Tuesday, December 15, 2009

AND I AM TELLING YOU I'M NOT GOING: I'm just not here very much at the moment. Not to get all personal-interest-bloggy, but you could write an HBS case study on me right now entitled "Why It's Insane to Think That One Can Hold a Full-Time Job, Volunteer to Run Things at Both of One's Kids' Schools, and Have Any Time Whatsoever Left Over to Consume Popular Culture, Much Less Blog About It." So, a big thanks to my co-bloggers for politely not alluding to my non-existence, and for the rest of you, some thoughts on stuff.
  • How is it possible that there is a SYTYCD performance finale on television right this very moment with six (6) dancers remaining? I haven't been watching much this season -- I haven't found it compelling enough to hold my attention -- but if the show was going to have one less week than usual, was the right answer really to do just as many audition shows as ever but to go from six to one over the course of one night? It's very strange. I hope they go back to summertime and nothing but summertime.
  • So if I'm not watching SYTYCD, then what am I watching? This has been a big season for chefs, both Top and The Next Iron. Iron Chef is my Law & Order -- I always keep a few stacked on the DVR for viewing emergencies. Never having watched the first Next Iron Chef (but thinking that Michael Symond is the bomb), I was curious to see how this would work. Talk about a show that is influenced by every nuance of Reality Television: obviously there's a big Top Chef thread running through TNIC. Then there's Alton Brown, who is more of an amped up Tim Gunn than anything else. And then we had the ANTM goes to a foreign country element, in which the chefs have to fend for themselves in strange surroundings. There's also a smidge of Survivor in the mix -- who's hoarding the scallops? Did Chef Mehta purposely leave the ice cream maker dirty so that Chef Mullen would have to waste valuable time cleaning the paddle while his arthritis was acting up? Could Chef Freitag have wrestled the whatever-protein-it-was away from Chef Appleman if she'd really put her weight into it? I enjoyed the show, and thought that they got the winner right, but really, didn't the finale at Kitchen Stadium seem terribly discordant as compared to the rest of the show's run?
  • As for Top Chef, I was disappointed. The outcome wasn't wrong, given the final meals cooked by the final three, but it was a bummer to see Kevin whiff like that.
  • Leaving the chefs and turning to the families. Every once in a while there's a fall TV season that totally changes my TV viewing habits. (See, e.g., 2004.) Other years, it's like there are no new shows at all, as far as I'm concerned. Modern Family and Glee have replaced pretty much everything else on my schedule this fall. Modern Family has fixed what I saw as its one big problem early on -- the complete implausibility of anyone actually being married to Phil -- by making Claire just as goofy in her own way. And now it is pretty darned close to perfect. And as for Glee, well, I am basically Row A, Seat 110 in Glee's target audience, so not much to discuss there.
  • Oh wait, there is something to discuss there. I didn't much like "Don't Rain on My Parade." Not only do I not care for the song, but I spent the whole time sitting there wondering how a show choir doesn't get DQ'ed for having one person alone on stage for pretty much an entire song. Not that I have the foggiest idea whether show choirs actually exist or what their rulebook contains.
  • The "Best Animated Feature Film" category in this year's Golden Globes is as abundantly rich as I can recall a category ever being. The fact that I have seen three of the nominated films is weird in and of itself, given how infrequently I go to the movies, but all three of them were wonderful in completely different ways. (I have not seen Up yet, although Cosmo Girl just got the DVD for Chanukah, so I expect to have that box checked in the next week or so, and I am unlikely to see Coraline at all unless it somehow bizarrely beats out the other four.) Fantastic Mr. Fox is an awesome George Clooney heist flick that happens to be about an animated fox; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was a lot of fun, and The Princess and the Frog was a 100% worthy addition to the princess pantheon. Fantastic Mr. Fox is probably the frontrunner in my mind, if only because it works equally well for grownups and children. Kind of à la Shrek, although it's a totally different movie.
  • But more on The Princess and the Frog. Cosmo Girl and I saw it at a special Disney Experience preview thingamawhatsit at the legendary Ziegfeld Theatre. In a theater that tends to draw quite a Caucasian crowd, the number of African-American mothers and daughters all decked out in their Tiana paraphernalia -- days before the movie had gone into wide release -- was striking and extremely sweet. I have been dubious about the racial angle of this film ever since I heard they were making it. I am no longer dubious: The Princess and the Frog is racially aware without dumbing it down too much and without excessively beating us over the head about it. And while I can't say that any individual song was terribly memorable, I had fun hearing all the different New Orleans styles reflected in the music. This was the first princess movie in eleven years (if you count Mulan --which I don't) and the first one I've seen in a movie theater since the advent of Cosmo Girl. Movies like Brother Bear didn't suck because traditional animation is dead -- they suck because they suck. The Princess and the Frog is decidedly unsucky.

That's it. Now I return to my cave.

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