A young hustler snaps Sarah Connor’s photo at a gas station, giving her the Polaroid that will inspire Kyle Reese, 30 years later, to come back for her. Bruce Willis, haunted by childhood memories of a murder, becomes the man murdered in front of his younger self. A newly-resurrected Tasha Yar chooses to travel back in time on a doomed ship, to prevent a present that the audience knows is out of whack. The coolest part of time-travel stories are the reveals, when everything falls into place like the last click of a Rubik’s Cube.
I adore most time-travel stories, even mediocre ones. (One of the more disappointing books I’ve ever read was The Time Traveler’s Wife, because the concept was so very cool and the characters were so very hateful.) The new, not-bad Men in Black movie inspired this post over at Movieline, an ode to Terminator, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” Connie Willis’s Oxford historians novels and more.
2 Far, Shivaree
5 and 1/2 Minute Hallway, Poe
6’1”, Liz Phair
9 Crimes, Damien Rice
16 Military Wives, The Decemberists
19th Nervous Breakdown, The Rolling Stones
20 Years of Snow, Regina Spektor*
24, Jem
50ft Queenie, PJ Harvey
100 Days, 100 Nights, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
1000 Oceans, Tori Amos
1901, Phoenix
1963, Rachael Yamagata
2000 Miles, Coldplay
2080, Yeasayer
So if you’re looking for a song title, it’s apparently cool to start with a number below 30, a big round number on the order of 100s or 1000s, or a date within the past or future century. Says a very scientific poll of the songs I could fit on my iPhone last time I synced it with my computer.
*Stones —> Spektor is a particularly awkward transition when you’re listening to songs in title order
Every once in a while, I watch a string of Grey’s Anatomy episodes and get lulled into thinking it’s just a slightly soapier-than-usual workplace/romantic drama. Then, boom, plane crash. Which was almost outdone by the subsequent episode of Scandal, in which a senior White House aide solves his irritating-reporter problem with a pair of scissors to the neck. (Even Dick Cheney didn’t go that far.)
I haven’t cackled that much at a couple of television episodes in a really long time, maybe since the helicopter came back for the rest of Romano on ER. Still, there’s something about Shonda Rhimes’ ability to just go for it that I enjoy and admire. I’d put her batting average with these ridiculous plot twists at about .300 — the bomb in the chest and the hospital gunman worked for me, not so much the ghost sex and the ferry crash and the sinkhole and the crazy woman cutting a baby out of the pregnant doctor. And Private Practice as a whole has never really clicked for me — there’s something about the setting, or the age of the characters, that seems too grown-up or prosaic for all the usual bed-hopping shenanigans. But Grey’s still reliably brings the nutty fun, and I have high hopes for the sheer outlandishness of Scandal, which has already killed off two recurring characters. None of the main characters seem that sympathetic, but who needs that when you have scissors to the neck! Ex-CIA torturer! The President of the United States mooning over his True Love in the Oval Office!
I liked The Avengers a lot less than I liked The Cabin in the Woods, but at least Joss Whedon’s usual schtick was a lot less annoying! As a kind of sequel for Movieline, I wrote about four Whedon tics that worked well in The Avengers, including: The ragtag group of heroes, the poignant death of the supporting characters, and the women who sometimes get to do things.
Movieline: 4 Joss Whedon Stand-bys That Pay Off in The Avengers
Jonathan Frid, who died last month, originated the role of Barnabas Collins on Dark Shadows in the 1960s. The original tortured-vampire TV series was truly a soap — daily airings, haphazard plotting, bad production values and all; Frid regularly stared off into the distance for long pauses, in what he admitted was an effort to remember his lines.
But its gloomy, sepia stories were still compelling; I sucked down most of them one high school summer, when I stumbled across SciFi Channel reruns. And Dark Shadows laid a lot of groundwork for Buffy and Twilight and True Blood. Frid was haughty, frightening, magnetically ugly and romantically tortured over the death of his lost love; there’s a lot of Barnabas Collins in Angel and Eric Northman, although both of those vampire antiheroes have been played by younger and prettier men.
All of which to say is that I am extremely skeptical about the movie version of Dark Shadows, starring Johnny Depp in his Willy Wonka drag and recycled Addams Family sets. Whatever aspersions you want to cast on the original series, and there are many you can, intentionally wacky slapstick was never its thing.
Both parents, in fact, had managed to convey the same message: Don’t let children or domestic life interfere with your art. “The drama between my mother and me has partly to do with her bad luck coming of age in the nineteen-fifties,” Bechdel said. “We were on opposite sides of women’s liberation, and I got to reap its benefits. With Dad and me, same story: opposite sides of Stonewall. If only my parents had been born later, they might have been happier, and I wouldn’t exist.”
I’ve been guilty of throwing around references to “The Bechdel test” without knowing very much about its creator, other than that she’s a lesbian cartoonist who wrote the Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip. Judith Thurman’s fascinating New Yorker profile of Bechdel (subscribers-only, unfortunately) doesn’t even mention the pop-culture test of women’s presence or personalities in film and television. But it does make Bechdel sound like the deftest, if most opportunistic, chronicler of her parents’ foibles since Ruth Reichl.
