Pay Cable Summer Lovin'

"Weeds"

Showtime via DVR

"True Blood"

HBO via DVR

I mentioned AMC's "Breaking Bad" yesterday as an example of a show that might never have made it past a third airing were it not for the new realities of TV's business model. It was a tough, bleak show to watch with no name actors and a number of unique, possibly off-putting elements. But AMC was hot at the time, could afford to take a risk, and had already seen with "Mad Men" how DVD and On-Demand could build massive, bankable buzz even around a show with tiny initial ratings on a network most people couldn't find without assistance.

"True Blood" when it first premiered had critics circling in the water. The relatively small community of newspaper television writers built up HBO's reputation as the only network around worth paying for solely on the basis of its original programming, and journalists aren't any less susceptible than screenwriters to the lure of the perfect third act. Having chronicled the premium channel's maverick rise and awards-hogging golden era, our TV writers were all too ready to shovel dirt on Home Box with "Six Feet Under" and "The Sopranos" concluded, "Deadwood" prematurely suspended, "John from Cincinnati" a costly flop, and "Entourage" becoming malodorous self-parody even more rapidly than (its model) "Sex and the City" did.

But wait! "Flight of the Conchords" and "Eastbound and Down," two totally different and completely hilarious comedies, were both partially dismissed by critics as minor fare before they even made their debuts. Neither exactly concerned itself with intimate contemplation of human mortality, but so what? "Conchords" was nominated for both Best Comedy and Best Actor (Jemaine Clement) Emmys, and "Eastbound and Down," when it's all said and done, might be the single funniest original series HBO has ever put its name on. (Not to say that it's brilliant, mature work, but "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is hardly cerebral either, not to mention "Dream On" and the proliferation of premium cable "comedies" that are/were a half-hour long but not even remotely funny.) In retrospect, writers seemed overly predisposed to dismiss whatever HBO was serving because it fit in with their storyline: big heavyweights leaving, shady business dealings here and there, network leadership being reshuffled amidst scandal... sure, all of that has happened at HBO in the last 18 months, but also at pretty much all of the other television networks within the last couple years.

"True Blood" had problems when it first appeared, but not insurmountable ones. As a one-hour show with a noted fussbudget auteur as creator and producer (Alan Ball of "Six Feet Under"), drawing comparisons to David Milch's "John from Cincinnati" was bound to happen. However, "John" was almost unquestionably doomed from the start. It was impenetrable and dense, populated by creepy people, and seemingly went out of its way to alienate us from the few characters that seemed identifiable. (I kind of liked it.) But "True Blood," even though the first couple of episodes really sucked, had some obvious assets that professional television watchers overlooked in their rush to heap dirt on HBO's grave. It wasn't serious about itself at all, a conscious choice of Ball's after the hermetic "Six Feet Under." It had a truly bizarre cast, a mismatched collection of solid pros, good-looking but talent-light bimbos of both of the male and female variety, and a couple of recovering child stars eager to claim their own small part of the legacy that really built HBO's empire: unimpeded on-camera views of the female nipple.

It's wild to think about it, because HBO has been trying for years to justify its essentially prurient roots with all kinds of contrived sex series and documentaries, but "True Blood" is the first show they've ever produced that uses sex and nudity to this degree without it becoming the whole point of the exercise. It's a credit to Ball's vision that the graphic content has only increased since the show started and yet it's become less and less the focus when it comes to discussions of "True Blood." He's created a world where characters, protagonists even, are free to pursue (mildly) deviant sex in search of greater pleasure and self-actualization, and where one of the major themes even is that what you choose to do by consent in the bedroom has no bearing on your character otherwise. That's wildly rare, possibly even unique, for American television. A lot of writers have zeroed in on "True Blood" as a metaphor for the gay liberation movement but I think Ball is aiming more broadly still.

"Weeds" is a beneficiary of the new pay-cable reality as well, having survived both a rough shakedown period (enduring major cast and stylistic changes in the first few episodes) and a meltdown of a third season (leading to really major cast and stylistic changes at the beginning of the fourth). While I was happy to see the show survive, I'm still on the fence as to whether the decision was entirely creatively motivated. It seems like Showtime really needed an other female-led half-hour show to pair with "Nurse Jackie," and they didn't have anything else likely in the pipeline. The fourth season, with some hiccups, seemed to represent enough of a correction from the previous year's wreck that the show could live on. Only a few episodes into Season Five, I am reconsidering this long-term assessment.

Trouble is, I just don't trust "Weeds" creator Jenji Kohan any longer -- the woman suffers from incurable plot incontinence. Giving drug dealer Nancy a boyfriend in the DEA isn't enough, she has to marry him. Then he has to be killed by Armenians, so she can sleep with the mayor of Tijuana. And then she has to get pregnant, so Alanis Morrisette can play her OB/GYN. Are you following all of this? This is insane, right? Well, any sitcom that runs long enough can probably be made to seem pretty silly by picking the right string of random plot points. The trouble with Kohan and her show is that it's just never found a balance between hurtling forward recklessly and giving any of its characters a thread to hold on to and follow for more than a couple of scenes. Buffy and her gang saved the world at least twice per year and they still had tons of time for self-reflection; Data played Henry V, wrote poetry, solved cases as Sherlock Holmes, painted, and had at least two cats named Spot in his free time.

Everybody on "Weeds" is so constantly reacting to the latest seismic shock -- most recently, Kohan jump-cut the show forward almost an entire nine-month pregnancy with a single title card -- that they never have any time to be anything. Nancy's sons are two somewhat distinct collections of neuroses, Doug and Celia are reduced to being one-joke characters (two different jokes, at least), and even Justin Kirk's usually reliable Andy seems to be running on fumes. All right, it was at least a little bit funny that Andy reacted to rejection by Nancy by "growing" a pathetically fake beard and spending every waking hour playing Ms. Pac-Man. But the subplot before that, which had Andy assuming the identity of his late brother to seduce a spinsterly bank teller, seemed degrading to character, actor, and writers alike. Isn't anybody here, fictional or otherwise, learning anything from their past experiences?

Mad Kids

Revolutionary Road

DVD via Redbox

Have you noticed? Television is easily outpacing cinema in terms of creating sophisticated, adult drama, and has been for several years now. There are a lot of factors for the change. Partly, it's that studios find marketing films about ideas and not high concepts very difficult. A movie like Transformers 2 might cost $250 million to make, but with the correct advertising approach, it's guaranteed to make $300 million. Because of TV on DVD, On-Demand, and Netflix, cable outlets have a lot more potential revenue streams besides up-front ad sales. That means that it's hardly a setback when a fine piece of television work like AMC's "Breaking Bad" doesn't attract a huge audience in its first season. With the awards and writeups it's now received, the studio and network have a way of profiting from the already-aired first season in a way they didn't several years ago.

Revolutionary Road, a high-profile prestige picture directed by American Beauty's Sam Mendes and centering on two (overrated) A-list Hollywood stars, is impossible to discuss without making the comparisons to "Mad Men." And none of them are flattering. Both are about unhappy bourgeois marriages in the 50's. Both involve a couple who are probably too sensitive and intelligent for the life imposed on them; in both scenarios, the husband finds "acceptable" outlets in affairs and drinks with the boys while the wife is imprisoned by the double standards of the era. It seems unusual to say so, but in this case, the TV actors are grossly superior. Leonardo DiCaprio cannot be taken seriously as a grown man; his voice sounds like that of a cartoon dog and he winds up into curse words like a nun is going to run in from off-camera and clobber him. Winslet can be very good but she isn't here, her housewife plays as self-centered, deluded, and childish. She's hobbled by an odd decision by writer and director to completely ignore the two children the couple are supposed to have. They exist, as a plot difficulty, but they don't have personalities or (hardly any) lines. It's an impossible task for Winslet to seem sympathetic as a full-time mother who is never seen interacting with her children.

The whole cast is filled out with types, rather than supporting characters: the nosy neighbor, her loutish husband, the dorky boss, the compliant mistress. In sharp contrast to "Mad Men" and Mendes' earlier domestic drama, the cast outside of the leads have no hopes or dreams of their own, they only serve to point out to the central couple things that they themselves are too self-obsessed to realize. Michael Shannon has gotten a lot of notice for his very small part as the mentally ill son of older neighbors. He's not really that good (and the role is badly, inconsistently written), it's only that everyone else in the movie is slotted directly into an obvious archetype and this individual stands out starkly in that context.

About two-thirds through, when it becomes clear that the miserable family isn't going to pack up and move their problems to France, Revolutionary Road goes from tolerable to stupid. DiCaprio and Winslet start shouting very obvious movie script lines at each other while Mendes' camera intrusively jams into their faces and then pulls back randomly, sullying the tension and not helping either celebrity with what end up as a pair of trite, shrill, unlikable performances. A smarter movie, one following the inner lives of its cast rather than the life events than define their surfaces, would follow through on the Wheelers moving to France... and then have them fight even more viciously there. Despite Mendes' repeated attempts to create a nightmare visual motif out of the suburban house on the hill where these unhappy people live, it's hard not to watch Revolutionary Road and think that the filmmakers utterly missed the point. These are some unpleasant people, and the film doesn't redeem them -- rather, it cheats, somewhat misogynstically cutting away romantically (and traditionally) from the husband's affairs while Winslet's housewife's degradations are shown in clinical detail.

The big problem with the movie is that the filmmakers feel that these people are significant, that they were meant for more, and situations outside their control led to their lives ending in tragedy. I didn't feel that way at all. He was a jerk, and she was a passive-aggressive mess. There's a spark in Don and Betty Draper (and the younger adman played by Vincent Kartheiser, who's a lot more similar than the effortlessly alpha Jon Hamm to DiCaprio's character, only Kartheiser can act) that nobody in Revolutionary Road touches.

Streets I'm Watching

"Homicide: Life on the Street"

DVD via Netflix

I finally finished watching "The Wire" last month. I still don't feel prepared to begin breaking the series down critically, because (although I'm hardly the first to point this out) it's far more like a novel than any other television series and it would be foolish to begin higher-level analysis on a novel you've only read once. Before the year is out, I plan on getting the complete series box set and chugging through again. After a third viewing (summer '1o?), perhaps I'll have a few preliminary observations to share.

After finishing that weighty project, it's not surprising that I've gone to DVD comfort food these past few weeks. Immediately after "The Wire," I decided to give another go at watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" all the way through in order. I've seen all the episodes (I think), but unlike "Deep Space Nine," "Next Gen" doesn't benefit in the least from being watched in rapid succession. Since I purchased the DVD's several years ago, I've given "TNG" a couple of tries, but it never took. Sure, certain episodes ("Disaster," which I watched last night, is a favorite) I've cued up multiple times, but I don't think I was doing myself any disservice never going back for a second viewing of "Shades of Grey" or "Identity Crisis."

This time, in large part because my girlfriend hadn't seen any "Star Trek" at all and is rather enjoying the prolonged exposure (she loves Data), it looks like I'm going to get all the way to the end. We're in Season Five now. The first three seasons were really rough, way worse than I remembered. Most of the really great writers who leap to mind when I think of "Next Gen," like Michael Piller, Ron Moore, and Rene Echevarria, didn't come on board until the fourth season or later. Also, it seems to have taken the syndicated show some time to earn the respect of the character acting community. The guest performances for the first half of its run are almost uniformly ghastly (except for John De Lancie, who almost counts as a regular, and Colm Meaney, who would eventually become one on the spinoff). It's not until after "Best of Both Worlds" that folks like Terry O'Quinn, Ashley Judd, Michelle Forbes, Bebe Neuwirth, David Ogden Stiers, and so forth begin appearing to send you scrambling off to IMDb to figure out where else you've seen them. Forgot about Whoopi Goldberg, I guess... although I don't have an opinion either way on her schtick or her character Guinan, whatever it is that Whoopi does on screen can't exactly be called acting. In any event, no watching old "TNG" episodes for any of you until you've been through the markedly superior "DS9" at least half as many times as me.

Having the bulk of "Next Generation" in the rearview, including all of the stupendously bad first two seasons, I've finally stepped up to some new content. My "Wire" research led me to (creator) David Simon's extraordinary work of novel-length journalism, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and the book in turn led me to the television series that was nominally adapted from it. I must say, I nearly quit halfway through the pilot, sent the disc back to Netflix, and canceled the rest of Seasons 1 & 2 from my queue. "Homicide," the TV series, is not journalism. It's certainly not "The Wire."

What really drove me nuts watching the first "Homicide" TV episode was all the minor changes made for no reason. The series has the rookie cop played by Kyle Secor going out for his first case and winding up the primary on the investigation of the murder of a 12-year-old girl. That's stupid, insulting, and unnecessary. There's no way any big-city police department would put a wet-behind-the-ears rookie on a "red ball" like that (unless the mayor's office deliberately instructed them to do so, as happened to Kima on "The Wire"). In the book, Baltimore detective Tom Pellegrini had been in homicide for several months and had worked a handful of cases as primary before the case the TV show is vaguely retracing fell on his desk. That's pretty amazing as it is -- why did the show have to overdo it? Massive lack of respect for the intelligence of its audience is the only answer. As scripts continue to take big chunks of Simon's prose and turn them into grandstanding speeches for the comically implausible Andre Braugher character, you long for the foul, inarticulate reality of the real cops in Simon's book and the believably fictional ones of "The Wire."

But it's not the fault of "Homicide" or its talented if conventional writers, actors, and filmmakers that I didn't get around to watching it until after "The Wire" spoiled more or less all network cop shows for me. (Except "Life." Bring back "Life," NBC!) To Barry Levinson, who knows Baltimore pretty good, bringing Simon's book to the small screen meant making the concessions to storytelling and recognizable character archetypes that most movies and television feel necessary. And it's not as if they filmed the thing in Vancouver. The sets look right, the stories largely resist pat endings, and at least one of the cops has a mustache (although in the book, every single last one of them did, and also none of them were women). Clark Johnson and Ned Beatty are terrific, even more so if you are familiar with the real cops their characters are patterned on. Donald Worden, the 25-year vet from the book, is one of those amazing real life characters not even Charlie Kaufman could dream up. Watching elements of his personality show up in Beatty's Bolander and Lester Freamon from "The Wire" reflects how deep of an impression Worden must have made on the young David Simon.

Ultimately what I like best about "Homicide" the TV show is something that doesn't have to do with Simon at all. The early episodes borrow his prose a lot, as I mentioned, mostly in speeches by Braugher or Yaphet Kotto. But they can't repurpose any of his dialogue quoted from the actual cops, because (like most cops I assume) everything they say is irreparably vulgar. That puts the "Homicide" writers in an interesting bind. In attempting to repackage Simon's marvelous reporting as a TV drama, giving some glimpse into the offbeat personal lives of the detectives is part of the challenge. To serve both realism and the structural requirements of the televised, commercial-interrupted network series, the characters are given lots of wholly original off-topic dialogue. Thanks to the unflagging quality of the cast of regulars (except for the minor Baldwin brother, who's distractingly bad, like Charlie Sheen's insufferable "Two and a Half Men" manchild only as a cop) and guest casting that doesn't have to work out of the hole of syndication (a younger Edie Falco has a standout bit in an early episode), these scenes really pop. I really like listening them BS about Memorial Stadium, Robert Irsay, blue crabs... Baltimore stuff.

(Anybody watching the All-Star Game notice that the Orioles went back to putting "Baltimore" across the front of their road grays, after years of "Orioles?" I approve of the change. Might finally get that Melvin Mora jersey now.)

It's bittersweet watching Richard Belzer on "Homicide." As good as Belzer is, and as iconic as his John Munch character has deservedly become, neither holds a candle to Detective Sergeant Jay Landsman from the Homicide book. Almost certainly a relic from a bygone age (as reported in 1988, when the insular, men-at-work camaraderie of the homicide unit was in its death throes, beset by affirmative action, political correctness, and monumentally incompetent administrators), Landsman's singular sense of humor begins at necrophilia and then gets really dirty.

So, no more watching "TNG" until you do your "DS9" homework, and no "Homicide" until you read the book where it all started. Got it?

Character Actor Collection

"The Unusuals"

ABC via DVR

I'm burning off the last several episodes of ABC's already-cancelled "The Unusuals" this morning. Not sure why, other than that having watched nothing off the DVR except for multiple installments of "Wipeout" this month made me feel weird. But here in Episode 8, "The Dentist," pops up a welcome, familiar face and I don't feel so much as if I'm wasting my time.

The last time I did a little bit on a character actor I love, Malcolm Barrett immediately landed a series regular gig on "Better Off Ted," which unlike "The Unusuals" has survived to a second season. I hope this little note will have equal or greater effect on the career of David Costabile.

If you're a big-time casting director and the producers are on you to get Peter MacNicol, but the guy who got second billing in the big-screen Mr. Bean movie asks for too large of a salary, what do you do? You call David Costabile. He out-Peter MacNicols the actual Peter MacNicol. He's nebbish, with balding curly hair and an open-lipped expression of peeved anguish that you can't write or teach. And his CV is fantastic -- he played the nefarious managing editor in Season Five of "The Wire" and Mel's pathetic husband on "Flight of the Conchords." He's got some unbelievably random movie credits -- rap biopic Notorious, the "Project Greenlight" movie Stolen Summer, the Jim Carrey Grinch movie -- and of course who can forget his lovably neurotic John Cage character from "Ally McBeal?"

Wait, sorry, that last one was the actual Peter MacNicol.

Props go to the departed, unlamented "Unusuals" for using Costabile cleverly; he played a con man whose unassuming appearance made for his biggest asset. Costabile's character quickly zeroed in on the least self-confident man in the series' cop shop, Kai Lennox's Eddie Alvarez, won his sympathy pretending to bond as a fellow joke target and loser, then made off with fifty grand in evidence money. Good storyline for a show that needed more of them.

"Unusuals" failed because it couldn't harness its quirk to stories that finished with sufficient dramatic payoff. Weird things happened to odd cops, whose personal lives mostly went on unaffected. The writers could only give their characters plot points, not real personalities. Wooden writing in the romantic scenes prevented it from following its instincts towards being more of a relationship drama -- although less frequently terrible, the working relationships that needing developing, between Amber Tamblyn's Shraeger and the versatile (he was great in his "House") Jeremy Renner's Walsh and between Adam Goldberg's Delahoy and Harold Perrineau's Banks, didn't play either. Goldberg and Perrineau both escape with their reputations unaffected, the former, in particular, was a real bright light on a show that otherwise never seemed as funny as it thought it was. Renner shouldn't have trouble finding a better vehicle and Tamblyn can clearly plain grown-up, although not this particular one.

Where do you go on TV now if you want to watch a police show that treats its cast like human beings, not robotic line-reading plot developers? Cable, clearly. But "The Shield" and "The Wire" are both done, and the current rage on TNT and AMC is lawyer shows ("Damages," "Raising the Bar") and crook shows ("Breaking Bad," "Leverage"). I guess it's time for me to get on board with "The Closer," even though Kyra Sedgwick kind of chills my blood. Seems to me there's a gaping void on pay cable, with either Showtime or HBO needing to step up and give us something challenging and adult. Maybe David Milch has a few ideas. I'd like to see Milch ("Deadwood") thrown into a room with David Simon ("The Wire," "The Corner") just to see if their opposite energies cancelled each other out. Everyone on Milch's shows speaks as if they were a Shakespeare scholar while Simon has an ability almost like channeling when it comes to nailing down rigidly realistic dialogue. I don't know if they could possibly write a pilot together, but if they made a show about them writing it, I would watch it.

More Than Enough Vampires to Go Around

Twilight

DVD via Redbox

"True Blood"

HBO via On Demand

You'd think Halloween would be a better time of the year to concentrate your horror-centric film and television premieres, but times have changed. Vampire pictures aren't low-budget, focus group-targeted quickie moneymakers any longer, they're big business. There's money to be made anew in selling the blood, sex, and danger of the vampire myth to teen girls. How can we tell the bloodsucker market is on the rise? The villainous Kuzui family are preparing a "Buffy" reboot -- with no input from Joss Whedon. I take it as a point of pride I've never seen the Whedon-discredited original Buffy motion picture, with Kristy Swanson and Donald Sutherland. You can count me out for the remake as well.

The new industry leader in sublimating adolescent desire into yarns about pale, brooding pointy-teeth and the warm-blooded girls who love them, Twilight has risen to such cultural status that Entertainment Weekly regularly runs "stories" on its sequel that amount to nothing more than cheesecake photo spreads. It's also got one imitator on cable (HBO's wacky "True Blood") and a couple more coming to network this fall.

It's weird what both of these new works steal from "Buffy" and what they add. Both Twilight, in its competent if drab film version, and "True Blood" thematically center on the same powerful truth as Whedon's TV series: when you're young, very attractive, and often short of breath, every love affair seems like the freaking apocalypse. In a lot of ways things have gotten less complicated since the 90's. Compared to their predecessor, neither of the new vampire sagas tracks much in subtext -- "True Blood," in particular, is so literal that's it's a little off-putting. There's also a strange loss of care when it comes to visual effects. Both "True Blood" and Twilight, when placed into context among the larger history of vampires on film, will seem anachronistic for their dopey fast-motion vampires and strangely underwhelming CGI shots.

The biggest deviation from the "Buffy" physics that "True Blood" uses is the fact that its vampires explode into piles of sticky, disgusting gack when staked. That makes sense in a way, because when vampires die in the "True Blood" world there are usually consequences. Vampire society and legal precedent are much more established in Alan Ball's series, based on a sequence of novels where the pale folk are beginning to tentatively integrate into human society. The best bits of "True Blood" take place when we get to see glimpses of this Vampire: The Masquerade-like political structure. HBO's clout gets amazing Euro guest stars for these roles, including Stellan Skarsgård's hunky son and the unmistakable Zeljko Ivanek from "Heroes" and "House," probably the most likely human being on the planet to come out first when the real vampires decide to make their presence known.

Trouble is, a deranged Iron Curtain-influenced dark political thriller is only one of the dozen or so separate things "True Blood" is trying to be at once. The inconsistency of the casting reflects this. The complex, slow-talking Louisiana cops played by William Sanderson and Chris Bauer are directly out of a John Sayles movie. Anna Paquin has the expressiveness of a serious actress but her accent and her dye job are soap-opera stuff. Storylines featuring the major characters played by Ryan Kwanten and Rutina Wesley don't register properly because the actors are so crappy. Sam Trammell's character is so alarmingly similar in appearance and vibe to Rufus from "Gossip Girl" that I totally forget which one of them now is a shapeshifter. The best roles are for vampires. Stephen Moyer, as the male lead, makes difficult, contrary acting choices and genuinely seems to be a man out of time; I wish the show was about him more and Paquin's Sookie less. And the great Stephen Root absolutely knocks his three-episode arc as a nebbish, gay accountant vampire out of the park.

"True Blood" disappoints a lot. It introduces terrific characters, like the dangerous vampire blood junkie played in the first season by Lizzy Caplan, and then gets rid of them before they have the chance to work through to their logical endpoints. It cheats gratuitously as a mystery show, with Sookie's telepathic ability coming and going whenever it's convenient for the storytelling. And whatever its larger ambitions, it's never going to be able to shake the air of abject silliness that hangs in the air beginning with the pilot. "Buffy" worked around this in a lot of ways "True Blood" can't. It had a heightened reality, but maintained it. It had enough, but not too much, of a knowing attitude about itself. Mostly it had characters who seemed unquestionably real even when the events around them were too ridiculous to take seriously. "True Blood" lacks that, except for Vampire Bill and the sheriff, and I'm not sure if those two could carry could the show by themselves. Also a major element of the show's appeal that we haven't discussed yet is that evidently everyone in the cast is required to appear nude -- a lot -- and nobody really wants to see William Sanderson naked.

Twilight is remarkably slight, by comparison; its plot lacks conflict, character development, and most of the other basic characteristics of effective popular movie storytelling. Girl meets boy, boy turns out to be vampire, surprisingly no one really minds very much, insert chase scene, the end. Kristen Stewart seems to be half asleep for most of the proceedings. That's not surprising given the sodden Washington state setting -- everybody involved must have been soaking wet, cold, clammy, and leaden for the entire shoot. That doesn't help the pace of the film very much, and the complete lack of anything resembling a proper plot in Stephenie Meyer's source material hurts worse. About two-thirds of the movie seems to be set pieces taking place to fill space because there's nothing actually happening. (And I hear the sequel, New Moon, is duller still.)

Even so... Twilight doesn't have high ambitions, but it works for what it is, because Robert Pattinson is worthy of the hype. Sometimes just looking the part is all you need, and Pattinson does look exactly right to be playing teen dream vampire Edward, all poignant brow and piercing eyes. He looks a lot like David Boreanaz in the first season of "Buffy," before he bulked up. The entire movie hinges on him being everything Bella (Stewart) sees in him, because the film is utterly uninterested in its lead -- Stewart is onscreen for the entire time and even though the actress is attractive and intelligent-seeming the character is an utter zero. We don't have the least idea why Edward and most of the rest of the single male townfolk, vampire, werewolf, and otherwise, seem so taken by her. I think that's because Bella is a cipher by design -- she's not a real person, she's a stand-in for the teen female viewer, who can easily imagine her own characteristics imposed upon her since she has none of her own.

But Pattinson is a little better than the material requires. He's a hunk, sure, but I think he can act a little too. The only really memorable scene in the film comes when he rages, convincingly, against how his nature as a vampire makes him so irresistible to humans, since his kind has evolved specifically towards luring in the warm-blooded. The trouble with Twilight is that these scenes are way too infrequent. The film takes forever building up Edward's mystery, which is stupid because the whole marketing scheme for the movie relies on giving that up right up front. Then there's a whole bunch of scenes where other characters reflect on his behavior, all incorrectly because they don't know what the audience does before even sitting down. This is dumb. Edward is the only character in the movie who isn't a plot prop or improbably stupid. As such, he should be much less of a passive presence.

Thanks to Entertainment Weekly's round-the-clock coverage, I now know that Pattinson and Edward barely appear in New Moon. Prisoner to their own success, Meyer's junky novels have somehow become sacred texts. The movie series will adhere slavishly to their every shortcoming, which seems pretty stupid to me. "True Blood," on the other hand, is taking the "Dexter" path. After the first season, which followed the first Sookie Stackhouse novel, the writers are going off on their own for the second (premiering later this month). They've got a lot of stuff to work with, and a lot of things they need to clean up. I'll be interested to see them try. As for Edward and Bella... pass.

It Was Inevitable

Sports

On TV

I think this is the season when the NBA, against all odds, has pipped to baseball to become my new favorite sport. I just have so little interest in the product MLB is producing these days, with its pinball ballparks, steroid-hairshirt sportswriting, and lying, profiteering owners, agents, and players. It doesn't hurt that the local nine, for the first time since I moved to Colorado, have become irrelevant even before the Nuggets' season ended.

So I have been soaking up the basketball playoffs. I haven't been as bothered as many about the officiating. Since I haven't been that big a basketball fan for that long, I view the referees as I would umpires -- mostly doing their best at an impossible job, occasionally giving into the pressure of the moment or a flare of ego but on the whole way less than you or I would. The way basketball is called nowadays, the way the league wants it to be called, doing even a C-, 70% job as an NBA ref is an inhuman task. And, deep down, I'm old school. I like the implication: Don't like it? Shut up and practice your free throws.

I love when teams lose in the playoffs because their bigs (or any of their guys) can't make their free throws. I get to give my Rick Barry speech. The best story of this playoffs for me has been the emergence of Dwight Howard as an A-list superstar. How fun is he to watch? He smiles all the time! He's huge, he can throw it down from a standstill right under the basket, he gets 20 rebounds sometimes. And in the playoffs, he's been making his free throws, a wholly new phenomenon for the big man. If he starts missing in the finals, he's gotta call Rick.

The Eastern Conference finals were fun because it was like watching one ideology crush another: Stan Van Gundy's single-post offense vs. Mike Brown's no-switching, no-rotating, all-hustle defense. Brown stubbornly refused to stop playing a frontcourt rotation with at least two guys who could never in a million years cover Rashard Lewis -- for the entire series. It was like watching a little windup toy bash into the wall, over and over and over again. If Brown had gone small, put LeBron at the 4, actually let his point guards handle the ball a little, and let James abuse Lewis off post-ups (or just run past him, since The King apparently is too noble to approach the basket butt-first), the Magic never win the series. But nope, eventually that windup toy is going to break a hole right through that wall. Maybe when they go to the 11-game series.

The Nuggets put on a good show but ultimately gave in to the Lakers, who waited until the last minute to click as they often tend to do. After last season's playoffs it's odd that it was the Cavs, and not the Lakers, who seemed on a mission up until the conference finals. (Although observe what happened to Cleveland.) With the amount of scoring talent Los Angeles has, it can be frustrating to watch guys like Odom and Gasol play lackadaisically. At times it seems their guards -- Kobe is the least of the offenders -- ignore the bigs, but then again even when Derek Fisher plays crappy, he plays crappy hard. Gasol and Odom in particular drift through games at times, even in the conference finals. That seems unlike the behavior of a championship team.

And that is how the Finals will go -- the Lakers will certainly win if they get the maximum output from their talent. Orlando is a versatile team with a creative offense, but they're not as good as L.A. if Kobe, Gasol, and Odom romp on them for 70 points and 30 rebounds, as they are all fully capable of doing no matter what Orlando tries to do to defend them. The Magic don't have a second big capable of guarding Gasol when Phil Jackson goes big, unless Marcin (The Polish Hammer) Gortat mutated into O.G. Ben Wallace while no one was looking.

Of course, for Phil to put Gasol at the 4 Andrew Bynum has to be effective, not picking up quick, stupid fouls on D-12. That is not as easy as it looks -- Howard has his own atmosphere. There's a double-edged Kobe factor as well. He's clearly on a mission. That could mean that he averages 50 a game for the Finals and the Lakers sweep, but it also could mean that Shannon Brown could miss a couple of open jumpers and Kobe could snap him over his knee like he just struck out swinging on an 0-2 slider. He's been known to freeze out teammates in the playoffs or refuse to shoot or otherwise psychologically freak out before, and clearly the pressure's on him now more than ever before -- LeBron has surpassed him and will get teammates sooner or later and Carmelo and Howard and Wade are all post-Leap and hungry to eclipse him. If the Lakers drop Game 2 at home and then Odom has a classic Lamar Odom in the Fifth Dimension 1-8, 4 rebound game in an ugly loss in Orlando, we could see the first ever mid-Finals trade-him-or-me demand from the Mamba. You never know where the Mamba will strike next!

I don't know what I will watch after basketball is over. Maybe the Royals. We drove out to Kansas City for their opening series against the Yankees, not the first game but the second two of the three-game set. I'd never been to the stadium before they redesigned it this offseason, but it's a small gem. No bad seats, very good fans. There's not much they can do about the extremely unimpressive outfield panorama short of moving Kansas City physically in space like the island from "Lost."

Fight!

The Wrestler

DVD via DVDPlay

Resurrecting the Champ

Encore via DVR

There's exactly two kinds of sports movies: those that are essentially romantic about the game, and those that aren't. Most fall in the first category. I usually don't like these.

I was looking forward to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler since first I read reviews; the director's visual style can be described many ways but in absolutely no sense "sentimental." The Wrestler blew me away. I was expecting it to be wonderful-looking but I did not expect the almost persistent realism of the film from the guy who made Pi and Requiem for Dream. Although there are many jump cuts, otherwise the movie is almost documentary-style. And there are a few very long, slow, simple shots -- one of an abandoned ballroom at an old amusement park is unforgettable -- that are old-style cinema. I am quite nearsighted and tend to respond to dialogue or music more often than visual images, but this movie was quite special.

Resurrecting the Champ, on the other hand, is quite a bit of self-interested pap, a story about the danger of romanticizing the homeless and turning journalism into entertainment -- that romanticizes the homeless and turns journalism into entertainment. The movie has very flawed ideas about what is and isn't heroic, and ultimately doesn't prove that the liar played by Josh Hartnett and the fraud played by Samuel L. Jackson are worthy of having their stories manipulated into a lamely told film adaptation. Jackson should have known better; Hartnett should have picked a better haircut.