Hopefully, what we have to look forward is stuff like ABC’s Trophy Wife, which in its tone and wit reminds me of the way-underrated Suburgatory. It’s not that Trophy Wife doesn’t do a lot of the things I’ve already claimed that contemporary (and, let’s face it, traditional) family sitcoms do: it affirms family values, its central family is so white you need sunglasses to watch them, they live in a comfortable upper-middle class neighborhood, etc. Product placement abounds, from the cars to the phones to the hilarious prop that is (of all things) a water bottle.

But Trophy Wife has wit. And maybe that’s what I was getting at in the beginning of all this: our 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s sitcoms had reliable formulas that made it clear which ones were shit and which ones were great, because they were so stripped down that the jokes themselves were front and center. Trophy Wife is not a mockumentary, so none of the jokes are in the editing. The jokes are actual jokes, right there in the dialogue and the premise, and they’re good ones, too. The premise is that Kate (Malin Akerman) meets Pete (Bradley Whitford) after a meet-cute at a karaoke bar. They end up in the hospital together and fall instantly in love, but then Kate finds out he had two former families. Mercifully, the show spends almost zero time dragging this set-up out (it’s all handled in a quick flashback w/ helpful narration), so instead we can just dive right into the chaos. Kate’s both overwhelmed by the fact that she’s had to give up her party-girl lifestyle so suddenly and also a little peeved that no one takes her seriously enough to let her parent any of the eight million kids running around. The series essentially follows Kate as she tries to adjust.

Maybe that’s one thing I like about Trophy Wife: it treats family like something you have to adjust to, rather than the steady rock that everyone turns to in relief from the Big Bad World outside the home. Akerman, sounding like Cameron Diaz but with a less self-consiously goofy vibe, is a kickass choice for someone to carry the show, but even if she weren’t, the rest of the cast is great, too. Bradley Whitford is welcome to come back to TV any time, and Marcia Gaye Harden (!) plays the stone-faced, humorless former wife who has little patience for what she calls a “child bride.” (There’s also an adopted Asian kid, I guess because the series premieres after Modern Family, and they needed some crossover reference or something; long story short is that it’s the one annoying aspect of the show, this need to create a rainbow world despite the fact that white people still dominate the cast).

Even the situations—the “sit” of sitcom—are funny, and smart too. Pete’s son writes a spin-off of the Odyssey (!) in Homeric prose that devolves into a sex fantasy about his new stepmom. And Pete’s daughter sneaks vodka into school by putting it in a water bottle. When her mom is about to catch her, Kate bails her out by chugging the whole thing, making for the best second half of an episode of any comedy I’ve seen in at least a year.

I like families. I do. I like them so much that I think it’s wrong to use them, to see them only as potential consumers to whom we have to consistently proclaim, “You’re doing great! Family rules!” Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard. Trophy Wife gets that, or at least tries to.

The post Family Values Tour: Trophy Wife appeared first on Rookerville.

Dads is bad. Dads is painfully, totally, in spots off-the-charts bad, made with the kind of primitive humor and style that makes you wonder whether anyone involved had ever seen a sitcom before. It’s the only multi-camera, laugh-track sitcom of the lot here, but that’s not what makes it regressive. It regresses to a time long before the advent of multi-camera sitcoms.

Dads’ premise is simple enough: two guys (Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi) work together designing videogames. They have a hot, young Asian secretary who does everything they want her to do, including dress up in Sailor Moon outfits. One day, their dads decide to move in to their apartments (because of the economy or something; I swear the telling is so clunky and awful that I can barely recall the set-up).

I teach a unit of my class on media ethics, wherein the students are required to determine what the demographic (age, race, gender, etc) and psychographic (attitudes, worldview, political leanings, etc) for a given television show is. Sometimes that’s tough. In the case of Dads, it’s easier to tell who the show’s written for than it is to remember any of the characters’ names. I mean, they design videogames for a living? They can’t work unless they’re stoned? Their secretary has no work to do—seriously, none—aside from walk in and throw in a few punch lines? How much pandering does a show have to do before it just turns into one giant circle jerk?

Unsurprisingly, the dads are un-PC and deliberately offensive. Very surprisingly, someone actually convinced Martin Mull and Peter Riegert to play the dads. It’s depressing to have to watch them deliver dusty old lines that would make Archie Bunker roll his eyes at the lameness of. “I was going to eat a piece of chocolate,” says Riegert, “but then I remembered it’s for women!” Ha ha? “The Chinese are an honorable and noble people,” says Mull, “but you can’t trust them!”

I mean come on. It’s not even like the show is actually offensive in any way—it came under fire recently for its handling of Asian stereotypes, but I just assume that’s because Seth McFarlane is involved, and everyone likes to wring hands about Seth McFarlane. Truly offensive humor might even make it fun for the shock. It’s simply lame, the kind of sitcom that we’re (hopefully) almost done with; at least it’s hard to imagine members of the current generation, reportedly the most tolerant generation the world has yet known, playing curmudgeonly racists in forty years, but who knows?

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The soapy family values that MJFS can’t help but avoid are on full display in The Goldbergs. For weeks I’ve been seeing Facebook ads proclaiming, “Liked The Wonder Years? You’ll love The Goldbergs,” and reviews have strangely lumped the two together as well. I have no idea why. Aside from the presence of the protagonist narrating the show as an older man, I have to say that I have seen The Wonder Years, and you, Goldbergs, are no Wonder Years. TWY was an unusually accurate portrait of the awkwardness of adolescence, set against the background of the Vietnam War. The whole point of Kevin Arnold’s upbringing was that he was learning the serious and dark ways of the world at the same time as the rest of the country, losing his innocence as the country lost its own. The Goldbergs is about a kid named Adam Goldberg whose family is crazy. End of premise.

What’s weird about the show is how mind-numbingly average it is. It’s not even bad; if it was bad it would at least be memorable. It’s simply lazy, I think. One reason this might be the case is that the show was made by Adam Goldberg—real life Adam Goldberg, as opposed to the protag. of the series—who seems to be doing little else besides rehashing stories from his childhood. The effect is exactly what it sounds like: you just feel like you’re being told about someone else’s upbringing or looking at their family photos, which is crazy boring, I assure you. Adam captures the whole thing on a camera (as does Mike Henry’s daughter in MJFS), basically because I think it’s illegal to not have people speaking directly to cameras in sitcoms these days. But otherwise there’s no flare in the telling; no Kevin Arnold-style neuroses or cringe-inducing moments of honesty; no consciousness of this family-as-a-microcosm-of-the-whole-country; no context at all. The Goldbergs exist in a vacuum.

Well, there is one piece of context, and that’s the 80’s. And Jesus Christ, if ever there were a television show that pandered to its chosen decade, it’s this one. The paean-to-the-fifties Happy Days looks subtle by comparison. Even That 70’s Show had fewer time-period references, at least insofar as it didn’t try to sell the 70’s as the greatest time anyone could have ever lived. Director Seth Gordon seems physically incapable of staging a single shot of the whole pilot without at least six references to the 80’s: everyone wears Star Wars t-shirts and plays with Rubik’s cubes and watches Alf and listens to REO Speedwagon and has big hair etc etc. We get it! We get it! And in case the wholly unsubtle directing didn’t let you know when you were clearly enough, the writing goes even further to drive the point home: “It was the 80’s. There were no parenting blogs or peanut allergies. There was no Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram…” says the narration, attempting to paint it as a simpler time. Maybe I’m just getting old, but weren’t the 80’s not that long ago? Isn’t this nostalgia a little…weird? But I mentioned before that Goldbergs isn’t actually bad, it’s simply average. It could have been worse. It could have been Dads.

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The Michael J Fox Show (Thurs. 8:00) is not the good show. It also is not, however, bad in any way. The premise is that Fox plays an ex-news anchor named Mike Henry who had to quit his job due to his Parkinson’s disease. If you’re thinking that the show is maudlin or manipulative in any way, the show is well aware. In fact, more or less the entire pilot is about how sick Henry’s entire family is of everyone’s sympathy, and the writing is refreshingly unblinking at its central subject. Mike tries to scoop some eggs for his wife without spilling any as his hand shakes, and she waits patiently, only to follow it with, “Jesus, can you not have a personal triumph right now? We’re starving.” Likewise, Mike’s kids deal with the ins and outs of being the children of a Parkinson’s victim in creative ways. One scene has his daughter coming to school, the teacher taking an extra moment after taking attendance to ask, “Are you okay?” “Fine,” she responds nonchalantly. “Are you?” he asks again, as everyone stares at her, and all she can do is roll her eyes at the callousness of the people she’s surrounded by.

She realizes, as any kid would, that this situation is a potential goldmine, and decides not to do the assigned reading of The Grapes of Wrath, instead making an over-the-top Hallmark-style video of her dad (“Parkinson’s is his personal dust bowl”). The teacher gives her an F, calling it manipulative, and she shrugs incredulously as her own song parody of Enrique Iglesias’s “Hero” plays on the tape.

This is all great stuff, and, as I said, kind of a miracle considering that they’re trying to make Fox’s real-life disease into so much farce. The only question is where the show is going to take it from here. It could go either way. One path—one I hope they don’t go down—would be to simply hammer these jokes into the ground over and over and over again, the way Will & Grace used to do with gay jokes: they knew they had something innovative, and they played their one-joke premise for all it was worth. Another direction they could go in is one that Mike Henry himself worries about in episode one: he doesn’t want NBC to turn his return to TV into a weepie personal victory “in slo-mo with soft music playing in the background.” While MJFS wants to be too hip to stoop to that level, it comes dangerously close to it, especially in the last few minutes. Like Modern Family, it soft-pedals everything that happened in its first twenty minutes by abandoning the jokes in the final two, with annoying voiceover summings-up of the proceedings, and, yes, inspirational soft music playing over the final shot.

What I hope it ends up doing is simply moving on from the Parkinson’s thing altogether. Fox is and has always been a charming actor, and it may sound trite but the disease by no means defines who he is, and neither should it define the show. The writing is strong enough in its non-Parkinsonian moments to prove that it can go elsewhere if it wants: Mike’s sister stops over and smells something he’s cooking in the kitchen, and when she guesses it, she says, “Oh my god, enough with the kale. We get it. You’re white.”

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It was inevitable, I guess.

The state of the TV sitcoms is dire, and it’s a long time coming. While television dramas are improving exponentially each year—so much so that TV is arguably the most dependable medium through which to receive any kind of quality product—sitcoms are struggling to maintain a foothold. Fewer and fewer audiences watch sitcoms anymore, anyway, and they (sitcoms) have certainly lost any kind of water-cooler cache (do people still gather around water coolers?). Probably that began with the advent of the single-camera, laugh-trackless sitcoms of the turn of the century, a phenomenon we at the time found to be unequivocally a Good Thing, and yet it also kind of fucked things up, reliability-wise. The multi-camera sitcoms of the second half of the twentieth century were mediocre, sure, but they were reliably mediocre. Like the verse-chorus-verse, three-minute pop song, the form had been carved, and the quality was easy to gage. The only variable was the quality of the jokes.

Not so anymore. Sitcom writers were encouraged to go off on their own for a while, gain some experiences, Thoreau-like, then experiment when they came back. So we got Arrested Development, and we got Scrubs, and we got My Name is Earl. Most impressive was the fact that, in this brave new sitcom world, the squares weren’t kicked out altogether; the conventional sitcom form was allowed to stick around as well, and nobody shat on it for being itself—so Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother got their days in the sun, too.

After a while, though, network heads got a little nervous, wary of this culture of chance-taking, so they looked for some stability, a surefire new formula that couldn’t miss. Around this time, NBC imported The Office from Britain and had moderate success. At the very least, it was successful enough to spawn two new phenomena: the mockumentary and the rebirth of the workplace comedy. Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Two Broke Girls, and most significantly, the powerhouse ratings juggernaut that is Modern Family were created in this wake, the latter of which being the only true, no-bullshit, unquestioned hit in the lot.

We were warned pretty heavily last year that the family sitcom was going to come back—hard. Underseen gems like Happy Endings were yanked off the air last spring, making room for some family-friendly fare. Here’s the problem: family sitcoms are 1. horrible, and 2. cynical. They are horrible for pretty obvious reasons—the kids are watching, so make sure everything’s watered down, and never end an episode on a note that doesn’t suggest that Family is the Most Important Thing in the World (barf)—but the ways in which it’s cynical are trickier than all that. Network TV exists because of one thing, and one thing only: advertising. Advertisers put up crazy amounts of cash to have their product pushed on the air. And advertisers only give to shows with audiences who’ll buy either really expensive stuff (hence the mid-90’s push for upper class urban dwellers in shows like Friends and Frasier) or buy their stuff in bulk. And who buys stuff in bulk? Why, two-parent, firmly established, financially stable groups of people living in one house, of course. Families.

All of this is a very, very long-winded way of saying that the network heads must have been very happy that Modern Family hit it so big, so they could justify making all these family shows again, and the networks have all but sprayed a new crop of shows at us about moms and dads (like, off the top of my head, Mom and Dads). The question is, are any of them any good?

I watched Dads (Fox), Trophy Wife (ABC), The Goldbergs (CBS), and The Michael J Fox Show (NBC) to find out what they had to offer. One of these shows is alarmingly good, one is potentially good though it’s not good right now, one is totally fucking lame, and one is so godawfully bad that I’m wondering whether there’s a joke I’m not getting, as though it’s actually supposed to be a parody of a horrible sitcom rather than a bad sitcom itself.

Check back this week each day as we reveal Ted’s thoughts on each of the shows he watched. 

The post Family Values Tour: It Begins appeared first on Rookerville.

Here’s the thing: here are issues, and there are Issues. Every film, at least those with a conventional narrative, is going to have an issue at its core. Characters need conflict and crisis to butt up against, they need problems to solve and hurtles to overcome and yes, issues to deal with. That’s par for the course. Some films, however, find their characters dealing with capital-I Issues, big, heavy socially-, culturally-, or even globally-relevant stuff, so that the film is more a statement than it is a story. In a film with issues, the issues are the mcguffin because what we really care about are the characters, and we want to watch them develop. In a film with Issues, however, the characters are the mcguffin, purporting to be the main show when really all they are is a set-piece upon which the filmmakers can say what they need to say.

Does that make sense? Let’s try something concrete to help me sound a little clearer. The Dark Knight is a film with issues: Batman has to catch the Joker, and he has to deal with his childhood (or something), and I think he has to work through stuff with Rachel Dawes. Precious is a film about Issues: it’s not that characters don’t exist in the film, it’s that the film is much more interested in Precious as a representative of all manner of serious societal problems: AIDS, child abuse, sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, race, illiteracy, poverty, class (Jesus that movie had a lot of Issues). Blood Diamond’s another good example—it was a story, sure, but it was first and foremost “about” something, namely the illegal diamond trade in Africa. It used the medium of a film narrative to get across its point, and you never really got the feeling that anyone cared too much about whether the story was any good (which is probably why it wasn’t).

All of this is to say that Short Term 12 is a film that can’t help but deal with certain Issues, since it takes place in a short-term foster home for disadvantaged kids who’ve been through all kinds of hell. What’s admirable about it is that, for two thirds of it at least, it finds a way to not be “about” those things; that is, it manages to avoid after-school-special territory, and to avoid making its characters into mouthpieces for the filmmaker’s social commentary. The fact that it does that is some kind of miracle; the way in which it does that is so common-sensical that you wonder why no one’s done it before.

The film, as I’ve mentioned, takes place at a foster care facility, at which works the dedicated and unsubtly named Grace (Brie Larson), who loves the kids dearly and advises a new co-worker on his first day, “You’re not their parents, you’re just here to provide a safe environment.” The film does little more than follow the day-to-day inner workings of the center (it was originally a short film, and you can see the remnants of a much less structured piece being stretched into film-length material). Sure, Grace gets pregnant (in like the second scene, I’m not giving anything away) and has to deal with some of her own stuff, but mainly what we’re watching is the interactions between the kids and the social workers, getting a sense of what it’s like to work at a place where chaos is the norm.

Acknowledging that chaos is the norm is the aforementioned common-sense strategy the film deploys to avoid becoming a very special episode of a mediocre sitcom. There are foster kids here who’ve been abandoned, abused, molested, arrested, who cut themselves, who cut other people, who are heavily medicated for severe psychological issues—or Issues—and yet director Destin Cretton manages not to make any of that feel oppressive, because this stuff is everywhere, the natural order of things rather than the exception to an otherwise worry-free life.

That tone is established (a bit self-consciously, albeit humorously) in the opening scene, wherein the social workers smoke a cigarette before work and recount the story of a kid who so violently wanted to get off of a bus that he made Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), the social worker telling the story, shit his pants instead of argue with the kid. Halfway through his anecdote, the door behind him flies open and out runs a manic foster kid trying to escape, screaming obscenities as he attempts to get farther and farther away, and without breaking stride three of the workers run after the kid, hold him down until his tantrum breaks…at which point Mason finishes his story as though nothing happened, so familiar is he with these violent outbursts.

And so on. Other kids swear and hurt each other, and hurt themselves—though, again, when this happens the social workers and the film itself just kind of deal with it, secure in the knowledge that a girl trying to tear off her own skin is a minor blip on the radar of anyone who works in this environment from day to day. And the film’s responsible, too, in that it does own the potentially severe consequences of these situations (Mason’s anecdote ends with the kid on the bus found dead in a bush two weeks later). Turning what would ordinarily be conflict into normalcy might make the film sound one-note (what’s at stake in a world where every new emergency is as plain as stubbing your toe?), but there are surprises in store. Probably the most interesting thing about the film is the way the social workers manage to find creative ways to ease these kids’ pain. One worker delivers a single trinket to a kid who’s been forced by a psychiatrist to give all of his childhood toys away; another hangs out and draws with a girl who’s a budding artist; in the most impressive scene, a particularly difficult case named Marcus (Keith Stanfield) isn’t chastised for beating another kid with a wiffle ball bat—instead he’s encouraged to read the new lyrics he’s written after the incident, so that the workers can understand why he did it in the first place, and the scene is shot so wonderfully, in a single take, slow-zooming closer and closer until you can see the pores of his skin as he reads, that you almost want to give it a standing ovation.

You don’t though, and you end up kicking yourself for being moved by that or any other scene, because the film ultimately proves gutless and conventional in its final third. I get the feeling that if I saw the film again, I’d wonder how I didn’t see that coming, because the narrative arc is flimsy: the inciting incident of the film (what a former professor of mine might have called the “why now” of the story) is that a new kid has arrived, a girl named Jayden (“It’s a boy’s name,” she says. “I don’t think so,” says Grace. “Will Smith did,” she mutters). Jayden’s a smart girl, an artist, an introvert who announces on her first day that she doesn’t want to be rude but she’s not there to make friends. Grace becomes overly attached to the girl because they share histories of abuse; both are cutters and both have been sexually assaulted by their fathers. So the narrative of the film finds Grace becoming near-obsessed in her attempts to make sure Jayden doesn’t get returned to her father. I call that arc flimsy because, well, it is: she works in a fucking foster home, for Christ’s sake—hasn’t she run into this kind of kid before? Wouldn’t the slow breakdown that she has already have come about in an earlier case, where she tried to play hero in an attempt to rectify the crimes that were done to her? (You could make the argument that she’s pregnant this time, and that there’s a maternal drive kicking in, but that connection is never made by the film until a throwaway line at the end).

Furthermore, the film has like six climaxes—I won’t name them but you’ll know what I mean; around the hour and fifteen minute mark moment-of-truth after moment-of-truth after moment-of-truth start popping up, like a spirited game of So What’s This Movie About?—the most climactic of which is a major letdown, especially since it’s preceded by (SPOILER ALERT) the possibility that Grace was going to break into a house and beat the shit out of a man with a baseball bat (!), then devolves into standard-issue expensive-car-as-objective-correlative-for-rich-abusive-dad stuff. (END SPOILER).

Anyway. I don’t know. It’s definitely worth a look, so don’t let my mini-rant dissuade you. Far too few films like this are made and seen, films with real balls and which are more interested in submerging the audience in their world than in leading you through said world with a phony narrative. I just wish the narrative it did settle on was a little less phony. Maybe that’s just my own Issue.

(p.s. are we supposed to believe that this entire foster care facility is managed by four people—one of whom just began working, meaning that just before his first day, only three people managed the whole thing—and that these people can spend significant one-on-one time with each kid, doing things like (for instance) braiding their hair? What happens when one kid tries to lock herself in her room and three people arrive to break down the door, and then another kid simultaneously tries to start a fist fight somewhere else in the house? Seems like a remarkably well-managed place to me…)

The post Foster the People appeared first on Rookerville.

“This Happened in Texas,” states the title card of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, before you see anything else (in fact there are no opening credits, so that’s the only graphic you get at all) and it’s a damn good thing. Without that piece of exposition, it would be tough to get your bearings. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is so awesomely sharp and single-minded that it often forgets to set us in a time or place, to let us know how much time has passed between events or give us any visual cues w/r/t the space around its characters. Actually, “forgets” is the wrong word, since it suggests that director David Lowery doesn’t know what he’s doing. Untrue. This is actually one of the most self-assured films I’ve seen in a while, exuding a confidence in the telling that is severely lacking in cinema these days.

The film centers on Bob and Ruth, a young couple who are deeply, deeply in love but can hardly make ends meet. Bob attempts to solve this through petty crime and bank robbing, which Ruth reluctantly goes along with (“I don’t wanna go to jail,” is the third sentence we hear out of her mouth, just before, “I’m pregnant”). Bob’s psyched about the latter news; it (the news) does, however, present them with even further financial burden, which leads to a much heavier crime that leads to a shoot-out which lands Bob in jail. So Ruth has the baby alone, Bob counts his days in prison—he tries to escape five times—while keeping in touch with her through letters, and all the while she waits. Eventually their daughter is four, and it’s right around this fourth birthday that Bob escapes successfully. The remainder of the film focuses on Bob’s attempts to get back to Ruth, and every single other character’s attempts to stop him.

If this sounds like some sort of Nicholas Sparksian love story, then I’m not doing my job very well. This isn’t the story of lovers torn apart by circumstance and their belief that their love can overcome etc etc. This is the story, very simply, of a man who has one goal in mind, one thing and one thing only to live for, and he goes and does it, no questions asked. It’s also the story of a woman who tries to wait as best she can, but has a daughter to raise and a nice local police officer who’d gladly alleviate her burden.

And it’s also the story of the men who try to keep them apart, which men are probably the most interesting characters in the film. This is partly because their motives for keeping these two apart are completely justified—they care about Ruth, know Bob isn’t a dependable person, and at least Skerritt, a local owner of a gun shop, is keenly aware of the kind of people who might hunt Bob down once they find out where he is. Officer Wheeler has a thing for Ruth, so you might think his motives are selfish, but actually he takes his time courting her, and even admits that he’s got nothing against Bob—which is pretty big of him, since he thinks Bob shot him.

I focus on what happens, rather than on the visuals or its themes, because the film puts what “happens” front and center. There are no subplots, few supporting characters, and nary an extra minute of film. There is one, single, very clear goal, and a finite number of obvious, tangible obstacles. There’s almost zero exposition (hence the inability to get your bearings mentioned above), Ruth’s pregnancy for instance being told in a series of Bob’s letters, the length of her hair changing, and a quick birth scene in ECU of her pained expression. Almost the entire film is shot in either close-ups or two shots; it consciously avoids the sprawling, open-air establishing shots so common of Ford-style westerns. It’s a simple story, simply told.

That allows the performances to do most of the telling. And the performances, like the film itself, are understated, subtle and muted so that there’s about a hundred times more being suggested than told. Wheeler asks Ruth whether she knows where the escaped Bob is and she says, “No. He won’t come for me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ll do whatever I can to help you but he won’t come find me.” Rooney Mara, as Ruth, manages to convince the cops of this statement while simultaneously convincing us that she doesn’t believe it herself, that she’s actually just waiting out the clock until he gets back. Mara is (here, as always) impossible not to watch, Emily Blunt-like in her looks but with a husky southern accent that lets you know she can take care of herself, and gets you to understand why every man in the movie is so interested in looking after her. Casey Affleck, as Bob, is fine but has little to do, though he brings a great deal of his leftover Western outlawhood from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to this role, bringing the performance to a new level in a scene where he hitchhikes and talks to his ride about family. Ben Foster’s pretty much unrecognizable as Wheeler, and does a good line in double-edged aw-shucks-ness, convincingly showing it as the other side of the coin from his ability to (for instance) shoot a dude in the face without thinking much of it.

Keith Carradine as Skerritt benefits from the most interesting role, and the two most interesting scenes. One involves the men who are looking for Bob, walking in to the gun shop as Skerritt does his best to ignore them—it’s a lesson in the building of tension and suspense. The other is his face off with Bob himself, a dark (both visually and thematically) standoff made all the darker because there aren’t any bad guys in the room, just two people whose motives we completely understand, and completely agree with.

Ultimately, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints ends up being a film that makes every other film you watch look expository and over-produced by comparison. Reviews that have called it slow are ludicrous—this is probably the best-paced film of the year. It’s spare in its parts, and that’s just another reason to love it. It’s refreshing to see a not-a-lot film in a year of too-much.

The post Ain’t This Movie Awesome? appeared first on Rookerville.

In the title story of Tom Perrotta’s new collection of short fiction, Nine Inches, a high school teacher chaperones a dance, and his job is to separate any students who might be slow-dancing a little too closely. Because of a school-sponsored event that got out of hand a year before, all students are required to obey the eponymous “nine inch” rule—they have to stay at least that far apart from each other at all times. The teacher is given a length of yellow measuring tape, but refuses to use it when he spots two seventh graders dancing to Snow Patrol at the end of the night, “clinging to each other in perfect, almost photographic stillness,” and can’t bring himself to break it up. Rules of decorum in a manmade society seem so arbitrary, and never more so than in the face of something as primal as the urge to share the animal warmth of those around you.

That’s a theme that runs throughout all of Perrotta’s ten stories in Nine Inches. Indeed, that’s a theme he’s been exploring since his first book, the totally underrated and seldom-read Bad Haircut[1]. Perrotta’s adept at setting characters in the ennui-laden land of suburbia, where once-passionate citizens have tamed and tranquilized themselves into monotonous existences. Perrotta’s view of suburbia has always been bleak, the deck stacked a little too obviously: everyone moves there because they never questioned whether they shouldn’t, and as a result they all end up trapped and longing for a better life. It seems unfair to just assume that no one ever bought an SUV and a three-bedroom house because they wanted to—because that itself was their (totally valid) dream[2].

Consequently, Perrotta’s best characters here are the teenagers, who certainly may despise the suburban hellhole in which their trapped, but also 1) haven’t chosen to be there, and 2) suffer from boredom rather than ennui, which makes all the difference. These characters also fit nicely into the theme mentioned above, i.e. not understanding etiquette when it conflicts with their raging hormones and changing minds. In “Senior Season,” for instance, a football player named Clay gets a brain injury and has to sit out. His friends can’t fathom his newfound inability to enjoy sports or parties, and his girlfriend moves on to the guy who took his position. Clay wants to join his friends—or rather, he wants to want to join them, but can’t gather up the energy, and can’t understand why he has to keep all of these feelings in check. Likewise, the young girl, Jessica, in “Grade My Teacher,” finds it (rightly) unfair that her older sister is pretty and popular while she seems to have been cursed with extra weight. And the aforementioned teenagers in the title story won’t even listen when their teacher tells them to break it up, “as if they had no one to answer to but themselves.”

All of these characters are touching and real, and we feel for them, mainly because they don’t feel like gimmicks. They’re heartbreaking because they’re still young, still yet to be graduated into the barren world Perrotta describes. Maybe that’s the other reason the teenagers work best here, what makes each of their endings so bittersweet: we know they’ll leave this hellhole once they turn eighteen, but we also know they’ll return to it when they get desk jobs later on, the only difference being that this time they have only themselves to answer to.

To say that what Perrotta does in these stories is a gimmick would be ungenerous, because the “gimmick” is that he continually draws portraits of two seemingly disparate people, then gets them to realize each other’s humanity. It’s a nice sentiment and it’s actually saying something substantial—that the commerce and comfort we seek in everyday life has blunted our ability to step outside our comfort zones and discover people who aren’t like us—so it’s not a gimmick. Still, there are ten of these stories, and their narrative rhythm gets familiar pret-ty fast, and by the time you get to the home stretch you’re hoping that at least one of them is going to surprise you with its plot, rather than just with its characters.

In Perrotta’s defense, he tries to find new avenues to reinforce that whole comfortable living=fear of leaving comfort zones=living in a private bubble=never connecting with strangers theme. One avenue that pops up again and again here is technology[3]. People google themselves, a sad ex-musician looks up chords on Youtube, recently-dumped teenagers look at Facebook statuses of their girlfriends and posted pictures of wild times at college, an unpopular teacher looks herself up on a site called Grade My Teacher, etc. It happens so often that it must be a deliberate choice, and it works kind of, at least thematically. But, not to be unkind, it also gives you the what-a-shame feeling you get when one of your favorite authors is obviously past his prime and doing what he can to stay hip[4].

But Nine Inches is worth a look. Perrotta’s more of a novelist than a short fiction writer, it’s true[5], but that’s not to say his short fiction isn’t worth reading. The prose can get a bit pedestrian, but that’s because he’s dealing in pedestrian people, often uneducated or at the very least willfully ignorant of their own situations, so it makes sense that they have trouble articulating themselves. And anyway, the accessibility of the language makes for a quick read, a welcome change from the dense and purposely opaque New Yorker fiction so often jammed down our throats.

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