Parabasis

Ragtime opens

all the reviews, as usual, can be found at Critic-O-Meter.  Personally, I sort-of-loved it.... by which I mean, the whole was waaaay more than the sum of its parts, many of which (particularly the over-synthesized pit) are kind of problematic.  Overall, though, I ate that shit up like a banana split.

Metro Weekly Profile of Sarah Marshall

Sarah Marshall has been one of my favorite actresses since I was 14.  And having seen her in Jason Grote's Maria/Stuart last season at Woolly, I can attest that she's still once of DC's best character actors.  And now she has a nice profile in Metro Weekly!:

"We have a company here at Woolly, but it's not like we had companies then. You were employed for the entire year. When they had a company at Arena, they had health benefits. Even if members of the company weren't in a show, they still had a salary. And we always had work, and we taught, and we were in children's shows, and rehearsing in the afternoon for the plays at night. We were really working hard for our money."

RTWT here.

Recanting Radical Islam

It seems to me that if we want to have any hope of "winning" the "war or terror" (whatever those terms mean), studying Jonathan Hari's brilliant profile of several ex-Jihadists in Britain *might* be a better thing to do than, oh I don't know, giving money to contractors who give it to the Taliban so the Taliban won't attack them.  

Quote of the Day

"If I have to edit every remark I make because someone somewhere might misunderstand, I’m going to become very dull very fast."

-- Rocco Landesman on The NEA's blog (which has comments)

Pot Und Kettle

I just wanted to say I think it's rather funny that the same person who wrote this and this and perhaps a dozen or so (at least) of similar pieces  wants to get his sanctimony up because of a throwaway sentence I wrote here. 

The Television Juggling Act

(Note: This post contains spoilers about this season of Mad Men, some of the Sopranos and probably some other shows) 

 One thought that occurred to me as I watched the quite satisfying and totally ballsy season finale of Mad Men was that fictional television shows tend to rely on a series of simple rules and set ups, all of which create various tensions throughout the show.  Generally, the plot line of a season of a television show involves threatening those tensions, only to have the threats resolve while the tensions remain. 

So, in seasons one and two of Mad Men, certain fundamental tensions existed in the show. There was always the specter of Don's marriage dissolving, of him leaving Sterling Cooper, of Pete leaving or being fired etc. etc. and so forth. In both seasons, those threats were resolved while leaving the tensions between the elements of the show intact.

The problem is, you can only keep this up for so long. One of the problems with The Sopranos, for example, is they never really had the stones to completely blow up their show's premises.  One of them was detonated for them when Nancy Marchand died, but in general, they would constantly step up to the precipice... and then back away from it. Tony would go to jail... but wouldn't stay in jail. Carmela leaves Tony... but she comes back to him.  Doctor Malfi is raped but doesn't ask Tony to kill her rapist even though she knows who he is.  Following through on any of these three things (and countless other plot elements like them) would fundamentally change the juggling act of the show. The end result was that the show remained basically the same for a decade and got a little old after awhile. (An example from season one of Mad Men in a similar vein: I never found it believable that Don didn't fire Pete.  It kinda felt like a cop-out. The show needed Pete to remain at Sterling Cooper, so he did)

This season on Mad Men, there was a palpable tension in the plotting of the show... the old premises of the show-- Don's hidden life, Don's unhappiness at Sterling Cooper, Don's failing marriage, Pete's competitions with Cosgrove, Sal's closeted homosexuality-- were getting old but they hadn't quite figured out what to do about it.  What they chose to do was create an hour long heist movie that allows them to hit the Big Reset Button... now they can focus on the characters they want to focus on, they don't have to deal with Don + Betty's failing marriage now that it's flat-out failed, they can keep Pete, Joan and Peggy, Don and Roger have reconciled etc. Basically, they took everything they liked about their show, cut out everything they were bored of and decided to move on.  Awesome. In a weird way, if this was the series finale, I'm not sure I'd mind.

Yvette Clark

Wait... let me get this straight. Not only did my Congresswoman lie about graduating from College (and lie about lying about it) prior to getting elected... but now she let drug company lobbyists write statements for her? And because of the Democratic Party machine in New York, she essentially has her job for life.  

Another triumph of American democracy!

More On The Catholic Church and DC

It seems to me the proper response to this threat is to simply cancel their contract now and redirect the funds to secular organizations.

Little Break.

300,000 Starlings. Sixty seconds. Amazing (sound not necessary, so you can watch it at your cubicle!):

Jason Zinoman on Robert McKee

JZ has a great measurement of the screenplay emperor's elothes in this month's Vanity Fair in which Zinoman, a horror movie enthusiast who is interested in writing a horror screenplay, decides to take McKee's workshop and leaves... shall we say... underwhelmed:

McKee teaches that a protagonist must be a willful character, and on that count, McKee certainly qualifies. But our hero quickly runs into trouble when he asks the crowd who has traveled the farthest to see him. “Japan!” shouts someone from the front row. McKee looks surprised, but not too surprised. As with seemingly everything in his opening act, this exchange leads to more stern words, in this case about the impossibility of doing business with the Japanese. He rants that his book, Story, has been translated into 20 languages, but not Japanese. He asks, “Did you know that there is no word in Japanese for ‘yes’?”

McKee takes a sip of coffee, as his cowering, twitchy admirers mull over this provocation. He asks the question again, as if it were a hilarious punch line that improves with repetition. But then something unexpected happens, the kind of reversal you need in any effective thriller. A brave woman in the audience dares to challenge the master: “Actually, there is a word for ‘yes,’” she pipes up. “It’s hai.”

McKee, a lover of jargon, has coined a name for this moment in a screenplay: the Inciting Incident. It’s the act that upsets the balance of the life of the protagonist. McKee freezes for a moment, shoots her a look and, like John Wayne in a Western, refuses to back down, repeating his line a third time, as if that gave his assertion more credence. “No,” the woman says with exasperation. “It’s hai, and I know because I’m Japanese!”

RTWT here.