TiVo Lady

Worst Movie of the . . . Year

I am a newly-devoted Tina Fey fan, but I have to say that her just-released and highly-hyped movie, Baby Mama, is simply and truly one of the worst "comedies" ever.  That word is in quotes, because it is supposed to be funny, but it is most definitely not.  Here's how the script progresses:  blah, blah, blah, joke, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, (joke), blah, blah, blah. . . .  and the feeble jokes are definitely not worth the wait. 

I think viewers believe that since the movie features:  Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Steve Martin that it must be funny.  It's like a mathematical formula:  If Tina Fey:  Then Funny.  Usually, yes, I agree.  Just not here.

There are very nasty classist comments here, about white trash;  there are nasty comments about Boomer Signourney Weaver's odd ability to keep getting pregnant, despite the fact that her eggs "are from the '40's."  Hey, these 30-somethings should look only half as good as Weaver does--at the age of, get this, 58!  Fey is funny, but she's no actress, and neither is Poehler;  their characters seem empty, limp versions of people who spew one-liners like feeble arrows trying to hit a target only inches away.  Only they never do.

I'm disgusted with this movie, and I am awarding it a Cringeworthy Crown, because so many of the alleged jokes will absolutely make you cringe.  In addition, so many critics said so many half-kind things about it, like Entertainment Weekly, which says the movie "bring(s) a politicized raised eyebrow to the sacred realm of pregnancy and motherhood among a certain estrogenically mindful population of entitled thirtysomethings."  (Hmm, not all that positive, now that I examine it.)  But The New York Times said that the movie "pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean."  Yeah, right, but that doesn't mean it's entertaining.

It cost me $10.50 to see this movie.  I asked the ticket seller for my money back, but he told me that "we didn't make the movie," so they didn't have to give me a refund.  He's right, of course.  Then he said that if we'd left during the first half hour, we would, in fact, have received a refund.  So if you don't believe me, pay your money, watch the first 28 minutes, then leave.  You'll get your $10.50 back.  And next time, you won't waste the gasoline.  (Which is rapidly becoming more expensive than the movie tickets anyway.)

Brain Dead...

It could be the result of some new form of brain death, but I think this is funny.  So sue me.

It's surely a lot funnier than this week's episode of Brothers & Sisters, to which I would award a Cringeworthy Crown, if it weren't so undeserving even of that.  See, Rob Lowe decided not to run for Vice President, so he and his wife, Calista Flockhart could work on making viable fertilized embryos.  And the illegitimate Walker sister is actually not, since she got a DNA test to find out, but she's lying about the results to her half-brother, though she doesn't know he'd prefer to be her boyfriend.  And Rachel Griffiths was right about that Chinese business deal, because the company went bankrupt and now the Walker family is in debt for $20 million.  Blah blah.

I'm almost finished writing Chapter Three of My New Book, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm beginning to be completely and utterly fed up with my TiVo.  The only thing worth watching, really, is.... you know what.  BG.  I won't say it, but it rhymes with Battlestar Galactica.

I Know I Promised, But. . .

I know I promised never to discuss Battlestar Galactica again, but.... I'm in a FEVER of watching:  four episodes just today!  Returning 2 DVDs to NetFlix tomorrow--how efficient is that?!  I'm thinking of it in terms of efficiency and economy, rather than as the enormously time-consuming, pop-culture devouring exercise in work postponement that it is.  Of course, another way to view it is that it is my reward for writing Chapter Three, which I have been doing, also feverishly, all this week, and last week too.  It goes like this:

Work Two Hours = Watch BG Episode = Work Two Hours = Watch 2 BG Episodes = (etc.)

I.  Just.  Can't.  Stop.  I'm not sure if it's that good, or if I am possessed by some kind of SciFi Channel Demon.  Either way, I'm doomed to finish the entire Season Three in the next week or 10 days.. . . .

Here's what I am hoping will happen by the end of Season Four, the final season, being aired now.  The one I am TiVoing until I finish watching everything that came before.  The 12 Colonies, advanced planets with human residents--just like us, only younger and prettier--are invaded by Cylons, evil robots they created who turned on them with the sole purpose of destroying humankind.  Most of them are silvery, weaponized thugs, machines really, whom the real people refer to, as a slur, as "toasters."  This, I love.  Anyway, the Cylons have killed off billions of people, and there are only 37,000 or 49,000, or some very small number of survivors, who are on the run in the vastness of space.  In many galaxies far, far away.  But their goal--it's part of their religion--is to find their lost home, one they've never seen, called "Earth."  It's a myth to them, and so distant and obscure, that they can't really figure out how to get there.  But it's clear that at the end of the series, they will find Earth.

And here is my prediction, and my hope.  I am hoping that they will find Earth, they will land on it, and they will find:  Us!  It's the present, and when we are invaded by aliens, by terrifying ET's, they will turn out to be:  Us.  Well, us, only younger and prettier.

How great would this be???  I'm hoping the writers are on my wavelength. 

Zzzzzz... (Wake me when Bros & Sis is over..)

I know I lauded Brothers & Sisters for being so Boomer-licious in the first season--it stars and features Sally Field, among other real Boomers.  But, still.  Here's an unanticipated consequence of the writer's strike:  When one of your favorite shows comes back on the air, you can't for the life of you figure out why you liked it in the first place!

Sally is all whiny about moving from California to Washington, D.C., and away from her five overly-dependent, whiny allegedly-grown up children.  She announces quite firmly that she will go, to be with her new boyfriend of just a few months, played by Af-Am Boomer, Danny Glover.  She can't stand all of her children's eye rolling and barely-concealed irritation with her, and she's ready for a Major Life Change that's just for her.  Go Sally! 

I admit that I was relieved to be rid of her.  Now all they have to do is move a few of the other, equally annoying, members of the Walker clan to the Right Coast, and maybe the show will be tolerable.  But no.  Sally changes her mind, whatever's left of her mind, because the children need her.  The children, by the way, are all over the age of 30ish, or so.  And the decision made no sense, in the context of what she'd already said about why she needed to do something just for herself, and her own happiness.

Also, Kitty Walker, played by Ally McBeal, has a new husband, Robert McAllister, who is played by Rob Lowe.  Thankfully, in this week's episode, "Separation Anxiety," he lost the Republican Presidential nomination.  Really, I can't think of anything more BORING than a fictional Presidential race, while we're suffering through the real thing.  Alas, it looks like he may get the nomination for Vice President.  Ugh.

Where's another Writer's Strike when you need one?

Two Weeks of Splendor

For about 14 days, the Northeastern United States looks as lush and as tropical and nearly as gorgeous as Rio de Janeiro.  (Well, almost.)  So, RioGringa, just to remind you, we are in those days right at this moment.  And here's what they look like:

Sleep Deprivation/Dog Training

Whoever said that you need less sleep as you age was, quite simply, crazy.  I still need my sleep, as do almost all of the Boomers I know.  Thus it is that I am suffering severely from the consequences of sleep deprivation:  it reminds me of when my children were newborns and never slept for more than two hours at a time.  I would wake up at 2:12 a.m., deal with the baby, and then calculate how many more minutes of sleep I'd be able to get before I'd have to wake up again...

No babies this time around.  Oh no;  this time around, it's this.  Not a baby, but a dog.  A bad dog.  A dog who can take a nap during the day whenever she feels like it.  That's why she can bark outside our bedroom door at 1:02 a.m., trying to get in so she can hop on our bed to sleep.  And it's why she decides to try again, at 3:23 a.m.  Hope springs eternal when you are dog wanting to get into the good bed.  And when that doesn't work, it's why she tries again, at 5:54 a.m.  Husband has been responding to this loud and insistent barking by opening the door and letting her in.  Thus, she has successfully trained him to respond to her barks in the exact way she had hoped.  And, as I've explained to Husband over and over and over and over, it's why she will never stop barking at night. Because it works.

So, last night, I instituted a new training regime.  She barks, I yell:  "Go to bed!  No!!"

No door opens.  And again, two hours later:  she barks, I yell:  "NO!"  And so on.  (Repeat X 4.)  On fifth time, at 5:00 a.m.-ish, I open the door and push her barking head down with my hand.  I yell, firmly:  "No.  Barking.  No."

Time will tell who is training whom.

An Oprah-matic Novel

Of all the dreams that writers have--and I include myself here--none is more powerful, or more often frustrated, than that of getting on Oprah.  "If only," we say to ourselves, "Oprah would see my book, she'd recognize its power/excellence/worthiness/superior qualities, and everybody in America would buy a copy! Please, please Oprah!  Look at meeeeeeeeeee!!" (As if.)

Let's say there were, roughly, 200,000 books published in 2007 (an underestimate), including mine. (Beyond the Mommy Years, which Oprah, sadly, neglected.)  I'd guess that at least 180,000 of them were written by a person who (secretly) hoped he/she would snag a spot on Oprah.  Alas, almost all of us did not.

Meanwhile, some authors go much further, apparently.  I am reading The God of Animals, by Aryn Kyle, and I'd say that this novel was concocted in an Oprah-matic Machine, in an attempt to be Oprah-fied.  It's simple, see.  You take bits of everything Oprah loves:

• a confused but sensitive 12-year-old girl
• depressed, agoraphobic mother, formerly gorgeous and oh so lively
• a distracted but loving father
• a missing, then not, sister
• poverty so crushing that the 12-year-old girl wears clothing and shoes that are several sizes too small
• animals
• animals in jeopardy (abused horses, pregnant horses, weaned foals)
• Elvis
• lots of bad dreams
• an ominous threat of sexual abuse by teacher

Put it all in a blender, pulse for 60 seconds, and presto!  A story custom-made for Oprah! 

Alice Winston is the pubescent girl whose mother never leaves her bedroom and who helps her father run a horse ranch in Colorado.  It seems like the present, but these people have apparently never heard of mental health services, or anti-depressants, or agoraphobia, for that matter.  So Mom stays hidden in the bedroom, a taboo topic of the day, week, and year.

Alice lives her life, though she works almost full-time on the ranch.  She gets to see how the other half lives, when she goes to a sleep-over birthday party for Sheila Altman, who's taking riding lessons on the Winton's ranch.

"Everything in the Altmans' [wrong use of apostrophe here] house was shiny and clean, not a speck of clutter anywhere.  The walls were lined with pictures of Sheila.  She was on skis, wearing bathing suits on beaches, siting beside Christmas trees, hanging upside down by her knees from a jungle gym.  Mrs. Altman's whole purpose, it seemed, was to follow Sheila around with a camera, recording every single second of her clean, pretty life."

There's a ZING to suburban parents everywhere!  And indeed, the book is entertaining--if only for a Boomer rube who has never set foot on a horse ranch in Colorado, and probably never will.  I enjoyed all of the details about breeding horses and training horses and boarding horses and weaning horses...

But....  I'm almost finished, and I am hoping there is a clincher coming, something to knock me out of my socks and make me understand that this book was worth the use of my eyeballs.....ADMISSION:  She got much, much better reviews for this book than I ever did for Mommy Years.  (Actually, I think I only got one review, period, in a library journal.  But it was a nice one.)

(Meanwhile, in a veritable fever, watching unmentionable BG!!!)

Lots of Sleeping Dogs. . .

And I'm letting them ___________________.  (Fill in the blank.)

Lush Life

Just because I am drowning myself in Battlestar Galactica (um, Look, it's raining Netflix!!), doesn't mean I have stopped reading.  I'm nearly finished Richard Price's new book, Lush Life, a Lower East Side cop story and murder mystery that, if it were any grittier, would have me sweeping up the floor every time I turn the page.

The author of Clockers and Freedomland, Boomer Price (born in 1949) seems to know the New York Police Department inside out and upside down.  I find it amazing and mind-boggling that he's never been a cop--only a writer.  (I can even forgive him for the completely dreadful movie screenplay he wrote for Freedomland:  one of the WORST book-to-movie adaptations ever made!)  He writes for The Wire, apparently, one of the few allegedly-great television series that I haven't ever watched.

The insider details of cop procedure in this book is completely riveting.  Here's how "Quality of Life" patrolmen, Lugo and Daley, try to intimidate a street kid who's been driving around with a fake, cardboard license plate.  The kid's girlfriend is pregnant, and they want him to give up "a gun," meaning anybody the kid knows who traffics in the sale of illegal firearms.

"Criminalistically speaking?  That forged plate automatically makes this a RICO charges.  Twenty years mandatory."

"As in years."

"Do not tell me that."  The kid whipping his head so fast his hair was a blur.

"That baby due in five months?" Lugo yawned.

"Gonna be calling some other guy Daddy," Daley finished.

"You'll be Uncle Plexiglass."

There is humor here, and tragedy, too.  A young man is killed while trying to resist a robbery;  but the kid who pulls the trigger is desperate and needy and tragic in his own way.  The story is so gripping that it pulls you through until the end--even if you are glued to Battlestar Galactica.

I'm on page 351 of 455 pages, so I don't know how it ends.  But I trust Price, completely and utterly, not to disappoint me in the way in which he wraps this up.

Also, RioGringa, are you avoiding me?

Over and out.

Sshh!! Don't Tell My TiVo...

...that I am cheating on it.  Yes, I must confess that I am cheating on my TiVo:  I joined NetFlix, so that I could catch up on Battlestar Galactica.  Okay, so I could watch three whole seasons of the show on DVD, which my TiVo would not allow me to do, because the show is no longer being broadcast.  Some nerve. 

I'm thinking of this arrangement as a free ride, since the first two weeks of the Netflix membership are free.  (See TiVo?  I pay for YOU, but not for your ... uh, competitor.)  Even when I revert to Deep Procrastination Book-Writing Mode, I will still not be able to watch that many hours of television--3 seasons times 18 episodes each equals 54?--in two weeks.  I don't know how quickly I will be able to do this, but let's just say that I watched the first two discs within 48 hours, and that was, maybe seven episodes.  The only low-tech piece of the Netflix puzzle is having to rely on snail mail to receive the DVD's, rather than having them magically beamed into my TiVo.  (Actually, there are a limited number of movies and television shows that you can Netflix right into your computer.  But I don't watch on my computer, I work on my computer.)

I promise not to blather on about how much I am enjoying this show, after I do, one more time:

Reasons I'm a Battlestar convert:

1. The sets:  this happens in the future, when humanity is on the run in the far reaches of outer space from Cylons, robots they created who want to destroy every living human being.  They are in space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light, or something-ish, and "jump" into hyperspace.  But meanwhile--and this is the part I love--the machines are oily, and full of gears and rust and ancient-looking metal parts.  The ship sort of resembles a World War II era battleship, only with neon, cool Art Deco-ish touches, and views of asteroids instead of the North Atlantic.

2. The inconsistencies:  when they want to get rid of a bad guy, or of the dead, they seal off a hatch and open a port door, and the bodies are sucked into the vacuum of space.  But, sometimes, there's a big hole in the outer shell of the ship, and people in space suits explore the bomb damage, somehow NOT getting instantly morphed into space jelly.  Why?  Who knows?  And those Cylon humanoids just appear on the ship, infiltrating the ranks of the real people--but how do they actually get on board?  Again, who knows?  And how did ace pilot, Kara (Starbuck) Thrace, manage to write her entire nickname in what appeared to be masking tape on the underside of her stolen space ship, when she had already run out of oxygen?  And the vehicle was flat on the ground?  Again, again, who knows?  And I don't care, either!

3.  The cast:  Mary McDonnell is sublime as the new President of the republic.  She was 32nd in line for the presidency, see, but was the only one in the government not nuked by the evil Cylons.  I'd vote for her this fall, if I could.  She's way more sympathetic than Hillary, though maybe not as savvy about foreign affairs.  But, hey, she doesn't have to be.  There aren't any foreigners any more!  Also, in the middle of all this tsouris (trouble), what with the possible end of humanity and the running for their lives in the vast reaches of space, she's got cancer.

4.  The underlying themes:  what does it mean to be human?  Are robots who talk and think and feel just like we do any less human because they are artificial?  What does it mean to have a truly democratic government, even when facing complete extinction?  Who has rights and who doesn't?

5.  The fights:  the pilots fly Vipers into space, but they fly around just like planes above earth, swooping and zooming and firing lasery-type bombs and bullets that look pretty against the blackness of the void.  I have no idea if this is scientifically feasible, and I wonder every time I see it, but it looks really cool.

6.  The cheekbones:  every so often, several of the handsome youngsters on the show play a scene in which their high cheekbones, perfect skin, and glowing vitality are almost too much to bear watching.  It's funny how these survivors of a future apocalypse are so attractive.  It's the Rule of Television Darwinianism:  The Survival of the Prettiest.

Okay, I promise, no more about BG.  Just let me watch it in peace!  (And hurry up with my replacement DVDs Netflix, before my TiVo quits on me in a fit of jealousy!)