THAT IS, I THINK IT'S NOT TOO BAD

Have you ever heard a band you really like cover a song you love, but somehow been tremendously disappointed with the result?  Sure you have!  Covers are a dime a dozen, but good ones are as rare as...I dunno, something less common than dimes.

Consider this:

That, of course, was R.E.M. with a why-bother version of Richard Thompson's great Wall Of Death.  It's not bad, really, but it just kind of sits there--there's a half-assed attempt at making it their own, but they don't seem to want to try too hard, and what's more, they don't really commit to the song.

And maybe it's not really a song for them.  Thompson's original has a sing-along feel that makes it seem like some traditional melody, but as is usual for him, it's also very personal, with a heavy dose of anxiety and angst at its core.  To do it justice, you'd really need to embrace both its sunny melody and hidden darkness, and R.E.M. by nature tend to be a little more detached. 

In other words, they didn't connect to the song.  It happens, and usually in far worse ways.  After all, there are too many bad versions of great songs to count.  This time of year, you can't walk into a public place without hearing some generic easy-listening crooner murdering Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.  The problem is always the same: They make the song about themselves, about their show-offy styles and melismas and grandstanding.  They're not performing a song, they're demanding attention like a little kid having a hissy fit.  If you can get all the way through this, you're stronger than me:

Obviously, Aguilera can sing, but she wants to make damn well sure you know it.  The song is incidental.

Which brings us to the worst kind of cover: The clueless version.  The version performed by an artist who obviously has no idea what the song is about, but for whatever reason, does it anyway.  The popularity of karaoke shows like The Voice seem to encourage this sort of thing, but it's a long and ignoble tradition, sometimes done with actual malicious intent (Pat Boone removing any trace of soul from classic R&B songs, and somehow reaping profits that the actual creators of the material were denied), but most often it just happens because the music industry is a terrible thing that must constantly feed on itself.

Nothing illustrates this better than the endless string of Beatles covers.  There have been countless albums full of the damned things, jukebox musicals on stage, and terrible, terrible movies.  And the worst of these by far is the 1978 disaster Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees as ersatz Mop Tops.  Inexplicably produced by George Martin, the Fifth Beatle himself, the soundtrack was one dreadful misjudgement after another, performed by artists who simply don't seem to understand the basic emotions of the songs they're performing.  Let's take a listen to Sandy Farina's version of Strawberry Fields Forever, and observe John Lennon's wistful classic turned into some faux-Olivia Newton-John styled pop                                                                                                

 Ugh.  Well, we won't do that again.

But obviously, there are good covers.  But even then, they sometimes try too hard.

Great song, good cover.  I mean, Tom Jones sings the hell out of it--that's what he does--but Art Of Noise approaches the material as something to be deconstructed, and includes so many distracting bells and whistles that the actual song is almost secondary.  Which is kind of ironic, really, because Prince is often prone to over-producing his own work, but Kiss in its original form is one of the few times he lets the song do the work.

And that's really what it comes down to.  Marshall Crenshaw's version of Abba's Knowing Me, Knowing You is one of my all-time favorites, simply because Crenshaw has the good sense to leave well enough alone.  Nothing here is significantly different than the original recording; even the keening, minor-chord guitar solo comes straight out of the Benny & Bjorn playbook.  But simply by singing it in a straightforward manner, in his own sad, resigned voice, Crenshaw makes it sound like it came straight out of his own repertoire.  It's an approach all singers should take: Always trust the song.

I KNOW THAT YOU KNOW IT MAY BE THE LAST

I don't even remember how many mulberry trees we had on the farm.  The one on the fence row of the old orchard was the best, and closest to the house.  The one behind the pump house would do in a pinch, if I was playing in the corn crib and needed my fix.  The other trees tended to be scraggly, and most of the berries they bore were more pinkish than purple.  But I might eat them anyway, because they were mulberries, and they were there.

Because soon they would be gone.  Mulberries were at their ripest in June and July, the prime days of summer, when every day was a string of endless possibilities.  The farm had essentially ceased functioning as a farm around the time I was born, so the chicken coop, the barn, all the buildings and abandoned equipment were mine to do with as I would.  Of course a hay rack was made to be a pirate ship; what other purpose could it serve?

Then August would come, and the mulberries would be gone.  The whirr-whirr-whirr of cicadas and the Greene County Fair served as annual reminders that summer was coming to an end.  School would be starting again, and dread gnawed at my stomach.  Precious weeks, then days, were all that remained of my freedom.  But how could I enjoy them when I knew they had to end?

The very concept of things ending haunted me as a kid.  I was prone to depression, but not to philosophical musings, or I may have realized that it is the very fact that all happiness has a sell-by date is also the thing that makes it so precious.  Seasons, at least, are predictable.  We know when they will end.  Life itself is more wonderful than all the glorious days of summer, better even than a handful of mulberries, but it could all be over any time.

Which is OK.  Everything needs an ending.  And really, good things are lessened when they run too long.  (It's why the earlier, shorter James Bond movies are more satisfying.)  Trees change color, school starts again.  People grow older, people die.  But they were good while they were here, and we'll have fond memories, until it's our time to go, and hopefully others will have fond memories.

There's a mulberry tree in my back yard.  Everyday while it was in bloom, I would stop while taking the dog out and pluck some berries from the branches.  They were always delicious.

PART HEAVEN, PART SPACE, OR HAVE I FOUND MY PLACE?

Janie got out of bed because my loud snoring was keeping her awake, and now she's sleeping in her recliner.  It seems like she and I have been together forever, but really, it's only been about four and a half years.  Paul is sleeping in the other recliner, because he still hangs out here a lot.  He came into my life when I dated his mother, and even though that relationship only lasted a few months, he and I have stayed friends for--wow.  Eight years and change?  That's a long time.  (I'm still friends with his mom, for that matter, although minus the whole "hanging out together" part.)  And of course, freely traveling between both chairs is Isabella T. Beagle, the greatest dog in the history of dogs, curling up with both of her friends for a few minutes, then coming back to me and placing her head on my lap as I type, nuzzling my beloved cat Staley.

It's a nice, warm life I've made for myself, here in a ramshackle house I can at least call my own.  There's only one thing wrong: Mom missed the whole thing.

When my mother passed away nine years ago today, I was in a bad place: Still reeling from the breakup with my wife four years earlier, prone to fits of depression and anger, certain that I was destined to drift through the world alone.  Mom had confidence in me, thought that wherever I landed would be wherever I was meant to be--she actually phrased it that way during one of our conversations, to which I responded, "Thanks a lot, Buckaroo Banzai," and of course she laughed, because there weren't too many arcane pop culture references she wouldn't get--but I was certain that my marriage was my one shot at happiness, and I'd blown it.

Well, maybe not certain.  In fact, I was starting to think the whole divorce thing was just a distraction in my life, but I hadn't figured out what the next act was supposed to be.  When Mom got sick, even though she stayed in good spirits even as the doctors explained just how far the cancer had progressed, spending as much time as possible with her became a kind of top priority.

Then she died, and I felt lost, and briefly wondered if I'd ever feel happiness, or anything, again.  But I'd inherited mom's cat Monika, who started interacting with psychokitty Delmar in the most entertaining ways, and I loved just watching them get to know each other, and I found myself laughing at their antics on a daily basis.  So I could still feel some measure of joy.  And I started this very site, initially as a way to process my grief, but then it kind of turned into a journal of my dating life, because that's a thing that also continued.  (Eventually, of course, it became whatever the hell it is now.  To Theoretical Reader Who Has Been Here All Along, I'd just like to say how very sorry I am for all those clips from Lynda Carter variety specials.)

Most importantly, I just kept living.  I'm pretty sure Mom would be overjoyed to see I've finally attained some measure of happiness in life.  Heck, I'm certain of it.  But I will never be able to share it with her, and knowing that is an ache that will always linger, a hole in my heart that can never quite be repaired.

WELL. I GUESS WE HAVE TO TALK.

Today is the birthday of actor Marc Blucas, and I mean no disrespect--I'm sure he's a nice guy and all--but it seems like as good a reason as any to explore the little-discussed cultural phenomenon of the Made-For-TV actor.


Television is a unique medium because its text is ever-changing by its very nature.  A novel may turn out very differently from its authors original intentions, but the reader only ever sees the finished work.  The script of a movie may go through dozens of different drafts, but we only see the version that was filmed.  And a play is a text set in stone; it can be interpreted any number of ways, but the words and actions will always be the same.

But a successful TV series is its own beast.  Even if its creators have a particular goal in mind, the workaday nature of TV production can provide detours along the way, or even change the goal.  The network nixes a particular plot development.  A planned location is suddenly unavailable.  A necessary scene is simply too complicated to pull off within the scheduled time and budget.

And then there's the actors.  Casting a TV show is a leap of faith.  The evolving nature of a TV show means that characters are liable to be put through some pretty extraordinary paces, be required to do things whether comedic or dramatic that the creators may not have originally intended.  And that may require the actors to deploy a skill set that they simply don't possess.

A sidebar here: For the longest time, there was believed to be a clear difference between "movie actors" and "TV actors".  Movie actors could do more heavy dramatic lifting, and more importantly, they had charisma, they had cool.  Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton--those were movie actors.  TV actors could do light drama, light comedy, and were familiar comforting presences: David Janssen, Alan Alda, the casts of most seventies sitcoms.

But even among the actors that toiled in the TV trenches, there was a subset: The Made-For-TV actor.  These were guys (and they were mostly guys) like Ben Murphy or Gil Gerald, affable, unthreatening presences with only trace amounts of charisma, doomed forever to star in shows like Gemini Man or Buck Rogers, programs that only got on the air because a network couldn't just schedule dead air for an hour.  You see someone like Gil Gerald in a show, you immediately know you're seeing the third or fourth choice for the role.

Back to my main point: Once an actor is cast on a series, the character evolves, mostly because the writers see what the actor brings to the role.  The classic example is Edward Asner's role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show--it became obvious that he could do absolutely anything, nail any punchline but also break your heart.  Moore's name may have remained in the title, but Asner clearly was the soul of the series.

The first season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a fairly rough ride, as you see the writers and the actors struggling to figure out exactly what they want from the show and its characters.  But what the sow will be is still there, in embryonic form; it just needs to evolve.

And it does, quickly.  The actors assembled by creator/producer Joss Whedon may not have the technical chops of more rigorously trained thespians, but they're perfect for their roles, and as the show goes along, the writers clearly play to their strengths.  And more delightfully, it's the kind of show that can mock itself and its cast--when other characters discuss Buffy's idiosyncrasies, they're as much discussing the various shades of Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance. 

All of which brings us to Marc Blucas.  Introduced as Buffy's love interest in Season 4, Blucas stands out like a sore thumb in this series.  It's not entirely his fault--his character has no real traces of personality, but that's probably at least partly due to the fact that he's written as a fairly standard-issue jock, and you don't get the feeling that the writer's room of this particular show was filled with people who knew much about jocks.

Still, Buffy specialized in characters who seemed to be one thing but turned out to be much more.  And maybe that was the intention, but it became obvious that Blucas just wasn't up to it.  But he didn't go away, and his presence undermined the entire season.  He could have been like Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie, only Blucas didn't seem to realize he was the straight man.  (The original Marx Brothers analogy I was going to use was Alan Jones--the bland romantic lead nobody cares about--but in earlier Marx pictures that role was usually essayed by Zeppo, and as all Buffy fans know, the show already had its own Zeppo.)  He had no self-awareness at all.  He played his character as a straight-ahead TV type, a Ben Murphy on a show that had no use for Ben Murphys.

In that sense, he may have represented the last of a line.  Sure, there are still TV actors hilariously outmatched by the demands of their part--have you tried sitting through that new Katherine Heigl thing?--but it's very rare to find a purely Made-For-TV actor anymore.  Thanks in no small part to Buffy itself, TV writing has become smarter and deeper than ever before.  There are still time-killer shows, but even those incredibly formulaic CBS procedurals showcase the likes of Joe Mantegna and Laurence Fishburne.  The days of Ben Murphy, Gil Gerald--and Marc Blucas--may be gone forever.

KNOWS NOT WHERE HE'S GOING TO

If you grew up in the seventies, you will likely always associate The Carol Of The Bells with this

Watching that commercial as a kid, or others like it, which suggested cheap mass-market alcohol was a portal to class and sophistication, I ached for the world it envisioned, a world in which feather-haired men in sweaters and blandly pretty blondes rang in the new year with clinking glasses.  There would be toasts, and finger food, and a general air of--I imagined--adulthood.

Even though my parents were adults, and they certainly didn't do that sort of thing, I assumed they once had.  They must have.  It was part of the allure of being a grown-up.  It seemed like silly behavior, but I felt certain that once I reached that point in my life, it would all make sense.

Evidently I got lost along the way.  My twenties were marked by stays in mental wards, suicide attempts and whole years lost as I fumbled in a haze of depression.  When I more or less turned my life around, I got married, and made a point of having the ceremony on New Year's Eve, because hey, surely that would lead to toasts and clinking glasses and the life once promised me by Andre champagne.

That didn't work out.  In fact, one of the peculiarities of my life is that, despite being divorced, losing both parents, buying a house--despite the fact that I am nearly half a century old--I don't feel like an adult.  I have a reasonable amount of life experience, but I'm still waiting for the big reveal, the moment when everything clicks into place and I realize I've arrived.  Until then, it's always going to seem like champagne is being poured somewhere, but not for me.

SOMETIMES GOOD THINGS GET THROWN AWAY

My brother and I weren't talkers, so all we did was listen.  People babbling excitedly about the movie they were waiting to see, or other movies they'd seen recently, why they were here, where they were from.  It was December of 1980, and we were waiting in an increasingly long line on this cold winter night for the massive Plaza Theater to open its doors so we could all pile in and get our first look at Robert Altman's Popeye.

The Plaza was the only theater in town showing this particular blockbuster, a fairly common practice then.  If you wanted to see a movie, you had to go where it was playing, because it wouldn't be playing at two or three or ten auditoriums in every multiplex in town, because there were no multiplexes.  Sure, there were three- or four-screen theaters, but every screen played something different.

So since the number of locations showing a movie was limited, seating space was at a premium.  Lines formed, and in those lines little communities developed.  People got to know each other, there was a shared anticipation, a communal ritual known as "going to the movies". 

The Plaza was one of several remaining stand-alone theaters Des Moines had in the seventies and eighties.  There was the mighty River Hills, originally built for Cinerama, and its neighbor, the classy Riviera, its auditorium resplendent in rose and white hues.  There was the Capri, a vision of early sixties modernity, the location for most middlebrow Oscar bait.  There was the Wakonda, a nondescript neighborhood theater that miraculously transformed in 1980 to The Movies, the same auditorium with the addition of a fifty seat adjunct called the Screening Room.  The Movies would become Des Moines' first repertory theater, and there I saw Once Upon A Time In The West, The Red Shoes, Dark Star, The Seven Samurai, Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead--a roll call of what would become my all-time favorite movies, in often battered prints that nonetheless looked beautiful on the big screen.

All these theaters are gone now, except for the Plaza, which was renovated and renamed the somewhat less elegant Merle Hay Mall Cinema, and which features a colossal sixty-foot screen and the first THX-certified sound system in the state.  Well, it has those features until tomorrow night, when it closes forever.

The closing was immediately prompted by the opening of a new bar/restaurant/theater right next door, but the end has been coming for a long time.  The last movie I saw there was Guardians Of The Galaxy, and though it was a real treat to see such a thoroughly modern blockbuster projected in 35 mm--complete with cigarette burns to mark the reel changes!--it felt strangely incongruous.  Guardians is a wonderfully entertaining movie, but in the modern blockbuster style, meant to be consumed and enjoyed but nothing more, a fun ride while it lasts but not the shared dream we use to experience in giant temples built to honor the cinematic gods.

And I tell myself that's okay.  It's the movies that matter, not where you see them.  But I think of seeing Apocalypse Now on the 70-foot curved screen at the River Hills, and I know that's not true.

THERE'S BEEN AN AWAKENING

It starts, as it always does, with what pretends to be a valid argument.

"Hey," one observer mentions on Reddit or 4chan or whatever depressing part of the web where decency goes to die, "what's with that new Star Wars trailer?  The first thing we see is some black guy in a Storm Trooper outfit.  But how can that be?  Storm troopers are all clones."

Then someone else points out that no, that was a thing that happened during the Clone Wars (as established in Episode II: Attack Of The Clones, and yes, I'm embarrassed to know this), but the Clone Wars were already over by the time the original trilogy started, and the Storm Troopers were just guys recruited by the Empire, and somebody else says, No, man, you're wrong, and the conversation continues, and pretty soon it becomes obvious that the original poster wasn't so much complaining that the black guy playing a Storm Trooper conflicted with what he saw as the series' continuity as he was...complaining about a black guy being in a Star Wars movie.

The conversation deteriorates, as again, it always does, with claims that a black actor having a prominent part is a capitulation to the forces of "political correctness" which descends to watermelon and fried chicken jokes and undisguised racism of a force and virulence that you thought surely would surely no longer exist in this day and age.

But of course, it does exist, as one is reminded on a daily basis when reading any comments board on the events in Ferguson, or the ongoing sexual assault claims against Bill Cosby, or pretty much anything to do with Barack Obama, whose very legitimacy as a president and an American citizen is challenged by bullies online every single day.  But not because he's black, God knows.  You can tell, because these claims are frequently preceded by the claim, "I'm not racist, but..." 

And then it starts, as it always does, with what pretends to be a valid argument.

HELLO DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND

Mike Nichols was already a legend when he directed his first film, the 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.  As a member of Chicago's Compass Players, he had been at the forefront of the movement towards improvisational comedy, and as a result of that he formed a duet with Elaine May that quite simply helped change the form forever.  From there he easily segued to directing for the theater, where he was responsible for, among other things, the original production of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple.

But all of Nichols' work to that point had involved connecting with a live audience.  Film is a different medium, requiring a great deal more subtlety, and here he was directing a theater piece on celluloid, starring two of the biggest ham actors of all time, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  There was almost no way this could work.

He knocked it out of the park.

Of course he did.  Mike Nichols, who has died unexpectedly at the age of  83, was a professional.  Yet he was kind of an odd duck as a filmmaker, since he was never quite an auteur.  He never wrote his own scripts, and his films were often adaptations of plays or novels.  There was no difference in his mind between directing for the theater or directing movies.  The job was always to find the best way to interpret somebody else's material.

When the material was strong--The Graduate, Catch 22, Carnal Knowledge, Charlie Wilson's War--it inspired him to amazing heights, to create films that had tremendous influence of everyone from Hal Ashby to Steven Soderbergh to Wes Anderson (who gave Nichols a "Special Thanks" credit on Fantastic Mr. Fox).  His mastery of the form could be breathtaking.

But then again, there's Day Of The Dolphin.  And Heartburn and Working Girl and--shudder--Regarding Henry.  You could probably argue that Nichols made the best possible movies he could from such awful material, but that doesn't change the fact that they weren't worth doing in the first place.  Most of Nichols' worst work came in the eighties and early nineties, admittedly a bad time for the sort of literary, mid-budget film he did best, but surely he could have found better things to do than directing Wolf.

But he rebounded, with The Birdcage and Primary Colors, and a fine adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels In America for HBO.  Plus more work for the theater, and occasional reunions with Elaine May.  And he'd return to Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, which he'd later direct for the stage and even played the lead in one production.  And why not?  It's the quintessential Mike Nichols work--caustic, cruel and way more sentimental than it dares admit.

IN THAT BRIGHT LAND TO WHICH I GO

I'm dreaming, and I know I'm dreaming, so it's easy to sit back and enjoy the ride.  Specifically, this ride--an endless loop around the parking ramp on the north side of Merle Hay Mall.  It's dark, and the headlights barely keep up with my speed.  But again, it's a dream.  I'm safe.

Then, immediately, the outside of a hotel, an old dilapidated affair.  There are lights around it, and machinery and scaffolding--it's being excavated.  I'm not an active participant at this point.  This is like watching a movie.

Cut to the inside of the hotel.  A small team of rugged, anti-social types have gathered to learn whatever secrets this place might tell them.  Oh, I get it.  This is like Alien or The Thing, and this band of disparate near-strangers will have difficulty working together once...whatever happens.  Will it be aliens or ghosts or...well, I guess I'll find out.

The plot moves right along, as the guy in charge--who vaguely resembles Kurt Russell, but not from The Thing but from Stargate, and since this is my dream that's weird, because I hated Stargate--is offering running exposition, even though nobody is listening to him.  He passes the desk in the lobby, and lodged between an old-timey ledger and a ceramic cherub is an envelope from Rexall pharmacy.  He opens it and pulls out a thick stack of old Polaroids.  "This is the key," he says, and hands them to me.

And it's not like a movie anymore.  I'm standing alone in the dark, with only enough light to see the photos.

The first picture is of my beloved and much-missed cat Monika.  It was taken at my apartment in Des Moines, after Monika had moved in with me when Mom passed away.  Of course, the only reason Mom had her in the first place was because I'd abandoned her when I moved away to get married.  Wait.  No...it's not quite as heartless as it sounds.  When I moved, Mom moved back into the house where I'd been living.  Monika stayed put.  She just had a different master, is all.  I didn't "abandon" her.  Why did I use that word?

Next photo: The outside of the apartment building where I lived in Iowa City.  There seems to be no significance to this picture--there are no people in it, not even my car is visible.  The sky is gray and there are no shadows.  I don't remember taking this picture.

Next photo: A black-and-white image of the clothesline from the farm where I spent my childhood.  The grass is tall, and unshelled walnuts cover the ground.  The orchard is in the background.  Everyone called it the orchard, but nothing really grew there, unless you count the rhubarb patch.  To the right of the photo is the old broken-down swing set that took up a surprising amount of space in the yard, considering it was unusable.  Even further to the right is the very tip of a dog's tail.  That would be Penny--I know it's her even though I can't see her.

Next photo: Inside the farmhouse, in color this time.  Mom's wingback chair.  Beside it is the little wooden stand she used to hold all manner of junk, and on top of that is her jade green ashtray--complete with a lit cigarette--and coffee cup.  In front of the chair is a ratty foot rest with the remains of the day's newspaper piled on top of it.  Behind the chair is the drawing my sister scribbled when she was little, of what she said was "Mighty Mouse all tied up."  But it's a more recent photo, after the living room was painted, so the drawing had been touched up with magic marker.  And again, there are no people in this photo.  It's like a recreation in a museum.

Next photo: Dad's recliner, with the floor model ashtray beside it, and a few empty bottles of Grain Belt on top of that.  On the other side is...a stand and behind that...is nothing, literally nothing.  It's like my mind can't supply the details, but come on, I spent the best part of my life there, I can remember this, but no, this picture doesn't lie, it's right there plain as day, a document of my faded memory. 

Next photo: But no, before I can see it, I feel something, a presence, and I immediately know it's Mom trying to tell me something...

...and suddenly, violently, I'm awake, aware only of what is missing, still waiting for Mom's voice to comfort me, knowing it will never be heard.

I HAVEN'T GOT TIME FOR ORGASMS AND FLATULENCE

Let's get this out of the way first: Robin Williams made a lot of bad movies.  Stunningly bad, reference standard bad: Jack, Jakob The Liar, Bicentennial Man, Old Dogs and especially Patch Adams had reduced Williams' name, turning him into a punchline in someone else's joke. 

True and unfortunate.  Still, there's the astonishing comic inventiveness of his work in Popeye and The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, the lived-in decency displayed in The World According To Garp and Moscow On The Hudson, the terrifying darkness found in The Fisher King and World's Greatest Dad.

Good or bad, what all of his movies have in common is he was fully invested in all of them, giving absolutely everything he had.  Williams was much the same as a comedian: His material could be uneven, but that hardly mattered when skittered across the stage like a live wire, free associating random bits, observations and dialects, his whole body contorting or expanding, an entire vaudeville review in the form of one man.

More than anything, he could make people instantly connect with him.  Gen Xers first knew him as Mork from Ork, Millenials loved him first as the Genie from Aladdin, then loved him all over again in Mrs. Doubtfire, a wacky, sight-gag laden comedy that nonetheless delivers some hard truths about divorce and its effects on families.  Plus, you know, Good Morning Vietnam, Dead Poets' Society, Jumanji...the list is yours to make.

The last few weeks have been brutal.  Increased tension with Russia and Iraq, the ongoing madness in Gaza, the racial and social fissures erupting in Missouri, the growing feeling that not only our government but our very nation is somehow broken.  Earlier this week we lost Lauren Bacall, one of the last living links to the glamour of Old Hollywood, to another, seemingly better time.

But the pain of losing Robin Williams is because he was so very much of our time.  We grew up with him and he was supposed to always be around.  To entertain us, sure, but dammit dammit dammit, even more to inspire us, to fill us with that passing joy that is as essential to human life as breathing.

EVERYTHING YOU EVER

It's strange to even consider now, but back in 1998 I actually eagerly anticipated Roland Emmerich's Godzilla.  True, I'd hated his previous movie, Independence Day, but come on--this was a Godzilla movie.  How bad could it be?

Astonishingly bad, as it turns out, but its release at least briefly generated some interest in the character, and when Sony subsequently released the first in Toho's Millennium series, Godzilla 2000, to theaters in an English dub, I paid money to see it twice.  I also bought the DVD, as I did with all the further Millennium titles, as well as the Showa titles as they were released in definitive forms, and when Criterion released the 1954 original on Blu-ray, I bought it again, even though I already owned it in many, many different formats.

The point is, man, I love me some giant critters.  It would follow, then, that the recent spate of monster movies--Pacific Rim and its announced sequel, the newly-rebooted Godzilla and its announced sequel, as well as Skull Island, yet another King Kong adventure--should make squeal with delight.

Or maybe just sigh with regret.

Sure, the 1973 epic Godzilla vs Megalon is an objectively bad movie, but the wrestling matches between towering robot Jet Jaguar and an explosive-spitting whatsit from beneath the earth are a lot of fun, and even the (many) non-monster scenes have a certain goofy elan.  But when Guillermo del Toro--a fine director, to be sure--stages similar robot/monster fights in Pacific Rim, they somehow underwhelm, and the movie itself is ponderous and overlong.

A similar problem mars Gareth Edwards' otherwise admirable Godzilla, which keeps its title monster off screen for much of its runtime--a valid dramatic choice, but it forces us to spend too much time with flat dramatic scenes featuring charisma vacuum Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

Worse, both of these movies feel incomplete, as if they're setting up not just sequels but series, inspired by the success of  the Marvel Studios superhero franchise, where every movie is connected to another and you can't tell the players without a scorecard.  This suspicion is furthered by the fact that Godzilla and Skull Island both come from Legendary Pictures, which is presumably setting up an inevitable Godzilla/King Kong showdown at some future date.

So every movie will just be a setup for the next movie, and if they're all taking place in a shared universe, they'll all be tonally similar.  Yeah, sure, Toho cranked out a lot of monster movies back in the day, but they weren't much on continuity--you could drop in to the Showa series at any point and have a great time.

Or not, if giant monsters aren't your thing--after all, Toho in the fifties and sixties not only made giant monster movies, they also produced and released many of the great films of Akira Kurosawa.  But these days, Hollywood seems to produce nothing but movies aimed at twelve-year-old boys.  Guardians Of The Galaxy is a ton of fun, but it's still just an exemplary version of the same formula we've seen a million times before, and as a former twelve-year-old, I enjoy that sort of thing, but come on.  There are still many great movies being made, but they don't have nine-digit budgets and open in 3000 theaters at once.  And to make something like, I dunno, The Godfather, you'd need that kind of money.  But studios don't want to make that kind of movie anymore.  Bring on the digitally-rendered monsters!

ANY WORLD THAT I'M WELCOME TO (APRIL '84)

Orange.  Maybe closer to brown.  Somewhere in between.  Burnt umber, according to the Crayola Corporation.

All the walls are like this here.  Lime green, if the lime is overripe.  Sky blue, and oppressively cloudless.  A combination of bright and neutral.  Soothing by design.  Don't want to have anything that might disturb the nutjobs.

But here, in my room, orange.  Two toned orange.  The color of puke from someone who's eaten too many fruit-flavored Pop Tarts.  Not soothing.  Disturbing.

Or maybe it's just me.  I'm the disturbed one, right?  I've got the scars on my wrist to prove it.  Colors that are interesting might somehow angry up my blood, make me want to harm myself.  Not that it would be easy to do that around here.  They won't even let me have a plastic fork unless I'm supervised.  Can't even have a can of instant pudding because it has sharp edges.

But hey, I can have books.  No sharpened pencils for me, but they didn't have a problem with my mom bringing in a copy of Naked Lunch, which, let's face it, seem like the most cliched book a suicidal young man could be reading.  Maybe I should read one of the books they have in the day room, old Arthur Hailey and Harold Robbins potboilers, or one of the eighty million Harlequin Romances.  It might be nice to know what normal people like.  If there are such things as normal people.

******************************************************************************

The windows in the day room face east.  The blinds are up, and morning light floods the room.  Then again, even with the blinds down, the lemon-yellow walls are clearly meant to induce some kind of fake cheer.  But it doesn't work like that.  When you're depressed, a perfect sunny day is just something to be endured.  The few people who are out sit in chairs as far from the windows as possible.

I seem to be one of the younger people here.  No sign of that cute girl I saw last night, the one I almost certainly won't talk to, because that would mean talking to someone, and I don't do that.   But that guy who looks kinda like Sean Penn in Bad Boys, he's here, still strutting around like he's waiting for his closeup.  Most of the people are in their thirties and forties, lost in themselves, making occasional small talk with the attendants but never interacting with each other.

The TV is tuned to Good Morning, America.  I'd turn it over to cartoons, but that's probably discouraged.  If we saw Jerry whack Tom with a pool cue, it might give us bad ideas.  My first morning here, and I feel like I've been here for years.

*******************************************************************************

Mom called last night, and asked if I'd watched the first episode of some new Earl Hamner-created TV series about young kids volunteering in a senior citizen home.  No, I hadn't seen it.

"Well, if you're still there next week, all of you should watch.  It's so nauseatingly sweet, it'll make you all mad.  You can form discussion groups and talk about how much you hate it."

So, summing up: My mother phones her son in the psych ward for no better reason than to complain about a horrible TV show she watched.

Yeah, we're definitely related.

********************************************************************************

I made a reference to Zelig during my counseling session this morning, and my therapist actually knew what I was talking about.  She even seemed to appreciate it, and I was encouraged, so I told her I wanted to make other semi-brainy references so she'd like me more, and I'd fit in, and I wanted be the depressed loser I am.  Then she asked me if I'd always felt like that around other people.

No, I said.  It was a joke.  Another Zelig reference.  Ugh.  Jokes never work when you have to explain them.

*******************************************************************************

There's a dry-erase board in the dayroom and every day a new stupid homily/affirmation/line of bullshit is written on it.  Today's bit of wisdom is this: "A comfort zone is relaxing, but nothing ever grows there."

What the hell?  OK, first of all, that's just stupid on the face of it.  So we shouldn't do what we're comfortable with, what we're good at?  Joe Namath's entire post-football career is a strong argument against that.  And did anybody ever watch a Marx Brothers movie and think, yeah, these guys need to do some heavy drama?

But more importantly...what the hell does that have to do with me, or anybody in this ward?  Comfort zone?  I cut my fucking wrists a few days ago.  I don't feel comfortable anywhere.  I would kill just for the chance to have a comfort zone.  I don't know what it's like.  Maybe I will someday, but I doubt that I'll get there if the best you can offer me by way of a cure is meaningless catch phrases and bright colors. 

I go back to my room, to the burnt umber walls and scribbled notepads, and I stare out the window.  There are trees and grass and sunshine, and it all looks like some alien world to me.

I SUPPOSE I SHOULD JUST--GOD HELP ME--LET IT GO

So the Frozen soundtrack is once again atop the charts, the Blu-ray and DVD release is poised to sell a bajillion copies, even as the movie itself is still in theaters, and still racking up record ticket sales.

And that's fine, really.  It's a good movie.  Honest.  It's easily one of the best animated movies of the last few years, which, okay, granted, isn't exactly wild praise.  (It's better than Turbo and Rio combined!)  It tells a good story, it tells it well, the characterizations are vivid, it's funny and even occasionally moving.

I just don't know why it's animated.

This is the problem I have with at least 90% of recent CGI movies: They're so busy trying to recreate reality, with meticulously rendered hair and fabrics, that they beg the question of why they weren't shot in live action anyway.

Consider this, the big moment from Frozen, the most character-defining moment.  In particular note the action starting at about 2:56.

Yes, she's literally letting her hair down, but the moment is a total throwaway, because absolutely nothing is done to emphasize it.  There is literally nothing in this entire sequence that gains from being animated.  Or, more accurately, there's nothing here that takes advantage of what animation can do.  The settings and movements are depicted with thudding literalism. 

This is the recurring problem with computer animated features.  All the software is written to depict a sort of reality.  The settings are meticulously rendered, and furnished with equally realistic lighting.  The Dreamworks feature How To Train Your Dragon went so far as to hire the great cinematographer Roger Deakins as a visual consultant.  It didn't seem to occur to anyone that maybe, for an animated movie, they should employ painters or graphic artists instead.  That's the advantage settings in an animated film have over live action: They can turn abstract, or deploy colors purely for visual emotional effect.  Here's a sequence from Pocahontas, a lesser film in the Disney canon, one of their last big successes in cel animation before Pixar started the CGI revolution with Toy Story.

Even before the visuals turn vaguely abstract, the colors are varied, the shades of blue alone turn according to the emotion of the scene.  Quite a contrast with Frozen, where the color and lighting remains the same from shot to shot.

But the movement is even more mundane that the setting.  Again, consider the shot of her letting down her hair.  She just kind of reaches up, removes the tiara and her hair...just falls.  The moment isn't emphasized, or, more to the point, the movement isn't emphasized.  Animation is all about exaggeration, a caricature of reality, but that isn't what happens here.  It's what you'd see if this was being performed on a stage, but shouldn't the power of animation be used to emphasize the significance of the moment?  She's becoming a whole new person, but this is depicted almost entirely through the song and through Idina Menzel's powerhouse vocals.  True, she's making a palace over in her own new image, but even that is depicted rather prosaically--that is, the character is literally doing this, and we see it, but it doesn't have the impact it would have with more vivid staging.

 I admit, I prefer hand-drawn animation to CGI, but every form of art has its strengths and limitations.  Brad Bird made fine use of stylized movement and realistic settings in The Incredibles, Pete Docter beatifully gave cartoonishly-designed characters a sense of reality in Up and, though the movie itself isn't much, Genndy Tartakovsky proved computer animated characters could stretch and squash with the best of old school cartoons in Hotel Transylvania.  My problem isn't really with computer animation, it's with how it's deployed.  And with the massive success of Frozen, it seems less likely than ever that anyone will try to do anything new.

I HEAR YOU ARE SINGING A SONG OF THE PAST

There's an old issue of Weird War Tales about a soldier who receives a talisman from some wizened gypsy that reveals the moth and year of his death.  It's the middle of World War II, but this talisman says he won't die until sometime in the seventies.  Which means...well, as far as this war goes, he's bullet-proof.  He begins taking crazy chances, because he knows he won't die.  Except the talisman only promises he'll still be alive by that date.  It doesn't say his body will be in one piece...

Cheap irony, with a big twist you can see coming from a mile away, but it made a huge impression on eight-year-old me, and I find myself thinking about it a lot lately because...Well, partly because my brain pan is crowded and random memories float to the surface and refuse to leave.  But mostly because reading that story provided the first time I'd ever considered mortality.  There's no magic talisman, and you can't know the precise date and time, but there will come a day when you will die.

It's OK, really.  I'm fine.  As far as I know.  That's the thing, though: As far as I know.  But I turn forty-nine in a couple of months.  My mom and dad both had colon cancer.  Family history being what it is, I have a preview of what's going to happen.  Sure, a safe could fall on me or my heart could explode, but barring that, I will get cancer and die.  It's a certainty, an inevitability, like Charlie Sheen getting fired from another TV show.

(Incidentally, and because I love pointless parenthetical asides, I would observe here that almost twenty years ago--Lordy, I'm old--when I used to write for a kinda-sorta-alt weekly in Des Moines, I was known to use Charlie Sheen as a metaphor for terrible things happening so often that one of the editors rejected a column with a hand-written note: "Charlie Sheen AGAIN?")

Obviously, like most people, I'll ignore the warning signs, signs that will be in flashing neon because, again, I know they're coming, and soon it will be too late and...Why yes, funny you should ask, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this.  And I wish I could say I've been using all that time in a valuable way, taking stock of my life, making plans for the great inevitable, or maybe for crying out loud actually getting around to doing some work on that one idea I had for a novel that one time that really, swear to God, would have been great, I had a killer opening paragraph and everything but man it just kind of sat there and I was so terrified by the notion that it wouldn't be interesting for more than twenty, thirty pages max that I just kind of let it die.

But, uh, I've done none of those things.  Things get in the way.  Good things, mostly, and bad ones, too.  I mean, my life is good, relatively speaking.  I try to live in the here-and-now, but the reality of now changes as you go through life.  You acquire knowledge along the way, and you can rage against it, or try to ignore it, or even accept it, but that knowledge rules your existence.

So sometimes I escape into the past: I'm sprawled out on the couch in the living room, all excited because when Mom came home from town today, she brought me the latest issue of Weird War Tales, always one of my favorites.  I open the cover with anticipation, not knowing that will be the last moment of my life untouched by a feeling of creeping dread.

DAMN YOUR PACIFISM!

It's unpleasant, to say nothing of unseemly, to turn this space into an ongoing obit section for my cultural heroes.  I don't write much anymore, and when I do, it seems like it's yet another memorial piece.  And it's sad and depressing, and honestly, I don't enjoy doing it, which is why there hasn't been anything here remembering Nelson Mandela or Doris Lessing or, most recently, Peter O'Toole.

Then Billy Jack dies, and dammit, that shit's personal.

If you were the right age in the 1970s, the half-breed ex-Green Beret ass-kicking pacifist Billy Jack was as big a deal as Bigfoot or Evel Knievel.  The creation of writer/director/producer/star/messiah Tom Laughlin, our Billy first appeared in 1967's The Born Losers, a routine biker picture (albeit one with an unconscionable 113 minute running time, because Laughlin's ego was already in place), but it was 1971's Billy Jack that briefly made the character and the actor household names.

A weird mix of standard drive-in fodder with typical early 70s hippy-dippy mysticism, Billy Jack is less noted as a movie as for how it was sold: A flop in its initial release, Laughlin famously sued Warner Bros. and reacquired the rights to the picture and sold it his own way, renting out neighborhood theaters one at a time and keeping all the profits himself.  Both the four-walling of theaters and the accompanying heavy duty TV ad campaign were highly influential--the notoriously awful indie outfit Sunn Classic Pictures used Laughlin's technique to sell their fake documentaries like The Mysterious Monsters and In Search of Noah's Ark.

It worked--Billy Jack became a smash hit, and Warner Bros. rereleased it again using a variation of Laughlin's technique ("See it again...for the first time!"), and it was a smash one more time.  It was basically a liberal-populist version of the conservative-populist Walking Tall, and it played small towns and drive-ins forever.

At the box office, if not artistically, Laughlin had even grander visions.  The 1974 sequel, The Trial Of Billy Jack, was again produced in conjunction with Warner Bros., but Laughlin mapped out the ad campaign himself.  It was the first movie to open really wide--over a thousand theaters at once, quite a feat in those pre-multiplex days--accompanied by a massive advertising blitz.  (I remember the full-page color ad in the comics section of The Des Moines Sunday Register!)  It worked--the movie made a then-astonishing $11,000,000 in one weekend.  Those numbers are amazing--that's at the level of Jaws or Star Wars.

Except the movie sucked, and after the first weekend, it tanked.

And thus ended Laughlin's career, basically.  He made a horrible semi-mystical Western, The Master Gunfighter ("A Billy Jack Enterprises Production") and the barely released Billy Jack Goes To Washington...and then he just kind of went away.

Laughlin had been a journeyman actor for over a decade before his big success, with guest shots on TV and bit parts in the likes of Tea And Sympathy and South Pacific.  But Billy Jack--the character and the movie--seemed to change him.  The Trial Of Billy Jack is a terrible, terrible movie, and sitting through it is like spending three hours with your nutjob conspiracy-theory cousin, the kind of guy you assume is a hardcore lefty until you notice his Ron Paul For President bumper sticker, and even if you agree with its politics, you'll cringe at the presentation.

But Laughlin clearly believed.  He meant every half-baked they're-all-out-to-get-us assertion, and to him it wasn't a movie, it was a manifesto.  Going back to mere acting wasn't in the cards for Laughlin, so his celluloid legacy pretty much begins and ends with the original Billy Jack, the only halfway decent movie he ever made.

And that's the strange part.  A big deal at the time, it's kind of sad how little impact it ultimately made.  Laughlin was a marketing genius, and it's easy to imagine he could have had a nice career as an action star, a philosophically aware Clint Eastwood, but that's not what he wanted.  He had to tell the truth, man.

As the seventies ended, Laughlin tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at politics, and wrote vanity-press books on psychology and alternative medicine.  And he kept making plans for more Billy Jack movies, including one with the wonderful title Billy Jack's Crusade To End The War In Iraq And Restore America To Its Moral Purpose, which suggests that his ego certainly never diminished.

Laughlin died this month at the age of 82, having failed to bring an end to racism or war or poverty or any of the things his character stood for.  But you know what?  In 1975, my brother Keith dragged ten-year-old me to a re-release of Billy Jack pretty much for the sole purpose of making fun of it.  We counted the number of times the boom mike was visible, we yelled out our own responses to some of the dumber dialogue, we laughed at the action scenes.  But we had a great time watching it, and I've seen it countless times since then, and enjoyed it every time.

So no, Billy Jack didn't change the world.  But he taught me how to watch movies critically, and I'll always love him for that.

IT'S JUST A SHOW

Things had deteriorated, obviously.  With her cancer, Mom's doctor had already given her less than six months to live.  Plus, there'd been a mix-up on her meds which had caused to to hallucinate wildly, she'd fallen a couple days before and...well, time was running out.

But I didn't want to believe that.  So when I got home from work that day and discovered several messages from my sister telling me Mom was in the hospital, I refused to believe it was anything but a bump along the way.  After all, she still had a few months left; a doctor said so.

When I got to the hospital, I was shocked by how small she looked, how fragile and lost.  The bump on her head from her fall had gotten worse, now resembling some Cronenberg mutation.  And there was her voice, faint and far away but oddly cheerful: "Hi, Honey.  Did you have to work late?"

Yeah, I said.  Sorry, I didn't know until now.

"That's OK.  Have you eaten?"

No, I explained, I came over here as soon as I got the message.

"Oh.  Well, you should eat.  I'll be OK.  It's almost time for Lost, and after that, I'll get some sleep.  What are you going to do tonight?"

I don't know.  I'm kind of worried...

"I'll be OK.  Really.  Go have some pizza and watch MST.  That always makes you feel better."

So I did.  Mom was right--Mystery Science Theater 3000 always made me feel better, could always be counted on to give me a laugh when I needed one.  So I picked an episode at random, Joel and the Bots going to town on the Roger Corman Western Gunslinger.

An odd choice, as it happened.  The movie itself is oddly obsessed with death, and that carries over to the rest of the show, which features this sketch:

Kind of weird, but nothing creepy about it.  Sure, Mom was in the hospital, but she'd be alright.  Wouldn't she?  Wouldn't she?

You can guess what happened next: An early morning phone call, a long, agonizing vigil, bad hospital food, then...well, then she died.

And the bottom dropped out of my world.  Mom was always there, the one person above all others that I could always count on to be there for me, to point me in the right direction, to tell me what I needed to hear.  Without her, how could I go on?

Something else was there for me, though.  In the blur of days following, the visitation and funeral and dread of returning to work and everything else, I wondered if I could ever regain what had been lost.  In the depths of sorrow, could I ever be happy again?  There was one sure way to find out:

Another random episode: I Accuse My Parents.  The intro made me happy, and the episode made me laugh.  A lot.  And when it was over, I knew Mom was right: It would be OK.

I'm writing all this right now because Mystery Science Theater 3000 premiered twenty-five years ago today.  It was hugely influential to the comedy landscape of the late twentieth century, and its lasting impact continues to be felt well into this century.

And more than that, it's the show that kind of saved my life.

A TREMOR IN THE FORCE

Again, I have been accused--just yesterday--of being a Star Wars geek.  Again, I plead not guilty.

The main evidence seems to be that I know Admiral Ackbar's home planet (Mon Calamari--yes, I do know this), a fact which isn't revealed in Return Of The Jedi, and thus something I could only have learned through reading of spin-off novels, comic books or, at the very least, repeated trips to Wookiepedia.

But I've done none of these things!  (Okay, I visited Wookiepedia one time--just once, I swear!--and oddly enough it was to look up the proper spelling of "wookie" because there was some dispute about that in the very early days of Star Wars fandom and look, never mind how I know about that.)  But Star Wars is Star Wars, a vast cultural thing that everybody knows something about, even if they've never seen the damned thing.

Let me put it this way: I've never watched porn.  (Unless Caligula counts, which technically, it probably does.  Oh, and that one Laura Gemser Emanuelle movie where the girl jerks off the horse and there are a few penetration shots, but they were obviously just inserted (tee-hee, inserted) after the movie was shot, so that really shouldn't count.)  More specifically, I've never seen Behind The Green Door, but I've read two different books on its directors, Jim and Artie Mitchell.  (They invented the lap dance!)  I've also read Sinema and The Other Hollywood and could tell you more about The Opening Of Misty Beethoven than you could ever want to know.

On the other hand, I've never seen any of the awful live-action movies Disney cranked out in the seventies, but if you shouted out their titles, I could probably tell you who directed them without even looking it up.  (No Deposit, No Return? Norman Tokar!  The Shaggy D.A.?  Robert Stevenson!)  Hey, as a bonus, I can tell you that Frank Phillips was the cinematographer and Cotton Warburton edited most of those things, because Disney used pretty much the exact same crew in all their movies back then and WHY DO I KNOW THIS?

But does all this make me a porn and/or Disney geek?  I can tell you who produced both The Genius Of Ray Charles and Pink's Raise Your Glass, even though I don't imagine many people who revere the former have even heard of the latter.  I can quote whole passages of James Joyce's The Dead verbatim.  I couldn't tell you my sibling's birthdays, but if you ever want to know who shot Ilsa, Harem-Keeper Of The Oil Sheiks, I'm your guy.  I can't remember the precise layout of the house where I grew up, but I can remember exactly the details of the mighty River Hills/Riviera theater, where I first saw 2001, Fantasia and, okay, Star Wars, which, granted, yes, I saw five times in the summer of '77, but hey, so did everyone else.  It played theatrically for almost a year.

And it's not like everyone who saw it became a geek.  We liked it, then we moved on with our lives.  If, by "moved on" you mean "continued to fill our heads with ever-widening but essentially useless pop culture knowledge that unfortunately we used as a prism through which to view real life, and found reality wanting".  And if by "we" you mean "me". 

SO GLAD YOU MADE IT

It's OK.  I'm still here, theoretical reader who probably doesn't even exist anymore.  Well, not here, at this site, actually writing things.  But I'm still, you know, here in the world.  Things get in the way, life goes on, what have you.

But hey!  Here's a little something we haven't done in awhile: Lynda Carter singing!  It's from a 1984 variety special, and if you had told me people were still turning out this kind of crap as late as '84, I'd have said you were nuts.  But here's the eye-gouging, ear-punishing evidence.  Enjoy, or whatever.

FROM THE LAND BEYOND BEYOND

I can tell you every single detail of that Monday night: the trip form the farm into Perry in Mom's Ford Galaxie, the stop at Fareway for supplies for the evening's entertainment (Shasta cola and an industrial-sized bag of M&Ms), the whir of cicadas sounding from the shrubs on west side of the drive-in, the pink and purple clouds as the soon slowly descended, part of the endless wait for the movie to begin; the flashes of lightning far off to the north, somewhere far away, as the movie finally began.

The movie was The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad.  It had been heavily advertised on local TV, the commercials promising monsters and visual wonders aplenty.  I didn't know then that the movie was nearly twenty years old; I didn't know the name of Ray Harryhausen, though I noted his name in the credits as "Creator Of Visual Effects", and I knew what it meant: He was the man who made the mosters.

Mostly, I didn't--couldn't--know the profound effect those monsters would have on me.  How Harryhausen's cloven-hooved cyclops, with his splayed legs and delicately-curving back, formed an interest in the mechanics of the human body, an appreciation for choreography and dance, or how the slow, painful death of a dragon would haunt my dreams, its stumbling final movements echoed in the sad exits of my own beloved pets.

By the time a skeleton dropped down from the ceiling, grabbing a shield and sword and engaging our hero in a duel to the death (or redeath), my mind was completely blown.  I had never seen anything like this before.  My mom was an adult, she knew things, so I asked her how this sequence was done.  "I have no idea," she answered.

Which convinced me more than anything of the reality my eyes told me: It was real!  There was magic in the world!

And there was, once.  But no more.  Ray Harryhausen, creator of more wondrous sights than any other human ever imagined, died today at the fine age of 92.  The world is a sad place for his passing, but an infinitely better place because he lived.

SHE'S A NUN! SHE FLIES! WHAT DO YOU NEED, A ROADMAP?

Wow!  It's been--months?  Actual months since I've posted anything here?  Things happen, momentous things, in my life and in the wider world, and this space has remained silent.  But there are still things worth discussing, like, um, this.



The increasing numbers of entertainment providers desperately needing any type of content--whether online services like Hulu and Netflix or specialty cable channels like MeTV and Antenna--has spurred the rights holders of scores of vintage television shows to haul their products out of the mothballs.  Suddenly shows unseen for years are back, and the results are...interesting.

TV has always existed primarily as a way to kill time.  In the pre-internet days, the vast majority of programming was the equivalent of Chuck Norris memes and cat videos on YouTube, a way to spend a half hour here and there when you really had nothing else to do.  If you were watching The Love Boat and the phone rang halfway through it, you'd go ahead and answer, confident that you weren't really going to miss anything.

And it's still that way.  For the last decade or so, many believe TV has entered a golden age of creativity, and the best of what's out there gives that argument some weight.  Sure, dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad and comedies like Louie and Community, but even animated kids shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and cop shows like Justified are astonishing--fully cinematic, but with a novelistic approach to plotting and detail.

But these are exceptions, and there have always been exceptions:  Sgt. Bilko, The Twilight Zone, Route 66, The Rifleman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Columbo, The Rockford Files.  The cream always floated to the top, but then as now, there's a lot of time to fill.  TV as a whole is as crappy as it's ever been--have you ever tried sitting through an episode of Rules Of Engagement?--but it's a whole lot slicker.  Writing rooms are full of Harvard grads eager to show off their education, which is why even a lowly Disney Channel sitcom will have an occasional reference to Proust.  The directors who set the visual style of the likes of Chicago Fire have been to film school and want to show off their skills for composition and editing, in case it might land them a feature film gig.

Which brings us back to The Flying Nun.  It's safe to say we'll never see its like again.  Sure, we'll see other shows with astonishingly stupid premises--Dog With A Blog is a thing that exists--but there will never again be something this innocent and naive, and by "innocent and naive" I mean utterly incompetent.

Let's look at that intro again.



The opening of a show is meant to get you to watch.  It can lay out the premise or establish the characters or simply bombard you with snazzy images and a catchy theme song.

Or, in the case of The Flying Nun, it can be a clumsily edited assortment of available footage.  There's no flow between the images, no rhythm, no sense.  Ed Wood couldn't have done a worse job.  She's a nun, she's flying, OK.  Other cast members appear, obviously filmed in a studio.  Are they supposed to be watching her?  Their eye movement suggests yes, but the clips we've seen show her at a much greater height, and then--wait.  Now she's walking across a plank?  And suddenly becomes airborne?  But we've already seen her fly!  Shouldn't this have started the sequence?  (I especially love the slide whistle deployed for this bit; that was a hacky comedy device even in Vaudeville.)  And now she's...got a dog?  And the cable holding her up is incredibly obvious...seriously, they didn't have a better take to use in the title sequence?  Another random shot of Alejandro Rey, apparently not realizing the camera was running, then she's crashing through a stained glass window, an image that seems more appropriate for a mid-seventies Italian Exorcist knockoff.  Suddenly she's flying again, exec producer credit, and we're out.

The show itself is a pretty typical relic of its era--flat lighting, ABC-simple plotting, uninteresting characters--but that opening sequence has a maladroit charm.  It's the type of thing that's hard to believe even exists, but like the dinosaur, its time has gone.  TV now is so damned professional.