You all know him of course. He usually plays lawyers, or doctors, a figure of middling authority. Perhaps he is so easy to cast in these roles because his bald head and spectacles suggest he is one of life’s middle managers.
Despite his vague appearance, Tobolowsky is something of an earworm, instantly familiar having appeared in over a hundred films and television shows since the early 80’s. Have a gander – Thelma and Louise; Basic Instinct; Seinfeld; CSI – Miami; Boston Legal; Freddy Got Fingered; Malcolm in the Middle; Garfield; Curb Your Enthusiasm; Deadwood; Heroes; Perry Mason; LA Law…
The list continues to grow, with a starring role in 1976’s Keep My Grave Open setting his career in motion.
Yet it was for his memorable scenes with Bill Murray in Groundhog Day that he is most remembered. Ned Ryerson, the insufferably annoying insurance salesman.
Ned… Ryerson. “Needlenose Ned”? “Ned the Head”? C’mon, buddy. Case Western High. Ned Ryerson: I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Bing! Ned Ryerson: got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn’t graduate? Bing, again. Ned Ryerson: I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple times until you told me not to anymore? Well?
What strikes me most about Tobolowsky is the genuine pride he feels for his career of walk-on bit-parts. He takes the time to fashion something memorable out of a cameo, without having the advantage of celebrity or a striking face. His scenes in Memento as Sammy – a key figure in helping us understand the dilemma of the protagonist, despite his story occuring in flashback – are heartbreaking and touching all at once. Then there’s Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party a documentary that focuses on the actor himself. He obviously enjoys a reputation as being a safe pair of hands, one who won’t steal the spotlight from the glitzy celebs, but at the same time will make a scene work and add that something extra.
Bringing us bang up to date is his performance as the music teacher cum registered sex offender Sandy Ryerson in Glee. Is Sandy a cousin of Ned’s? Or perhaps a long-lost brother who fled a dreary life in Punxsutawney for a glamorous existence treading the boards….as a music teacher in William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio. His delivery of the line ‘Kill yourself!’ has had me chuckling for days.
Actor in a Supporting Role – Christopher Plummer/ Christoph Waltz(It’s the Battle of the Christophers!)
Actress in a Leading Role – Sandra Bullock
Actress in a Supporting Role – Mo’Nique (in the bag – see Robert Downey’s speech from Tropic Thunder)
Animated Feature Film – Up
Art Direction/ Cinematography/ Sound Editing/ Sound Mixing/ Visual Effects – Avatar (sfx extravaganzas sweep the techies)
Costume Design – Coco Before Chanel (It’s Chanel!!)
Directing – Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron’s too much of an ego, Reitman’s too callow, Tarantino’s too much….no one knows who Lee Daniels was and we don’t wanna go give a social realist director a big head. That’s not what the Oscars are about)
Documentary (Feature) – The Cove (those poor widdle dolphins! Plus it replaces the need for liberal America to actually *do* something about Japanese animal cruelty that could lead to an international incident)
Film Editing – Inglourious Basterds
Foreign Language Film - “The White Ribbon” – Germany (Hollywood pretends it ‘gets’ Haneke)
Makeup - “Star Trek” (see Avatar and ‘techie’, principle)
Music (Original Score) “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (Which I want to win – but it won’t)
Music (Original Song) - “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” from “Crazy Heart” Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett
Best Picture “The Hurt Locker”/“Up in the Air” Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman, Producers (too close for me to call)
Short Film (Animated) “A Matter of Loaf and Death” Nick Park (darker than previous entries, but still excellent)
Writing (Adapted Screenplay) “In the Loop” Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche (Iannucci is the voicepiece for Liberal British guilt vis a vis the war atm)
Writing (Original Screenplay) - “The Hurt Locker” Written by Mark Boal (it comes as a shock to everyone that films are ‘written’!)
Throwing aside everything I’ve said…the Oscars are not about merit, or what are the ‘best’ films. They’re about promoting cinema. No film this year has done more to promote the idea of visiting the cinema than Avatar. It’ll make a killing, there can be no doubt.
The debut novel of Austin Grossman is a strange beast. It’s a novel that at its heart is a love letter to comic books, the bastard cousin of the more refined print-based artform, criticised in the past as a childish interest suitable only for illiterates. Grossman himself is feted as a newcomer to genre fiction, although a quick wiki reveals his father is a poet, his mother a novelist, his twin brother also a writer, his sister a scultor – and Grossman himself well-known in the computer game industry for his involvement in
Ultima Underworld II
System Shock
Deus Ex
Thief: Deadly Shadows
Tomb Raider: Legend
Plot based Role-Playing Games for the most part, hardly the usual first-time author juvenalia. He’s even written for the New York Times! Then there’s the promotional artwork of Bryan Hitch that features in the book, the comic-book artist credited with inventing the ‘widescreen’, aesthetic that has allowed comics to further ape the visual excesses of big budget summer blockbuster movies. Not the typical amateur cover art then.
Thankfully Soon I Will Be Invincible carries the weight of expectation ably. Its knowing title is a clue to the awareness Grossman brings to the comic book tropes on show. The story focuses on two first-person narratives. Doctor Impossible, a twelve-time imprisoned supervillain who has a horrible habit of blurting his secret plans and blames his villainous behaviour on a personality disorder; and Fatale, a new superheroine plagued by self-doubt in the typical Modern Age fashion, whose tragic origin allows for that other great trope of contemporary comics, the fetishizing of the female body courtesy of her cybernetic implants. Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven-of-Nine meets Brian Michael Bendis’ Alias.
Doctor Impossible, the arch supervillain who just will not quit trying to take over the world, is the stronger character of the two. Given the title I suspect the original draft may have solely focused on his attempts to defeat the hero team The Champions. Perhaps Grossman felt this was too narrow. In any case courtesy of the two POV characters we follow the progression of the plot, with the heroes attempting to stop Doctor Impossible following his latest jailbreak and solve the mystery of their colleague CoreFire’s disappearance.
We are invited to sympathize with the villainous Doc, despite his continued efforts to takeover the world. Even he is unable to explain exactly why he acts as he does. He appears to be of the opinion that his vast intellect actually drives him to be evil, that to see the world as he does predestines supervillainy. In that he follows the Stan Lee tradition of villains who are at times misunderstood, occasionally even noble. Doctor Doom may be a totalitarian dictator whose hatred of Reed Richards is spurred on by vanity – but he also is a bereft son, whose study of the occult was undertaken to rescue his gypsy mother from demons. In Kevin Smith’s Mallrats Lee makes a cameo appearance and delivers dialogue he wrote for the Spider-Man villain the Vulture, which revealed a vulnerable side to the costumed criminal another writer may have ignored.
Grossman’s Doctor Impossible is also not a world away from Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible, or The Venture Brothers’ The Monarch – both ultimately delusional romantics who have been left disillusioned by the world. The heroes to them are merely the next stage in development of the schoolyard bullies they grew up with. CoreFire’s invulnerability lends him a smugness that’s similar to Whedon’s Captain Hammer: Everyone’s a hero in their own way / Everyone’s got villains they must face / They’re not as cool as mine / But folks you know it’s fine to know your place
The post-Marvel Age, post-Watchmen deconstruction trend allowed writers to re-examine superheroes with regard to their motivations and true intent. Batman became a psychopath, the X-Men child soldiers in a battle of ideologies, Superman a fascist boyscout and the Incredible Hulk a victim of abuse. Grossman plays with this exaggerated comic book ‘realism’, but undercuts it with genuine affection for supers.
At one point Fatale even wonders self-consciously if we have entered a ‘Rust Age’, in keeping with the classifying of different comic book periods as Golden Age, Silver Age etc. The general rule of thumb is that the earlier comic books represent a more hopeful era. Comic book historians have to turn a blind eye to the prevalent racism and misogyny to maintain such a claim, but it’s one that still holds some currency. Fatale herself, with her badgirl look and militarised powers is firmly in keeping with the modern era’s blending of sex and violence. Grossman has her repeatedly question her origins though, obscured by a convenient bout of amnesia and in that query the treatment of characters like Fatale, who are oftentimes designed to titillate rather than exist as independent female superheroes. That this all becomes a function of the plot itself displays just how much Grossman intended the book to be both a critique and a homage to the comics he loves.
Soon I Will Be Invincible I was gratified to discover is much more than a printed version of some gamer’s Champion’scampaign. It’s quite possibly the most entertaining book about comics since Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Ok here’s my argument, in brief, as to why Glee is a fantastic show.
They featured a team of American football players dance in formation to Beyonce. Ladies and Gents, gay culture just went mainstream. Hold onto your hats.
What I love most though is that that entire plot idea of mixing football with dancing previously featured in an episode of the Snorks I saw when I was a kid.
This one will be brief, as I have learned to my cost that criticising Mr Hamilton, author of The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, online is tantamount to waving a red flag at a large bull. Whose hooves have been specially filed so it can type up its literary opinions.
Anyway, why do I hate Peter F. Hamilton’s patented brand of space opera?
Bionic genitals. It’s that simple. The Reality Dysfunction deserves to have won the Bad Sex Award retroactively every year since its publication in 1996. Of course, due to it being locked in the sf ghetto folk like Melvyn Bragg get the kudos, but seriously, judges of terrible literary sex, I implore you to consider the merits of Mr Hamilton.
Said enhanced genitals ensure that the adventures of our hero as he bedhops across the stars during a galactic crisis are long and unendurable. See that’s why I really hate them. It’s not prudery on my part. The conceit actually lengthens the tiresome description of the sex itself!
There’s also unpleasant scenes with possessed cadavers being transformed into rotting zombies sprouting spines; or a stage Irishman ressurected in the far future who is indistinguishable from the racist caricatures of 19c Punch magazine.
But that’s just a side-dish of awfulness. Bionic genitals people. Yuck.
It’s always good to know where people’s priorities lie.
For example. The widespread destruction caused by last week’s earthquake in Haiti. Reading the reportage on this tragedy, I was surprised to discover that this is not a story about the suffering of thousands of Haitians and their incredible loss.
No this is in fact a story about how much of a dick Pat Robertson is. You may remember Pat, he also claimed that Hurricane Katrina was the result of gays hosting awards shows.
There’s a further comparative with Katrina here actually. Today’s Telegraph leads off with a headline about murder and looting on the island. The picture is of a Haitian man threatening another with a carving knife. Remember the stories of New Orleans becoming a hotbed of looting, rape and murder?
Whereas today’s Guardian headline leads with ‘No room in Haiti’s cemeteries but cruise ships still find a berth’, and carries a photo of a tourist vessel docked at a private pleasure beach.
It’s always nice to have a paper’s ideology nailed to the mast so prominently.
Euronews had an interesting moment when a Haitian/American woman described the earthquake as worse than 9/11, which she had also lived through as an aid-worker. So where’s the sympathy? A colleague angrily remarked that if Haitians are so poor (this was in relation to the Irish government providing aid) how could they afford that lavish presidential palace?
Oh you mean the proxy White House? That would be American money there. So little is known about Haiti in the West. So much is ignored.
One of my favourite films is the quirky Jump Tomorrow, a multi-lingual road trip across America. It features a scene with a Frenchman and an Englishman (Gosford Park’s James Whilby) arguing over the relevance of the French language. All the great Gallic thinkers and writers are dead, whereas English thrives thanks to the dominance of America.
You can see a similar smugness with regard to Russian culture. All those tolstoys and dostoyevskys had been buried by fukuyamism, relics of a dead culture, historical artifacts of the conflict between ‘freedom’ and despotism.
Except of course that’s nonsense. Russian letters are alive and well. In fact they are thriving on the fallout from the same conflict that buried the Soviet Empire. In Sergei Lukyanenko’s Nightwatch series the protagonist is caught in a century’s old conflict between the forces of good and evil – but takes the time to list the songs on his walkman as he wanders down a street. Lukyanenko’s novel was adapted into a film, which annihilated the Russian box office, inevitably drawing the attention of Hollywood. Some weighty handshakes later and the Night Watch books have been translated into English and a second sequel to the film set in America is due soon. Headcrusher by Alexander Garros and Aleksi Evdokimov reads like a post-Soviet Fight Club, as a highly educated young Latvian becomes increasingly disillusioned by the free market, realizing he is just another corporate drone. The cathartic diversions of Western culture, violent video games and movies, provide him with the inspiration to escape his fate, with bloody results.
I find it appropriate that the plot of Wanted, directed by Nightwatch’s Timur Bakmambetov, is very similar to Headcrusher. Stripped of the excesses of Mark Millar’s comic, it embraces the decadence of Western cinema violence, while also exploding a bomb beneath the drudgery of corporate neo-feudalism that its audience is subject to.
All of this is prelude to the clown prince Victor Pelevin. Like Slavoj Zizek, I am left unsure after each of his books just where the margin between parody and insight lies. Babylon focuses on the psychological conditioning of modern-day advertising by having its main character entire a state of drug-induced free-association, with commercial logos becoming transformed into ever-present Jungian archetypes. The Helmet of Horror appears to be inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, though it also appears to be a satire on philosophical wankery.
Just last week I finished The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, which cites its primary source as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The main character is a boyish prostitute, although Pelevin mines Eastern mythology by having her also be a shapeshifting fox named A Hu-Li. After a series of events almost lead to her exposure as an immortal shapeshifter, she encounters an intelligence officer who is also a were-creature named Alexander. The FSB officer is based on yet another literary character from the Russian canon and himself acknowledges this when A Hu-Li mentions Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. The were-foxes it is revealed feed on human desire, whereas the were-wolves are in the service of the Russian government as oil-diviners. The book is an attempt by A Hu-Li to describe her path to enlightenment, but as foxes are essentially imitative, she may only be imagining that she is experiencing such.
In the end the book is a satire on modern Russia and a pastiche of its literary and philosophical legacy. The fox A Hu-Li is tragic character frustrated that the long winter of the Cold War has not thawed enough, fondly reminiscing upon her former life in Asia. Alexander is plagued by loyalist fervour and machismo. He serves as Pelevin’s critique of Russian men and like the protagonist of Headcrusher finds himself out of place in a post-Communist world. The English translations of his books cannot come soon enough for me. I find it sad that the market sees fit to promote him as a ‘Russian Will Self’, whereas I find he shares little of the Englishman’s detached cynicism. He is to my mind a pop-literate tolstoyan, seeking the traces of the human condition among PSP games and blockbuster movies.
Granted it’s only a preview, but our favourite Star Wars critic is preparing to unleash a new ‘review‘ of the prequels, this time Attack of the Clones.
Plus bonus – the trailer is a neat mash-up of Johnny Cash and Star Wars footage. Given our pizza roll loving film critic is locked up in the slammer, y’see.
Well The End of Time was reliably anticlimactic. Bye bye Russell T. So long David Tennant. I bow in deference to Lawrence Miles’ assessment of the finale, copied and pasted from here.
1. Repeats of “The End of Time” will seem more tolerable if you try not to notice that the first hour is almost entirely made up of characters telling you what’s going to happen at the end, and that the second hour is almost entirely made up of characters reminding you what they said was going to happen at the end.
2. Also, the final Happy Ending Montage is almost tolerable if you forget that you’ve already had to sit through “Journey’s End”.
3. Russell T. may now have presented us with the lowest nadir of “magic wand” plotting (wherein the Machina that Exes the Deus is just an ordinary handgun, which can destroy the link to Gallifrey even though this makes no sense and hasn’t occurred to either the Master or Rassilon as a possibility), but the bugger’s never going to be able to do this to us again.
4. At least we now live in a nice, simple, straightforward world where black people of opposite sexes always get it on, even if they’re wholly mismatched in every respect.
5. Look at it from Gary Russell’s point of view: after a decade and a half of writing stories based on high-concept ideas like “what would happen if the Nimon met the Macra?”, he finally gets to script-edit a multi-million-pound TV story which ends with the Master killing Rassilon. Using death-rays. From his hands.
That being said Bernard Cribbins just has to scrunch up his Wombly eyes and my heartstrings get a good, firm tug. As for Matt Smith/Steven Moffat, I am cautiously optimistic. Who was in something of a rut and maybe this is exactly what it needs. A changing of the guard.
I am a little concerned to see so many of Moffat’s creations from previous episodes reappear in the trailer. Weeping Angels? River Song? This season may be as crowded as RTD’s first, which hit as many populist notes as it could, seeing as a second year wasn’t guaranteed. Britney’s Toxic, Simon Pegg, Big Brother, Trinny and Susannah – looking back it all seems a bit desperate, no?
Returning to his own story concepts is of course fine, but I am worried that Moffat is too concerned with going with what is familiar to the established fanbase. For all my complaints about RTD, he gambled big and managed to transform Doctor Who from a nerd commodity stuck in the horizon of a convention-centre-black-hole, to popular Saturday evening fare. Hell he may have even staved off the evil empire of Murdoch from wiping out the BBC for just a little while longer. The merchandising alone…
Now if only someone would commission an episode from Miles himself.
