Category: Broken Girl Media

Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming

“At Your Funeral” – Saves The Day

I sing a lot. In the shower. Out of the shower. Pretty much all the time. The response to this behavior has varied; I’ve made strangers fall in love with me while listening to me through a shared wall, and I’ve made people who love me want to scream at me to please shut the fuck up already.

Either way, it means that existing in my orbit requires an embrace of my musical taste, which I would describe as “‘70/‘90s rock-pop fusion and large swaths of the Billy Joel songbook”.

With that said, it’s funny how much of what I call “‘90s music” was actually released somewhere between 2000 and 2003. To me, Saves The Day’s “At Your Funeral” belongs alongside Nada Surf’s “Popular” and Marcy Playground’s “Sex & Candy” in the timeline, but it was actually released in 2001.

Like most of my favorite songs, it’s musically cheerful and lyrically morbid, bubbling over with disturbing imagery. (It’s probably for the best that the video doesn’t even try to go there.) This will no doubt come as a shock to many of you, but turns out, I’m fascinated by things that seem bright and appealing on the surface while being depraved and gross on the inside.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

I’ve had a shitty couple weeks: got sick, managed to hurt myself while sick —you blood fetishists would have loved it, but I was less amused— and have generally felt like warmed-over garbage.

So instead of dirty stories and provocative commentary from me, you get more pop culture bullshit. Congratulations!

  • Okay, so MoviePass may be part of a worrying trend of analytics-driven business models, but I’ve got to tell you, they’ve nailed the customer experience. I’ve now seen Infinity War and Solo, and I’ll probably see Deadpool 2 before the week is out… all for a total of $9.95. It only adds one smartphone screen tap to the ticketing process, and I was honestly surprised by how smoothly things went. Granted, they’ll probably be out of business in a year, but for right now, the service is kind of awesome.
  • Speaking of Solo: I didn’t hate it, but I’m glad I saw it for free. Emilia Clarke was a small actress in every sense, Woody Harrelson was serviceable but predictable, and more than anything, it turns out I’m just not interested in seeing the universe (re-)expanded. The Star Wars brand of fluffy-nonsense science-fantasy just doesn’t lend itself to world building; it’s a franchise that has looked relentlessly backward from it’s very beginning, and if you want me invested in anything beyond one particular family of space-samurai, then you need to be looking forward.
  • Speaking of which: The Expanse lives on, and I’m not cancelling my Amazon Prime account, even with the price hike. I’m not in love with where the current season is heading —I fear I’ve seen the last of my giant, beloved Bobbie— but The Expanse provides more food-for-thought in the background of its scenes than the Star Wars universe as a whole.
  • (With that said, thank you Kasdans, for retroactively rationalizing “in under 12 parsecs”, something that really pissed me off when I was twelve. Although now that I think about it, isn’t it weird that there’s now a family of men whose primary work in this lifetime has been making another writer’s work seem less shitty? There’s something sad and/or beautiful about that.)
  • (And with that said, both Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover are quite adept at recreating the vibes of other actors’ performances; I think Glover comes off better because Lando is written as Lando, while Han is written like an awkward amalgam of motivations that come off like continuity patches rather than human desires and decisions.)
  • Of course, the most mind-expanding entertainment available right now is Legion, which long ago devoured its own source material and bloomed into a metaphysical exploration of consciousness, causality, and the way great male minds torture the women who adore them. Also —and I can’t say this often enough— I love Syd. I want her to be my TV girlfriend. (“He’s my man.” “I’m. On. Your. Side. Asshole!” Good stuff.)
  • We rediscovered Reno 911! last week, and I couldn’t be happier. I loved The State and Wet Hot American Summer as much as everyone else, but my favorite State sub-group will always be Lennon/Garant/Kenney. (I’m a Cleese/Palin guy, too, for the record.)
  • Arrested Development is back, but I’m still only halfway through a Fateful Consequences (re-?)viewing, so I haven’t yet indulged in season 5. I clearly lack George-Michael’s impeccable sense of timing, if not his overt sexuality.

Everyone’s freaking out about Brooklyn Nine-Nine being cancelled, and all I can do is shrug; it was by far Michael Schur’s weakest show, and it’s kind of amazing it survived as long as it did. I basically have no desire to see Andy Samberg when he’s not standing next to Justin Timberlake, and I vaguely dislike the Peretti family in general —I’m giving Jordan Peele a pass on this— so it’ll be nice not having to endure them. I watched the show for Andre Braugher and Joe Lo Truglio —Boyle is Joe’s best work since The State— but they’ll both find work elsewhere.

(If only NBC would notice that ‘90s nostalgia is a big thing, Braugher is free, Clark Johnson and Kyle Secor are busy-but-gettable, Melissa Leo and Giancarlo Esposito are willing to pick up a check for crap like Wayward Pines and Once Upon A Time, and both Belzer and Yaphet Kotto are still alive… hell, even Daniel Baldwin hasn’t managed to kill himself yet. Throw some HBO-level money at David Simon, and I’ll bet he’d be willing to write Braugher another Emmy. It’s fate, people. Make it happen.)

Now, if you want to get me agitated over a cancellation, just announce that, say, The Expanse has been axed… wait, what? Are you fucking kidding me? Excuse me while I root through my closet for a torch and pitchfork. It took SyFy seven years to find a real replacement for BSG, and they give up this quickly? I’m going to miss everything about it, but especially Shohreh Aghdashloo and Frankie Adams— Frankie’s my second-favorite giraffe in the world, right behind @domestic–doll and right ahead of Gwendoline Christie.

(As an aside: being a cishet white guy, I don’t usually make my viewing choices based on diversity, but wow… cancelling arguably the two most diverse shows on television on the same fucking day? That’s not a good look, Hollywood/Vancouver.)

“Hello Mary” — David Baerwald

David Baewarld – “Hello Mary”

So what’re ya drinkin’?
No, I gave it up.
It was nothing like that,
just enough became enough.
Tell me about your life,
tell me about your man.
No, I was only curious,
I was thinkin’ you’d understand.
Okay, we won’t talk about your man.

I enjoyed this song when I first heard it in 1990, but it took ages to fully grow into it. For the longest time, my greatest appreciation was technical; I fell in love with the idea of telling stories with half the pieces missing, a love that echoes today in most of the shit I write.

But loving it for what it’s saying took years. In my twenties, it just felt like more Boomer nostalgia… and to a degree, that’s what it is. (Baerwald has a whole cluster of songs about old friends and lovers reconvening to celebrate/mourn the past.)

Now, though, I see it’s also an ode to the death of memory and the life of narrative. it’s about that moment when you realize you’ve lived long enough to no longer truly remember the major experiences of your life, and all you have left are the stories you’ve told about them.

I just called
to check and see
if my memory’s correct
and you mean a thing to me.

Infinity War

 Every now and then, I take the dog for a walk in the rain, and I’ll find the trail is empty… the side streets are vacant… even the birds are quiet. The world is still and peaceful beneath my feet, like all the life has been drained from it. And in those moments, I think, “Thanos had a point.”

Now, thanks to Avengers: Infinity War, I can share that thought, confident that most people will get it. Having my childhood obsessions consume the mainstream will never stop feeling weird.

Now, obviously, growing up, “my” Thanos was this guy:

I couldn’t precisely remember why he made such an impression on me, so I dug it up to refresh myself. It seems to come down to two things.

First: I was in grade school and still wanted to be an astronaut, so the fact that Thanos had a mile-wide spaceship that looked like the result of a TIE fighter fucking a Borg cube was pretty much the most awesome thing ever.

But what really stuck in my mind was what happened to Thanos at the end. (Spoiler alert for a forty year old comic book you’re never going to read.)

Writer/artist Jim Starlin makes it clear a few pages later that Thanos is alive in there, encased in stone, unable to do anything but scream through eternity.

The mere thought of such a fate severely fucked with my head. I don’t know how many times I stared at that page over the years, disturbed to my pre-pubescent core. Of course, then I became an adult, found out about locked-in syndrome, and realized that life is so much more cruel than art.

As for the movie…

Was that a movie? Don’t get me wrong; I loved it, whatever it was. I’m just not sure it’s a “movie”.

Movies introduce characters, establish situations, raise stakes, and provide resolution. Infinity War says “fuck all that”, on a scale never before imagined. It doesn’t begin and it doesn’t end; it’s a two-and-a-half hour burst of… everything. I’m this close to calling it something new, it’s own kind of thing. A kind of cross-cultural art that can only be created by a multi-billion dollar organization, that can only exist because hundreds of people devoted thousands of their work-hours to build a cinematic Skinner Box that never stops doling out yummy pellets of fun and melodrama.

I’m almost prepared to call it the first true capitalist masterpiece.

For better and worse.

Any Wednesday (1966)

From my “shit you people have never heard of” list:

Released in 1966, Any Wednesday was already old by the time I saw it as a kid. One of our local TV station managers apparently felt that he needed to squeeze every dime from the licensing fee he paid for the movie, because he ran it in the afternoon, every Saturday for a month. By the end of that month, AW was burned into my consciousness, and my pre-teen self was in love with Jane Fonda.

What’s weird is that, as ancient as it is, it ticks a lotta kinky Tumblr boxes. Jane is a sugar baby, living in a fab kitschy-arty apartment paid for by Jason Robards’ philandering CEO-with-an-age-gap. He’s domineering, patronizing, and dismissive, but he buys her pretty things and calls her “baby”, so she’s content. When Dean Jones’ version of Captain Save-A-Ho shows up, he sets out to undermine her autonomy and make her feel like a helpless gutter slut for taking what she’s been given. Hijinks ensue.

Is it funny? If you’ve got a taste for Broadway farce and Jane Fonda in her wide-eyed, “oh golly gee!” mode, then yes. It probably helps if you grew up watching Dean Jones in all those old “Herbie” and “Shaggy Dog” movies, I suppose. (Dean Jones was the ‘60s version of Christopher Gorham, but with better comic timing.) If two fast-talking white dudes waging a relentlessly polite, passive-aggressive war of words over a bimbo strikes you as amusing, you’ll have a good time.

Of course, I don’t know if there’s even a point in mentioning any of this… I doubt it’s streaming anywhere, and if it isn’t streaming, it doesn’t exist to you people. But you can buy a cheap digital copy from Amazon, if you’re so inclined.

Pop Culture Stuff

  • UnReal is special to me for many reasons, among the biggest being that I identify with Quinn and Rachel more than all of the male characters combined. Shit, I’d be content to be Quinn, and there are only a handful of fictional women who meet that standard. If I could teleport myself into a new career with a snap of my fingers, I’d be show-running The Bachelor and torturing pretty girls for a living.
  • IZombie is back, which makes me happy. Rose McIver’s face is the round, button-nosed essence of adorable, and the supporting cast is stronger than anything outside of an ensemble like The Magicians. Making everything better, Rachel Bloom made a cameo as an involuntary brain-donor this week, which upped the adorability through the roof. (As an aside, If you’d asked me ten years ago which Michalka sister would grow up to be “the hot one”, I would have said AJ. But damn, Aly. Damn. Also if you’d asked me ten years ago if I’d watch a show featuring the guy from One Tree Hill that isn’t Chad Michael Murray, I’d have laughed.)
  • While I’m thinking about iZombie… so both Saoirse Ronan and Rose McIver are in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones? How did this escape my attention? I skipped it at the time due to all the lukewarm-to-negative buzz… I wonder if it’s actually that bad, or if people were just all Jackson’d out in 2009? I haven’t liked anything he’s made since Heavenly Creatures, so it didn’t seem like much of a loss.
  • Altered Carbon was a giant, watchable mess; lots of big ideas, but no real payoffs. Meanwhile, everyone made a big deal out of the show’s nudity, but c’mon… it’s mostly just Joel Kinnaman and Martha Higareda striking sexy superhero poses with their clothes off. It’s aesthetically pleasing and all, but not hot. And as much as I wanted to like Dollhouse, it’s time we let Dichen Lachman go, or limit her to roles where she’s not required to read lines.
  • Thor: Ragnarok is now officially the first Marvel or DC movie I’ve enjoyed since the original Guardians of the Galaxy. And just to be clear, I would watch Tessa Thompson —who will always be “Veronica Mars’ Tessa Thompson” to me— in a Valkyrie movie ten times over before I would sit through one second of a Wonder Woman sequel.
  • Season two of Jessica Jones is going along fine; I’m only a few eps in, but I’m hopeful it’s going somewhere good. It’s still a little awkward, though… I try not to get all Cranky Fanboy about casting choices, but it bugs me that Krysten Ritter’s physical presence automatically changes Jessica from the dumpy, drunk, depressed schlub of the source material into a leggy model in tight jeans. And I love Krysten Ritter, for the record… Don’t Trust The B should still be on the air. I just think Jessica should be kinda short and generally wearing unflattering clothes.
  • The Last Jedi was good. I enjoyed every minute of it. And Mark Hamill actually seemed at-home on a movie screen for the first time in his life. Rian Johnson is clearly the 21st century’s Miracle Worker.
  • It was boring, because like Stranger Things, it’s too busy being about the ‘80s to be interesting. The ‘80s were terrible, people.
  • Legion is back. I have no idea what’s going on, and I don’t care. I just want more of it.
  • The Expanse is back, and honestly, I wish the entire show was built around Bobbie and Chrisjen. The rest is merely okay.
  • With the third season finale of The Magicians, I’m left thinking (a) that Felicia Day, while lovable, is not a fit for every franchise, (b) the show needs to find a way to make Quentin non-annoying again, and © as a plot device, Fillory is getting old. Also, I know I should be applauding her growth and inner peace, but I miss Sexy, Broken Julia from season one.
  • For the first time ever, I agree with Ronnie… Sam, you should have come back. It’s still fun having the Jersey Shore idiots back without her, but given that Ron is going to spend the entire show talking about her anyway, she might as well be there and collect the check. It’s interesting, though, how the relative maturation of most of the cast is making it clear that Vinny —once the most reasonable person in the group— is his own kind of dickish creep.
  • Last year, we decided to sit down and go through all eight or nine seasons of both Modern Family and The Middle. And I swear to you, no one is more surprised than me to learn that I’d rather watch the latter than the former… I’m sorry, but Sue is just the best. I’m only pissed that they’re all the way to the end of their run, and there hasn’t been a single Scrubs cast cameo other than Dave Foley. What, someone couldn’t throw a few bucks at McGinley to show up for five minutes to play an obnoxious high school basketball coach or something?
  • I’m glad Grant Morrison was able to get Happy! made. It’s gross and weird and I’m shocked it has any audience at all, but it’s very, very good.

Now that most of the run of Forensic Files is on Amazon Prime Video, we’re re-watching the really old stuff that we haven’t seen since the ‘90s, and wow, the tone is different.

In the ep we just watched, the narrator keeps referring to “choke and dump” murders and the “choke and dump” site, which feels like phrasing that wouldn’t fly today. And while the narration simply says that the victim died by slowly bleeding out from vaginal lacerations, the re-creation shows the perp with one arm drenched in blood, like he fisted her to death.

It Was A Different Time.