SKINS S2E4: On The Beach

OK, enough with these endings. Fool me once by dangling the fate of Sid and Cassie over my head, shame on me. Fool me twice by dangling the fate of Sid and Cassie over my head, well, when that happens it becomes clear that their relationship is more important to the audience than it is to the showrunners.  So… shame on them! (This episode ends with Sid hooking up with Michelle in his room  ("FINALLY"-No one) unaware, for a while, that Cassie is sitting there in the corner watching. Ugh, right?)

Now, sometimes a kind of adversarial relationship between creator and consumer can be fun and interesting (see Sopranos, The), and sometimes going too far to please your fans is a bad idea (see Harmon, Dan). So it’s not like there’s a hard and fast rule for this kind of thing. But this particular ending is just cheap and grabby. I thought I could hold Skins to higher standards.

(And what’s funny is that a move that was meant to cash in on my enthusiasm for Sid/Cassie instead neutralized it. I was irritated and bored and realized I didn’t really care what happened to them. So, good going, Skins! You’ve ruined something beautiful.)

Another reason ending the episode on another Sid/Cassie cliffhanger is lame is that the only thing this one really has going for it is a sustained mellow tone. It follows Michelle as she moves, with her mother, into a house with her new step-father. Michelle hates the house and hates the step-father. Then the guy’s (eerily affectionate) daughter shows up, and (surprise!) Michelle hates her too.

Her birthday is coming, and she wants to go camping. Nobody else really does, but they go anyway. Except Tony, who can’t pitch a tent. HEYYOOOOOOOO. But seriously folks: he can’t achieve an erection anymore! And suddenly the deep and abiding love Michelle feels for him is neither deep nor abiding. The Skins gang sets up shop on the beach, and then we’re mostly dealing with a lot of sun-drenched footage of sand, and water, and tides coming in.

Michelle’s problems aren’t very serious, and they particularly pale in comparison to what Sid is going though. It becomes clear almost immediately that Michelle’s new step-sister isn’t so bad, but it takes our heroine a long time to come around. The scale and scope of her problems aren’t much of an issue, however, as they seem commensurate with the scale and scope of the episode. This is supposed to be light and airy. A sorbet episode after the bottle episode. 

Anyway, Sketch turns up and seems sort of normal now. Then step-sister makes a play for Sid which only seems to depress him, and he wanders off. Michelle follows, and they end up having sex on a dune. How much do you know about sand dunes? I took a coastal morphology class in college (my friend Jill told me it would be easy and that there was a trip to Cape Cod at the end. She was right about the second part) and I feel like, for a while, I was kind of an expert. Now I couldn’t even tell you how they’re formed. I mean, wind, yeah, I know, but what else? Can you tell how much I don’t want to think about Sid and Michelle having sex?

 

Everybody goes home, and Sid and Michelle prepare to hook up again. And then the tense music starts playing, totally harshing our mellow. BOOM: Cassie. (“Whatever.”-Me) Sorbet doesn't work if you add a dramatic twist at the end, just like how metaphors don't work when you mix them. 

N.B. Yesterday I posted a little notice explaining the transition from this blog to zacharylittle.com. Skins is going to finish here, but Blogging Game Of Thrones will be over there. So bookmark up!

Snow White Of The Ring: The Fellowship Of Snow White: A Review

I saw Snow White And The Huntsman last night, and today our esteemed colleagues at KStewartNews reported that the movie has already grossed $100 million worldwide, putting it on track to surpass Mirror Mirror's total in short order. So OK, I guess Kristen Stewart and her team won the War Of The Snow Whites. But at what cost? 

When Snow White And The Huntsman rocked Comic-Con's world last year, producers only had concept art and a cast on hand. Later, word was that the script was being re-written and revised even as production began. And guess what? It shows! ("'Only fools rush in' -wise men" -UB40) SWATH is somehow both over- and under-written, like they spent so much time on the outline they never got around to the script. When characters actually say things (which is rare!) their lines are too concise, too thematically self-evident. Like this movie was written in the way you'd compose a particularly artful tweet (Sample dialogue: "Have I not given you all?" "Have I not given all to you?").

Here's the story: Snow White is born, and so named because her mother was out walking in the snow one day and thought: "I'd like to get some dick." Also she cut herself on a rose, which is vaguely important. Then the mother dies, leaving Snow White's dad, the Burger King mascot, miserable. Then a dark army appears on the edge of town. If the battle scene that follows doesn't strike you as unnecessary, maybe you didn't hear Chris Hemsworth's voice over, which is something like "And then an army came or whatever, so they fought them for some reason." And so begins one of too many action scenes which basically consist of close, shaky-shots of stuff crashing into other stuff. (This a rare bird: an action movie where the quiet parts between action scenes are far more compelling than the fights.) The dark army (who are like, made out of shale) is keeping Charlize Theron "prisoner," and the Burger King "rescues" her, but actually it was all a ruse, which we know because again Chris Hemsworth says (essentially) "but it was a ruse!" The Burger King dies, Snow White gets locked in a tower, and Queen Charlize rules all, taking weird milk baths in front of her brother, Aryan McNulty, and otherwise sucking the beauty from everything around her (which is SORT OF a metaphor about female beauty when you think about it, or rather when you don't think about it too much--we'll get to that). "Anyway," narrator Chris Hemsworth says, "I'm going to bail on this voice-over part now, for the rest of the movie." Don't you LOVE when that happens?

One day, Queen Charlize's power starts to wane, and she finds out it's because Snow White just turned street legal and so the normal soul-sucking routine (you saw it in the trailer) won't keep her shit tight anymore (except it does, at intervals throughout the rest of the movie, but whatever, magic is complicated). And then we finally see K. Stew, imprisoned in the tower, mumbling prayers to herself and making weird dolls out of garbage. Interesting! Too bad none of that ever really comes up again!

Snow White manages to escape, Queen Charlize sends her brother out to find her with Irish Thor (Hemsworth) as a guide. Then Irish Thor (one of my favorite kinds of soap, obviously) goes rogue, and so begins he and Snow White's journey through about 90 minutes of really beautiful-looking nonsense. Shout out to the visuals in this movie: all of it is wonderful to look at, especially when it gets really trippy, which is not often enough! I include Kristen Stewart under this positive visual category: the movie luxuriates in her pale skin and (admittedly Smeagolesque) eyes.

(And if you were worried: her accent is fine. She mostly whispers, and her too-modern laugh and a few other non-affectations are problematic, but when she's speaking clearly there's nothing distracting about it. Except, of course, that the words out of her mouth are so silly; she has a rallying battle speech that literally sounds like free-associative poetry: "Fire will melt iron! But iron will first writhe around inside itself!" Are actual lines. "And so fire...is good! And also rocks! Which are mighty!")

But it's a problem when the visuals (excepting, again, most of the action) are the only thing you can really hang your (elfin) hat on, and even they become difficult to appreciate as the movie drags on and on and on and on. Snow and Hunt (new detective show on TNT this fall, obviously) hook up with the Seven Dwarves, because of course, and later she eats an apple, because of course, but those things are just there because they are, nothing really leading to them or coming from them. When you realize that everything is moving toward a final battle with the Queen you're not excited, you're exhausted. "Get it over with already!" you say. And then they do, and you're like, "Fine."

And then there's the way it seems like someone cut up a feminist textbook and scattered it all over this movie like fairy dust. Queen Charlize has an early speech about being put-upon by the men of this world. In a flashback, we learn that Charlize's mother cast a spell to make her youth and beauty into a weapon. Snow White (too briefly) visits a village of outcast women who have scarred themselves to make sure they won't be a threat to the Queen's beauty and power. Snow White frets about her ability to lead men. Later, when she suits up and goes to battle, The Huntsman tells her she looks good "in mail" (as in chainmail) which is a play on words (male/mail) Kanye West would find enthralling. Certain shots during the battle seem intended to maximize Stewart's androgyny. As short on thematic substance as this movie is, it's dense with feminist shrapnel. But I'd be hard pressed to make much sense of it all. Anybody got an interesting take?

In the end, SWATH was an OK movie. There's about an hour in the middle, where nobody's talking much and we seem to be tumbling through different fairy tale tropes, that is pretty interesting. But then it lands on aping Lord Of The Rings and sticks there. Oh well. I'm not upset I saw it, but in terms of movies I've seen in the theater this year it really only ranks above Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance. It's also, if you count repeat viewings, the fifth consecutive Chris Hemsworth movie I have seen in theaters (The Cabin In The Woods, The Cabin In The Woods, The Avengers, The Avengers, this). He's having a good year. I'm starting to feel like my prognostications for Kristen Stewart are off, though. The release of this movie has sparked a wave of K. Stew hatred the likes of which we haven't seen in years. And it's coming from semi-contrarian blogs like Videogum and Jezebel. If On The Road garners her any good will later this summer (fingers crossed), it will likely be dashed by Breaking Dawn pt. 2: Waiting For Aro in the fall. At least one person has Kristen Stewart's back, though: James Franco. "Kristen is a warrior queen," he says in his thoughtful, weirdly formal review for the Huffington Post. "Give her the crown." And when James Franco is on your side... uh, well, that could mean almost anything.

SKINS S2E3: Party On, Pain

I don’t know what kind of audience expectations Skins had when it first aired. It comes with this first-sentence Wikipedia vibe of like “the crazy party show with lots of kids fucking” which is weird because the kids almost never party and almost never fuck. Mostly, they undergo serious trauma. WOOOOO! YEAHHHH!

But that must have been the reputation Skins had, given the way it seems to so aggressively fight against it, week after week. This episode, for instance, traps us in Sid’s house for an extended period of time, following only the members of Sid's extended family, and when we finally do return to our old gang we’re seeing them dully, through the lens of Sid’s grief. (This show does a wonderful job of CONSTANTLY recalibrating your expectations and is a master class in tone.) And a party scene, featuring a cameo from a real band (Crystal Castles), which should be exactly the kind of scene you’d want were Skins the kind of show it is perceived to be, is not fun at all but actually where Sid finally breaks down, weeping hysterically in Tony’s arms while the incongruous music blares.

So yeah, this is a wonderful episode, the first one that I’ve found truly moving. We’re at Chez Sid for the first 30 minutes, without a break. His father’s father is visiting, and so Sid’s dad (Mark, played by Peter Capaldi) has convinced his estranged mother to return and pretend to be his wife for the sake of, well, not for the sake of pleasing his father; I guess for the sake of keeping the dude’s displeasure at a minimum. Because when you see what Sid’s family is like, you can really tell what an intergenerational victory Mark has scored by raising his son into a reasonably decent guy. There’s a bunch of animals—or, to paraphrase Mark: fucking Scottish cunts.

This is Capaldi’s show, and the actor weathers Mark’s victories and humiliations with a certain kind of gruff charm. The Sid/Mark relationship is one of the better son/father relationships I’ve seen, and it’s all the better for being articulated subtly. No Cat Stevens on the soundtrack here, in other words.

Sid is mostly a passive bystander to the drama between his elders, but also is fuming over the mistaken impression that Cassie’s cheating on him while away in Scotland. But all of that gets pushed aside when, the night after briefly reuniting with his wife and finally telling off his father, Mark dies.

Sid, alone in the house with his father's body, goes numb. He goes to class, doesn't talk to anyone, and barely notices that 1. someone has declared a fatwa on their college for their 9/11 play (ha ha ha) and 2. Angie has left the school, and Chris, for good. (More on all that later, maybe?) Tony finds Sid still sitting silently in the darkened classroom hours later, and takes him to a concert. Tony’s still in pretty bad shape physically and verbally (later there’s a wonderfully tension-breaking joke where Tony reacts to Mark’s dead body by saying “Ficking hell!” and Sid gently corrects him) but he seems to sense that everything is not all right with his friend. Sid wanders off in a daze, Tony finds him in the crowd, and Sid finally manages to tell someone what happened. And that’s where I totally lost it, you guys. It was an embarrassing show of human emotion and I am glad none of you were there to see it.


The coda to the episode is a goofy little O’Henry thing, where Sid and Cassie turn out to both be on trains going to see each other. I like that it pushes us even further afield from the dark, dusty house where we spent most of the episode—we’re there, we’re there, we’re there and then we slingshot away—but other than that it’s kind of silly. Unless we’re headed for a few episodes of “Sid’s adventures in Scotland!” That’d be OK. I <3 U, Sid.

So yeah, we're back to talking about Skins, okay? Did you guys watch this episode? What did you think?

Esquire's Profile Of Mireille Enos Is Some Next-Level Shit

Longtime readers of this blog are certainly aware that I hatelove Esquire Magazine's profiles of female celebrities. They're bizarre, pretentious, condescending, obsessive, and often go to such great lengths to avoid souding creepy that they become far creepier than one could have previously anticipated. Last summer I outlined the general formula for an Esquire Profile Of A Female, and when I did I conducted no research whatsoever, did not even go back and read a single old article, because I've read enough of these fucking things that I can create a reasonable facsimile in my sleep. And apparently, I am not alone in this skill. Last month Esquire's Tom Chiarella profiled The Killing's Mireille Enos, who basically wrote the (ridiculous) article herself. Let's start with the opening paragraph:

Her hair is loosely clipped in a chignon, that most delicate and mutable twist, so when she leans forward, when she lounges, when she reaches for an olive or fingers a pit from between her lips, placing the dead soldier on a paper napkin on the table between us, each time, Mireille Enos offers up a slightly different aspect of self.

So far, so Esquire-y. I swear to god those sentences are real and were really in a magazine. But hang on:

She purses her lips, then nods. "You've got to figure it out. I'm not saying anything about mystery, either. I'm just saying a woman should have to be considered from many angles."

So the author basically plaigarized the lede from his own subject--it isn't his observation, it's hers. About herself (This article doesn't cast a positive light on the writing at Esquire, but it doesn't exactly reflect well on Enos, either). From there, it hits all of the Esquire marks. Weird, incorrect but bold declarations about society ("Everyone's a Mormon these days"), references to her body veiled in descriptions of personality ("She's warming up out here on the patio, and it becomes clear that Mireille is a shin-bumping, knee-patting, olive-popping enthusiast"), pseudo-masculine biographical detail ("I'm a black belt in tae kwon do"). Then, as every celebrity profile draws to a close, there's the appraisal of career-state:

She is without complaint about her career, past, present, and future. But why would she protest? She locked up roles in major movies like World War Z  with Brad Pitt and The Gangster Squad* with Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, and Emma Stone, both out in the next year.


[*Photographic memory types will remember, and those keeping track of the way everything on this blog connects Kevin-Bacon-like back to everything else will like to know, that Ashley Greene auditioned for The Gangster Squad last year.]

She looks straight at you when she's talking about movie projects. You can't see the bun, though the cheekbones and the slender neck are a separate pleasure. This look she gives must be to convey calm, the sense that she's willing to live with the vagaries of fame and to work in the movie business without falling to pieces, or blaming someone else.

I think they just put this paste this paragraph into every female profile, just subbing in the bun for whatever other non-tit body part they decide to obsess over. Earlobe, pinkie toe. At the end Enos mentions helping her father fix cars, mostly by handing him wrenches. That's another Esquire trademark--ALWAYS MENTION HER FATHER--the Freudian implications of which I do not care to unpack. But in this case it is also Enos assuming control over the article again. Her bun falls apart--how symbolic!--and she confidently begins to put it back together.

She turns her head then, and it is clear that the hair has all gone to hell and the chignon is wilting. "This I can fix for sure," she says, nodding at a bobby pin on the table. "Just keep handing me the wrenches, will you?"

With actresses like these, who needs writers? Chiarella tries to take control again, closing out with this line: "Pin in hand, she reaches back and starts to assemble a new angle." Nice try, buddy, but she wrote that one too! I don't feel like Esquire should be allowed to go on after this. The students have become the teacher.

SKINS S2E2: The Sense God Gave A Lemon

One thing Skins does very well, which I haven't noted before, is visual storytelling. That's hard to do--I mean not only is it conceptually difficult to tell a comprehensible story in images instead of words but it's also like, literally logistically hard to move the camera and lights around and show all the stuff you need to show. It's much easier to just have a guy say, "Oh, so Maxxie's stalker lives on THAT floor." And this episode of Skins is a particular standout in that regard--multiple scenes rely on understanding spatial relationships between characters,* and a huge amount of information is conveyed visually. You could almost watch this episode with the sound off.

(*And if you think that isn't hard to do, watch most TV shows while trying to understand where everyone really is in a room. They're not usually really showing you!)

Of course if you kept the sound off, you'd miss all the 9/11 jokes. This episode is centered around a production of Osama! The Musical, an original work being performed by the Skins Repertory Theatre. One walks a fine line when one attempts 9/11 jokes, and the easy and usually irritating way to get away with it seems to be the "look how transgressive I am being" Family Guy madlib approach "(Hey Stewie did you hear about how the Pope aborted a 9/11 terrorist at George Zimmerman's house?"). It's not as though jokes coming from that dark place can't be funny, but truth be told usually they aren't, and using them too often suggests something uncomfortable about the joke-teller. It's not unlike the trend/problem of "hipster racism" that's been in the news lately, mostly because of Girls. 

("Hipster racism" is one of those things I want to say more about, but sort of can't yet, as it mostly a "know it when I see it" situation. It's definitely real, I mean it is the most predictable outcome imaginable--relatively affluent white people appropriate aspects of an ethnic culture without becoming assimilated into the original culture and a reflexive reaction to that embarrassment follows--but most of the writing happening (that I have read, anyway) on the subject is muddled and usually half-about something else. This article on Gawker just seems to be about regular racism, and The Atlantic Wire's articles on the subject are mostly about Girls writer Lesley Arfin and her tweets, which seems like a misguided focal point, to me. More on this story as it develops, in my brain.)

What Skins does differently, or at least seems* to do differently, is come at 9/11 jokes from a goofily earnest place. Their deluded theater teacher thinks he is telling a stirring, noble story. So much of the transgression on Skins comes from an innocent place, right? Especially in the character of Chris, who continues to be the best (at least while Cassie is in absentia).

(*I mean, yeah, the jokes are still being written by knowing, cynical people, and if you think the cuddly rubes of the Skins cast DON'T shield this gag from scorn I suppose I can't blame you.)

ANYWAY this episode follows the exploits of the appropriately named Sketch (full name Sketchy Misery McSwimfan), a single white female living with her disabled mother and building a One Hour Photoesque shrine to Maxxie in her bedroom. We get a headfake toward pathos for Sketch when we first meet her, helping her mother in the bathroom (yikes). But it's short-lived sympathy; Sketch's opening salvo is attempting to murder Michelle. Then she gets a teacher fired for (not really) molesting her. And then she ties up her disabled mother and goes full Black Swan during the play, poisoning Michelle and seizing her role then surprising Maxxie and making an overture to him onstage. Finally, it all comes crashing down on her.

Elsewhere: Michelle is having feelings for Tony, Tony is still mostly a vegetable, and Chris and Anwar have suddenly developed a strange habit of trading Tarantinoesque one-liners about pop culture (Star Wars, Driving Miss Daisy, and the complete filmography of Hugh Grant). It's not entirely unwelcome, and it at least works during the (semi-inexplicable) costume party, but much like the 2006 dark comedy American Dreamz, it sorta came out nowhere. (See?)

True story: in high school band we performed a piece that was meant to evoke 9/11. All noble soaring melodies with just a hint of something sinister from the brass section, and then, no joke: a long trombone slide followed by a cymbal crash. I'm pretty sure I skipped out on the final performance of that piece, lying about a dead family member so I could go to a Rilo Kiley concert. Fair enough, right?