Category: Movies & Television

Peter Krause

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I’ve recently had an unscheduled marathon of Peter Krause. I’m most of the way through the first season of Six Feet Under, just finished watching the Sci-Fi miniseries The Lost Room, and have been enjoying the new NBC series Parenthood.

I came to Parenthood first, so it was kind of interesting to see the different contexts that he’s worked in. In SFU, he plays a charming, but rootless young man who (at the beginning of the series) isn’t really sure what he wants to do with his adulthood. In both Parenthood and Lost Room, he plays a charming family man who is primarily motivated by his family.

What’s interesting to me is that Krause’s upbeat charisma is a constant through all his roles. In this, he reminds me of George Clooney. They may be in different roles, but their personal identity is so strong that it always comes across as well. I think this is a little different from one note, Michael Cera-ish acting. With bad actors, they don’t have the skill to understand, or create, the personality and identity of the character they’re playing. Good actors, even when they are bringing a lot of themselves to the role, allow their personality to become a part of the character, not overwhelm it. George Clooney is good at this, as is Meryl Streep, Geoffrey Rush and John Goodman.

LOST: Michael Giacchino

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

There’s a nice profile by Alex Ross of Michael Giacchino, the composer for “LOST” in this week’s New Yorker (I’m not going to bother linking to it because it’s behind a paywall). I’ve never been a big fan of the music on LOST. Even though, as I learned from the article, all of the music is recorded with live musicians, the arrangements can feel a little cheap. Furthermore, his themes are weak. I can name innumerable times where a dramatic moment in the show has been undercut by a heavy-handed theme that turns drama into melodrama. He relies too often on a couple of cliches of choice, see the trademark trombone glissando; tinkly, New Age-y piano noodling; and directionless string pads.

I did reconsider my position a bit after reading the profile. I did realize that the meat-and-potatoes, drama-inducing music cues usually work for me–the 98% of the score that wouldn’t make it onto a soundtrack CD. I have a lot of respect for Giacchino’s working methods and the way that he supports studio musicians. It’s clear that, by virtue of the successful films that he’s scored, he has a tremendous amount of power in the filmmaking hierarchy. I should also mention that I’ve liked certain others of Giacchino’s scores; his Academy Award-winning score for Up didn’t make a great impression on me, but his score for The Incredibles is one of my favorite movie scores ever.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

This movie looks ridikulus, but I love puns so much I’m probably going to see it. Also, a Tom Stoppard fan.

I am a television addict.

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I realized this while watching a second episode in a row of Grey’s Anatomy. It was a shitty TV episode, watched right after another shitty episode on a shitty TV show that I quit watching because it was shitty like three years ago. But I couldn’t help it. With online streaming and Hulu, it almost seems like more effort not to watch it.

It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. About a month ago, I binge-watched the complete Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, but once that was done, I felt a compulsion to fill it with something else. Recently, I’ve been feeling the effects that this kind of watching has been having on my concentration and attention span. Anything over a half-hour of television, and I’ll inevitably mouse over to my web browser to check my e-mail, or Fark.com, or something to read while the episode comes on. I can only make it through a movie when I’m watching with other people. At this point, it hasn’t been interfering with my work or music, but I know that I’m not practicing as much as I should be. It’s not where I want to be.

It has physiological consequences as well, especially with my sleep patterns. I often get about a quarter-day off if I’ve been up late with people on weekends, or if I need to pull a late night for school. But it’s gotten to the point where I can’t sleep without the ambient sounds of dialogue to nod off to.

I don’t think that television is evil, or anything like that. In fact, I’m really glad to be alive at this time. There is more, better, television than at any point in the medium’s history, and it hasn’t yet gone to the point where the networks realize that TV will never be as profitable as in the past and stop putting money into it. It’s an art form like any other, and like any other, just because most of it is crap doesn’t mean that there is no value in the rest.

So I think I’m going to just become more selective. I’m going to pick 7 shows, one for every night, and limit myself to watching just one hour during the week (I think it’s ok to relax on the weekends). It’s always been my dream to be primarily a content creator, not a content consumer. I think I can think of better things to do with my time.

Revisiting Community

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The last time I wrote about NBC’s Community, I was deeply ambivalent. It was a little to shiny and cutesy for me. Since then, I’ve become a semi-regular watcher, but once again, I think I’m going to stop watching the show.

One of the things that pisses me off is the free pass that the show seems to get from TV critics about the show’s racial humor. I think this pass is a result of two things, the fairly ( and depressingly uncommon) diverse and integrated cast, and the fact that every once in a while, the show has extremely witty race-based humor (see the clip above). For example, read this fawning passage from Todd VanDerWerff at the AV Club:

Community‘s about a lot of things, really, but one of the things it keeps buried until it’s useful to trot it out thematically is the fear of getting old. I mean, just aside from the fact that the show has an elderly guy and a middle-aged black woman as characters and actually takes them seriously beyond the stereotypes other shows would reduce them to, …

…As much as everyone loves the supporting characters on the show, Jeff and Britta are its heart, with Annie and Troy as reminders of who they were, Pierce and Shirley as ideas of who they might become, and Abed as the odd man out, observing and always commenting.

The thing is, I’m not convinced that the show takes these characters beyond stereotypes at all. Alyssa Rosenberg blogged about this in relation to Glee a few days ago:

I love, love Amber Riley, and I love Mercedes as a character who can declare “I’m worried about showing too much skin and causing a sex riot,” as an explanation for why she refuses to wear a cheerleading skirt, and I hate that the inevitable end consequence of having a big, sassy black girl is a story about eating disorders and a rainbow of high school students singing Christina Aguilera’s most saccharine song.  Why can’t she just be fabulous without consequence? Why can’t she have a boyfriend? Why are the show’s best, tartest couple reduced to sidekicks?  Why does the gay kid have to be semi-pathetic and clueless?

What this comes down to is that there is still work to be done, still decisions to be made once the casting is done. Both Glee and Community would have you believe that they are poking fun at the “sassy black woman” stereotype. But the shows never made that transition to treating their characters beyond stereotype, and so end up reinforcing them.