Friday, September 29, 2006

The Krofft Brothers Are P.O.'d

You watch Lost or you have at least once. How do I know this? Because everyone does or has. I resisted, kind of, for a season. Now I'm hooked on the eternal Lost mindscrew. The Muse kept telling me how good it was. The pitcher on my softball team tapes it because our games are Wednesday night. My aunt The Nurse watches. Last May, I went to San Diego to see much of my family and I hadn't been able to watch the season finale. The Nurse, my brothers The Philosopher and Intensio and my sister-in-law The Organizer could barely contain themselves from talking about the finale in front of me. It is a cultural phenomenon, people.

What you all should know, though, is that Sid & Marty Krofft are going to be coming for Lost's highly profitable butt. Why? Because they thought of it first. They put Land of the Lost in 1974 and they are going to want a pound of flesh. Don't believe me? Check it out:

ABANDONED IN SOME KIND OF WEIRD JUNGLE PLACE? Check.

STRANDED DURING A ROUNTINE EXPEDITION? Check.

Lost: Flights from Australia to L.A. are pretty routine. I mean, Rain Man loved Qantas, right? (I have always liked the word Qantas. Good for Q, throwing off the shackles of U's co-dependent oppression.)

Land of the Lost: Not that I take my kids when I take rafting trips to explore the jungle, but the theme song did say it was a "routine expedition."

MAROONED THERE BY A CATACLYSM? Check.

Lost: Crash of Oceanic Flight 815.

Land of the Lost: "The greatest earthquake of them all," at least according to the theme song.

STRANGE BUG-EYED AND EVIL PRIOR RESIDENTS? Check.

Lost: Henry Gale, the Others guy.

Land of the Lost: The Sleestaks.


WEIRD, BUT HELPFUL, PRIOR RESIDENT? Check.


Lost: Desmond.


Land of the Lost: Cha-Ka.

SELF-APPOINTED LEADER WITH A GOD COMPLEX? Check.

Lost: Jack (Wouldn't it be funny if Jack from 24 switched places with Jack from Lost? I'll bet Sawyer wouldn't be so mouthy any more. Jack Bauer would mess him up. Jack from Lost would be dead in five minutes on 24.)

Land of the Lost: Marshall (well, he was the dad, so I guess he wasn't so self-appointed)

TENSE TRIANGULAR RELATIONSHIP? Check.

Lost: Jack, Kate and Sawyer (although, God, I wish they would give that a rest).

Land of the Lost: Marshall, Will and Holly (sibling rivalry can suck).

RANDOM CREATURES WANDERING THE JUNGLE PERIODICALLY THREATENING THE LOSTIES? Check.

Lost: Polar bears, smoke monsters, etc.


Land of the Lost: Stop-motion dinosaurs.

STRANGE PORTALS INTO THE REGULAR WORLD? Check.

Lost: I mean, how did Mr. Ecko's brother get into that plane? Some serious space-time issue was going on there.

Land of the Lost: They could open portals by stirring crystals or something.

So do you think all of this is a coincidence? To quote one of the greatest things that I have ever heard a child say, "I doubt it." And I think Sid & Marty Krofft doubt it, too. They will be coming for J.J. Abrams' and ABC's sorry butts. After all, they sued the pants off of McDonald's when McDonald's ripped off H.R. Pufnstuf. (See Sid & Marty Krofft Television Productions, Inc. v. McDonald's Corp. (9th Cir.) 562 F.2d 1157.) Watch your back, Lost.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Strawberry Fields Forever

The Beatles have never done that much for me. When The Muse asked me with surprise a couple of years ago, "You like the Stones better than the Beatles, don't you?," I said "Yes" without hesitation. Maybe it relates back to when I was a kid, when my parents listened to 92.9, what was then a new oldies station in Fresno, and the only Beatles song they really played were stuff like Love Me Do. That early Beatles stuff very well may have been pretty revolutionary at the time -- after a few years of Frankie Avalon and Dion, particularly -- but it sounded kind of lame to me. Add that perceived lameness to the fact that the Beatles were on all . . . the . . . time and I didn't like them much.

The Muse has always been a big Beatles fan and now the kids, The Mermaid in particular, are big Beatles fans, so we are listening to the Beatles a lot these days. We have lots of homemade Beatles CDs. We have Beatles posters in multiple rooms in our house. We all have favorite Beatles (mine is John, The Muse's George, The Mermaid's Paul and Enthusio at least was Ringo, but that may have changed). Accordingly, I have a specially-made Beatles CD that the kids want to listen to when they are in my car. And, lo and behold, I have found that I find one Beatles song to be just brilliant.

Strawberry Fields Forever, to be specific. There are others that I like a lot (e.g., Help!), some for which I have great affection (Yellow Submarine, which The Must and I used as a lullaby for The Mermaid when she was a baby), but Strawberry Fields Forever is the only one that I find to be really great.

Basically, that song was at least 25 years ahead of its time. I don't know what album Strawberry Fields Forever was one, but it's from about 1966, before Sgt. Pepper's, which was released in 1967. I don't think that any well-known band really made anything like it until maybe Nirvana released Nevermind in 1991 (not that I have an encyclopedic knowledge of 1967-1991 popular music).

To me at least, in Strawberry Fields Forever, John Lennon used strange, confused lyrics to show how he (and maybe the other Beatles), or maybe society generally, were very confused, not sure where they were going. "Always, no, sometimes think it's me, I mean I know when's it's a dream." "It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out, it doesn't matter much to me." "And I forget just what takes, and yet it makes me smile, I find it hard, it's hard to find, oh well, whatever, never mind." Similar stuff, man.

It's not exactly a brand-new thing to do in art, to use confused language to express confusion. William Faulkner wrote at least 1/4 of The Sound and The Fury in the voice of a 33-year-old retarded man (although I only got through about four pages of that because it drove me crazy). But Strawberry Fields Forever seems pretty revolutionary to me because it incorporated that into the most popular music. Most popular music tells stories, usually pretty simple stories. That just doesn't work that well when you're trying to get over that you're really confused, though. The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds is a brilliant album (I listened to Wouldn't Be Nice? about 15 times in a row today), but it has this song "That's Not Me," which, well, sucks. That's Not Me was kind of trying to get over the same feeling as Strawberry Fields Forever, but it has lines like, "I miss my pad and the places I know, and every night as I sit there alone, I would dream." It's too direct. By being explicit, That's Not Me recites cliches and feels dated. Strawberry Fields doesn't feel like that. It feels weird, but that's the feeling that John Lennon was trying to get across in the lyrics.

Now, when you pile the lyrics on top of the music in Strawberry Fields, you really get something brilliant. If Strawberry Fields came out today and someone told you it was Beck, would you be surprised? No, you wouldn't. It has all this mixed up, un-pop-y stuff, horns and what sounds like a record being played backwards and all kinds of stuff. But it mostly sounds just this side of confused. You add that up with the lyrics and you just get a great, great song, one that doesn't sound like anything before and not much after for 25 years or so.

So, after years of not thinking much of the Beatles, I have discovered that they -- or at least John -- could be pretty brilliant after all. So, when I make up my 60's playlist on the IPod that I'm getting for my birthday, along with Marvin Gaye, Martha & The Vandellas, The Stones, The Beach Boys, Frankie Valli, The Kinks and The Hollies, I'll have at least one Beatles song. Maybe the first song.

Monday, September 18, 2006

WWII

One time, a few years ago, I was laying around watching cable TV and, for no particular reason, was watching some WWII show on History Channel. I think it was "The Last Days of Adolf Hitler" or "War in the Pacific." Anyway, The Muse comes in and says, "Are you watching a World War II show?!?" Are you interested in that stuff?" Just instinctly, I said, "Of course, all men are interested in World War II."

A book I just finished reading, "Ordinary Heroes" by Scott Turow, reminded me of that. There was a time when I really, really liked Scott Turow. The Muse will tell you that I decided to go to law school because I liked Presumed Innocent so much. (It is certainly true that I read Presumed Innocent at a time when I was debating whether or not to go to law school, and that the trial work in that book was presented so well that law school seemed like a pretty decent option there in the fall of 1991, with the economy in a mild recession and me about to get a poli sci degree, although I had been thinking about going to law school for a while, at least since my senior year of high school, when I wrote my admissions essay for the UC's about liking to argue. Eat that run-on sentence, Strunk & White.) I read One L my first year of law school and, damn, that book pretty much nailed the experience. (I highly recommend it to anyone thinking about law school.) I really like Burden of Proof, too. Pleading Guilty, however, made me so angry that I threw it across the room when I finished it. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Ordinary Heroes at the beach on our big trip, but, hey, it was a $7 hardback.

Plus it was about WWII. Basically, it's about a just-retired, kind-of-flailing newspaper reporter whose father dies and who discovers really surprising stuff about his father's experience during WWII in his papers and pursues the story. The book then alternates between ever-briefer sections told by the reporter and ever-longer sections from the father's supposed description of his experiences. I really liked the stuff in the father's voice about WWII and pretty much found the reporter's stuff from now to be pretty lame. At some point, though, I felt compelled to look up something about the book on Amazon. Some review excerpted on Amazon said that the book wasn't very good and just repeated a lot of WWII cliches, at least until a particular harrowing scene during the Battle of the Bulge.

The funny thing was, I hadn't seen it that way at all. I was just really enjoying the WWII stuff. The part after the one harrowing scene -- where the father and his troop play dead for hours in the snow so that Nazi snipers won't shoot them -- was better, but it didn't seem like it was that much better to me.

That made me think about WWII some. I think that just about every American guy of my generation and probably the generations that followed the generation that fought in WWII has some level of fascination with it. I mean, there was one time that I watched my best friend from law school and his undergrad fraternity brothers sit around drinking cheap beer -- Henry Weinhardt's, I think -- and debate what Hitler's biggest tactical error was. Look at the way that Tom Brokaw talks about The Greatest Generation. Look at how popular WWII shooter games for XBox, GameCube and other game boxes are. Why do we, American males, do this?

I think it's basically because WWII represents the high point, at least so far, for the American male. Basically, in the popular imagination, the U.S. was forced into the war by a sneak attack (although FDR of course had been giving the U.K. help sub rosa for a while), went out and fought the people who perpetrated the sneak attack and their pure evil ally, defeated both of them after just horrendous fighting (although of course the Russians probably tend to believe, with more than a little justification, that the millions of people that they lost in the war had an awful lot to do with the Nazis' defeat) and then turned around and helped both Japan and Europe get back on their feet (although we undoubtedly did that in no small part to contain the Soviets). Unlike WWI, we didn't just get in at the end to break a deadlock, the resolution of which led to another war. Unlike Korea, WWII didn't end in a stalemate. Unlike Vietnam, we won. Unlike the Civil War, we weren't shooting each other. You have to leave aside the Japanese internment and enforced segregation in the military to make this vision work, but, it's one that pretty common and very attractive. And, at least for my generation, it's a way to think well of our grandfathers, which is always cool.

So that's it, I think. That's why the History Channel basically should be called the WWII Channel and why, if there's nothing else on, I will happily watch "D-Day: Invasion of Europe" on a slow Sunday afternoon.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Impressing Enthusio

Last week, Enthusio got this giant blow-up football. Last weekend, he was trying to blow it up himself by blowing into it. I told him to stop and that I would blow it up with a pump that we have. He went out to play on the trampoline with his friends. I blew the football up with the hand pump and, about 10 minutes, I went outside with the blown-up football for Enthusio.

When I emerged with the football, Enthusio yells, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" Well, that was a good moment, although I have to say that I didn't feel like I really earned THAT much enthusiasm. I went inside and told The Muse, "There will come a day when nothing I can do will make my son say 'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" but today is not that day."

It was only after The Muse said, "There's blog entry," that I realized that I had ripped off Aragorn from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Cable TV

Sitting here watching cable TV this weekend, I decided two things:

(1) I do not want a Countrywide combo loan. I do not care that it is a unique kind of loan that would allow me to combine my home loan, my car loan and my loans so I have only one low monthly payment. I just want the Countrywide Home Loans commercials to stop. Now. Mr. Countrywide Home Loans seems like a decent guy, but, you know, at this point -- after seeing him 27 times an hour during every hour of TV watching that I have undertaken in the last month -- it wouldn't bother me if he got hit by a bus.

(2) Prison time should be mandatory for anyone who exploits Sept. 11 to sell cheap shit on TV. About 30 minutes ago, I saw a commercial for a Franklin-Mint-knock-off (yes, a Franklin-Mint knock-off, because pewter Star Trek chess sets need to be knocked off) company that is selling a specially-minted gold coin in which the World Trade Center -- or, as the commercial says, "the Twin Towers" -- are inlaid in silver "minted from silver that was stored in the vaults of the Twin Towers themselves." But that's not all. The "Twin Towers portion of this special coin rises to form a beautiful table display." In other words, there's a hinge on the World Trade Center part of the coin so they stand up. Then the commercial ends by saying something like "once the silver from the Twin Towers' vault has been used, these special coins will never be minted again." They never should have been minted in the first place. Someone should get locked up for this B.S.

Munich and Spielberg

When the Muse goes out of town, I tend to try to rent a movie that I know she doesn't want to see. You know, with shooting and guts and stuff. Sometimes this works very well, like the time that I saw Saving Private Ryan. Sometimes it doesn't work so well, like the time that I watched Femme Fatale. Wow, that one was bad. The Muse is out of town this weekend, so I rented Munich. The Muse pretty much told me straight out that she had no interest in seeing that one.

As you probably know, Munich is Steven Speilberg's movie about Israel's supposed program to track down and kill the Palestinians responsible for organizing the killing of 12 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.

[SPOILER ALERT: I AM GOING TO TELL ABOUT THIS MOVIE, SO, IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, JUST STOP RIGHT NOW. I'M TELLING YOU, STOP, BECAUSE I'M GOING TO TALK ALL ABOUT THE ENDING.]

This movie was pretty darn great. The whole thing was very believeable. Given Israel's history of awfully audacious military operations -- kidnapping Adolph Eichmann from South America and bringing him back to Israel for trial, destroying the whole Egyptian air force in an preemptive strike at the beginning of the Six-Day War, flying a whole military unit into an Ugandan airport to take over a hijacked airliner full of Israeli in 1976, preemptively bombing Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1982 -- I completely bought the idea that Israel would send out a group of secret-agent guys to assassinate the Munich organizers. It was very tense for much of the movie, with the group of five guys undertaking various frightening operations. It was completely believeable how the operations never seemed to go quite right.

What the movie is really about, though, is how the leader of the group, played by Eric Bana, basically loses it as he keeps killing guys in cold blood and almost getting killed in the group's operations and having guys in his group get killed and realizing that other people out there apparently have found about him and are now trying to kill him and the people in his group. When it becomes clear that his group isn't going to be able to much more -- three of the five guys have died and the Palestinians they are trying to kill basically are on to them -- he is brought in from the cold. He then goes off to Brooklyn, where his wife and baby have moved to get away from Israel. (His wife was pregnant when he started on the operation and he only saw the baby when she was just born and hadn't seen her for another year or so.) Once he gets to Brooklyn, he basically thinks everyone is out to get him. Finally, his Israeli handler comes and asks him to come back to Israel, but he decides not to. Anyway, it's really good movie.

But it could have been better. Basically, Spielberg just couldn't help going over the top to beat us over the head right at the end with, first, perhaps the single strangest scene that I have ever seen in a movie and, second, one of the most blatant closing shots ever. I found these things to be really interesting because they were really similar to the kinds of things that Spielberg did in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan that kept those movies from being really brilliant, at least to me.

First, the climatic scene of the movie is one where Eric Bana is laying in bed, unable to sleep, in Brooklyn and his wife comes on to him. They end up having sex. Bana is on top and starts looking all possessed, like he's taking out all of his problems on his wife. Now, Spielberg intercuts this scene with the climax of the Munich situation, where the Palestinians realize that the airplane that was supposed to fly them and their hostages out of Germany has no pilot and that they are surrounded by the German military on an open tarmac. Basically, what they did as they were being shot was kill all of the Israeli athletes by hand grenade and machine gun. So the climatic five minutes or so of the movie flip back and forth between Eric Bana having rather disturbing sex with his wife and Israeli athletes being slaughtered. At the end, when Bana's done, his wife tells him softly that she loves him. O-kaaaaayyyy.

Second, the very last scene of the movie -- where Bana's handler comes to Brooklyn to ask Bana to come back to Israel -- takes place in a park right on the river in Brooklyn across from Manhattan. So the Manhattan skyline is the background of the scene. When Bana tells his handler that he's not going back to Israel, the camera follows Bana as he leaves the park, thus panning across the Manhattan skyline. As Bana leaves the park, the camera centers on the World Trade Center. And stays there as Bana leaves the park and some verbiage about how nine of the 11 Munich organizers eventually were killed. Oh, I get it, Spielberg's trying to tell us that killing only leads to more killing -- see Munich, then assassinating the Munich organizers, then eventually Sept. 11 -- or something. Thanks, Steven, nice use of Sept. 11, wouldn't have figured out that terrorism and killing is bad without that last shot.

Don't get me wrong, Spielberg is a very, very good director. Jaws is a brilliant movie. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my all-time favorites. My Dad swears that Duel -- the TV movie that really got Spielberg going -- is one of the best things that he has ever seen. And, as he has gotten older, he has taken on really interesting and difficult topics. Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan and Munich all are great movies, some of the best of their various decades.

But Spielberg always seems to find some way to take them just over the top in schlocky ways that really detract from them. In Schindler's List, it was the little girl in the red coat. You do a whole, very difficult movie very, very well in black and white and then you stuff a little girl in color in there just to make sure that we get the point that the Nazis were killing lots of innocent people and were pure evil. Lame. Even the scene at the end of the people going to Oskar Schindler's grave was more tolerable than that. In Saving Private Ryan, you have to have the scenes at the beginning and end with Private Ryan visiting the graves of the guys who saved him and crying about it and hugging his grandkids. Really, that was necessary? (I'll bet if you polled the Oscar voters who didn't give Best Picture to Saving Private Ryan, they point to those scenes.) Then those last couple of scenes of Munich. I mean, really, did you really just hit us over the head with Sept. 11? Come on.

It's very unfortunate. As Spielberg has gotten older and so freakin' powerful that he basically can get any movie made -- I kind of doubt that Munich would have gotten made if Spielberg hadn't been involved -- it is great that he making movies about these difficult and fascinating issues. The flip side of having that kind of power, though, is that no one is going to edit your stuff. You can see that with George Lucas, who seems to have had no editing at all in the second Star Wars trilogy (I mean, he let his kids name characters, thus leading to one of the big bad guys being named "Count Doo-koo" (phonetic)). That seems to be going on with Spielberg, too. You have to give him credit that the movies he's making are great, with these schlocky problems, and not bombs like Phantom Menace.

But, God, Steven, get someone to help you make brilliant movies out of your great movies.