Netflixorama

A tragic television hardware malfunction has rendered us without cable. I feel like I've gone to live in a cave. A cave without reality t.v. However, in every tragedy, there is opportunity and I have been able to catch up on my films.

1) Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
Nicole Kidman plays the famous fringeophile photographer, known for her portraits of freaks, nudists and carnies. And she plays Arbus well, a woman stunted by her wealthy Jewish upbringing and her traditional marriage to fashion photographer Allan Arbus. Into the Arbus apartment building moves Robert Downey Jr. dressed as Chewbacca (well, not literally but his character suffers from an incurable hirsuteness disease). Over the course of the film, Arbus' love affair with the thoughtful freak destroys her marriage and awakens her creative vision.

It's a fine premise anchored by a strong performance by Kidman but I couldn't help but feel that the love story was forced. Robert Downey Jr.'s become one of the dullest actors around, constantly mugging and smirking as if his dream job was the lead detective on the next CSI spinoff. The lovable furball and Diane's love for his freakish humanity overwhelms the plot and Arbus' peculiar vision as a photographer, hinted at early in the film, gets lost. In addition, the softpedaling of the personal consequences of Arbus leaving her husband and two daughters seemed a poor screenwriting choice, especially when Arbus' deteriorating mental health caused her commit suicide at age 48. Still, the film is a competent take on Arbus' artistic coming-of-age.

Grade: B-

2) The Aristocrats
As a lover of comedy, I really looked forward to seeing 100 comics telling the same joke 100 different ways. But the concept sounds better than the execution. If anything, The Aristocrats kills a 60-year joke in 90 minutes. Out of the 100 tellings of the Aristocrats, 90 sounded more or less the same with a slightly different bent on feces, incest, and bestiality. For their versions, I'd give Sarah Silverman an A+, Taylor Negron an A-, Jason Alexander, a B and Howie Mandel a B-, and anyone who dared to actually reverse the punchline an A. Other than that, many of my favorite comedians disappointed.

Grade: C

3) Kramer v. Kramer
Back in 1979, when advertising was hot and even the yuppies looked like 80s hippies and divorce and custody battles meant drame, Kramer v. Kramer swept the Oscars. Fast-forward 30 years and the film doesn't age so well. Ad agency salaries are $30,000 a year. After Meryl Streep abandons her husband Dustin Hoffman and their son, Hoffman and the other single parent in their apartment building cling to each other like single parenting is post-apocalyptic. Now it's matter-of-fact. Still, Kramer v. Kramer's relentless earnestness works and it's nice to see two legends in their prime with Streep looking like Kate Winslet and Hoffman looking a spastic cross between Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success and Tom Cruise chopped off at the waist.

1979 Grade: A, 2006 Grade: B

4) The Door in the Floor
Based on the John Irving story "A Widow for One Year," The Door in the Floor stars Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger as two married getting over the loss of their twin boys in a traffic accident. Bridges plays Ted Cole, a successful children's book author, who has moved on (sketching nudes with bored local housewives until they'll sleep with him) but his wife, Basinger has not (catatonic throughout). Bridges hires an assistant, who happens to look like their boys, and soon Basinger and the college kid are porking and drama ensues. It's Bridges' performance that makes this film work, giving his character a swaggering, often comic narcissism that's imbued with enough compassion and vulnerability to make you care. Everyone else around him is gray in comparison, especially Basinger, who you'd think has been around the industry long enough to turn in at least one or two non-wooden performances on accident.

Jeff Bridges Grade: A-, Kim Basinger Grade; D, Overall Grade: B+

TV Thoughts: Studio 60

Am I the only one who thinks Aaron Sorkin is no big deal? He's certainly doesn't deserve enough incessant ego-stroking to drive him to do rails to "ease the pain."

Conventional wisdom says The West Wing circled the crapper after Sorkin left the show but lots of watchers mistook style for substance. How do you give credit to a writer who makes every single character a mouthpiece for himself? I love talking to myself as much as anyone, but an hour of it on TV with different actors saying all the words the same way? I mean, please Aaron Sorkin. Just stop doing coke and maybe your characters will talk a little slower and actually sound like different people.

His latest overrated TV show, Studio 60 takes on a topic that we know everyone cares deeply about: sketch comedy shows. High stakes, folks! Sorkin's rapid-fire glib style works when you're friggin deciding whether or not to drop a billion tons of bombs on Qatar. It makes us feel for the characters because they're glibbing away to cope with massive decisions that shouldn't rest in the hands of most mere humans. But throw Sorkin's style into the cast of a sketch comedy show and it's just a bunch of pampered Hollywood comedy writers snorting their bounty up their noses and glibbing away at what they seem to think is the most important thing of all things. Ratings. The life of a television network. Wow. I'm not sure how the starving people of Darfur are going to react to this.

But really, Aaron Sorkin, I'll take your word for it, what you're doing is important. I mean, those jokes on Weekend Update. Culture-changing, really. A oversmart drama about a comedy that deals with how red state TV audiences laugh differently from blue state TV audiences.

Here's a memo from my television network to yours: The GOP will lose the mid-term elections and I'm not sure it has anything to do with how crappy SNL is. Try a show about The Colbert Report next time.

REVIEW: The Departed

93% of reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes gave The Departed Scorcese's Hollywood remake of Infernal Affairs positive marks. The usually tough Entertainment Weekly gave it an A-. Scorcese has finally done a good movie again, the critics say, not a failed masterpiece like The Aviator and Gangs of New York.

And for an hour, it appears The Departed has a worthy destination. Leo is crying and twitching and losing his nerve over being undercover with the mob for too long. He and Jack Nicholson are actually dropping their "r's" occasionally like Bostonians. The audience has likely erased the memory of Leo doing a brutal Dutch South African accent in the Blood Diamond trailer. We're all generally optimistic.

And then The Departed derails. Too much Matt Damon, who makes being a cop/mob informant seem like a boring desk job. Too much Jack Nicholson, who, for some reason, can't figure out that the informant is Dicaprio even though he 1) is the new guy, 2) used to be in the police, 3) the only person in Nicholson's crew that speaks full sentences, and 4) has two cell phones (one red, one silver)!

The end really devolves with Leo being DiCap-itated by another random mob informant in the police force (who has been on screen for about 3 seconds). And then, when the comic relief Mark Wahlberg magically shows up at Matt Damon's apartment and kills him and a rat literally crawls across the balcony railing as the camera pans out...I start to wonder how Scorcese has gotten away with all this bloated and amateurish dreck. And I haven't even covered the completely useless characters would have ended the cutting-room floor of just about any other disciplined director. Oh, right, he's Scorcese, that's why.

The Departed is 93% awful.

Randomness

- Listening to Lou Pinella on Fox baseball broadcasts is brutal. "Rickey Henderson was the best at reading pitchers I've ever seen...or managed." Lou, if you've managed the player, it's likely you've seen him too.

- Maybe 1 out of 20 passengers wears blazers on the Muni in San Francisco. Socioeconomic statement?

- Why is it that anyone who reads The Complete Henry Miller dresses and grooms like Rivers Cuomo?

- Come to think of it, why does anyone who looks like Rivers Cuomo look like he's addicted to porn?

- If he was actually Rivers Cuomo, he would likely be addicted to Asian porn.

REVIEW: The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

One of my favorite short stories of all time is Eurotrash by Irvine Welsh. And when I saw him at the Edinburgh Castle several years back and learned that he was moving to San Francisco to write his novel, I was thrilled. Irvine Welsh! With his gallows humor and Scottish dialect and black humor about young low-lifes, he brought new credibility to the stale San Francisco literary scene of the 826 Valencia group (writers no one will remember in 20 years like Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliott, Vendela Vida) and the Grotto's lit-chic for cerebral yuppies (Po Bronson, Ethan Canin, JT LeRoy).

Age doesn't suit all. Welsh's latest novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, is a self-conscious attempt by Welsh to mature, to deal with mortality, concepts of malehood, a decidedly post-nihilist, post-smack, post-Trainspotting novel. Welsh has "chosen life" as his beloved Renton would say. The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is about Skinner, a boozer looking for his lost father and frankly, a clue, and Kibby, a feeble male who is an afficionado of gaming mags like Game Informer. And Welsh's pinot noir novel, if you will, might have worked. If anyone with a modicum of editorial skill actually redlined the thing.

The book is asoak with verb tense problems and random shifts in POV, sometimes bouncing from first person to third person in the same person. The heart is there, but it's as if Welsh wrote this 500 page manuscript between trips to the loo during a pub crawl from the Edinburgh Castle to the Zeitgeist. The only saving grace of the book is that it appears Welsh has moved back to Dublin.