The story of a love affair, told in dictionary format.
Levithan presents a series of dictionary words, each with commentary from the narrator (identified only as "I") speaking to his partner ("you"). I and You are never specifically identified by gender. There's a joke about pregnancy early on that, if taken literally, would make I male and You female, but I don't think there's any reason that the joke must be taken literally.
Each entry in this dictionary/journal gives us another tiny piece of their story, which is a fairly typical one -- they meet and fall in love, there is infidelity and a breakup, there may be reconciliation (the ending is a bit ambiguous). And since there's nothing particularly unusual or compelling about the story, the book succeeds or fails entirely on the strength of Levithan's fragmented method of telling the story.
It works pretty well. We get a surprisingly strong sense of who I and You are in a short space; the book's only 211 pages, it's a tiny book, and many of the pages/entries are only a sentence or two long. Levithan chooses words one would expect to find in a love story (ardent, beguile), words one might not (antiperspirant, deciduous), and words one would hope not to (defunct, hiatus). The fragments build on one another in interesting ways; there's a conversation beginning with the words "It's over" that repeats several times, each time getting longer and changing our perception of what's happening.
And some of the individual entries are lovely, almost little poems or short stories in themselves. This, for instance, is the entry at "only":
That's the dilemma, isn't it? When youre single, there's the sadness and joy of only me. And when you're paired, there's the sadness and joy of only you.
It's a melancholy, haunting little book, and Levithan does a lovely job of giving us specific character details that take the story beyond the rather mundane events.
Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Leila Josefowicz, violin; Christine Schäfer, soprano; Matthias Goerne, baritone; Los Angeles Master Chorale
The program:
Mackey: Beautiful Passing
Brahms: A German Requiem
It's taken me a few days to get around to writing up this concert, which surprised me in many ways. I had my first major disappointment with Dudamel, and fell in love with a new work by a composer who I hadn't heard about much before.
Let's start with the Brahms. This was one of the first serious pieces of music I got to sing when I went to college, as my small-town high school choir had been the standard mix of badly arranged pop songs, awful show tune medleys, and treacly originals for the high school market, most of the latter involving (a) rainbows, (b) dreams, and (c) the importance of following (a) and/or (b). So getting to sing Brahms, even in English and with two pianos instead of an orchestra, was a big deal, and it's a piece I've had a soft spot for ever since.
The biggest problem with Dudamel's interpretation is that it was deathly slow, running 77 minutes (I'd like to have seen at least 5 minutes chopped off that). Yes, it's a requiem, but it's supposed to be warm and consoling; the waltzes need to have some lilt, some dancing quality, and here they just plodded. The balance between chorus and orchestra was badly off; when they could be heard, the Master Chorale sounded find, but they were too often buried by the orchestra. As for the soloists, they made very pretty sounds, not a word of which was comprehensible. And finally, even if there are supertitles in the hall, there is absolutely no excuse for an organization with the resources of the Los Angeles Philharmonic not to include text in the program.
Steven Mackey's violin concerto, on the other hand, was a delight. It was written shortly after the death of his mother, and takes its title from her final words: "Tell everyone I had a beautiful passing."
Beautiful Passing is about 20 minutes long, divided roughly into two halves separated by a cadenza. As the piece opens, the violin is playing long, serene phrases and constantly being interrupted by wild outbursts from the orchestra. In his program notes, Mackey stresses that he doesn't see the orchestra as evil here; it's simply uncontrolled, chaotic, random -- all the things that life itself is. (It is, perhaps, in the spirit of drawing from all of life that Mackey gives to the brass a bit of melody which he tells us comes from the ticket-printing machines of New Jersey Transit. "A nice little tune," he says, "as ticket machines go.")
There are occasional moments when some of the orchestral instruments (most prominently, the oboe) join forces with the violin, but they quickly return to the general mayhem. Then the cadenza arrives, and it's the first major virtuosic moment the violinist has been given, filled with triple stops, spectacular runs and arpeggios (all of which Josefowicz played the hell out of). And when the orchestra rejoins her, it's not as if its outbursts are all that much more controlled than they had been, but there seems to be some method to the madness now, and even if the orchestra and the violin aren't exactly working together, they seem to be not quite so much working at cross purposes any more. The orchestra even calms down and backs off enough at the very end to let the violin end with a lovely, serene moment of the type she's been trying to have since the beginning.
It would be easy to read the piece as the victory of serenity over chaos, but I think it's more complicated than that. That virtuosic cadenza, I think, is the moment at which the violin allows the wildness to enter, recognizes that it has always been (and will always be) present within her, and begins to make peace with it. And in so doing, she channels it, harnesses it, transfigures it into something that's less chaos and more energy. And when you accept that you can't have only serenity in your life, the serene moments you do get are all the more meaningful, not only because they're unexpected, but because you haven't completely burned yourself out trying to force them to happen.
It's a lovely and profound piece which I'd love to hear again, and I need to explore Mackey's music further.
On Sunday, the Brahms festival continues with the second symphony, paired with Sofia Gubaidulina's Glorious Percussion, a concerto for five percussionists.
It's the traditional choice night for the final three. The contestants pick one, Jimmy Iovine picks one, and the judges pick one. I tend to put the most emphasis on the contestants' choices; it's their first completely free pick since the semi-finals, and one would hope that they have learned something about song selection and their own strengths and weaknesses. A bad performance in this round is a very bad sign.
The rundown for round one:
Scotty, "Amazed" -- It's a pretty enough performance, but there's no passion to it; he's not amazed so much as he is very mildly startled. Part of that is that he's a bit young for the song, which is not about the blush of first love; it's about a relationship that amazes by continuing to get better, even after that first thrill has worn off.
Lauren, "Wild One" -- The song is unusually dull, and Lauren is struggling with the tempo; lyrics are disappearing in a mush in the verses, and she's frantically grabbing gulps of breath during the chorus. A serious disappointment.
Haley, "What Is and What Should Never Be" -- It's the right style for her voice, and she generally sounds pretty good, if occasionally a bit hard to understand. She seems to get lost for a moment as she comes back up onto the stage (from the judge's comments, she apparently fell), but recovers reasonably well. Not great, but good enough to win the round.
For round one: Haley, Scotty, Lauren.
On to round two:
Scotty, "Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not" -- He's just so damned earnest; it's not until the very last line of the song that he shows any sign of understanding the playfulness of the lyrics. It's an improvement over his first round, but his consistency has turned into blandness. He desperately needs a jaw-dropping moment, and I don't think he has one in him.
Lauren, "If I Die Young" -- What a creepy little song! I don't know how you sing that to make it entertaining instead of morbid, but it's certainly not by grinning throughout. A bit of a mess, but I mostly blame Jimmy's song selection.
Haley, "Rhiannon" -- The song is in precisely the right key to show off the break in Haley's voice, though I think she goes a bit overboard with it on the repeated "Rhiannon"s. And there's a bit of a regression here to the creepy sex-kitten Haley from five or six weeks back. It's another performance that's just a bit better than the mediocrity of the other singers.
For round two: Haley, Scotty, Lauren.
And round three:
Scotty, "She Believes in Me" -- Here's the thing: Scotty has the big grown-up voice, so Jimmy and the judges want to hear him sing big grown-up love songs. But he's 17, and from all indications, a rather shy and geeky 17 at that, so a song like this (which is, like his first song, about love after the first thrill has passed) is beyond him emotionally. It's a very pretty series of notes, but it's nothing more than that.
Lauren, "I Hope You Dance" -- The judges have served Lauren well; her youthful optimism and innocence are well suited to the song. And it's a very nice performance, even if it never quite rises to the level of being exciting or distinctive. (The less said about the glittery blue prom dress, the better.)
Haley, "You Oughta Know" -- The verses are pitched far too low for her, and the bottom notes are completely disappearing. She sounds terrific on the chorus, though, and the song is right in her comfort zone.
For round three: Lauren, Haley, Scotty.
For the night: Haley, Lauren, Scotty.
For the season: It's a very tough call. Scotty's been extraordinarily consistent, but has been content to be very good instead of striving for greatness. He's the kid who shows up to class every day and gets B's on all the tests; you're happy that he isn't failing, but you kind of wish that he'd at least try for an A once in a while. Lauren has shown the most steady growth over the season, and I think her lack of confidence is her biggest weakness. Haley has been wildly inconsistent; mostly awful for much of the season, then suddenly good -- occasionally spectacularly good -- over the last three weeks. The three are so tightly bunched that any ranking would be entirely about personal taste.
Let's send home: It should (again) be Scotty. I think it will be Lauren.
We open with a weird "vote for them so they can go home next week" pitch, as if the loser this week will be locked in Guantanamo and never allowed to see their family again. Which sets the perfect tone for a round of "songs that inspired me."
The rundown:
James, "Don't Stop Believing" -- You gotta figure Fox loves the subliminal cross-promotion for Glee. It's an OK performance, but he's over-singing a bit, holding on to notes ("smalltown booooooy") for too long, robbing the song of the punchiness it needs. It's rock, not Verdi.
Haley, "The Earth Song" -- Ecocatastrophe, dying children, war -- this is inspiring? It's pretty enough, but pretty isn't Haley's strong suit, and when she breaks out the raspy stuff at the end, it doesn't suit the song.
Scotty, "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning" -- Do these kids know what "inspire" means? "Hey, remember 9/11?" is not an inspiring message. It's true that Alan Jackson's song was less jingoistic than many of the country world's responses to 9/11, but this is still the most shameless bit of patriotic pandering we've seen since Kristy Lee Cook trotted out "God Bless the USA." Oh, the performance? Meh.
Lauren, "Anyway" -- Finally, someone understands "inspiring." Lovely song choice; simple, understated delivery. She's not laying on the twang too thick, but when it's there, it's just right.
For Round 1: Lauren, James, Scotty, Haley.
Next up, the songs of frequent Idol honorees Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, with mentoring from Lady Gaga, which doesn't intuitively seem like a great fit, but who knows?
The rundown:
Haley, "I (Who Have Nothing)" -- Holy shit. Anyone see that coming? That was the most spectacularly intense thing we've seen on Idol in a long time, and that wail coming back into the verse (after "windowpane") was scary-ass thrilling. Remarkable.
Scotty, "Young Blood" -- More energy than we've gotten from Scotty in a while, and far more playful; he's teasing the audience with the interplay between his high/low registers (love the "looky there" sequence). And yet Steven isn't wrong when he says (meaning to be complimentary, I think) that there's something Pat Boone about it; even at his best these days, Scotty seems like the watered-down, safe for mass consumption version of something that should be more exciting.
Lauren, "Trouble" -- It's not as bad as I'd feared, given her qualms about the word "evil," but why do the nice girls always want to sing this song? Lauren is about as evil as marshmallow.
James, "Love Potion #9" -- Badly out of tune on "selling little bottles," and he's missing the tone of the song entirely. This shouldn't be shouted; it needs to be sly, insinuating, winking. He's doing what he does reasonably well; it just doesn't suit the song at all.
For Round 2: Haley, Scotty, James, Lauren. And special kudos to Gaga for understanding that singing is acting, and for being a damn good drama coach.
For the night: Haley, James, Lauren, Scotty.
For the season: James, Lauren, Haley (though she's given two of the season's best performances in two weeks, and the gap with Lauren is very small), Scotty.
Let's send home: Scotty, though I fear it will be Lauren.
The Philharmonic's 5-week "Brahms Unbound" series begins; over the course of the series, we'll be getting all four symphonies and the German Requiem.
The original plan had been for a new piece to accompany each of the major Brahms works, but the Philharmonic has run into bad luck with its newly commissioned works. Composers Peter Lieberson and Henryk Gorecki died before finishing their pieces (a percussion concerto and a fourth symphony, respectively), and Osvaldo Golijov didn't finish his violin concerto on time.
Those works have been replaced (mostly) with other relatively new works; filling in for Golijov today is Dutilleux's 1985 violin concerto L'arbre des songes; the title translates at The Tree of Dreams.
I'm quite sure I didn't entirely follow or understand the piece; it flows from moment to moment in what feels a very stream-of-consciousness manner, and the logical connections that hold the piece together were not always obvious on first hearing (at least to me). There are some striking moments in it, to be sure.
Dutilleux uses a large percussion section, mostly made up of instruments that ring and resonate for a good length of time -- gongs, suspended cymbals, vibraphone. They're often used to create misty clouds of sound that dissolve into one another as the solo violin floats in and around them. Effective use is also made of the cimbalom, an eastern European instrument related to the hammered dulcimer, and there's a lovely duet passage for the solo violin and the oboe d'amore.
The Academic Festival Overture was Brahms' thank-you gift after receiving an honorary degree from a German university, and most of its tunes are popular beer-hall drinking songs of the period. It's hard to imagine what the contemporary equivalent would be (if only because it's hard to imagine a modern university wasting an honorary degree on a boring old classical composer while Snooki is available to be feted). Perhaps it would be a medley of that year's popular karaoke hits, treated with slighly mocking solemnity, topped off with the school fight song. In any event, it's a charming and jolly piece, even if some of its humor is lost after 130 years.
Brahms' First Symphony is filled with moments of great drama, and the Philharmonic delivered on all of them. The brass section was particularly fine, and timpanist Joseph Pereira made such a feast of his pounds and rolls that he was cheered with great enthusiasm at the end of the performance. The big tune in the fourth movement -- Brahms' homage to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," the program notes tell me -- is always a grand moment, and Dudamel took it slightly slower than I've heard it before, giving it remarkable tension and energy.
Next week: the German Requiem and Stephen Mackey's violin concerto Beautiful Passing.
At the New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott discuss the current movie craze for violent young women.
Slate's Bill Wyman explores what it means to be a music collector in an age when the Internet is making rarity an obsolete concept.
On a not entirely unrelated topic, NPR's Linda Holmes comes to terms with the fact that there's just more art out there than any of us can ever keep up with.
Y'know, I'm almost getting nostalgic for the tightly constrained, potentially embarassing themes. C'mon, admit it, you're kinda wanting to see Scotty tackle disco, or Jacob squirm his way through George Jones night. But all we get tonight is "now & then," a round of contemporary songs and a round of oldies. Sigh...
Ah, well, the rundown:
James, "Closer to the Edge" -- The song is right in his strike zone, which makes it odd that it's one of his worse performances. He's got the mike so close at the beginning that the words are distorted to the point that they're incomprehensible, and his pitch is off throughout, especially on the big dramatic long notes.
Jacob, "No Air" -- The song is a lot of choppy phrases that don't show off Jacob's style very well, and instead of the dramatic build that he's good at, he seems to be always either screaming or whispering at us. Not terribly effective, and not a good song choice.
Lauren, "Flat on the Floor" -- The song's a bore, the lyrics are being completely lost on the lower-pitched notes, and the big pageant hair's a disaster. She's still gaining in confidence with every performance, though, and this is the type of material she should be doing.
Scotty, "Gone" -- It's not great, but it's pretty good; it's certainly the most interesting thing he's done in the last month or so. And on what is turning out to be a disappointing night so far, that might be enough to save him for another week.
Haley, "You and I" -- It's sung pretty well, actually, though the vibrato at the beginning is a bit too wide and wobbly for my taste. But we're back to Haley trying to act sexy, and there's something about Haley in sexy mode that I find really creepy and offputting. She somehow manages to bypass sexy and go straight to sleazy.
For Round 1: Scotty, Haley, James, Jacob, Lauren.
On to the oldies:
James, "Without You" -- That was as emotionally connected a performance as we've seen this season, and somewhat unexpectedly, the quiet verse was better than the big loud belty chorus, which got a little shrieky in spots. Overall, though, very nice indeed.
Jacob, "Love Hurts" -- I wouldn't have thought of turning this into a gospel-flavored shouter, but when you get hold of a good song, you can do pretty much anything to it and it'll still work. And that worked really well. The harp at the beginning was a bit on the twee side, perhaps, but the performance was terrific.
Lauren, "Unchained Melody" -- It's a tale of two registers. The higher notes sound OK, and the lower notes are breathy and out of tune. She also runs into trouble because it's a song that doesn't condense well, so the transitions feel awkward and the ending can't build the way it needs to.
Scotty, "Always on My Mind" -- The calm simplicity of it works very well, but he's so laidback that he's not putting quite enough energy into his voice to get it up to pitch on some of those long notes. A missed opportunity.
Haley, "The House of the Rising Sun" -- Excellent, and we've finally found the right context for all of Haley's growling and wailing. The last few lines are a little harsh and screamy, but that's a minor flaw at the end of the night's best performance.
For Round 2: Haley, James, Jacob, Lauren, Scotty.
And so, it's a round of weak performances of new songs and mostly strong performances of oldies. Haley and James help themselves the most, and Lauren has a weak night.
For the night: Haley, James, Jacob, Scotty, Lauren.
For the season: James, Lauren, Jacob, Haley, Scotty.
Let's send home: It really should be Scotty, but I think it's likely to be Lauren.
Seventh in the Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series. The two lead characters are the Episocopalian priest and the police chief in Millers Kill, a small town in upstate New York, and the development of their personal relationship is a background plot throughout the series.
As this one opens, Clare has recently returned from deployment in Iraq (she's an Army helicopter pilot) and is meeting with other Iraq vets from Millers Kill in a small veterans' support group. We flash back over the last several months to the stories of their individual returns from war and the challenges they're facing readjusting to civilian life.
Spencer-Fleming takes her time with these stories, letting us get to know each of these characters before actually getting to the murder mystery part of the plot. The body isn't found until almost halfway through the book, in fact, and when Russ and his department conclude that it's a suicide, Clare refuses to accept that, and recruits her fellow vets to help solve what she insists is a murder.
This is a very solidly constructed book; a lot of things that look like unimportant background details during the telling of the various vets' backstories turn out to be more significant, and Spencer-Fleming does a lovely job of tying all the threads together. The fact that all of the vets are somehow tied into the mystery feels a bit overly coincidental, maybe, but no more so than usual for the genre. The post-war struggles of Clare and her fellow vets are neither sugarcoated nor overly sensationalized, and the progress of each feels realistic.
This is one of the best series in recent years, and if you haven't been reading it, you should. The mysteries in each volume are stand-alones, but the development of the Clare/Russ relationship (and some of the relationships among the recurring supporting players) is interesting enough that you'll enjoy them more, I think, if you read them in order. (The first volume is In the Bleak Midwinter.)
Making the Boys, which is finally getting a theatrical release after a couple of years on the film festival circuit, explores the impact and legacy of Mart Crowley's play The Boys in the Band. When the play opened off-Broadway in 1968, it was the first major play to attempt an honest depiction of gay men as neither sick nor villainous. Since then, it's faded somewhat in memory; the movie's man-on-the-street interviews find that many younger gay people have a vague sense that they should know what it is, but aren't quite sure. Even among those who remember it, the play is viewed by many as a mildly embarrassing relic; its assortment of bitchy men at a drunken birthday party are not seen as encouraging role models.
And there were those who felt that way from the beginning; Edward Albee thought the play "skillfully written," but refused to invest in it, believing that its portrayal of gay men would be harmful to the burgeoning gay rights movement.
But despite those views, the play was enormously successful. It ran in New York for over five years; there were two American road companies; and the play was translated into multiple languages. The success of the play gave Crowley enough clout to keep the entire original cast for the 1970 film version, and there was even a cast album, a rarity for a non-musical.
One of the strengths of director Crayton Robey's film is how well it shows how quickly things were changing for gay Americans (at least in the larger cities) in this era. When the play opened, a year before Stonewall, the fact that the play even existed was seen as an incredible breakthrough; by the time the film opened two years later, its characters were already seen as pre-Stonewall relics, to the extent that the film was picketed by gay activists in some cities. The play had gone from groundbreaking to dated with remarkable speed.
Robey has assembled a large assortment of playwrights, scholars, historians, and cultural figures to talk about the play. Crowley is a charming and engaging figure, and two of the three surviving cast members are on hand to talk about their experience. (There is one terribly sad sequence where we learn that more than half of the 9 original actors died of AIDS.) Friedkin talks about making the movie; in addition to Albee, playwrights Tony Kushner and Paul Rudnick talk about the play's significance.
The movie isn't terribly exciting stylistically (you won't miss anything if you wait for cable or DVD), but it's a smart and entertaining look at a significant cultural landmark.
Phil Rosenthal was one of the producers of Everybody Loves Raymond, and in this documentary, he takes us to Moscow, where he's helping a Russian production company prepare the pilot for a Russian version of the show.
Rosenthal is sure that the show's family humor will translate to any culture, but things don't go as smoothly as he expects. The sitcom is a very new form in Russian television, and the Russian team struggles to find actors who can get the tone right. One early villain is the costume designer, who wants the show's housewife to be dressed in glamorous outfits ("to educate our women about fashion"), and can't understand Rosenthal's insistence that such clothes aren't appropriate for a woman who spends her days cleaning the house and dealing with kids.
There is a fair amount of "oh, those silly Russians" humor here that comes perilously close to ugly-Americanism (there are lots of yucks at the expense of the studio, a gloomy concrete building of which Rosenthal asks "do you know which room it was they filmed Saw in?"), and if you've seen one behind-the-scenes look at TV production, you won't find that the Russian version of the process is all that different from the American version.
Rosenthal is funny enough to keep the movie mildly amusing throughout, and I did find myself rooting for him to get through to his Russian colleagues. Not essential viewing, but if the subject interests you, you'll enjoy it, I suppose.
If you do see it, do stay for the closing credits. One of the movie's best jokes comes at the very end, when we see Rosenthal's visit to the office of the director of the Moscow Art Theater -- the theater where Stanislavski arguably invented modern acting -- and we learn that some humor is indeed universal.
"Such a convoluted patchwork," says Jemisin's heroine at one point, as she tries to piece together the story of who's trying to manipulate her, and how, and why. And that's as good a summary as any of this book.
Yeine is the granddaughter of the king, but he disowned her mother when she ran off to marry a man from a "barbarian" tribe. It comes as a surprise, therefore, when Grandfather summons her and declares that she shall be one of the competitors to be his heir. She's competing against his niece and nephew, who are far more familiar with the Machiavellian politics of the kingdom than she, and it soon becomes clear that she is being used as a sacrificial lamb.
The convoluted patchwork involves the backstory of the Gods' War, a great battle among the three sibling gods who created the world, one of whom killed his sister (except that she's not quite dead) and imprisoned his brother in human form. There are also a bunch of the gods' children -- "godlings" -- running about, also in (mostly) human form, with immense powers that are never terribly well defined, and with agendas of their own.
By about halfway in, I'd entirely lost track of who was pulling who's strings, and I honestly didn't much care. By the time we get to the end, which is about as literal (and cheesy) a deus ex machina as one could imagine, I was just sick to death of the story and everyone in it.
With this book, I've now read all of this year's Nebula-nominated novels, and I am underwhelmed by the field. Two of the nominees -- this one, and Connie Willis's Blackout / All Clear -- also made the Hugo list (I suppose I should move on to the rest of that list now), and they were my least favorite of the bunch. I can understand Willis making the list; she's immensely popular within the field, and has a long (and richly deserved) reputation for fine writing. There's no way her magnum opus wasn't going to be nominated, no matter how badly padded and over-stuffed it is. I'm more perplexed by the Jemisin; she's a first-time novelist, so personal politics is significantly less of a factor. Anyone out there who read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and liked it? What am I missing?
None of the other nominees blew me away, but if you made me vote for a winner, I'd probably go with Jack McDevitt's Echo.
There's been surprisingly little of Carole King on American Idol, and most of the songs we're hearing tonight are making their Idol debut. And we're padding to 90 minutes by adding duets, a rather blunt admission that Fox has nothing else worth putting on the air.
The rundown:
Jacob, "Oh No Not My Baby" -- After a few weeks of relative restraint, Jacob's cutting loose tonight, with elaborate riffs and a very impressive Big Long Note. But it's all icing and no cake; I'm left awed by the technique but wondering "what was the song about again?" (And that outfit makes him look like the ringmaster at a really cheap circus.)
Lauren, "Where You Lead" -- Dunno if it was meeting Miley Cyrus or the shock of Kenny's smart question ("Have you ever gone for the note and not hit it?"), but something's given Lauren a massive confidence boost tonight. She looks more comfortable than she ever has, and sounds terrific. The arrangement is smartly updated, and the song suits her well. Very fine indeed.
Casey/Haley, "I Feel the Earth Move" -- Who would have expected that Haley would come off better in this pairing? Casey's harmony lines are out of tune, and when he's got the lead, he's shouting so much that he sounds like a parody version of himself. On the other hand, the song fits Haley's voice quite nicely, and though it's taken her most of the season to do it, she finallly seems to be figuring out who she really is as a singer.
Scotty, "You've Got a Friend" -- The arrangement is a disaster; the song needs a bit more rhythmic kick to propel it, and Scotty's drowning in that syrupy sea of strings. Pick up the tempo a bit and replace the easy-listening strings with some fiddles and a steel guitar, and this might work, but as it is, it's a ghastly mess.
James, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" -- One very badly placed breath ("...or just a mo (gasp) ment's pleasure..."), but otherwise, this is really lovely. The opening verse sung a cappella is excellent.
Lauren/Scotty, "Up on the Roof" -- The arrangement is clearly in her key, not his, and he's having to strain particularly hard on his harmony lines. They're both a bit on the bland side here, which is a step up from his solo number and a step down from hers.
Casey, "Hi-De-Ho" -- It's beginning to be a guessing game as to which Casey is going to show up each week. On a good night, we get the tasteful, bluesy Casey; on a bad night -- like this one -- we get the gratingly mannered Casey. As he did in his duet, he sounds like his own evil twin.
Haley, "Beautiful" -- She's better than she was a month ago, but the improvement isn't big enough or fast enough to put her back into the race. This performance is OK, I suppose -- better in the rocking chorus than in the flowing verses -- but not terribly interesting or memorable.
Jacob/James, "I'm Into Something Good" -- Individually, they sound fine; but when they sing together, neither is making any effort to blend with the other, and their wildly different tones grate against each other very badly.
It's been a very uneven night, with terrific highs and horrid lows, but nothing that shook up the standings too badly.
For the night: Lauren, James, Jacob, Haley, Casey, Scotty.
For the season: Lauren, Jacob, James, Casey, Haley, Scotty.
Let's send home: Scotty's finally worn out his welcome, I'm afraid. I would not be surprised, though (or too disappointed), to see Haley get the boot.
In a brief editor's note, we are told that Lutz and Hayward agreed to collaborate on this novel, writing alternate chapters. They would do no advance plotting, and neither was allowed to change the plot developments the other had added to the story. Each occasionally comments on the other's chapters in footnotes, and at the end of each chapter, we get to read a brief exchange of notes between them. That situation is complicated by the fact that Lutz and Hayward were once romantically involved; their relationship appears to have ended rather badly, and it is strongly suggested that the end was brought about by their last attempt at collaboration.
A serious quibble here: No advance plotting for a murder mystery? Even for a fictional setup, it stretches credulity that any authors would think they could pull that off successfully.
But that's the conceit, and the Lutz/Hayward relationship is always present in the background as we read the mystery they've concocted, which is set in northern California, where 20ish brother and sister Paul and Lacey are rather aimlessly drifting through life in a small town. Paul grows pot; Lacey works at the local coffeeshop; each has quiet dreams of getting out of this place. When a headless corpse turns up on their property, they can't exactly call the cops -- all those pot plants, you know -- so they move the body to someplace where they figure it will be found fairly quickly. But things go awry, and it's not long before Paul and Lacey are working to solve the crime themselves.
As the professional relationship between Lutz and Hayward begins to fray, and their footnotes and chapter notes become more hostile, the sibling relationship between Paul and Lacey shows some strain, too, with each wondering if the other might be involved in the murder. The rule about not undoing the other author's plot points goes out the window; one character dies, turns out not to be dead after all, and dies again in consecutive chapters.
Given the "no pre-planning" rule, it's not surprising that the mystery rambles a bit (and let's face it, tight plotting was not one of the strengths of Lutz's novels about the Spellman family), but it does so in an amiable enough fashion, and it's fun to watch the authors take increasingly vicious pot shots at each other in their chapters. (Lutz frequently complains that Hayward uses too many obscure words; his response to those complains is the single best joke in the book.)
Heads You Lose isn't going to win any awards, and it's not at the level of Lutz's earlier work (it's Hayward's first novel), but it's an amusing piece of fluff.
Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, explores product placement through a sort of immersion technique. The movie is entirely funded by product placement, and much of the movie consists of Spurlock's meetings with potential corporate sponsors about how they might be promoted in the movie. The movie winds up with an official car, an offical airline, an official hotel, etc., and the three largest sponsors get actual 30-second commercials (starring Spurlock) during the film.
I'm choosing not to name any of those sponsors; after all, Spurlock may be getting paid to plug the hell out of them, but I'm not. The largest sponsor paid a million dollars for above-the-title placement; the actual full title of the movie is (Sponsor Name) Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
In addition to meetings with sponsors, Spurlock talks to brand consultants (his own brand is identified as "mindful/playful," and many of the brands he targets as participants fall into the same general type), lawyers, consumer advocates (Ralph Nader shows up to scowl and mutter about how doomed we all are), and media critics. A few directors talk about their own experiences with product placement; Quentin Tarantino says he's never done much of it, mostly because he keeps getting turned down.
Spurlock approaches the subject in his usual style; he's the uninformed, curious layman, inviting us along as he discovers what goes into product placement. To be sure, there's a certain disingenuousness in that style -- Spurlock knows exactly what message he wants to send -- but as populist documentarians go, I find Spurlock's droll, laidback presentation more appealing than Michael Moore's angry polemicist.
Any company willing to take part in a project like this has to have at least some sense of humor about itself, and Spurlock deftly walks a fine line between plugging and gently teasing his sponsors. Part of his success there derives from the fact that a lot of the teasing seems self-directed; there's a slight "can you believe I have to do this nonsense?" wink in his most blatant plugs. The plugs don't end on screen, by the way; when I bought my ticket, I was handed a small assortment of samples and coupons from some of the movie's sponsors.
If you're a reasonably aware moviegoer, I don't think Spurlock is going to tell you anything you don't already know, but we don't normally get so close a view of the process. And with Spurlock as a guide, I had a lot of fun watching the sausage being made.
At The Onion's A.V. Club, Rabin has specialized in reviews of the misunderstood, the disappointing, and the disastrous. "My Year of Flops" began as a twice-weekly, year-long project to explore the most reviled commercial disasters cinema has to offer. (The series has continued past that first year, though it appears less frequently.)
Here, fifty of those explorations -- fifteen of them appearing here for the first time -- are gathered for cheerfully snarky re-evaluation, and each is given a final label of either Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success. The difference between a mere Failure and a Fiasco is summed up in a quote from the first film in this book, Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown:
A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-coe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folktale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn't. Happen. To. Them.
Obviously, there's going to be a certain amount of gleeful nastiness and cheap shots here, but Rabin goes into his reappraisals with a genuinely open mind; he wants to find something good in these movies, and often does. Among his "Secret Success" finds -- movies that are better than their reputation would suggest, or that at least offer some good reason to sit through them -- we find Robert Altman's O.C. and Stiggs, the Steve Martin-Bernadette Peters version of Pennies from Heaven (I was a little surprised to find that one in the book at all, actually; I thought it had a solid critiical reputation), The Rocketeer, and Joe Versus the Volcano.
But even the Failures and Fiascos are described in such affectionate terms that I find myself wanting to see them (or see them again, in some cases). Who could resist Paint Your Wagon, "a three-hour-long movie where Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin sang and danced and were married to the same woman yet seemed kind of into each other," or Scenes from a Mall, which features one of Woody Allen's few appearances in a movie directed by someone else, and Bette Midler as his wife? And I really should finally get around to seeing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or to a second viewing of the spectacularly weird The Apple.
Rabin has a knack for summing up a movie's problems in concise fashion. He describes Rent, for instance as "a musical about Gen Xers, the most cynical and sarcastic generation known to man, that's wholly devoid of cynicism and sarcasm." Of the ghastly miscasting of Lucille Ball in Mame, he helpfully observes that "it's never an encouraging sign when a choreographer's main concern is his leading lady throwing out a hip."
His style is light and droll, and he knows enough about movies and how they work (or don't) that you never feel as if he's being mean just for the sake of being mean. There's serious critical analysis going on behind all the jokes.
Another wide-open theme, about which there's not much to say but this: I shall have harsh words for anyone who picks a song from the year 2000, which (as all right-thinking people know) was the last year of the 20th century, and not the first year of the 21st. Shall we away?
The rundown:
The Rejects, "So What" -- We're padding the top seven to ninety minutes (remember when the top ten took only an hour?) and so we get this. It is not a good idea, and it is not a good performance We sent these people away for a reason, you know. Paul seems to be particularly lost in a style not his own.
Scotty, "Swingin'" -- Well, "harsh words for a song from 2000" looks rather quaint in the face of this theme cheat, a song that's ten years older than Scotty is. As for the performance? Scotty's got a natural flirty quality on stage; he doesn't need to try to flirt with us as he's doing here. The extra effort makes him seem less naturally charming and more "keep your daughter away from that creepy McCreery boy."
James, "Uprising" -- Love the arrangement; those pounding drums are very effective. But some of those big rock-boy high notes are a little shrill and out of tune tonight, and when James drops into his lower register for the verses, he's hard to hear and his enunciation is a bit weak. It's a spectacular bit of theater, though.
Haley, "Rolling in the Deep" -- Very good song choice that suits her raspy tone quite well; those yodel-y little breaks into head voice are nicely done. By far her best performance, and the first time I've felt like we were hearing Haley instead of some character she was putting on.
Jacob, "Dance With My Father" -- You can hear in the first few lines that the emotion is getting to him; his voice is a little thicker than usual, and he's running out of breath in a way that he doesn't normally do. But once he hits the chorus, he's gotten a grip on it, and it's a lovely performance, quite moving. There's not much to say about Jacob at this point; he's reliably and consistently very good.
Casey, "Harder to Breathe" -- This is crappy songwriting; the lyrics are crammed in with utter disregard for where the stress is going to fall (most egregiously on "...finALly clear..."). The performance is fine, though it's not anything that I'll remember for very long.
Stefano, "Closer" -- Stefano's strength is in the long, silky phrases, and the choppiness of this one ("I. Just. Can't. Stop...") doesn't suit him well. It's also a song that's not well-suited to Idol performance; there are a lot of overlapping layers, and on stage, we're left with Stefano wailing wordless "oh"s and "ah"s while the chorus carries the lyrics.
Lauren, "Born to Fly" -- Another smart song choice; the youthful energy and optimism of the song suit her very well. There's nothing glaringly wrong with the performance, and it should keep her around for another week, but it's not exciting in any way, and she really does have to kick it up a notch if she wants to win this thing.
We're down to that point in the competition where we don't expect many genuinely awful performances, and there weren't any tonight. But while it's true that the remaining field (and the season as a whole) has had a higher base level of competence than most previous years, we have yet to see any truly breathtaking moments. It's still a tightly bunched group, and things are wide open for someone to break free from the pack with a goosebump moment. Haley helped herself the most tonight, and Scotty continued his long slow decline into irrelevancy.
For the night: Jacob, Haley, James, Lauren, Casey, Scotty, Stefano.
For the season: Jacob, Lauren, James, Casey, Stefano, Scotty, Haley.
Let's send home: While it wasn't quite enough to move her off the bottom of my list, Haley deserves a reprieve for her best performance thus far, so it's gotta be either Stefano or Scotty.
Here we have the story of Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg), a Brazilian blue macaw who's captured by smugglers and winds up living in Minnesota with his owner, Linda (Leslie Mann). They are visited one day by Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro), who tells Linda that Blu is the last male of his species, and they need to take him back to Brazil in the hopes that he will mate with the last female.
That female is Jewel (Anne Hathaway), who's not remotely interested in nerdy little Blu. (How nerdy is he? He's never even learned to fly.) But when they are captured by smugglers (which must feel practically routine to Blu at this point), they have to work together to escape.
The voice cast also includes George Lopez, will.i.am, and Jamie Foxx as Brazilian birds who get involved in the quest; Jemaine Clement as a villainous cockatoo who aids the smugglers; and Tracy Morgan as a bulldog with a serious drool problem. Most of the cast fails to bring the level of energy that good voice acting requires; animated characters, no matter how well done, are less expressive than live people, and the voice acting has to be somewhat exaggerated to compensate. Clement comes off best, throwing himself into Nigel's evil scheming with wild abandon.
The story is a bit bland and predictable; it's quickly obvious how the parallel love stories (bird and human) are going to play out. That's not necessarily a bad thing in a kid's movie, but Rio lacks the smartness that makes a movie like Rango work on different levels for kids and parents.
The movie is at its best in its most elaborate scenes, when it gives in to the riot of color that Brazil offers. There's an opening musical number set in the jungle that is to birds what The Little Mermaid's "Under the Sea" was to fish; Foxx and will.i.am get a few musical moments of their own; and a chase scene through an elaborate parade captures the exuberant joy of Carnaval.
A mixed bag, but your kids will enjoy it, and there's enough to keep you mildly entertained, too.
A few weeks, I very much enjoyed Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, a look at how our scientific illiteracy makes it easy for drug companies and the media to scare us with various non-existent medical crises; among Goldacre's targets was the incompetent and fraudulent science behind the anti-vaccine movement. Offit's book deals with that movement at greater length, and while he doesn't ignore the dismal "science" that's behind it, he focuses just as much on its history and politics.
It shouldn't be surprising that there have been anti-vaccine activists for just as long as there have been vaccines; the phrase "conscientious objector" actually derives from the anti-vaccine movement of late-19th-century England, and was only later used for those protesting military service.
(An interesting pop-culture artifact of the anti-vaccine movement: The Raggedy Ann doll, whose designer modeled it after his daughter, whose death he blamed on smallpox vaccine. The doll's floppy limbs mimic her symptoms.)
And the tactics of the anti-vaccine crowd have been remarkably similar from one era to another. Discredit the science; malign the motives of doctors; claim that vaccines are dangerous, unnatural, or a violation of God's will. The most dramatic change in the modern movement is the role of lawyers and money.
Offit also provides very good explanations of how we're all put at risk by unvaccinated children, and of what a difference mandatory vaccination makes. He offers as one dramatic example the case of Texarkana, a city that sits on the Texas-Arkansas border, which suffered a measles outbreak in 1970. At the time, Arkansas required children to be vaccinated before entering school and Texas did not. Of the 633 measles cases in Texarkana, 608 were on the Texas side of the city.
Is there any hope? Offit sees only three ways out, and acknowledges that one of them -- ending religious and philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws -- is unlikely to happen in the current political and legal climate. He clings to the hope that Americans will somehow come to their senses and begin to trust their doctors again.
I find it hard to be that optimistic; we've reached a point where parents are putting their faith in Jenny McCarthy over, say, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and I fear that Offit's third way out -- the most pessimistic -- is the most likely. And that way out begins with massive outbreaks of childhood diseases that once seemed nearly wiped out: mumps, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough. I'm afraid that a lot of parents will have to suffer, and a lot of children will have to die, to shock America back into its senses on this issue.
Offit explains the problem clearly, and lays out the science involved in a way that shouldn't be beyond most readers. This is an important, passionate book about a growing public health crisis; sadly, those who most need to hear its message will probably never read it.
The Straight Dope, Cecil Adams: What are the legal implications of getting a tattoo of your favorite team's logo?
Future of Film, Chris Dorr: Could subscriptions and memberships save movie theaters?
A pair of thoughtful commentaries on recent movies: At Mirror, Kartina Richardson on Certified Copy; at Asking the Wrong Questions, Abigail Nussbaum on Source Code.
Making Light, Teresa Nielsen Hayden (and her commenters) on Transnistrian Infundibulators and publishing genres.
At the Los Angeles Times, Meghan Daum explains how Sarah Palin avoids the criticism she deserves.
And let's close with this, which gets away with a bit more tugging at the heartstrings than I usually like:
After the year's obligatory shocking departure -- we'll miss you, Pia -- we return for a night of songs from the movies, continuing (as promised) the year's series of theme nights that leave plenty of room for everyone to find something appropriate.
The rundown:
Paul, "Old Time Rock and Roll" -- I still don't like his voice, and I wish he would stop bounding about the stage like an anorexic hobbit in a Nudie suit. But lord knows he's got personality to burn, and he's having so much fun that it's hard to completely hate him.
Lauren, "The Climb" -- She's learning fast, isn't she? Smart song selection that falls right into her stylistic strike zone, and a good solid performance; she also seems to be more relaxed on stage every week. Not a goosebump moment, but I'm now at the point where I wouldn't be surprised to get one from her eventually.
Stefano, "End of the Road" -- Pretty enough voice, but the boy's got all the star quality of a brick.
Scotty, "I Cross My Heart" -- I wish he'd stuck with "Everybody's Talkin';" that would at least have had the potential to be surprising. This isn't much of a song, and Scotty doesn't do much to elevate it. It's an adequate performance, but there's nothing interesting about it.
Casey, "Nature Boy" -- Casey at his most eccentric, both in song choice and performance. The vocal is more oddly mannered than usual, with lots of distracting "ah" puffs at the end-ah of every phrase-ah. Pitch was a bit wobbly in spots. I'm not sure that performance gets many votes from the tween girls who dominate the voting.
Haley, "Call Me" -- We're four or five words into the song before she's even close to the right pitches, and even once she settles into the notes, it's not pretty. It's another of Haley's bad-cabaret performances. I still don't think we know (or that she knows) who Haley really is as a performer; all of her songs feel like the work of a bad actor playing a role.
Jacob, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" -- Oddly lifeless; given this combination of singer and song, there should have been goosebumps on goosebumps by the end of it. That sustained climb on the last three notes was quite nicely done, though.
James, "Heavy Metal" -- Well, it's not my thing and I won't be rushing out to buy his record, but it was very well done, and certainly the most energetic and passionate performance of the night.
The top half of the field remains very tightly bunched, with Lauren moving up a bit; Scotty continues his slow slide into the back half of the pack, and Paul finally escapes the basement.
For the night: Lauren, James, Jacob, Paul, Casey, Scotty, Stefano, Haley.
For the season: Jacob, Casey, Lauren, James, Scotty, Stefano, Paul, Haley.
Let's send home: It ought to be Haley, and given the "let's send all the women home first" trend of the season, that wouldn't be a surprising outcome. But I'd also be worried if I were Jacob, because we're entering the part of the season beyond which black men tend not to survive, or Casey, because I don't think Idol voters respond well to weird.
