind of woman today.  And really, that’s one of the show’s chief pleasures, seeing just how far we’ve managed to go in 50 years.

But with it now over, I don’t really know where to go next.  I’m hoping to find some new great series that I can get into, one of these I haven’t had time for.  I’ve added Homicide to my netflix queue.  And I’m going through Prime Suspect as well, even though it’s not a traditional series in any way.  All these great shows are spoiling me.  I’m having trouble with everything else.  24 is a joke, I can’t get through an episode.  Lost is perfect, but is now on a month-long hiatus.  It is quite a dilemma.   I guess I could start watching those movies in my netflix queue, but there’s something so nice and digestible about the one-hour drama.

Mar

18

Currently…

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Lately I find myself unable to write posts about any one particular thing.  Instead I have to write about 10 things at once in little blurbs.  I’m not sure why this is.  But here’s what I’ve been reading and watching and thinking lately.

Last night Eric had a meeting that lasted so long that I was able to watch an entire Merchant Ivory film and have a little time to spare.  I watched A Room With a View, one of those movies I’ve postponed for no real reason for years.  And watching it, I got that feeling of nostalgia a lot like the one I got from I Capture the Castle.  The feeling that my sixteen-year-old self would have Adored this movie (Adored with a capital A).  That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it as my current self.  I liked it quite a lot.  But I could see just how much younger me would have swooned over it.  And I wish I could have taken it back to her.  After all, it was around when she was only 6, it wasn’t like it wasn’t accessible.  Still, my sixteen year old self probably wouldn’t have found appropriate the scene where three naked men run around a pond over and over.  She found nudity very troubling and distracting from the story.  I have lightened up, though, and thought the scene pretty hilarious and while unexpected, fitting with the story.

And can I say how strange it was to see such a young Helena Bonham-Carter?  I’m so used to seeing her in her more recent roles.  I’m glad she still gets work, but she does tend to like the dark stuff, doesn’t she?  Here she was all scrubbed and sweet, like Daisy Miller or something.  (The whole thing was a lot like Daisy Miller, except British and romantic.)   Her voice was high and young and so different from that throaty voice she has now.  But I thought she was marvelous, I must say.  In looking through the various awards and nominations it received, I think she was criminally overlooked.

After watching it, I was so sad to see it was over that I went to the computer, pulled up the library catalog, and immediately reserved Howard’s End on audio.  I’ve seen the movie and wanted to read the book, especially since I read On Beauty last year and loved it so much.  (On Beauty is basically a big homage to Howard’s End.)  And since I’m going to need lots of audiobooks in the future, it seemed like a good one.  (My new job has a significant commute a couple days a week.  Lots of audiobooks will be heard.)

One of the podcasts I listen to, Filmspotting, is having an Almodovar marathon and I’m following along.  It gives me the chance to see some of his older films that I’ve never seen.  Last week I watched The Flower of My Secret.  I enjoyed it a lot, though it doesn’t quite reach the level of his later films.  The last 4 have been completely phenomenal.  This week is Live Flesh, another I haven’t seen.  I probably won’t re-watch All About My Mother, I’ve seen it several times.  But I will definitely rewatch Bad Education and Volver if they get into the marathon.  I may even pull out my old VHS of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! since most of his early stuff hasn’t made it to DVD yet.

My current audiobook from Audible is Lush Life by Richard Price.  I think Price is great, truly a master of the real gritty urban novel.  Normally I’m not much for grit, but Price’s characters are pitch perfect.  Clockers is most likely his best and most famous, though I liked Freedomland and Samaritan a lot, too.  Lush Life is his newest book and while it covers familiar territory–kids from the projects, cops, a murder investigation–it also takes a different look at things.  The book is in large part about gentrification of sorts, a neighborhood on the lower east side of Manhattan, near the projects, where young hipsters are starting to take over from the immigrants that used to make up the area.  Having never really been a hipster myself (hipsters don’t allow you to join their crew if you have an advanced degree in something practical) I am enjoying the knocks they’re taking in Price’s book.  It’s not that Price really seems to hate them, but he’s certainly harder on them than some of his other characters.  I read one criticism that said the book had too many characters, and I agree to an extent.  The audiobook requires strict attention.  If I tune out for a couple seconds, I could be in a completely different story than I was moments ago.  But I like all the different points of view Price offers.  I like how he doesn’t treat his cops as saints.  Another review I read compared him to Tom Wolfe, and I think it’s a fitting comparison.  They both have a real eye for people, places, and language.  Price doesn’t have the comedic elements that Wolfe does, his satire is much more reigned in, and their subject matter differs.  But I enjoy their books for many of the same reasons.

On a side note, the reader of Lush Life, Bobby Canavale, isn’t an audiobook reader but a legit actor.  The reader of my last audiobook, I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, was another actor, Dylan Baker.  Both are really great and I’m enjoying them thoroughly.  Sometimes the professional book readers get a little boring.  Both these guys have kept me very in the story.Hopefully my upcoming free time will give me time to read my big book, Team of Rivals, about Lincoln.  I need more nonfiction.  But I admit it’s intimidating when the book is so fat.  Definitely going to have to renew this one before I finish it.

Watched Half Nelson last week.  Expected to like it much more than I did.  Didn’t like it much.  I’m tiring of meandering Indies.  Also watched Syriana, which led me to the conclusion that Clooney won an Oscar for his beard and gut.  That and that everybody really liked Good Night and Good Luck.  The Academy has a tendency to reward people after the fact when they’re not quite as deserving.  (Case in point: Russell Crowe winning Best Actor for Gladiator the year after he lost for The Insider.)  The one thing that drove me crazy was that the subtitle weren’t working.  So I didn’t understand any of the many Arabic scenes.  I’m assuming this was our mistake, since I haven’t seen any references in reviews to the scenes not being translated.

I miss Veronica Mars.  Since ending, I’ve been stuck watching Dexter.  Also a good show, but not as consistently enjoyable to watch.  Sure, it’s better than 90% of what’s on tv, but I still think it has flaws.  Am looking forward to regular television coming back on.  If it weren’t for Lost, I’d be dying.
I’m about to have a lot of time on my hands and I’m not sure how I’m going to use it yet.  I’m not sure quite how I’ll be organizing my time and how much reading and watching will be squeezed in.  I guess I’ll start figuring it out soon.

Feb

26

Veronica Mars

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Who would have thought that the writer’s strike would lead to me watching more television instead of less?  Inevitably, my tastes go back and forth from television and movies to books.  I go crazy with one and then gravitate toward the other.  I went on a crazy reading streak a few weeks ago, so it’s not surprising that I’m not in much of a reading mood lately.  (And I haven’t been to the library in a couple weeks.)   And I haven’t been updating much because my time has been basically consumed by just one thing.

I am completely addicted to Veronica Mars on DVD.  It’s a show that was on the WB (now the CW) about a teenage private eye.  Yes, that’s really what it’s about.  Think Nancy Drew in the new millennium.  It was a show I always intended to watch but was too busy for.  And actually I’m glad I’m catching it on DVD because that lets me watch, oh, four episodes in a row.  (Yes, four.  I am a loser and I have absolutely nothing better to do.)  It has just about everything a girl could ask for: snappy dialogue, ever-changing hair styles, and cute guys.  But really I find it intriguing to watch it for its plot: season-long mysteries where clues are dropped bit by bit in each episode.

I am about 3/4 of the way through Season 3 (the last one, sadly) which seems to have a different approach.  They’ve had a few medium mysteries that last for several episodes instead of one big one, though I’m still waiting to see if we get a big wrap-up at the end.

When going through the show, it keeps largely to the same formula, but I do have my criticisms.  Like when they tried to make Veronica’s hair wavy at the beginning of Season 3.  Doesn’t suit her and doesn’t really go with her character.  And when Logan got a girlfriend in Season 2 who probably weighed about 45 pounds and whose acting was about on par with the three girls from America’s Next Top Model who made guest appearances.

My biggest complaint, though, is that they’ve changed the credits in Season 3.  Not only have they decided to go with this weird looking slow noir-ish montage instead of the peppy normal sequence they had before, they’ve taken their totally awesome theme song and made it sound completely lame.  (The song is “We Used to Be Friends” by the Dandy Warhols, a band I already liked and liked even more after the lead singer guested on an episode singing karaoke.)

The only problem with watching a mystery show so obsessively is that you start to pick up on their patterns.  I’ve been pretty good at picking out the bad guy the last few times, although I totally missed the big culprit of Season 2 despite big flashing signs pointing their way all season long.  Fortunately they’ve moved past Season 1, where it was virtually impossible to have guessed the killer in advance.  (And where a cast member in the main credits gave about three lines all season, while another made regular appearances but was only a “guest star.”  Where’s the love for Tina Majorino?)

Overall an excellent show.  Of course, it requires major suspension of disbelief.  (Especially when you’re a criminal lawyer.  Sometimes I just have to shut my eyes.)  And it requires the usual need to get-over-it that tends to go along with shows that feature teenage characters who are all too smart or too rich for their own good.  I suppose I’ll have to start reading again when I finally plow through the few episodes I have left.  Shame.

Update!  So I tried to just slide through Season 3 and wait to see when they were going to blow me away.  Except that it just kept getting worse and worse as the season went by and then ended.  Just ended.  No resolution, no big tie-up, no nothing.  It was like they were interrupted mid-sentence.  Perhaps they realized they’d messed up the season and decided to screw it?  I’d recommend stopping at the end of Season 2.   The cliffhanger there is minor and you’re much better off that way.

Jan

16

Freaks and Geeks

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In the midst of the yearly top-10 list craze, I heard someone say that they enjoyed watching Freaks and Geeks more than pretty much anything they’d seen this year. I admit, I’m inclined to agree. While there were plenty of movies I really liked this year, the joy of turning on any episode of Freaks and Geeks is right up there with the best of them.

I missed the show when it came on in 1999. It’s understandable. I was in college, I didn’t watch a whole lot of television. But I did hear about it. And I’ve heard about it ever since. If you keep up with television, you can’t help but hear people pining for the return of Freaks and Geeks and how most shows just can’t compare. I never expected to like it much, it was a high school show after all, but I figured I’d get around to it. It had Mike White as one of its main creative forces and I love him (The Good Girl is a film I particularly love).

So with the writer’s strike and all (How much do I hate not having new episodes of 30 Rock and The Office and How I Met Your Mother? A lot.) we’ve been doing a lot of catching up with shows we missed on DVD. So far, we’ve had a few shows where we watch every single episode and others that can’t hold our interest. (In the former category, Entourage and Arrested Development. In the latter for me, 24. Seriously, why does everyone think that show is so good? I was okay with season 1, but have now bailed on 2 and 3 because they sucked so hard.)

But Freaks and Geeks is by far our favorite. The closer we got to the end of the show, the more I loved it and started to dread it ending. (It’s been a month or so, but I’m still known to mention how much I love Haverchuck without prompting.) Every episode of the show covers a high school cliche–getting beat up by a bully, the school dance, a big crush, peer pressure, even the old one where your single parent dates one of your teachers–but they address it in a way that actually feels real and intelligent. The cliches and stereotypes always ended up getting turned on their head.

Of course, one could argue that I love this show in large part because the main character is a smart girl. I’m a sucker for such things. Had there been a bunch of “bad kids” in my school who were cute and funny, I may have ended up a lot like her. I like that she’s good at math and that at one point she dates a guy that she quickly realizes is dumber than she is by a lot. (Many smart girls go through this. It’s rough. He likes me! But he’s dumb. But he likes me! But he’s dumb.)

If you are looking for anything new to watch to relieve strike-induced boredom, I highly recommend getting the DVD’s.