Sep

18

Company

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This week my life is winding back down.  So yesterday, since I would spend the afternoon and evening working, I treated myself to a nice slow morning complete with my recently-arrived-from-Netflix DVD of Company.  Somehow it had been festering in the middle of my very long queue, but the other day I bumped it up to the top so I could finally see it.  The revival was on a couple years ago, and I’m kind of surprised it’s been so long.  Despite never having seen the show at all, I was all atwitter about the reviews and dying to see Raul Esparza in the main role.  Thanks to Great Performances, I get to see the whole thing.  (Great Performances is the best thing ever.  I highly recommend the revival of Oklahoma! with Hugh Jackman they taped a few years ago.  And their Candide in concert was also quite good.  I only wish they would go tape all the other shows I want to see.)

It was a really great show.  I’m still just a bit torn on John Doyle’s whole everyone-has-instruments thing.  I heard it was more effective in his version of Sweeney Todd, yet another show I didn’t see.  (Although the old-school DVD exists.)  But it has its uses and it certainly adds a layer of metaphor.  As a whole, I thought the direction was pretty effective in melding together rather disparate pieces.  The singing was nice, very lush, you never hear voices like that on Broadway anymore.  It’s all about belting and not so much about blending, so it was nice to hear a lovely chorus of voices in Sondheim’s so-tight harmonies.  Raul Esparza was fantastic, managing to be accessible yet neurotic yet smoldering yet lost all at the same time.

Mostly though, I just loved the show.  I’ve never seen it before.  I knew a lot of the songs (so many good ones!) but never really knew they were all from the same place.  I didn’t know much about any of it, really.  And I’m glad I saw it now.  I don’t know that it’s the kind of thing you really get as a teenager.  (The fact that it’s one of the musicals performed in the movie Camp is now ten times more funny to me.)  A meditation on marriage, melancholy, and urban life is not necessarily the kind of thing you’re able to process when you don’t really understand any of them yet.  And the whole thing is witty enough and hilarious enough that you leave feeling up instead of down.

It was also great to see a new Sondheim show.  (I only have a few left that I haven’t seen, of the major ones, at least.  Passion, Follies, Merrily we Roll Along, Assassins, and most shockingly, Gypsy.  How have I never seen Gypsy ?  The mind boggles.)  You can’t really appreciate a lot of Sondheim songs until you see them in their intended context.  A good example is Send in the Clowns, which I never liked until I actually saw A Little Night Music and suddenly it just grabbed me.  (I also saw recently in a Sondheim interview that the reason the song isn’t terribly singable is that it was written for Glynis Johns who couldn’t sing long phrases.)  It always felt so shmaltzy and stupid until I saw the scene and the feeling and then it became very lovely.  A similar song in Company is Marry Me a Little.  If you don’t know it, you can watch Esparza sing it here.  It sounds like such a pretty romantic song, and yet the lyrics aren’t really that romantic.  Once you get that Bobby is completely deluded about love in the first place, it all makes a lot more sense.  We like to dress up quasi-romantic sentiments in that pretty romantic box to make it seem like something bigger and prettier than it is and it works very well.  Many of the songs in Company are like that, saying one thing but meaning another.  I loved it.

Theater isn’t really one of those things Eric and I do together.  But I’ve spent many years watching musicals and plays and operas by myself, so in some respect it’s one of my favorite ways of getting in touch with myself.  Plus, I’m planning on gradually taking over the family by force.  As a child indoctrinated by musicals from a young age, I know very well that this is possible.  I look forward to it.  Though I will have to hold off on the Sondheim for a while.

Sep

13

Some Serious Disasters

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I have been doing a lot of flying, which generally equates to doing a lot of reading.  All that time and not a whole lot else to do, so books it is.  Thanks to all the traveling, I’m officially at the 100-books-in-2008 mark.  (Approximately.  I’m convinced I’ve forgotten one or two along the way.  It’s already happened twice, though I managed to fix them eventually when I remembered.)

Book #100 was a good one: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale.  (It’s a non-fiction book, so there’s of course a long and unnecessary subtitle.  I hate that trend.)  Anyone who’s ever read a mystery should read it.  It’s so good and so convincing that it made me want to read Dickens.  You have to know me and how I feel about Dickens to realize what a big deal this is.  I will still happily disparage David Copperfield whenever given the chance.  And not only did it make me want to read Dickens, it made me want to read Bleak House, which I’m sure is about a million pages long.  The book is about a murder in England that basically led to the integration of the idea of a detective into mainstream society, as well as our obsession with murders and solving them.  You even get to see how early murder mysteries specifically copied facts from this first big case.  (It’s a doozy, a “country house mystery” where the murderer was someone inside the house at the time, you just don’t know who.)  It’s well written and terribly interesting, with the kind of awesome facts you only get from nonfiction, but with the suspense of a good mystery.

Other recent reads include The Sister by Poppy Adams, which was cool and kind of gothic-y until the ending just went splat.  You can’t have a whole book built on what appears to be some kind of secret (or secrets) the reader doesn’t know and then never resolve them.  Also The Turnaround by George Pelecanos, which I saw at the library and got since every critic and their dog seemed to be talking about it.  Pelecanos writes for The Wire, a show it’s difficult for me to watch.  (It is gritty and real and all about crime, I guess it made me feel like I was back at my old job.)  But a show which also had Richard Price as one of their writers, and I adore him.  I just didn’t really love his writing style.  He’s the kind who drops all these random details about their characters: what kind of music they listen to, which sports players they like, etc.  That drives me nuts.  It doesn’t really give me any insight and it’s a huge pet peeve of mine.  The book was okay, but I don’t feel the need to search out any of his others.

I am currently in the middle of a really bizarre book which I’m finishing simply because I’ve gone too far to quit.  It’s called Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson, a big thriller from 1994.  I read something about it somewhere (and now I can’t figure it out, it’s driving me crazy) and it had lots of really lovely blurbs.  But I should have read the inside flap first.  It is way way way too over the top.  I will quote:

If Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock were to create a film together, the movie would be Kolymsky Heights.

To this I say, No.  No, it wouldn’t.  I could have told you this before reading the book because this kind of praise is just so high there’s no way anything could live up to it.  It seems to be more of a spy thriller, which has never really been my thing, but I just don’t get it.  There’s been more than 250 pages of crazy plot so far and yet I have no idea why anyone is doing anything.  What is the point?  What are the stakes?  It’s great that there’s this super-genius hero who also happens to speak every known language and have the skills to do virtually anything, but why is he bothering?  The 1994 science is also quite troubling, it’s before DNA and genetic work really exploded and he just gets it SO wrong that Eric and I had a good laugh about it at dinner the other day.  I’m finishing it just in case there’s some big reveal.  I figure there has to be a reason that a critic that I’m assuming had a pulse called it the best thriller in 25 years.

Now that I’m back from my traveling, I have a few more books to get to (including the new Christopher Buckley, I’ve heard mixed reviews… but I heard mixed reviews for Boomsday!, his last, which I still liked) but I’m currently catching up on television.  Today Eric and I watched the first episode of the new series Fringe.  It was an obvious choice.  I have watched every single episode of every single J. J. Abrams show ever, with the exception of the last few episodes of Alias.  But the pilot was a huge disappointment, a massive failure.  I just don’t get it.  It seems like they want to re-do The X-Files, a personal favorite of mine, but it ends up more like CSI.  This is not a compliment.  I consider CSI and its ilk to be a catastrophe of calamitous proportions.  I can handle the way Law & Order occasionally fudges the legal system and the way The X-Files occasionally fudged its science.  But CSI fudges both.  Constantly.  Crime scene investigators are not detectives!  They sit in labs!  They process stuff!  They are not magic!  And they do not have that kind of budget!  Fringe is just the same, complete with bad acting and bad writing.  Eric and I both agreed that to pull of science fudging, you just have to gloss over the details, be loose with your concept, just let it be sci-fi and let us suspend our disbelief.  But Fringe goes out of its way trying to explain the scientific process they’re going to use to help sexy FBI chick tap into the dream of her comatose partner so they can have a nice little brain chat.  Their procedural stuff is just as sloppy as CSI at its worst.

The casting also seems to be off, and this is what really throws me.  JJ’s shows usually have awesome acting talent.  Nearly the entire cast of Felicity is still working.  (Keri Russell is fabulous, and I even learned today that Scott Speedman is in Atom Egoyan’s new film.)  I loved all the actors on that show (with the exception of Amy Jo Johnson, who was way too old and not a great actress).  Alias had great actors: Jennifer Garner was tough and cute, Victor Garber became an object of my great affection, Ron Rifkin worked the creepy thing well,  Lena Olin who came on for a season or two was knock-me-down incredible, and I even liked most of the supporting actors a lot.   And Lost has great talent, from semi-known actors who got a chance to shine (like Matthew Fox-Jack, Dominic Monaghan-Charlie, Emilie de Ravin-Claire, and Terry O’Quinn-Locke) and introduced even more great unknowns (like Naveen Andrews-Sayid, Evangeline Lilly-Kate, and Yunjin Kim-Sun).  So I know they can cast a show really well.  But I didn’t like a single actor on this one.  Sure, the FBI chick is cute (though it was obvious when she did the obligatory scene where she stripped down to her undies that she is not one of those really buff actresses, just one of the really skinny ones, bleh) but I don’t see the same charisma I’ve seen in these others.  Joshua Jackson STILL runs his words together and has yet to get a decent line reading.  But I can’t exactly tell if it’s really the actors or if the writing is just that bad.

I will watch another episode or two, but I’m expecting something really awesome or else I’m out.  I’d have quit twenty minutes in if I didn’t expect more from JJ.  Maybe he’s phoning it in, since he’s working on the Star Trek movie and all.

I did enjoy the new HBO show True Blood.  I’ve always liked Anna Paquin (though I think I’m in the minority) and I thought it had a fun tone with its mix of melodrama, camp, and sex.  Should be interesting.  But all will not be right with the television world until the shows I really like are back on.  Like 30 Rock and Big Love.  Until then, it’s all settling.  No, that’s not entirely true.  There is Mad Men, which continues to have me completely spellbound every week.  How does it stay so incredibly good?  This season is, I think, better than the last.  I’m especially fond of the episodes about Peggy, I love how they’re really taking it all in unexpected directions.  I really think they may be right when they call it the best show ever.

Sep

7

Best of the X

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After a long wait and unexpected demand (2 people!) for a list of good X-Files viewing, I’ve compiled a list of my personal favorites.  These aren’t “mythology” episodes dealing with aliens and whatever.  Instead, they’re mostly the monster-of-the-week episodes with self-contained storylines.  The whole series is available on DVD.  These are my favorites, they may not be the same as yours, but they stand up upon repeat viewings.  I can vouch for that since I’ve rewatched basically the whole show from beginning to… well, not end, but where it stopped being good.  But it was good to get reacquainted with my old friend and to introduce it to Eric who’d shockingly never watched it.  While I got pretty bored in those mythology episodes, I did introduce Eric to one of my favorite X-Files customs: yelling “Krycek!” whenever Nicholas Lea’s name comes up in the credits.  Sadly, Krycek only shows up in mythology episodes so you won’t see him on this list.

I’ve divided episodes into 3 tiers.  My personal favorites, episodes worth a specific mention (for good or bad), and leftovers that I think are worth watching.  My favorites tend to be overly populated with comedy episodes, btw.  Generally, I’d recommend watching from season 1 forward.  Chronology won’t assist you with storylines, but it’ll keep the hairstyles and the outfits changing in a more orderly fashion.  It will also help with the oh-so-gradual progression of Mulder/Scully flirtation, since each season ups the ante a little.  (My episode numbers may be off by one or so occasionally, different sources use different numbers, but the titles will all be correct.)  Don’t bother with the last couple seasons.

Tier 1: My personal favorites

  1. Squeeze, Season 1 Episode 3.  Everything from Season 1 must be taken with a grain of salt.  The show wasn’t as defined, the characters were new.  But Squeeze introduces one of the creepiest monsters ever on the show.  Plus it has the bit where Mulder and Scully walk into a room with flashlights, which you see in the opening credits.  (A second “sequel” episode comes in Tooms, Season 1 Episode 21.)
  2. Ice, Season 1 Episode 8.  Mulder & Scully and lots of guest stars are in the arctic in a kind of parlor mystery situation.  A strange disease turns them all against each other after a research team pulls up sample ice cores that are thousands of years old.
  3. Humbug, Season 2 Episode 20.  A series of murders in a retirement community for carnival workers.  Need I say more?  Also has a guest spot by excellent character actor (that I remember most fondly from Amadeus) Vincent Schiavelli.
  4. Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Season 3 Episode 4.  Perhaps the best episode ever?  Great guest spot by Peter Boyle, playing a psychic-of-sorts who can predict how people will die.  Not really played for laughs (except for a couple), and probably one of the more poignant episodes around.
  5. War of the Copophrages, Season 3 Episode 12.  A whole lot of cockroaches and an entomologist named Bambi.  There are plenty of episodes that are tough for the squeamish, you may want to skip it if you hate bugs.
  6. Pusher, Season 3 Episode 17.  Pusher is perhaps my favorite villain because he’s not really disgusting but he is very scary.  He’s a serial killer who can make anyone do anything just by telling them to do it.  (The sequel is Kitsunegari, Season 5 Episode 8.)
  7. Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, Season 3 Episode 20.  May well win the award for most bizarre episode ever.  Very very deadpan comedy and a crazy labyrinthine plot.  Also an excellent guest spot by Alex Trebek of Jeopardy!  (My favorite part: Mulder’s girly scream.)  A great one-liner episode.
  8. Quagmire, Season 3 Episode 22.  The episode revolves around a lochness-style lake monster.  But I like this episode because it features Scully’s dog, Queegqueg.
  9. Detour, Season 5 Episode 4.  It may not have the best monster ever, but the set-up, with Mulder and Scully headed to a leadership conference, and their night staying warm in the woods have some of the best X-Files quotables ever.
  10. Bad Blood, Season 5 Episode 12.  Arguably the best episode ever, definitely the best comedy episode.  Mulder and Scully deal with Texas vampires, but both tell their own side of the story.  Scully was never more whiny and Mulder was never more obnoxious.
  11. Dreamland I & II, Season 6 Episodes 4 and 5.  Mulder switches bodies with a disgruntled Area 51 employee.  This may be the most-referenced episode in the show.  Several later episodes refer to little things that take place here, usually Mulder’s waterbed.  Lots of comedy, and great guest spots by SNL alums Michael McKean and Nora Dunn.
  12. Monday, Season 6 Episode 14.  Right up there for one of the top episodes ever.  Like Groundhog’s Day but serious.  The same day keeps repeating over and over again as a botched bank robbery stops time.
  13. Arcadia, Season 6 Episode 15.  A great comedy episode, weak on the monster but heavy on the satire.  A gated community is obsessed with rules and plagued with disappearances.  Mulder and Scully go undercover as a married couple leading to plenty of verbal sparring.
  14. Je Souhaite, Season 7 Episode 21.  There’s a genie involved.  And Marshall from Alias.   And once you get this far, just stop.  There’s no reason to go past Season 7.

Well-known or worth mentioning:

Worth watching if you’re looking for more: