TV - SciFi Channel

Intro: Dr. StrangeFi or How I Learned to Love the Bombs
SciFi Channel has four new shows. This is dangerous, considering that the only successful SciFi Channel shows seem to be ones transplanted from other channels (like the Stargate franchise) or remakes of previously established hits (Battlestar Galactica). Farscape couldn't grow beyond a cult following, and neither could First Wave, Invisible Man, or the myriad other attempts made at original cable programming. But these new programs--one drama, one reality show, and two comedies--are worth checking out. And if you don't now, you won't get the opportunity later. So here's the rundown.

Eureka
Handled properly, this could be the next, great X-Files. Handled improperly, we could skip straight to the last season of The X-Files. Eureka is a show about a seemingly innocuous town that harbors a big secret: it is the secret testing ground of all major scientific advances in the last fifty years. Everyone who lives there is a mad scientist waiting to happen; week after week, we get to watch as things go terribly wrong. (That, as you all know, is when things get terribly entertaining.) In the most recent episode, "Many Happy Returns," the cast contends with not just a clone of the woman they just buried, but also with the time-displaced ghost of her husband. These are fresh twists with fun (if a little too wry) dialogue and decent acting.

Where the show trip up is with the script and cast; right now, Eureka is pandering to the audience with joke after obvious joke, and the actors are hamming it up just as much. Science-fiction actors are, theoretically, actors first -- I'd like to think that as Eureka matures, we'll actually see growth in the details of each scene. As for the plot, so long as they don't sacrifice their single-episode format to the plot-arc gods, these writers can make anything happen on the show. I say, let them. And about damn time.

Who Wants to Be a Superhero?
Full disclosure? I went to college with one of the contestants, Nitro G. (I use his secret identity for no other reason than that it amuses me to do so.) Fuller disclosure? So what? That's reality TV; anybody can be a contestant. It's both a good and bad thing that he's the second hero eliminated: the show is easily nerds on parade, and the only place these "heroes" are going is on a panel at the next mid-level comic-book or sci-fi convention. It's a bad thing because Who Wants to Be a Superhero is actually a well-written reality show; Nitro G is now a loser on a show that people might watch.

Flamboyant costumes, improbable characters, and simply silly stunts--Who Wants to Be a Superhero flaunts every nuance of why people like reality TV: laughing at other people. (And who can't laugh at Cell Phone Girl, or how seriously Major Victory and Monkey Girl take this?) This is a new low, which, in reality lingo, should be a major high. The one flaw of the show, but an admitted draw for the comic book fans, is that Stan Lee hosts the programming and controls the votes. However, he never actually speaks to the contestants in person, which gives him the feel of a megalomaniacal, hermetically sealed villain: the anti-Donald Trump.

Though the series has the predictable commercial-friendly twists (with big revelations teased right before the break) and all-too reliable confessionals, the challenges--in other words, the scripted portion--are where this reality show excel. In the first episode, one contestant is eliminated before even entering the heroes' lair...by another contestant, Rotiart, who turns out to be a plant. (His name, when read backwards, is Traitor.) Hidden challenges, like this initial morality test, keep things fresh; the question of how serious some of these contestants are provides the rest of the sinful entertainment.

Later in the episode, I get more guilty pleasure at watching all-too-focused superheroes dash right by a crying little girl [another plant]; the real test, of course, is finding out which heroes think "saving" a civilian is more important than the mission itself. And this is the meat of Who Wants to Be a Superhero: as Stan Lee acknowledges, the show really can't test the outer superhero (that would be funny in another--painful--way), and each episode is a little lesson in morality. And who knows? The winner, who will be the superhuman punch line of many jokes, may even get a chuckle out of Nietzsche.

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace
A documentary by a fictional Stephen King-like character about a fictional show he supposedly wrote, directed, and starred in, in the late 80s for British television couldn't possibly work, could it? Pretentious doesn't begin to cover the bases, but weirdness and originality work in its favor--and there's some invigorating audacity, too.

Unfortunately, the showiness of the format currently overwhelms the humor. The clips from this faux-TV series are flush with enough parody of the genre and era to work solo (in the same way that Soap encompassed its time); the documentary portions, which often interrupt the show-within-a-show's already shaky narrative, are mostly devoid of laughs and don't fit nearly as well. They simply don't need to mine two distinct styles: tacky acting, intentionally awful editing, and painfully funny voice dubbing is where Garth Marenghi's Darkplace triumphs. And that's in the spoof itself, not the analysis of it.

After all, when you've got a hospital called Darkplace built on the bowels of hell, do you really need anything else cluttering the story? The gimmicks--enough blood to make Sam Raimi proud, or low-budget special effects (like throwing a cat into a scene)--are good; the conceit is not.

Amazing Screw On Head
Full disclosure (again)? I'm a huge Mike Mignola fan. His artwork for Hellboy is dark and mysterious, with ominous mythology crammed into every jagged line. The strength of his Dark Horse-published series was enough to make me invest in Amazing Screw On Head, a one-shot that used the same art and supernatural crime-fighting concept for shits and giggles. Not only is the television show drawn in a style similar to Mignolia's own, but the voice-actors (headlined by Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce) understand that it's just for fun.

And really, who doesn't get it? The year is 1868, the country is America, and Screw On Head is a lively head that can screw into various mechanical contraptions. Oh, and he works for Abraham Lincoln. Ah, and he's assisted by his manservant, Mr. Groin. Er, and he's facing the undead army of the gleefully insane Emperor Zombie. Any critic taking this show seriously is seriously in over his or her head.

Suffice to say, Amazing Screw On Head will find its audience in the same devout, cultish fans who loved Duckman and The Tick, two other similarly implausible cartoons. Those who call shenanigans need not watch; the rest of you: hop onboard.

Stargates (SG-1, Atlantis)
Oh, I couldn't resist saying a few words on these returning fan favorites. The only way that a show becomes a fan favorite is by catering to the every whim of a mostly idiotic viewership. After enough seasons, viewers have fallen for the characters, not the plot, and are content to waste hour after hour watching the same (or similar) scenario unfold so long as their "heroes" are killing time with witty banter.

So how does a show survive losing one its main draws? In the case of Stargate SG-1, they transplant characters from another franchise. In this case, it's Ben Browder and Claudia Black from the frakked carcass of Farscape. In order to keep the fan base, Browder and Black play pretty much the same characters as before, but that's fine: all these popular, long-running hits tend to have the same characters anyway.

How else to explain Atlantis? This spin-off basically duplicated every character from SG-1 and placed them in a slightly different location. Last year, the Atlantis team fought the Wraith, and the SG-1 team fought the Ori. To do so, both looked for archaic weapons that had been lost to them and had to deal with the political manipulations of the sinister humans that surrounded them. This year, the battle continues. Big deal. The original seasons felt fresh; each week the SG-1 team would face unique challenges as science itself turned against the protagonists. Now, each year, the Stargate teams face the same stubborn challenges, and science has very little to do with it. (Unless, that is, you count the science performed by the CG artists who litter episode after episode with space battles.)

No wonder I'm so enamored by this new slate of programming; it's different.

Conclusion: It's The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
This is a hip slate of programming which should provide the solid devotees of Friday's two Stargate series and the new quirky drama Eureka with some great alternative programming. But though it panders to the right demographic, MTV’s Aeon Flux tried (and failed at) the same thing. (The show has belatedly grown into a hit now that the original audience has grown-up and looked through their past for memorabilia.)

There's also the sad truth that of all SciFi Channel's current series, only Battlestar Galactica is a real drama. The rest are sarcastic action meets science shows, and that might lead to some redundancy or resentment among viewers looking for the next Quantum Leap. With the exception of Eureka, these shows have nowhere to grow. They are niche programs, best served as mini-series: future installments promise more of the same, more of the same, and more of the same. Lexx, the most boundary pushing SciFi Channel show yet, had a whole universe to explore; I worry that we've already seen everything these new ones have to offer.

ESSAY - On Writing [I]: The Modern Library Writer's Workshop

Can anyone tell you how to write? No. At least, they shouldn’t; then you're not writing so much as dictating or channeling the voice of another author. The minute someone prescribes advice for you, be it in showy cliché—“show don’t tell”—or precise instruction—“In media res is the best way to start your story”—you’re in trouble. What then, is the point slash role slash need of the literary lessons of books like Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop?

Sparks, my friend. Not the overburdened and one-dimensional sparks of Spark Notes (as if there could be a crib sheet for writing), but for insightful quotes from successful authors on how they’ve managed to write. When Koch leaves it to them (and his own experience), clarifying thoughts without proselytizing the necessity of them, his book is a charming and edifying read. When he plays the role of the headmaster, explaining such niceties (I refuse the word “necessities”) as the ten-percent rule—“Second draft equals first draft minus ten percent”—he grows insultingly dull.

Or maybe it’s just me, holding on to the vain notion that writing is grown and cultivated—a gut instinct—rather than a planned, sculpted, and constantly revised process. (For what it’s worth, Koch does mention authors like Sommerset Maugham who wrote single-draft stories.) But for the most part, it shouldn’t be necessary to read (or write) a chapter on revision: to say that there is a formula or process for correctly explaining the story is just fallacious, and unfortunately misleading. The one anecdote Koch uses that sticks with me is of one of his students putting together a final project. She keeps coming up with crap, and at last Koch advises her to forget her last revision, and to simply tell the story. She does, working through a painful deadline to produce a slim but brilliant story. What inevitably worked for her? The deadline? The advice? The time she’d spent writing and learning to identify her worthless sections? Perhaps none of these, perhaps some weird amalgam of them all. The point is, something different works for all of us and only experimentation can unlock your potential.

That said, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop rocks when Koch debunks popular schoolhouse mythos, like “write what you know” or the need for research. To the former, he retorts that we know a lot more than we think¬—including of course, the things we have read about, which creates a secondhand narrative that is the very essence of fiction. As for the latter, Koch dismisses it: why bog ourselves down in fact when we can invent first, and check the substance later? (Or as I see it, why limit ourselves to specifics if the story itself is good? Koch would agree, to some extent, with this: he is a climber of Mount Probability; he acknowledges that some things require the improbable to occur.)

Of course, Koch also has rules—many of are irreconcilable with his own text. For instance, his first line—“The only way to begin is to begin, and begin right now”—forces you to stop reading. In fact, if this guideline were followed to the bitter end, one would never read, though Koch later confesses that we become better writers by first becoming better readers. (In some cases, Koch even uses the familiar anecdote of authors beginning their daily writing by transcribing their favorite authors to get the juices and rhythms flowing, so to speak.) This is also where we run into the steadfast scholar, a man who dictates that there are rules for the first draft, among which are the rather obvious “Do it” (right up there with “only you can prevent forest fires”) and “Do it quickly” (which he then contradicts by explaining that some authors are more prone to writing slow first drafts). His heart is in the “write” place, but why not think about perfection the first time through? Yes, it’s good to get it all out on paper, but must that be a sedentary way of doing things?

Then again, it’s probably good for some people to hear what I consider obvious staples of the writer’s craft: keeping a notebook of thoughts and ideas, for instance, or arming oneself with a pen (the idea can strike at any time). And you can’t go wrong with Koch’s use of quotes. Take, for instance, James Baldwin’s assurance that “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” These are things that perhaps we need to hear on a regular basis, basic truths that we need to be reminded of—that genius means nothing if it is devoted to sloth. I’d say that justifies a book like this—that a phrase may uproot your laziness and make you write again—but if you’re reading, you aren’t lazy.

Mock as I do the idea of reading your way through a writing workshop, Koch’s “class” is very organized, and has enough italicized or fully capped sentences to make skimming for inspiration a breeze. I also gloss over a lot of the interesting points that Koch makes, such as the difference between plot and story, or—so long as you take his words as suggestions and not commandments—how to go about cultivating a voice. I also make it seem, at times, as if Koch is not aware of his own contradictions—he is. He’s simply ignoring them to better facilitate you, the reader, who will inevitably vulturize (as I have) the parts that you find tastiest. That said, pick away.

Those paying attention may have realized that there is no actual review of The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop; how can I possibly stand on a pedestal and write whether or not a book on writing is good? It has encouraged me to write some vaguely expressed opinions on the craft of writing itself, so I cannot call it uninspiring, and I must acknowledge that writing is a realization of the phrase “to each his own.” You sir, must decide what best serves your craft, so now you, sir, must do just that.

Go.

THEATER - "Crazy for the Dog"

The title of this play is Crazy for the Dog, but it’s anybody who goes and sees this Off-Broadway run that is crazy (and not in the obsessed, lovesick way of one character, Paul, toward his dog). Rather than being a dark comedy, director Eric Parness keeps every character in such proximity to one another that it becomes a stupid drama—not cheesy enough for melodramatic laughs and not serious enough for nervous ones. This is a sophomoric attempt at The Goat, and if playwright Christopher Boal wants to salvage the good moments of the second act, he needs to do away with the first.

Granted, I’m the wrong audience for this show. I don’t have a pet—in fact, I’m allergic to most of them—and on that note, I’ve never seen the appeal of enslaving a filthy animal and drawing sustenance from the way it grows to depend on you. That said, I don’t understand why the characters get so worked up over a dog, or, as we find out later, the drowning of two “innocent” kittens. Even if you accept that this entire play is about the emotionally stunted Paul coming to terms with his love object, a kidnapped dog, having characters scream about it for ninety minutes is hardly necessary. Better to just get to the cathartic confession and allow the drama to build from there, rather than to eke out what is, to the audience, a transparent observation from minute one.

Those still struggling to be entertained by Crazy for the Dog will be further stymied by the acting. Patrick Melville plays Paul so passively that the obsession is absent and emotionless. This explains why Melville’s only action in the show is to walk really close to other actors and then to coolly explain the situation to them--but it doesn't justify it. You can’t play repression. Of course, if the negative choices ended with Melville, there might still be a show; unfortunately, the female lead, Wrenn Schmidt, plays the crazy younger sister as someone who is crazy, which isn’t an action so much as a state of being. The reason Act II works so much better than the first is that Ryan Tramont, as dog-napper Kevin, is at least trying to get something from Paul—the fault with his character is that Mr. Boal has forgotten to include what that is in his play.

It’s a shame that Crazy for the Dog impressed enough of the right people to garner an extension. It’s just a doggone shame.

BOOK - "Everyman"

Do old people do anything after they get old, except get older? Philip Roth’s last novel, The Plot Against America, convinced me that they could grow as authors, shaking off shades of Zuckerman to tap into new genres (like alternative history) that would explore isolation on a broader scheme. Perhaps that was a fluke: Roth’s new novel, Everyman, ambles too politely towards death, belaying the inevitable by discussing the advance of death, observing the death of others, and mulling the death of one’s livelier (and more promiscuous) youth. In many ways, it is like Gilead or The Sea, only sans the invigorating reflections of the active first person. Trapped in the third person, Everyman remains excessively broad and rarely emotional: a stagnant, perfunctory read. Nothing exciting happens, and the language is dull as death.

Where Roth salvages his narrative, and where more time and attention should have been focused, are in his descriptions of family. He begins Everyman by shattering the illusion of a happy ending: the family members are attending the main character’s funeral. We see, in some splendid pages, how much this man has left behind, and then, as the book progresses, how dead he already was to these people. That’s something we can empathize with: the death of love while we are still living to acknowledge it. “He [his younger son, Lonny,] was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn’t antagonism but that his antagonism denied him the means to release. When he opened his mouth, nothing emerged except a series of grotesque gasps, making it appear likely that whatever had him in its grip would never be finished with him.”

Other passages fall into the trap of deprecatory humor: “An oncologist, a urologist, an internist, a hospice nurse, and a hypnotist”—already it sounds like a joke¬—“to help me overcome the nausea.” “The nausea from what, from therapy?” “Yeah, and the cancer gives you nausea too. I throw up liberally.” “Is that the worst of it?” “Sometimes my prostate feels like I’m trying to excrete it.” Ha, ha. Funny. But not.

Still other passages seem like recycled Roth anecdotes about foolish faith—“Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life”—or overabundant descriptions that are closer to fodder than anything poignant: “On the evenings he drove over to eat broiled bluefish on the back deck of the fish store that perched at the edge of the inlet where the boats sailed out to the ocean under the old drawbridge, he sometimes stopped first at the town where his family had vacationed in the summertime.” Ha, ha. Funny. But not.

Roth quotes Chuck Close within his novel: “Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” If this sad, small, uninspired novel is the mark of a professional, then turn to the amateurs. There’s nothing new or interesting here.

THEATER - "Altar Boyz"

Though both the boy band and Christian rock are already pretty much parodies of themselves, Altar Boyz finds enough mileage in playing stereotypes to come across as a cult musical sensation and one of the few true “guilty” pleasures. Though the substance is as flimsy as Godspell, the up-tempo, modern groove makes it more than bearable—pleasant, even—and the cast is talented enough to make certain songs and gags (the two are interchangeable) infectious.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "Food for Fish"

With his manic juggling of a one-note joke for the sixty minutes of Nerve, playwright Adam Szymkowicz seemed to be modeling himself after Christopher Durang. With his new play, Food for Fish, Szymkowicz is both more polished and less manic, but he’s still modeling his scripts: this time it’s Anton Chekhov. The urbanized result tries a little too hard, and Szymkowicz is still struggling to flesh out his characters, but two (Bobbie and Sylvia) come across as genuine, and the play itself is eerily entertaining.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

FILM - "Superman Returns"

Can anybody say that Bryan Singer doesn't give the fans what they want? Save for a shortage of action, this is a modernized classic: the natural fifth film in the Superman franchise. It's not a reinvention--it's too chock full of nostalgia and anachronism--and to its credit, Superman Returns is marvelously entertaining in that regard. But much as Singer is a great caterer, he's not that great of a chef, and the majority of scenes come across as too bland, too scripted, and too silly to rise above the "comic book" moniker that haunts so many new movies. (Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins is still one of the few good adaptations out there, Tim Burton's Batman is perhaps the other.)

Singer's done a great job casting the film though: Brandon Routh is (so I'm told) both a heartthrob and an adorable klutz, and he does manage to uphold the awkward grace of a god among men. On the reverse of the coin, Kevin Spacey exudes his own brand of charm: he hasn't been this delightfully sinister since Seven. But whereas Seven was a dark film, here, Spacey lets words like "kryptonite" roll off his tongue; he teases out the insanity of Lex Luthor ala Gene Hackman, but gives the man a real spine too. Kate Bosworth is the one questionable cast member: she seems far too young to be a mother, and far too ditzy to be a Pulitzer-winner reporter. (Her son, by the way, is another problem with the film: his true father's identity is all-too obvious, but also completely against the mythos, and ultimately tangental to the plot.)

Superman's back, and he's believable, but it's hard to give him a villain to fight. As the mad scientist, Luthor only throws things at him, and watching him "fight" a giant landmass (think crystal tumor) isn't much of a climactic showdown. His five-year absence isn't really much of a plot device either--it's used only to give Lois a child (what writers call "an obstacle"), and contributes nothing towards what's essentially another go-around on the same damn ride. Comic books adapted to this by giving Superman equally powerful and often more intelligent villains; movies are still hobbled by budgets or, in Singer's case, too much allegience to the Golden Age of comics, and not enough to the darker, and more entertaining, modern ones.

When you take action out of a comic-book movie, you cripple it; what else is there? In the case of Superman Returns: a whole lot of villanous comic relief, lush backdrops, and ambiguous romance. Homage or not, as a film it's certainly not super, man.

FILM - "Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest"

It is unfair to call Dead Man’s Chest a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. This is a Pirate of the Carribean film, based less on the Disneyworld ride, and even less on pirates, so much as on one specific pirate, Captain Jack Sparrow, the most gleeful anti-hero since Harrison Ford’s Han Solo or Indiana Jones. (It’s also funny to see Johnny Depp playing the lead in another movie that has “Dead Man” in the title: those of you still not convinced that Depp is the greatest actor ever need only watch Jim Jarmusch’s similarly titled feature to see Depp’s range.) Though this role is no stretch from Depp’s last outing as Sparrow, he manages to keep it fresh—buoyant, in fact—and it would be fair to say that he carries the whole movie on his shoulders. From his flamboyant movements while bound to a giant pole to his constant pratfalls and facial mannerisms, it's clear that Depp enjoys being Sparrow, and that joy does more to keep the film afloat than the marvelous digital gimmickry.

Is Bill Nighy, as the carbuncled Davy Jones, not an entertaining villain? Of course he is: but he’s so computer generated, and so on the periphery that it’s hard to see him as part of the film, and not just an effect (whereas Geoffrey Rush, as Barbossa, was a real foil for Depp.) Another effect is Orlando Bloom’s "heroic" Will Turner, who is now even more of a “bootstrap”--just tagging along for the ride--than ever. And though it’s expected of them, the crew of the Black Pearl is still just comic relief or fodder for the various aquatic monsters (like the Kraken) that populate this film. Only Keira Knightly is provided with a bit of development, growing more badass, more the ravishing beauty. Oh, there are some good moments shared between two of the formerly skeletal pirates from the first film (one of them’s Mackenzie Crook, from BBC’s The Office), but these are trimmings, not the main course.

The course itself is problematic too: just as Jack’s compass now points in various directions, so does the film, which stresses the arrogant (yet well-dressed) British sea empire as much as it does the villainous squid-crew of Jones’s Flying Dutchman. It makes little sense for certain characters like Norrington to be allowed into this sequel (though Jack Davenport plays him well) and the main narrative thrust—Jack’s search for a means to renegotiate his debt with Davy Jones (his soul)—is constantly being thwarted by writers trying to cram all the characters from the first film into the sequel. As a result, the action is not as relentless or charismatic as the first film, though once the ball gets rolling (or in this case, a giant waterwheel) it’s impossible not to get swept away.

The problem with Dead Man’s Chest is not Gore Verbinski’s direction—he is just as solid and proficient here as in the first, and still has a marvelous sense of lighting. The problem is that this is the first part of a longer film (the final chapter, At World’s End, is filming now) and lacks a resolution. The only real difference between Dead Man’s Chest’s ending and that of The Empire Strikes Back is that for Star Wars, that was the best film in the series, and the darkest point of the franchise. For Pirates, this was just more or less of the same, and while you’ll be hard pressed to find people who honestly didn’t enjoy the antics and japes of Depp and company, it’ll be harder to find people who didn’t enjoy the first one a lot more.

MUSIC - The Weepies, "Say I Am You"

You expect that Deb Talan and Steve Tannen, otherwise known as The Weepies, would be lyrically inclined to write about what’s depressing and melodramatic. And yes, sometimes they do (“Woke up and wished that I was dead/with an aching in my head/I lay motionless in bed”). But people with great voices and a folksy sheen to their acoustic deftness aren’t very good at melodrama. So at worst, a couple of the tracks on their album Say I Am You come across as old and familiar anthems but not saddening -- unless, of course, you're depressed by getting a song instantly stuck in your head.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar