Asking the Wrong Questions

It's pretty far down the very long list of reasons for its awfulness, but 2016 has not been a great movie year.  The failures of this year's summer movies have been sufficiently enumerated, but the truth is that by the time they rolled around, I was sufficiently burned out by the disappointing spring that I didn't even bother to watch most of them.  And a great deal of interesting 2016 films that I would have liked to see--such as Midnight Special , The Lobster , High Rise , and The Handmaiden --didn't even make it into theaters near me.  This post, therefore, actually covers something like five months of movie-watching, and though some of it has been worthwhile or entertaining, none of it counters my impression that 2016, in its cruelty, couldn't even offer us the distraction of good movies. Love & Friendship - The biggest and most vexing question raised by Whit Stillman's adaptation of Jane Austen's unpublished novella Lady Susan is: why the title ...

It's been about four years since the movie adaptation of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" was announced, and during that period, every time I heard a piece of news about the film's progress, there was always one question paramount in my mind: how?   How could you possibly take Chiang's story, a trippy, challenging piece of writing whose ultimate conclusion needs to be carefully laid out for even the most attentive and game reader, and translate it into a mainstream movie, in a medium that isn't normally permitted to spell out its themes and ideas the way written fiction is?  For me personally, there was an element of protectiveness to this wondering.  "Story of Your Life," which I first read in my late teens, was an eye-opener for me.  In its focus on the "soft" science of linguistics, in its willingness to use relatively abstruse concepts from both linguistics and physics to build its premise, and in its foregrounding of a thoroughly ...

This year's fall pilot season is shaping up to be rather muted.  Which, to be fair, is an improvement on the dreck of previous years, but also not much to talk about.  It probably tells you all need to know about the fall pilots of 2016 that there are two different time travel shows-- Timeless and Frequency --and neither of them are worth saying anything about.  Nevertheless, here are a few series, good and bad, that I thought were interesting enough to write about, even if I'm not sure I'll be sticking with all of them. No Tomorrow - Over the last few years, I've come to trust the CW and its programming instincts.  Not only does it air some of my favorite shows-- iZombie , the smartest superhero show on TV; Jane the Virgin , still going strong and finding real drama at the heart of cheesy soap opera plot twists; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend , one of the funniest, most original, most heartbreaking shows in existence--but its DC superhero block is easily the most rock-soli...

One of the main points about writing a pop culture blog is that most of what you write about is available for your readers to consume.  In fact, much of what I write is from a perspective that assumes that my readers have already read the book, seen the movie, watched the TV show, and are now willing to talk about them with someone who is equally informed.  Which is part of the reason why I don't tend to write much about theater (the other being that most of the theater available to me year-round is in Hebrew), and that when I do, it's about something like Hamilton , whose original cast recording has become its own phenomenon, available to millions of fans who may never even see the play. Today, however, I'm breaking my rule to talk about Bedlam Theater's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility , which I was lucky enough to see this week on my vacation in New York.  If you're in the city, I strongly urge you to try to get to see this play before it closes in November...

As I've mentioned already, I spent much of the summer working on a large writing project, which is now online.  Over at PopMatters, you can read my essay "This is the Next World": The Stealth Futurism of Person of Interest , in which I discuss how an initially inauspicious high-concept procedural transformed, over the course of five seasons, into one of the most explicitly SFnal shows on TV, one that tackled core SF concepts like AI, and explored the ways in which an artificial life might see the world, and how its existence would challenge our ideas of personhood and free will. I ended up rewatching Person of Interest in preparation for writing this essay, and though some aspects of the show remained unimpressive throughout--the standalone plots start out halting and overwrought and, almost impossibly, get worse as the show draws on--what struck me at the end of that rewatch was how much I had to say.  My essay is quite long, and yet it leaves so much out that I could...

"For black lives to matter, black history has to matter."  A character says this shortly into the first episode of Luke Cage , Netflix's third MCU series, and the fourth season of television it has produced in collaboration with Marvel as it ramps up for its Defenders mega- event.  It's easy to read this line as a thesis statement on the nature of the show we're about to watch, but it's not until some way into Luke Cage 's first season that we realize the full import of what creator Cheo Hodari Coker is saying with it, and how challenging its implications will end up being.  As has been widely reported and discussed, Luke Cage is the first black MCU headliner--not just on TV or on Netflix, but at all.  And, unlike the forthcoming Black Panther , whose story is set in a fictional African superpower, Luke Cage is explicitly a story about African-Americans in the more-or-less real world, at a moment when the problems and indignities suffered by that commun...

This week has seen the first inklings of the new TV season, as the US networks start trotting out shows in the hopes of success, legitimacy, or even the tiniest bit of attention.  And yet here I am, still talking about some of the shows of summer.  This is partly because, as we've all more or less accepted, network shows just aren't where it's at anymore, and there isn't that much to say about yet another raft of samey procedurals and underbaked high concepts.  So this post covers a British miniseries and a Netflix series, as well as a few network pilots.  Still, I do enjoy this time of year, and I keep hoping that one of these shows will surprise me, so stay tuned for further reports.  (Not discussed in this post, because there wasn't much to say about them: Designated Survivor , which has an ironclad elevator pitch that I'm not sure it knows what to do with, and Notorious , which seems desperate to be a Shondaland show but actually feels more like a parody o...