Every year around Halloween, I rent a bunch of horror movies from the 70s and 80s and watch them over a couple of days. Typically, this includes at least one Friday the 13th movie, and this year was no exception.

It’s my favorite horror series, and I’m not always sure why. Largely nostalgia, I suppose; my mom was always pretty indulgent with letting me watch R-rated movies as a child, so I think by the time I was about 12 I had seen all the movies up to that date. It’s certainly not about quality; I like Friday the 13th more, but I have to admit that the original Halloween is a much better movie. I have to say that the music is quite good, especially in the early ones – the scratchy strings and of course, the ch-ch-ch ha-ha-ha (or, for you purists, ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma) “breathing” motif (but there again, Halloween’s legendary score has it beat).

So it’s got to be Jason Voorhees, then. Wielder of the machete, wearer of the goalie mask. No surprise; he’s the central figure and, let’s be fair, semi-protagonist of the franchise. But here’s the thing:

Jason makes no sense.

There’s no proper explanation for him. He was a deformed and possibly developmentally disabled child who apparently drowned in Crystal Lake, but it turns out he didn’t, or maybe he did and came back from the dead somehow. He’s not really a zombie, but he is undead; but even before he became truly supernatural when he was killed in Part IV and rose from the grave in Part VI, he was able to take crazy amounts of punishment. In Part VIII he gets hit with toxic waste and somehow reverts back to a little boy, which is ignored in Jason Goes To Hell, in which he’s a magical, body-hopping creature. Which, in turn, is ignored in Jason X where they talk about him having regenerative properties like Wolverine.

And fans wondered why the recent Friday the 13th remake/reboot didn’t do a Batman Begins/Casino Royale and delve into the character of Jason? Take a look at that previous paragraph and tell me how the hell you would do that. He’s not a character, he’s a big scary guy who walks around killing whoever he comes upon. Jason is a gimmick – and I say that as someone who loves Jason. A good gimmick is still a gimmick, and Jason as a horror icon owes everything – everything – to being a fantastic visual; there’s no reason in the story or thematically why he should be wearing a hockey mask, but it works to create a haunting image.

But I watched His Name Was Jason, a fairly fluffy documentary about the film series, and most of the cast and crew involved tried to offer up some kind of justification for Jason. It’s to be expected – this was made by fans, for fans, so they had to say something that sounded deep and worthy other than “because he looks cool.”

So most of what they say revolved around the idea of Jason getting revenge for being tormented as a child for being different and being left to drown by inattentive camp counselors; someone on the DVD said he was both the killer and the victim. But I really don’t have any sympathy for this brutal killing machine. And yes, a lot of the people he kills in the movies “have it coming” in the logic of the film – there’s the mean jock, the trampy brunette, the annoying stoner, and so on – but in the real world, I should hope nobody looks upon those things as being punishable by death.

And yet, I think we’re on the right track there. Because these are kids who, to borrow a phrase from Philip K Dick, were punished too much for what they did. Much has been made about the conservative tone of these movies in which sex and drugs = death, but it’s not like there isn’t some real-world precedent for that. If you have unprotected sex, there are possible repercussions – unwanted pregnancy or disease, and if there’s disease, then possibly death. If you smoke, you run the risk of developing health problems and, again, possibly death. You drink too much, there’s health problems there too, or you could run your car into a tree.

Basically, the world can punish you for wanting to have a little fun.

Someone else in the DVD described the “teens go into the woods without adult supervision” plotline as “ritualized,” and that’s dead-on, because it is a ritual. You might ask why people keep going to Crystal Lake if there’s a chance you could get your head split in half with a machete. But then people do all the things mentioned in the previous paragraph when there’s also a chance that bad things will happen as a result. Always have, always will, and I’m certainly in no position to judge anyone. Sometimes you get away with it. Sometimes you don’t. It’s random and senseless and unfair and brutal.

And that’s why Jason is the perfect vehicle for this metaphor, and why I think these movies resonate with people, whether consciously or unconsciously. Because a complex character would muddy it up too much. Jason is Fate, Jason is Consequence, and those things do not really operate with any rhyme or reason. Why does Jason wear a hockey mask? Why does he keep coming back from the dead? Why do bad things happen to good people? Sometimes they just do.

And that’s what Friday the 13th really means, Charlie Brown.

Iggy Popped

Poor Michael Ignatieff. For months he’s been neck-and-neck with Harper in the polls, and people have been warning him that if he doesn’t force an election soon it’ll make him look weak. Then no sooner does he say he won’t support the government any longer but his support drops by ten points, because people say they don’t want another election. Even the publication of a nearly hagiographical profile in The New Yorker probably can’t cheer him up now.

So what’s behind the about-face? Were people’s eyes just bigger than their electoral stomachs? Personally I think the not-another-election thing is a smokescreen, a rationalization for the ugly truth: people feel they ought to want to vote for Ignatieff, but nobody really does. Outside of the West nobody much wants to vote for Harper — certainly nobody wants to hand him a majority government — but they’re not ready to vote for Iggy either. He’s the classic case of someone who looks good on paper, the computer-selected date that generates no chemistry: he’s everything we say we want in a prime minister, but when it comes down to it we just can’t get behind him.

The reason, I think, is that he isn’t mean enough. It seems odd to say it, since Canadians are renowned for our polite and easygoing nature, but the fact is we like our leaders to be sons of bitches. Sure, we tell ourselves we like Trudeau because he was charming and did pirouettes and brought home the Constitution, but what we really liked was that he fought with US presidents and gave people the finger and invoked the War Measures Act. No wonder Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark — nice guys both; try to get anyone to say a bad word about Joe Clark — didn’t stand a chance. Mulroney was certainly mean: the only thing more dangerous than being his enemy was being his friend, always a temporary condition. And Chretien? The man choked a protestor! He made jokes about people being pepper-sprayed! He FOUGHT OFF A BURGLAR WITH A PIECE OF INUIT SCULPTURE! (That’s to say nothing of the damage he did to the English language daily.)

But Ignatieff is in a bind, because if he goes on the attack too much he’ll sound like he’s lecturing, which nobody ever likes. He also seems to be a guy who instinctively plays defense rather than offense, which doesn’t bode well for him. So Harper, whom we all say we don’t like, will probably stay, because he’s mean enough for us to respect him. (He’s also learned the secret to governing with a minority, which is to bypass Parliament completely and run the country through the PMO.) And we’ll all grumble and complain about the money that was wasted for yet another election that doesn’t change anything, and six months later we’ll be wondering why Ignatieff doesn’t man up and bring down the government already.

Revenge of the third banana

In all the hoopla around the Marvel-Disney deal and the Warner-DC restructuring, one point that’s come up again and again is the rich bank of characters each publisher owns, with the assumption that this is a good thing. The problem is that each company only owns one or two genuine first-tier properties (with first-tier being defined as “someone with whom a non-comics fan is almost certain to be reasonably familiar.”) For DC it’s obviously Batman and Superman; for Marvel it’s Spider-Man and maybe the X-Men or the Hulk — the X-Men weren’t really familiar to non comics-fans before the movies, but their fanbase was enthusiastic enough to guarantee good sales, while the Hulk is well-known to a certain part of the population which is, unfortunately, not the part that goes to movies. When you’ve only got a small number of properties, you’ve got to get them right: it took eight years for Warners to relaunch the Batman franchise after Batman and Robin, and they’ll probably have to wait ten years before the stink from Superman Returns blows away.

The success of Iron Man has people saying that the future is in the second-tier properties — which is a reasonable argument to make if you forget about Daredevil, Fantastic Four and Ghost Rider. I would argue, in fact, that Iron Man was successful because it wasn’t a comic book movie, or at least it didn’t look like one to the general public. After all, no matter how successful a comic book is, there simply aren’t enough fans to make a movie successful, never mind a franchise; you’ve got to appeal to people who don’t read the comic, and in most cases the trappings of a superhero comic — the costume, the secret identity, even the superpowers — work against that. But Iron Man, as presented in the movie, doesn’t have any of those things. The suit is presented as a tool or a vehicle throughout (note the direct comparison to a car), and the emphasis is always on Tony Stark as the pilot of the suit; we’re not invited to conflate the two into a single identity, as we are with Batman or Superman. As well, note that the villain uses the exact same technology as the hero, removing the two-origins problem that afflicts so many superhero movies. Even though it’s not actually more plausible than a typical superhero story, Iron Man feels more believable to people who aren’t accustomed to the tropes of superhero comics.

So are those thousands of characters, the ones that Disney just paid a mint for and Warner just realized they own, actually worth anything? Sure — but not the way people think they are. It’s very unlikely that Deadpool or Green Lantern or Thor or Wonder Woman are going to be franchises or even successful movies — cripes, I don’t know why Wonder Woman is even still a comic — and, more to the point, a flood of unsuccessful superhero movies, like the one that followed the 1989 Batman, will most likely make comic-book movies in general radioactive. If either studio is sensible, they’ll focus on the properties they own that, like Iron Man, can be sold to a broader audience: it’s probably no coincidence that the next two DC movies to hit the screen will be Jonah Hex and The Losers, both non-superhero comics. Another good example is Blade: could anyone have guessed that a supporting character from a long-cancelled comic would wind up being one of Marvel’s most successful licensed movies? But in fact it was the lack of baggage, the absence of superhero trappings that let Blade just be an action/horror movie, and that’s what let it be successful.

See, as comics fans we tend to assign an inordinate value to these properties, but to the movie industry they’re just more grist for the mill: they don’t care if something’s had one issue or a thousand, they don’t care if someone read it by flashlight under the covers when they were nine, they just want something that can be quickly made into one of the hundreds of scripts that keep the development cycle flowing — the more cheaply the better. If I were a production company, I wouldn’t even look at a DC or a Marvel property; I’d be scanning the small presses and webcomics, looking for the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Men in Black.

On this Tuesday I bring you the most delicious of internet meats: animated beat poetry.

The Cat Piano

If you aren’t familiar with Nick Cave, well, once you have recovered from the resultant therapy and been re-introduced to society, let me say only this: the man can make a kazoo sound badass.

Hey all. Remember me? Will Entrekin. One of the guest contributors over on the side, there? Been a while since I posted, but some recent discussion of The Dark Knight and the mention of Ledger’s Joker Halloween costume, plus some comments discussion here regarding genre (not to mention: the upcoming Oscars), got me thinking. So I thought I’d crosspost the following here and on my blog. But I also wanted to say hi first, so there wouldn’t be any confusion. That out of the way:

Not long ago, I went to a Philly bar called Eulogy with my best friend. This bar is a Belgian sort of pub one feature of which is a private room with a table like a coffin, and this best friend is a guy earning his master’s in literature but who also moonlights as a keyboardist in one band and a lead guitarist in another, which I hope will intimate the overall atmosphere. If only because my buddy and I have the conversation where we discuss Derrida but totally admit to neither ever reading or understanding the guy.

Over the course of (several) fine Belgian beers (Rochefort 10 ftw!), we started talking about Heath Ledger and The Dark Knight. Now, what you have to know, straight off, is that while we’re good buddies, he and I rarely agree on anything related to either music or movies. We both like music in general and good music in particular, but we have very different definitions as to what that exactly means.

So, Heath Ledger. The Dark Knight.

I didn’t love the movie. I’ve read many people claim that the reason it’s so great is because Christopher Nolan, moreso than directing a good superhero movie, managed to make a good movie, overall, but I’m not sure. See, I think that what really happened is that Nolan managed to make a good crime movie out of superhero material, because I can’t agree it was overall a good movie; it’s at least twenty minutes to half an hour too long, the final twenty minutes to half an hour of which seem composed of a philosophical treatise on the nature of good and evil telegraphed through dialog to the audience because Nolan suddenly got scared his audience hadn’t picked up what he was saying. Still, I will admit I originally thought it was badly structured, but I’ve since realized it’s not, that the plot turns when it’s supposed to for the most part (given 3-act structure and 140 minutes, the first plot point should come about 35 minutes in, with another midpoint beat and then a second plot point, each coming 35 minutes after the previous).

Also: when did Two-Face debut? In the comics, I mean. He’s been around at least long enough that Tommy Lee Jones played him nearly a decade ago, but yet he lasts, like, fifteen minutes in this flick? Wtf? I suppose it’s possible Nolan was lolzing us and will bring Two-Face back for The Dark Knight Returns or The Dark Knight Again or The Dark Knight Lightens Up a Bit, Because, Seriously, Why So Serious?, but either way, I think Nolan blows his villain load by using two who merely serve as thematic foils to Batman/Bruce Wayne, rather than any story use.

Because I think that’s the problem I have with the Joker (and with Ledger’s portrayal of him). While he claims to both want chaos and have no plan (and I realize that his claim of the latter probably serves the former), I think that the two villains clash in a way that the Scarecrow and Liam Neeson didn’t in Batman Begins. The first movie was about Batman and how he foiled the plans of Neeson, whose subsidiary was the Scarecrow; this movie is not just about Batman anymore. It’s about Gotham City and heroes and good and evil (as Nolan seems to want so dearly for us to see). It’s almost like Nolan had the exact opposite problem as the brothers Wachowski: while the second two Matrix movies probably should have been combined into a single flick, Nolan probably should have taken his time with this story and let the second installment become two.

(which, too, would have solved the problem Warner Bros. now faces, because, sorry to be callous about it, but who’s going to play the Joker now?)

Can the Joker desire chaos but have no plan? I’m not sure it works both ways, but given a little more fleshing out, Nolan might have proven it can and does. As it stands, though, the problem with the Joker is that he’s merely the foil or the anti-self or the whatever-opposite of Batman. He’s reactionary, really, and I’m trying to come up with great characters who have been solely reactionary but not really succeeding. He wants chaos, but only seems to want chaos because other people have plans he doesn’t like.

(of course, the major argument there is there’s no such thing as order, anyway, given that the natural tendency of all things is toward disorder/entropy. Had the Joker taken any science courses, he might realize that life exists despite chaos, in which case he might file for unemployment by reason of redundance)

Given all that, Ledger arguably did the best job he could with a somewhat otherwise limited role; I’m not sure he’s the only reason The Dark Knight wasn’t a typical superhero movie, but he might have been. That and his premature death are, I think, a large part of the reason his performance has gotten the acclaim it has. Which might seem cynical or even callous, I fear, but the thing is, I keep thinking of his performance in Brokeback Mountain. Now, I didn’t like Brokeback; in fact, I shut it off after fifteen or twenty minutes, because I was bored out of my skull. And I think that The Dark Knight, despite its flaws, is a movie far superior to Brokeback if only because the latter commits the cardinal sin of movies, which is that it’s not at all entertaining, but still, I watch Ledger as Joker and I just don’t think his performance there is nearly as good as he was in Brokeback Mountain. In Brokeback, he wanted something (namely: Gyllenhaal) but yet restrained himself, and in that restraint is all the subtlety and craft that I thought the Joker lacked. The Joker seemed wall-to-wall Id. Creepy thrift-store drugged-out rockstar more likely to front an emo band, sure, and entertaining to at least the degree you expect him to be onstage lamenting about how nothing actually has meaning, but just being crazy-villain guy seems to require little effort. I mean, in some ways, it strikes me that his role was of the just-add-alcohol variety; skip all the inhibitions and the performance executes itself.

Do I think he’ll win (not that you asked)? I don’t know if it’s important, at this point, if only because I think there’s too great a disconnect between good movies and critically acclaimed, award-winning movies. And why do I think that?

Because the one thing my buddy and I could agree on, over those fine Belgian beers, was that Ironman might well have been the best movie all year, and Robert Downey, Jr. has always knocked every performance he’s ever given straight out of the park. I mean, the fact that he doesn’t have an Oscar yet is nearly as big a travesty as that Zodiac went completely ignored last year, and if he got one this year for being “the dude playin’ the dude disguised as another dude,” I wouldn’t argue. I’d say he could then dedicate it to Ledger, but didn’t Daniel Day-Lewis already do that last year?

All that said, I might also just be bitter. I still wish Nolan had cast Christian Bale as the Joker, too, because I think that would have been awesome.

Ever since the current government made their staggering cuts to arts funding, Stephen Harper has claimed that the Conservatives spend more on the arts than the Liberals did. “Really?,” everyone asked. “Sure,” said Harper, “I even have my grade 9 in piano!”

The problem with making those kind of claims is that it’s really hard to know for sure. Thanks to a soon-to-be published report from the Canadian Conference of the Arts (and some excellent journalism by James Bradshaw at the Globe and Mail) we now know for sure that Stephen Harper is a big fat liar. About the funding, that is; I have heard nothing about his skill as a pianist.

Anyway, so the reason Harper is a liar is because he said that the Cons spent more on arts funding than the Libs. If he had said they spent more on culture funding than the Libs, he might have gotten a pass—though Bradshaw points out that the Cons are taking undue credit for a large boost to culture funding that occured in their first year in power, fiscally speaking.

“Culture” is the responsibility of the Department of Canadian Heritage. It includes things that you and I would consider to be arts (visual art, music, film, television, radio, dance, etc.) and some things that fall better into the vague category of culture (sports, national identity building, official language initiatives). The former category is called SO1 and the latter SO2.

The report shows that since 2006-07, funding for SO1 has fallen from $817-million to $759-million. However, funding for SO2 increased from $567.7-million in 2006-07 to $631.6-million in 2008-09. And that’s not even including the $45-million from the recently axed SO1 programs (see list here) that is being shifted to SO2 programs (like the Olympics). So there you have it: arts funding is not increasing under a Conservative government. It is decreasing dramatically.

“Such a revelation certainly hints at a targeted approach to arts cuts, which would contradict the government’s assertions that programs were axed based on simple efficiency reviews – and without ideological motivation,” says Bradshaw. Targeted indeed. The Cons have have been openly hostile toward the arts and artists, ever since they circulated a memo that denounced “wealthy celebrities”, “fringe arts groups” and “highly ideological individuals” with “agendas” who inflict “offensive material” on the decent Canadian public. In an open letter to the Prime Minister, playwright-director Wajdi Mouawad says that Harper has symbolically “declared war on the artists”:

Your silence and your actions make one fear the worst for, in the end, we are quite struck by the belief that this contempt, made eloquent by your budget cuts, is very real and that you feel nothing but disgust for these people, these artists, who spend their time by wasting it and in spending the good taxpayers money, he who, rather than doing uplifting work, can only toil.

And so the harsh charictarization of the arts by the Conservative government continues. It’s arts vs. culture; SO1 vs. SO2; lazy, condescending artists vs. salt-of-the-earth taxpayers; offensive material vs. uplifting material; city-dwellers vs. everyone else; shiraz vs. Lucky lager.

It’s obvious to anyone but the teetotallers that sometimes you like to throw back a cold one and sometimes you like to shop in the LCBO Vintages section. Too many cold ones makes you stupid, and too many bottles of Bordeaux make you broke. The important thing is finding a balance, and Stephen Harper wants to throw a kegger.

I am bad at metaphors.

X-posted to Say It With Pie.

Sigh.

X-posted to Say It With Pie.

1. Expecting that the follow-up to The Dark Knight is going to be a film adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns.
Michael Doran had a piece on Newsarama that started some of conversation about how the logical sequel to The Dark Knight would have to be an adaptation of Miller’s mini-series, in order to complete the three-act structure of the films. Which makes a little bit of sense, if you say it in a really authoritative voice (or, maybe, if you can mimic Bale’s bat-growl), but is actually kinda silly. One, the Nolan pictures aren’t a trilogy and don’t need to be. Two, one of the main things that made them work is the cast, which would have to be dumped entirely in order to skip ahead twenty years. And three, everything that makes The Dark Knight Returns work doesn’t exist for this version of Batman.

See, the thing that makes The Dark Knight Returns effective is the idea that, after a spectacular crime-fighting career, explored over decades of stories in the various Batman titles, he left an indelible mark on Gotham City and cast a huge shadow that’s still felt decades after his retirement. His return is a huge deal, something that rattles Gotham to its core.

But the Batman hasn’t had that kind of career in the Nolan pictures. He’s been at it for maybe a year, if you figure that he hadn’t caught the Scarecrow yet and Wayne Manor hasn’t been rebuilt after the first movie (just enough time for Rachel Dawes to change the way she looks entirely), and if he were to suddenly vanish, twenty years later it’d be, "oh, remember when there was a guy who dressed like a bat and fought crime for a couple months a really long time ago? That was fucked up." You have to have the context of Batman as a legendary figure who changed the city forever for his return to be a big deal. Otherwise, he’d be running around opening shopping malls and struggling to get press. Twenty years is a long time.

And you can’t just set it earlier, maybe five years down the line, when his name’s still familiar and you can keep the cast, because it wouldn’t have any real impact. It’d be like Jay-Z coming out of retirement a couple years after The Black Album and underwhelming everybody. People would think he just, like, got busy and forgot to fight crime for a while.

And all of this leaves aside the fact that most of the major characters in The Dark Knight Returns don’t even exist in Nolan’s films. There’s no Robin, no Catwoman, no Superman, no Ronald Reagan… You’re left with old-guy Batman beating up old-guy Joker. There’s no point. The Dark Knight is hurtling toward half a billion dollars at the box office- there’s going to be a sequel, and it’s going to be pretty conventional. It’ll star Christian Bale as Batman in that nebulous late-20’s/early-30’s stage, he’ll fight a villain who hasn’t been in the series yet, and it’ll make another gazillion dollars.

2. Spamming LiveJournal political discussion groups with vaguely-coherent rants intended to convince people that their stereotypes of Russia are wrong.
So, like, Russia fought a war this weekend, and it was backed up by a dedicated set of blogging troops, out to win the war over the hearts and minds of the people of the world. Mostly on LiveJournal, because LiveJournal is owned by a Russian company and is the number one blogging service in the country. And those bloggers wanted the rest of the world to know that their troops were peacekeeping forces out to stop the genocidal Georgians from slaughtering the South Ossetians at George Bush’s command. But if you’re trying to convince the world that Russians are not the propaganda-spouting antagonists that much of the Western world has seen them as, spouting propaganda about the "peacemakers" actually serves to work contrary to your point.

And while it’s frankly delightful to see the nuttier online conservatives get a chance to kick it like it’s the 80’s again with big bad Russia as the enemy- seriously, it’s like the online political ranting equivalent of the Police’s reunion tour, playing venues that didn’t even exist when they were on the charts- I do feel it’s probably necessary to remind right-wing bloggers who are unable to see any amount of nuance in a situation like the one between Russia and Georgia that neither side is the hero or the villain, because it’s the real world and that shit is complex. So while I hesitate to interfere at all with their Red Dawn fantasies ("Wolveriiiiiiiiiiines!"), it’s probably for the best that this whole thing seems to have come to a relatively stable conclusion, at least until the next one.

3. Releasing an iPhone app for $1,000 called I Am Rich.
Well, mostly it’s just in bad taste, but boy, is it in bad taste. Like you’re not conspicuously consuming enough just by waving your iPhone around, you need to have a useless application to prove how little you value money? That dude should have created one called I Am Feeding Starving Children and donated the money to charity if he wanted to get his name in the news. At least then it might have been good press. 

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

First, I want to think MGK for inviting me to stay on as a guest contributor and all the readers of this blog for a terrifically positive experience. I was nervous, at first, but you’re awesome.

Second, this is Will Entrekin, and I’m cross-posting this entry to my own blog, Will in the World.

This entry concerns House, M.D. I thought that since I had already written about Doctor Who and Supernatural, I really should devote some screentime to my favorite show, especially since I’m so worried about it.

I don’t quite remember when I became a fan of House, but I certainly remember how: my best friend in my writing program at some point, told me I needed to watch it and lent me the first season on DVD. I don’t remember why, nor how it came up, but man, it hooked me right away.

Some background: I was, during college, premed. I got right up to the MCATs before I realized I’m not a doctor, and by then it was late enough that I ended up graduating with a secondary major in science. My primary major was literature, and I did my thesis on the connection between medicine and writing as embodied in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and William Carlos Williams. Looking back, I think what ultimately made me give it up was realizing that I really couldn’t handle that responsibility. It’s not the blood or the guts or anything; it’s the fear of making a mistake the cost of which would be a life.

I was skeptical when my friend lent me that DVD, but then I started watching the show, and I found I very quickly couldn’t stop. I’d say I’m not sure there’s a better show on television because I’d have a very limited sample set (I haven’t really owned a television in several years), but I know I just kept going, straight on through. I watched the entire first season in a weekend, and then watched most of the second over my first USC winter break, my first Christmas and New Year’s on my own and in LA.

And I loved it.

For anyone not watching; House is less a show about medicine than it is about diagnostics, problem solving, and detective work, and House himself has less in common with, say, Doug Ross (or choose a favorite doctor character) than he has with Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. One can pretty much pick up the series with any episode; most are completely self-contained, and all focus primarily on a single case. With nearly perfect three-act structure in every episode. Plus, House is acerbic, sarcastic, and brilliantly curmudgeonly.

But after last season, I’ve been wondering if he hasn’t limped over the shark.

The first three were mostly terrific, and the third ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger in which he lost his entire team (Omar Epps, Jesse Spencer, and uber-hot Jennifer Morrison). It was set up well enough to be a dramatic development, and season three began first with House on his own, until his boss forces him to hire a new team. In typical House fashion, he basically has a marathon interview with, like, forty applicants. The third season pretty much became survivor in a hospital with House as Jeff Probst, with several odd-ish complications along the way.

I started to notice it most when House used a hunting knife and a wall socket to electrocute himself. I’m not sure how he did it, though; my father is an electrician, and so far as I know (do not try on your own), one needs at least two such implements, one in each slot of a socket, to complete the circuit and get a shock. How he managed to kill himself with just the knife is anyone’s guess (though, I guess, being House, he probably accounted for it), but moreso it took the character to a weird extreme. House is a Vicodin addict, certainly often a prick, and by most accounts self-destructive in some ways, but destructive enough to set aside survival instinct to see if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel? It felt very much against character.

I can really only hope that the issues that occurred midway through the season did so for the same reasons that I speculate occurred with Supernatural; that writers’ strike messed up productions several ways to Sunday, and about the only show I’d guess it didn’t affect would have been The Bachelorette and its “reality”-based ilk.

The season ended with the death of a character too prevalent and well developed, over the season, to really be called minor but not really exactly major, either. It seemed to come a bit out of left field, but it did complicate various relationships in the show in a lot of ways.

With a few weeks left before the new season starts, I hope they’ve gotten their act together and pull it off well. I’m interested to see where it goes. The friction between House and Wilson (played by Robert Sean Leonard– Swing Heil!) could be insanely tense, and Laurie and Leonard are two actors I’d love to see holding nothing back while going for each other’s throats. They have as dramatic and amazing a chemistry as Laurie ever had with Fry (and if you haven’t seen A Bit of Fry and Laurie, you must).

I’m also wondering if they’ll ever demonstrate just what Taub actually brings to anything, because so far, I’m not totally clear on his use in the show, and why he’s there.

I’m also hoping to see more of Jennifer Morrison. But that’s kind of an obvious request, probably.

You’ll be forgiven if you’ve not heard of An American Carol, David Zucker’s follow-up to Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, set to precede Scary Movie 5 (seriously, there are five of those fucking things). There’s no trailer, and the movie doesn’t even have an official web page. But, oh, you’re missing out on some surefire train wreck gold if you haven’t been keeping up with the project.

An American Carol is basically a Scary Movie-style spoof of American liberal politics, starring every famous conservative entertainer. Which is pretty much just, um, Kelsey Grammar, Jon Voight, James Woods, and Dennis Hopper. Oh, and Kevin Sorbo. Clint Eastwood, apparently, still wanted to be able to look himself in the mirror afterwards. The cast is rounded out with conservative commentators and country music stars like Bill O’Reilly and Trace Adkins. And basically they seem to have just made a movie where they all run around saying liberals are stupid! for an hour and a half. We’ll see how that turns out for them.

The movie stars Chris Farley’s little brother (Larry the Cable Guy was busy, seriously, not a joke) as "Michael Malone", a hefty anti-American documentary filmmaker out to ban the pledge of allegiance, with the help of the dastardly movealong.org. He gets visited by the ghosts of George Washington (Jon Voight), John F Kennedy (some soap star named Chriss Anglin), and General Patton (totally Kelsey Grammar, I’m not even kidding), and they show him the error of his ways. Hence the "Carol" part of the title, I guess. Michael Moore is Scrooge.

See, it’s clever because the names are almost the same as the people they’re parodying, so you don’t have to waste time that could otherwise be spent rollicking in the funny trying to figure out exactly who each of their targets is supposed to be. They’re doing the work for you! Also, Michael Malone lets out a roaring fart within ten minutes of the film opening or I will paypal you £100.

Apparently a writer for The Weekly Standard went out to the set to rally the troops for their Hollywood Takes On The Left cover story. I will no ruin some of the film’s jokes, because it’s surely going to be funnier to read about them than to actually watch. Um, spoilers, I guess.

Dennis Hopper makes an appearance as a judge who defends his courthouse by gunning down ACLU lawyers trying to take down the Ten Commandments.
Because apparently his copy of the Ten Commandments was missing thou shall not kill, or something. See, it’s funny because it’s stupid to have to win arguments when you have guns!

David Alan Grier plays a slave in a scene designed to show Malone what might have happened if the United States had not fought the Civil War. As Patton explains to a dumbfounded Malone that the plantation they are visiting is his own, Grier thanks the documentarian for being such a humane owner. As they leave, another slave, played by Gary Coleman, finishes polishing a car and yells "Hey, Barack!" before tossing the sponge to someone off-camera.
Wait, this movie has Gary Coleman in it? Playing a slave? And Obama jokes? I take it back, this does sound edgy and hilarious. I like to hope that the scene ends with Chuck Norris kicking Barack’s head off.

In the film, a rotund comedian named Rosie O’Connell makes an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor to promote her documentary, The Truth About Radical Christians. O’Reilly shows a clip, which opens with a pair of priests walking through an airport–as seen from pre-hijacking surveillance video–before boarding the airplane. Once onboard, they storm the cockpit using crucifixes as their weapon of choice. Get it, because Christians would never do anything violent. All those abortion doctors just blew up spontaneously.

And finally, if you were wondering the philosophy governing Zucker’s entire career, it’s summed up succinctly in the article:

"Why be original?" Zucker asks. "I’ve done that. It doesn’t work, like BASEketball."

I’m sure this’ll be a gem. Watch for a huge push from nuttier conservative groups to drive it to the top of the weekend box office, so they can prove that America really loves this stuff, and then for it to flop harder than Battlefield: Earth. At which point they’ll blame the puny man-animal liberals for stifling their expression.

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)