Legally Blonde notes

I just saw the Upper Moreland (Pa.) High School's production of "Legally Blonde," and though  I'm not going to review it (the girl who sang while jumping rope though should just get an honorary Tony), it made me think of a character point from the film that bothered me.

Why are we rooting for Elle? She's perfect. She's one of those beautiful, perfectly coiffed, perfect-in-every way, affluent sorority sisters who could have any guy or career she wants. We laughed when John Belushi spit mashed potatoes on this character in "Animal House," and now we're rooting for her. It's kind of like wishing Margaret Dumont gets the best of Groucho Marx.

My other problem was  the film's sequel, which, like Home Alone 2, was really just a remake. The part of the first film in which she's actually cracking a case was the best part. I thought the sequel would be more of that, some actual Perry-Mason-in-Prada courtroom theatrics, but no.

Old timey film review: The Animal Kingdom

I'm a fan of Myrna Loy, it's on YouTube, what's not to love?

Well, this is pre-Thin Man Myrna Loy, and Hollywood still had no idea what to do with her. Here she's the bitch who makes Leslie Howard ditch all his friends within 15 minutes of their engagement. She also puts her nose in his business dealings.

Leslie Howard puts up with her and you just want to slap him. Ann Harding is the long-suffering former gal pal/ friend with benefits, who tries to stay noble while being shut out. The only other film I saw her in was "Double Harness." Good actress, but she played a martyr there, also.

It's all very talky, and stagy and you just know it was based on a drawing-room drama that might have been controversial in the day, but now it's kind of dreary and dated. And all the characters talk like they're in a drawing room drama from the '30s.

The negligees are skimpy and again I'm amazed that the negligees are wasted on really flat-chested women. Did bigger boobs evolve over the past 80 years, or is it Hollywood today won't cast you unless you wear a DD cup?

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

What a great way to binge watch.

Ellie Kemper has such an expressive face, and her character's constant optimism are such fun, a viewer can't help but love her. And the jokes come very fast.

As everyone knows, Kimmy has spent the last 15 years held hostage in a bunker by a cult leader. This  could have been "Hogan's Heroes" level tasteless, yet, Tina Fey and Robert Carlock made it all work. Kimmy is starting life fresh, it doesn't matter where she came from. This is Mary Richards leaving her failed relationship and moving to Minneapolis. It's really all the same, just more absurdist humor.

Speaking of which, UKS takes place in the same absurd New York City where "30 Rock" took place. Lots of fortuitous running into each other, and no part is too small to not be hilarious.

Notes:

Jane Krakowski is pretty much playing the same character from "30 Rock." She's vain and glamorous and deep down very insecure. Still, funny is funny.

Her roommate Tituss has been carrying most of the B plots, this is a little jarring because we shift from stories about fish-out-of-water Kimmy to Tituss going on auditions. "30 Rock" had A and B stories, but all the characters had the same employer. There's a disconnect between these characters' stories.

Recurring themes from "30 Rock" are turning up, a wolfman, an old man with dementia used as a plot device, the 15-year-old nemesis.

The last three episodes, tying up the arc that started with the first episode are probably the best. Tim Blake Nelson's Barney-Fife-only-dangerous, was hilarious, as was Fey's hapless Marcia Clark.

Still, as it took about a season for "30 Rock" to get into its groove, I expect UKS to only get better.

Lost Trek Lore

If you can find it, try to get Bill Planer’s “Lost Voyages of Star Trek.” It includes synopses of Star Trek scripts that were never filmed.

In the mid-70s, Paramount was going to start a “fourth television network” and its flagship show was to be “Star Trek: Phase II.” The adventures of the Enterprise’s second five-year journey.

Scripts were commissioned, the actors were going to reprise their roles, except for Leonard Nimoy.

New characters were drawn up: Decker, a headstrong, young first officer; Ilya, a psychic, and onetime lover of Decker’s, and Xon, a vulcan who, unlike Spock, actually enjoyed working on a ship with humans and wanted to be more like them. (These three characters might sound familiar.)

Then something big happened: Star Wars. 

Paramount executives who had spent every morning climbing over a new pile of mail from Star Trek fans begging for a Star Trek movie started asking themselves: Do we own any properties that have spaceships in them?

Plans for the fourth network and Phase II were scrapped. (Barry Diller, the Paramount executive spearheading this concept, would take it to Fox. You might have heard of this.)

Roddenberry was ordered: Make us a movie.

Then came an astonishing series of bad decisions, one understandable, the rest bewildering.

Bad decision one: Choosing the director. This is the understandable bad decision. We’re talking Robert Wise. “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” Blockbusters both. But most important to Roddenberry: “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Possibly the most cerebral science fiction drama up to that time, and probably to this day. (Call me what you must, 2001 a Space Odyssey was a pretentious overlong boring indulge-o-fest)

Rodddenberry didn’t want spaceships blowing each other up, he wanted a movie just like “The Day the Earth Stood Still”: men in military uniforms sitting around discussing what to do about the alien threat ... if it is a threat.

The problem is, after Star Wars, no one else wanted that. We wanted fast ships and explosions. Instead we got long long talky meetings, and interminable inspections of the outer hull of the Enterprise

Now the baffling decisions: Roddenberry went to the stack of scripts written for Phase II and found “In Thy Image,” a story about an Earth space probe that becomes self-aware and returns to meet its makers. 

Two problems with this script. A) it had been done before as an episode of Star Trek, B) the concept really doesn’t lend itself to a big budget motion picture experience. There are no villains! Now after “Wrath of Khan” I can’t argue that going back to the source material is a bad idea, but Khan was a sequel, building on the original. And if you’re going to spend $20 million (then a lot of money for a movie) to remake an episode of Star Trek, do “The Doomsday Machine” That episode just begs for the big-screen treatment. (Check out the CGI-improved version, you’ll see I’m right).

Baffling decision 2: “Let’s shave Persis Khambatta’s head!” 

Baffling decision 3: Upon finding out the revived Star Trek would be a movie, Leonard Nimoy was suddenly interested. At this point, Roddenberry thought, wow, I can keep Decker and Ilia, but I’ll have to kill off Xon. 

Kill off Xon? 

Roddenberry somehow was thinking that not only were the Star Trek Phase II episodes filmed, they were aired, and the fans would want an explanation on why Xon wasn’t in the movie.

How else to explain his role in the film as the quickly introduced, quickly dispatched Vulcan, making a movie that was a half hour too long even longer?

The film was released, became a hit, but was quickly nicknamed Star Trek: The Motionless Picture. 

So, Roddenbery went into exile and Paramount would never release another Star Trek film without phasers being fired and things blowing up.

When Roddenberry returned from exile, they let him produce an ambitious little TV program called Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Once again, he raided the box o’ scripts from Phase II. Only wherever it said Kirk, he crossed it out and wrote Picard. Decker became Riker; Ilia became Troi, and Xon became Data.

This man was the master of recycling.

As  pointed out in a Cracked article, Roddenberry’s talents were somewhat overrated in favor of people who worked for him. Cracked cites Gene Coon, but I would add DC Fontana and David Gerrold to the mix. When they left Next Generation things quickly went to crap. Interesting thought-provoking scripts were replaced with tropes that were moldy in the ‘60s. Evil twins, unambiguously-good good guys. A captain who surrendered seemingly every episode, the psychic who provided no insight that wasn’t always obvious, the boy genius for whom every episode had to stop in its tracks so someone could explain the plot to him, and a Klingon who got knocked on his ass in every fight.

Star Trek: Phase II could have been the best Star Trek series of them all. Roddenberry was always somehow Star Trek’s greatest champion and worst enemy.

Film Review: Annie

It was much better than I thought it would be. I expected something more girly and extra-sweet, but Quvenzhané Wallis is so ridiculously adorable she won me over. Such a  great screen presence. There's a quick scene where she's eating a lobster, drops it on the floor and in the eighth of a second before she leans over to pick it up, she makes an "oops" face that's so cute. Lots of charisma but the only thing she doesn't have is one of those great big Andrea McArdle singing voices. (there would have been no shame in dubbing her voice.)
Cameron Diaz was another unexpected surprise. She was very funny as Miss Hannigan. Mean, but never threatening.
It did go on maybe 20 minutes too long, and the story meandered a bit, but it was much better than its reviews.

film review: Big Hero 6

OK, my 7-year-old liked it.

There's two Disneys really, there's the Disney that makes films for 7 year olds ("Cars," any "Cars" sequel), and the Disney that makes films for everybody ("Tangled," "Maleficent")

This would easily go in the 7-year-old class.

There's a lot going on and the animation is of course stunning, but the plot's surprises are predictable (if someone dies and they never find the body, two out of three times the person is not really dead), and the characters seem to come from a random generator of multicultural characters. At one point they say, "Let's be superheroes,"and they use their science smarts to be superheroes.

That was simple, in fact, too simple to be entertaining.

But then the one girl pulls sticky balls out of her purse you think, "wow, they really ran out of ideas for super powers. ("The Incredibles" at least stole from the Fantastic Four).

The centerpiece is Baymax, the medical, comedy relief robot who is oversized and inflatable because, well, it's funnier that way. Later when they give him jet boots and armor and Hero, the boy genius, rides him through the sky, you're supposed to feel awe, instead you feel, "awe, I saw this already in "Iron Giant." They also borrow from the "Lost in Space" movie, especially the ending.

And at one point, Hero hides Baymax from his aunt (because, of course, he's an orphan.) Why? His brother had been working on it in his bedroom for years, she never saw it? Why did he keep it a secret, yet show her everything else he did?

The bad guy steals a scientific creation from Hero and uses it for evil. A plot hole I couldn't get over was, Hero invented this, can't he override the bad guy's commands and shut it down? This is never addressed.

Take a 7 year old, and a good book.

Substitute Day

Remember back in grade school when your teacher called out sick and there was this feeling of disorganization? You sat in the classroom wondering what you were supposed to be doing, and various administrative types would poke their heads in the door to assure you someone was coming in. Eventually someone would be called from out of her bed and come in and provide some sense of order but deep down, you knew she really didn't know what was going on.

The seams of the organization were visible and this always fascinated me.

What's further amazing is when this happens on TV.

I remember turning on the Tonight Show one night in the mid-80s and Steve Allen was the guest host. That was odd, it wasn't one of Johnny's many many many many weeks off. Johnny obviously called out and we can only imagine what happened next. Freddy DeCordova and Peter Lassally huddled together going down a long list of comics, making calls and seeing who was available. "Jay, this is Freddy, can you host the Tonight Show this afternoon?.. You're booked? OK, thanks anyway."

(Steve Allen meanwhile made the night his own, delivering his monologue from a piano. He'd play between jokes and it became pretty obvious, this is the guy who invented the Tonight Show, and NBC should have probably never let him go.)

Anyway..

This happened last night with The Daily Show. Jon called out sick, the producers weighed their options. John Oliver, who did such an great job subbing for Jon over the summer is now at HBO, so he's off the list. Jennifer's too green, how about Jason or Samantha?

So Jason Jones hosted it, he did a bit about Joe Biden that was obviously written for Jon, jokes were made about his nervousness, and it pretty much worked. In the second segment, Samantha Bee made jokes that she should be guest hosting, which were cute, and recycled from when John Oliver hosted. Then they showed her pre-filmed segment.

In the third segment things kind of went off the rails. Samantha refused to leave the desk, and she and Jason both interviewed Daily Show alum Wyatt Cenak, in an interview that made you appreciate Jon's ability to put everyone at ease and be the funny guy for serious-minded guests, or be the straight man for comics.

Cenak had brought a pie, Bee asked if he made it with his own hands, then she said she wanted to taste his hands in the pie and it was just awkward. Jones brought up his American citizenship test and asked Cenak some questions. This worked. Cenak then  did a bit about plugging books by dead authors which was OK, but the whole time I'm just sensing flop sweat.

People like Allen and Carson and Cavett make hosting a talk show look easy, but maybe it's harder than we all think.