TV @ The Movies: "Glee" and "The Walking Dead"

What is the ideal format for talking about tv? I'm beginning to think it's Twitter since even in the days of next day recaps and the 'watch it on your own time' DVR reality, people often watch it in great masses, round about the same time -- only staggered with everyone in their own slightly skewed time zones. I'm on NESST (Nathaniel's Eastern Stop & Start Time). TV has never been the all immersive experience that the movies can be... so it makes sense that people are now tweeting as they're watching. TV is jerry-rigged to withstand distractions: housework, phone calls, commercials. Twitter and Facebook only amplify this and now everyone has become their own tv critic, ringleader, announcer, omniscient narrator, diarist. I always wish that the movies were this accessible to people to enjoy en masse but... sigh.

With deeper immersion comes less accessibility I suppose.

If she's growling and decomposing, shoot her! 

Anyway, Sunday night I opted not to tweet through AMC's much ballyhooed THE WALKING DEAD. I was curious before the series even began how they would work around television restrictions, only to realize that there are no restrictions. You can apparently show anything on non-premium cable during prime-time hours including little girls and grown men getting their brains blown out (in slo-mo!) and men getting their heads smashed to bits with baseball bats as long as nobody says the naughty "F" word or shows the naughty boobies, butts or dangly man-bits.

[Lots on GLEE & more WALKING DEAD after the jump]

Otherwise it's all good!

I had planned to tweet but I didn't get any further than this.

Now that it's had time to settle I don't even know how to review The Walking Dead. It felt like every zombie movie that has ever been made cuisinarted together. Once it had become a fine slush, it was poured into a new TV sized mold slowly, slowly now... you gotta string it out over several episodes. While pouring, Chef Frank Darabont (he's writer, director, producer), described his "new" old concoction with a southern twang.

True to AMC's form, The Walking Dead is a well made show. It was scary, well acted, and intense. I can easily give it that. The only missing AMC ingredient was a unique identity. It even starts its zombie apocalypse just about the same exact way (homage?) as the chief revivalist of today's current zombie craze. In this film / tv show our hero "Jim" (Cillian Murphy, 28 Days Later) /  "Rick" (Andrew Lincoln, The Walking Dead) wakes up in an abandoned hospital, disoriented, sick, thirsty and totally unaware that while he was "sleeping" (coma?), the world basically ended from a zombie plague. The only difference? Rick wakes up buck naked in a stripped hospital bed and Jim wakes up under sheets and under those he's wearing a hospital gown and under that he's got boxer shorts on.

Twang, not wang!

I don't mean to be flippant. I don't expect to see nudity on television. But I'm being absolutely 100% serious when I say that I do not understand why the MPAA ratings or television board (I forgot the name) exist. They've always been, well, dumb. But theoretically their 'goddamn raison d'etre' is easy to understand. But if you seek to destroy a whole entertainer's career over a wardrobe malfunction but you can show a zombie movie on TV with all of the R rated violence intact (they pulled approximately zero punches) what the hell are you on about?

Are body parts (non bloody rotting ones I mean) and excessive profanity the only remaining taboos?

I know there's a lot of violence on TV shows (especially procedurals which really seem to get off on it) but it's usually more "described" than shown. I mean, I watch Dexter. I can handle some violence. But that's a pay cable series. I'm not sure I am okay with the idea that any little kid who wants to can watch The Walking Dead and enjoy all the grisly slaughter. It reminded me of something I'd long since forgotten: on the weekend that Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake opened, two teenagers approached me at the movie theater and asked me to buy them tickets. Apparently the theater was policing that R rating. I declined. I wasn't trying to be a jerk but I'd seen way too many parents leading their little kids (not even teenagers) into slasher movies in that same exact theater and so I had become ultra sensitive and judgey about what people were letting the newest generations watch. Just think, all those teens had to do was wait 6 years and they could see the same thing on regular cable for free.

a tough cop and  a hungry mom.

Back on topic. I might give The Walking Dead another episode or two -- again, it was well executed -- but I'm nervous.

I'm especially uncomfortable with what struck me as a pretty obvious (if unintentional?) misogyny: the first female we see is the little girl zombie. She's the first kill. We follow that with a jump backwards in time and we sit with two cops (Rick and his partner Shane, Jon Berthal, pictured above) and we discuss Rick's cruel nagging wife and how she wants him to share his feelings (god forbid!). We don't meet her then so she gets no voice of her own, just the one prescribed to her: cruel, nagging, relentless, one who causes emotional distress to her husband AND child. The next important female "character" we meet is another cruel mother; this one is a zombie who really wants to dine on her son. The boy's good heroic father is protecting him from her, though he still can't bring himself to kill his now-cruel wife. Later, we see a few living female characters (no names) and we discover that Rick's wife (the cruel nag) is alive and she's now sleeping with his former partner (pictured, left). In their defense they both think Rick is dead but basically what we have here is dead women, hungry dead women, and living unfaithful nags!

My rating has to be threefold thus far. Execution: B+ | Morality: D | Originality: F. So, I guess I'll have to go with a C for now.

I'll give it one or two more episodes on account of its fine acting/execution and to see if I'm wrong about the morality and originality problems. Maybe I am. (And, yes, sexism is a moral failing. But I notice on AMC's site that there are a couple of female principals so maybe things will be different soon.)

Meanwhile over on network television...

GLEE was also shoving our hypocrisy in our faces with its strange decision to do a tribute to the very R rated Rocky Horror Picture Show. That one I did tweet through. Glee is generally as horny as your average (gay) teenager -- the show is constantly seeking opportunities to show us the bare abs and chests of the male characters -- but in the same episode, they shamed the teacher (Mr Shue, Matthew Morrison) for his willing exploitation of teen flesh. "Pot." "Kettle." The show just doesn't seem smart enough to be aware of or intentionally presenting its own ironies or hypocrisies. The writing is way too inconsistent to give it that benefit of the doubt. If they can't even remember basic personality traits and motivations from episode to episode, how they gonna build complex story-telling with meta commentary while belting their show stoppers?

My overriding question is this: Why did they choose to do Rocky Horror in the first place when they couldn't even bring themselves to sing the words "transsexual" or "heavy petting" let alone commit to drag or same sex hedonism (Mercedes plays Frankenfurther, negating all of this. Happy to see her get a plum role, but...this one?)?

But, most importantly, I 'm not sure I can live in a world where everyone starts misquoting Rocky Horror's hilarious lyrics because Glee did them wrong; show tunes are sacred!

But for all of my frustrations with Glee, I dig it on some deep level and want it to be a million times better than it is. It's sometimes so embarrassing but every once in a while it transcends. At the very least there's usually a good quotable or three buried somewhere in each messy episode. Becky's "give me some chocolate or I will cut you" has already become a favorite.  And there's a certain amount of joy in the mass-sharing of a public phenomenon. #glee always sparks fun tweet conversations.

WonderRobbie always delights me and Glee's weird double standards on sexuality have escaped virtually no one -- though I hadn't noted, like Joseph wisely did, that the GQ photoshoot that everyone got their panties in a twist about, made an interesting duet with all of the punches they were pulling when doing Rocky Horror.

In the end, I realize I had a similar reaction to The Rocky Horror Glee Show that I had to The Walking Dead. I thought I was enjoying it while it was going on only to realize afterwards that I was totally disappointed. The little missteps and underlying weak foundation just piled up. So I have to hand it to the often brilliant critic Matt Zoller Seitz. We got into it on Twitter -- here's a little of our public back-n-forth...

I share this because, after his brilliant full length write-up of the show, I'm totally coming 'round to his point of view. Except, that is, when it concerns that Britney Spears episode which he liked and which to me was such a creative nadir that I am stunned that the show ever crawled back up again, let alone started doing high kicks and pirouettes like it had never fallen in the first place.

Sweet Transvestite
The Brilliant Tim Curry

I was never an obsessive fan of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). I brought toast and rice to throw and what not but I never dressed up in costume or made it a weekly midnight habit. But I did buy the soundtrack and went to 4 or 5 midnight shows over a 2 year period. And I got really fascinated by the overriding theme "Don't dream it. Be it." which scared the hell out of me at the time (late 80s in my case) as it would anyone who is repressed on any level.

So, I was happy to see it revived again in this major reaching-millions way. But since Glee doesn't really have the strength of its convictions, they should probably steer clear of randier material. Please, people, no more Sweet Transvestites from Transsexual, Transylvania. I mean, clutch your pearls, children could be watching! Why couldn't Glee just have gone with something wholesome like Sweeney Todd's throat slitting and cannibalism; you can't can do that on television!
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Halloween Top Ten: I ♥ Zombies; or, Up with Dead People

Craig here. It's Halloween and the new horror tv series The Walking Dead is nearly upon us. This is what I've been thinking about day-to-day for the last few weeks. So here's a Tuesday Top Ten Special (i.e. it's on the weekend instead... and it's Halloween themed) to get you thinking about all things zombified. Perfect for a day made for the dead. Alive or recently embalmed, all enter here. But shuffle in s-l-o-w-l-y now...

A Top Ten Undernourished and Underloved Zombie Characters (in no order) are all getting some love this Halloween. Who's first out of the grave...?

1. Colin in Colin (2008)

Colin: the most exotically-named zombie character ever

Poor old Colin. He should rank alongside Day of the Dead’s Bub as one of the most sympathetic cinematic zombies ever. Apparently it only cost director Marc Price £45 to bring Colin to the screen; not a penny was wasted on achieving pleasingly affecting acting from the man himself, Alastair Kirton. If, like me, you wonder just what went on in the pre-zombified lives of the unnamed undead – folk like, say, Second Zombie on the Left or Gunshot-Wound to the Head Zombie or Uncle Zombie Who Can Recall His Past Lives, those who dwell at the foot of the end credits – then watching Colin may come as a refreshing treat. It's about one of those very bit players. And very bit he was. The film takes a superfluous character and gives him a movie of his own to walk amok. Although Colin's the shy and retiring type, just looking to escape mad, apocalyptic London and reconnect with his girlfriend. He's a zombie with heart. The heart may have been in his hands, but he had love to give all the same. The guy deserved a break: even he ran from the undead hordes. So, Colin, mate, here’s to you: First Zombie on This List.

2. Dr Freudstein in The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Dr Freudstein waving for the camera. Bless him.

With a name like that I'll bet you had an insurmountable array of problems in your life as you did in your afterlife, eh, Dr. Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava)? Kept in the basement by the cemetery by director by the cemetery Lucio Fulci for the entirety of The House by the Cemetery, you didn't half moan about your lot. But then, you did look like a brown paper bag glued to an over-sized peanut. But piss and moan you did. Not before getting your hand lopped off and being outfoxed on a ladder by a girlish-sounding 10-year-old misery moppet by the name of... Bob. Still, you had Mrs. Freudstein to keep you company all those decades spent beyond one of Fulci's Seven Gates of Hell. (Why not click here for more Fulci-on-Zombie action.)

3. Tarman in The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

What is it with directors keeping their zombie charges trapped in basements. Subterranean dude Tarman (Allan Trautman), birthed from, yup, some kind of dubiously nuclear tar-like goo, dwells "below" just like Dr. Freudstein. Well, at least it's below a medical supply warehouse right next to a handy morgue-slash-cemetery. This brain botherer spends the film awaiting the split skulls of a band of '80s hooligan punks to sink his rotten teeth into. Looking more like some kind of lavatory skeleton, Tarman's a bona fide zombie in name, rank and number – all of which were printed on the septic tank he arrived in. Lovely.

Gay zombies, musical zombies, and celebrity zombies after the jump...

4. Davina McCall in Dead Set (2008)

Davina, you're live on Channel 4, please don't... rip the housemates' faces off

I’m not entirely sure how famous Davina McCall is elsewhere in the world, but she’s pretty darn famous in the UK. So when Charlie Brooker (I’m not entirely sure how famous...) decided to marry TV’s Big Brother with Dawn of the Dead, and keep it true to both, he of course had to cast Ms. McCall: the face, voice and hair of Big Bro. Davina was game for gameshow gore – she jumped right into it, ghoulish make-up and all. Those that have seen the three-part TV zombie series Dead Set will know that it was no light entertainment reality telly. It was wall-to-wall housemate carnage: a settee satire with garden-based grue. Never has Davina’s catchphrase “You have been evicted – I’m coming to get you!” been so apt.

5. & 6."Jay Leno" & "Burt Reynolds" in Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Jay and Silent Burt stare back

Because when this exploding-head double act cropped up in the crosshairs in Zack Snyder’s yes-it-is-still-pretty-good remake of Dawn of the Dead, it was a hoot. They're on the list purely for reasons politically incorrect, more than a little bit wrong, but funny as all hell. The inclusion of Zombie Jay and Zombie Burt was surely Snyder's hearty nod to the fashions and facial hair of the Romero’s original sequel's setting as well as a sly comment on our celebrity-obsessed society: we see celebs everywhere! So let's shoot them! Ah, pity the poor, anonymous rambling shoppers simply going about their own undead business who just happened to resemble popular icons. Shoot ‘em in the head! They did.

7. Otto in Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008)

Otto was more of an anarchic mission statement of intent than a fully worked through feature film. But then that’s always the way with filthy provocateur Bruce LaBruce. If he’s not flashing quasi-political slogans at us, he’s giving us a bit of man-on-man. In this he went for some undead man-on-undead man. Re-animated gay hipster corpse Otto (Jey Crisfar) blunders through an arty backdrop whilst random rebellious and subversive stuff happens around him. I mainly liked seeing Otto blankly chow down on road kill (left).

And just like buses, you wait for one gay zombie movie directed by Bruce LaBruce to come along and two arrive at once: his controversial L.A. Zombie, which is about – and I’m hazarding a wild guess here – a zombie in L.A., is due soon. Rejoice. Then rebel.

8. Mary in Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Mary (Nicola Cunningham), we spied you briefly on the supermarket checkout at the start of Shaun of the Dead (2004). But we’d of course forgotten about you by the time you came stumbling into Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s garden. Sneaky Mary. Poor Mary. Proud Mary keep on gurning. We know you weren’t “sooo drunk”. You were simply a pulse-denier like the rest of Greater London. Not that we could tell any difference between you on the checkout counter and you at the point where you got speared through your midriff on the base fixture of a rotary washing line. Oh, Mary. You had such a good photo face as well. And Mary? You’ve got red on you.

9. Michael Jackson in Thriller (1983)

This one doesn’t need much pre-amble. He was ushered in by the smooth and assured voice of Vincent Price for his 1983 benchmark music video. He danced his undead dance, backed by decomposing body-poppers, and clapped and shuffled to the top of the charts. MJ routinely got props for the video but lesser kudos for embracing zombie lore at a time, unlike now, when it wasn’t exactly plastered all over the media. I’ve never been a Jacko fan, but this is my very favourite thing he put his talents to. But John Landis and special effects wiz Rick Baker (and his team) get my share of the Thriller praise.

10. Anyone and Everyone Who’s Ever Had a Small Role as a Zombie in a George A. Romero Film.

Because the night... belongs to zombies

You lot are the luckiest moulding death sacks on legs to have ever groaned and moaned your way through a movie. If you’ve ever been a Romero zombie – big or small, young or old, freshly dispatched or long in the grave – you know what it really feels like to be a true movie zombie. From the old gormless guy (S. William Hinzman) stomping the graveyard and coming to get Barbara in Night of the Living Dead (1968), to the horseback zombie lady (Kathleen Munroe) endlessly galloping the island in Survival of the Dead (2009), every human being gracelessly converted into a braindead walker gets the last, but never the least, place in this ten. For any extras or out-of-work actors getting their parts bit in a Rom-zom bit-part, corpsing for George is the highest zombie-honour of all. Every one of you have my praise. And my eternal envy: I’d give my right arm for a split-second walk-on in a Romero zombie flick, even if you'd prefer my brains.

Super Mario Beats It: The Lessons of NYCC 2010

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JA from MNPP here. New York's Comic Con went down this previous weekend in the massive Javits Center here on the island of Manhattan, and if you were there amongst the stacks of dusty Fantastic Four comics and shiny samurai sword replicas and Jason Voorhees masks you might've seen me wandering around in a glassy-eyed stupor. Every Comic Con I've been to breeds the same overstimulated dullness - within a couple of hours my pupils dilate and seeing things like a ten-foot tall Orc tickling Wonder Woman just starts to seem normal. This happens every day! Still, a couple of things stood out this year and I shall now document them.

10 Random Things I Learned at NYCC This Year

01 Girls really like the Silk Spectre costume - Or maybe it's that they know the boys like seeing them in the Silk Spectre costume - either way, I saw about twenty different ladies wearing the slutty bumblebee ensemble from Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore's seminal comic book. The film hadn't come out yet when the last Comic Con happened here in NYC - in 2009 NYCC happened in February, while they moved it into October for 2010 (a permanent move), and Watchmen came out in March 0f 2009 - so I don't remember seeing the costume last year, but it was literally - literally! - everywhere you turned this time around. Does this make Malin "Baby Girl" Akerman a geek icon?

02 Danny McBride's a trooper - The panel for David Gordon Green's Your Highness was at the geek-freaking hour of 10:30am on Saturday. Keep in mind you've got at least an hour's wait to even get into the building at that hour, plus with the commute there... needless to say it took me some effort to drag my bum there, but I did. Then I heard through the press-vine that McBride & Co. had been partying hard until the wee hours of morning before the panel and I felt a little less super for my own efforts, since I'd been in bed by 11:30. James Franco seemed dazed, but Danny McBride was firing on all cylinders. Funny man.

And the footage they showed from the film, while definitely geared to the Comic Con audience - Natalie Portman's thong! Puppets smoking from a bong! (hey that rhymes) - was every ounce the bizarre mish-mash I could've hoped the film would be. It looks terrific. I don't entirely understand David Gordon Green's directing career, but it's been a pleasure watching it play out so far.

03 Geeks will stand in a very long line to watch a commercial - This is nothing new to Cons, I've seen it at every one I've gone to, but it always baffles me. The fine folks behind the upcoming release of the Alien Anthology, as they call it, had a booth where they'd close you up in a sleeping pod and right up in your face was a TV screen and it'd show a bunch of clips from the four Alien movies with some sound effects echoing in your ears. The end. And yet the line never stretched less than fifty people long! I suppose the T-shirt they gave you that cleverly stated "Want A Hug?" had something to do with it, but still. (I totally did it anyway, and I cherish my T-shirt.)

04 The family that geeks together, is adorable together - I wish my parents had dressed me up like a Jedi or Baby Yoda and taken me to these sorts of things. So I could immediately fall asleep. Damn you, parents!

05 In The Thing, There Be Tentacles - While I'm still unsure about a prequel to John Carpenter's brilliant 1982 film, itself a remake, the trailer for Matthijs van Heijningen Jr's film - which has made its way online in an exceptionally shaky, hand-held version - had a couple of quick glances of their take on the plant-animal alien monster things and they did excite this nerd's senses. Although only glimpsed, they look right, which in this era of lousy CG was a concern. Now let's just hope they can nail the right paranoiac tone needed too.

06 Katee Sackhoff and Tricia Helfer are pros at this - I can only imagine how many of these events these ladies have entertained at this point, but the dynamic Battlestar Galactica duo had the audience eating out of their palms. They have a terrific rapport - they are apparently great friends in real life - and joked that they're waiting for the reboot of Cagney & Lacey to come along to showcase it. I would watch that.


07 But Michelle Forbes is scary - I don't care that she told us she's nothing like Admiral Cain in Battlestar of the maenad MaryAnn on True Blood or [insert the name of every character she's ever played] and that she's really a hippie-type in real life - there's a reason she's successful for playing harsh ladies, and she made me nervous. I had to keep checking to make sure everybody's eyes weren't going all black, because with all due respect the audience at a Battlestar Galactica panel at Comic Con is not the audience I want to be having an orgy with.

08 M Night Shyamalan, amiable dude - I defended M Night for a very long time, well past when most people had bailed ship - I liked The Village, and I liked parts of Lady in the Water - but the one-two punch of that book about him and The Happening (shudder) kind of killed any arguments I could make anymore. So I only sat through half of his panel by happenstance, in order to get a good seat for the panel following him (on AMC's The Walking Dead, which looks epic by the way). But he came off really well! It was for the 10th Anniversary of Unbreakable, a terribly underrated film, and you could tell he really loves the film and that its negative reception put him into a bit of a tailspin. He came alive showcasing the storyboards for the train scene at the start of the film - you can say a lot of things about him, but I don't think you can argue about the meticulous craft on display. And he was fascinating to watch in discussion of that.

09 According to Frank Darabont, Zombies are the new Vampires - Which seems like an odd argument to make, right? The last decade has seen every iteration of zombies you could ever imagine - it's not like they need to make a comeback to be the hip thing. I get that he was selling his Zombie TV Show, and it does look terrific. But isn't it really Frankenstein Monster's time to shine again? I want sexy Frankenstein, dang it. (Yes, SNL got there already.)

10 You haven't lived until you've seen Super Mario dancing to Michael Jackson's "Beat It" - This one is self-explanatory, and true. You might not know it's true. But then you see it happen, and you understand its truth. The fundamental sort.

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Links: Social Networks, Hulk Bulges and Zombie Pornos

Just Jared more pics from the set of Captain America. Chris Evans with prosthetic feet. I always did wonder how they filmed barefoot chase scenes.
The Evening Class a defense of Bruce LaBruce's porno/horror hybrid LA Zombie.
Freaking Awesome ...speaking of zombies, this poster is created from zombie movie titles. Sick.
The Playlist Stanley Tucci shopping a sports biopic to direct and star in? At least it's not a traditional sports star biopic.
Vulture Mark Ruffalo will actually be playing the Hulk in his monster 3D form (i.e. motion capture) "I hope I don't bulge in anyone's face."

In Contention "I'm just here for the movies" I'm glad I have Guy Lodge with me on this. While it's true that some Oscar pundits care about the race first, with the cinema being but a happy-accident side dish, that's not true of all of us.
Boy Culture Remember when I got to meet Michelle Pfeiffer and Julianne Moore? Good times. Matthew Rettemund, who wrote my favorite book on the icon (Encyclopedia Madonna), finally got to meet her. Here's his story - with video!
LA Times Lindsay Lohan wins more jail drama. I am going to valiantly try to never mention her again on the blog. I'm not sure why I'm doing so now. It'll be hard for me but I feel embarrassed, actually, that I've been rooting for her and intermittently defending her talent for 12 years. What so many millions of people would do with the breaks, beauty and talent she was gifted.
LA Rag Mag Adam Levine wants you to know that Jake Gyllenhaal is not gay.
Noh Way in the wake of the release of Easy A, looks at Hester Prynne throughout movie history

Finally, here's the first bit of the NYFF press conference after our screening of The Social Network yesterday.



I love this bit from Aarron Sorkin...

I didn't think it was a movie about Facebook. I thought it was a movie that had themes as old as storytelling itself: friendship and loyalty, class, jealousy, power -- these things that Aeschylus would write about or Shakespeare would write about or Paddy Chayefsky would write about. Luckily none of those people were available so I got to write about it.

I don't know if I quite buy into the "it'll win Best Picture!" mania that's spreading (it's only September 25th, after all. We don't even know how it will fare with the public) but I 100% believe that Sorkin has a very strong shot at taking home whichever Screenplay category he ends up in.