Show Review: VERONICA MARS

LIke many people, I missed this show when it was on the air (actually, I watched five minutes and said "Wow, a high school girl who's also a detective? That's retarded!"), and didn't give it a second thought until I saw all three seasons sitting on the shelf of a person I respected. I raised a disdainful (but still respectful) eyebrow in his general direction, and after five minutes of fervent gushing and insistent nudging I walked out of his office with the aforementioned three seasons nestled in my bag. Rebecca and I sat down to check out an episode that night, and I quickly realized that my friend was right: VERONICA MARS is a great freaking show.

The heart and soul of the show is, of course, high-schooler Veronica Mars herself, played with brains, guts, and sass by Kristen Bell. She is Nancy Drew for the new millennium, except twice as hot and she carries a Tazer. Bell is a joy to watch, and she is supported by an outstanding group of actors (Enrico Colantoni is fantastic as her private detective/former sheriff dad). The show is built around a big mystery that takes an entire season to solve, while each individual episode has its own smaller story arc. The big mysteries are compelling and complex, and the episodic story lines are tightly woven and smart. With echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett ringing through every episode, VERONICA MARS is a modern noir, except its set in a high school and nobody smokes.

Of course, no show is perfect, and MARS is no exception. The lighting is preposterously stylized, the characters can sometimes be a touch one-note, and you are asked to believe that the only Latino kids who go to Neptune High are in a gang--a biker gang. HOWEVER! The fact of the matter is that everything else about the show is so good, and done so well, that the flaws come off as charming quirks rather than glaring failures, and make you love the show all the more (Rebecca and I always laugh when a featured extra is blatantly 35 years old). There are only three seasons of the fantastic show, and each one is better than the next. By the time you finish the last episode of the series (and the 12-minute promo for Season 4), you will shake your hands at the heavens and ask why a loving and merciful God would allow this show to be cancelled.

Thought of the Day

The most destructive forces in nature are Time, Water, and Gravity.

The most destructive forces to the human soul are Power and Money.

Movie Review: THE PROPOSITION

There are movies that can be viewed as a metaphor for hell, but there are very few movies that make you feel like you are actually in hell. The movie is haunting and bloody, set in a blasted wasteland where everyone is out for blood, and even the ground seems like it wants to scorch the life away. And the FLIES! I have never seen a film where flies were an integral part of every scene (and I don't mean a single fly like in, say, THE FLY, but little clouds of them, buzzing in and out of the frame and landing on people's faces like little black harbingers of death). The plot centers on one brother who is sent to kill his older brother in order to keep his younger brother from the noose, but that is just what is happening on the surface. The screaming subtext of the movie is about hubris, and the dangerous futility of colonialism ( I say "screaming" subtext because if you haven't gotten the point during the opening credits, you aren't smart enough to watch this movie. Or any movie, for that matter.) I won't say much more, because I like for people to go into movies with a fairly clean slate, but suffice it to say that there is much more going on here that what you see on the screen, and what you see on the screen is going to stay in your head for a long, long time. Well worth a watch.

Movie Review: THE INFORMANT

I'll be brief: THE INFORMANT isn't very good. It's not that it's bad,it's just that it's not very good. It is, quite frankly, boring. There are a few nice touches here and there, from the 1970's score by Marvin Hamlisch and Matt Damon's increasingly delusional narration, but overall there just wasn't much to keep me interested. The movie didn't really take off until the last fifteen minutes, and then I wished that the whole movie had been about those last fifteen minutes. I give Steven Soderbergh full marks for being consistently inventive, but no one hits a homerun every time.

Waits and Coffee

That's the way to start your day: a hot cup of joe and Tom Waits Live in Atlanta, 2008. I got a free concert from his "Glitter and Doom" Tour at tomwaits.com (courtesy of NPR) and have been listening to it in chunks before I go to work in the mornings. I have several concert bootlegs (as well as every single album), and the thing that amazes me about Tom Waits is that he never plays a song the same way twice. You know how sometimes you'll hear a live version of a song by a band you enjoy, and it's like "Yeah, that was okay, but I think the studio version is better." Well, with Tom Waits, no matter how he plays it, it's friggin' awesome.

Go listen to Tom Waits RIGHT NOW.

I Don't Understand iTunes

Why does the album artwork sometimes change (to the incorrect album cover) even though I did nothing to effectuate the change?

Why can't I organize all the albums by an individual artist chronologically, rather than alphabetically? (I still do this, but I have to type the year in front of the album title, which takes a really long time.)

Speaking of alphabetizing, why doesn't iTunes know how to do it?

So annoying...

Tom Waits and Me

Those of you who know me personally or work with me know that I have developed something of a Tom Waits habit over the last few months, and those of you who are married to me (hi Toots) know that if you ask me to put on some music for dinner it is going to be Tom Waits. Every time.

For my friends, this just means that I will talk about Tom Waits at length if you show even the slightest interest, and if you are my wife it means that you are the most forbearing woman on the planet and I love you.

All of which is to say that the music of Tom Waits speaks to me in ways that no other music ever has, and the power of his songs doesn't diminish with repeated listening (and believe you me, I have been listening repeatedly). More to come...