TV: Major Crimes (TNT, Monday 9)

TNT's Major Crimes isn't a spinoff from The Closer so much as it is a direct continuation. Gone are Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson and Detective David Gabriel, off to work in the District Attorney's office (leaving them close by for the occasional guest appearance).

Taking over as the new head of the LAPD Major Crimes Unit is Sharon Raydor (Mary McConnell), and none of the returning detectives are thrilled with her by-the-book approach. Even worse, the city is insisting on a new approach; getting confessions is being downplayed in favor of making deals, because plea bargains are cheaper than trials.

Two new cast members join the old Closer crew. Kearran Giovanni is Amy Sykes, an ambitious young detective who's just been assigned to Major Crimes; she doesn't get enough to do in the first episode to give us much sense of the character. Graham Patrick Martin is Rusty, a homeless teen who Raydor takes into her home for safekeeping before he testifies in an upcoming murder trial. That's a risky plot, and Rusty could easily become the Cousin Oliver of crime dramas, but Martin and McDonnell have a sharp chemistry, and the producers have enough residual goodwill with me from the seven season of The Closer that I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Given that 90% of the cast and the setting are the same, the differences between the shows come down mostly to the differences between former lead Kyra Sedgwick and new lead Mary McDonnell. By the end of its run, The Closer had taken advantage of Sedgwick's scattered, frantic energy to turn Brenda into a marvelous comic character; some episodes of the show bordered on farce.

McDonnell, on the other hand, couldn't do scattered to save her life, and her chilly laser focus brings a very different energy to the show. She's not without humor, but her style is less about broad dialogue and physical comedy, and more about impeccably timed reaction shots and droll understatement.

In part because of the change from Sedgwick to McDonnell, it looks as if Major Crimes will be a darker, less broadly comic series than The Closer was. But then, The Closer began as a more conventional crime drama and only gradually developed its comic edge, so it's possible that Major Crimes will lighten up over time, as the writers get the hang of writing to McDonnell's strengths.

Major Crimes is a perfectly safe and seamless continuation of the franchise, and there's no reason it shouldn't run just as long as The Closer's seven seasons.

MOVIES: Celeste and Jesse Forever (Lee Toland Krieger, 2012)

Celeste and Jesse Forever opens with the title couple (Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg) spending a day together, running errands and driving around Los Angeles. They have an easy rapport, share lots of inside jokes, and seem spectacularly comfortable together. He drops her off at home before heading to the beach to surf; she reminds him to be back in time for their dinner with friends that evening.

So it's something of a shock when we find out during that dinner that Celeste and Jesse are separated and in the process of getting a divorce. They still consider themselves best friends; he lives in her guest house; and they seem entirely happy with their new status as best buds/soon-to-be exes.

The biggest problem with the movie, though, is that because they seem like so perfect a couple, we desperately need to know why they've split up, and we never really find out. Oh, Celeste grumbles at one point that "Jesse doesn't even have a checking account. Or dress shoes," but those things were surely true when she married him in the first place, so what's changed? We don't know. And since their current status is so utterly inexplicable and arbitrary, it's hard to have any interest in where they wind up.

Which is a shame, because there are some talented actors here. Jones and Samberg are both delightful. He's a particular surprise; nothing he did on Saturday Night Live would have led me to expect this kind of real acting. Will McCormick has a laid-back, dry charm as the local pot dealer; Emma Roberts is funny as a not-so-dumb pop star; and Chris Messina is carving out a very nice niche for himself as a 21st-century Ralph Bellamy, always playing the brother, the best friend, the Other Man, and so on.

Elijah Wood is less successful as Celeste's boss, who wants desperately to be her Sassy Gay Friend, a joke that isn't made any funnier by having him explicitly comment on how desperately he wants to be her Sassy Gay Friend. (And how much longer do we have to keep pretending that Wood has anything to offer other than those creepy Keane-moppet eyes, anyway?)

It's a movie with a lot of interesting moments, but the great gaping hole in the narrative is so distracting and frustrating that it's hard to enjoy them as much as you'd like to.

TV: Go On (NBC, Tue 9)

NBC is taking advantage of the Olympics to offer sneak previews of a couple of their new sitcoms. This week, we got a first look at the Matthew Perry vehicle Go On, which will premiere in its regular Tuesday night time slot on September 11. (EDIT/Sep 7: Last minute schedule change from NBC; the pilot will air again on Monday, September 10, with a new episode in the show's usual Tuesday timeslot on the 11th.)

I will not be the only one, I'm sure, to note that the structure of the pilot episode is virtually identical to that of the Community pilot: High-strung professional gets booted from his job until he completes some task which he thinks is beneath him; doing so throws him into a group of semi-random strangers who will eventually become his support system and surrogate family.

Perry is Ryan King, sports radio host whose wife has recently died; his boss (John Cho) refuses to let him come back to work until he's attended ten sessions of group therapy. (It's already clear that the office stuff is going to be far less interesting than the group stuff; don't be surprised if it's slowly phased out to the point that Cho doesn't survive to the end of the season.)

Ryan winds up at "Transitions," which isn't specifically a grief group -- it's for people dealing with "life changes" -- where he meets his gang of lovable co-stars. At this point, I don't remember any of their names, and they've only got one or two character traits each, so we'll just shorthand them. There's Widowed Lesbian (Julie White), Elderly Blind Black Guy (Bill Cobbs), Young Black Guy with Brother in Coma (Tyler James Williams), Asian Control Freak (Suzy Nakamura, and if they mentioned the specifics of her "life change," I didn't catch it), and Creepy Stalker-y Guy (Brett Gelman, and ditto on his specific trauma).

Laura Benanti is the leader of the support group, despite the fact that her experience and training consists of leading a few Weight Watchers groups. (Which makes me wonder why this group was on Ryan's work-approved list of therapy groups in the first place. Which makes me wonder if an employer even has the right to require an employee to seek therapy before returning from bereavement leave. Any HR people in the room?)

There are a lot of talented actors here; in particular, I'm always happy to see Julie White and Bill Cobbs. And the central role is a pitch right over home plate for Perry, who could play this sort of lovably smug not-quite-an-asshole in his sleep.

An obvious question is how the show continues beyond a single season. People don't stay in "life change" group therapy indefinitely; the show could get away with rotating supporting players in and out around Perry and Benanti (she could, theoretically, be replaced by a new group leader herself, but I assume the show has long-range romantic couple goals for the two of them), but how do you keep Ryan coming back to the group every week over two or three or six seasons?

The even bigger question is what direction the show takes from this point on. Clearly, the gist of the narrative will be that Perry's insistence that this is a waste of time and we all need to just get on with our lives will be good for the group, and Benanti's insistence that the process is important will be good for him.

But does it do that by really exploring the darker and more difficult side of grief -- does it delve into the painful parts of these characters' psyches in the way that (since it's already an obvious point of comparison) Community does? -- or is it content to be a cheerfully glib sitcom about a bunch of people who are stumbling wackily through recovery? There are moments in the pilot that suggest the show isn't afraid to get dark; the funniest scene finds Ryan leading the group through a "whose problems are worst" tournament he calls "March Sadness."

If the show stays at the usual superficial sitcom level, it'll probably be a harmlessly entertaining half-hour; if it has the courage to dig deeper, though, it could be really interesting.

BOOKS: The Troupe, Robert Jackson Bennett (2012)

The Troupe is a horror-tinged fantasy set in the world of vaudeville, where 16-year-old George Carole works as the house pianist in a midwestern theater. He's only in vaudeville for one reason, though; he's waiting for the Silenus Troupe to come back to town. The Troupe is led by the mysterious impresario Heironomo Silenus, whom George believes to be the father he has never met.

When George does find Silenus and his company -- puppeteer, exotic soprano, strongwoman, and mute cellist -- he discovers that they are connected to a mysterious and ancient battle between good and evil, in which nothing less than (you guessed it) the very existence of the universe is at stake. And you will also have guessed that as a descendant of the Silenus line, George has a key role to play in that battle.

The Troupe could stand to be edited by 50 pages or so. It runs nearly 500 pages, and the cycle of danger resolved by some convenient, but heretofore unmentioned, bit of magic or folklore gets rather repetitive.

But the characters are charming and vivid, and Bennett is excellent at creating a mood of creepy dread. The prose flows easily, and is slightly formal and heightened without being overly florid or poetic. The horror elements are genuinely scary, and never tip too far into mere gore for gore's sake.

Bennett's depiction of the era's less enlightened social attitudes is appropriate without being gratuitously offensive; his use of one character's homophobia, in fact, is quite striking in the way it sets up a major plot point, keeping that character from recognizing the true nature of one key relationship.

An unexpected pleasure.

BOOKS: Broken Harbor, Tana French (2012)

4th in French's series of loosely linked novels about the Dublin police.

The loose linking comes from the fact that the main character of each novel was a supporting player in the previous one. This time, our narrator is Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy," homicide detective, who is assigned to a group of murders -- dad and two kids are dead, mother's barely alive -- in a new housing development called Brianstown.

When Mick was a kid, the land that is now Brianstown was a sleepy beach town called Broken Harbor, and that's where the Kennedy family took its summer vacations, so he has strong memories of the place. They're not all pleasant memories; this is where his mother died, and he's always assumed that her death is at the root of his younger sister's emotional problems, which are still disrupting his life.

But at the moment, Dina's problems have to take a back seat to the murders of the Spain family. A likely suspect crops up fairly quickly, and when the guy confesses, Mick's ready to wrap things up; his partner, rookie detective Richie Curran, is a lot more skeptical of how easily this seems to be going.

French's usual strengths are on display here. In particular, I am (as usual) impressed with how well French uses dialogue to define relationships among characters. There are a lot of interrogation scenes in this one, and through them, we learn a lot about Mick and Richie, and the working relationship that they're developing. Mick is at first surprised, then impressed, by how quickly Richie takes to the job; Richie's got an intuitive understanding of the differences between the two of them, and how best to play those differences to ingratiate themselves with any given interview subject.

I was slightly disappointed with the final act. There are two inevitable plot points in this sort of book -- the moment when Mick's personal and professional lives come horribly crashing together, and the moment when we realize that the person we've been led to believe is guilty isn't (hardly a spoiler, that happens in every police procedural) -- and while I admired the way French tied those two moments together, I didn't find the plot twist very convincing.

In fact, the personal story this time around is much less interesting than usual for French -- Dina is something of a garden variety crazy woman, and feels like a less well thought-out character than anyone else in the book -- but the crime story more than makes up for it. This isn't French's best work, but that just means it's a solid B instead of an A+. Still worth reading, as (even more so) are the earlier books in the series.

MOVIES: Ruby Sparks (Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton, 2012)

Six years is a long time for most directors to go between movies, but that's how long it's been since Little Miss Sunshine. Now Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton are finally back with a follow-up, Ruby Sparks.

As the movie opens, we meet Calvin (Paul Dano), who published a spectacularly successful novel as a 19-year-old high school dropout. But that was ten years ago, and aside from a few short stories, Calvin's had a severe case of writer's block.

A writing assignment from his therapist (Elliott Gould) proves unexpectedly inspiring, and Calvin finds himself churning out pages about his perfect girlfriend, whom he names Ruby Sparks. Then one morning Calvin wakes up, and there in the kitchen, cooking him breakfast, is Ruby (Zoe Kazan, who also wrote the movie).

His natural reaction is to think he's going crazy, but when it turns out that other people can see Ruby, he's not sure what to do. He can control Ruby's behavior by adding to the pages he's written about her, but is hesitant to do ("I want to make her love me without making her love me"). But as Ruby goes on living, experiencing life that Calvin didn't write for her, she begins to change and have her own reactions to things, and the relationship doesn't always go where Calvin would like it to.

Kazan's screenplay is very smart, going for understatement and relative subtlety instead of broad laughs and rom-com cliches. She and Dano are both excellent here, and when they finally have the big confrontation that the movie is inevitably building to, it's a beautifully tense and painful scene to watch.

The supporting players are uniformly well cast: Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas as Calvin's mother and stepfather, Chris Messian as his brother, Steve Coogan as a pompous rival author.

Very much worth seeing; a delightful surprise.

MOVIES: The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield, 2012)

The Queen of Versailles is a documentary about David and Jackie Siegel, a spectacularly wealthy Florida couple whose lives crumble when the family business is hit hard by the financial collapse. They find themselves teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, having to shop for Christmas presents for the 8 kids at Wal-Mart, and at risk of losing the massive 90,000-square-foot mansion they're building. That home is called (and inspired by) Versailles; it's got 10 kitchens, a grand ballroom with a balcony large enough to hold a full orchestra, and a separate wing for the children.

Neither of the Seigels coms from a wealthy background. David built his business -- he's the "king of time-share resorts" -- through obsessive devotion to it, largely at the expense of his family; Jackie is his third wife, and his son acknowledges that their relationship is purely a business one. Jackie's 35 years younger, a former Mrs. Florida with a computer engineering degree and a Botox-frozen face.

It would be easy to make the Siegels monstrous villains, but director Lauren Greenfield gives us a more nuanced portrait. Yes, the Siegels are spoiled and greedy, and David has built his fortune by taking advantage of people who can't really afford the wealthy lifestyle he's offering them, but they do acknowledge that the employees who are being laid off and losing their homes are suffering far more than they are.

And Jackie, in particular, comes off mostly as naive; this kind of wealth is new to her, and while she doesn't relish the thought of losing it, and says some painfully embarrassing things ("I never would have had so many children if I didn't think I'd have the nannies"), she also comes across as a deeply loving mother and wife.

Ultimately, what we're left with is a sense that the Siegels, like their time-share customers, are trapped in the American cycle of always wanting more, always aspiring to a bigger, better home than they need or can afford. We're a society for whom there is no such thing as "enough." It's a problem that's destroying lives, and while it's tempting to laugh when we see that happening to the ridiculously wealthy, the laughter's undercut by the realization that the consequences are a lot more severe when you step a few rungs down the economic ladder.

MOVIES: The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Well, let's start with the good things about The Dark Knight Rises. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, though he isn't given anything interesting to do as a young Gotham police detective, is professional and competent, and doesn't embarrass himself; and Anne Hathaway, as Selina Kyle (never specifically called "Catwoman" in the movie), is charming, with a light grace and ease that the movie could use more of.

And...

Um...

Let me think...

Nope, that's about it. The rest of the movie is pretty damned boring. The problems start with something as simple as voices. Christian Bale's Batman voice still sounds as if Bruce Wayne is a nervous 19-year-old putting on what he thinks is a real man's voice. And while Marion Cotillard's English has gotten good enough that you can understand the words, she still has a tendenCY to put the emPHAsis on all THE wrong sylLABles.

And then there's Tom Hardy's villain, Bane, who speaks through a mask in an electronically altered rasp that is frequently incomprehensible, and for whatever reason, it gets worse whenever the dialogue is at its most expository and you really need to understand him. (And physically, Hardy is so freakishly bulked up that he barely looks human anymore.)

The movie plods along for more than 2 1/2 hours, and could easily be pruned down to under 2; the biggest time-waster is a long sequence involving Bruce Wayne trying (over and over and over) to escape from an underground desert prison.

Not only is the story padded to ridiculous length, it's also a seriously conservative political statement. Bane's rhetoric (and Selina's, in the early going, before she abruptly switches to being Batman's ally) is very much inspired by the Occupy movement, with lots of talk about how the little people need to fight back against the oppression of the wealthy, and a violent attack on the Gotham Stock Exchange.

The movie argues that the end result of the Occupy movement is violent anarchy from which we can only be saved by the generous actions of the wealthy, here represented by billionaire Bruce Wayne/Batman. Everyone who claims to care about the future of the little guy, or of the planet, turns out to be a villain; the wealthy are their innocent victims.

Even technical things that the earlier movies in the series got right don't work here; Hans Zimmer's score is a loud percussive assault, and the movie is ugly to look at, with fight scenes that are impossible to follow.

Sad way to bring the Nolan/Bale Batman era to an end. Maybe at least the spinoff movies that are painstakingly set up in the final act will be an improvement.

MOVIES: The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012)

Finally caught up with this and wasn't all that amazed. As much as I like Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, they are (even by Hollywood standards), waaaaaaay too old to be playing high school students. And at the other end of the spectrum, Martin Sheen and Sally Field are too young-looking for Uncle Ben and Aunt May; Aunt May is supposed to be a gray-haired old lady, dammit.

(Garfield is about the same age that Tobey Maguire was when he did his first Spider-Man movie, but he looks several years older; Sheen and Field are roughly ten years younger than the more age-appropriate Cliff Robertson and Rosemary Harris were, and Field in particular looks even younger than that.)

Rhys Ifans is a dull villain and Denis Leary's police chief is no substitue for J.K. Simmons' Jonah Jameson. And the special effects have the same overwhelming problem that distracted me through all of the Maguire movies -- whenever Spider-Man starts swinging, there's no sense of him having any weight on the end of that line. It's just a massless object swinging across the screen.

Most of all, it's just too damned soon. Let us forget about the last version for a while before you shove a new one at us.

TV: Sullivan & Son (TBS, Thu 10)

Sullivan & Son wants to be a 21st-century Cheers. It's not. The show saddles a fine cast with material so dismal that it can't be salvaged.

Co-creator Steve Byrne stars as Steve Sullivan, New York corporate lawyer who decides to buy the family bar when his parents (Dan Lauria and Jodi Long) decide to retire. His snooty girlfriend is appalled at the thought of moving to Pittsburgh, leaving Steve free to start dating his old sweetheart Melanie (Valerie Azlynn). His sister Susan (Vivian Bang) is horrified to have him back home again, believing that he was always the favorite.

The bar's regulars include Steve's best friend Owen (Owen Benjamin); Owen's mom, cougar/lush Carol (Christine Ebersole); and the lovable old racist Hank (Brian Doyle-Murray).

The jokes are mostly creaky old ethnic and drunk jokes; a lot of mileage is gotten out of Long as the scary Korean dragon lady, and Doyle-Murray has to deliver a wretched monologue about how he's learned to accept the changes to the bar as different groups have moved into the neighborhood, "but at least we've kept out the Mexicans!"

Doyle-Murray is so damned good, though, that he almost manages to pull off even a speech that awful; Ebersole works similar miracles with her paper-thin boozy slut. Long and Lauria are convincing as a couple whose marriage is equal parts love and irritation. Byrne is blandly amiable, which is about all one expects from the island of sanity in a sitcom sea of lunacy.

It's a very likable and incredibly talented cast, but the material is so far beneath them that Sullivan & Son isn't remotely worth your time.

BOOKS: Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Graham Joyce (2012)

The woods near Tara Martin's village have always been a mysterious place. Some would say haunted, some would say enchanted, but strange things happen there. But it's still a shock when 16-year-old Tara disappears without a trace from those woods. It's even more of a shock when she turns up at her parents' door 20 years later, seeming to have barely aged a day.

The mystery of what happened to Tara is at the heart of Graham Joyce's Some Kind of Fairy Tale, a lovely novel that combines fairy tale tropes with magical realism and outright fantasy.

Tara's story is farfetched, to say the least. She claims that a man on a white horse took her away to another world, and that she's only been gone for six months. Her parents aren't convinced, but are so thrilled to have her back that they're not going to press the issue. Her brother, Peter, on the other hand, will have none of it; he arranges for Tara to see a psychiatrist, and his own family begins to feel the strain caused by Tara's reappearance.

Most profoundly affected, perhaps, is Tara's old boyfriend, Richie; though nothing was ever proven, most of the locals have assumed for 20 years that Richie was responsible for Tara's disappearance, and the cloud of suspicion has made it difficult for him to get on with life.

Joyce tells the story from multiple points of view, and each of his narrators has a distinctive and convincing voice. He's taken a variety of familiar storytelling motifs and re-imagined them, combining them in ways that make them new and fresh. His prose is clean and spare, never getting in the way of the story or drawing attention to itself. It's a marvelous book.

TV: Political Animals (USA, Sun 10)

Once upon a time, we would have called USA's Political Animals a miniseries, but that word has fallen out of favor, so now it's a "limited series event." And if the first episode is any guide, we're in for a delightfully trashy six-week fantasia on Hilary Clinton.

Oh, they're calling her Elaine Barish (played by Sigourney Weaver), but look at the fictional resume -- former First Lady whose husband was wildly popular despite his sex scandals, who now serves as Secretary of State in the administration of the man who defeated her in her own bid for the presidency -- and it's impossible not to see Hilary.

There are a few cosmetic differences. Elaine Barish divorced President Bud Hammond (Ciaran Hinds) after losing the nomination, and they have two sons instead of a daughter. The good son, Douglas (James Wolk), works as his mother's chief of staff; the troubled son, T.J. (Sebastian Stan), grew up as the first openly gay kid in the White House, and now struggles with drug and alcohol addiction.

The cast also includes Adrian Pasdar as the new president; Ellen Burstyn, hamming it up in style as Elaine's boozy mother; and Carla Gugino as a political reporter who has a long history of being sharply critical of Elaine. (The scenes between Gugino and Weaver are the best parts of the show; TV rarely gives us two ambitious women talking about their careers and the price they pay for them. "Never call a bitch a bitch," Weaver advises. "Us bitches hate that.")

The show's created by Greg Berlanti, who brought you Brothers and Sisters, and there are similar elements of the family soap here. Douglas is engaged to marry a pretty young woman with an eating disorder; Bud's dating a sexy TV star; T.J. wants his parents to invest in his nightclub (because where better for a guy with booze and drug problems to work than in a nightclub?).

And some of that carries over to the political family, as well. We get the sense that the vice president (Dylan Baker) is none too bright; Elaine doesn't get along well with the president's chief of staff (Roger Bart).

But this isn't meant to be a serious look at the workings of the American political system; it's meant to be wildly goofy soap opera, and as such, it's great fun. The cast is uniformly top notch (with the mild caveat that Hinds never does quite get a grip on a consistent Southern accent), and there are enough plot twists at the end of the episode to bring me back for the full six weeks.

BOOKS: The Uncertain Places, Lisa Goldstein (2011)

Lisa Goldstein's The Uncertain Places is a marvelous 100-page novella, followed by 130 pages of less good follow-up to bring it to novel length.

The setting is northern California in the early 1970s, where Berkeley student Will Taylor has just been introduced to the Feierabend family, a mother and three sisters who own a vineyard in the Napa Valley. Will falls hard for Livvy, but their relationship becomes complicated when she falls into a mysterious sleep.

The rest of the family doesn't seem as shocked by this as Will is; they've actually been expecting it. The Feierabends are, it turns out, the central figures in a fairy tale that the Grimms never published, and Livvy's sleep (which is to last seven years) is part of a family curse in exchange for which they are blessed with luck and good fortune.

Will's attempt to free Livvy from the curse is the focus of the first half of the novel, and if you stop reading on page 101, when he says "I bet you thought the story would end there," you will have been told a nearly perfect tale.

I looked forward to continuing, because I generally enjoy stories about what comes after "happily ever after," but in this case, I felt somewhat let down. Goldstein stretches the tale into a second generation of the family, introduces a variety of new (less interesting) characters who know bits and pieces of the Feierabends' story, and spends way too much time in the realm of those fairies who placed the curse.

It's not that the second half of the novel is poorly written or uninteresting; it's a pretty good story with some clever twists and uses of fairy tale tropes. But in comparison to the brilliance of those first hundred pages, there's definitely a slump towards the sluggish and the pedestrian.

It may just be that Goldstein has trouble writing endings; I thought that the final chapters of her Dark Cities Underground fell a bit flat, too. I liked that book, though, and even the weaker half of this one is worth your while.

(I see from her Wikipedia entry that she's written several other novels. Anyone familiar enough with her work to recommend any of them in particular?)

MOVIES: Ted (Seth MacFarlane, 2012)

Ted suffers from the basic problem that you see in most of MacFarlane's work -- the next big punchline is always more important than the story -- but it's more coherently plotted than, for instance, the average episode of Family Guy, and the jokes are funny enough often enough to make the movie a lot of fun.

Mark Wahlberg stars as John, a guy in his mid-30s who's never quite finished growing up. In part, that's because he still lives with his teddy bear, Ted (voiced by MacFarlane), who came to life one night after 8-year-old John's wish came true. The two of them share an apartment with John's girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis), whose patience with this unorthodox arrangement is starting to wear thin.

The relationship between John and Ted is the best part of the movie, and the effects work makes Ted a remarkably convincing character. An angry brawl between the two of them is a highlight of the movie. Other characters are less successful. Kunis isn't a natural comedian; Joel McHale's romantic rival is a bit one-note; and Giovanni Ribisi dials the creepy a couple of notches too high for the tone of the movie. The movie also features what is surely the most unlikely celebrity cameo of the year, from someone who's slipped so far into obscurity that he barely even still qualifies as a celebrity.

This is a Seth MacFarlane project, so the jokes are often vulgar, tasteless, and offensive, but I laughed a lot. Not great cinema, but terrific entertainment.

BOOKS: Year One, Rob Reid (2012)

I'm pretty sure that it is now illegal to review a comic science fiction novel without referring to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but let's face it, Rob Reid's Year Zero doesn't run screaming from the comparison.

Seems that for the last 30 years or so, Earth music has been all the rage in the rest of the galaxy -- it turns out to be the one thing humanity is spectacularly good at -- and almost every sentient being carries with him a complete jukebox of all of our music. (And talk about space-saving: It's encoded directly into their DNA!)

But galactic legal codes require that artistic products be dealt with as they are dealt with on their home world; if a planet's theatrical works are presented in outdoor amphitheaters, then other planets are obliged to present them the same way.

And that's a problem, because under Earth's laws, every alien has committed an extraordinary amount of music piracy. They've stolen so much music that to pay the fines they owe would bankrupt the rest of the galaxy, which the rest of the galaxy isn't too keen on, and the only way out they can see is to simply destroy us.

Some of them would like to avoid doing so, and so Frampton and Carly arrive in the offices of Nick Carter, a junior attorney specializing in entertainment law. (Why him, and not someone higher up? They assumed he was the Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys, and couldn't pass up the chance to meet him.) Nick and the aliens have only a short time to find a legal solution that will save the planet.

Reid's novel is certainly more tightly plotted than Adams ever was; the Hitchhiker books generally had no more plot that was absolutely necessary as a framework on which to hang the digressions and the bizarre anecdotes about alien life. But the tone is similar -- light and breezy, enjoying its own silliness, not taking anything too seriously. Reid builds on his premise in surprising ways, carrying the idea to all of its logical (and not-so-logical) conclusions.

It's a fun book, and certainly the most entertaining novel you'll ever read about copyright law.

MOVIES: Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

Here's the problem: Stripping isn't sexy. Sexy requires at least some small level of intimacy, and you can't achieve that when you're on a stage shaking your ass for a screaming audience of 50 or 60 people. And since stripping isn't sexy, Magic Mike isn't sexy. And Magic Mike is very much being sold as sexy, marketed to women as a chance to see some prime slabs of beefcake.

(And, yes, marketed to gay men, too. But they're a small slice of the movie's target audience. If gay men were enough to make a movie a hit, Showgirls would be the new Avatar.)

The movie is being sold to its audiences, in fact, in precisely the same way that the movie's strippers are being sold to their audience. So in the way the movie treats that audience, we get a strong sense of how Soderbergh and his colleagues feel about us, the folks watching this movie. And it's not pretty.

The audience at Xquisite, the strip club run by Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), where Mike (Channing Tatum) is the star attraction, is portrayed as drunken sorority girls, lonely housewives who can't keep their husband's interest, and pathetic losers too ugly to get a man of their own. Most of the movie's dance sequences feature an audience member brought up onto the stage, and in one of the movie's ugliest moments, one of the strippers throws out his back trying to lift one of the women, because she's just so damn fat. (She's not a Hollywood-thin waif, certainly, but neither is she morbidly obese; she's an ordinary-sized woman.)

The audience is being told -- and by extension, we are being told -- that we are sad and pathetic losers for having come here in search of sexy, and that we are even more stupid for having expected to find it.

The story is predictable; the acting is minimal (Channing Tatum was more interesting than this in 21 Jump Street); and the level of "but they're all straight, no really, they are, we swear" defensiveness is enough to choke you. This is a sad, sleazy little movie with nothing but contempt for its audience.

MOVIES: Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley, 2012)

Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz isn't quite at the level of her directing debut, Away From Her, but it's a very good movie with three terrific central performances.

Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen are Margot and Lou, a couple nearing their fifth anniversary; they're struggling a bit with the transition from the passion of the early years to the cozy domesticity of the middle years. Neither one is willing to admit that there's a problem, and they're trying frantically to pretend that they still have the romantic fire they had as newlyweds, but we can see how hard they're working to make that fire happen.

So when Margot meets the charming Daniel (Luke Kirby) on a business trip, and he turns out to have just moved into the house across the street, she finds herself torn between loyalty to Lou and the temptation of something new and exciting. It's not a comfortable place for her to be; "I don't like being in between things," she tells Daniel (the dialogue is occasionally a bit clunkingly obvious, especially in the early going). Throw in Margot's apparent inability to ever be genuinely happy, and it's clear that this mess isn't going to end well for anyone.

There are a few problems with the movie. Margot and Lou seem to have an awfully nice home, given that she's a struggling writer and he's a cookbook author. Daniel's quirky charm is painted on rather too thick (not only is he an artist, but he supports himself by pulling tourists around the city in a rickshaw). And Sarah Silverman is (as always) a waste of time in her small role as Daniel's troubled sister.

But there are some spectacular moments to be found -- a verbal seduction scene in which Daniel has Margot melting in her seat without a single touch (and to be honest, I was wiping my own brow a bit), a falling-in-love scene set to "Video Killed the Radio Star." And the actors are marvelous. Rogen doesn't get a role this serious very often, and he rises to the challenge; Kirby is more than just a pretty face (though he certainly is that); and both men are entirely compelling as they struggle to please a woman who's too indecisive to know what she wants.

And Williams adds to her quickly growing list of remarkable performances. Passive is a hard thing for most actors to play, because it's not a very likable quality, but Williams is entirely willing not to be liked. Margot is not someone who takes charge of her life; she is someone to whom life happens. Williams brings her so vividly to life that by the end of the movie, it doesn't really matter whether the plot leaves her with Lou or Daniel; the tragedy of her life is that she's never going to be happy, no matter who she's with.

MOVIES: Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)

Beasts of the Southern Wild was the Grand Jury Prize winner at this year's Sundance festival, and the buzz surrounding the film has been deafening ever since. I got a bit nervous, though, when the trailers started coming out; they made it look as if the movie were going to be a Malick-esque exercise in poetic style over substance. While the movie does have a fair amount of over-the-top "look how pretty!" nonsense, there is an actual story (sort of) and characters to follow, so it's not a full-on Malick-style bore.

That's not to say that the movie has anything like a linear plot; it's a meandering, episodic look at life in The Bathtub, an impoverished community on a low-lying island off the coast of New Orleans, where 6-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry). There is a massive storm on the way, Wink has taken ill, and Hushpuppy sets out in search of her mother, who she has been told "swam away" when Hushpuppy was a baby. And the whole thing is punctuated by Hushpuppy's fantasies about the melting of the ice caps leading to the return of the aurochs, the giant beasts who dominated the world before the Ice Age.

It's hard to see those aurochs without being reminded of the equally pointless dinosaurs from The Tree of Life, and they call attention to the similarities between the movies, both of which attempt to mash together the intimate story of one family with grander, more cosmic concerns. But director Benh Zeitlin pays more attention to his characters than Malick does, allowing them to become people instead of mere archetypes.

At the center of the movie is the remarkable Quvenzhané Wallis (that's kwa-VEN-zhuh-NAY), who was 6 when the movie was filmed, and who is on screen for almost the entire film. At that age, it's hard to tell how much of what we're seeing is acting talent, how much is the ability to follow directions really well, and how much is pure charisma. Whatever it is, Wallis holds the screen completely, and she has a ferocious personality.

She even survives the rather overwrought narration that she's been given, which is ponderous and so ridiculously poetic that it makes Shakespeare look like Tom Clancy. She's such a potent force that I was carried through the movie's sillier flights of artistic fancy solely by the desire to see what happens to her next.

So yeah, the movie's a bit of a mess, and there are moments that simply don't work, but it is a wildly creative and ballsy mess that takes more chances in any single scene than six months' output from the Hollywood studios.

BOOKS: He Stopped Loving Her Today, Jack Isenhour (2011)

George Jones recorded "He Stopped Loving Her Today" in 1980, and it's generally considered one of the great country records. Isenhour gives us the "pretty-much totally true story" of how it came to be.

It was a song that no one thought would be a hit -- too morbid and gloomy -- and the recording process was painful. Jones in 1980 was at the depths of his problems with booze and cocaine and couldn't learn the song (he kept trying to sing it to the tune of "Help Me Make It Through the Night"); when he did finally get the tune down, it turned out that although he could sing just fine while drunk, he couldn't handle the spoken verse at all.

Purists complained that the record wasn't country at all (those violins! the background singers! a freakin' woodblock, for chrissake!), which Isenhour uses as the jumping-off point for a terrific discussion of authenticity in country music, and the perpetual "those confounded kids today don't know what real country music sounds like" grumbling of fans.

We also get a crash course in the history of country music, a look inside the economics of Nashville songwriters and session musicians, and an exploration of why the live performance is so often disappointing when compared to the record.

Isenhour's style is casual and friendly, more so than you'd expect from a university press, but the book is solidly researched, filled with unlikely (but relevant) cultural references ranging from Milli Vanilli to Charles Wuorinen. It's a charming, lively, thoroughly entertaining book.

MUSIC: 2012-13 LA Philharmonic season

So, the subscriber brochure for ordering single tickets to concerts outside my subscription arrived, and I've placed my order. I've got tickets for a dozen concerts, and my season looks like this:

Gustavo Dudamel, conductor
Ravel: Pavane pour une infante défunte
Stucky: New work (world premiere)
Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps

Dudamel, conductor; Netia Jones, video/director
Ravel: Mother Goose (complete, with video)
Knussen: Where the Wild Things Are (with video)

Robin Ticciati, conductor; Lars Vogt, piano
Liadov: The Enchanted Lake
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto #2
Sibelius: Symphony #2

Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, conductor: Lynn Harrell, cello
Haydn: Symphony #6 ("Le matin")
Haydn: Cello Concerto in C
Albeniz/Frühbeck de Burgos: Suite Española
Ravel: Bolero

Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; David Fray, piano; Gerald Finley, baritone
Salonen: Nyx (West Coast premiere)
Schumann: Piano Concerto
Lutosławski: Les espaces du sommeil
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel

Christoph Eschenbach, conductor; Martin Grubinger, percussion
Tan Dun: Percussion Concerto (US premiere)
Tchaikovsky: Symphony #4

Pablo Heras-Casado, conductor; Midori, violin
Kodály: Háry János Suite
Eötvös: Violin Concerto (world premiere)
Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra

Dudamel, conductor; Gil Shaham, violin
Wagner: Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung
Brahms: Violin Concerto
Schumann: Symphony #3 ("Rhenish")

Dudamel, conductor
Vivier: Zipangu
Debussy: La mer
Stravinsky: The Firebird (complete)

David Robertson, conductor; Orli Shaham, piano
Britten: Four Sea Interludes
Mackey: Stumble to Grace (West Coast premiere)
Mussorgsky/Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition

(Looking at Mackey's website, it appears that his piano concerto for Shaham has been renamed since the Phil printed its schedule, and is now called Learning Curve.)

conductor as yet unannounced; Cameron Carpenter
This concert is part of the Phil's "Brooklyn Festival;" program not determined in full, but will include:
Hearne: New work (world premiere)
Copland: Organ Symphony

Dudamel, conductor
Penderecki: Ciaccona
Mozart: Sinfonia concertante, K. 297b
Mendelssohn: Symphony #5 ("Reformation")

(I think I got all those accents and diacritics right...)

I am particularly looking forward to the new pieces from Stucky and Mackey, having liked what I've heard from them at previous Philharmonic concerts; Mackey's violin concerto Beautiful Passing was a highlight of the 2010-11 season. And I am always a sucker for a new percussion concerto.

Though I'm not a fan of the Phil's increasing inclusion of operas in its season -- if I wanted to hear opera, I'd be subscribing to the LA Opera, thank you -- I adore Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and have long been curious to hear the operatic version.

Throw in a few warhorses of which I'm fond -- Firebird, Pictures, Le sacre, the Sea Interludes -- and it should be a fun year. Of course, as I always do, I'll miss some of these along the way as other stuff comes up, but these are better spaced out than my seasons often are, so there won't be any spots where I think "oh god, another concert this weekend? that's the third in a row."