An Incredibly Well-Reasoned Argument Against 'Girls'

Since the end of its first season, I've tried to figure what it is about Girls that irks me. I've never watched a television show that fights its viewership quite as hard as this one. While that sounds good on paper—really, I'm all for difficult TV—there's something about Girls​ that I find impossible to watch, or even explain. I wonder sometimes if I would like the show better if shown it in a vacuum, if I knew nothing about its origin and had read no commentary of it on the Internet. But as it is, everything I read about Girls​ makes me want to watch it less. So all of this week's ballyhoo about the terrible-sounding Season 2 finale got me thinking again. Because it's apparently impossible for me to speak coherently about this show, I decided on a very easy, very fun way out:

I missed last night’s Girls finale. Missed the whole season, in fact. This wasn’t due to any particular choice, it just so happened that after the first episode of the second round premiered, I had no urge to torrent it, convert it for use on my DVD player, and watch it on my incredibly fancy $40 TV. (That’s right—it’s a Trinitron.) The fact is, I just don’t like that show, and I’ve spent the last seven or eight months trying to puzzle out why.

There’s no good reason for me to dislike Girls. The show is funny, well-made, and occasionally features Chris O’Dowd. It’s about a place where I live and characters that are like people that I know. And Lena Dunham is ungodly talented—as a writer, but as an actor too. The show is sickening in a way that I like my television—sickening like Curb, like the British Office, like Peep Show—and yet it leaves me cold. The best answer I can come up with is a cop out, but a beautiful cop out, a cop out so elegant and wonderful that you will thank me for sharing it with you. Why did I lose interest in Girls?

Because I hate its stupid face.

For better or worse, it goes on from there.​ I thought I'd made a funny point. The commenters didn't agree, calling me "completely irrelevant," "an airhead," "embarrassing" and "really, really dumb." Well, you can't please everyone. Or, apparently, anyone. No matter. Because people hated it, that post got more pageviews than anything I've written for Bullett, which says more about the Internet than I ever could.

Oh My Stars, How Sorry I Am For Neglecting You!

I was absent last week, and I do apologize. I was distracted by a nifty new gig I just got—more on that in a week or two—and the continuing amazingness of the World Baseball Classic. (Which I'm writing about, not just watching obsessively, I swear.) But though I was too lazy—I mean busy!—to update the blog, I did do a bit of jabbering over at Bullett​. Take a look:

First, I wondered whether or not a Trainspotting​ sequel would happen. If it does, would it be a terrible idea?

The ending of Trainspotting always seemed to be a bit of a cheat—a happy ending to a story that had no business ending well. But the sight of Ewan McGregor’s Rent Boy scurrying off into the dawn, his friends hard-fought drug money clutched in his fist, was so feverishly delightful that I didn’t mind. After all, what’s a heroin comedy with a cheery ending? I’d always wondered where Rent Boy ended up, but also not wanted to know—a recovering heroin addict with a sack full of stolen money is not a man you expect to live very long.

​Next, I pondered the wildly successful Veronica Mars​ kickstarter. The kickstarter was definitely a good idea. Reviving the series, I think may prove a mistake. But hey, what do I know?

Which producer will be the next to cash in on his fanbase? Will Judd Apatow try to crowdsource Freaks & Geeks: The Movie? How about a kickstarter to revive My So Called Life, Crime Story, or Police Squad, starring a computer generated version of Leslie Nielson? Using digital technology to revive a beloved, cancelled-too-soon TV show is a tempting thing. When the new episodes of Arrested Development are released in May, we’ll see for the first time whether or not it’s a good idea. When the richest, dumbest man on Kickstarter gets a chance to say, “Your check, sir,” we’ll see it on the big screen. But my gut tells me that cancelled TV shows are like dead bodies. They shouldn’t be brought back to life.

​And then, on Friday, I delved into Marilyn Monroe's reading collection.

Like a rather lovelier Rodney Dangerfield, Marilyn Monroe never got no respect. For one thing, she was funny, she knew it, and she hardly ever got a chance to show it off. We all know she could sing, but come on—she could really sing. And yet, she remains thought of as not much more than what Truman Capote called “a platinum sex-explosion.” (Of course, she was that too.) Capote thought a lot of Marilyn—there’s a beautiful scene with her in Music For Chameleons—but apparently Marilyn didn’t think much of him, because she didn’t own a thing he wrote.

Really, she didn't! There's this whole list of her books, and not an ounce of Capote among them.​​ Consider that article my last word on Smash​, which last week was officially moved to the TV graveyard that is Saturday nights. Smash​ and Marilyn...sad, sad, sad.

Baldwin Reminds Shia, "I'm Not Your Fucking Chief"

The still-simmering Alec Baldwin/Shia LaBeouf feud is starting to mesmerize me—mostly because it's not really a feud. It's like a nerdy kid is trying to pick a fight with the captain of the football team, and Mr. QB Handsome has to keep telling ​him to back down before he gets hurt. Today, for no reason at all, LaBeouf released some new emails. Once again, they're more puzzling than enlightening, and they seem to make him look bad. The highlight:

Baldwin: “We start Monday. But I’m so fucking tired.”

LaBeouf: “I’m a hustler. I don’t get tired. I’m 26, chief.”

Baldwin: “Listen, boy. I’m not your fuckin’ chief. You got that? Ha. Hahahahaha. Let’s go.”

What does this tell us about the creative process of famous actors? Nothing. But it’s a nice reminder that most actors are children at heart, incapable of letting someone else have the last word. Shia LaBeouf is clearly not cut out from Broadway, and it was good of him to quit the show as soon as he realized that. Remember—he didn’t force these producers to cast him. They picked him for the sake of name recognition, and nothing more. If he’s being excoriated for cutting and running, I think it’s because the critical establishment feels like it’s been cheated out of a pan.

And Alec Baldwin? Well, I’m happy to see that in private email conversations, he’s just as crazy as I like to imagine. If LaBeouf thinks he can turn New York against Baldwin with screenshots of fairly innocuous emails, he’s proved something I’ve long said about film actors. A job that requires you to work for no more than 45 seconds at a time does not do much for your capacity for critical thought.

​I've got more on the "feud" as a whole over at Bullett​. Check it out, fella.

Stevie Spielberg To Revive "The Best Movie Ever Made"

Oh-ho-ho. Madman Stephen Spielberg announced this morning that he has decided to do the impossible. Picking up where Stanley Kubrick left off four decades ago, Spielberg is going to film a sprawling mini-series biopic of Napoleon​. Spielberg is a genius at bringing impossible films to life—he made Tintin​, for god's sake!—but so was Kubrick, and the little Corsican beat him. I just wonder if maybe Spielberg shouldn't have started with something easier—like bringing Kubrick back to life. 

Why was the project snakebit?​

Rare among visionaries for actually making his epic dreams come true—consider 2001, Spartacusand Barry Lyndon—with Napoleon, Kubrick reached higher than ever before. Over two years of intensive research, he employed dozens of assistants, eventually producing thousands of pages of notes and tens of thousand location stills—a treasure trove that was recently assembled in a very expensive, very pretty book. In a typically modest letter to his producers, he made the famous claimthat, “It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.”

To defray the cost of his cast of thousands, Kubrick planned to film his interiors in France and his battle sequences in Romania, breaking production up into thirds to allow for added planning time. His plan was to “shoot with available light” and “exploit the fully dressed interiors of the period which are readily available in France,” suggesting the movie might have had the dreamy look he later used to bring Barry Lyndon’s eighteenth century alive. His proposed budget was $4 million—impossibly low, considering that the comparatively simple 2001 cost over $10 million. Sensing madness, Hollywood finally pulled the plug.

​More at Bullett​. 

Although I haven't read any of that very expensive, very beautiful book, I've been curious about this movie for a long time. I'm not sure if I'd rather Spielberg fail to finish the movie by attempting to do justice to Kubrick's vision, or succeed by ignoring all of the dead man's hard work. Thankfully, it's not my problem.

I'm Not Wild About The New Bowie, & I Hope I'm Wrong

Today, people are having opinions. Lots and lots of opinions about David Bowie, a man whose media attention has, in the last few years, been at an historic low. Good or bad, The Next Day​ merits having some opinions—and just that is a triumph, I think. Like everyone else, I listened to the album this afternoon on iTunes, and I don't like it very much.

The new David Bowie is currently available to stream for free on iTunes, and the question on everyone’s mind is, “How sad should this make us?” The Next Day is the onetime superstar’s first album since 2003′s indifferently-received Reality, and it hasn’t been hotly anticipated so much as warily watched out for. If this were Springsteen or the Stones, no one would worry too much. We know they’re doing fine. But Bowie made his bones as an artist, and just because he hasn’t made any good art in decades doesn’t mean that his ambition is gone. This is a man whom we don’t want to fail.

The question is what constitutes failure for Bowie. Should we treat this as a serious attempt, and trash it? Or do we let him coast on his name, and give him another pass? It depends on whether or not you still take Bowie seriously as an artist—or whether you think he takes himself seriously. It's a big question, and one that I am way, way, way under qualified to answer. ​One thought I had though—for every article you see about this album (including my two), take a look at the accompanying photos. If every picture you see is from the '70s, well, that says more about this album's importance than I can.

I'm going to give the album a few more listens this week, and hope it grows on me. Heathen ​and Reality​ both did, although I haven't really listened to them much since high school. You'll feel much less conflicted about The Next Day if you like the album straight off, as Gothamist​ does. I hope everyone feels the same way they do. I hope I am completely wrong.

Today in, "Oh No They Didn't," The USPS Takes On Dolly

All right, so the post office isn't really going to war with the woman who wrote "Jolene," "9 to 5" and "I Will Always Love You."​ They'd have to be goddamned fools. But they are screwing with her charity, and I don't like that one bit, so I wrote a doodad about it:

As if the United States Postal Service didn’t have enough trouble, a little-noticed news item ran this week that suggests they are about to make a powerful new enemy: East Tennessee’s favorite daughter, Miss Dolly Parton. In 1996, Parton founded the Imagination Library, which sent a free book every month to children in Sevier County, the forever-impoverished mountain community where she was born in 1946. (Huh. Never thought of Dolly as a baby boomer.) In 2000, she took the program nationwide, partnering with local libraries and community groups to spread the love of reading across the United States. It’s an uncontroversial charity, because everyone likes reading.

Everyone, that is, besides the Post Office. The local newspaper from Maryville, Tennessee, reported this week that the Post Office has begun throwing out Imagination Library books that were returned due to a bad address. Although the local Kiwanis Club was once allowed to pick these books up free of charge, Uncle Sam has changed his mind. Post Office flunky David Walton said:

They are wanting to go pick those books up without paying that return fee. We can’t afford that. They are wanting to … bypass that fee that most other mailers pay. For some time, they have been getting away with that. It’s costing us money.

For the Post Office, I predict this will prove a fatal mistake.

Read on, if you'd like to know more about why I love love love Dolly Parton.​ Is this a Tennessee thing, or do people nationwide find her incredibly inspiring? I don't know the answer, but I do know that if I have a few too many beers tonight, this is the song I'm putting on the jukebox:

The Porter Wagoner Show

The Last Thing I'll Write About The Oscars In 2013

I was so proud of myself for skipping the Oscars that I turned it into a self-righteous, poorly spell-cheked, one-man movement. Apparently, the world did not listen. All morning, the whingers of the Internet have bickered about an unsurprisingly tasteless host, an unsurprisingly dull series of montages, and an evening of television that was all-around awful in a thoroughly unsurprising way. The Oscars were awful—who'dve thunk?

But no one is asking the important questions. The insane questions. The questions that don't need to be answered because they were too stupid to have been posed in the first place.​

No one...but me.​

Today I’m wondering if Argo might have been better off not winning Best Picture. Take away that honor, and the film remains an underdog—forever remembered as the little (big budget, star driven) movie that could. Argo was a fun movie, but calling it the best picture of 2012 only underlines. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that Argo is wildly inaccurate. God knows I don’t give a damn about historical accuracy, but even for those whose tastes run towards the swashbuckling, the last twenty minutes—when gritty tension explodes into cartoonishness—were too much for me.

The movie is remarkable not because it’s great, but because it’s well-made, clever and exciting—three things Hollywood does far too rarely these days. That’s nifty, but not transcendent. Put the weight of best picture on this flimsy little movie, and it falls right to pieces. Argo is a good movie, but if it’s the best of 2012, then Hollywood is in worse trouble than I realized.

(Let us take this moment to gaze upon the evening’s finest gif. Watch that for ten or fifteen minutes, and proceed to the next paragraph once your brain begins to function again.)

​You can go read the rest of that harebrained rant over at Bullett​. On Astor Place Riot, ​I'd like to talk a little about gifs. Specifically, this one:

It's pretty good, isn't it? You can't look away.​ It's strange, repetitive, endless—showing you something bizarre that you might not have noticed if you were watching it in full speed. It is, in short, everything a gif should be. And it's the first good gif I've seen in months. 

Animated gifs have been around for so long that, when I was in high school they were considered passe. In the last couple of years the form has made a comeback, and with ubiquity comes laziness. After any major event, cesspits like Buzzfeed​ and supposedly worthwhile news outlets like the Guardian​ flood their front pages with crap like this, overloading our web browsers and dulling our capacity for rational thought. 

Does anyone think a page of forty or fifty sluggishly-loading animated gifs is funny? Or are we being held hostage by traffic-hungry web editors who haven't had a good idea since 2009? An endlessly-repeating, half second video clip can be mesmerizing, even beautiful. Anything less is a waste of your bandwith.​

With that, I give you the only two other gifs I've loled at in the last six months. For the sake of your browser's sanity, I'll link to them.

Buttfumble​

Owl trapped in car grill

Also, holy hell—the Chrome browser spellcheck is okay with "loled." Civilization is dead, isn't it?​ Why didn't anybody warn me?

Here's A Week Old Story About 'Star Wars' Fandom

Hey you!

You like pictures, don't you? Pictures of awesome imaginary space stuff? Then why don't you stroll over to Bullett​ for more pictures like the above shot from one man's unbelievable 140 square foot Hoth diorama?

Click through the above slideshow, and you’ll see he’s got built-in explosions, built-in laser fire, built-in smoke and enough action figures to populate a completely unnecessary remake of Small Soldiers. Squint at the pictures and, because the original film was made with models, it’s easy to pretend you’re looking at screenshots.

What kind of man would devote himself to such a creation? Big surprise: he’s a goofball. In a video released to his friends on the forums, Barry shows off his “dio,” spending less time on technical specifics than he does on nerdly jokes about being a pornstar. He’s geeking out in a totally safe space, refusing to even take the time to brag about the incredibly awesome thing he’d made. He built this for him, and you’re welcome to take a look at it.

​The words are whatever. But the pictures, oh my. The pictures are divine.

To Break the Oscar Habit, Just Say No

As a kid, I lived for Oscar night. I filled out a ballot, I read up on history, I became incensed over who won and lost, even though I'd seen almost none of the movies. For a long time, I felt the same way about Saturday Night Live​. At some point, to lessen the heartache that comes with watching a beloved institution slide into meaninglessness, I cut my losses. More on Bullett​. 

Just as schoolchildren the world over have accepted the roundness of the earth and the deliciousness of pizza, everybody knows that Saturday Night Live is terrible. That doesn’t mean that nobody watches it. Like cigarettes, inactivity and (sadly) pizza, Saturday Night Live is a bad habit, and one that must be broken for a person to lead a healthy weekend life. The show’s relentless badness—and the fact that there are sometimes other fun things to do on a Saturday night—makes breaking that habit fairly easy. Quitting the Oscars is much harder.

I wrote in December about my resolution to avoid Oscars preview coverage, which is as entertaining as a horserace with no horses. This was fairly easy to stick by. On Sunday, I will keep a promise I made to myself the year that James Franco staked a claim to being the worst Oscar host of all time. I will find something better to do on Oscar night.

Seriously, folks. Respect yourselves. Skip the telecast. Watch movies instead. You love movies and—unlike the Oscars—they love you right back.​

How Does David Ives Start A Short Play? Quickly

Like some sort of magical flying rabbit, Primary Stages' current revival of All In The Timing is light, fluffy, and will have you home by 10 o'clock. When most Broadway shows threaten to end just before 11 pm, that's a value not to be understated. But that's not all! All In The Timing is simply delightful. Don't believe me? Ask the Times.

Last week, I spoke to director John Rando about what makes this evening of one acts click. Today, the interview ran at Bullett. Right now, you can read it.

As you’ve directed it, All In The Timing rockets past quick enough that the actors barely have a chance to breathe. What makes that speed possible?
David’s writing is so distilled, and so like music. My job is teaching his tempo. It’s a very detailed, specific process, where an actor has to find a through line, find a character, find an emotional reality—and at the same time recognize that the language is heightened and sharp and quick. Being able to do that takes a lot of musicianship from the actors.

This seems like a collection of plays that, directed badly, could fall flat on its face. How did you avoid that?

With David’s short plays, the first twelve lines of the play are the heart of the show. Getting the beginning of the play right—visually and emotionally—makes it all make sense. We’ve got three monkeys sitting around and typing and randomly trying to produce Hamlet. It’s ridiculous. But making that very clear at the very beginning allows the audience to catch up quickly. Because they’re short plays, you don’t have time for exposition. Your exposition’s over before you know it.

I like that. If, after the first twelve lines, you haven't set everything up, you're doing it wrong. David Ives knows. He's a funny guy.

On a related note, am I the only person who's sick of the phrase "an evening of one acts"? I used it above, and I'm not proud of myself. In the intro to the Rando interview, I called it "a clutch of one act comedies." I'm going to keep trying to come up with clever new words for that kind of thing. The day's theme is vocabulariety. You heard it here first. And probably last.