Slowly Going Bald

Fragmented and uninvolving.

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A few laughs, but mostly dull and forgettable.

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Easy to admire, tough to love. Cera's going to need a killer role if he wants to be anything other than a stereotype of himself. Maybe he needs a few years off.

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Also: shameless plug!

I've submitted a panel idea for next year's South by Southwest Film Festival. I want to talk about what it's like to be a critic in the digital age, and how it's tough to maintain balance when you're beset by men and women willing to shill for a studio instead of honestly talk about a film. I go into slightly greater detail over at Pajiba, and I'll likely promote this on multiple social networks in the coming weeks, but if you vote for me, I'd really appreciate it. You do have to register (small hassle, I know), but it only takes a moment, and you'd really be helping me out.

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Decent enough little thriller. No great shakes, but probably worth a rental if you're interested.

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Unrelated: This was the second screening I've attended in Houston where the movie in question featured a gay relationship, and thus the second screening at which audience members let out groans and jeers at the presentation of same-sex affection. Now, I know it would be unfair and inaccurate to act as if what happened at these screenings was indicative of the city as a whole. I've got a growing network of friends and acquaintances here, some of them gay, none of them homophobic. But it's still a shock to hear this stuff. It's a disturbing and seriously heartbreaking reminder of how far we have to collectively go before things get better.

Plus also on a purely technical note: Why go see a movie featuring gay people when you don't like them? Is the allure of a free screening sponsored by a radio station or newspaper so great that you're willing to slightly tamp down your homophobia just to go to the theater? That can't be it, because these people clearly were determined to keep grumbling their displeasure at the sight of two gay people kissing or saying "I love you." If you're not going to be okay with it or even hide your anger, why go?

When I got home from the theater, I tweeted my displeasure here, here, here, and here. The AMC Helps account saw my tweets and asked if they could help, but I said that short of curing homophobia in the South, there wasn't much that came to mind. Of course, I wasn't even at an AMC when it happened, but an Edwards, so they're off the hook anyway.

I love this shot (click for larger) from Shutter Island. I thought it was a solid, engaging movie, and that Scorsese's amped-up psycho-noir tone was perfect. It was gorgeously shot by Robert Richardson, who's worked with Scorsese several times. A great thriller.

From M.T. Anderson's YA novel about a future in which commerce and relationships are driven by a chip in everyone's brain. It's a quick, sharp read, full of dark humor and incisive observation about the ease with which culture erodes:

Marty had also gotten a Nike speech tattoo, which was pretty brag. It meant that every sentence, he automatically said "Nike." He paid a lot for it. It was hilarious, because you could hardly understand what he said anymore. It was just, "This fuckin' shit Nike, fuckin', you know, Nike," etc.

Everything was not always going well, because for most people, our hair fell out and we were bald, and we had less and less skin. Then later there was this thing that hit hipsters. People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition of Pity, but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. It happened to Calista and Loga. We were real worried about them for a day or so. We knew they'd be all right, but still, you know. Marty was like, "Holy fuckin' shit, this is so Nike fucked."

Very good. Gripping, inventive story; stunning effects; basically impressive all around.

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Flag football was important. The intramural games were divided into two leagues, championship and recreational, the level of skill on display pretty apparent in the names. Within the champ and rec league divisions, teams were further ranked by number, from Team 1 (the best) on down. The Team 1 flag football games were chances to watch two gangs battle, to see and be seen, to flirt with possibility.

We experienced none of this. As pledges, our job was to support the players with a variety of cheers, usually the ones marked with the kind of blatant innuendo that takes firmest root in private schools populated by the sexually repressed and morally confused. E.g., when our team was on offense and close to the goal line, our 19-year-old voices would send up a cry of "Penetration! Penetration! We wanna score!" This was our duty, and we took it seriously.

There were trade-offs, though, at least for the less physically resilient of us. Whenever our team scored, we were to drop into a line and execute a number of push-ups to match the score, which meant that on the first touchdown we did seven, on the second we did fourteen, and so on. As a result, I found myself utterly emotionally divided at every game: I rooted for our success and dominance, yet I dreaded touchdowns because they meant exercising in front of female spectators, about as close to a living nightmare as I've ever come. The best games for me were defensive grudge-matches in which we established a lead early on and then rode it out in a ground war.

The girls did all this, too, or at any rate their pledges were present to support the female teams playing on the adjacent field. The purpose of their presence beyond anything symbolic was never really clear. They came, they cheered, they marched off, displaying a military precision but none of the terrible joy my friends and I seemed to channel.

One night the girls' pledges brought their notebooks with them to the field. This particular group of girls used plain three-ring binders as totems of their status as pledges; we used wooden blocks on which our names had been scrawled in permanent marker. The girls' notebooks were their treasure, the thing they kept with them at all times and had been instructed to guard like children. At one point, the notebooks were left in a giant pile while the girls cheered on their team, which is when our own leader gave us orders.

"I want those notebooks," he said, grinning the grin of a young man commanding even younger ones to do something stupid for no reason other than the fun of it. "Go get 'em."

We charged the pile of plastic binders with a total lack of planning, immediately drawing the girls' attention and sending them running toward us as they grabbed at our sweaty arms and dirt-crusted shirts to reclaim what was theirs. Some of us fell; one of us went down on his knees, arms out to his sides, hoping or begging to be crucified or merely smothered.

I took a single notebook and ran east, away from the field into a neighborhood of cheap houses mostly occupied by students, then cut north into an alley that would lead back to school. I was less than a minute into my journey when I heard her panting behind me. "Stop," she said between gasps for air. "Stop, please. I need that. Give that back, I need it." She'd have shouted if she'd had the energy.

I glanced quickly back at her but didn't stop moving. She seemed exhausted, running between garbage bins through an alley barely lit by the moon. She seemed to be staggering with rhythm than actually running, though whether her slowness came from fatigue, injury, or an inherent lack of athletic ability is something I never learned. I thought in that moment how happy I was to have someone chasing me who wasn't very strong. It was one thing to struggle through group exercises beneath the uninterested stares of this girl's superiors; it would be quite another for her to catch and assault me on foot. I often lied in the presence of women about my physical abilities. I'd taken a general strength-training course a year earlier that was co-educational, and one of the regular tasks had been to pair off and perform as many sit-ups as possible in a given time, after which we would recite our total as the instructor moved down the list and recorded our achievements in his log. I always embellished my total, sometimes by as many as 20 sit-ups, never wanting to appear that I couldn't do something that a woman a fraction my size could accomplish. My partner never challenged me, either, merely gave me a knowing look every time it happened. I wound up dropping the class two weeks before the end of the semester, afraid I wouldn't meet the performance requirements for a passing grade.

I turned my head back to the path and kept running, pushing myself to go as fast as my heavy frame could carry me. I heard her start to fall back even as she continued to plead with me to show some mercy. I knew what she meant, too: Losing the thing you're supposed to protect is a grievous offense, usually punishable by further physical labor. I would not have wanted to be in her situation.

I lost her, or she gave up. Either way, I arrived back at my dorm and hid the book among my things. My roommate and I kept it for a few days, exploring the trivia and history within but mostly marveling at how useless and ultimately boring it was. I'm sure I returned it to her, though I can't remember how or when. I know I didn't keep it. I saw her around campus for two more years, but we never really talked.

Best movie I've seen so far this year.

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A bit of a misstep for Pixar. Not terrible, but not the quality we've come to expect.

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Solid summer action fare. Easy on the brains, heavy on the explosions, and pretty fun throughout.

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"Glee" recently wrapped its first season, but the 22 episodes were split up into the original 13, which aired last fall, and this spring's "back nine," a group of episodes that a network will often order to give a full year to a show about which it initially held reservations. And that division in the show's first season is the root of its problem, and the source of everything that's wrong with it.

Musicals are inherently going to push the boundaries of reality more than any other genre. Some numbers have framing devices that keep them rooted somewhat in a believable story line, like a glee clubber performing on stage, but most of the numbers exist in that blurry fantasy-land unique to the genre in which people just start singing their feelings. These moments do as much to move the plot and help characters develop and express emotion as any other, but the problem with "Glee" isn't its willingness to smudge the line between reality and fantasy. It's that it no longer pretends to care about the reality.

The show's success led to a back-nine set of episodes that felt progressively gaudier, as if the show had to keep topping itself if it wanted to stay hot. As a result, all the creative energy was focused on the songs and none of it — not one blessed ounce — on the stories of the people doing the singing. The opening scene of the season finale had Will and Sue arguing in the principal's office about Sue's intrusion into the club and the principal's continued threat that the club would be shut down if they didn't ace their next show. This scene has happened so many times the first season that it has lost any ability to create drama or tension; it's just annoying. A viewer could watch the pilot, the fall finale, and the season finale and barely feel like they've missed anything, and that's bad plotting.

It's also lazy and annoying to insist that every plot about the club deal with its very survival, which are the highest stakes possible. This would be like making every episode of "The West Wing" about the president's potential impeachment; after a couple dozen hours of the same story always winding up okay, the cracks would show, and that's what's happening to "Glee." It's not that there's nothing to care about. It's that we don't get a chance to. It would be far braver and more interesting to just assume that the glee club will continue to exist, and that Sue must find some way to cope with them or harass them that doesn't involve another lamely constructed joke about Will's hair.

Are the musical numbers still good? Yes. But they're not great, and can't be until the show is once again able to establish a connection between the singing and non-singing moments. When the football players last broke into "Single Ladies," it was sublime precisely because of everything that had happened in the story to that point. The musical number was a perfect emotional extension of the narrative. Compare that with Sue's fantasized version of Madonna's "Vogue" video from this spring: lots more money and effects, and absolutely none of the joy. The show has forgotten that songs need people, not just performers.

Funny but insubstantial, and not as good as its forerunner.

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