The cover of this now-defunct magazine changed my life.
It was waiting in the mailbox for me one day because, I believe, I had a letter to a character printed in an issue (it was to Cal Winters; I believe the jist of my letter was "Why are you still pining for Diana Colville [ed note.: that was Genie Francis's character before she returned to GH for the umpteenth time] when you could be pursuing Kimberly Brady?" Well, my dreams were answered, and then to get rid of or recast the character, Cal Winters turned into a stalker and a murderer).
In 1990, I was 13 years old. I was videotaping (or "VCRing") DOOL every single day at this point. The Internet was a marshmallow cloud in Al Gore's mind, so fanfiction wasn't readily accessible (I get that there were 'zines and all that; please don't educate me on the history of fanfic).
The cover of this magazine was my fanfic. It was confirmation that someday, Emilio would be a distant memory, and Jack and Jen would fill at least four days a week with their nonstop bantering. My teeny just-teenaged imagination could not fathom the adventures they would have: Jack kidnapping Jennifer from her wedding to Emilio; uncovering the mystery of Patch's first wife, Marina Toscano (played by the stunning Lynda Carter-esque Hunter Tylo), and her hidden-away sister, Isabella, and stirring the ire of Victor Kiriakis; kissing in the secret passageway in Patch and Kayla's house; going on the Cruise of Deception, which was like a multichapter fic where nothing but sex and romance happened on a deserted island!
Jack and Jen tangoed. They tangoed!
I have popped in and out of DOOL over the past 20 years (ohmygodohmygodsooldsoold): my college roommates were enamored with the stupid and horrible Marlena possession years and the subsequent Hope is Princess Gina bullshit; I had a flare-up of affection for Sami and Lucas; I returned when Stephen Nichols and Mary Beth Evans were reunited. And I'm the kind of stooge who returns every single time Matthew Ashford comes back (and dies...and is murdered...and dies again).
I'm older now and realize that Jennifer's bangs were way too big and that Matthew Ashford can come across as incredibly smarmy, but in teenage bedroom in my heart, taped to the cotton-candy pink wall, is the cover of that magazine and with it is preserved the little flush of joy I feel at the promise of two imaginary characters about to embark on romance and shenanigans.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Classic/Crap: Bad Day at Black Rock/Predators
This latest attempt at a feature was born out of blahmanda's initial idea for herself that she would attempt to watch the contents of her DVR in chronological order, focusing on all the movies she recorded in good faith, saved in good faith, but is likely to keep until humans undergo their next evolutionary change (I hope our vestigal tails grow back so we can more easily reach and grab).
Then I turned my critical eye to my Netflix queue, examining what lack of attention and a tendency to clickclickclick on suggestions but not really sort them, and I mentioned to Amanda that I was considering applying her basic idea: freezing my queue as-is and trying to tackle it, poor organization and all, and blog-a-booing about it.
What she suggested a few weeks later is what we both settled on: we would Netflix one classic film (or, at the very least, one pre-1970s film) and one garbage film (of which we are both enthusiastic consumers) and watch both in a synched-up, Gchat style.
What is funnyish about this all is that I don't think it was either of our intentions to select two films that shared similarities. After all, Amanda suggested Spencer Tracy's post-Adam's Rib, pre-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner film, Bad Day at Black Rock, without, I imagine, knowing much about it beyond the general description: a WWII veteran with one good arm conspicuously but unassumingly dismounts a train one day in a dying gold mining town and stumbles into an environment of barely contained paranoia and violence.
Predators, as we all know, is about Predators. Predators live in jungle environments, look like bipedal pig-sandworms with dreadlocks (or Manny Ramirez), and hunt b-list movie stars of varying degrees of talent. But Amanda said it best: Amanda: So what are all the Predator movies? You gotcher Predator, yer Predator 2: Predator in the City, yer Alien vs. Predator, yer Predators, yer AVP: Requiem...
Then I turned my critical eye to my Netflix queue, examining what lack of attention and a tendency to clickclickclick on suggestions but not really sort them, and I mentioned to Amanda that I was considering applying her basic idea: freezing my queue as-is and trying to tackle it, poor organization and all, and blog-a-booing about it.
What she suggested a few weeks later is what we both settled on: we would Netflix one classic film (or, at the very least, one pre-1970s film) and one garbage film (of which we are both enthusiastic consumers) and watch both in a synched-up, Gchat style.
What is funnyish about this all is that I don't think it was either of our intentions to select two films that shared similarities. After all, Amanda suggested Spencer Tracy's post-Adam's Rib, pre-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner film, Bad Day at Black Rock, without, I imagine, knowing much about it beyond the general description: a WWII veteran with one good arm conspicuously but unassumingly dismounts a train one day in a dying gold mining town and stumbles into an environment of barely contained paranoia and violence.
Predators, as we all know, is about Predators. Predators live in jungle environments, look like bipedal pig-sandworms with dreadlocks (or Manny Ramirez), and hunt b-list movie stars of varying degrees of talent. But Amanda said it best: Amanda: So what are all the Predator movies? You gotcher Predator, yer Predator 2: Predator in the City, yer Alien vs. Predator, yer Predators, yer AVP: Requiem...
That's a lot considering Predators are actually not that interesting! Nevertheless, the movies did share some basic themes that made the end-of-the-road comparison last night fun:
1) The heroes are unconventional
Bad Day at Black Rock's John J. Macreedy is "handiCAPABLE!" (according to Amanda), deliberate, and unflappable in the face of increasing threats against his person and his life. He's also played by Spencer Tracy, which means he's square and blocky in that Giants of Ireland way, suggesting he's better at eating potatoes and sitting on a barstool than solving mysteries and fighting dudes half his age.
Predators's Royce is an [insert some official-sounding military nonsense to which neither Amanda nor myself paid the slightest bit of attention] and talks like Brody saw Batman Begins and The Dark Knight the day before shooting started and thought it'd be pretty cool to use a scratchy voice as a character trait. Much like Han Solo or poor man's Han Solo, Mal Reynolds, Royce has a cynical, blackened heart (unless a lady is involved), a vaguely European accent that pops up from time to time, and a beak the size of Toucan Sam's. Not exactly your average cruddy action movie white hat
The difference lies in the condition each of them are in by film's end:
Macreedy:
10:17 PM me: I love how you described him as being so rumpled and dusty; it's so true and it wasn't treated as a Columbo-like deceit or anything.
10:20 PM Amanda: I loved how the wardrobe really marked him as an outsider. The dark suit and brown hat. Never has anyone been less dressed for the desert.
Royce:
10:32 PM Amanda: Hahaha! It was definitely necessary for him to take off his shirt! [Ed note. That's sarcasm: there wasn't even the excuse of covering himself in mud to drop his temp, making it hard for Predator's Heatvision to locate him...or if that was the intent, he smeared that mud real half-heartedly]
10:33 PM me: HEE!
2) The movie is largely supported by character actors
In Black Rock, you had:
- Lee Marvin ("Lee Marvin was the Ron Perlman of the fifties!" Amanda joked after I observed that he looked eerily like RPerl; I didn't recognize Lee)
- Ernest Borgnine, who was effective as a gleefully malevolent, googly-eyed bully
- Walter Brennan ("He really talked like that!" - Amanda again) as the town doctor, a rocking-chair philosopher who is the first to see Macreedy as the town's hope and savior
- Handsome-wormy Robert Ryan as town despot Reno Smith
- Long-before Throw Mama From the Train Anne Francis as the Pretty Tough and Pretty, Tough Girl
- Along with lesser-known folks like Dean Jagger (IMDb tells me he was The Major General from White Christmas; awww, we'll follow the old man wherever he wants to go...unless he's bootless, incompetent, drunk, and spineless) and that kid who played the desk clerk who didn't look remotely familiar.
In Predators, you had:
- Danny Trejo (surprisingly, spoiler alert, and assume spoilers from now on, the first to bite it!)
- Walton Goggins as a NON-Southern degenerate who alternated between panicked and charmingly (or straight-up) disgusting
- Topher Grace (mild-mannered...or is he?!?!?! Spoiler alert: he wasn't)
- "Mahershabazalabshazhalikishabwbaka Ali" (the black guy who died second; "Progress!" according to Amanda)
- Oleg Taktarov, star of Rollerball, I guess
- Alice Braga as The Pretty Tough and Pretty, Tough Girl
- Louis Ozawa Changchien as a Yakuza fellow who had a sword and was tattooed
- And, covered in pineapple rings and glazed with Method, Sir Laurence Fishburne...
9:53 PM me: He's like the intense, Shakespearean Fred Sanford.
9:54 PM Amanda: HAAAA!
He is certainly making some choices.
9:55 PM me: It's like he saw Ralph Fiennes in "Spider" and thought "I'd like to do that, but in a cruddy action-monster movie."
3) There is an evil being fought
In Black Rock, that evil was xenophobia, cowardice, and a regime comprised of ignorance, small-time, bad-neighbor criminal enterprise, fearful silence, and willful blindness: Robert Ryan's Reno Smith, after conspiring to cheat a Japanese-American farmer by renting him what he considered unfarmable land, heads out with some "friends" to have "fun," only to burn the farmer's house (and the man, for a while) and shoot and murder him.
Macreedy dismounts the train to award the farmer his son's military medal for saving Macreedy's life but finds himself the rumpled, dusty symbol of what is truly right and American: freeing the townspeople from the oppression of a petty criminal turned warlord and uncovering the crimes committed so justice can be served. He does so with a single-minded, quiet will, only raising his hand once (and boy, it's awesome when he does).
In Predators, the evil was Predators. As mentioned before, alien monsters that look like worm-pigs with dreadlocks. Oh, sure, there were several kinds, as Amanda discovered when watching the credits ("Berserker Predator, Tracker Predator, Original Predator, and Falconer Predator"; collect 'em all, kids!), but, you know, basically kind of the same (and that is not a xenophobic statement).
I guess at one point, the evil Royce and Isabelle battle is Topher Grace, whose Justin-Long spastic, barely-believable doctor cover melts away at a convenient point to reveal that "[he] is what you call A Dexter" (Amanda again), who believes this planet full of pig-worms is a Paradise for serial killers. You can imagine how that goes: Royce handily stabinates him and uses his bloody, weakened body as bait to kaboom! a Predator.
Try as I might, I can't make this a haunting allegory to our past or current state of American affairs.
***
I think Amanda and I agreed on both films for the most part:
Amanda: So, overall, which movie did we enjoy more?
11:10 PM me: I'd say "Bad Day at Black Rock." Overall, I liked Spencer Tracy coolly assessing over pkew pkew shirtless Adrien Brody.
11:11 PM Amanda: I would have to agree.
me: Not to judge each film by their heroes alone or anything.
Amanda: I think that Bad Day at Black Rock, while lacking Falconer Predators, had a better script overall.
I think the things we didn't agree on were minimal at best. In Black Rock:
9:05 PM me: This one-size-fits-all, full-orchestra score is driving me a little crackers; it doesn't fit the rest of the movie.
9:09 PM Amanda: It's very fifites. It's kind of working for me. It's more forceful than the visual elements, so it adds punctuation. Nice sense of foreboding.
Except I had to turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue and now the score is too loud.
In Predators:10:36 PM Amanda: I have seen fic for this pairing [Royce/Isabelle]. Not gonna lie: I would read it.
10:37 PM me: Oh, boy.
10:38 PM You are such a sucker for an action hero.
And we both agreed on one thing: neither of us had the time, energy, and/or interest in tackling the gender issues of either film:
11:12 PM me: And Alice Braga didn't girly-run, at least.
Amanda: Oh, boy, should we talk about how Anne Francis was the only woman in [Bad Rock] and the only character to end up dead? Or should we noooouugggghhhh
11:13 PM me: I vote latterrrrruggh.
Hee hee.
So anyway, there were some fine moments, though I have to admit that the most fun was when we got off-track:
11:18 PM Amanda: Oh, A Guy Named Joe is on TCM right now if I feel like more Spencer Tracy. I've seen it, though, and I don't know that I need to see that more than once. Although I've seen Always more than once (also unneeded).
11:20 PM me: I was thinking of retiring to try and start one of my new books; I know I'll only get a few pages in before I zonk out, but I figure it's worth the effort.
11:21 PM Amanda: I just switched to Soapnet for a minute. Did you know Kin Shriner is on Y&R?
me: (I will probably give up and turn on the movie channel...
Amanda: Reading books! There's an idea.
me: Whoa, whoa, just got the Kin Shriner alert.
No, I did NOT know that.
Has he gotten hideous plastic surgery, or is he still smugly handsome as ever?
11:22 PM Amanda: I only saw him for a second. He might have some hair tomfoolery going on.
me: Well, I always forgive Jon Lindstrom for that.
11:23 PM Amanda: Hahaha! Victoria: "You read your mom's blog, didn't you?"
11:24 PM I'm sure Lauren and Phyllis (they have real names I guess) have had toooons of work done, but they don't look horrifying like whatsherface on B&B.
When a temporary Royce/bait Original Predator formed an alliance:
10:23 PM me: This is like the one episode of TNG where they saved the young Borg and Georgi named him Hugh and then Hugh became a resistance fighter.
10:24 PM Only this is Predators.
Amanda: "I, Borg"
Was the name of that
me: I think so!
Because "Hugh" was from the li'l Borg misunderstanding the pronoun "you."
(And now I see that Amanda was telling me, not guessing at the title, like I would have. Doy.)
And we got to get our film nerd on from time to time:
Black Rock:
10:43 PM Amanda: I love mid-century socially conscious earnestness, myself.
10:44 PM Some interesting stuff in Ryan's imdb bio
10:48 PM It's interesting to watch Crossfire, which is a noir about antisemitism, while keeping in mind that the novel it was based on was about homophobia.
10:49 PM Hey, also, how about that Cinemascope?
me: I know it's a dumb cliche but they really don't make movies like that anymore.
10:50 PM That shot of the windmill made me think for a little bit if anyone did that kind of non-clunky silent atmosphere setting without being a bunch of sarcastic goofs (Coen Brothers). I couldn't think right off the top of my head.
10:52 PM Amanda: I had something about the town and "dessicated humanity" but I lost it.
10:53 PM imdb trivia: "The suit that Tracy wears throughout the film was bought by him off the rack, at his insistence." Awesome.
10:54 PM The sign behind the hotel desk is a quote from English evangelist John Wesley: "Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can."
me: Wow, I didn't even notice that once.
10:57 PM Speaking of socially conscious movies from that era and Spencer Tracy: I could watch "Inherit the Wind" again. Probably right now if I had it.
11:00 PM Amanda: Oh, yeah, I haven't seen that in years.
This also made me want to rewatch High Noon.
me: Which I have never seen. I always meant to. That and "Shane."
11:01 PM Amanda: You know, you mentioned the Coen Brothers, and I think they are the closest thing around today to the kind of suspense that was in our feature tonight.
I guess "style" is a more precise word than the mushy "kind."
Predators:
10:16 PM Amanda: Poetic.
10:17 PM With the waving grass it was almost as if Terence Malick directed that Japanese-mobster-swordfights-alien-monster scene,
10:18 PM me: HA!
"The Thin Predator Line"
So I had fun. We haven't discussed options for the next go-round, but it was thrown out there that neither of us have seen Shane.Until then, please consider Amanda's ideas for next year's Yuletide exchange:
11:14 PM me:I have a feeling that Ernest Borgnine's character and Walton Goggins's character would have had a lot to talk about (you know, in a crossover AU).
Amanda: YULETIDE!
me: Those would be the BEST requests.
11:15 PM Amanda: Can Macreedy survive the Predator planet even though he's old and he only has one arm?
me: HEE!
Amanda: SHAME ON YOU, PREDATORS!
And PS if you think of a better name for this series than my lazy tribute to Face/Off, please feel free to suggest it in comments.
Corrections courtesy of Amanda: "Doc was the town undertaker (I
guess they called him "Doc" ironically?); you're thinking of Anne Ramsey
from TMFTT (that's what the kids call it at their TMFTT conventions
[MommaCon]). The lovely Anne Francis was Honey West, and spent the 70s
and 80s appearing in tv movies and Murders, She Wrote."
Corrections courtesy of Amanda: "Doc was the town undertaker (I
guess they called him "Doc" ironically?); you're thinking of Anne Ramsey
from TMFTT (that's what the kids call it at their TMFTT conventions
[MommaCon]). The lovely Anne Francis was Honey West, and spent the 70s
and 80s appearing in tv movies and Murders, She Wrote."
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Glee 2xwhatever, "Funeral"
Around 1998 or 1999--good Lord, that was over 10 years ago; argh, I'm so old!--I went to Patch Adams at the Eau Claire Budget Theatre with a few of my then-college roommates. I remember feeling my impatience and resentment growing with each passing moment of pandering and blatant emotional string-pulling. By the time the film reached the--spoiler alert, and suck it, because count yourself lucky if, by this point in your blessed and peaceful life, you have not watch the shitheap that is Patch Adams--point where Patch Adams's Girlfriend was murdered, I was furious, especially at myself as tears welled in my eyes. I was falling prey to the movie's manipulation all while totally conscious of and valiantly fighting it.
I think we even went on $1 Tuesday, which made it even more insulting. Jesus, if you can't even be passable for a dollar to a college student who had watched Titanic SIX TIMES in the theater...
The whole point of this story is that last night's Glee was the Patch Adams of Television.
I briefly considered doing some LOL screencaps and bitching about it, but my resentment reached a point where I was like, "Shit, this was basically free, man [argument about effects of marketing and advertising here]. Do you want to spend any more time thinking about how aggravating the umpteenth adjustment to Sue Sylvester's character was, all the more so because it was laziest possible way to ditch a storyline they didn't even need? Do you want to talk about how Jonathan Groff makes the corpse Orville Redenbacher look like a spring chicken? Do you want to gnash your verbal teeth over Rachel and Finn and Quinn and that particular merry-go-round of horseshit?"
No. No, I do not.
Instead, here's a picture of Kurt being cute:
To quote Kelly Kapoor: "Honestly, that show is just--it's irresponsible."
I think we even went on $1 Tuesday, which made it even more insulting. Jesus, if you can't even be passable for a dollar to a college student who had watched Titanic SIX TIMES in the theater...
The whole point of this story is that last night's Glee was the Patch Adams of Television.
I briefly considered doing some LOL screencaps and bitching about it, but my resentment reached a point where I was like, "Shit, this was basically free, man [argument about effects of marketing and advertising here]. Do you want to spend any more time thinking about how aggravating the umpteenth adjustment to Sue Sylvester's character was, all the more so because it was laziest possible way to ditch a storyline they didn't even need? Do you want to talk about how Jonathan Groff makes the corpse Orville Redenbacher look like a spring chicken? Do you want to gnash your verbal teeth over Rachel and Finn and Quinn and that particular merry-go-round of horseshit?"
No. No, I do not.
Instead, here's a picture of Kurt being cute:
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Well, it's not like he's the Crypt Keeper, but even Judd Nelson looked more like he belonged in high school
It's pretty funny that this week's Glee ep referenced a John Hughes movie, since from what I recall of movie trivia, a lot of the Hughesian cast members were well clear of their teens when stepping into roles in The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (if I were a little less lazy, I'd look up examples, but screw that noise).
Because Johnathan Groff looks about as much like a teenager as Ian Ziering did in the first season of 90210. In fact...
But I guess some of the girl and guy theater nerds love him. Even if he is the Crypt Keeper's feisty young nephew.
Prom! I mostly liked "Friday" (the various shots of the cast dancing and enjoying the song cracked me up, particularly Santana and Karofsky) and the weightier Kurt and Karofsky scenes. It's nice to have someone who can keep up with Colfer, acting-wise.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Are we to the point where we can all agree they are secretly married?
My favorite bit was the arm along the back of Eames's chair. I know you're in the kitchen, Goren, but that doesn't mean you're at home with your wife-partner.
*Like a little one, like the Monopoly piece. Not one of those Kentucky Derby, Lucy-Coe-married-Alan-Quartermaine numbers.
I come to bury Sweet Valley Confidential, not praise it: the last rites of this godforsaken book
1) I was right: the fight at Grandmommy's--siiiiiiiiigh, the Wakefields are one of those families?--was not particularly interesting or surprising:
a) Liam the Black Irish Bartender was instantly enamored with Jessica (his excuse for not being all over Elizabeth? "Pheremones." That means dudes are animals who can sense when a female member of the human race won't put out, Elizabeth) and made a big show of being all up in her grill.
b) Todd, in a bit of emoting that made zero logical sense, flipped the fuck out and accused Jessica of running off with Liam at some point to tongue-kiss him.
c) Bruce Patman was there. Because...he's...there's...I don't know.
d) Everyone starts yelling at everyone right out of a scene from a wacky-yet-touching family Thanksgiving movie.
e) Alice Wakefield yells, "Ned, bring out the fucking cake!"
e) is the best thing because it actually reads like something a frustrated mom would do when her adult children were acting like a bunch of well-groomed monkeys who had learned language from General Hospital.
2) Then Elizabeth returns home to NYC and, in short order, takes up with Will the Angry Young Playwright as "friends with benefits."
3) Then the play opens and Will's estranged fiancee comes along with Thurston Howell and Lovey, Will's parents.
4) Then Will is in love with his estranged fiancee and Elizabeth knows that their friendship with the benefits of sex has come to a close, 24 hours after it began.
I'll take a break here, because I know you're puzzled. Me too! I was going to launch into how maybe as a girl who doesn't engage in the "friends with benefits" game, perhaps I don't understand how it works. But I think it's less that the "friends with benefits" thing is puzzling and more that every single step of this was so accelerated, like reading Ikea directions as fast as possible, only instead of building affordable Swedish crap, it's an author shouting out the elements of a romance plot. "Okay! So! First Elizabeth is mad! Then she leaves for New York! Be sure not to forget that Bruce is her best friend and looks at her adoringly! Okay! She lands in New York! Makes up with Will! He bones her! The play opens! Oh! His fiancee is there! And scene!"
Using the allen wrench, put screw into whatever like diagram A. Got it.
Yikes. Pacing would be helpful, FP. Or genuine interaction betwixt characters not dictated by the iron-clad structure of the plot. Something, Francine. Give me something.
5) Jessica shows up, sleeping up against Elizabeth's door like a wino. She has left Todd because of that fight about Liam and is ready to make amends. At first Elizabeth maintains her icy composure, but because time's a-wasting, and a reconciliation needs to happen nowrightnowthere'sonly32pageslefthurryhurryhurry, Elizabeth then changes her mind or her heart grows three sizes like the Grinch or she has a breakthrough and all her various personalities join the host personality (Sybil!) and then boom, reunited, and it feels so good.
6) Then Todd shows up, hanging out outside the apartment building.
Okay, the whole feel of that sequence was like in Sleepless in Seattle, when we all get to follow Jonah and Sam and Annie as they cross the entire country on their way to and from each other. Dotdotdotdotdot I'm here! It's like these people have never struggled to get the exact right price at Orbitz before. How do they all make travel plans so easily? Oh, that's right: loveeeeeeebarf.
7) Jessica and Todd make up in one of those cute-only-the-movies way of saying "I'm sorry" and "I love you" at the same time.
8) Then everyone is happy and going to go to Jessica and Todd's wedding wheeeeee!
9) So Elizabeth is back in Sweet Valley, and in a turn of events, it turns out Winston Egbert faked his death in order to elude the authorities, who were closing in on him as a suspect for a string of serial rape/murders, but he's alive and living in the basement of the Sweet Valley Country Club, and he kidnaps Elizabeth! Good thing the team from Criminal Minds flies out to sunny CA and, using psychology and science, they locate her just in time. Then that girl with the cat-eye glasses says something saucy and Shemar Moore's shirt falls off.
Sorry, fell down a procedural hole there.
The for-real 9) is that Bruce calls Elizabeth to his house, pours her favorite obscure wine, and tells her he's moving to New York to be with the woman he loves. Because this book is a series of moments wherein people have a-ha! moments at convenient times, Elizabeth is all, "Ohmigod, I love Josh! I mean, Bruce!" and is having a mental meltdown about losing her friendship that also has the side effect of making her a fucking ninnyhammer.
10) So Bruce basically says, "Elizabeth, you ninnyhammer, I'm in love with you! Haven't you noticed the way I've mooned after you since my character was reintroduced? No? You're a ninnyhammer? Okay!"
11) Then they Do It. And it is amazing.
Prime selections follow in bold:
"But this kiss was no silly romantic nonsense. It was real! And it was wild!" (Well, the exclamation points certainly have me convinced. How's about you?)
"It reverberated right through her whole body. Before she knew it, Elizabeth threw her arms around Bruce as if she had just returned from a million years away from the man she loved." (Yes. No silly romantic nonsense. Right.)
"At last Bruce had the love of his life in his arms, the unattainable woman he had adored for ten years, the woman he watched loving someone else. He'd known their love was wrong, but he couldn't tell her the truth because..." (Oh, God, shut it, Patman, and just fuck her already.)
"They were both overcome, out of breath."
Why does everything related to love or sex in this book make the characters sound like they are suffering from some kind of terminal disease? And not, like, in the cool way where the guy writes poetry and then dies, making a bumper sticker slogan also stand for Paul Strobe, I Love You.
"Bruce stood up and held out his hand. And as she did ten years ago in that hospital waiting room, Elizabeth slipped her hand into his. Together they walked up the steps to his bedroom.
Once there, they just held each other..."
Bo-ring.
"....Then Bruce put his hands on her shoulders and moved her back slightly, only far enough to see her completely. To make certain she was absolutely there.
Gently, he unbuttoned her silk blouse. She didn't move. He slid it down over her shoulders, deftly unhooking her bra and allowing her breasts, with their taut nipples, to be free. He just stared at her, drinking in the sight of the flesh and blood of years of longing. Still she didn't move, waiting for him to slip her skirt and th-th-thong-tha-thong-thong-thong down over her hips and reveal her total nakedness to him."
Is anyone else creeped out by the way Elizabeth is standing like a statue? I saw a totally ucky French film once, called The Piano Teacher, and in the climatic scene, the title character initiates her rape fantasy with her boyfriend by lying stock still, seemingly unwilling, while he has sex with her. It was one of the most upsetting things I've ever seen in a film. So thanks, Francine Pascal, for making me flash back on all that.
Also: of course she's wearing a silk blouse that is slid down over her shoulders. It's like I fell back into a pile of the Silhouette novels I read in my early teen years.
"With the excitement of standing in front of this man, whom she had known so long from the distance of friendship, of being completely exposed to him, it took all her willpower to keep from closing the space between them and feeling the heat of his body against hers.
But now it was her turn. Elizabeth reached out and began to unbutton Bruce's shirt. She moved her hands to his belt, unzipped his pants, and with a gentle push, allowed them to drop to the floor, exposed his smooth, almost sculpted body and his desire for her."
I was telling Kristen that the way this sex scene played out was like a literary imagining of what it was like when you were eight or nine years old and you stripped your Barbie and Ken naked and made them kiss and sort of collide into each other. You were certain that plastic naked colliding was something, but you just didn't have all the facts, and you were years away from reading Flowers in the Attic and the filthy parts of your mom's copy of Joan Collins's Sins.
This is plastic naked colliding, right down to the "smooth, almost sculpted body." His desire for her is, like, a philosophical, half-imagined concept, not an actual engorged penis. Just FYI.
"Bruce let his shirt drop from his arms, kicked his legs free of the clothes, and took his love in his arms, pressing so hard he feared he would break her, but he couldn't stop himself and she didn't break. Together, they fell to the bed.
When they made love, it was completely loving, full of such deep tenderness that the passion almost played second to the adoration."
1) Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...what?
2) [plastic colliding, plastic colliding]
"But the passion was there, and once the love had been established, the excitement took over and spun them out into the wild reaches of the glorious.
At last Elizabeth knew the splendid, the marvelous, the amazing, the spectacular!
The over the top!"
I honestly don't even know what happened here. I feel like instead of two characters having sex, Francine is shaking a thesaurus upside-down and just letting adjectives fall onto the page.
***
To wrap this all up, I think it's important that you know the music selections for Jessica and Todd's wedding:
a) The flower girls walked down the aisle to this, apparently.
b) A "melange of Beatles' music" (which, I hope, included "Rocky Raccoon" and "Octopus's Garden")
c) Jessica (the piece de resistance) walked down the aisle in a "strapless sequined" gown to "All I Ask of You" from Phantom of the Opera.
So even though Francine made every effort to mention TwitterGiggle and Bookface and all the other bells and whistles of our technological age, Jessica and Todd still took a time machine back to 1988 to get married. Awesome.
There's a coda to the book, much like the end of American Graffiti, where you get to know what's happening with some of the tertiary characters, but it's certainly not the wild reaches of glorious, so who cares, right?
Heck, let's read it one more time:
"But the passion was there, and once the love had been established, the excitement took over and spun them out into the wild reaches of the glorious.
At last Elizabeth knew the splendid, the marvelous, the amazing, the spectacular!
The over the top!"
Good night, and good luck. May flights of angels collide your body with that of a naked Ken doll. We out.
a) Liam the Black Irish Bartender was instantly enamored with Jessica (his excuse for not being all over Elizabeth? "Pheremones." That means dudes are animals who can sense when a female member of the human race won't put out, Elizabeth) and made a big show of being all up in her grill.
b) Todd, in a bit of emoting that made zero logical sense, flipped the fuck out and accused Jessica of running off with Liam at some point to tongue-kiss him.
c) Bruce Patman was there. Because...he's...there's...I don't know.
d) Everyone starts yelling at everyone right out of a scene from a wacky-yet-touching family Thanksgiving movie.
e) Alice Wakefield yells, "Ned, bring out the fucking cake!"
e) is the best thing because it actually reads like something a frustrated mom would do when her adult children were acting like a bunch of well-groomed monkeys who had learned language from General Hospital.
2) Then Elizabeth returns home to NYC and, in short order, takes up with Will the Angry Young Playwright as "friends with benefits."
3) Then the play opens and Will's estranged fiancee comes along with Thurston Howell and Lovey, Will's parents.
4) Then Will is in love with his estranged fiancee and Elizabeth knows that their friendship with the benefits of sex has come to a close, 24 hours after it began.
I'll take a break here, because I know you're puzzled. Me too! I was going to launch into how maybe as a girl who doesn't engage in the "friends with benefits" game, perhaps I don't understand how it works. But I think it's less that the "friends with benefits" thing is puzzling and more that every single step of this was so accelerated, like reading Ikea directions as fast as possible, only instead of building affordable Swedish crap, it's an author shouting out the elements of a romance plot. "Okay! So! First Elizabeth is mad! Then she leaves for New York! Be sure not to forget that Bruce is her best friend and looks at her adoringly! Okay! She lands in New York! Makes up with Will! He bones her! The play opens! Oh! His fiancee is there! And scene!"
Using the allen wrench, put screw into whatever like diagram A. Got it.
Yikes. Pacing would be helpful, FP. Or genuine interaction betwixt characters not dictated by the iron-clad structure of the plot. Something, Francine. Give me something.
5) Jessica shows up, sleeping up against Elizabeth's door like a wino. She has left Todd because of that fight about Liam and is ready to make amends. At first Elizabeth maintains her icy composure, but because time's a-wasting, and a reconciliation needs to happen nowrightnowthere'sonly32pageslefthurryhurryhurry, Elizabeth then changes her mind or her heart grows three sizes like the Grinch or she has a breakthrough and all her various personalities join the host personality (Sybil!) and then boom, reunited, and it feels so good.
6) Then Todd shows up, hanging out outside the apartment building.
Okay, the whole feel of that sequence was like in Sleepless in Seattle, when we all get to follow Jonah and Sam and Annie as they cross the entire country on their way to and from each other. Dotdotdotdotdot I'm here! It's like these people have never struggled to get the exact right price at Orbitz before. How do they all make travel plans so easily? Oh, that's right: loveeeeeeebarf.
7) Jessica and Todd make up in one of those cute-only-the-movies way of saying "I'm sorry" and "I love you" at the same time.
8) Then everyone is happy and going to go to Jessica and Todd's wedding wheeeeee!
9) So Elizabeth is back in Sweet Valley, and in a turn of events, it turns out Winston Egbert faked his death in order to elude the authorities, who were closing in on him as a suspect for a string of serial rape/murders, but he's alive and living in the basement of the Sweet Valley Country Club, and he kidnaps Elizabeth! Good thing the team from Criminal Minds flies out to sunny CA and, using psychology and science, they locate her just in time. Then that girl with the cat-eye glasses says something saucy and Shemar Moore's shirt falls off.
Sorry, fell down a procedural hole there.
The for-real 9) is that Bruce calls Elizabeth to his house, pours her favorite obscure wine, and tells her he's moving to New York to be with the woman he loves. Because this book is a series of moments wherein people have a-ha! moments at convenient times, Elizabeth is all, "Ohmigod, I love Josh! I mean, Bruce!" and is having a mental meltdown about losing her friendship that also has the side effect of making her a fucking ninnyhammer.
10) So Bruce basically says, "Elizabeth, you ninnyhammer, I'm in love with you! Haven't you noticed the way I've mooned after you since my character was reintroduced? No? You're a ninnyhammer? Okay!"
11) Then they Do It. And it is amazing.
Prime selections follow in bold:
"But this kiss was no silly romantic nonsense. It was real! And it was wild!" (Well, the exclamation points certainly have me convinced. How's about you?)
"It reverberated right through her whole body. Before she knew it, Elizabeth threw her arms around Bruce as if she had just returned from a million years away from the man she loved." (Yes. No silly romantic nonsense. Right.)
"At last Bruce had the love of his life in his arms, the unattainable woman he had adored for ten years, the woman he watched loving someone else. He'd known their love was wrong, but he couldn't tell her the truth because..." (Oh, God, shut it, Patman, and just fuck her already.)
"They were both overcome, out of breath."
Why does everything related to love or sex in this book make the characters sound like they are suffering from some kind of terminal disease? And not, like, in the cool way where the guy writes poetry and then dies, making a bumper sticker slogan also stand for Paul Strobe, I Love You.
"Bruce stood up and held out his hand. And as she did ten years ago in that hospital waiting room, Elizabeth slipped her hand into his. Together they walked up the steps to his bedroom.
Once there, they just held each other..."
Bo-ring.
"....Then Bruce put his hands on her shoulders and moved her back slightly, only far enough to see her completely. To make certain she was absolutely there.
Gently, he unbuttoned her silk blouse. She didn't move. He slid it down over her shoulders, deftly unhooking her bra and allowing her breasts, with their taut nipples, to be free. He just stared at her, drinking in the sight of the flesh and blood of years of longing. Still she didn't move, waiting for him to slip her skirt and th-th-thong-tha-thong-thong-thong down over her hips and reveal her total nakedness to him."
Is anyone else creeped out by the way Elizabeth is standing like a statue? I saw a totally ucky French film once, called The Piano Teacher, and in the climatic scene, the title character initiates her rape fantasy with her boyfriend by lying stock still, seemingly unwilling, while he has sex with her. It was one of the most upsetting things I've ever seen in a film. So thanks, Francine Pascal, for making me flash back on all that.
Also: of course she's wearing a silk blouse that is slid down over her shoulders. It's like I fell back into a pile of the Silhouette novels I read in my early teen years.
"With the excitement of standing in front of this man, whom she had known so long from the distance of friendship, of being completely exposed to him, it took all her willpower to keep from closing the space between them and feeling the heat of his body against hers.
But now it was her turn. Elizabeth reached out and began to unbutton Bruce's shirt. She moved her hands to his belt, unzipped his pants, and with a gentle push, allowed them to drop to the floor, exposed his smooth, almost sculpted body and his desire for her."
I was telling Kristen that the way this sex scene played out was like a literary imagining of what it was like when you were eight or nine years old and you stripped your Barbie and Ken naked and made them kiss and sort of collide into each other. You were certain that plastic naked colliding was something, but you just didn't have all the facts, and you were years away from reading Flowers in the Attic and the filthy parts of your mom's copy of Joan Collins's Sins.
This is plastic naked colliding, right down to the "smooth, almost sculpted body." His desire for her is, like, a philosophical, half-imagined concept, not an actual engorged penis. Just FYI.
"Bruce let his shirt drop from his arms, kicked his legs free of the clothes, and took his love in his arms, pressing so hard he feared he would break her, but he couldn't stop himself and she didn't break. Together, they fell to the bed.
When they made love, it was completely loving, full of such deep tenderness that the passion almost played second to the adoration."
1) Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...what?
2) [plastic colliding, plastic colliding]
"But the passion was there, and once the love had been established, the excitement took over and spun them out into the wild reaches of the glorious.
At last Elizabeth knew the splendid, the marvelous, the amazing, the spectacular!
The over the top!"
I honestly don't even know what happened here. I feel like instead of two characters having sex, Francine is shaking a thesaurus upside-down and just letting adjectives fall onto the page.
***
To wrap this all up, I think it's important that you know the music selections for Jessica and Todd's wedding:
a) The flower girls walked down the aisle to this, apparently.
b) A "melange of Beatles' music" (which, I hope, included "Rocky Raccoon" and "Octopus's Garden")
c) Jessica (the piece de resistance) walked down the aisle in a "strapless sequined" gown to "All I Ask of You" from Phantom of the Opera.
So even though Francine made every effort to mention TwitterGiggle and Bookface and all the other bells and whistles of our technological age, Jessica and Todd still took a time machine back to 1988 to get married. Awesome.
There's a coda to the book, much like the end of American Graffiti, where you get to know what's happening with some of the tertiary characters, but it's certainly not the wild reaches of glorious, so who cares, right?
Heck, let's read it one more time:
"But the passion was there, and once the love had been established, the excitement took over and spun them out into the wild reaches of the glorious.
At last Elizabeth knew the splendid, the marvelous, the amazing, the spectacular!
The over the top!"
Good night, and good luck. May flights of angels collide your body with that of a naked Ken doll. We out.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
For fans of fine wooly mustaches and/or Scott Grimes
Thursday, May 5, 2011
"Like a heart attack, the love kind": More Sweet Valley Confidential
Here is a belated list of writing tics and annoying bologna that I wish would stop within the text of Sweet Valley Confidential:
- The attempts to give Jessica's dialogue some Valley Girl flair. Between the "like"s that turn up sprinkled throughout her sentences like so many poisoned Reese's Pieces on a cup of TCBY fro-yo that are not comma delimited, like God and MLA intended, and her sometimes-italicized, sometimes-not use of "so" for emphasis, I'm about ready to go blind.
- The "friend" overuse continues to run rampant. Bruce and Elizabeth both refer to each other as "friend," like it's a pronoun. It is so...okay, I ran through the following adjecives; feel free to pick one: creepy, odd, off-putting, artificial, weird.
- Bruce Patman, everyone's favorite Porsche-driving, girl-banging, arrogant prick, is, naturally, in love with Elizabeth Wakefield, his best friend. (Oh, and I'll save you the excruciating work that Kate and I put into trying to remember the name of the title where Regina snorts coke and dies: it's #40, On the Edge)
- Steven Wakefield, who many of you remember for his tragic love affair with Tricia "Who Had Leukemia" Martin, married Cara Walker... and then got his gay on with Aaron Dallas, who has one blue eye and one brown eye, like a husky (awwwwwwwwwwww) (and don't worry, fans, Jessica still has her bizarro damn-the-social-mores attraction to her brother, even if he does like dudes now)
- Winston Egbert, everyone's favorite third-string Jughead, morphed into a storyline from The Social Network (which I guess is a documentary or something?) and was a rich dot-com genius with no real friends because he was an asshole who was shitty to women.
- Then he died.
- By plunging off a balcony while drunk.
- I know, right?
- There were approximately 1 billion flashback sequence, until time and space folded in on itself and there was a flashback of the same anticlimactic confrontation between Jessica, Jessica's rich-not-quite-abusive husband, Elizabeth, and Todd told from both Jessica AND Elizabeth's perspectives. You know, like that Japanese movie about rape using multi-POV narrative that I still haven't seen, or an Italo Calvino novel, or...
The Bruce Patman section is--I say this confidently--easily the worst part of the book thus far. Bruce's parents die in a horrible car accident (his mother instantly, his father after six days of coma), and the grinding, flop-sweaty effort to redeem Bruce is embarrassing to experience.
"It was in those endless hours in the chill of the hospital waiting room, waiting for the miracle that didn't come, that Bruce's life changed. He let the change in [ed. note: consequently, he also let the sun shine, let the sun shine in, the sun...shine in]. It was almost overnight. When he came out of grieving, he knew he was different."
And just when you think it can't get worse, Bruce narrates falling in love with Elizabeth as she ministers to his grief:
"She comes every day [heh heh heh], and I wait for her. But it's a different wait. When I see her coming from the elevator my heart starts to speed up and I feel my breath coming in shallow gasps [dude, get that shit checked out]. Like a heart attack, the love kind."
I'll let you roll that over in your mind. Try saying it out loud. Do it. I dare you.
And if you're done either weeping from the pain, or have regained your breath after the nearly paralyzing laughter, I will direct you to the next passage where Bruce says he is "better now, able to control the physical symptoms, but the ache for her is still there, the longing and the love." So...are the physical symptoms...like, the mild heart attack you had that first time? Or...boners? Bruce, point to how you feel here:
I will now subject you to my complaining that this book's obsession with redemption or, I don't know, growth as a person, as "new" vs. "old," e.g., "old Bruce would have x"* or "old Jessica would have y." It is eerie. It's like this novel is the portrayal of the weird robotic humanoids of The Island or something. The delineation is very exact, leaves little room for the idea that someone has room for multifacetedness or, I don't know, a second dimension. You can change and adjust behaviors and personality traits and not be a robot. I think.
On a different topic, I don't even know what to do with Steven's thought that "Sometimes [he] was struck by how heterosexual his homosexuality was." What the shit does that even mean? Just because Steve can have teasing, "clever" conversations with his male lover, that's...not gay? But you still have mansex with him, right? Right, Steven? And for your information, being bantery and clever does not just belong to straight people. Jiminy Crickets, Francine Pascal, thanks for letting us know that it does get better...if you let any author other than Francine Pascal portray someone coming out of the closet and living their life with the Husky or soccer player of their choice.
And as if the Wakefield family vibe wasn't incestuous enough back in the day, when Jessica would often admire her shirtless or recently showered brother:
"A thousand times a day [Jessica] needed Elizbeth, needed to see her in a crowd and know she was hers, to touch her skin, to brush her hair, just to push up against her, so natural as not to be noticed, to pluck a piece of lint off her skirt, wipe a crumb from her chin, to be able always to enter into that private space that everyone else holds around them, inviolable."
Hey, everyone, I've got some really beautiful flowers. They're in the attic. Want to come up and see them? Have sex with each other?
So friends--if I may call you "friend," and be sure to address you as "friend" often, so you are absolutely crystal clear as to where our relationship stands, and that if the song "You've Got A Friend" ever plays over the speakers while we are at a bar, I probably put it on the TouchTunes--I closed the book just as Elizabeth was entering the country club with Liam, the Irish Bartender--that's right, the virtual stranger did accompany her to her grandmother's 80th birthday, where she is almost certain to make something of a scene with her twin sister who once bonked her sister's ex-boyfriend ohhhhhhhh I'm dizzy. I know that you, like me, look forward to the absolute lack of drama that will no doubt be generated from the fallout.
Friend.
*For example, do you know what "old Bruce" would have done? Tried to get Elizabeth Wakefield to go all the way with him, even though she clearly had a metal plate in her head or dissociative personality disorder, in #7 Dear Sister!
Boy, that was a good one.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
And to keep you updated on Street Kings 2...
The following Google Search led someone to my blogaboo:
Search Keywords
charlotte ross ray liotta street kings 2 nude
Sorry to disappoint you, Googler, but neither Eve Donovan nor Ray Liotta get naked in this otherwise satisfying(ish) film.
Search Keywords
charlotte ross ray liotta street kings 2 nude
Sorry to disappoint you, Googler, but neither Eve Donovan nor Ray Liotta get naked in this otherwise satisfying(ish) film.
Sweet Valley Confidential II: Spoiler Alert--Everyone Continues to Not Get Laid
I've progressed nearly 40 pages, and I have to tell you that on the bus this morning, as I was reading, I very nearly broke out sweating, the dialogue was so painful. My reaction was so visceral, it reminded me of Kevin Murphy's account of going to see Corky Romano in the theater with Mike Nelson ("The whole movie hurts. We're sitting on coarse-grit sandpaper.")
I mean, honestly, take this flirty (read: puzzling, poorly translated from Telenovela Spanish to English) exchange betwixt Elizabeth and former object-of-hate, Todd-almost-lookalike Will:
"Elizabeth Show Survey! [ed. note: okay, I admit, using the magazine as Elizabeth's last name sort of made me laugh; you win this round, Sweet Valley Confidential] That sucks. I'm actually one of the the nicest, kindest guys you'll ever meet."
"How come when I asked you to answer a couple of questions you nearly bit my head off?" [asked Elizabeth flirtily-barifly]
"Hey, I'm an angry young playwright. What was I supposed to do?"
Question: how many Os can one stick in the word "Groan" before it becomes overindulgent overstatement? Ten? Twelve?
So their "banter" progresses and they make out a little, but naturally, Elizabeth doesn't put out. I swear she's like the polar opposite of an episode of Red Shoe Diaries (remember that little gem on Showtime? David Duchovny narrates stories where people inexplicably ended up having paint-by-numbers soft-core sex?). And shortly after the two of them have overshared (He left his fiancee and law school for The Theeeeeeeatre! His father, Thurston Howell, is disappointed! Elizabeth, as we are all WELL AWARE, was cheated on by her boyfriend AND TWIN SISTER!) and drunkenly made out, the natural progression of such an acquaintence is to call the dude and have the following phone conversation shortly after not even giving the dude a my-pants-are-a-no-fly-zone BJ:
Even though it was ridiculously early in the relationship, Will would probably understand [why Elizabeth is calling with the terrible, terrible idea to invite a near-stranger to fly to the opposite coast with her and attend her grandmother's 80th birthday party in the hopes that it will somehow relieve the sting of seeing Cheater McGee and Cipher Todd]. Without wasting a moment in sensible thinking [yeah, why do that? That's for losers and well-written three-dimensional characters who don't act like desperate Lifetime Movie villainesses], Elizabeth looked up [Will's] number and dialed.
"Hello," Will said. She could tell he had been sleeping off the martinis.
"Hi, it's Elizabeth."
That woke him. "You're coming back?" [Poor deluded sap; prepare to have that half-mast woody dashed into flaccidity, sucka!]
"No, not today anyway, but maybe soon [said the cocktease].
[Blah blah stuff about the play, I will spare you all, who cares]
"Actually, I'm calling about a big favor from a new friend" [said Elizabeth]
"Am I the new friend?" [said Will]
[blah blah Elizabeth asks him to fly to California, creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy]
"I would really love to go with you and shove it to that sister and her lying, cheating fiance [that's right, folks, this guy is a playwright], but they would never let me leave, even for a day. [Blah blah I'm thinking about getting a restraining order] I'm really sorry, Elizabeth. Am I still your new friend?"
"Forever."
At this juncture, I actually audibly groaned, like I was struck with appendicitis or food poisoning. Does Francine Pascal know the definition of the word "friend?" The overuse of the word reminds me of Frankenstein, seconds before he snapped a child's neck. Its awkwardness and artificiality make the dialogue read as creepy or mentally handicapped or...well, Frankenstein.
I'm waiting for the villagers of NYC to gather outside Elizabeth's apartment building with torches and pitchforks. I'd almost take the vacuous and idiotic Carrie Bradshaw approach to fun, flirty, single NYC living over this. There. I said it.
And to make matters weirder and more oddly contradictory, Elizabeth, with Will's help, ham-handedly put together a half-scheme for Elizabeth to invite Liam, the "black Irish" bartender to Sweet Valley instead. Who is even MORE of a stranger than Will, mind you. It's like the entire sequence is a setup for a PSA about the dangers of Craigslist or something. "Hey, that bartender that was giving me the sex eye seemed nice. I should ask him to accompany me on a trip. I certainly won't end up splashed on the cover of the New York Post as missing! L&O: SVU won't then rip my disappearance and subsequent corpsical discovery from the headlines!"
Like all plot progressions thus far, Liam conveniently/nonsensically is a California transplant who has been meaning to go see his Irish surgeon dad (I know, right? My reaction was the same as yours...that is, if you just RCA Dogged the screen and made a Tim Allen noise). So that worked out swimmingly. Until the murdering begins, that is. Because everything is a James Patterson novel or an SVU episode in my mind. Thanks, NBC Movie of the Week Starring Fred Savage Where He Domestically Abused, Then Murdered Candace Cameron!
And that isn't even the weirdest part:
Additionally, what she'd taken for romantic interest on his part wasn't realy there. And that nonfeeling was mutual and comfortable.
Say what, girlfriend? I mean, I'm pretty sure it was mere pages ago that you were all:
Elizabeth watched the bartender [blah blah hey kids buy Stolichnaya] eyes fixed on her all the while, mixing the drink by feel. Even without the alcohol, she was beginning to cheer up, though he was definitely wasting his time on her.
"Olive?" he asked, pouring the chilled liquid into a martini glass and making the single word sound positively loving, flashing a dimple that was almost overkill.
So readers, I have determined that, much like Humbert Humbert, Elizabeth Wakefield is what the literary nerd set call an "unreliable narrator." By the time she kills her sister in a jealous rage and we all meet for book club, one of our discussion questions will be: "Was Elizabeth sane or insane? Can we trust that what she shared with us regarding her internal conflict was genuine? Also: does Elizabeth know what a friend is? Is she The Bride of Frankenstein?"
Onto another topic, I've realized why the flashback sections are so off-putting: they are written in present tense! What a jarring narrative decision, Francine. Well, also the flashbacks are stupid. That doesn't help. Did you know that Jessica was married to a possessive, borderline-abusive rich guy for four months? And lived on a yacht? And escaped, much like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, to a small town? Only she didn't fake her death and, one assumes, Patrick Bergin will not track her down to straighten her towels and stalk her? Yep!
I have this sense that all these various threads of sensational half-stories (or, in Elizabeth's own words, "enough family turmoil to start a new HBO series"), the introduction of various "frieeeeeend"s who are barely established, not useful for sex scenes, and awkwardly shoehorned into Elizabeth's ongoing 2.5-on-a-scale-of-10 efforts to get revenge or vent her spleen at Jessica will pan out to nothing.
Thus making me more irritated and eager to make fun of it. So good deal, I guess.
Next up: oh, my word, Jessica works for an ecologically-friendly makeup start-up. Mercy.
I mean, honestly, take this flirty (read: puzzling, poorly translated from Telenovela Spanish to English) exchange betwixt Elizabeth and former object-of-hate, Todd-almost-lookalike Will:
"Elizabeth Show Survey! [ed. note: okay, I admit, using the magazine as Elizabeth's last name sort of made me laugh; you win this round, Sweet Valley Confidential] That sucks. I'm actually one of the the nicest, kindest guys you'll ever meet."
"How come when I asked you to answer a couple of questions you nearly bit my head off?" [asked Elizabeth flirtily-barifly]
"Hey, I'm an angry young playwright. What was I supposed to do?"
Question: how many Os can one stick in the word "Groan" before it becomes overindulgent overstatement? Ten? Twelve?
So their "banter" progresses and they make out a little, but naturally, Elizabeth doesn't put out. I swear she's like the polar opposite of an episode of Red Shoe Diaries (remember that little gem on Showtime? David Duchovny narrates stories where people inexplicably ended up having paint-by-numbers soft-core sex?). And shortly after the two of them have overshared (He left his fiancee and law school for The Theeeeeeeatre! His father, Thurston Howell, is disappointed! Elizabeth, as we are all WELL AWARE, was cheated on by her boyfriend AND TWIN SISTER!) and drunkenly made out, the natural progression of such an acquaintence is to call the dude and have the following phone conversation shortly after not even giving the dude a my-pants-are-a-no-fly-zone BJ:
Even though it was ridiculously early in the relationship, Will would probably understand [why Elizabeth is calling with the terrible, terrible idea to invite a near-stranger to fly to the opposite coast with her and attend her grandmother's 80th birthday party in the hopes that it will somehow relieve the sting of seeing Cheater McGee and Cipher Todd]. Without wasting a moment in sensible thinking [yeah, why do that? That's for losers and well-written three-dimensional characters who don't act like desperate Lifetime Movie villainesses], Elizabeth looked up [Will's] number and dialed.
"Hello," Will said. She could tell he had been sleeping off the martinis.
"Hi, it's Elizabeth."
That woke him. "You're coming back?" [Poor deluded sap; prepare to have that half-mast woody dashed into flaccidity, sucka!]
"No, not today anyway, but maybe soon [said the cocktease].
[Blah blah stuff about the play, I will spare you all, who cares]
"Actually, I'm calling about a big favor from a new friend" [said Elizabeth]
"Am I the new friend?" [said Will]
[blah blah Elizabeth asks him to fly to California, creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy]
"I would really love to go with you and shove it to that sister and her lying, cheating fiance [that's right, folks, this guy is a playwright], but they would never let me leave, even for a day. [Blah blah I'm thinking about getting a restraining order] I'm really sorry, Elizabeth. Am I still your new friend?"
"Forever."
At this juncture, I actually audibly groaned, like I was struck with appendicitis or food poisoning. Does Francine Pascal know the definition of the word "friend?" The overuse of the word reminds me of Frankenstein, seconds before he snapped a child's neck. Its awkwardness and artificiality make the dialogue read as creepy or mentally handicapped or...well, Frankenstein.
I'm waiting for the villagers of NYC to gather outside Elizabeth's apartment building with torches and pitchforks. I'd almost take the vacuous and idiotic Carrie Bradshaw approach to fun, flirty, single NYC living over this. There. I said it.
And to make matters weirder and more oddly contradictory, Elizabeth, with Will's help, ham-handedly put together a half-scheme for Elizabeth to invite Liam, the "black Irish" bartender to Sweet Valley instead. Who is even MORE of a stranger than Will, mind you. It's like the entire sequence is a setup for a PSA about the dangers of Craigslist or something. "Hey, that bartender that was giving me the sex eye seemed nice. I should ask him to accompany me on a trip. I certainly won't end up splashed on the cover of the New York Post as missing! L&O: SVU won't then rip my disappearance and subsequent corpsical discovery from the headlines!"
Like all plot progressions thus far, Liam conveniently/nonsensically is a California transplant who has been meaning to go see his Irish surgeon dad (I know, right? My reaction was the same as yours...that is, if you just RCA Dogged the screen and made a Tim Allen noise). So that worked out swimmingly. Until the murdering begins, that is. Because everything is a James Patterson novel or an SVU episode in my mind. Thanks, NBC Movie of the Week Starring Fred Savage Where He Domestically Abused, Then Murdered Candace Cameron!
And that isn't even the weirdest part:
Additionally, what she'd taken for romantic interest on his part wasn't realy there. And that nonfeeling was mutual and comfortable.
Say what, girlfriend? I mean, I'm pretty sure it was mere pages ago that you were all:
Elizabeth watched the bartender [blah blah hey kids buy Stolichnaya] eyes fixed on her all the while, mixing the drink by feel. Even without the alcohol, she was beginning to cheer up, though he was definitely wasting his time on her.
"Olive?" he asked, pouring the chilled liquid into a martini glass and making the single word sound positively loving, flashing a dimple that was almost overkill.
So readers, I have determined that, much like Humbert Humbert, Elizabeth Wakefield is what the literary nerd set call an "unreliable narrator." By the time she kills her sister in a jealous rage and we all meet for book club, one of our discussion questions will be: "Was Elizabeth sane or insane? Can we trust that what she shared with us regarding her internal conflict was genuine? Also: does Elizabeth know what a friend is? Is she The Bride of Frankenstein?"
Onto another topic, I've realized why the flashback sections are so off-putting: they are written in present tense! What a jarring narrative decision, Francine. Well, also the flashbacks are stupid. That doesn't help. Did you know that Jessica was married to a possessive, borderline-abusive rich guy for four months? And lived on a yacht? And escaped, much like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, to a small town? Only she didn't fake her death and, one assumes, Patrick Bergin will not track her down to straighten her towels and stalk her? Yep!
I have this sense that all these various threads of sensational half-stories (or, in Elizabeth's own words, "enough family turmoil to start a new HBO series"), the introduction of various "frieeeeeend"s who are barely established, not useful for sex scenes, and awkwardly shoehorned into Elizabeth's ongoing 2.5-on-a-scale-of-10 efforts to get revenge or vent her spleen at Jessica will pan out to nothing.
Thus making me more irritated and eager to make fun of it. So good deal, I guess.
Next up: oh, my word, Jessica works for an ecologically-friendly makeup start-up. Mercy.
Monday, May 2, 2011
BookIT! (without the personal pan pizza): Sweet Valley Confidential
My friend amanjo, knowing my prediliction for Sweet Valley High and Sweet Valley High-related nostalgia, was kind enough to offer me her copy of Sweet Valley Confidential. My initial enthusiasm for buying my own copy to visit my friends, the Wakefield twins, was dampened when she told me that the hardcover release was 20-some bucks (looks like Amazon is kinder). Why, back in my day, when I routinely special-ordered the latest paperback SVH and, to a lesser, not as chastely sexy and glamorous extent, Sweet Valley Twins, a title ran me $2.50! But like I said: amanjo was more impulsive and committed to the concept than I, so I inherited her gently used copy.
It arrived last week in a USPS parcel, and I took my time cracking the cover. I'm a grown-up person with a degree in literature. I've written papers about Age of Innocence and "Twelfth Night" and Things Fall Apart! How could I backpedal into something I've clearly outgrown, with all the education (not to mention the sweet, sweet love of ironic enjoyment) and the adulthood I now possess.
Pretty easily actually. The love of sweet, sweet ironic enjoyment helps a lot.
I'm only about 80 pages in thus far, but one thing is for certain: ELIZABETH WAKEFIELD IS PISSED. The world's most perfect boyfriend, Todd, has apparently cheated on her--once in body, but months in soulmate longing and clandestine meetings at a diner right out of Happy Days or Alice--with her identical twin sister, Jessica. Elizabeth lets you know she is super pissed via internal monologues that occasionally end in awkward swearing (gasp!), as well as odd past-tense passages that are like flashbacks or coma dreams or journal entries. Those also sometimes contain swearing (gasp! I mean, Elizabeth! She was perfect!). She's living a shitty existence in New York as only a character in a cruddily constructed YA novel can: working at a startup magazine dedicated to off-Broadway shows that is crumbling, yet can afford to pay her to do an in-depth piece on a play about Samuel Johnson.
Thus far, she has nearly had sex with her boss (but not really), got serious sex vibes from some amazing "black Irish" (that's a phrase Jessica Wakefield and no other English-speaking human uses, by the bye) bartender (but she didn't wanna), and is engaging in a love-hate relationship with--sigh--a playwright who happens to look almost exactly like Todd.
The teases about how much sex Elizabeth could be having but chooses not to reads like Brian Johnson of The Breakfast Club: next, she's totally going to meet a guy, but none of you will know him, because he's from Niagara Falls.
Meanwhile, Jessica is tormenting herself like Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights, only many times stupider. That is, when she's not full of righteous and indignant fury that "matronly" gossip Caroline Pearce (isn't it great, by the way, how all of the characters you knew and loved in Sweet Valley made no efforts to grow or develop or change any of their constrictive two-dimensional roles) is trying to nose out whether Elizabeth has called or forgiven Jessica('s scheming vagina) or is coming to Jessica and Todd's wedding.
Todd is a cipher, made even more of a zero than his high-school self by his cheating, which seems like it is supposed to make sense in the context of the novel, but instead comes across as though it was created in a vacuum, never really the behavior of an actual human person but of a plot point generating robot. The menfolk that litter Elizabeth's lifescape are not much better than a collection of adjectives, eye colors, and hair descriptors. If I may dust off my degree for a moment: the way the male characters are portrayed in this novel suggests, like Jane Austen, that Francine Pascal lived in a society where males and females were largely segregated and, therefore, she has little idea how men think or act and therefore tends to marginalize...okay, well, Austen tended to marginalize, so let's call what Pascal does "straight-up half-pipe fancy-skateboard-move biffs" the male voice. For example, a furious, seemingly straight playwright, when faced with the stunning, everyone-wants-to-sex-her-because-she's-byoooooootiful-but-also-has-a-headache-tonight-honey Elizabeth, finds himself thinking "...why he had been so unfriendly to this beautiful girl. He made up his mind to make her his friend."
Here are some alternate and more believable ways that sentence could have ended:
"He made up his mind to make her his fuck buddy"
"He made up his mind to maker her his concubine"
"...his latest conquest."
"...his plus-one to a hot afterparty."
"...his next teammate on his co-ed dodgeball league."
"...his girlfriend, for crying out Pete."
It's an odd experience reading this thus far. For all I'm sassing, it's almost as though I'm too embarrassed for my young self to make fun of it, because it exposes what a naive dork with poor taste I was. Dave White recently wrote in a review of a tweeny movie, Prom, "because while it’s ostensibly about high school kids, it’s not for them. Instead, it’s a children’s film about how cool it’s going to be when they get to be big and can drive a car and stay up late and go out to a huge party." And that is exactly how I imagine Sweet Valley High would read now. At the tender age of 34, that's certainly how this version of the late 20s is reading...only worse, it's like a kid's idea and execution of a nighttime soap opera like 90210: The Original: big showy fights with awkward transitions and poor use of vocabulary; lots of talk about sex but very little actual sex; the very serious use of the term "soulmate" and "beloved"; a half-baked presentation of "living an artist's life"; everyone has glamorous jobs that all could be the topic of "When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be..." homework.
But who am I kidding? My desire to make fun of all these things, and to find out if Lila Fowler and Ken Matthews really do get divorced, will win out.
Also: I really want to read another poorly executed sex scene like Jessica and Todd's one blazing night of passion, their "mouths furiously pressing, kissing, sucking, inhaling each other" as they "make love with an otherworldly passion."
Which is exactly what 10-year-old Jessie would say, come to think of it. Minus the "poorly executed" adverb-verb combo.
It arrived last week in a USPS parcel, and I took my time cracking the cover. I'm a grown-up person with a degree in literature. I've written papers about Age of Innocence and "Twelfth Night" and Things Fall Apart! How could I backpedal into something I've clearly outgrown, with all the education (not to mention the sweet, sweet love of ironic enjoyment) and the adulthood I now possess.
Pretty easily actually. The love of sweet, sweet ironic enjoyment helps a lot.
I'm only about 80 pages in thus far, but one thing is for certain: ELIZABETH WAKEFIELD IS PISSED. The world's most perfect boyfriend, Todd, has apparently cheated on her--once in body, but months in soulmate longing and clandestine meetings at a diner right out of Happy Days or Alice--with her identical twin sister, Jessica. Elizabeth lets you know she is super pissed via internal monologues that occasionally end in awkward swearing (gasp!), as well as odd past-tense passages that are like flashbacks or coma dreams or journal entries. Those also sometimes contain swearing (gasp! I mean, Elizabeth! She was perfect!). She's living a shitty existence in New York as only a character in a cruddily constructed YA novel can: working at a startup magazine dedicated to off-Broadway shows that is crumbling, yet can afford to pay her to do an in-depth piece on a play about Samuel Johnson.
Thus far, she has nearly had sex with her boss (but not really), got serious sex vibes from some amazing "black Irish" (that's a phrase Jessica Wakefield and no other English-speaking human uses, by the bye) bartender (but she didn't wanna), and is engaging in a love-hate relationship with--sigh--a playwright who happens to look almost exactly like Todd.
The teases about how much sex Elizabeth could be having but chooses not to reads like Brian Johnson of The Breakfast Club: next, she's totally going to meet a guy, but none of you will know him, because he's from Niagara Falls.
Meanwhile, Jessica is tormenting herself like Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights, only many times stupider. That is, when she's not full of righteous and indignant fury that "matronly" gossip Caroline Pearce (isn't it great, by the way, how all of the characters you knew and loved in Sweet Valley made no efforts to grow or develop or change any of their constrictive two-dimensional roles) is trying to nose out whether Elizabeth has called or forgiven Jessica('s scheming vagina) or is coming to Jessica and Todd's wedding.
Todd is a cipher, made even more of a zero than his high-school self by his cheating, which seems like it is supposed to make sense in the context of the novel, but instead comes across as though it was created in a vacuum, never really the behavior of an actual human person but of a plot point generating robot. The menfolk that litter Elizabeth's lifescape are not much better than a collection of adjectives, eye colors, and hair descriptors. If I may dust off my degree for a moment: the way the male characters are portrayed in this novel suggests, like Jane Austen, that Francine Pascal lived in a society where males and females were largely segregated and, therefore, she has little idea how men think or act and therefore tends to marginalize...okay, well, Austen tended to marginalize, so let's call what Pascal does "straight-up half-pipe fancy-skateboard-move biffs" the male voice. For example, a furious, seemingly straight playwright, when faced with the stunning, everyone-wants-to-sex-her-because-she's-byoooooootiful-but-also-has-a-headache-tonight-honey Elizabeth, finds himself thinking "...why he had been so unfriendly to this beautiful girl. He made up his mind to make her his friend."
Here are some alternate and more believable ways that sentence could have ended:
"He made up his mind to make her his fuck buddy"
"He made up his mind to maker her his concubine"
"...his latest conquest."
"...his plus-one to a hot afterparty."
"...his next teammate on his co-ed dodgeball league."
"...his girlfriend, for crying out Pete."
It's an odd experience reading this thus far. For all I'm sassing, it's almost as though I'm too embarrassed for my young self to make fun of it, because it exposes what a naive dork with poor taste I was. Dave White recently wrote in a review of a tweeny movie, Prom, "because while it’s ostensibly about high school kids, it’s not for them. Instead, it’s a children’s film about how cool it’s going to be when they get to be big and can drive a car and stay up late and go out to a huge party." And that is exactly how I imagine Sweet Valley High would read now. At the tender age of 34, that's certainly how this version of the late 20s is reading...only worse, it's like a kid's idea and execution of a nighttime soap opera like 90210: The Original: big showy fights with awkward transitions and poor use of vocabulary; lots of talk about sex but very little actual sex; the very serious use of the term "soulmate" and "beloved"; a half-baked presentation of "living an artist's life"; everyone has glamorous jobs that all could be the topic of "When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be..." homework.
But who am I kidding? My desire to make fun of all these things, and to find out if Lila Fowler and Ken Matthews really do get divorced, will win out.
Also: I really want to read another poorly executed sex scene like Jessica and Todd's one blazing night of passion, their "mouths furiously pressing, kissing, sucking, inhaling each other" as they "make love with an otherworldly passion."
Which is exactly what 10-year-old Jessie would say, come to think of it. Minus the "poorly executed" adverb-verb combo.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
This may seem like hyperbole...
...but sometimes I feel like my relationship with Glee is like that of a superhero(ine, whatever, eat it, Jezebel) and her #1 nemesis. Like, we started out friends and then some horrible accident befell Glee and mutated it and made it crazy and annoying and sometimes poorly written...
And somehow it knows my weakness, my Kryptonite, if you will.
It'll disappoint me by being Sue-centric or robbing a bank using a laser stolen from the government or something next week, probably.
And somehow it knows my weakness, my Kryptonite, if you will.
It'll disappoint me by being Sue-centric or robbing a bank using a laser stolen from the government or something next week, probably.
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