setsuled

Sometimes life is a string of chaotic perversity with little sense of direction or purpose. 1984's The Hotel New Hampshire is one of several Tony Richardson movies that give this impression. But while his British New Wave movies, for all their idiosyncrasies, felt like they had real insight into normal life for young people in Britain in the '50s and '60s, The Hotel New Hampshire feels altogether surreal and disconnected from reality. Not in a bad way, though it does seem less remarkable than A Taste of Honey or The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

Beau Bridges plays a hotel owner and father of the large family that staffs it, including incestuous siblings Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster.



There are a lot of big names in this movie. Wallace Shawn invites them to leave their American hotel to run one in Germany where they meet Nastassja Kinski who always wears a bear costume because she's uncomfortable facing her humanity. However, in Germany they also meet Matthew Modine, a Communist revolutionary who happens to look exactly like the boy who instigated a gang rape of Foster's character, and is just as despicable. But she's attracted to both of them anyway.



The family has a dog named Sorrow who constantly farts. His name is used in dialogue throughout the film to give double meaning to lines; after she's raped, Foster's character says she wants to sleep with Sorrow. She doesn't know yet that her younger brother, played by Seth Green in his first role, has had the euthanised Sorrow stuffed. Which symbolises . . . I sure don't know what.



The movie moves along quickly and mostly the family is shown laughing and bickering through tragedy and good fortune and various bizarre incidents. Overall, I was struck by a kind of tenacious flippancy. I guess that's one way to get through life.

The Hotel New Hampshire is available on Amazon Prime.

The second season of The Orville premièred last night, just barely qualifying as a 2018 season, with a low key, entertaining relationship comedy episode. Most of the humour fell flat for me but there were still a lot of jokes that did land, particularly the cold open. An episode that seems at first like it's going to be about Bortus ends up being a rumination on the conflict between logic and emotion in relationships, expounded through the dubious choices and opinions of the show's characters. It was certainly nice to see them all again.

Spoilers after the screenshot



I guess this was the episode that was originally intended to be the finale of the first season and the big guest star teased turned out not to be Patrick Stewart, as many people assumed--Stewart's been on most of Seth MacFarlane's other shows, it seemed obvious he'd be on MacFarlane's Star Trek: The Next Generation homage show. Instead, we got Jason Alexander as the easy going bartender with rhinoceros horns. His appearance was brief but good, hopefully we'll see him regularly as the show's Guinan.



Ed (Seth MacFarlane), after not ending up getting back together with Kelly (Adrianne Palicki), is depressed and drinking a lot. Alara (Halston Sage) joins him at the bar and the two talk about how much they have in common, the biggest hint so far of a possible relationship between Ed and Alara, something I'm in no hurry to see, as much as I like both characters. I have nothing against people having relationships with big age disparities but the way their chemistry's been developed so far he feels a lot like her dad. Fortunately, the scene ended with the one laugh I got from the episode's central-ish plot; Bortus (Peter Macon) interrupts them essentially to say they need to stop the ship so he can get out and pee. Of course, there's more to it--Bortus' species, the Moclans, only urinate once a year so they have a big ceremony when they do. His deadpan exposition, the alarmed and confused reactions of Ed and Alara, and the crescendoing stinger with a fade to black just about killed me.



After this, I was done with Bortus' ceremonial piss. I didn't laugh at Gordon (Scott Grimes) and LaMarr's (J. Lee) comments in the conference room or Ed struggling to fine polite euphemisms in conversation. I did enjoy Gordon's attempts to learn from LaMarr how to flirt with women. The bit with the jacket zippers was funny as was the dating simulator.



There are three other plots going on in this episode--there's Ed poorly adjusting to Kelly's new boyfriend, Cassius (Chris Johnson); there's Alara dealing with her blind date with Dann (Mike Henry) and its fallout; and there's Claire (Penny Johnson Jerald) dealing with her kids and her oddly evolving relationship with the artificial lifeform, Isaac (Mark Jackson).



MacFarlane doesn't write the dynamic between Claire, her kids, and Isaac nearly as well as Brannon Braga but her eldest child, Marcus (BJ Tanner), falling under the influence of a problem classmate does have a very Jake Sisco and Nog feel to it. After Marcus and his friend hack into a replicator to get a bottle of vodka, arguments result and Claire turns to Isaac for advice. His idea that she punish Marcus by giving him a dangerous amount of vodka was too much of a sitcom cliche for me but with Isaac's other pieces of brutal advice the point is made that Claire, while angry in the moment with Isaac, ultimately appreciates his candour and logic. I wonder if they're heading in the same direction as the fourth season TNG episode "In Theory".



Meanwhile, Dann does not appreciate Alara's brutal honesty when it comes to his bad poetry and Ed has to explain to Cassius that when your girlfriend's upset one of the worst things you can do is tell her to calm down. "A woman can't really love a man unless he's part dope," Ed explains in his infinite wisdom, apparently indicating Cassius should've been supportive of Kelly's feelings rather that pointing out her flawed logic. As though Ed himself has never needed illogical emotional support. But what was Kelly so upset about?



Ed had done a "drive by"--he'd taken a shuttlecraft out and flew past her quarters to find out who her new boyfriend was. I had two stages of reaction to this--when Cassius more or less defends Ed's behaviour as bad but understandable, I was amazed. How could you excuse Ed spying into Kelly's personal quarters? But then I thought about the term "drive by" and imagined an ex-boyfriend driving by a girlfriend's house and seeing her with her boyfriend through an open window. That seemed to fit the tone of the discussion better--bad behaviour but not horrendous. I found myself wondering why Ed flying by in a shuttlecraft looking in from the outside of a viewport seemed worse than a car driving by a house. I guess it's because I infer more of an expectation of privacy on Kelly's part, though maybe I shouldn't. It's not like that apparent black void is really empty of any eyes, and come to think of it, it's not unreasonable to expect there are sensors capable of simply looking in on the various portholes--this feels like I'm overthinking it.

Anyway, it was a decent episode. I'm looking forward to the rest of the season and hopefully some more Brannon Braga episodes.

Last night and to-day I enjoyed some crisp and pretty visions of the 1950s courtesy of The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel. I watched the first episode last night and the second to-day of this new series created by Amy Sherman Palladino, a really fun fantasy about a well to do housewife who becomes a stream of consciousness comedian in the mould of Lenny Bruce.



In fact, Bruce is a supporting character on the show. Played by Luke Kirby, who does a decent imitation, we first see him when the lead, Miriam (Rachel Brosnahan), is on a date with her future husband, Joel Maisel (Michael Zegen). This inspires him, after they're married, to try a career in comedy himself but when he fails at that, along with his marriage, Miriam, now Mrs. Maisel, accidentally finds she has a knack for it one drunken evening.



The first two episodes are written and directed by Amy Sherman Palladino, who fills both of those roles for most of the series--her husband, Daniel Palladino, contributes in both capacities here and there, much as he did for Sherman Palladino's best known series, Gilmore Girls. And there's a lot of Gilmore Girls in Mrs. Maisel--both series are about a young, witty mother making a life for herself after splitting with her first love.



I kind of wish they hadn't made Mrs. Maisel a mother--the actress is 26, making it kind of an empty joke when she brags about looking 21--in fact she looks 18. The kids are barely seen in the first episode because the Maisels are wealthy enough to have a whole separate floor in the apartment building for the kids and their nanny. Like Gilmore Girls, everything's improbably clean and pretty, at least here the wealth provides some explanation. But it makes it a bit awkward when an attempt is made to show a messy reality next to the put on prettiness when the underbelly is also pretty. But the visuals are a pleasure in any case, especially the costumes--I love this lavender dress.



The show also avoids any of Lenny Bruce's more controversial material--his ramblings on race and sex are too rough for to-day's political climate. Also like Gilmore Girls, which made references to William S. Burroughs and The Velvet Underground, the tone of the comedy is never much like these figures foregrounded as apparent influences. Sherman Palladino's rapid quip dialogue is more like something you'd hear delivered by Carole Lombard or Cary Grant in his earlier films. In the context of this fantasy version of 1958 it makes even more sense than it did on Gilmore Girls.



Alex Borstein, who played broad comedic roles on Gilmore Girls reminiscent of her days on MADtv, plays a down to Earth manager in a leather jacket for Miriam. She's really good in this, from what I've seen so far, especially in the second episode where she comes to Miriam's apartment and voices most of the reactions I had to the location in the first episode--"Is this Versailles?" she says when she sees the improbable splendour.



But it's Mrs. Maisel's show and Brosnahan is very good, helping to make it a very satisfying vicarious experience, watching a heroine finding strength in unlikely ways. I look forward to watching the remaining six episodes.

Last night's new Orville, "Firestorm", seemed mainly to be another set of homages to Star Trek until the end when it took things in a surprising and satisfying direction. Directed by Brannon Braga and written by Family Guy writer Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, the episode is an entertaining and effective contemplation of an individual's ownership of her own fear.

Spoilers after the screenshot



The episode begins with a provoking dilemma for Alara (Halston Sage) when the super strong head of security fails to rescue a crewmember trapped under debris because she freezes at the sight of flames. Caught off guard by her own unexpected psychological response, she immediately wants to resign but Captain Mercer (Seth MacFarlane), like the rest of the crew, realises she's being too hard on herself. But even Mercer, in a nice scene reminiscent of Picard compassionately addressing a crewmember's issue with them in his ready room, recommends that Alara look into the evident fear she has of fire.



This leads to an amusing cameo from Robert Picardo, the first major Star Trek star to cameo on the series, and he and Molly Hagan are perfectly cast as Alara's parents. They all three have kind of the same mannerisms and vocal inflections and they kind of look alike. And, on a side note, it's nice to see Sage has ditched some of the stilted delivery from earlier in the season.

Her parents inform her that she had a traumatic experience with fire as a child and this could have led to lifelong psychological effects.



Chevapravatdumrong has a Juris Doctor degree from New York University Law School and she majored in psychology at Yale--a resume I honestly would have never expected from a Family Guy writer but makes sense for this episode of The Orville. Obviously Alara can't expect to be given a heads up every time she runs into fire so she has to deal with the problem. By combining a hallucination plot with a memory wipe plot, Chevapravatdumrong comes up with a perfect solution for Alara who basically gives herself a crash course in all possible debilitating frightening stimuli. What seems like a story about how Alara is victimised nicely turns out to be one of extraordinary empowerment.



The effects were nicely done, I liked the nods to Aliens in the score and in the shots of Alara running down corridors with a rifle and a ripped shirt. The humour didn't always work for me in this episode but I liked Ed mistakenly thinking the regulation Alara invoked was the one forbidding bare feet in engineering.

So I guess disco does live on in the Federation imagination--this week's new Star Trek Discovery, "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad", featured "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees in the form of a sample in a song by Funkmaster. So maybe they just don't know it used to belong to a genre called disco? Maybe they don't even know what they're hearing in the Funkmaster song is a sample. The future just gets more and more pessimistic by the second. In any case, this was an entertaining episode. Throwing aside logic for a feeling of lower stakes allowed writers Aron Eli Coleite and Jesse Alexander to concentrate on a story about romance without any sense of the urgency one might otherwise expect from a story set in a temporal crisis during a war.

Spoilers after the screenshot



It seems making himself part tardigrade has allowed Stamets (Anthony Rapp) to retain memories of alternate timelines. I liked how, even before interference from anyone who remembers the other timelines, each iteration was already slightly different--in one case it's Saru (Doug Jones) who notes the endangered status of the space whale immediately, in the first case Michael (Sonnequa Martin-Green) has to point it out when Lorca (Jason Isaacs) has decided to move on. Could it be Saru retains some subconscious memory of the previous timeline? In any case, it means that repeating the thirty minutes isn't like Groundhog Day--it's not actually the same thirty minutes over and over.



Stamets, we learn, has also been experiencing some emotional imbalances, which would explain why he prefers to indulge in Michael's romantic troubles with Voq (Shazad Latif) instead of hurrying to convey information and find solutions. But Michael, too, seems to feel fine dancing with Voq before springing into action. One can just accept this as the writers preferring to concentrate on the doomed romance between Michael and the Klingon leader than on the story at hand but if we wanted to rationalise it we could also say that at this point in Starfleet history officers had a lot of trouble trusting each other. That would explain why we don't see Stamets trying to explain things to Lorca. We see that the crew of a Federation ship is not necessarily a happy and well oiled machine, possibly this is reflected too in the frat house ambience of the party.



Poor Michael--she still thinks Voq is a Starfleet officer named Ash Tyler. It's not clear why she likes him, especially since he seems really douchy, though a big part of the episode's underlying idea was that people who act like they hate each other actually really love each other. Maybe she's attracted to him because on some unconscious level she finds him repulsive? Can we hope for some outright S&M in this series? Time will tell. Certainly Michael's love interest having eaten her beloved mentor is a start on that route if it's not wildly misogynistic.



It was nice how Mudd's (Rainn Wilson) reunion with his wife, Stella (Katherine Barrell), neatly punctuated the themes of the episode. Here's two people who act like they love each other but we know at least one of them feels nothing but contempt.

There shouldn't be any mistaking The Orville for a parody now, though I'm sure people still will. Last night's new episode, "About a Girl", is the third written by Seth MacFarlane, making that three more episodes written for The Orville than MacFarlane's written for Family Guy in the past ten years. It presents the kind of issue episode that has been absent from television since Star Trek and while I have one or two quibbles about it I'm mainly excited to see it. The Orville even goes some places Star Trek never dared to go.

The modern trend in television to present season long arcs has led to some wonderful story telling but it makes it difficult to tell the kind of story seen in "About a Girl". Bortus (Peter Macon) and Klyden (Chad Coleman), a couple who belong to an all male species called the Moclan, give birth to an incredibly rare female infant. The mostly human crew of the Orville are shocked when they learn the two wish for the child to undergo a sex change operation.



I was expecting the episode to get more flack for using "gender" and "sex" as synonyms though I haven't seen it yet in nitpicky reviews of the episode. I have seen some anger that these people in the future apparently aren't up on the same sociological literature as some viewers. One could argue that the crew of the Orville ought to be using state of the art terminology but maybe this is an area where a comparison to Star Trek isn't appropriate. The Orville isn't the flagship and it's crewed by at least two people we know to have had troubled careers. So instead of the best minds of the Federation tackling these issues, we have some mostly adequate minds of the Union muddling through.



In this way, the show actually turns some familiar, illogical plot devices of Star Trek into somet more feasible and even thought provoking prompts. It didn't really make a lot of sense that the Enterprise bridge crew were constantly being drafted as lawyers in courtroom episodes, for example. Here, I can believe that Kelly (Adrianne Palicki), with only one year of law training, is the most qualified person available to defend Bortus when he decides he doesn't want to allow his baby to receive a sex change. And we also get some instructive demonstrations of why certain arguments about sexual equality, while satisfying, might not be very effective in getting the point across.



It's satisfying watching Alara (Halston Sage) beat Bortus in a boxing ring and it's funny hearing Gordon (Scott Grimes) on the stand demonstrating that men can be intellectually inferior to women. But virtually all of Kelly and Ed's (Seth MacFarlane) evidence is anecdotal and nearly all of it relies on aliens. No-one who pays attention to this episode will come away thinking men are superior to women, the flaws in Ed and Kelly's arguments are useful to get people to think about what doesn't work when you're engaging with people of an opposite opinion. I really like the fact that what brings Bortus around is watching Rankin/Bass' Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which demonstrates the unexpected power art can have.



The episode is somewhat similar to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Outcast" about a member of a sexless species, the J'naii, who becomes female. The Moclan differ from the J'naii in that everyone is male rather than neither male or female, which should raise a question. How does one define sex or gender in the absence of any other? And of course we find out that the Moclan aren't single sex at all, that the prevalence of male Moclan is at least partially the product of misogyny endemic to the culture. Biological females have been effectively bred out of the populace, something that doesn't seem far-fetched for a technologically advanced misogynist people.

Like "The Outcast", one of the nice things about "About a Girl" is that by recontextualising so much it introduces new ways of thinking about issues and highlighting abstract connexions that might not have even been consciously considered by the writer. It introduces the concept of a basically liberal people allied with a culture that fundamentally rejects more socially liberal values, though at the same time, Bortus and Klyden are a same sex couple in the main cast, something Star Trek hasn't managed to do on television yet, though a same sex couple is apparently forthcoming on Discovery.*



In fact, my only real complaint about the episode is that I wished more time had been spent developing Bortus and Klyden's relationship before getting to this story. The conflicts here would probably have been a lot more interesting portrayed late in a second season. But that's a minor quibble compared to my delight that there's a thought provoking show, willing to engage with issues, that has an enormous number of viewers.

*The relationship between Dax and a former lover's symbiote in a new female body on Deep Space Nine was close but not really the same thing.

Twitter Sonnet #1036

The curling shoe was like a thunder clap.
As winds are bending trees to castle ears.
In just a moment dripped from wooden tap.
The final court arranged a time for beers.
Uncopied eyes arrange around the monk.
A dragging stone arrives atop the game.
The worth of weight was not in how it sunk.
The waiting paint absorbs a shrinking frame.
As sparking space enclosed the ship they watched.
Although the canvas blinked it caught the sight.
Beneath the dime in time to wrench the botched.
In ordered stakes the bet amends the light.
A sign regressed to shell amid the head.
Ideas append the tort remained unsaid.

Is Ghostbusters 2 really so bad? Well, yes, it has some big, crucial flaws which a few virtues can't make up for. But there are a few virtues. I've certainly seen worse. Like, the 2016 reboot, for example.

Like the Star Wars prequels, Ghostbusters 2 has become a byword for bad followups for popular franchises. The Star Wars prequels, in my opinion, don't quite warrant the casual rancour they get but in any case they're certainly more complex than people give them credit for. Ghostbusters 2, as many, notably Roger Ebert, complained at the time was like a rough draft of the first film, a far less satisfyingly complex version, in other words. The broad outline is there--Dana (Signourney Weaver) is a normal woman whose encounter with the supernatural forces her to bring the vexing and eccentric Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) into her life. The Ghostbusters struggle at first to be seen as legitimate, they're threatened by a vindictive government functionary before the mayor (David Margulies) grudgingly admits these clowns are the only ones who can save the city and they become improbable, everyman heroes right in front of a massive, cheering crowd.



The necessity of rebooting the relationship between Peter and Dana creates a lot of problems directly tied in to one of the biggest flaws in the film, Bill Murray's performance. In the first film, he has his cheap little tricks and jokes, but you could also see why Dana was eventually charmed by him. In Ghostbusters 2, he just comes off as a pushy creep. His saying to her baby that he might have been his father ought to be sort of sweet and sad but it just seems presumptuous and obnoxious. He's filled with nervous energy throughout the sequel whereas in the original his charm was his ability to remain calm with maybe a simmering anger. But what's worse is that his anxiety in Ghostbusters 2 seems to have nothing to do with ghosts or Dana but seems oddly hostile to everything. Like he didn't want to be in the movie.



Egon (Harold Ramis) and Ray (Dan Aykroyd), though, actually come off generally well. The film lacks the sense of real guys struggling that the first part of the original film benefited from but I love the idea of Ray having an occult bookshop. And Egon's experiment with the couple in marriage counselling is genuinely funny.



I was a big Ghostbusters fan as a kid--I was ten when Ghostbusters 2 came out and by then I was already close to having worn out a VHS copy of the first film and avidly watched the cartoon series. I don't know if it's like this for all kids, but oddly I didn't think about whether one film was better than the other, I was just happy that there was more. In a sense, kids are easy to please, but despite the fact that the second film is more kid friendly than the first, no VHS copy of it was ever in danger of getting worn out. Why is it, when I had no idea what they were talking about when Ray took out a second mortgage on his childhood home or even really understood what was happening when they were getting kicked out of college I still enjoyed the first film more? Maybe it's because when you're a kid you're used to not understanding the things adults do but still sense an underlying logic so the sense of authenticity was more satisfying even then.



Certainly watching the second film as an adult has provided me with insights I never had as a child, like the mood slime that unfortunately takes up so much of the plot. I can't be the only one who raised eyebrows when, shortly after Venkman speculates on whether the Statue of Liberty is naked under the robe, the guys get inside her and immediately begin spraying love goo from some very phallic guns. Some might be tempted to see this as a metaphorical rape but I see no reason not to see it as consensual--I mean, there's no reason that would make less sense. I don't know if Ramis and Aykroyd were thinking of symbolism when they wrote the screenplay but I actually found the concept peculiarly resonant--because of the thoughtless every day behaviour of American citizens, a destructive natural force has gradually gained power and now threatens their destruction. The Ghostbusters wondering if the city can actually consciously reverse course on environmentally harmful, habitual behaviour surprisingly had me thinking of the reaction to climate change. Suddenly the mood slime didn't seem so silly. How symbolic sex with the Statue of Liberty fits into it I couldn't exactly say . . . and yet I think one could tease out a meaning. Like human behaviour in positive harmony with nature (consensual sex as a representation for a love of liberty) versus human behaviour as a selfish, destructive influence (climate change).



I remember really finding Vigo fearsome as a kid. Now I still think Max von Sydow as his voice is pretty impressive. Peter MacNicol as a foreign man from no distinguishable country is funny as a sort of harbinger of Tommy Wiseau.



I really like the scene on the abandoned subway tracks, Winston's (Ernie Hudson) only real moment to shine, first when a demonic voice speaks his name in the darkness, then when he's struck by a ghost train. The severed heads that appear briefly around the group feels more Evil Dead than Ghostbusters but it works, especially in contrast to the softball subway scenes in the new film. I liked the weirdness of the Titanic coming to dock and Janosz flying in as a demon nursemaid seemed like kind of a nice homage to Darby O'Gill and the Little People.



Aside from Bill Murray and the less adult storytelling, I'd say the biggest flaw is the score. Elmer Bernstein's score for the first film is something I associate even more with it than Ray Parker's familiar theme. The Randy Edelman score from the second film just feels like a cheap imitation and it's distracting.

Twitter Sonnet #1035

A night in steady pulses waits again.
In bronze balloons were cast to dream of work.
A shifting eye's behind the system's spin.
And yet the green and drifting spirits lurk.
In to the seat descends a walking lamp.
Beneath the cushions coins're coarse to take.
Above the bait the fish have built a ramp.
But fins refuse to step or scales to bake.
On tongues and tips, retried the trees demurred.
And soft, the step of glancing wisp to pass.
In brighter lights the aether last inured.
As armless birches sway in candid grass.
Misplaced the squash's found asleep inside.
In catered stories roles and hills reside.

I've been kind of fascinated by the extreme gulf between critical and audience reaction to The Orville, the new Sci-Fi adventure comedy that premièred on Sunday. Rotten Tomatoes currently says the show's scored 22% positive in critical reviews but the audience score is 90%. It's not just on Rotten Tomatoes I see this divide--nearly every online review I've read is negative, some downright vitriolic, while in the comments section I see mostly people puzzled and somewhat taken aback by all the negative reviews. The general consensus among the comments I've looked at seems to be that while the pilot episode is flawed the show's not bad at all and has a lot of potential. This is basically my feeling after having watched it.

At Comic Con this year, I was already hearing a lot of jabs at Orville on panels, more than one person calling it a rip-off of Galaxy Quest, which it certainly isn't. The film Galaxy Quest is a spoof centred on the actors on a Star Trek style show while Orville is clearly not a parody at all but an earnest attempt to create a space opera with heavy homages to Star Trek but with a more comedic tone. This might have been close to the Galaxy Quest series that has been in development for a long time but at best I'd say it's two shows in the same genre. If you're angry at Orville for being too much like Galaxy Quest you might as well swear off Deep Space Nine for being too much like Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica for being too much like Space Battleship Yamato.



The pilot of the Orville is directed by Jon Favreau and shots of the ship in dock and leaving it are nicely done, clearly loving homages to shots of the Enterprise leaving dock in the first two Star Trek films and I really, really love the idea of wanting to create that sense of awe at the sight of a starship again. Seth MacFarlane in the lead role as Captain Mercer and Scott Grimes as helmsman Gordon Malloy in the approaching shuttle craft have comedic dialogue about drinking too much the night before; it's silly but it functions within the reality of the show. I found this moment, like many others in the episode, not laugh out loud funny but amusing and in its way it enhances the coolness of the space stuff by the contrast.



One of the things that makes the show different from Star Trek and many other space operas is that the Orville and its crew are by no means top of the line. It's not the flagship, it's not an awesome prototype, it's just a nice ship. The helmsman and the navigator, John LaMarr (J. Lee), take the usual buddy dynamic seen between LeForge and Data or O'Brian and Bashir and dial it to something more low brow, though Malloy is supposed to be a great pilot and one of the surprisingly effective parts of the climax is that his "Hugging the Donkey" manoeuvre is actually pretty cool and you can see how it might be genuinely effective and difficult to pull off. These two guys might just be exceptionally regular but I also like the idea of there being some real assholes among the crew--which was sort of Alexander Siddig's initial idea for playing Bashir; you can see he's intentionally playing unlikeable in the DS9 pilot. Even Jayne on Firefly ended up having a heart, though. It would be nice to see one of these shows sustain a real jerk but I don't think MacFarlane intends to go that route.



I think one of the reasons critics hate him so much is the ironic humour on Family Guy has gone so stale. I kind of suspect MacFarlane's sick of it too. What I took away from watching Ted is similar to what I picked up on from Orville--MacFarlane, at heart, has a real, sincere love for the old formulas in sitcoms and dramas. So there's nothing really ironic about him throwing Ed and his ex-wife, Kelly (Adrianne Palicki), together as captain and first officer. He wants a chemistry like the leads on Cheers or Who's the Boss much as he wants to invoke the milieu of Star Trek--not to roast it but to truly keep this kind of storytelling alive. I'm never been a fan of sitcoms like that but I find something endearing about MacFarlane's sincerity, especially since he gets so much shit for it.



That said, I would like Kelly to be developed more. Her motivations in the pilot are entirely based on Ed and I would like to hear more about her motivations that have nothing to do with him. Why did she join the fleet? Did she also dream about being an officer on a ship since she was a kid? The show has several Star Trek directors slated to direct episodes, including Jonathan Frakes, I hope it brings in some Star Trek writers, too.



I do like MacFarlane in the lead. There is something Shatnerian in his unabashed hamminess though he doesn't project authority as much as Shatner does. But I can see as much potential in that being a distinction for the show as a drawback. Time will tell.

Twitter Sonnet #1033

A cup emerged between the lily pads.
A draught impressed in steaming rooms at night.
The other side survived on higher rads.
The blue of sea contained the vessel tight.
Too many veg'tables are on the moon.
A secret book confirmed a fever dream.
In smi'ling Play-Doh men you'll find the boon.
The fitting shapes of blocks aren't all they seem.
In transit apes are caught inside the wall.
Prepared in sight the pudding fell to plague.
The walking voice proceeded down the hall.
The agent's shining limbs are somewhat vague.
The dice replaced a drink within the cup.
The birds of fortune turning home to sup.

What if the world is secretly controlled by aliens and the only one who can see them is a cheesy guy with a mullet? I'm not sure if the characters in John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live are poorly developed or are calculated to subvert heteronormative expectations without its stars or studio getting wise. The Sci-Fi concept is nice, its best distinction from something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the daring to incorporate economic class, though this has had the unfortunate effect of the movie being co-opted by the alt-right, prompting John Carpenter himself to speak out recently against anti-Semitic interpretations of the film. I don't think the movie espouses bigotry, I do think it's a bit muddled. Its cheesy 80s action charm sits a bit oddly with the implicit ideology of its concept.

I don't like to foist a sexual identity on people or movies. I think of the Ani DiFranco song "In or Out"--"their eyes are all asking are you in, or are you out and I think, oh man, what is this about?" On the other hand, the movie makes a lot more sense if you assume Roddy Piper's John Nada and Keith David's Frank Armitage are in love.



The movie has the least interesting John Carpenter soundtrack I've heard--most of the time we hear the same three notes on guitar played repeatedly as we watch Nada walk around town, trying to get work or wandering. He finally catches a break with a construction crew though he's discouraged when it's mentioned that it's a union job, at which point the camera cuts to a group of Hispanic workers chatting.



Which seemed like it was playing on a right wing fear of Mexican-American labour unions. But maybe not since Nada does get the job and starts working shirtless, his improbable physique scoped out by Keith David's character Frank.




Nada needs a place to stay so he follows Frank to the shanty town where Frank lives across the street from a church. Frank later mentions having a wife and kids but we never see them. After Nada discovers the magic glasses that lets him see the aliens pretending to be humans, the film has its most perplexing scene when Nada and Frank get into a prolonged, five minute brawl.



It's a good fight scene, obviously Piper's in familiar territory. But it doesn't make any sense. All Nada wanted was for Frank to wear the glasses and the fight erupts when Frank repeatedly refuses to do so. On Wikipedia, Carpenter is quoted as comparing it to the brawl between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen at the end of The Quiet Man. That fight was not a fight to the death and was designed as a way for two characters to work out their issues in a form of cultural subconscious hyper-masculine communication. These issues built over the whole movie having to do with tradition and pride--Wayne's character trying to buy land that McLaglen's felt was his by right, the issue further complicated by Wayne's relationship with McLaglen's sister and--well, you can go watch The Quiet Man. You should, it's a great movie. But Frank and Nada had nothing like that. They basically just seem friendly, if a little brisk, when suddenly Nada, who's anxious about the whole world apparently being taken over by aliens, puts everything aside to grapple with Frank, who apparently just can't put on a pair of fucking glasses.



When Frank finally puts on the glasses--seeing how things truly are--the two check into a cheap hotel room together, although they had to live in a shanty town before, and Nada says sarcastically, "Ain't love grand?" and starts telling Frank about how he was abused as a child. I am quite certain I'm not the first person to comment on what this seems like--I haven't even mentioned how encouragements to procreate through relationships with the opposite sex are part of the sinister subliminal messages Nada is able to see. The only female character is played by the sinister looking Meg Foster (most notable, to me, for playing the casino cashier in the new Twin Peaks).



Like I said, I don't like to impose a sexual identity on anyone, but how does any of this make sense if Nada and Frank aren't discovering a physical love for each other? Either way, Frank is oddly underdeveloped. If the two really are meant to be taken as being in love, it would have been nice if the film explored it more directly.

Aside from the political allegory, the film seems to be well-known for Roddy Piper's line about how he's "here to chew bubblegum and kick ass and I'm all out of bubblegum." The bullshitting humour in this reflects the humour found in much of the film, its irony never quite meshing with the ghoulish beings taking over the world and the real threat this presents. Maybe the discord is supposed to be there, though--it's supposed to be discomforting that aliens and Meg Foster are crashing the bubblegum party.