→ January 26, 2008
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The Simpsons Movie.

I was cautiously excited to see The Simpsons Movie. I was a dedicated Simpsons watcher for most of the ’90s, but lost the habit some time during B-school as the show started to feel repetitive and the laughs became fewer. I hoped the movie would be a return to that style, since they’d have to pull out all the stops for the first feature film, right?

Didn’t happen.

I understand I’m in the minority on this one, but I didn’t find the movie to be all that funny. Early Simpsons episodes were packed with jokes, and often had a strong bit of social commentary. The movie felt like it had the same number of jokes – funny ones, that is – and degree of social commentary that you’d find in a 22-minute episode, spread out over 78 minutes. (I know the listed run time is 87 minutes, but that includes the credits, which had a few Easter eggs … but still, they’re credits. They don’t freaking count in the run time.) The humor was inconsistent, so I laughed hard a handful of times, although I had only one moment where I had to pause it (Ralph Wiggum’s sole line in the film), but it wasn’t as relentless as it should have been, and too much of what was funny was easy physical comedy – easy because you can draw a cartoon character hitting himself in the eye with the claw end of a hammer, but good luck getting an actor to do that on film.

The social commentary was just as disappointing as the humor. The target is the current Administration, but the line is dated – Cheney’s running the show, the government is incompetent, Halliburton, etc. In 2002 or 2003, it would have been funny. Now, we’ve heard these jokes for years, and they’re stale. And some of them are so incredibly forced that it’s painful to watch. When a government robot overhears Lisa saying that they’re fugitives, the scene cuts to a giant NSA room of agents listening in on private conversations. The agent listening to the Simpsons’ conversation jumps up and shouts, “The government actually found someone we’re looking for! YEAH, BABY, YEAH!” There was a good joke in there somewhere, but that wasn’t it. Besides, the government found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and dropped a bomb on his head while this movie was in production; I’d say that counts as finding someone they were looking for.

The bar for animated movies now is quite high. Pixar has churned out one brilliant movie after another based on strong writing, but the plot of this film was thin (of course, the show’s the same way) and the snarking missed its mark. The first two Shrek movies were dense with jokes (“Catnip.” “That’s … not mine.”) in a way that The Simpsons Movie wasn’t. And the fact that two of the funniest bits in this movie were in the commercial – the Spider-pig segment, and the ten-thousand-tough-guys rant – didn’t help matters either. If this is one of the funniest movies of 2007, we have let our standards for funny slip, because there just wasn’t enough of the funny in The Simpsons Movie, and there wasn’t enough of the other stuff to balance it out.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , ,
→ January 26, 2008
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The Onion article about me…

…okay, not really. But it could be.

Filed Under: Humor Tagged With: ,
→ January 25, 2008
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Vicente Padilla.

OK, looks like I need to clarify something. Andrew Johnson at his Defensive Indifference blog accused me of dropping an unsubstantiated allegation that Vicente Padilla has a drinking problem in my chat yesterday. I just want to point out that Padilla’s addiction to alcohol is no secret; he was driving drunk in Nicaragua two years ago with a friend in the passenger’s seat, got in an accident, and caused his friend’s death. Here’s an article from a Nicaraguan newspaper that says that he was drunk at the time of the accident and driving over 150 km/hour, and implies that the whole incident was smoothed over by local police. He was also arrested in Dallas in 2006 on suspicion of DUI. Now, on top of that, I’ve talked to plenty of people in baseball who’ve confirmed that Padilla has a problem, but that seems like icing on this cake. If you drive drunk and kill your friend, and yet get behind the wheel drunk again a few months later, isn’t that the very definition of a drinking problem?

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With:
→ January 25, 2008
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Knocked Up.

Finally got around to seeing Knocked Up last night, two months after recording it off pay-per-view, and it was excellent, very funny with a sweet undertone that never turns sappy, and some excellent performances.

Knocked Up scores biggest by avoiding the Big Artificial Conflict that wrecks almost every relationship comedy. I’m going to demonstrate this by using one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, the positively fecal The Object of My Affection starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. Rudd, who is also in Knocked Up plays a gay man who is roommates with Aniston’s character. They become friends. She falls in love with him. He’s still gay, but there’s some chemistry happening. She becomes pregnant (not by Rudd’s character) and wants him to help her raise the kid. Then there’s a pivotal scene in his bedroom when they’re just seconds away from a kiss … and the phone rings, and hey, whaddya know, it’s an ex-boyfriend of his who wants to get together. And that’s it – they end up apart, him with a guy, her with a guy she meets a few minutes before the end of the movie. This is horrendous writing, first because it’s just lazy to end a difficult and important scene with a deus ex machina phone call, and second because there was a much more important reason why the characters couldn’t get together – because HE WAS GAY.

Where Object and so many movies fail, Knocked Up succeeds. Yes, Alison and Ben break up, but it is an inevitable occurrence, the result of a slow build of tension that explodes in a hilarious, foul-mouthed screaming match that starts in a car and ends in a gynecologist’s office. It also serves as a pivotal plot point that gets Ben to grow up, which, frankly, I’d been waiting the whole movie for him to start doing. And, most importantly, Apatow picks up the movie’s pace after the split, avoiding the typical slowdown in most relationship comedies that comes after the writer has forced the two people apart and now needs to spend a solid 45 minutes showing us how miserable they are without each other. We don’t see Alison or Ben miserable; we see both of them acting responsibly, and we see Ben doing something about his half of the problem. What a decidedly grown-up concept.

The main actors were all very good. I’ve been a Katherine Heigl (Alison) fan since “Roswell” – the season-three hairstyle sold me, since you can’t pull that look off if you’re not flat-out gorgeous – so I didn’t need much convincing on that one. Seth Rogan (Ben) was outstanding as a very unlikeable guy who, it turns out, is more clueless than jackass. (Speaking of which, I don’t get the criticism that the movie is “sexist,” which Heigl herself even intimated in a recent Vanity Fair interview. Ben starts out as a goofball and a ne’er-do-well, he’s depicted as reaching in the relationship until the very end of the film, and his friends are socially retarded. Alison’s successful, smart, and funny. This is sexist … how?) Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd are hilarious as a vaguely demented married couple whose relationship is slowly disintegrating under the weight of two kids and his busy job; Rudd’s scene in the Vegas hotel room with Rogan was one of the film’s highlights. And Harold Ramis has a great cameo as Ben’s father.

The movie does have some missed notes and unevenness. Joanna Kerns as Alison’s psychobitch-mom-from-hell was jarring, and she appears just once as a sort of comic foil and doesn’t resurface until the closing credits. The Asian doctor was just as one-dimensional before a jarring character change near the film’s end – it’s like he was there for the joke, but then Apatow needed him to be more normal, so he altered the character. In general, Apatow uses his one- and two-scene characters as sharply-defined props to create slightly forced comic moments, when his specialty is building comedy from real situations. I thought ending the movie with a scene where Alison sees the nursery Ben set up would have been perfect, but that’s just me being sentimental. And I wish that the idea that Ben is a skilled handler of people – he wins two interpersonal negotiations near the film’s end by using conciliatory tactics in one and firm tactics in the other – had been explored a little more earlier in the film. If it was a latent skill, fine, but show us a glimpse earlier on rather than having him emotionally tone-deaf in all of these situations where he’s with Alison and says the absolute worst possible thing.

If you can handle some vulgarity and don’t mind marijuana usage as a running gag, Knocked Up is worth the rental. But if you’re married with kids, it becomes a must-see, because there’s another layer of humor that you’ll get that the non-parents in the audience just won’t quite appreciate.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With:
→ January 24, 2008
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The Age of Innocence.

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now known as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), with good reason, as Wharton uses the classic love triangle formula to expose the darker side of the seemingly idyllic Gilded Age of the late 1800s while also incorporating some savage wit. It’s also in the Novel 100 (#61), the Modern Library 100 (#58), and the Radcliffe 100 (#42), although it was published two years too early for TIME‘s top 100 list.

Age‘s main character is Newland Archer, a young lawyer in the social elites of New York in the 1870s who is about to marry the pretty but dull May Welland, a socially acceptable match and one he doesn’t question until he meets her cousin, the Countess Olenska. The Countess has just returned to the United States after fleeing a disastrous marriage in Europe to a man who used her ill (although his exact crime is never defined, I inferred that he was beating her), and Archer finds himself drawn to her in an obsession laden with sexual overtones. He ultimately has to choose between his engagement and then marriage to a woman he likes, but for whom he has no passion, and the woman who ignites his passion but for whom he’d have to abandon his family and status while flying in the face of all social conventions.

For a novel built around a serious idea, the choices people have to make between conforming to societal norms and following the riskier paths that offer a chance for greater happiness, Wharton manages to incorporate some bitterly sarcastic humor.

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English- speaking audiences.

No one is spared, but Wharton has a particular enmity for the small-mindedness of the pro-propriety set, who conspire first to send Countess Olenska back to her husband and later to keep her and Newland apart.

On top of the love triangle and its underlying story about choice, The Age of Innocence reflects the social upheaval of the interwar period in which it was written. May Welland represents the longing for the pre-war period, a true age of innocence in which the U.S. hadn’t been embroiled in a major conflict since the Civil War, and prosperity and opulence seemed guaranteed. The Countess represents the future, from the vantage point of the end of World War I, from America’s increasing involvement with foreign nations to the uncertain economic outlook (the book was written in 1920, before the great bull run of the 20s) to the changing cultural and sexual mores of the time. Wharton comes down clearly in favor of the forward-looking viewpoint, but that doesn’t mean that Newland and the Countess live happily ever after.

The Age of Innocence is comfortably in the top 20-25 books I’ve read, more evidence that the most fertile period for the American novel was the time between the wars. It’s an outstanding marriage – pun intended – of wicked humor and social commentary, with a simple plot made interesting through strong characterization.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ January 24, 2008
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Chat today.

FYI, I’ve got a 1 pm chat today over at the Four-Letter.

Filed Under: Chat
→ January 23, 2008
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Sugar addiction.

So the American sugar cartel is at it again, trying to get the government to prop up their industry, which should long since have either disappeared or shrunk into niche status. For those of you who don’t know, Americans pay three times the world market price for sugar because the government restricts sugar imports – true corporate welfare. NAFTA was supposed to put an end to this bullshit, but the sugar lobby is now trying to get Congress to do an end-run around the free trade agreement by forcing the government to buy Mexican sugar imports to keep them off of U.S. shelves.

That pisses me off to begin with, but here’s the thing that should bother everyone: This asinine, smoothawleyrific policy is exacerbating the rising rates of heart disease in the United States. Mass-market food manufacturers, notably the soft drink companies, use high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener – even though anyone with a functioning tongue can tell you it doesn’t taste as good as sugar does – because it’s significantly cheaper than real sugar. This makes the corn lobby happy, but the problem for consumers is that fructose has a major downside: It reduces the levels of two enzymes critical to heart health,, leading to enlarged hearts and increasing the likelihood of heart disease. A diet high in fruits isn’t likely to cause this problem, but a diet high in high-fructose corn syrup – you know, corn syrup that is HIGH IN FRUCTOSE – is. What’s the better course of action: Using government money to keep Mexican sugar off the market, gouging American consumers while raising heart disease rates; or letting the market dictate prices and getting sugar back into soft drinks?

Filed Under: Economics Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 22, 2008
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The pride of Smithtown …

Northport man charged in $68M scam

I’ve known the defendant since elementary school – he graduated from high school a year ahead of me. Never in a million years would I have pegged him as smart enough to pull off (temporarily, at least) a multi-million dollar fraud scheme.

Filed Under: Humor Tagged With: ,
→ January 22, 2008
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Ryan Howard, again.

Bill Conlin, fun and fact-free!, weighs in on Ryan Howard:

There is one set of numbers, however, that fails to match the monetary implications raised by his stature as a power hitter – the numbers on his paycheck.

Conlin appears willfully ignorant of how baseball salaries work. Ryan Howard is eligible for arbitration this year as a Super-Two player, and he will and should be paid like a first-time eligible player. Conlin is making the argument that the Phillies should give Howard a long-term deal that pays him closer to his market value – in other words, he’s saying that the Phillies will be better off if they voluntarily pay Howard more than baseball’s economic system says he should get. Conlin points

You don’t need an economics degree and an MBA to realize that voluntarily overpaying for your inputs is a rather simple recipe for failure. For all the complaining you hear about baseball’s economic system, it is heavily stacked in the teams’ favor: Player salaries are below market value for the first six years of major league service, and for most players, that six-year period will include some or most of their peak years. In Howard’s case, because he reached the majors so late, the six-year period will include ALL of his peak years. By the time baseball’s economic structure allows Howard to be a free agent, he’ll be 32 years old, and given his profile as a hitter and body type, he’ll be paid a salary commensurate with his peak-years production during his decline phase, assuming that he becomes a free agent.

But hey, should we be surprised? Conlin’s own employer pays him the top salary at the paper plus his pension, and his peak years are behind him, too.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ January 22, 2008
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Northanger Abbey film.

Now that’s more like it. The new movie version of Austen’s Northanger Abbey was spot-on, very faithful to the original novel with some excellent performances.

The plot of the novel, well preserved in the movie, is the simplest of Austen’s canon. Catherine Mansfield is a teenaged girl living in an English country village who loves to read the Gothic romances popular at the time, and who uses those novels as a substitute for the life experience she lacks. A wealthy couple offers to bring her to Bath with them for a few months, where she meets two suitors, Mr. Tilney and Mr. Thorpe, and becomes fast friends with Mr. Thorpe’s sister, Isabella, who is in love with Catherine’s brother James. One of her suitors is good, and one is bad. There’s a misunderstanding over her relationship with the wealthy couple. And that’s almost all of it. It’s a trifle compared to the character studies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, but it’s witty and sweet.

This adaptation – I only know of one other, which I haven’t seen – hews quite closely to the plot of the novel, keeping the characters all true to Austen’s writing. Felicity Jones is excellent as Catherine and it doesn’t hurt that she looks like a cuter version of Natalie Portman. Carey Mulligan – also pretty darn cute, and someone had fun with her in wardrobe – was superb as the superficial and often condescending Isabella. And unlike last week’s version of Persuasion, this film allows its scenes to develop rather than rushing us from one spot to the next to try to cram the book into 90 minutes of air time.

Next up: A new take on Mansfield Park, my least favorite Austen novel, due in no small part to its priggish heroine, Fanny Price. There was a 1999 film version starring the underrated Frances O’Connor as Fanny, and while it was a good movie, it was only loosely based on the novel, incorporating some elements from Austen’s own life (using her letters as a basis) and also just flat-out changing some things around. This upcoming version is reported to be more faithful to the text – the screenplay was written by Andrew Davies, who wrote the screenplay for the new Northanger Abbey version and the screenplay for the definitive 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries – which strikes me as a mixed blessing.

Filed Under: DVDs, Literature Tagged With: , , ,