I always say (to whomever is listening, whether they care or not) that when new comedies premiere, you don’t start watching for what the show is, you start watching for what the show will become. Most comedies need a full season to get their sea legs, as writers learn to write for their actors’ strengths, and the actors learn how to wring jokes out of their characters' quirks. Shows like “Parks and Recreation,” “Community,” even “Girls”*… they aren’t nearly the same shows they were when they premiered, and that’s usually a good thing.
*All three of these are separate cases. "Parks and Rec" started out as an "Office" spin-off, but it wasn't working and no one on the show was likable, particularly Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope as the oblivious Michael Scotty-type lead. The showrunners adjusted, changed Leslie Knope into a likable overachiever, and suddenly the show was about a bunch of nice people who had this easy workplace chemistry. It's unrecognizable as the show it was when it premiered.
"Community" seemed to start out as just another bland single-cam sitcom with a good cast, but developed into something referential and insane and occasionally brilliant and deeply uncommercial. In Season Three, it retreated a little too far into its own headspace, and creator Dan Harmon was fired as showrunner. Since showrunners are fired all the time, I was hoping that the effects of Harmon's firing would be overblown, and that the cast remaining would be enough to keep the lights on.
But, judging by the first results of Season Four, it seems that everything that made the show stand out has disappeared abruptly. It's a shame. That used to be my favorite show, and now it's a chore to watch it, especially since I know how much potential the show actually has.
As for "Girls," it seems we're still learning exactly what the show is as it goes, but it's deepened itself nicely as it hass expanded. Even on pay-cable, it's surprising to see a sitcom that makes character choices this subtle.
When a new comedy premieres, I’ll check out the pilot and an episode or two afterwards, to see what the potential of the show is. Sometimes I’ll enjoy the show enough to say “I’ll stick with this to see where it ends up.” Sometimes I’ll get a sense of the cast’s chemistry, feel it has promise but isn’t worth watching yet, and decide to check back in later.* And sometimes I’ll take one look and say “Nope. Never again.”
*This year, I thought both “Ben + Kate” and “The Mindy Project” were worth looking at again at the end of the year to see how they were coming along. I checked back at Christmas, but wasn’t much impressed with the change – both shows seem to be wasting a lot of actors I enjoy, like Chris Messina and Dakota Johnson. Though now that "Ben + Kate" is officially cancelled, I guess those guys are free to do other things.
With “The League,” it was the latter. But I received so many recommendations to pick the show back up that I found I couldn’t ignore it anymore. And when I finally watched another episode, I found a loose, bawdy, improvisational show completely different show from the one I’d left. The show had made the leap.
It’s this leap forward I’m referring to whenever I start getting animated about why people should watch “New Girl.” Whenever people ask me what I’m watching, that’s the first show I talk about, because it’s a show that's made the leap and hardly anyone noticed. Everyone sees the show’s original conceit (awkward hot girl moves in and baffles the three normal guys living in her apartment) and its star (professional awkward hot girl Zooey Deschanel) and assumes it’s going to be girly, faux-hipster unfunniness.
But instead, sometime last spring (specifically, the two-parter "Fancyman," if you're looking to check this out), it made the leap, and this was already a pretty good show to start with. If you haven't been following TV much lately, this will sound crazy but: it’s the best sitcom on TV.
By the time I started watching “Bent”, the show had already been officially cancelled. NBC blew threw all six episodes they’d made in three weeks, then announced that the show wouldn’t be returning. I was not shocked to hear the news, the promotion for the show had been spotty and mostly dismal, and the ratings had been correspondingly tepid.
They had their work cut out for them on this one, anyway. With a show like “Bent,” you had to sit through a few minutes to catch on to the loose, conversational rhythm of the show. But TV promotions need to be about 10 seconds long (because that’s the only way they know how to market shows), so in every ad, NBC’s marketing department would just pick a quick clip of dialogue that sounded vaguely similar to a standard set up/joke delivery, and then trot that out during commercial breaks. It’s not particularly surprising the strategy didn’t work, and “Bent” disappeared before most people noticed it had ever been.
Most of the shows I watch seem perpetually on the verge of cancellation. Every week, it’s a rallying cry on Twitter, begging for “first-watch eyeballs” (that is, non-DVRed viewing) on the latest “Community” or “Bob’s Burgers.” “Parks and Recreation” is only alive because NBC has nothing else in the tank to replace it. Some are anointing “Happy Endings” the funniest show on TV, just in time for it to likely disappear at the end of the year. “30 Rock” was, at its peak, the 62nd most watched show on television, and it signed off two weeks ago with one of the characters shouting, “that’s our show! Not a lot of people watched, but joke’s on you, because we got paid anyway!”
I’ve taken part in the begging myself. I’ve submitted a few “watch this, please!” tweets in regards to all the shows above, and I pushed for people to watch “Awake” so it wouldn’t be cancelled (neither of those things happened, sadly). I even feel kinship for campaigns to save shows I don’t particularly enjoy, like the fans who clung to “Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23” until the day it died – though mostly, I feel relieved that I don’t feel attached enough to the show to have to summon the energy to get up in arms about it.
A lot of people harp against the unfairness of it all, but I’ve come to feel the other way about it. It might be unpopular to say, but I kind of…. love following shows that could leave me at any moment.
Television is a static medium. That’s part of the appeal. We meet and fall in love with characters, and every week they return to us.
The trouble is, there’s nowhere else for that relationship to go. The show may get better for a time, and we will grow to love it more, but eventually, inevitably, it will get worse. The experience of watching it will become a chore. The network might take it off the air, or we might give up on it, but the unshakable fact of the matter is that either they will leave us, or we will leave them.
The news that “How I Met Your Mother” had been renewed for a new season would once have filled me with gladness, but now it only brings a hollow dread. As each of the last few seasons has progressed, everything I loved about the show has slowly drained away, until now I find myself unable to root for any of the characters. Each episode only damages the goodwill I have towards the show, and a new season – which I will helplessly watch at least some of – will only damage my relationship with the show more.
Compare that to the early, heady days, when the show was constantly on the brink of cancellation, and only a few CBS execs who liked the show kept it hanging around in hopes of it finally finding an audience. That was a young, alive show, something that looked utterly distinct from this plodding thing that doesn’t know what it wants to be anymore.
Shows that realize that any moment the guillotine could fall are different from their steadier counterparts. The pace is faster, the jokes packed tighter, the showrunners take more chances. I remember someone on a DVD commentary (I think it was Joss Whedon talking about “Firefly,” but who knows) saying that the threat of cancellation is bad for your health, bad for your sleep pattern, bad for your family life, bad for your marriage – but good for your show.
A show like “Modern Family” doesn’t have that attitude. It’s a massive hit, ABC counts on them to anchor a Wednesday night full of unproven comedies, and so everything they do seems safe, predictable. I saw about half-a-dozen episodes of the show this year. They were the exact same as the episodes I watched last year.
I once loved the show, but now there’s no reason to get excited when it airs, because I know there’s nothing I’ll watch that’s any different from anything I’ve seen before.
Of course, part of that may just be me. Knowing I can click away from the show and come back a few weeks later, and the show will still be there… that’s part of what a lot of people like about TV. Television is a dependable bedrock, sending you the same content every week, never messing up something you love. That’s a harder thing to do than I often admit, and it’s not like “NCIS” would be a better or more daring show if they only made ten episodes a season, anyway. It’s steady as a train, and it always arrives at the same station. One day it will be gone, but only when it has outlived its usefulness, and not before.
But a show like “Parks and Recreation,” where at any moment the powers at be can just say, “well, that’s enough of that,” and it’s abruptly gone from my life – it makes me appreciate the show that I’m watching while I’m watching it. Because I know that it’s going to leave me long before I want to leave it.
I tried doing this last year and failed miserably, as I didn’t manage to finish it in the midst of all the end-of-the-year movie reviews I was trying to do, which I also didn’t finish.
Yet another banner year in the world of the Ten-Four Blog.
Still, this is a place where I write when I feel like writing, and so if I start a list at number thirty-two and flame out at about nine, that’s just something we’ll all have to live with.
Where’d I finish in my “Top 100 Albums of All Time” list? I don’t even remember.
In any case, I ranked this list not on quality, but on the enthusiasm with which I looked forward to each episode. The episodes at the top were “drop everything, stay up late, whatever you have to do to see this,” the ones at the bottom were “let ‘em roll up on the DVR and catch ‘em on a lazy Saturday.”
I started a list for this really breaking down my relationship with each show, but my skill set isn’t much suited to that sort of thing. Instead, I’ll just start writing about things I find interesting, then put the final list up after I finish that. Otherwise, I end up so harried by the end that I reject all research and editing, and my reviews begin to look like:
“’Sherlock’ is a British show from a British channel (check on this later) that stars Benedict Cummerbund and Martin Sheen, and features unforgettable performances by guess starts like ______(check IMDB). There are only a few episodes every season, and the reason is ______ (copy Wikipedia entry). The show is very, very, very well written by Stephen (Steven?) Muffett, who we all remember from his work on “Dr. Who” and ________ (add obscure thing he’s done and a sentence that makes it sound like I’ve seen it). I enjoyed this show very much. Four starts."
Speed is not my strong suit. If I was the lead in “All The President’s Men,” I’d still be hacking away at the Nixon article.
Welcome back to my list of “The 12 Albums I Listened To The Most In 2012.” You might have been confused by Part One of this list, which talked a good deal about music without ever getting around to covering the twelve albums I listened to the most in 2012. Well, we’re getting to them today.
It took a bit longer to write this section, just because this sort of writing doesn’t come particularly naturally to me. I know that Pitchfork takes a lot of crap (go to Google, type “Pitchfork is”, then just watch what comes up) for the weird, pedantic reviews its members crank out, but its tough to write interesting pieces about music albums. It’s too easy to sound too harsh, it’s even easier to sound cloying, and after you’ve written two or three reviews almost everything sounds the same.
So I consciously tried to avoid that sort of writing as much as possible. I don’t have any idea whether these albums will be listed in the correct order of how much I actually listened to each of them, I only know that the order listed here seems right.
12. Of Monsters and Men My Head Is An Animal
If someone had told me that this album sounded like a folkier Stars record, I would’ve bought it the minute it came out.
Recommended Arcade Fire-esque “King and Lionheart” and brassy jam “Little Talks,” which I was surprised to find is a single. I don’t listen to the radio in Houston, because it’s horrendous, which is another whole discussion. I won’t get into it here.*
*Okay, fine, I will. Maybe I’m spoiled by growing up around Boston radio, but no place I’ve ever spent time has as bad a selection of radio stations as Houston. Houston is the fourth-biggest city in America, yet even when I lived in Kentucky outside of Lexington (the 62nd-largest city in America), I had more options than this. Look at this list. There are more oldies stations than there are rock and top-40 stations combined. There are ten Gospel stations, seven Tejano stations, 4 Latin/International stations, and one rock station. One. Even if you really like that station (and I don’t particularly), it doesn’t leave you a lot of choices on the dial.
This is why I wasn’t terribly bent out of shape all those times my car radio got stolen.
11. Jack’s Mannequin People and Things
A perfectly solid follow-up, but I don’t think anything Andrew McMahon (formerly of Something Corporate) records will ever match The Glass Passenger, his first record after recovering from life-threatening lymphoblastic cancer. Still, if Passenger confronted his mortality, People and Things is a much looser, exuberant piece of songwriting. I might prefer his darker stuff, but it’s still nice to see McMahon’s recovered enough to have fun again. Cancer seems like a bummer.
Recommended Cheerful single “My Racing Thoughts,” along with the more anthemic piano-rock aims of “Casting Lines.”
10. Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros Here
How much do these guys hate The Lumineers? They got here first, and those guys stole all their thunder, and all their commercial money. Of course, Sharpe’s band is much more playful, and their rootsy, gospel/folk sound feels more earned, if decidedly less accessible. That said, this album’s catchier and more immediate than something this deliberately obscure really has any right to be.
Recommended Low-key Springsteenesque album opener “Man on Fire,” late-sixties folk jam, “Fiya Wata.”
9. Jake Armerding Jake Armerding
Well, this album is much older than last year – Amerding released it in 2003, I just only started playing it after my dad shipped down his copy. It’s very unusual for me to make music discoveries through my parents at this point – my dad, for example, listens to a combination of sports talk radio and silence in his car, so he’s not normally a person I’d turn to in this regard. But Armerding had played a set at the family camp my parents visit in the summer, and they’d been enamored enough to pick up a CD.
Armerding makes most of his living as a string player behind acts like Josh Ritter and Nickel Creek, so the songs on his own release are elegantly trimmed with orchestration. The album’s got a gentle songwriter vibe to it, with a twinge of both country and folk (boy, there’s that word again), and a literary bent. The album’s opener revolves around the myth of Icarus, while the second track recallsIthaca – the home of Odysseus, rather than the city in New York. But his songs are rarely cryptic, they’re plaintive rather than esoteric; sad, and full of old memories.
Recommended The bouncy, harmony-packed opener “Destiny’s Flight” and mournful recollection “You Took Me In.”
8. Andrew Osenga Leonard, the Lonely Astronaut
I’m a sucker for concept albums, and Osenga’s one of my favorite songwriters, so I was in the tank for this one from the get go. Apparently Osenga always wanted to write a whole album about a man who lives in space alone (why not?), and one day got up the gumption to start a Kickstarter so he could build a spaceship inside his recording studio to write and record the album in. Supporters got shirts that said “I Helped Send Andrew Osenga To Space,” and several of them came in to help him construct the Kubrickian-looking room he made the album in.
For a concept album, it’s unusually diverse, with songs connected more by theme than by sound. As the album progresses, it becomes less a story about a man living out in the nothingness, and more about looking back on a life with real uncertainty of whether you’ve lived it the way you were supposed to - with the heavy knowledge that the wisdom you gained does almost nothing for you now.
Recommended “Brushstroke” builds its story slowly through a thudding acoustic line and a doleful whistle, while “Firstborn Son” transitions gradually from quiet recollection to gravelly rocker.
7. Joe Pug The Great Despiser
I can’t recall exactly how I discovered Joe Pug – it might’ve been Noisetrade, or a local music blog, or just a recommendation off Derek Webb’s Twitter. Either way, I felt intrigued enough to buy the LP right off the bat, which is unusual for me. Usually I dance around the edges of new acts for a long stretch, relying on links to new songs or free downloads of their older albums until I’m invested. However, my iTunes is bare of any Joe Pug music other than this album (though it won’t be for too long), so it looks like I dove right in.
Pug’s a singer-songwriter, slow and steady, with folk and rock and Americana roots (wow, it turns out I really listened to a lot of folk music this year. I had not realized that until just now). While it’s not unheard of for an occasional track to pack in some wailing electric, like the dull howl of the title song, the album mostly tracks in quiet moments. If you’re someone like me (which fortunately you’re not, but still) who becomes entranced by the subtleties on a Damien Jurado or Jakob Dylan or Civil Wars record, the album’s worth checking out.
Recommended Pug hides a muffled bass line behind a simple acoustic pluck in the Americana-laden “Hymn #76,” before cranking up buzzing guitars on the bitter “Neither Do I Need A Witness.”
6. The Killers Battle Born
I like it when a band is coming back from an album viewed as a disappointment. Sure, sometimes they get concerned they’ve wandered too afield, and their next album is too careful, a cautious apology note. But sometimes the band gets their dander up and comes back out guns blazing. “Oh, you forgot about us? Well, wait until you hear this song! I cranked all the amps up to eleven and then ran them through other amps cranked to eleven and then I spent six days recording the electric parts while submerged underwater and screaming.” I like a band with some demons on their shoulders.
Brandon Flowers was clearly aware of the blowback from the band’s mildly experimental Day & Age, and Battle Born sounds like a return to form. Which means it sounds like someone went into the desert to record a bunch of Bruce Springsteen songs. Weirdly, I mean that as a huge compliment.
Recommended The first four songs Battle Born create their own amazing little mini-album. Try those first – particularly the Tom Pettyesque “Runaways.”
5. Matthew Perryman Jones Land of the Living
You’ve heard me shill for this guy on this site before, but this album’s different. Jones gathered the players he wanted for the record and retreated to a remote recording space, with songs but no direction. Ryan Booth shot a short piece out there with the band about the experience that’s worth checking out. Both Jones and his producer, Cason Cooley (who is coincidentally from Andrew Osenga’s old band, The Normals) were adamant about building the sound around the musicians and the environment. As Jones notes, it’s built around the idea that “we’re just gonna play, and see what the band comes up with.”
The result is a very unified sound, something assembled from end to end as one consistent piece. It’s been said too many times by people who like to complain about things how digital music has ruined the album experience, which is why I love it when an artist goes to extremes to fight back against the trend.*
Recommended: The elegiac “O Theo” and the Normals-ish “Waking The Dead” (seriously, those background vocals. It’s eerie).
4. fun. Some Nights
I was on Twitter during the Grammys and, man, do a lot of people hate fun.. I’m not sure if it’s their prevalence on the radio (there aren’t a lot of other pop-rock songs they’re playing these days, I’ve noticed*), or the unfortunate capitalization/punctuation situation with their name, but there’s a real bitterness there.
*The situation in rock is so bad right now that Fall Out Boy reunited and named their album Save Rock and Roll. Yes, America, things are so bad right now that Pete Wentz decided to come and rescue us.
I don’t get it. Fun. is… I don’t want to say it. They’re, y’know, enjoyable. Agreeable. A good time. You know what I mean.
The album’s excellent, and inventive from start to finish, so much so that the best song might actually be the bonus track (“Out On The Town”). It’s packed to the gills with hooks. It’s the sort of bright, fresh pop-rock record that’s both popular and good. Snark all you want, but that doesn’t happen often.
Recommended: The album’s singles (‘We Are Young,” “Some Nights,” “Carry On”) are all pretty indicative of the rest of the album’s contents, but the dancey “All Alone” and the harmony-laden tattoo drumming of “Out On The Town” also stand out.
3. John Mayer Born and Raised
Boy, speaking of things people hate! Mayer really may be a special case. He’s the only artist I can think of whose music has gotten markedly better while people’s opinion of him has correspondingly descended. Well, maybe Chris Brown.
It’s funny to remember what a huge presence on Twitter Mayer was five years ago. He had 4 million followers (a figure that, at the time, really meant something). Then after a disastrous interview where he talked about racism and past relationships in ill-advisedly open terms, Twitter destroyed him (“John Mayer said the n-word!”). He’s never recovered.
Not that he’s done a great job of rehabbing his image in the meantime (seriously, Hollywood men, if you want people to like you, don’t break up with Taylor Swift. It will not end well).
At least he keeps upping his game as a recording artist. Born and Raised may be his best, an album that proved a long time coming – it was delayed almost a year after Mayer developed growths on his vocal cords, a problem that also forced him to cancel his tour after the growths cropped up again. The time away seems to have done him good. Mayer noted that Born and Raised was “his most honest album,” which for Mayer, is really saying something. “Honesty” never seemed his problem nearly as much as “ego.”
What sticks out to me is how natural this record sounds. Mayer’s spent his whole career trying on hats – acoustic songwriter, rock singer, blues guitarist, jazz enthusiast – and it’s satisfying to see all of those things mesh together so neatly. Maybe he just stopped trying so hard.
Recommended The 70’s-era lite rock of “Queen of California,” bluesy jam “Something Like Olivia,” and the Harry Chapin storytelling of “Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967” (a story told with such expressive detail I Googled “Walt Grace Submarine True Story.” Which is impressive, and also embarrassing for me).
2. David Ramirez Apologies
David Ramirez isn’t like other songwriters. It’s possible he owns a very healthy ego, but he couldn’t be less self-aggrandizing in his songwriting. His own verses seem to hold him in perpetual low esteem, a disheveled mess not much worthy of writing about. The album’s titled appropriately because Ramirez doesn’t seem to be in good standing with anyone, least of all himself. ‘Apologies are all I have to offer,’ he sighs on “Friends and Family.” ‘I wear them like jewelry, but I ain’t fooling no one.’
Most artists of Ramirez’s type, with his low growl and old country swagger, sound like imitations of realer men, but these songs sound thoroughly authentic. If Ramirez hasn’t gone through each of these moments a thousand times over, then he’s one hell of a liar. For all I know, that might be what he’s apologizing for.
Recommended “An Introduction” recalls a childhood search for God in churches with a bitter snarl (“it smelled like a hospital, but no one was getting cured.”), while “Stick Around” laments his inability to put down roots.
By the way, the video? Also shot by Ryan Booth. Small world.
1. Tyler Lyle The Golden Age & The Silver Girl
This album actually came out the year before, but I didn’t pick it up until the beginning of last year. Which makes me feel like a bad old friend, since Tyler had lived a few doors down the hall from me in college.
In my defense, I didn’t think of him as a musician at the time. Everyone on the hall had an acoustic guitar (which they all played constantly and at all hours), and I think I only saw Tyler plucking away at his maybe half a dozen times. If you’d asked me to rank the musicians on our hallway, I don’t know if he would’ve made the top 10.
Tyler’s interests seemed more diverse. Our conversations were spotted with philosophical musings and thoughtful, atypical takes on whatever the subject was at hand – from both of us.* He was the only person I could drag with me to see David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, and the only person in the theater besides me who liked it.
*Okay, only from Tyler. I generally contributed nothing.
So when I heard from a friend that they were really enjoying the Tyler Lyle album, it made me sit up straight, because:
a. I didn’t know Tyler had an album (Tyler and I lost touch several years ago) b. The person talking to me had never met Tyler, and had no idea who he was.
Now, there are a couple different standards for albums recorded by people you know.
Level One – Albums so bad that you have to tell your friend, so they can start to get a grip on reality. This is a horror show. While it’s true that a real friend stabs you in the front, it’s also generally true that you don’t get to keep the friend later, and often you end up getting stabbed yourself. I’ve gotten some very honest feedback about my personality in these moments.
Level Two – Albums you pretend you haven’t heard yet so you don’t have to talk to your friend about them. Hopefully, they aren’t too aggressive in chasing down your opinion. You can also pretend to have gone deaf, but that’s a very long con indeed, and I’ve never found it to be worth the trouble.
Level Three – Albums you encourage your friends about, because it’s clearly important to them. Hey, maybe the album’s not great. Maybe it’s pretty lousy. But it looks like they’re having a lot of fun, and that’s what’s important, as long as they’re having fun a good distance away from you.
Level Four – Albums with legitimate good elements to them, where you feel the need to give constructive feedback, hoping to encourage them to better things. This is a mistake. No one like constructive feedback. Even the “going deaf” strategy is stronger than this one.
Level Five – Albums that are surprisingly good, and you offer lots of compliments, because your expectations were so much lower. Tread carefully. These people sense the careful way you couch your adulation. “It’s the best song I’ve heard all morning!”
Level Six – Albums so good that you keep complimenting them so your friend knows that you’re not just gassing them up because they’re your friend. It usually takes six or seven tries before the friend realizes, “hey, this guy honestly really likes my record!” Try not to go past seven, though, because there’s a Single White Female line you’re gonna end up passing at some point.
Level Seven – Albums that become your favorite album, without qualifications. I’d never reached this level before. But I honestly didn’t put this album at the top of this list because I used to know Tyler. Tyler’s record is good.
It was played on NPR’s “World Café” and recommended on “All Songs Considered.” He had songs that showed up on “Hart of Dixie” and “Private Practice.” It’s not just me.
This was the album I listened to the most this year by a landslide. This was the album I recommended to people the most. This is easily – easily – my favorite album of the year.
Recommended Lo-fi rocker “The Golden Age and the Silver Girl,” dreamlike ballad “Things Are Better,” and brass-packed reflective howl of “Love Is Not Enough.” Or just download the damn album.
This music video (which picks up as it goes) is also by an old friend of mine from college, Aaron Champion.
My buddy Brandon dropped me a line this afternoon, asking for a list of my three favorite action films of all time (along with extensive reasoning for each selection) for a paper he’s writing on… movie criticism or something. He wasn’t specific. It’s very possible the whole thing is a hoax.
I figured if I were to make such a list, I might as well copy it over to a blog post and finagle some use out of it. Especially since it’s a question I’d never covered before on this site. Or even, come to think of it, ever asked myself.
Three's a small number, so I debated the topic for a couple hours before landing on a trio of films I felt good about. Just missing the cut: The Matrix, Star Trek, and Casino Royale all received serious consideration, but I finally decided fell just outside the “Top 3” threshold. I also considered adding Empires Strikes Back or The Fellowship of the Ring, but it didn’t feel right to label either just an “action movie.” The Hurt Locker was considered and rejected for similar reasons, and also because I admire the film much more than I consider it a favorite of mine.
All right, in no particular order.
Gladiator(2000) Gladiator was the first R-rated movie I snuck into a theater to see. My buddy James and I planned the trip for weeks, huddling together in study halls, whispering excitedly, imagining the spectacle. We met at ten in the morning on the first day of summer vacation, bought tickets to Dinosaur, and with a few cautious glances about, slipped quietly through the door.
Considering my alarmingly lofty expectations for the film, it’s all the more impressive how easily Gladiator cleared them. But the film succeeds on every level – as an action film, a period drama, as a treatise on honor and bravery.
It’s the film that first introduced me to Ridley Scott. Fans of Ridley’s work are supposed to anoint Alien or Blade Runner his greatest work (a few film snobs will point to The Duelists, but even they know they’re lying), but I think it’s Gladiator. That film is the reason I applied for an internship at Scott’s company the first week I arrived in Los Angeles.
It won five Academy Awards, including the big one, Best Picture, but I put forth that its most impressive win was Russell Crowe for Best Actor. Crowe barely raises his voice above a humble mutter the whole film, but his performance is still so memorable that most people can quote chunks of it verbatim off the tops of their heads (“…father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, and I will have my vengence, in this life or the next.”). Tom Hanks spent a year losing 50 pounds and brought a volleyball to life in Castaway and still couldn’t take the Oscar away from him.
There’s so much I love about the movie – Hans Zimmer’s brassy, thundering score, Joaquim Phoenix's sniveling turn as the usurping Emperor, John Mathieson’s epic, bronze-hued visuals. But the thing that elevates it onto this list is that while most action films consider themselves lucky to have a plot that’s even interesting enough to keep you in your theater seat until the next fight sequence, there’s no piece of Gladiator that isn’t wholly compelling.
Raiders of the Lost Ark(1981) Some movies age at an incredible rate. Special effects, film stock, stylistic choices – these things change so quickly that films from ten years ago already seem outdated. Heck, The Phantom Menace looked like a TV movie before its sequel was even released.
Raiders of the Lost Ark hasn’t aged a day.
On one hand, it’s easy to credit Harrison Ford for this. The sardonic, knowing way he played Indy, making him the idol of teenage boys the world over. Or Spielberg, for creating a giant action movie entirely on real sets. Even as visual effects improve, nothing compares with real life.
But I think what's lasting about it is just that Raiders is imbued with a sense of adventure rarely found in cinema. Movies don't swash and buckle like they should, when they do, people stand up and take notice. Look at Michael Curtiz's The Adventures of Robin Hood (the one with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone). The movie came out eighty years ago, and it's yet to land a single bad review on Rotten Tomatoes.
Adventure - and real adventurers - stand out. It’s one thing to have a hero who daringly runs amidst explosions and gunfire. It’s yet another to have him hunt for golden treasure and ancient mystery in the shadows of old gods with a wry smile on his face.
The Dark Knight (2008) It’s actually a little shocking it took this long to get a Batman film like this on the screen. Filmmakers love to explore the darkness of human souls, and Batman is a character who treasures darkness. Superman can come out in the sunlight because people adore and admire him, but Batman has to keep to the night. In the harsh light of day, the line between hero and vigilante gets much sharper.
For decades, Batman shows and movies embraced campiness because everyone assumed no one wanted to stare too deeply into the blackness of a man who lived his life for only revenge. We like our heroes a little tarnished, but not that tarnished. What Christopher Nolan gave us was something that seems even now unpalatable to modern audiences: a study of the grey line that separates a do-gooder from a madman.
Heath Ledger received so many accolades for the film in part because it’s the role that killed him, but mostly because he made the Joker a character that’s broad, over the top, and totally recognizable. There’s a scene where he kills a man with only a pencil, and yet that’s not part of the film that most makes me shudder. Inside a maelstrom of wicked insanity, there’s a kernel of our own selves, a dim, cracked mirror.
In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne choose the bat because it’s a symbol, fear in the darkness. In The Dark Knight, he has to choose a darker symbol still: sin. He takes the wrongs of another on his back so that the cause can remain unblemished, so that the city he loves will believe in goodness even if they see only evil in him.
Unsettling symbols like that aren’t found often in movies at all, never mind populist action fare. How is it possible that a movie this dark made a billion dollars at the box office? Maybe moviegoers want truth more than Hollywood suspects. But probably only when it shows up riding a cool motorcycle.
