How do you spell stupid? B-E-E

I've commented before that one of my least favorite things is the Little League World Series.  What should be a fun time for kids playing the National pastime has been transformed by adults into an event that generates millions of dollars of revenue (for the adults) and puts awkward pre-teens on national television playing a game that most of them are mediocre at, except for the one kid on each team who shaves, has a wife, and bats .679 with a 0.05 ERA.  What could be worse than adults exploiting young athletes?

Adults exploiting young nerds.

ESPN has, for reasons that escape me, been televising the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  Yes, that annual contest where children are asked to spell words that will never, ever, be used in a sentence by anyone, anywhere.  Children proved their mental superiority and fitness to pass along genetic material by devoting hours of their young lives memorizing the proper spelling of words like bruxellois, hippocrepiform, and iridocyclitis. 

Yeah, that will prepare them for the 21^st century job market.

Look, kids, I hate to break it to you, but there’s this thing called Spell Check.  People no longer need to waste precious moments of life cramming the various ways to spell obscure words into one’s brain.  You might as well be competing in a contest to see who can use an abacus to compute square roots the fastest. 

If this contest taught reasoning skills there might be some minimal value to it, but the fact is that most words in the English language are spelled the way they are because someone, possibly someone not very bright, decided it that way about 800 years ago.  English words are an amalgam of Latin, Germanic, and a rich stew of just about every language that has ever existed on Earth.  You can reason out how a word should be spelled, but the kids who excel at spelling bees got to the top by memorizing the irrational exceptions to the rules, not the rules.

It would also be marginally useful to teach kids how to spell words used in everyday conversation, like “commitment” or “embarrass.”  Both of those are on a list of the 25 most commonly misspelled words (along with, ironically, “misspelled”). But I am pretty sure that any word that anyone would ever encounter is tossed out of the national spelling bee in the first round.

Parents force their kids to waste time committing a medical dictionary to memory instead of playing outside in the fresh air, or learning how to play a musical instrument.  The kids are put under tremendous pressure and no doubt are ridiculed when they embarrass their parents.  ESPN analysts who would rather be covering game 7 of the Stanley Cup Conference Finals are instead talking to some Pakistani immigrant’s child about how he or she was able to spell pyrrhuloxia.

At least the kids participating in the Little League World Series are getting some exercise and developing some eye-hand coordination that will serve them well in other sports if they can’t make it as a baseball player.  The participants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee are just learning that the way to succeed is by memorizing a bunch of useless facts and not questioning whether what they are learning makes sense.  I hope none of them embarrasses themselves. 

  

David Letterman: the fat lady has sung

There’s something that I observed about the TV show Twin Peaks: if you do something in a non-linear fashion for long enough, it becomes linear.  The show is remembered for its first anarchic year, but its second season (after which it was summarily cancelled) is less remembered because it wasn't very memorable.  The unpredictable became familiar. After finding new and different ways of being new and different, it got old. 

The same principle is also applicable to David Letterman, who did idiosyncratic material on late night for so long that it came to seem normal.  Letterman no longer seems so odd because we live in a post-Letterman world.

Letterman left his late night TV perch this week with an avalanche of well-wishes and people talking about he “changed late night.”  He didn't really change late night, he just made it sillier (which is not a bad thing).  Late night shows still feature a white guy coming out from behind a curtain, doing 5 minutes of stand-up, bantering with his band leader/henchman from a desk, and then talking to show biz types hawking their latest movie/TV show/CD.  James Cordon, taking over Dave’s old spot on NBC’s Late Late Show, has tried tweaking the formula but it still is what it is.

The truth is, David Letterman didn't want to change late night.  He was always the underdog, the smart ass kid in the back of the class, the insurrectionist.  He didn't want to change late night; he just wanted to see what happened when you threw stuff off of a tall building.  Or ran over stuff with a steam roller.

Almost all of Letterman’s “innovations” date back to his early show on NBC weekday mornings.  Some were refined on his NBC late late gig, but by the time he got to CBS, the cake was done.  He relied on old reliables (that’s WHY they’re called “old reliables”) like the Top Ten list, and as years went by he did less of the crazy stuff like monkey-cam.  This is why he was different: other talk show hosts tried to be as cool as Johnny Carson, but Letterman never stopped being a guy from Indiana who got paid to throw stuff off a tall building or run over stuff with a steam roller.

One thing that never wavered was Letterman’s willingness to bite the hand that fed him.  On his next to last show he ran a clip of CBS affiliates mistakenly saying he was leaving The Tonight Show, with a final one saying “he was kinda hard to watch.”  He managed to make the employees of his employer look foolish, while being self-deprecating at the same time. Unlike Jay Leno (who never seemed to want to offend ANYONE), Letterman could be a little mean, but he always backed it up by portraying himself as the biggest goofball on Earth.

Despite all the silliness, there was also an element of gravitas with Letterman than Leno, Conan O’Brien, and the “Jimmies” Kimmel and Fallon never quite had.  After the events of 9/11, it was Letterman who gave the country, and the city that was his adopted home, permission to carry on.  He addressed his quadruple bypass surgery openly, as he did with an embarrassing sexual harassment scandal involving Late Show staff.

David Letterman’s greatest genius was that he pretended not to be a genius.  As with Johnny Carson, he was a product of the Midwest and never stopped presenting himself as an average guy who got very lucky.  But he was able to get away with so much, to be so subversive, because he was smart enough to know what he could get away with.  As someone who worked on his show said, his philosophy was to go up to the edge, but not over.  He was subversive, but he was not Howard Stern.

Letterman was a unique voice on television, an institution that often reveres stolidity and familiarity over innovation.  Conan can be a little cheeky, but in watching Conan you can rarely forget that he went to Harvard.  Fallon is a little too much like his predecessor, Jay Leno, in trying to appear to be a nice guy.  Kimmel is the closest in attitude to Letterman, but he often lacks Letterman’s empathy with his guests.

Stephen Colbert is an apt replacement for Letterman, someone who is both funny and smart, with grounded sensibilities and a taste for the absurd.  TV is diminished without David Letterman, just as it was diminished without Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, and Johnny Carson.  And TV will go on.

Mad Men: What Does It All Mean?

In my last post I did some ruminating about Mad Men’s final episode; now I want to go back and look at the series as a whole (as best as I can remember all seven seasons, or 92 episodes). What are we supposed to take away after spending seven years our lives (and ten of theirs) with Don, Roger, Peggy, Pete, Megan, and even Harry Crane?

The key to the series, and the opening line to season four, was, “Who is Don Draper?” His real name is Dick Whitman, but as Shakespeare said, “What up with that?” (I’m paraphrasing).  Are the two names Jekyll and Hyde, with Don the respectable façade and Dick the womanizing, inattentive father who disappears from work for weeks at a time?  Or is Dick Whitman the honest young man raised in a brothel and Don Draper his rascally nemesis?  The joke, I suspect, is that they are not two sides of the same coin, they are the coin.

In the final episode Don listed his sins to Peggy Olsen and included that he had taken another man’s name and made nothing of it.  But what was the real Don Draper doing with his name that was so special?  If he had had the life Don created, with a successful career, nuclear family, and numerous friends, then it wouldn’t have been so easy for Dick Whitman to step into that life.  Dick Whitman stepped into an empty vessel and made it his own, and did a far better job of being Don Draper than Don Draper ever did.

The final episode seems to suggest that Dick Whitman’s tragic flaw was his greatest strength, the advice he doled out a couple of times early in the show’s run.  In Season one’s episode “5G” he tells his brother that his “life only moves in one direction.  Forward.”  In the first episode of Season two he tells Peggy Olsen, who is suffering from shock and probably extreme post-partum depression, “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”  That advice helped Peggy become the driven career woman she had to be to survive in a man’s world.  It helped Don Draper become a legend in the advertising world, always looking for a way to advance like a pawn traversing a chessboard until it gets promoted to something greater.

But does it also explain Don’s flaws?  Does he sleep with so many women because he won’t regret it later because he’s looking forward?  Does he hop into a convertible driven by a cute blonde while at a conference and not come back to work for weeks because he knows the firm will take him back because he’s Don Draper?  Is Peggy married to her job because she is too driven to settle for any man?

But if he looked back, what would Don Draper see?  His life as Dick Whitman wasn't a picnic.  Would he have been a better father if he had pondered his relationship with his father?  Unlikely.  Would he have been more faithful to Betty if he spent nights pondering his upbringing in a brothel?  I doubt it.  Stephanie Draper said she thought he was wrong about looking forward, but on balance it seems to do more good than harm.

What other themes can we take away from the Series Mad Men?  Other than the fact that it sucked to be a woman in the 1960’s? Mad Men seems to demonstrate the truth of a line from the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven: “Deserves got nothing to do with it.”

Don and Roger smoke like chimneys, but Betty gets cancer.  Pete Campbell was a sniveling, self-entitled creep, but he ends up with the thing that eluded Don Draper, a happy nuclear family.  Joan Holloway Harris is a warm, loving, spectacular woman who gravitates to men who are small minded and incapable of appreciating her (my favorite fantasy about the future for the Mad Men characters is that when Don returns to McCann/Erickson he and Joan get together, realize they are both gorgeous people who are lousy at relationships, and invent the phrase “friends with benefits”).

The only character who seemingly gets what they deserve (unless Harry Crane catches a social disease for some starlet) is Peggy Olsen, who succeeds at work and ends up with strapping Stan Rizzo in her life.  But Peggy was always the outlier, the one character who persevered and managed to achieve what she set out to do despite whatever obstacles male chauvinism put in her way.  Maybe the trait that makes Peggy unique is her focus on looking forward. And by the way, a partnership with her and Joan would have either taken over the world or resulted in a murder/suicide.

I think one of the best things about Mad Men is that it defied easy categorizing and psychoanalysis.  What was driving Don Draper to succeed at work, yet take off when he felt like it?  Why did he feel the need to cheat on his gorgeous wife (and so often with so many women)? There are no easy answers; there is no “Rosebud” that explains everything.  Don Draper, to use an anachronistic reference, is a Rubik’s Cube that can’t be solved.  That's why he's one of the most fascinating television characters of all time.

Mad Men: An End is Come; The End is Come

When a major TV series ends, it’s like a friend dying.  All the characters you've grown to know and love cease to exist, in this reality anyway.  All you can do is imagine that they continue on in some sort of TV heaven. Movies can have sequels and reboots, but (next season’s Full House and Coach notwithstanding) once a TV show is gone, it is gone for good.

So it is time to say goodbye to Mad Men, one of the best dramas ever to grace the small screen.  Its final episode wasn't a home run, like the season finale of season 1 (the legendary episode called “The Wheel”).  It wasn't a train wreck, like the final episode of How I Met Your Mother, which finally got around to explaining that the Dad was asking his kids for permission to go back to nailing their Aunt Robin after their biological Mother had been dead an appropriate period of time.  However much AMC hyped it, it wasn't an “event” finale, like the interminable end of MASH or the finale of Seinfeld where they brought back every character who’d ever appeared on the show.

It was not a confused hodge-podge of attempted wrap-ups, like the finale of Lost (yeah, Sayid ends up in heaven with whiny Shannon instead of Nadia).  It was not a surreal epilogue, like the final episodes of Newhart (Bob Newhart ends up in bed with his previous TV wife), St. Elsewhere (it’s all a dream in the mind of an autistic child), or Quantum Leap (okay, this one was too weird for me to summarize).  It was more like the finale of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where the unit broke up but the individuals go on to lead happy lives that we know nothing about (except Lou Grant, who gets a job with a newspaper in LA).

The series finale offered somewhat more closure that was found on The Sopranos, the show Matthew Weiner worked on before Mad Men, which had one of the most argued about endings of all time.  Nothing came to an actual end on Sunday night; supposedly Don Draper took his new-found enlightenment back to Madison Avenue where he used it to sell Coca-Cola.  Pete found happiness in Wichita, finally getting the respect he always thought was his entitlement; Joan, typically, proves to be super-competent at business but with lousy taste in men; Peggy and Stan finally realize what the audience has known for several years, that they deserve each other; and Harry has no one to have lunch with, at least no one who likes him.

I found the most interesting thing about the finale was how Don’s advice to Stephanie about moving forward echoed similar advice he gave to Peggy when she was in the depths of post-partum depression at the start of Season 2. The advice worked for Peggy, but rang hollow for Stephanie (and the participants in group therapy session) who, like Peggy, gave up a child.  Is there something wrong with Stephanie for rejecting the advice?  Is a “move forward” philosophy at the root of Don Draper/Dick Whitman’s problems?  Is what saves Don at the end his discovery that, if he looks back instead of forward, he finds something worth living for?

I could quibble about some of the resolutions.  Peggy and Stan seems a little pat, although it is hard not to be a shipper after the incident where Peggy tried to lure Stan to her apartment to empty a rat trap by offering to “maybe make it worth your while,” and Stan flatly replied, “No, you won’t.”  Frankly, I can see the two of them working out some arrangement with the fashion photographer played by Mimi Rogers earlier this season, who was clearly interested in each of them.

I’m sure it will rankle some fans that Pete Campbell winds up with a happy ending, given that he’s been an unspeakable jerk most of the time on the show and that Trudy was more than justified in leaving him.  But, as Don pointed out in the season 4 finale, Pete did have good ideas and was good at his job.  Being in Wichita away from big city temptations will curb his appetites, while access to unlimited Lear Jets will stroke his ego.  After trying to be like Don and seeing where that got both him AND Don, maybe he’ll appreciate Trudy a little more.  Besides, given his hairline, trying to be like Don Draper with the ladies is no longer an option.

My biggest problem with the finale is Joan’s story, with poor Joan once again getting a raw deal in the love department.  My complaint is that, in the brief time we've gotten to know Richard, he seemed to vacillate between being perfect and being terrible.  He seems to understand Joan’s potential and wants her to use it, but not if it interferes with her giving him 100% of her attention 100% of the time.  Given that the Peggy/Stan relationship took years to gestate, throwing Richard in for four episodes and having him be supportive for the first three episodes and insensitive in the finale seems rushed and manipulative.  That said, her ending up in film production is a nice extension of her time working in the new television division with Harry several seasons ago.

Where does Mad Men rank in the history of television?  Of course an objective ranking is impossible, but it is certainly one of the top ten dramas in broadcast/cable history (excuse me for excluding premium cable fare like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, but the economics of HBO and Showtime are wholly different than that of the broadcast networks and basic cable).  I’d say Mad Men is in the top five, with Hill Street Blues, The Wire, The West Wing, and The X-Files (although I am sure most viewers would replace X-Files with Breaking Bad; I just never got that show).  The first two seasons were brilliant; the next three consistently excellent, and the last two abbreviated seasons were somewhere in between.

One final note: the character of Meredith became one of my favorite Mad Men characters based solely on the last two episodes.  The way she politely turned away Don’s boss at McCann/Erickson when he asked where Don was managed to be truthful yet cover Don’s back; her wish that Don was in “a better place” eliciting Roger’s emphatic, “He’s not dead!” was hysterical (“There are better places than this,” resonated with Dawn’s exit line in a previous episode; not everyone is comfortable being Don Draper’s secretary).  She deserved better than being fired because Don Draper took off for California.  I’m sure Don got her rehired (if she was willing to come back) before creating Coke’s “I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing” ad campaign.

Don't Buy a Used Car From the Patriots

According to the old saw, there are three statements you should never believe: “The check is in the mail,” “I’ll respect you in the morning,” and “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”  I think we can now add to that list anything uttered by someone associated with the New England Patriots.

When it was announced there would be an inquiry into the events surrounding “deflategate,” Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft vowed that the New England Patriots would “fully cooperate” with the NFL.  So, when investigator Ted Wells wanted to have a follow up interview with locker room attendant James McNally, they were blocked by Patriots’ attorneys.  The attorneys, in the Patriots’ jeremiad against the Wells report, explained that they thought McNally had been through enough and wanted to spare him more stress.  Coming up with an excuse for not cooperating is not cooperating. 

As an additional example of their cooperation, Tom Brady refused to turn over his cell phone so his texts could be examined.  Actually, it is worse than that—investigator Ted Wells later said that he had asked Brady to turn over not the phone, but just a transcript of any related texts and he would accept Brady’s word that no other relevant material was on the phone.  Even THAT was too much for The Golden Boy, who stonewalled the investigation.  There is an evidentiary principle that can be applied here; when a party in control of evidence refuses to make it available, you can assume the worst.  The ONLY REASON for Brady not to turn over his text records is the existence of the “smoking gun” that the Patriots have been denying the existence of since this began.

Brady says the reason he won't turn over the phone is to preserve the right to privacy for future players.  Right.  You have evidence on your phone that exonerates you, but you can't show it to us because it's private.  So we just have to take your word for it.  Does Tom Brady have that little respect for our intelligence?  If he has evidence, then he can waive his right to privacy.  The Patriots constantly talk about the lack of "conclusive" evidence in the Wells report, but they don't seem to be producing much conclusive evidence themselves.

Robert Kraft assured America that the Patriots were completely blameless and he would demand an apology when the report was released and vindicated them.  Another statement, another lie.  The Report found Brady and the Patriots guilty (or as Gary Trudeau once said about Richard Nixon, “That’s guilty, guilty, guilty”).  Don’t get mislead by the lawyer-speak of “more probable than not” which is just how lawyers say guilty when talking about incidents that don’t rise to criminal activity.  I suppose Kraft wasn’t really lying, he was merely setting the stage for moral outrage when the inevitable finding of guilt was released.

Wait, we’re not done.  At one point Robert Kraft said that the Patriots would accept whatever punishment the NFL meted out.  So where are we?  The Patriots continue to attack the Wells Report, Brady is appealing his suspension, and basically the Patriots will fight every single punishment being imposed.  Strike three for honesty, if you are scoring at home.

Of course Robert Kraft has an explanation; the Patriots are better at explaining than following rules.  He said the Patriots would accept the punishment, but the punishment was far far more than could have been reasonably expected.  I suppose that statement would technically be true since Bob Kraft expected the punishment from his good friend Roger Goodell would be a fine the size of Robert Kraft’s cuff link budget.

And anyone who believes the Patriots’ lawyers that the equipment manager called himself “The Deflator” because he was trying to lose weight should be e-mailed by a Nigerian prince, because the claims are equally credible.

The Patriots are the Oakland Raiders of the New Millennium, a rogue nation that follows its own rules and sneers at anyone who suggests they might want to play nice.  This goes all the way back to 1982, when the Patriots had a snowplow clear a path in the snow so their field goal kicker could win the game.  It has continued since; no NFL team has had its name associated with the suffix "gate"  as often as the Patriots.

The Patriots, not the media, have turned Deflategate from a molehill into a mountain.  Instead of just sheepishly acknowledging that “mistakes were made” they upped the ante by proclaiming absolute innocence, and then doubling down in the face of contrary evidence. I think they think that if they keep making it bigger and bigger at some point people will realize it is taking a speeding ticket to the Supreme Court and just let them off scott free.

Is four games too much of a suspension for Brady?  As I look at it, one game was for cheating, one game was for involving the staff, one was for not cooperating, and one was because of the Patriots’ history of lies, deception, and deceit (I think that’s their law firm).  It will probably get knocked down to two games, unless all of Kraft’s bile is pissing off Roger Goodell.  Does Goodell look like the Incredible Hulk when he gets angry?  I wouldn’t want to find out.

TV viewers are a little too comfortable

I suppose you could call television a democracy, of sorts.  Every 30 minutes on every night of the week, America votes with its remote controls, and we witness the outcome.  As with all democracies, sometimes people don’t like the outcome; hence the annual pleas from various segments of society to “Save Our Show.”  Because these people have nothing better to do than lobby networks to keep employing people who make way more money than they do.

These are odd times in television programming.  I’m not just saying that because suddenly a company that mails people DVDs is producing higher quality shows than the vast majority of those produced by companies in the television production business.  On the one hand, as the audience is spread thinner and thinner, networks are quicker to pull the plug on shows that are seen as underperforming.  It used to be that most shows were given at least 13 weeks to “find” an audience, as if such a thing could be done by moving the show from time slot to time slot.  Now, if there isn’t ratings growth after two episodes, a show is pulled and replaced by something the network didn’t think was quite as good in the first place.

On the other hand, when viewers get comfortable with a certain group of characters, a mediocre show can run longer than many of the all-time great series.  This week it was announced that two long-running shows were calling it quits: American idol, which I thought would run forever, literally, and CSI: Crime Scene investigations (the most redundantly named TV series ever).  Idol’s influence has been waning for some time; its winners used to be household names for about a year before returning to obscurity (whither Ruben Studdard?), but more recent winners came and went without so much as a blip on the cultural radar.  But I always assumed that if ratings flagged they’d find some different hosts and still make money off the recording contracts contestants were forced to sign.  I guess Randy Jackson found something better to do.

CSI formed the cornerstone of CBS’ seemingly non-stop production of crime procedurals that are created in some abandoned cookie factory.  At some point it was discovered that actors could leave the show but the brand would live on, so William Pederson gave way to Laurence Fishburn who ceded the chair to Ted Danson, and I’m not entirely sure why it is stopping now after 15 years.  Of course, it hasn’t completely stopped, as the CSI clones are still out there.

It used to be that a show only got to 100 episodes if it was great, and getting beyond five seasons was a sign of the highest quality.  But now Criminal Minds has been on the air for 15 years, begetting its own spin-offs.  The show has a rating at Rotten Tomato of 25% and a Metacritic score of 42, yet it lives on.  In 15 years it has gotten exactly 3 Emmy nominations, all for stunt work, so clearly viewers aren’t looking for great acting, writing, or directing.  Yet it still pulls in more than 10 million viewers every episode.

Other shows cracking the ten season mark include Survivor (which is technically on season 30 because they do two seasons per year), Bones, Supernatural, Family Guy, Law & Order SVU, and perennials like The Simpsons and 60 minutes.  The Big Bang Theory has been renewed through its tenth season, and shows like Castle, Modern Family and The Middle are still going strong after seven years or more. 

Stability is usually a good thing, but at some point it becomes stodginess.  As I blogged several years ago, when there was a concerted fan movement to save the show Angel (a show I followed avidly and own all five seasons of on DVD), if there is one thing we should learn from the story of a vampire seeking redemption it is that living forever is not necessarily a good thing.  Angel getting axed led David Boreanaz to Bones, which as I noted above is past the ten year mark (not that Bones is anywhere near as good as Angel).  Firefly being cancelled indirectly led Nathan Fillion to Castle.  More than 14 episodes of Firefly would have been nice, but if the show had lasted longer, would there be the movie Serenity?

I have decided to do something about this and I am reconsidering whether to keep watching some of my old favorites.  Castle has gotten a little creaky, and the plot twist that some mysterious “they” want Beckett to run for State Senate smacks of desperation.  I’ve enjoyed Elementary but the longer it is on, the further it diverges from being about a modern day Sherlock Holmes.  I stuck through Sleepy Hollow’s ill-conceived second season, but with the third season moving to Thursdays, I just don’t know if it is worth the hour it takes to watch.

So look at your viewing habits, and mix it up a bit.  Don’t just watch the same old thing.  Heck, maybe you should skip television and read a book.  Okay, let’s not get nuts.

Movie Review: The Age of Ultron

Avengers: the Age of Ultron is quite possibly the most confused, incomprehensible, and headache-inducing thing Joss Whedon has ever affixed his name to.  I can say this with some certainty as I believe I have seen everything he has done since the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I haven’t seen anything he wrote for the TV series Roseanne, but I have to believe it made more sense than Ultron, which is a mess.

Of course since the film’s release it has come out that Marvel executives tampered with the final product, forcing Whedon to include a scene making no sense at all in order to keep in scenes Whedon thought were important.  Way to go, Marvel; I’m sure pissing off the writer/director of you biggest grossing hit of all time in order to save a shot of Thor with his shirt off was a necessary sacrifice to protect the brand.

I’m trying to think of who is served well by Ultron, but aside from Jeremy Renner, I am drawing a blank.  The Oscar nominee finally gets some quality scenes and a backstory after being a non-entity for most of the original Avengers.  He has a wife and two and a half kids (one of the way), which is weird because I thought he had something going on with Natasha Romanov in The Avengers. 

But then I thought she had chemistry with Captain America in The Winter Soldier, and that she was passing on the Cap to stick with Hawkeye.  Maybe Scarlett Johnasen just has chemistry with everybody (could she please have chemistry with ME?).  Well, everybody except Mark Ruffalo, who the film tries to set up as her love interest in Ultron.  I think Black Widow can do better than a guy who goes green and destroys cities when he hits his thumb with a hammer.

I would recount the plot of The Age of Ultron, but it would sound like babbling.  The Avengers recover Loki’s scepter and the Infinity Stone in it, and because Tony Stark is a genius it takes him under thirty minutes to use it to create a malevolent artificial intelligence that calls itself Ultron.  What happens after that is a bunch of stock action sequences using CGI.

The cast could use some of Joss Whedon’s trademark thinning out at this point.  In addition to the characters from The Avengers (Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye), in this film both War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) make appearances (although Falcon is oddly absent in the big battle at the end).  Plus there are the new kids on the block, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, plus Tony Stark’s computer Jarvis.  Despite all the carnage, only one of these eleven characters bites the dust after the last battle, and it isn’t the one you’d suspect.

Of course there are examples of Joss Whedon’s patented verbiage; I suspect he couldn’t write a grocery list without a couple of choice bon mots.  But none of the characters have the chance to shine, we are familiar with all of their fighting styles by now (Black Widow flips and kicks, Thor hits things with his hammer, and Hulk smash), and there isn’t a lot of difference between a seemingly endless number of Chitauri attacking New York City and a seemingly endless number of Stark-bots attacking someplace called Sokovia.  Even Joss Whedon’s imagination seems to be empty.

Whedon has said he is done with the Marvel universe, which is as it should be.  He’s made his (well earned) money and can now focus on personal projects (like that Air Bud reboot he joked about after The Avengers’ record breaking opening weekend).  Besides, if one judges by The Age of Ultron, Whedon’s contribution to the Marvel universe is spent.  When the suits start giving notes to an auteur like Joss Whedon, it is time for him to make another adaptation from Shakespeare; at least THAT guy won’t give him any notes.

Brady's agent is doing him no favors

Boys and girls, let me give you the best advice you may ever get.  You may never have to use this advice, but believe me, if circumstances arise when it is applicable, just do what I say.  My advice is this: if a law enforcement officer ever says, “Would you like to speak to an attorney?” the answer is always, “YES!”  The yes must then be followed by absolute silence until your lawyer arrives.  There is no possible set of events that would ever make it a good idea to reply, “Heck no, officer, what would you like to know?”

That said, relying on a lawyer is still a pain.  Lawyers tend to be overly-risk adverse, mainly because if they say something and it turns out badly, they can be sued for malpractice.  Lawyers focus on legal consequences, ignoring things like your reputation and your standing with friends and family (“Go on, tell the cops about Uncle Jimmy’s still and you’ll walk.”).  Also, lawyers will come up with solutions that land you in jail, and you still have to pay them.

Lawyers also love to argue in the alternative.  There’s an old joke: a lawyer borrows a neighbor’s teapot, then returns it.  The neighbor notices a crack in the teapot and says something to the lawyer.  The lawyer replies, “I never borrowed your teapot, and if I did I returned it in perfect condition, and if I didn't then it was cracked when you gave it to me.”  That makes sense to a lawyer; to the rest of the world, it’s nuts.

Tom Brady’s agent Don Yee, who is a lawyer, is offering a similar defense for his client.  On the one hand, Tom Brady is completely innocent of all wrongdoing; on the other hand, the NFL tricked him into ordering the deflated balls in a sting operation.  This makes sense to the agent; logically it is an admission of guilt.

You can’t say that you didn't solicit that prostitute, and besides she was a cop who entrapped you.  Either you didn't offer her the money for sex, or offering her money for sex was her idea.  Both can’t be true.  Either Tom Brady was telling the truth on January 22 when he said he knew nothing about inflating footballs, or he was duped by the Colts into breaking the rules and ordering the footballs to be deflated because the Colts didn't complain the first time they caught him at it.

Tom Brady did not turn over his phone to the investigators for “nuanced reasons” according to his agent.  That’s lawyer speak for, “We don’t have to explain anything, my client is Tom F*$%#ng Brady.”  Yet later in the interview Yee says that Brady “fully cooperated with investigators [long pause] in that context,” the context being he didn't punch them in the nose when they asked him questions.  He did not fully cooperate by letting investigators check his phone for texts to the Patriot equipment managers.  Perhaps he had some candid snaps of his wife on the phone; oh wait, she’s a supermodel, everyone’s already seen her mostly naked.

Tom Brady has gotten some bad advice.  He should have never given the press conference on January 22 where he categorically denied knowing anything about ball pressure.  He should have turned his phone over to investigators, or come up with a slightly better reason than, “It’s complicated.”  And his agent (and his father) should not have publicly said that he’s guilty but the NFL is out to get him.

The idea that the NFL is persecuting Tom “The Golden Boy” Brady is beyond ludicrous.  There are lots of players Roger Goodell would relish punishing, including most of the Seattle Seahawks that Brady beat in the last Super Bowl.  The is one of Goodell’s worst nightmares: having to exact punishment on one of the league’s most popular players, who plays on the team owned by one of Goodell’s staunchest supporters. 

People ask, why would a great quarterback like Tom Brady have to cheat?  A quote attributed to Richard Petty says, “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.”  All great athletes look for every edge that can; that’s one thing that makes them great.  Different players have different thresholds.  A-Rod does cheesy things like trying to slap the ball out if the first baseman’s glove, or yell, “I got it” when on base and there’s a pop-up.  Is it any wonder he also used steroids to gain an edge?  Brady probably wouldn't commit an obvious violation, but if can get a slightly better grip on the ball and no one’s the wiser, then . . . .

If there is a root cause at the heart of this fiasco, it is the NFL’s policy to allow teams to control the game balls their team (but not the other team) uses during the game.  Who lobbied for such a cockamamie rule?  Tom Brady.  The guy who said he knew nothing about inflating footballs before a game.  And now he denies taking advantage of the rule he lobbied for?  Sure.  And I’m married to Giselle Bundchen.

Deflategate--the NFL actually does something

In a previous post I wrote about how sports often disappoints, that you expect a great game or a great performance and instead you get a blowout.  Well, sometimes the opposite is true; you expect nothing, but suddenly something appears that . . . doesn’t suck.  As someone once said, the great thing about being a pessimist is that you’re only pleasantly surprised.

The NFL released a 243-page report on the scandal known as “Deflategate.”  I expected a thin report to be issued in several months, maybe right after the start of the season, one that concluded that maybe mistakes were made but who can really say since we don’t have a “Ray Rice Second Video,” so no harm, no foul.  At best I thought some low-level Patriot employees might be implicated, but not identified by name or formally accused.

So imagine my shock when the report come out during the doldrums after the draft and specifically names Tom “The Golden Boy” Brady as a likely culprit.  Brady didn’t order the balls deflated, but played the role of Henry II, texting, “Will no one rid me of these troublesome over-inflated footballs?”  Brady’s father says his son has been found guilty until proven innocent; no, there is a 243 page report that proves he’s guilty (maybe not beyond a reasonable doubt, but this isn’t a court of law).

Two Patriot’s employees, Jim McNally the Locker Room Attendant and John Jastremski, an equipment assistant, were named and implicated with a bit more forcefulness.  The report, which I will read in its entirety on a night when there is nothing good on TV or in my Netflix queue, is described as thorough and damning.

Of course not everyone is convinced.  Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, said he was disappointed that there was no “incontrovertible or hard evidence” in the report identifying wrongdoing on the part of the Patriots.  Let me clarify something for Mr. Kraft—even the American judicial system does not require “incontrovertible” evidence of guilt, just evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.  I suppose Mr. Kraft is upset that Aaron Hernandez won’t be playing for the Pats next season because there is not ‘incontrovertible” evidence he murdered three people.

Kraft basically wants a Ray Rice Second Video, and since there weren’t any surveillance cameras in the Patriot’s locker room (have they checked the visitor’s locker room?  Just a thought) then the Patriot’s must be acquitted.  First, there is substantial circumstantial evidence that prompted the author of the report to its conclusion; the failure of there to be a “smoking gun” does not mean the mountain of evidence that does exist should be ignored.

Second, as I said before when writing about Deflategate, it is a strict liability standard of care.  The rules do not make it an offense to let air out of a football; the rules say the balls SHALL be properly inflated, and the fact that 11 of the 12 Patriot’s balls tested as low is a de fact violation (the average pressure for the Patriot’s 12 balls was 11.11 PSI by one test, 11.49 by the other, for the Colts’ 4 balls that were tested the PSI averages were 12.63 and 12.44, with the minimum proper pressure being 12.5).

One of the arguments being forwarded by Patriot apologists is that there is no evidence that the Patriots benefitted from the deflated balls.  This is stretching.  Let’s say you rob a bank and walk out the door with $50,000; you hop in your get a way car and speed off, and rounding the first corner the loot flies out of the car window.  Are you now innocent of bank robbery because you didn’t benefit from having the $50,000?

Even if you don’t buy that line of reasoning, the fact is this is sports—if you THINK you have an advantage, then you have an advantage.  Sports psychologists charge big fees to convince athletes they have an advantage over their opponents.  If the Patriot’s personnel thought deflating balls would give them an edge (and why would they do it otherwise?), then they benefitted from the cheating.

I suppose you could argue that the Patriots were favored against the Colts and would have won anyway, therefore there was no benefit as the outcome is the same without the chicanery.  But the outcome of the game shouldn’t influence the rules the game is played under.  Do referees stop calling pass interference if a team is down by four touchdowns in the fourth quarter?  Does a team with a 20 point lead have to gain 15 yards for a first down?  Was Richard Nixon not guilty of the Watergate burglary because he won in a landslide?  I think not.  It’s like saying Barry Bonds gained no advantage from using steroids because he was a great player before shooting himself up to the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon.

The question now is the penalty phase.  I said before I felt that making the Patriots forfeit the game was appropriate, and I still do.  Of course several months have passed, and the Super Bowl could hardly be replayed given team roster changes.  I suspect the two Patriots not named Tom Brady will be thrown under the proverbial bus.  Brady will get a fine that he’ll pay with the residuals his wife gets from the 2008 Victoria’s Secret catalog. The Pats will probably skate by scott free, maybe perhaps losing a low round draft pick in 2017.  I would say Bill Belichick’s reputation is irrevocably sullied, but if anything this probably enhances it. 

The report says there was no knowledge of the wrongdoing by Belichick and Kraft, but a phrase used in college football is “lack of institutional control.”  People who work for Belichick probably know his definitions of “right” and “wrong’ have been flexible in the past, and operate under that perspective.  I was surprised that the NFL report named Tom Brady as a wrong-doer; maybe they’ll surprise me again and suspend him for multiple games.

Orlando Jones leaves Sleepy Hollow

I’ve noticed an odd thing—fans of supernatural TV shows almost always hate change.  Maybe that’s why they like vampires so much; they never age, they never change their look, they are constant.  Given how shoddy the last two seasons of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer were, I have to admit part of me was relieved when Angel got to go out on its feet with some dignity after only five seasons.

Change is coming to another supernatural television show, but it isn’t much of a surprise: reports have confirmed that Orlando Jones will not be back for the third season of Sleepy Hollow.  I say this is not a surprise; yes, his character was killed off, but he was killed off once before and he somehow returned (that’s what I mean about supernatural shows not changing).  But given that they seemed to be cleaning house at the end of last season, it seemed clear that if Sleepy Hollow were to continue, it would have a smaller cast.

Note I said, “if.”  Given the low ratings and general discontent about the quality of season 2, season 3 was not a given.  While I loved season 1, I was one of those who felt that the quality dropped as the episode load increased from 13 to 18 and the cast expanded to include John Noble and Lyndie Greenwood.  But the Powers That Be at FOX decided to re-up for another season, albeit with a new showrunner.

The show never managed to integrate the character of Katrina, Ichabod Crane’s witchy-wife, who started off trapped in purgatory but still never fully interacted with the plots once she was released.  Katrina never found a situation she couldn’t make worse by trying to help, which made her character pathetic even though she was supposed to be strong and intelligent. 

And the show’s attempts to deal with new and different supernatural elements took them pretty far afield.  In one episode the protagonists sought a Biblical sword that was protected by a Gorgon.  In upstate New York.  And don’t even get me started on the absurdity of the interactive hologram of Thomas Jefferson.

Ichabod and his partner Abbie tried their best to defeat the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and prevent Armageddon, but Katrina kept having warm fuzzy feelings for her former fiancée (who was the Headless Horseman) and their son (who was the Horseman of War).  It is kind of hard to fight Evil when a member of your team wants to reform them and make them good again. 

To make another allusion to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it reminded me of season seven when Buffy fought “The First Evil.”  One problem the show had was that it was never able to quite explain why The First Evil was taking a week off so the characters could do something else.  Constantly fighting The First Evil is monotonous, but having it take a week off in order to develop other plot lines isn’t plausible.  It was the same with Sleepy Hollow season 2; Evil seemed perfectly willing to rest for a while in its inexorable quest to destroy the world.

I am partly relieved that Orlando Jones will not be back next season.  Not that I didn’t think he did a good job; in the early episodes he provided a grounding that was needed when talking about the Apocalypse.  The thing is this; Jones’ strong suit is comedy.  He rose to fame as a pitchman for 7-Up where his comic timing was essential to selling the phrase, “Make Seven [pause] Up Yours!”  He did excellent work on MadTV, and had a great supporting role in the largely forgotten David Duchovney comedy Evolution (he had the memorable line, “There’s ALWAYS time for lubricant!”).

I guess it isn’t so much that I am happy to see Jones go, as I am that Captain Frank Irving will be gone.  His whole back story with the estranged spouse he still loved and the child in the wheelchair were just underdeveloped from the beginning, and integrating him into the Apocalypse fighting unit erased his status as the outsider who grounded to project in reality.  Not that I want him replaced by the ridiculous “Hawley.”  The one thing Sleepy Hollow does not need is a blonde surfer dude-love interest for Abbie’s sister Jenny.

The show still has the chemistry of Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie, which counts for a lot (they could do an entire episode of Ichabod and Abbie doing karaoke and it would be entertaining).  But it needs Evil to have a better game plan.  And it needs better supporting characters than Captain Frank Irving. 

What did you expect from Mayweather/Pacquiao?

Every so often the Sports Gods will screw up and produce a confrontation that is NOT destined to become a classic.  Either it will be a blow-out because one side is obviously over-matched, or a boring event because the two antagonists don’t match up well.  But one of the things we love about sports is being wrong; the upset, the Cinderella story, the Rudy.  How else do you explain that every year people think the Kentucky Derby winner will win the Triple Crown, or the gaggle of people always expecting Tiger to win the next Major?

The latest example of this phenomenon happened last weekend as the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight failed to live up to expectations.  Or did it?  I expected a couple of past-their-prime boxers to cash big paychecks and do everything they could to avoid getting hurt.  And that’s what happened.  Anyone who paid $100 to watch the fight in HD is simply the exemplar of P.T. Barnum’s dictum that it is morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.

Both fighters were at least five years past their prime, at that’s being generous.  Mayweather successfully ducked Pacquiao for years when there was a chance that he could actually lose, but once Pacquiao lost to a fighter nowhere near as good as Mayweather, he knew it was time to cash in (his nickname isn’t “Money” for nothing).  Mayweather, a cautious, defensive boxer, had no reason to try and hurt Pacquiao, and Pacquiao, finally getting the big payday he’s wanted for years, had no reason to take any risks against a fighter whose MO was to take advantage of over-eager opponents (it is too bad they weren’t fighting “winner takes all” as Pacquiao once proposed).

Pacquiao defends his not going for a knock out in the later rounds on the grounds that he was sure he was way ahead on points.  First, like all those people whose cable went out after the bought the package, he must not have been watching the fight as Mayweather was way ahead.  Maybe after winning all those fights in which he wasn’t knocked out, he just assumed if he was upright at the end, it meant he was winning.

Second, it is odd Pacquiao thought he was winning because he now says that he lost because of his injured shoulder.  Not only did he think he was winning, but he thought he was beating a fighter with a 47-0 record despite having an injured shoulder?  I suspect he is “pulling a Peyton” which is what you call it when the loser of a sporting event later claims he was injured but didn’t tell anyone.  Either Pacquiao is lying about the injury, or he decided to cash a paycheck without being able to perform; neither should endear him to fans of the “sweet science.”

Mayweather says he is willing to fight Pacquiao again.  Of course he is!  He’d make millions of dollars for dancing around with a guy who either can’t hurt him, or has no intention to hurt him. Sadly, I suspect if there were a rematch, despite all the evidence provided by the bout on May 2^nd that there would still be a sizable audience willing to plop down $100 to see a couple of old guys slap each other.

Please, if you are one of those people, just rent a copy of Grudge Match and watch Robert de Niro and Sylvester Stallone pretend to fight each other in a movie.  It will be just as real as if Mayweather and Pacquiao decided to cash another paycheck.

Gotham season one: a post mortem

Stories, like lives and meals, are supposed to have beginnings, middles, and ends.  So, what can you do with a television show that is only about beginnings?  The TV series Lost ran into this problem at the start of their third season.  They couldn’t move the narrative ahead because they didn’t know how much time they had until their end date, so they produced some of the worst episodes of the series by simply spinning their wheels.  In a commentary track co-creator Damon Lindelof noted that they kept Kate ad Sawyer in polar bear cages for six episodes, conceding “I think I know why our fans came to hate us so much.”

Gotham has had to navigate the same area, setting up all sorts of origin stories for all of the famous characters we associate with Batman.  The problem is, the end game won’t happen for another fifteen or twenty years; Selina Kyle is a pre-teen girl, not “Catwoman.”  Bruce Wayne is a whiny little kid, not “Batman.”  Whenever they produce any character development, they have to slam on the breaks lest they go too fast.  We can’t have a 14 year old flying around the city fighting crime, can we?

The decision to renew Gotham is based more on sunk costs than quality.  The show looks good, with a lot of money put into creating an urban landscape that is both familiar and other-worldly.  The large cast is generally excellent; Robin Lord Taylor has redefined The Penguin, Ben McKenzie brings an intensity to a young Jim Gordon unimagined in the 1960’s series, Donal Logue provides a needed comic relief from McKenzie’s intensity, and Sean Pertwee has proven to be a stalwart Alfred Pennyworth. 

But the writing, my God, the writing.  The show keeps coming back to the origin stories of all the characters from the Dark Knight canon, but the fact is those characters won’t be who we are familiar with for a decade and a half.  So any progress would either have to be infinitesimal, or would create characters ahead of their time.  When the show doesn’t focus on origin stories, it is mostly dealing with mundane stuff like the mob war between Falcone and Maroni.  Way to take an exotic urban locale and make it like The Sopranos.

The show has had a few (very few) episodes that sort of got a look into how Gotham created the kind of villains that needed to be fought by Batman.  Spirit of the Goat resurrected an old case of Harvey Bullock’s that showed how institutions and the people who run them can’t be trusted.  Red Hood dealt with a gang of bank robbers whose leader was whoever happened to put on a red mask that seemed to take over their minds.  These were shows that were interested in telling a story from begging to the middle to the end, not with providing another clue that Oswald Cobblepot is a tiny bit unhinged.

But mostly the show was about arcs, long drawn out arcs that became like those guys who used to appear in the Ed Sullivan show spinning plates (am I dating myself?).  They ran out of stuff for Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith) to do in Gotham so they shipped her off to a mysterious island to meet The Dollmaker for several episodes for no apparent reason.  Cobblepot played Falcone off Maroni endlessly, until both of them looked like idiots for trusting him.  Jim Gordon vowed to fight corruption, as if his snarl was enough to convince bad cops to walk the straight and narrow.

Despite the good things about the cast, there were definite dead zones.  Cory Michael Smith was never given anything to work with in creating The Riddler, all he could deliver was a wide grin and some tics.  Jada Pinkett Smith chewed the scenery in an entertaining fashion for a while as Fish Mooney, but we always had to take her criminal genius on faith because she rarely displayed any business smarts.  Thank heavens dead weight Erin Richards, as Gordon boring girlfriend Barbara, was replaced by the far more interesting Morena Baccarin as his love interest; a couple of times Baccarin actually got Gordon to smile.

The producers of Gotham seem more intent on fan service than creating an atmospheric TV show about a corrupt city and its need for a White Knight.  It is easier to throw knowing winks at the audience than develop a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle and end.  But they will have a second season to try and get it right.  Given that the second season is a reward for screwing up the first season, I am not optimistic.  I swear, if they break out the Bat-signal, I’m done.