Grown Ups Talking

Joss Whedon, the Hollywood writer who brought television the good-natured campy hit Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is bringing a new comedy/musical to the little screen. Yes your computer. It’s called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog. and features Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible.

Apparently, Whedon was bored during the Hollywood writers’ strike, and the only medium he could work in, without crossing the picket line, was the Internet. I suppose the mother of invention is still necessity – and a really talented writer.

The series – I guess you could call it a mini-series – features 13- to 15- minute episodes that were available free for a short time, and are now available on iTunes for $1.99 an episode. I watched the first three episodes last night, before the free promo period ended at midnight. It was fun and entertaining. Not a blockbuster, but I have a sense it will be a hit once the plot gets rolling and I, and the rest of America, warms up to the quirky humor in much the same way people warmed up to Scrubs.

Dr. Horrible is a singing blogger who writes about the trials and tribulations of being a super villain. In the first three episodes, the doctor is trying to win entrance to a league of super villains. He is hamstrung by a big crush he has on a girl that he sees regularly at the local laundromat (yes, super villains have to wash their clothes too.)

His arch enemy, Captain Hammer, not only disrupts his villainous plans to take over the world, but is much better at picking up girls than the doctor – including Dr. Horrible’s elusive laundry lady. Hi-jinks, death rays, poppy foot-tapping songs, and a whole lot of tongue-in-cheek melodrama follows.

Two observations about the series: (1) This could be the first commercially successful use of the Internet for an entertainment series, although viewers would be charged $51.74 for 26 episodes if they bought them individually (26 episodes traditionally constitutes a television “season."), and that seems a little steep. But I think some sort of subscription is being offered; (2) Pomerol had this idea at least 6 years ago, maybe longer. Not the Dr. Horrible plot, but a web series broken down into little pieces.

So I ask: Why don’t we ever act on our good ideas? Oh yes, in this case, we didn’t have Neil Patrick Harris or the Hollywood production machine behind us. Still, we could have had that iTunes contract by now. We better start acting on our other idea, today. – Chianti.

And what about Bones? This wise-cracking romantic/serious forensic police drama features an expressionless leading gal and the former smouldering vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It also has some of the grossest images I’ve seen yet on a network television series, such as a severed head in a fridge and a 6-month old decaying corpse.

We also saw Cloverfield, a gay romp through Manhattan with a skyscraper-high monster that knocks over buildings and eats yuppies. Some cool special effects and camera work, but completely personality-free characters.

I’m not going into a “There’s too much violence and torture on television rant” like I did last year. But there seems to be a surfeit of grimness in popular culture. Cloverfield has the monster throwing the head of the Statue of Liberty into the street. Bones has everyday nice people under siege from serial killers and child molesters, though with a few ironic quips thrown in.

It seems to point to an undercurrent of unease in American society, like, we already know that the end is coming.

Hollywood has a eery way of predicting this stuff.—Pomerol

The disdain Dick Cheney has for the American public reached new heights recently when he was asked about polls that showed most Americans do not believe the Iraq War is worth fighting. The veep proclaimed, “so.”

That’s a chilling response from a war-time vice president, especially when the rebuttal is that the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq reached 4,000 this weekend. Further, more than 25,000 soldiers have been wounded since March 2003, when the war began, and one million Iraqis have died.

Meanwhile, Dick has been traveling around the Middle East pretending the talk down OPEC nations from raising the price of oil. What I really think he is doing is celebrating with the sheiks about how much money Halliburton (Dick’s former company) and Big Oil are making. Consider that Halliburton’s revenue for 2007 is up 21 percent over the year before to $15.3 billion. That’s with a profit margin of 23 percent, which means it generated 3.5 billion in profit – which is more money than the gross national products of most small countries, like Bermuda, Aruba, Fiji and the Cayman Islands, where so many fat cats vacation.

I hope the company you work for or own is doing as well as the recession takes its toll.

It seems as though the American people are numb to the antics of the Bushies these days – the war is languishing, nothing is improving in Iraq, and nearly 30,000 families in the U.S. have had their lives forever altered by the death or injury of their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brother and sisters.

I keep hearing the late Kurt Vonnegut’s mind-numbing drone from Slaughterhouse Five in my subconscious, “… and so it goes … and so it goes,” every time I think of Cheney’s response to American opinion.

Maybe it’s time to turn the page, and give Dick the book and movie that not only describes the horror of war, but is a good characterization of our VP and the country, respectively – Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. – Chianti

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am stating right here that I have not seen the movie I am about to comment on – the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, which was written and directed by the Coen brothers.

The reason is simple. Every time I have the opportunity to sneak out to a movie, I’m just not in the mood to see a psychopathic rampage.

I’m not a violence priss. I saw Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises. What’s more, I’ve seen Reservoir Dogs twice, and Goodfellas and Fight Club a whole bunch of times. I thought Pulp Fiction was hysterically funny, as was the Coen brothers’ Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou.

It’s just that the trailers featuring Javier Bardem scared the heck out of me, and I just couldn’t find the time to go to the movies during the day – so I wouldn’t have to exit the theater in the dark. I think that’s reasonable (although I’m definitely not as much of a scaredy cat as Pomerol).

I understand that the Coen brothers wrote an amazing script, did a fabulous job directing, and Bardem delivered a stellar performance. I’m just not in the mood for a wacko on the loose lately.

Why is that? Could it be that the real-life war in Iraq has dampened my appetite for violence. Maybe it’s all the outrageous talk of attacking Iran for no reason that makes me avoid grisly film fare. Perhaps it’s the injustice being manufactured at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, or the genocide in Africa that the U.S. ignores.

It’s all clear now. I realize why I want Cowboy Bush and his band of psychopaths out of the White House. It’s a selfish reason.

I want to go back to watching and enjoying Coen brothers movies again, without having nightmarish thoughts about the state of our nation. Under Bush, this really isn’t a country for old men, or young oned, or women or children, for that matter. – Chianti.

I like the way actor and international sex symbol Matthew McConaughey handled the press this week. He met them head-on with full disclosure.

McConaughey, the 38-year-old star of the upcoming Fool’s Gold, announced that he and his girlfriend, model Camila Alves, are expecting their first child. He made the announcement in a January 15, post on his blog.

Good for McConaughey. He beat back the trade rags and gossip mongering tabloids with transparency, essentially stealing their thunder and turning what could have been a month-long cat-and-mouse game into a non-story. (Well, at least until the kid is born and Vanity Fair locks-in the rights to the first photos.)

The deft publicity move was probably less about spin than about one of McConaughey’s personal tenets, “never lie.” An admirable goal, and something his fellow-Texan’s in the Bush Administration, led by chief secrecy officer Dick Cheney, could never fathom.

But then it hit me. The Cheney/Rove political industrial complex has kept one big secret for the past two terms.

They use secrets and lies as a facade to keep more important things, like stockpiling money and power, under wraps.

While Congress, public advocates, the media and the lower courts get tied up in knots about whether Cheney should reveal things like who participated in his secret energy meetings or what he told Scotter Libby about Valerie Plame, Dick has the time and freedom to fuss about with covert moneymaking schemes and powerplays.

Indeed, Dick’s army of lawyers, assistants and pals on the Supreme Court, are instructed to deal with the inconvenience of answering to the press and American public while he goes about his business.

That probably means that folks that value the truth are just suckers in the beady eyes of Dick Cheney. Nice way to run a country, Dick.

By the way, I did find one thing in common between the MCConaughey and Cheney. (No, not the international sex symbol thing). Rather, Fool’s Gold. – Chianti