Top Five Celebrity Appearances: Extras

Totally forgot to post yesterday, many apologies.  (Up to the gills in Buster - happy place...). To make it up to you, I'll give you two today.

So, here's number one!  I really enjoy Extras, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s second big sitcom after The Office.  Like its predecessor, the cringe comedy can sometimes be a bit strong for my tastes, but I like all the characters, the amusing conversations, and the fun look at British film- and television-making.  Without a doubt, however, the most entertaining part is the prominent celebrities playing unflattering versions of themselves.  Here are the best in my book.

Daniel Radcliffe

“I’ve done it, you know. […] With a girl.”  I get such a kick out of macho-posturing Daniel Radcliffe, showing off his cigarettes, trying to score with Maggie, and carrying around his unwrapped “ready for action” condom.  It’s a hilarious parody of child-star train-wrecks, and Radcliffe’s dorky, wannabe-playboy performance is a stitch.

Patrick Stewart

If I’m ever trying to convince someone to give Extrasa shot, I show them the scene of Andy with Patrick Stewart in his dressing room.  Stewart’s screenplay pitch, about an ordinary man who seems to use his superhuman mental powers mainly to see women with their clothes off, is delivered with such pitch-perfect earnestness; it just kills me.  I’m also fond of Stewart puzzling over a grown man with no wife or girlfriend who’s never seen Star Trek.

Orlando Bloom

Goodness gracious, how I love Orlando Bloom’s escalating attempts to “prove” his good looks to Maggie.  Especially good is his deep-seated loathing for/obsession with Johnny Depp and his insistence that the mere thought of kissing Johnny Depp makes Keira Knightley nauseous.  Not only is it wonderfully funny, but it provides a nice win for Maggie in an episode where she really needs one.

Kate Winslet

As an opposite to my last top five, Kate Winslet is the only woman on this list, and now that I think about it, the only female celebrity prominently featured on Extras – weird.  Still, she more than holds her own beside the boys.  Winslet’s calculated Oscar-baiting (Holocaust movie = guaranteed Oscar) is both astute and darkly humorous, and I like the way she pals around with Andy and Maggie, coaching them in making dirty phone calls.

Chris Martin

It’s a short appearance but such a great one.  Chris Martin’s persistent efforts to turn an ad about developing countries without clean drinking water into a plug for Coldplay’s new album are hysterical.  He has a can-do attitude that doesn’t know when to stop, and although it’s painfully awkward, his in-show cameo on When the Whistle Blows is ridiculous and awesome.

Benny & Joon (1993, PG-13)

And number two!  I’ve mentioned this movie as the film that made me interested in checking out Buster Keaton’s work, and for that I’ll always appreciate it for that, but it’s a splendid little film in its own right.  With its cockeyed sensibility, well-drawn character relationships, and lovely acting, it’s a unique gem of a dramedy about human connection.

Benny and Joon have always been a duo.  He’s always looked after her, ever since they lost their parents in childhood.  Now well into their grownup years, Benny works in a garage and Joon paints between inciting minor neighborhood incidents that call Benny from work – Joon lives with mental illness, and despite Benny’s insistence that they can get by without anyone’s help, the cracks are starting to show.  He almost never has any time to himself, she doesn’t like the way he treats her like a child, and their relationship has developed with a slight undertone that she has to be the helpless loon and he has to be the weary self-sacrificer.

Their lives are shaken up (of course they are – it’s a movie after all) when an unsupervised Joon acquires the oddball cousin of one of Benny’s friends in a strangely-staked poker game.  Quirky, dyslexic Sam, with his focused gaze, striking non sequiturs, and deep devotion to movies (from the silent greats to terrible slasher flicks,) takes up an unofficial position as housekeeper and Joon-watcher.  He performs old silent comedy routines in public, he uses an iron to make grilled cheese sandwiches, and most significantly, he treats Joon like a person rather than an illness.  Suddenly, Joon is exploring new possibilities for her life, including romance, and Benny is worried that all this change isn’t good for her.

This is a film that lives and dies by its characters, and every last one is engaging, flawed, and likeable.  Mary Stuart Masterson gives a fantastic performance as Joon; she’s shrewdly intelligent, shy, and rather standoffish, and she never loses sight of the way Joon stubbornly tries to hold onto her dignity when her world stops making sense.  Aidan Quinn does a fine job as regular-guy Benny exhausting himself in his efforts to be a provider, not even quite realizing that he’s veering from brother into caretaker (side note – when I first saw Gregson in Elementary, I shouted, “It’s Benny!” like a gleeful dork.)  And this movie was the first that really made me sit up and take notice of Johnny Depp as an actor; his Sam is goofy, perceptive, and very sweet, and he beautifully sells Sam’s fanboy homages to his comedy heroes.  Speaking of, Sam is no Buster, not in terms of sheer athleticism or comic intuition, but his routines are loads of fun and an excellent gateway drug into silent comedy.

In terms of subject matter, I appreciate the film’s earnest handling of Joon’s illness.  Sometimes it’s ridiculous, sometimes it’s heartbreaking, and sometimes it only lingers in the background of the action, and in Benny and Sam, we see how people both over- and underestimate its power.  Joon isn’t incapable of having her own abilities and desires, but neither is she simply a “free spirit” who’d be better off flushing her medication.  Though love can’t “cure” her, it isn’t beyond her reach.  It’s a thoughtful depiction that, in my opinion, does a lot of good.

Warnings

Thematic elements, some language, and light sexual content.

Poem: The Epiphany (2013)

 

The Epiphany

 

 

 

Once I staggered in unknown darkness,

Unaware of my unsight.

I strove ahead,

Heedless of the surrounding

Formless void.

I was a preliterate child who,

Dragging her finger

Across the words of a page,

Thinks she reads.

 

Then a sudden spark

Tore through my unused eyes

And illuminated all the hollow places

I hadn’t known rang with echoes.

It howled like a song

I’ve never heard

That was plainly written

In hopeful anticipation of me.

It streaked across my inner sky

With a comet-fire flash,

Littering my sunless self

With sacred detritus

As it continued on its blazing way.

 

I cast my gaze about

And tried to blink away my wonder;

So this is what it is

To see.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1931)

 

Now that I’ve dipped my toes into Buster Keaton’s MGM years, I’m of course saddened and angered that they wasted his talent and intelligence so incredibly, but it’s not entirely tortuous.  I’m heartened to find that not everything is Free and Easy – as a fan of Buster’s, I’m interested in his work, but I don’t know how many Free and Easies I could take.  Going forward with the MGM talkies, I may hate review some, I may lump some with others into more general reviews, and some, like this one, I’ll divide into their good, bad, and ugly qualities.

 

Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, plot-wise, is a bit of a Prohibition-era Taming of the Shrew.  It concerns young Virginia, who doesn’t feel she can get married before Angelica, her strong-willed, extremely picky older sister, and the Virginia’s fiancée Jeff sets out to find Angelica a man.  Enter Reginald Irving, Buster’s character.  A timid sign tacker, Reggie comes into their lives when Jeff accidentally hits him with his car (Reggie, captivated by Angelica’s beauty, wanders doe-eyed into the street – oh, Buster) and he’s brought to the house to convalesce.  Angelica takes it upon herself to look after Reggie, and Jeff tries to stoke the fire by giving Reggie a reputation as a notorious womanizer – why that appeals to Angelica, I don’t know, but she eats it up.  Schemes, misunderstandings, and naughty-for-the-30s shenanigans ensue.

 

The Good – For a talkie, this film has tons of physical comedy.  Buster gets to do some fine tumbling, there are a few good chase scenes, and there’s a sequence of Reggie learning and then practicing the art of seduction that’s an absolute scream.  The last item might seem out of place in the same sentence as tumbles and chase scenes, but it’s in the right spot, trust me.  The “seduction” scene is incredibly physical and athletic (no, not like that,) and Buster is hysterical in it.  He’s especially good with Charlotte Greenwood, who plays a woman enlisted to help Reggie learn the ropes.  Beyond that, the movie has a lot of callbacks to Buster’s silent classics that, while not as funny as the originals, are lovely.  The train scene from One Week is repeated (albeit with a car instead of a house,) and one shot is a pale-but-delightful echo of the standing-on-shoulders sequence from Neighbors.  Finally, if you’re interested in Buster’s real life, this film is neat in that it was largely shot at the Italian Villa, his gorgeous Beverly Hills mansion.

 

The Bad – Reggie isn’t a very strong character; while not as bad as Elmer in Free and Easy, he’s easily pushed around and often at the whims and machinations of others.  Save for a few moments, he doesn’t cause much of the action to happen.  Rather, the action happens to him, and he’s just sort of along for the ride, stumbling along as best as he can.  Another sticking point is that the movie has a somewhat schizophrenic tone.  As I said, the physical comedy is terrific, but the film seems to shift between near-silent visual sequences and stretches of talk-talk-talk joke dialogue.  Not that wordy humor can’t be funny (love me some Fry & Laurie,) but the mix doesn’t feel organic.  The two types of comedy aren’t integrated well – it’s like the movie has a “joke switch” that it flips on and off at random.

 

The Ugly – One word:  stupid.  There’s a long, painful scene of Jeff instructing Reggie how to woo a woman, and as Reggie takes notes, we discover that he can’t spell, among other things, the word “coat.”  That happens.  And it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s just ugly.  (Especially since, though Buster was perfectly literate and a smart cookie with a flair for engineering, he had no formal education and was always self-conscious about it.  Way to be jerks, MGM.)

Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 6 – “The Caretaker” (2014)

 

This episode totally and completely did notwork for me – honestly, if I were making a list of worst Who stories, this one would probably be on it.  It doubles down on everything that’s been bugging me this season, it acts like having to show all this boring adventures-in-time-and-space stuff is an irritating chore, and after a couple episodes that seem to get the Doctor pretty right, he’s insufferable and dickish here. 

 

There’s something non-terrestrial and deadly lurking near Coal Hill School, so the Doctor goes undercover to investigate, posing as the school’s temporary caretaker.  Since Clara has been running herself ragged trying to balance her TARDIS life with her home life (particularly the dating-Danny part of it,) everything builds to an inevitable head when her two very different worlds come face-to-face with another.  A tag-team effort by Moffat and Gareth Roberts, this should have been in a similar vein as Roberts’ “The Lodger” and “Closing Time,” a.k.a. the Craig episodes.  “The Doctor, undercover, integrates himself into a 21^st-century Earth setting and badly tries to pass himself off as a human” fits seamlessly with those stories, but “The Caretaker” has none of the charm, fun, or heart of those earlier Roberts venture.  In fact, it hardly seems to have any interest in showing the undercover Doctor-plot, preferring to focus on Clara’s horrified reaction to having the Doctor in her workplace, meeting Danny, and doing goodness-knows-what while she frets worries about Danny discovering the secret of her other life.

 

The only bits from the episode that I really enjoy are a few moments that do focus on the Doctor’s interactions at the school.  There’s an amusing scene of him trying to correct something Clara tells her class about Jane Austen, and he has a couple of nice scenes with a flippant-but-curious “problem” student.  Like with “Into the Dalek,” I’m inclined to give Roberts the credit for these – the rest of the episode feels like an utter waste of his talents.

 

It’s not that I’m looking to blame Moffat for the things I didn’t like.  It’s just that my problems with the episode are so Moffaty that I can’t picture anyone else having written them.  Here, we have haphazard plotting, character consistency sacrificed for the sake of pithy lines, the Doctor criticizing Clara’s appearance, and the same jokes repeated over and over.  The Doctor comes off particularly bad in this episode.  He’s rude and ineffectual, and his prejudice against soldiers (and apparent inability to even process the idea that a former soldier could teach math rather than PE) goes way overboard.  It’s bad, Ten-telling-Jack-he’s-“wrong”-in-“Utopia” bad.  I don’t understand how anyone could think this is a Doctor people would want to travel with.  It’s seriously makes me feel sorry for Peter Capaldi, to get every Whovian’s dream come true and actually get to be the Doctor, and then to be saddled with such sorry writing. 

 

I don’t need the Doctor to be romantic or adorkable or young-looking.  I don’t need the Doctor to be infallible.  I actually like the idea of a more abrasive Doctor who’s removed in an alien way.  But when I see him, there really should be a sense that he’s bigger, that he walks in eternity and protects worlds and still savors the wonders of the universe.  His companions should grow as people during their time with him, and watching this show should make me want to do something outlandish and marvelous.  I know PC can play that, and I’ve seen enough glimpses that I know the show can portray that with Twelve, but episodes like this make me feel like the series is actively fighting againstit, and I don’t know why it’s squandering so much potential.

Favorite Characters: Rumpelstiltskin (Once Upon a Time)

 

Yes, I know the show spells it “ple,” not “pel,” but what can I say – I like the traditional spelling.  At any rate, Rumpelstiltskin is a stellar character.  Unlike Emma or Snow, while he occasionally aligns with the good guys and flirts with redemption, he’s more villain than anything else. 

 

One thing I like about Rumpel is his utter devotion to the long game.  In flashbacks, his fingers are in countless pots, showing the myriad ways in which he orchestrates Regina’s casting of the curse.  At the heart of it is his desire to correct a mistake and recover what’s been lost to him – a sympathetic motivation perhaps, but it becomes an obsession that spans centuries and ruins lives.  All across the Enchanted Forest, he carefully nudges others into place, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly.  Random, seemingly out-of-character actions in one episode become mammoth dozens of episodes later.  Seeing how he uses the entire realm as his personal house of cards is endlessly entertaining and shows he has brains and patience to go with his magic.

 

Along with that is his generally cavalier attitude toward his villain status.  He doesn’t spend a lot of time agonizing over how people see him.  He’s embraced his identity as the Dark One, the monster, the demented dealmaker – in fact, he’s thrown more when someone views him like a person – and this avoids much of the woobifying that drags down many villains.  Rather, he regards his evil actions as utilitarian means to far-off ends or treats them like a twisted game.  It’s an intriguing, unflinching approach that works well.

 

It’s not all “mwa ha ha,” though, and like I said, the show sometimes offers more sympathetic glimpses of Rumpel, chiefly in his love for the few important people in his life.  Yet, it usually avoids suggesting that love trumps any terrible things he does.  Additionally, his consuming need for power (his magic, yes, but also just a need for control) constantly damages these relationships he cares about, but he continues to choose power.  I like seeing how his choices have cost him, and I hope the show keeps that up.  (His romantic relationship – I won’t say with whom, for spoilers’ sake – is hugely problematic and unsettling, though, and one major area where he consistently remains unpunished.  Hopefully, he’s heading toward a reckoning in season four.)

 

Since his nefariousness tends to be goal-oriented and he doesn’t have any big projects in the pipeline, a large-scale redemption arc may be coming.  Though the outwardly-evil Rumpel is definitely the most fun to watch, I’m not oppose to the idea.  Yet, given the show’s track record with Regina, I’m apprehensive.  Redemption for villains has to be handled so carefully, or you get Regina complaining that people don’t trust her and don’t applaud her efforts to change, and me saying, “Shut up – you murdered people.”  If the writers are looking to redeem Rumpel, it’ll require a steady hand and probably an ultimate choice of good/love/somethingover power.

 

Also, the acting is impeccable.  Rumpel in his flashback imp form is scenery-chewing perfection.  An odd compliment perhaps, but with over-the-top acting, there’s a thin sliver of audaciousness that plays, not as hammy, but as fantastically eye-catching, and Robert Carlyle’s performance hits it every time.  I love his weird, affected voice and the playful way he delivers horrific lines.  I love his flourishy, theatrical gestures, simultaneously funny and creepy.  I love his psychotic little giggle when his pieces fall into place and he’s the only one to see it.  Gleeful, bedeviled, or enraged, he’s held my attention from his first moment onscreen.

Favorite Characters: Snow White (Once Upon a Time)

 

Of the three characters I’m writing about this week (why only three?  Because nothing interrupts the Sunday Who review,) Snow White has received the shortest end of the stick.  Despite a fabulous start, the writing for Snow has floundered since the middle of season 2; a lot of her character’s coolness has been sacrificed, first for the sake of Regina’s ongoing redemption arc and later for an across-the-board IQ reduction for many of the heroes in order to prolong the central villain story at the tail end of season 3.  So in terms of characterization, the latter episodes have squandered a lot of what made me love her, but since those original qualities are excellent enough that I’ve mentioned Snow every time I’ve written about this show, today’s post celebrates all that I like about her.

 

I’ve already said that this Snow White does notresemble the baby-voiced wilting flower of the Disney movie.  She has a steep learning curve when she’s on the run after the unfortunate stepmother-tries-to-have-her-heart-cut-out incident, but she quickly builds the skills she needs to survive.  Soon, she’s climbing trees and shooting arrows like a pro, breaking into castles for daring rescue missions, and holding her own against unsavory trolls.  She’s a woman with an incredibly powerful adversary (both magically and politically,) and she’s still standing:  not bad.

 

And, like my favorite Strong Women, she does more than kick butt and take names.  She’s needed to have tremendous emotional strength to deal with all the crap she’s been through, she believes in True Love and the ultimate victory of good over evil, and she fights fiercest for the people she loves.  With Charming at her side, she’s been the benevolent ruler of a kingdom, and even when pursued by a vindictive sorceress, she takes time to make friends and help others.  (I realize that sounds super-Disney, and it is, but I actually like that about her.  Though I’m all for darker characters like Walter White or Frank Underwood, it’s nice sometimes to see good people just trying to do the right thing.)

 

The love story between Snow and Charming is emblematic of why I love her.  In the movie, Snow White idles in a walled garden, singing “One Day My Prince Will Come,” and sure enough, her prince catches sight of her and falls head over heels.  To the best of my memory, they never actually speak, and the next time he sees her, she’s in a coffin and he saves his dead girl whose name he quite possibly doesn’t know with a well-planted True Love’s Kiss.  By contrast, while Snow and Charming are immediately taken with each other in the show, it’s a fascination born out of the spark of their personalities, and over the course of an adventure, they gradually fall for each other.  True Love develops as they get to know one another – what they’re about, what struggles they’ve had, what they can do.  Their connection leaps off the screen, and it’s the best kind of fairytale, because they love each other rather than simply each other’s faces.

 

And yes, she eats the apple, she needs True Love’s Kiss to wake her, and Charming comes riding to the rescue.  But even when she’s a victim, she retains her strength of character, and she’s more than just a prop in her own story.  Plus, Charming needs to be rescued sometimes, too, and she’s happy to oblige.  More than that, she fights, vanquishes, and rules alongside him, taking more of the lead if anything.  After my years-long hatred of the simpering Disney princess, I was flabbergasted by this superb, vibrant character, and it’s disappointed see how she’s paled over the years.  Here’s hoping the new season returns her to the fantastic character she can be.