Myllyrd Fyllmore.

Merry Christmas, NCIS!

2010-12-16T22:35:00.000-05:00

Jane: And...we're back! And since we saw you last, we've learned that there are people out there who love NCIS even more than we do. They're in the know, and they will have this under their tree this year (I don't qualify as a superfan - I saw it at Barnes & Noble while shopping for actual books). Anyway. We left you hanging a bit after "Enemies Domestic" aired, mostly because the entire thing was a maze of flashbacks and it was really annoying. Blah, blah, Eli-and-Vance-cakes. Long story short: the ultimate villain (and possible contributor to Jenny's death!) is none other than Ron Butterfield (sad!). He tries to kill Vance in the hospital, Vance stabs him and Gibbs saves Vance from Ron's attempted morphine overdose. Eli tries to mend his relationship with Ziva by leaving a miniature Israeli flag in her pencil cup, and since it was still there in this week's episode, it just might work.

And now for Our Very Own Christmas Episode, In Which Abby Does the Turkey Trot and Ducky Joins Facebook!

Sucker! If you clicked to read more, joke's on you because you've already discovered the coolest parts of the episode. Though, in spite of the super-hilarity of Jimmy Palmer playing scribe to Ducky's burgeoning online profile and the spastic nature of Abby's dancing, this episode also continues the streak of Christmas episodes with Deep and Meaningful Lessons. Remember Peter Coyote, who plays the morose and artistically gifted vet/former deadbeat dad who gets reunited with his daughter in "Silent Night" and in the process teaches Gibbs that he has a family after all? In "False Witness," we get it all - a deadbeat/thug enforcer dad, a lost boy, a hot redheaded lady prosecutor, and Tony with a conscience. Oh, and one super-irritating murder witness whose life is being threatened. His dopey-eyed shtick is to make all the team's obvious and unspoken emotional realities, well, spoken out loud. In other words, He's the Ghost of Christmas In-Your-Face-Reality-Checks. Except they save him from the person the guy themselves, while Jimmy cries! Poor Jimmy. I like his dimples.

Carlynn, what say you?

RIP Norris Church Mailer

2010-11-22T10:10:00.000-05:00

Novelist, memoirist, model, actress, mother, famous spouse, expat Southerner. It seems unfair that we're starting to lose a generation of Inimitable Southern Ladies before their time (oh Dixie Carter). I wanted to read Church Mailer's memoir, A Ticket to the Circus, earlier this year (casualty of dissertation prospectus). Guess I'll have to now. I used to feel guilty about remembering to read memoirs by famous people only after their deaths, but all the folks on the subway reading Katharine Graham's bravura Personal History in 2001 convinced me that doing so didn't inherently make me a bad person.

Somehow, I have the impression that Norris would have appreciated that an anecdote included in her obituary sealed the deal for her memoir to become essential reading. From the New York Times:

Before she met Mr. Mailer, she claimed, she had a fling with the then-unmarried Bill Clinton. In her memoir she told the story with characteristic wit. A friend who was in politics told her when Clinton was president, “I guess he slept with every woman in Arkansas except you.”
“Sorry,” she replied. “I’m afraid he got us all.”

Giving Thanks

2010-11-22T08:56:00.000-05:00

Today at the gym, for no particular reason, I made a mental list of things I am thankful for (excluding the obvious - health, family, friends, Mr. TGreenie):

1. Books like Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women, which I finished last night. It gives me hope that language can be spare and unpredictable and still arrestingly beautiful. Also further proof that lyric and narrative can sleep comfortably side by side.

2. Getting to blog NCIS, my favorite TV show, with my best friend. And other writing adventures.

3. I'm not this woman, smiling painfully and waiting to be interviewed by Matt Lauer or similar. I swear, the Today Show was promoting this one every five minutes, and as I ran, I grew more and more sad for her, still trying gamely to show her bride's white smile for the cameras. We should all be ashamed for watching, necks craned for the wreck as we pass by on our way to the everyday.

4. My choice of careers, in spite of what it costs. And I'm listing this one while the feeling lasts, since it costs a lot. Today my job is to figure out how to go from this to this. I'm thinking of starting here. Bring it on.

Happy Thanksgiving a little early, y'all.

Pause for Photo: In the Footprint

2010-11-18T22:52:00.000-05:00

I saw The Civilians' production of In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards tonight. Review forthcoming, but seeing it prompted me to walk home via the Atlantic Yards site, instead of taking the subway. This shot is the external scaffolding and walkway beside it. It's like a concrete lightbox next to a black hole.

MF Says: Go See Emergency Used Candles

2010-11-18T12:05:00.001-05:00

Since this one-woman show is only playing through Nov. 20 at the Cherry Lane Theatre, this isn't so much a review of Chiara Montalto's Emergency Used Candles as a shameless plug. I saw it last night. If you can make it, go see it now.

Read more here.

"Don't Abandon the Book": Patti Smith Rocks All Over Again

2010-11-18T11:53:00.000-05:00

As a former denizen of the publishing world, I remain a lurker in their Twitterverse. So of course last night was filled with tweets sent live from the National Book Awards ceremony, which ranged from the eye-rolling snark at the Lifetime Award Winner, Tom Wolfe ("Tom Wolfe just sang the first few lines of The Girl From Ipanema...Oh the looks on the faces of the guests near the press corps. They ALL want Tom Wolfe to STFU") to my former boss's catalogue of bitchery about the food (Drunk broad at table next to me: "Where's the fucking steak?").

Leave it to Patti Smith, winner in the Nonfiction category for Just Kids, to expose all those cynical publishing tweeps as secret romantics.

In her acceptance speech, Smith beautifully recounted her time working at Scribner's bookstore, wondering what it would feel like to be a NBA winner. Tearfully and graciously, she thanked the audience for "letting me find out what it feels like." And then, the publishing Twitterverse swooned. Simply put, her balls-out sincerity un-spooled their snark. They could only shoot Patti Smith's words back and forth and every which way to as many people who could tweet and re-tweet them (count from my modest Twitter-lurker feed alone: 15, from Rosanne Cash to Publishers' Weekly to multiple book and fashion bloggers to my former boss to music fans and academics):

"Don't abandon the book. There's nothing more valuable in the material world." Sing it, Patti. And congratulations.

Pelosi 150, Shuler 43

2010-11-17T16:43:00.000-05:00

According to Deadspin, Heath Shuler ranks #42 on the list of Worst Players in NFL History, one fewer than the number of votes he got from the House Democratic Caucus today in his loss to Nancy Pelosi. As my Redskins-watching friends from D.C. tend to wail when his name comes up, "He once threw FIVE interceptions in one game against Arizona!" Yeah, and then he tried to play for the Saints, so we're even, y'all. But anyway. Does it mean anthing that he's closer to being a winner in politics than he was on the football field? It's not an exact comparison, but Shuler managed to garner nearly one-third of the House Democratic Caucus in his bid for minority leader while managing only 15 touchdowns in his entire footbal career. What lies ahead for us if the new minority leader can't beat down her competition as effectively as the Arizona Cardinals did? Maybe Pelosi is the House's Norris Weese, #67 on Deadspin's list, who can use his post-NFL-debacle CPA skills to take a whack at the deficit? Oh, forget it. The only thing worse than struggling to make metaphors between sports and politics is...well, sports figures in politics.

Blogging NCIS: Daddy Issues Remix

2010-11-16T23:18:00.121-05:00

Jane: My goal for this week's NCIS-blogging was to start off with a brief plot recap, but since this week's episode was the beginning of a two-parter, that's a tricky proposition. But I'll try...To start with, the title of the episode is "Enemies Foreign," which makes the unspoken "and Domestic" an unsubtle clue that some big-time bad news is about to go down on American soil. We open with some random shoplifter who plays deus-ex-machina before the opening credits (which now include the Field of Dreams shot of Gibbs "having a catch" with Ziva, keeping the "real America" meme alive) to reveal Ziva's ex-Mossad-teammate Malachi and Ziva's replacement, Killer Hot Chick, in the U.S. illegally to as a protection detail for...Ziva's father, Mossad Director Eli David, who has secretly come to D.C. with Palestinian terrorist-assassins on his tail. When we last saw Eli, he was guilt-tripping Ziva into pursuing another terrorist in Africa and leaving her there, presumed dead until Tony, McGee and Gibbs rescued her in last season's opening episode, "Truth or Consequences." Now NCIS and Mossad have to work together to prevent Eli's assassination (and we're left hanging at the end as to whether they've been successful, though it's heavily implied they haven't). RIP, Eli?

In the meantime, there's lots of innuendo about Eli's longtime relationship with Director Vance, sad exposition of Daddy Issues between Abby and Ziva (which I found surprisingly touching) and apparently, Agent Ron Butterfield from The West Wing (guest star Michael O'Neill) is a cantankerous Bigshot Agent Emeritus who likes to drink out of a cane. But I digress. NCIS is clearly building us up for what better be one hell of a kaboom next week. I was also uncharacteristically distracted by the one-liners this week, which ranged from the brilliant to the bizarre. Column A: Gibbs on Fast Times at Ridgemont High - "God I liked Phoebe Cates." Love it! Column B: Director Vance on Eli David's comparison of a terrorist to an infected splinter in his toe: "That is nasty."

I'm fresh out of eloquence and insight this week. Carlynn, save me!

Carlynn: Yeah, I noticed not only the one liners ("Next year in Jerusalem, my friend") but also more borrowed lines from other movies. Eli David to Ziva: "I have responsibilities that you cannot possibly fathom. I live every day surrounded by people with guns who are trying to kill me." Wait a minute, Jack Nicholson, are we trying to compare Israel to Gitmo? I think that's not what the writers intended, but surely they did intend for us to think, in case we had forgotten, that Ziva's dad is a big fat prick.

I liked the way this episode tried to muddy the waters between foreign and domestic by inserting Mossad. Now that Ziva is an all-American girl (did you notice her correct the sexy doppelganger's idiom?), who are the foreigners? And what does it mean for America that our own people have these significant emotional links to other countries. I loved that Ziva wanted to talk things through with her dad in the American style, but he remained resolutely Israeli, willing to talk but "not willing to beg." (I'm not sure that "Sorry I left you to die" is really begging...)

I did notice the motif of advancing technology recurring: the fingerless pickpocket, the disembodied shooter. This felt really relevant to me in the era of the unmanned drone. (Recently there was some issue that possibly the U.S. was violating the laws of war because the dudes who fly the unmanned drones from rooms in North Dakota, or wherever, don't wear uniforms and are thus, oh irony, irony, illegal combatants.) Even the real shooter seemed like a kind of Terminator: Ziva shot him point blank and he got up holding two guns.

The whole plot point about Amsterdam left me cold. What happens in Amsterdam, stays in Amsterdam, as far as I'm concerned. The idea seemed to be that only a threat to Leon's reputation could have summoned Eli David out of Israel, but come on, this is the man who left his own daughter to die. Even if he likes Leon, he's not going to risk his own skin for someone's reputation. Well, maybe for his own. We'll see where that goes.

I have to admit, I think the writers make a mistake when they go in for too many flashbacks. The appeal of the police procedural is not that they mine the past but that they reconstruct it in the present. What does the wife say that reveals her secret feelings towards her husband? What does the daughter say that reveals the family secret? What have the neighbors seen that they don't realize they've seen. I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who wrote a great piece in the New Yorker a few weeks ago defending Donald Rumsfeld's description of known unknowns versus unknown unknowns, and a good police procedural drama plays with that tension: the known unknown leads you to the unknown unknowns which lead to the truth.

NCIS irritates me most when it forgets what it does well (police procedural drama: who killed the joke-loving Marine with a thermos full of dry ice?) and tries to do what it does badly (international intrigue, weird foreboding, dangling plot lines: whatever the hell happened with Jenny Shepard's dad). Shadowy external forces morph into shadowy internal forces: if I could make a prediction, it's that next week's episode, "And Domestic", will reveal a traitor in their midst. Will he drink out of a cane? Stay tuned.

Jane, what am I missing? Should I be feeling more love for shadowy foreshadowing shadows?

Jane: I don't think you're missing much, Carlynn. Yes, Eli David is a ginormous dick (as, let's recall, was Malachi - thus, what was up with DiNozzo's locker-room talk with him? Ick.). I'm a bit more forgiving of the shadowy shadows thank you are, but they'd better deliver the goods next week. As for Amsterdam, I'm willing to give them a dollop of faith (but no more). I was literally growling in frustration at the "to be continued" as it appeared on my TV screen. But more to the point, good eye on the technology-and-weaponry themes! I hadn't made the connection between the pickpocket and the Terminator Terrorist in that way and I think it's spot-on. I can only hope the producers have taken a lesson from the Jenny Shepard Chronicles. Although I wonder whether the endgame between Leon and Eli isn't going to take us back to Jenny. Her name came up more last night than it has in a long while.

When the shadowy shadows of foreshadowing are good on NCIS, they are very very good - they eventually lead us to a truth that's more complicated than we'd like. NCIS does best when it keeps these Facing-the-Murky-Past forays to single-episode arcs for the characters in question. Episodes like "Broken Bird" in season 6, when we see Ducky grappling with the present-day cost of euthanizing a torture victim in the past, do this kind of thing well. But in the end, when they are bad at this stuff, they are horrid. We're dealing with the same creative mind that brought us Quantum Leap and Magnum P.I. here. Sometimes the truth doesn't need to be so complicated.

MF Reviews: Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen at MoMA

2010-11-16T15:02:00.005-05:00

After finishing a big project on suffrage cookbooks, I was delighted to be invited along on a friend’s recent visit to this exhibition. Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, organized by Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor and drawn entirely from MoMA’s own holdings, is up now and runs through March 14th of next year. If you’re at all interested in domesticity or design...run, don’t walk. Counter Space is so worth your time and money.

While the exhibit purports to highlight the museum’s recent acquisition of the “Frankfurt Kitchen,” designed in 1926–27 by the architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky (and it does, believe me), it also displays a daring and dazzling range of historical periods and artistic media. Books, kitchen objects, films and visual artworks (posters, photographs, three-dimensional works, drawings and paintings) document the kitchen’s cultural impact and the roles of technology and politics in the evolution of its design throughout the twentieth century in the United States, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and Asia. The curators have done a particularly deft job illustrating the relationship between home design’s materiality and its ideological content, especially with regard to gender and war (brings a whole new meaning to the words “home front”). Parts of the exhibit not to be missed:

“Kitchen-Sink Dramas,” named for the postwar British cultural movement toward a social realism that documented the real-life experience of the working class. This section documents and builds on the British influences, tracing them fruitfully forward to photographs like William Eggleston’s “Memphis” (c1972) and video pieces like Martha Rosler’s black-and-white “Semiotics of the Kitchen.”

Films and materials from the U.S. at midcentury, including a U.S. Department of Agriculture demonstration of the “Step-Saving Kitchen” and a 1939 World’s Fair production, “Mrs. Modern Vs. Mrs. Drudge.”

The pre-WWI works, especially Christine Frederick’s 1912 book, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management. Frederick’s “gospel of home efficiency” clearly had one foot in the long American tradition of household thrift (Lydia Maria Child’s 1829 The Frugal Housewife was the best-selling U.S. cookbook of the nineteenth century) and one foot in the need to preserve food in the face of impending war.

MF Score: 9. See it now.

I Hereby Renounce Excessive Capitalization

2010-11-16T14:50:00.003-05:00

So instead of following up on yesterday's teaser with witty responses to the hilarious and heartfelt performances from the Mark Twain Awards Ceremony (which I finally recorded at 2 am today), I now have to eat my words. Apparently, PBS has shown a gaping lack of balls and, by an act of creative editing, made it impossible for us to, as I claimed yesterday, "Unabashedly Support Public Broadcasting On This Blog." While we tirelessly affirm the cultural value of public broadcasting, I must say BOOOOOO, PBS. I suppose that's what I get for engaging in what a former professor might have called Excessive Majusculation.

PBS's decision to curtail Fey's remarks -- especially her radical suggestion that the advancement of one woman does not indicate advancement for all women -- is particularly maddening because she brings up a crucial point at this transitional moment in our country’s political life. While I think today's feminist vanguard has done a bang-up job debunking the "Palin is good for feminism" argument, too many people still do think "feminism's succeeded (and thus obsolete)" when they see a woman in power, regardless of her attitudes toward other women who don't share her background or experience. What are we supposed to do with younger women like Karin Agness, founder of the Network of enlightened Women (NeW) and Allison Kasic, senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) both featured in the MORE Magazine’s recent “What the New Feminists Look Like.” Organizations like NeW and IWF are, to my mind, all the more dangerous because unlike Palin and her gang, the women who support them aren’t afraid of being (and sounding) educated. Most irksome of all is what a big setback these groups are in the struggle to make feminism less of a game played by privileged white women. Which, of course, Tina Fey is well aware of, given her self-deprecating joke about being a “diversity candidate.” So congratulations, Tina Fey. Just because I have to eat my words about PBS doesn't mean we can't still be friends.

Sometimes It Skips a Generation

2010-11-16T11:14:00.004-05:00

Quoting a line from Teen Wolf as the title of a post about Sassy founding editor Jane Pratt's adventures is admittedly mixing my 80s metaphors a bit. But nonetheless, I feel a little wistful at the news this week that Pratt is teaming up with Tavi Gevinson, teen fashion blogger, to create a new magazine. Though I always wanted to love Jane, Pratt’s eponymous follow-up, it was Sassy that always had me at hello (at the bookstore, at friends' houses for sleepovers, even - gasp - at the library). And somehow, though news reports document Sassy’s lifespan as 1988-1996, it always felt like I came of age just a few years too late to really get it, because I never had a subscription. Though technically I graduated from high school just as Sassy closed its doors, its heyday was exactly that moment of my girlhood when I simply lusted for a publication that spoke to my budding feminism and femininity, my intellect as well as my age-appropriate instinct for celebrity worship. Not that I’m knocking what I did have – Highlights and Weekly Reader and romance novels pilfered from my grandmother's shelves (I’ll still remember you all fondly) – but what I really always wanted was Sassy, a magazine deemed “too grown up” for my pre-teen/young teen self. And while I'm a wee bit jealous, I’m glad that a younger generation might have something like it. I’m particularly thrilled to see this inter-generational partnership getting so much media play, since many magazines can’t help invoking mommy-killing melodrama between generations whenever they talk about feminism these days. I wish lots of luck and a big fist-pumping whoop of sisterhood to Pratt and Gevinson in their new endeavor. And since it’s holiday season, I’ll just motivate my thirty-something self to pick up a copy of How Sassy Changed My Life.

MF Teaser: Tina Fey's Twain Award

2010-11-15T14:04:00.005-05:00

As you may have read, Tina Fey was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor from the Kennedy Center in a ceremony on November 9. Because we Unabashedly Support Public Broadcasting On This Blog, and because I can't resist a line-up that promises me Steve Martin, Jon Hamm, Steve Carell, and Betty White in one sitting, I was waiting with bated breath to watch the telecast of the awards ceremony on PBS last night. However, in the name of Marital Compromise, I instead watched David Beckham getting a yellow card [see gratuitous photo for fun] in his LA Galaxy's 3-0 loss to FC Dallas in the MLS Cup Semi-Final. So I'll be waiting till Tuesday night's rebroadcast to give the full scoop on the Twain Awards (be on the lookout, readers - NCIS blogging and Betty White on the same night? Be still your beating hearts).

Anyway, some teasers in advance:

Fey is the youngest recipient and only the third woman. While graciously acknowledging the talents of her foremamas (let's face it, could Lily Tomlin BE more awesome?)Fey nailed the backwardness of gender disparity in the comedic arts: "I'm so glad to be the first woman head writer of SNL, the second woman to be pregnant on the air on SNL, and the third woman to receive the Mark Twain Prize. I'd love to be the fourth woman to do something, but I just don't see myself married to Lorne Michaels." As a follow-up: "You know something's wrong when the white girl from the suburbs qualifies as a diversity candidate."
My favorite line, possibly ever: "I'm not going to get emotional and all, because really, I'm a stone cold bitch."

More to come...in the meantime, feel free to share thoughts on Fey's award or leave messages of adoration for Lily Tomlin in the comments.

TV Review: Sherlock (2010)

2010-11-12T11:46:00.005-05:00

I went through an Arthur Conan Doyle phase in my twenties when I read a lot of his short stories, and while I enjoyed them, I think I need to start off my review by admitting that I'm not a devotee. The stories are almost impossibly spare—cerebral, factual, prone to weird plot digressions (the Mormons did it!), with none of Agatha Christie's affection for human nature or Dorothy L. Sayers' interest in the final flowering of the British toff-ish culture entre les deux guerres, before it was beheaded by inheritance taxes and incorporated into the larger celebrity madness post-Diana.

I mention this only because a true devotee of Conan Doyle's Holmes might have legitimate beef with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' freestyle adaptation of the work into Sherlock (2010), currently enjoying its American television premiere on Masterpiece Mystery.

For instance, "A Study in Pink" has very little to do with A Study in Scarlet—there is a taxi driver with an aneurysm and a body near which someone has scrawled "RACHE", but their significance is all confused and there are no Mormons, no imprisoned brides, no drunken sons, and altogether the whole thing is markedly less overwrought and paranoid, which is another way of saying that it is markedly less Victorian.

Moffat and Gatiss have shifted Holmes into the twenty-first century, and with him his plots and tools. The cinematography focuses on neon signs, computer graphics, text messages spelled up on the screen. In "The Great Game" Holmes receives his clues via iPhone from a blocked source. The television camera brings you out of Watson's point of view and into a rich third-person, and in many ways the camera acts as Holmes and Watsons' third partner, peering over their shoulders, checking out the scene of the crime.

The one episode in which the Victorian era seems to knock against the screen is the "The Blind Banker" (loosely based on Conan Doyle's "The Dancing Men"), which focuses on ... the nefarious work of Chinese gangs! Apparently one thing that has not changed in a hundred years is our suspicion of the Mysterious East. You cannot escape from the clutches of the Black Lotus! No joke.

Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as Holmes—fidgety, hyperactive, rude, evasive, charming—and Martin Freeman plays Watson as good-natured, much put upon, embarrassed by his addiction to adrenaline, something more than just a sidekick. I was also delighted to see good olde Rupert Graves as Detective-Inspector Lestrade. What a pleasant surprise!

Verdict: Still leaving origami lotuses in the hands of murder victims after all these years. MF score: 7.5

New York: Looking Up

2010-11-10T11:19:00.000-05:00

Today on my way to the dentist, I saw this building at First Avenue and 53rd Street. I love these buildings-within-a-building where they save the facade of the old building and build a new one inside. Look at all those balconies! I really don't want to live in Turtle Bay, but if I lived in Turtle Bay, I would want to live in this building.

Blogging NCIS: Daddy Issues

2010-11-09T22:29:00.007-05:00

Jane: This week’s episode blew my mind before the opening credits by including Bruce Boxleitner, a.k.a. Lee Stetson from the 1980s Scarecrow and Mrs. King, as Admiral Chase, a bigwig with the Joint Chiefs of Staff who discovers the body of our victim, Woody, in a dumpster on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Academy (pretty shots of Annapolis, by the way). Woody seems to have been killed en route to meet and tell Admiral Stetson, his Longtime Buddy, Something Very Important. Before I could catch my breath from the invocation of the Ghosts-of-Cold War-Hotness-Co-Starring-Kate Jackson, we were back in the action with the continuation of the thread from earlier this season, Ziva’s assimilation as an American. Just as she gets her new shiny passport, McGee finds out that Woody just arrived in D.C. from Switzerland on a private jet that morning, traveling with…Tony’s dad!

Robert Wagner is back, and his mixture of raffish charm and hapless buffoonery continues unabated. I have to say as an aside here that having two icons of American Studliness from Eras Past in Boxleitner and Wagner as guest stars was a bit wasted in this episode.

So anyway...the Something Very Important turns out to be a piece of a long-lost, American-made H-bomb linked to the Swiss mining company whose jet Woody and Tony Senior were hitching on. So of course we’re off to the races with three of NCIS’s favorite tried-and-true plotlines from previous seasons: international arms dealers, wealthy and nefarious men of mystery who at first seem to be terrorists and then turn out to be comatose, and men attempting to feel Ziva up while she’s undercover (in this case by Tony Senior, whose hand on Ziva’s ass made me want to laugh and gauge out my eyes with the DVR remote simultaneously).

That conflicted response – to laugh or to injure myself – was sort of a theme for me from tonight’s episode. Case in point: Senior’s use of Bogie’s line from Casablanca to Gibbs. Though I loved it at the end when Gibbs tells the accounting schmoe that Senior is “worth every penny.” Whereas Tony Senior is telling Gibbs that “this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Gibbs wisely assesses that Senior is the Gigolo With A Heart of Gold.

Carlynn, I’ll hand it off to you. One thing I noticed, in between Senior pawing all the female characters and going all “I love you man” on Junior at the end, was a continuation of a theme you picked up on last week. It’s just how isolated Ducky’s character seems to be: two tickets to the Norman Rockwell exhibit that he’s clearly going to by himself? I wanted to cry, or at the very least go with him (even though I sort of hate Norman Rockwell).

Also, dig the “scenes from our next episode.” Clearly, the Daddy Issues are not going to be a one-time thing this season.

Carlynn: Ducky! He's such a love. Off to coo over nostalgic images of America past. The assimilation/identity theme was alive and well in this episode. Tony's dad is the least American of Americans: he pals around in Gstaad with Saudi princes and reclusive billionaires; he doesn't seem to work for a living; he doesn't seem to want to work for a living. He's everything that a red-blooded American, like Tony, distrusts. (It interests me that the major class anxiety in the show is presented as a cross-generational struggle between Tony, who's managed to emerge from prep school as a Baltimore cop, and his jet-setting, woman-seducing, international-elite father. As the sustainability of the American dream itself is called into question, there's a flirtation with the meaning of downward mobility that adds a neat tension to that relationship.)

As you point out, there are nods to Casablanca, maybe a way of pointing out that red-blooded Americans sometimes live abroad without entirely diluting the hue. After all, both Tony and his dad share a wonderful memory of ... fishing together. Tony Sr. even produces actual documentary proof that once he wore a trucker hat and put his arm around his son while in the great outdoors. Never underestimate an effete coastal liberal, because they have hidden depths and abilities that are not obvious when they are working a room at a cocktail party. Such as their ability to totally knock down a nefarious arms dealer with an uppercut to the nose. That was amazing.

I also appreciate how much everyone else likes Tony, Sr. Partly this can be chalked up to the rest of the team's interest in annoying Tony, Jr. (best line of the episode: "Please don't call me Junior at work."), but partly it's a reflection of how open and cultured the rest of the team is. It's Gibbs, Mr. America, who is most suspicious of our aging playboy, and even he comes around in the end and authorizes the Navy to foot Senior's massive hotel bill. (Loved the hipster geek in Accounting. NCIS does do a good job with their extras.)

The plot itself, it's true, was definitely a bit recycled. I notice these days that you and I have tended to talk about the characters and themes rather than the plots of these episodes, and I think it's because there's been a change of focus by the show. Tony's dad is a redux, Gibbs' issues have always been in the background, but the solid, awesome police procedural plots are missing. (Remember the Medal of Honor winner? The underwater gun tester who's having an affair? The body in the bomb casing? The park warden who kidnaps and kills woman campers?) Have the writers run out of reasons that someone might murder a Marine or are they just navel-gazing? It's hard to tell.

Jane: All good points as always, Carlynn. Especially about the punch to the face (which Mr. TGreenie asserts was something called a "haymaker") - sheer brilliance. Your comment about how much everyone likes Tony Senior brought to mind the first time we're introduced to Gibbs's dad during season 6, in "Heartland," one of my favorite episodes. Clearly, if Ziva and Abby like you, you're a Good Guy. And of course you've managed to bring up what may be my very favorite episode, second season's "Call of Silence," which features Charles Durning as the aging Medal of Honor winner. Talk about well-used guest stars! I could write about this episode for hours. Also, it aired immediately on the heels of "Terminal Leave," which gave us a rare and multifaceted portrait of Micki Shields, a female vet of the Iraq war who is the victim of an attempted murder. Even though the plot itself was a bit Lifetime-ish - a bait-and-switch between al-Qaeda terrorists and the adulterous soccer mom down the block - this episode showed us a veteran enduring the effects of war on herself and on her family. Taken together, these two episodes are a beautiful acknowledgment of American military service and the price of heroism, applicable across history, race, class or gender. Wrapped in the shell of a police procedural with comic relief, of course.

To attempt to actually answer your question about plot vs. theme, though, I suspect that we're caught in another long arc of Heavy Foreshadowing by the producers. We've seen this before - with "Bete Noir" and "Reveille" in season 1 setting up the end of Season 2, when Ari kills Kate; also with the belabored hints in seasons 4 and 5 that Jenny Shepherd's father may be alive and she may be dying (they confirmed the latter and just let the former...hang out there unanswered). I think we're building for some major play by Mossad Director Eli David, possibly involving his relationship with Ziva but more likely giving us the goods on his underexplained friendship with Director Vance. Though these impossibly long arcs of storytelling often yield big results plot-wise, they've gotten increasingly laborious and have now, as you say, taken hostage the meat and potatoes of what NCIS does best: find a mystery, solve it, then make a joke. Repeat.

The Bush Book: The Post in Which I Say WTF?

2010-11-09T16:56:00.004-05:00

If you know me, you know that I usually try to ask probing, analytical questions in response to books. Because even if your book is badly written, inane or has been written already in a better version by someone else, readers are an important community deserving of respect. So I try to respond to books with a level of discourse worthy of such a community.

In the case of Decision Points, I'm afraid my response is a surface-level, garden-variety WTF?

If you know me, you also know I used to work in publishing. And this was my former boss's Facebook status today: "George: What is sex like after 50? Dinner party guest: It's pretty good if you are fucking someone who is 20. Barbara: Don't you know it." WTF?

In a cultural moment already swirling with feminist icons denouncing Attachment Parenting and political analysts debating "The New Momism," we have W's justification of his anti-choice views (significantly, not shared by his spouse, and for good reason, it seems). I've had protesters with children in tow shove images of fetuses in my face and that alone, while it didn't alter my pro-choice position, surely did make me question the advisability of subjecting those elementary-schoolers to the literal blood and guts of the abortion debate. Let me tell you, I'm rarely speechless, and this revelation of W's pro-life stance just left me without words. I'm torn, honestly, because on one hand, I believe that miscarriage is--like abortion and rape--one of the great silences that women in our society desperately need to turn into noise and narrative, now. On the other hand, I just think this is atrocious parenting. So, I say again: WTF?

Apparently the former president was in rare form at his Oprah taping, making jokes aplenty, including: "A lot of people didn't think I could read, much less write." Bush's ability to have a sense of humor about himself has long been a source of his "wanna have a beer with the guy" appeal. But his knowledge of his own reputation within the universe of political memoir-makers (you can accuse the Clintons of many things, but being poorly-read and unintelligent are not two of them) suggests Bush's willingness to make a book that communicates with today's readers and not just with Posterity or History. Is it possible, then, that President Bush's memoir, regardless of its content, comes from a place that aims to connect with readers at a level beyond the surface? If that's the case, then I definitely have to ask: WTF?

Faux News, Liberal Style

2010-11-07T18:39:00.005-05:00

OK. Keith Olbermann. He's apparently the new progressive cause celebre following his suspension after it was revealed that (gasp) he donated $2,400 apiece to three liberal candidates. I guess the idea is that the news is supposed to be presented by people who don't care about politics—I mean, people who don't care who wins. But could anyone who watched MSNBC's coverage of election night doubt that Keith Olbermann is a raging left-winger? I watched only about five minutes of Keith's incredibly snide interview with Michele Bachmann, and believe me, I'm not a fan of the Congresswoman from Minnesota, but Olbermann's condescending head shake and disbelieving laugh reminded me of no one so much as Bill O'Reilly. And Bill O'Reilly reminds me of man's inhumanity to man. So, obviously, I went back to NY1, the best news channel on TV, one more reason why New York is the only place to live, where they were doggedly interviewing random people in attendance at the respective parties honoring Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino. It's an historic night! How does it feel to be there?

At any rate, MSNBC is in the actual process of branding itself ("lean forward"!) as the Left's answer to Fox News (by which I mean to say: as capitalism's answer to an unexploited market share), so it strikes me as pretty ridiculous that now they are acting like their pundits are supposed to be objective. But I am not signing any petitions, because I don't think the Left should have a Bill O'Reilly or a Michael Savage or a Rush Limbaugh. The whole point of being a liberal is that you are not a idiot who wants to be whipped up into a frenzy of hatred in the service of some corporate overlord. Frenzy, frenzy, America, them, stupid, buy this car, buy this detergent, talk to your doctor about Avandia. Count me out.

MF Goes to the Movies: Doug Liman & Company on Fair Game at the Angelika

2010-11-07T11:37:00.006-05:00

SPOILER ALERT. And photo credit to Mr. TGreenie for the image of Doug Liman you see here.

After last night’s late showing of Fair Game at the Angelika, the doors opened in the back, a camera light went on and a voice yelled out saying that the director, producer and head writer were there to do a short question and answer session. It was recorded presumably for the DVD extras (so check them when they come out for yours truly and Mr. TGreenie, who were sitting in the front row). Director Doug Liman (who apparently “lives around the corner”), producer Akiva Goldsman and screenwriter John-Henry Butterworth (who penned the script with brother Jez) took questions from the crowd. Now we’re talking West Village on a Saturday night, so there were a predictable number of questioners eager to dish the poo on the Bush administration’s efforts to screw over Plame and Wilson and other machinations involving, in Butterworth’s delightfully British parlance, “the invention of causus belli.” We trust you, fearless and informed readers, to be up on all that on your own, so I’ll just mention the stuff we found interesting.

Their most fascinating point speaks to just how ludicrous it is for critics to object to the film on the grounds that Plame, “a glorified secretary,” wasn’t involved firsthand in operations at the time of her outing. In reality, Plame was among a sort of elite agents called “NOCs” = No Official Cover. These people have no connection to the CIA on paper, and when they go overseas to do secret agent work they receive no diplomatic cover. Not only was the leak of her identity to the press illegal, but it also put other agents at grave risk. According to Liman, at least four other agents used the same Georgetown venture capital firm as a front employer, from whom she and they received paychecks. She and other agents also filed tax returns with a special IRS department designed for agents to use their cover employers without committing perjury. When Bob Novak’s column ran, their cover was blown as well, since the firm was exposed as a CIA front company.

Other highlights included:

Apparently, the scenes in which Penn plays Wilson as a lecture hall gadfly are true to life. The film shows us a Joe Wilson who quotes Ben Franklin and demands of his audiences why they all know his wife’s name but none of them know Bush’s sixteen words (“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”). Apparently, the real Joe Wilson attended a beach party for the film at the Cannes Film Festival, and while there, found a mike and lectured the French partygoers on the U.S. Constitution. Liman and Goldsman swore he thundered the line “The Bill of Rights is a Bill of Responsibility!” At which point Butterworth muttered, “Yeah, but everyone there was French but us!” Also, Wilson--whose business, according to the Hollywood trio, involves raping the land in Africa for its minerals--isn't as much of a lefty as either side might like.

The research for the film was for real. The scenes that take place in the White House (which, fascinatingly, show Scooter Libby as the shark and Karl Rove as the buffoon) are all drawn from life and based on transcripts from Libby’s trial and various government reports.

Although the Iraqi-American doctor with the scientist brother subplot is fictional, the scenario it stands in for isn’t, insisted both Butterworth and Goldsman. Plame, still bound by law not to talk explicitly, would only say to Butterworth of the operation to extract Iraqi scientists, “It didn’t end well.” At this point, Goldsman took the mike from Butterworth and insisted emphatically, “Scientists and others died because of this leak.”

The scenes with Plame acting as a covert agent – set in Kuala Lumpur, Jordan and elsewhere—are based on the writers’ interpretation of what her job was like, on her memoir and on interviews with her and with other CIA agents. Butterworth was quick to point out that Plame “didn’t spill the beans.” So it's not “true” but based on a good hunch.

Liman talked about the mindfuck of being interviewed by one of the reporters to whom Plame’s identity was leaked – the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, who like Matt Cooper and Judith Miller, opted not to print it. Liman told the crowd about asking Pincus if he could ask him a few questions. When Liman inquired of Pincus why he hadn’t printed Plame’s name, he responded that not only did it sound like an implausible story (that a CIA operative at Plame’s level would have "sent her husband to Niger" without a superior’s approval) but it also was completely irrelevant to the story he was working on at the time of the leak. Read Pincus’s thoughts on the film here.

Liman's next project--a film account of the Attica Prison uprising that he says he's working on with Goldsman--shares an interest in fact-finding but is also much closer to home.

Movie Review: Fair Game

2010-11-07T11:27:00.004-05:00

Some critics have already objected to this movie’s “biased” take on the outing of Valerie Plame. My response to that would be, “Thank you, captain obvious.” Screenwriting fraternal duo Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and director Doug Liman (son of Arthur Liman, chief counsel of the Senate's Iran-Contra investigation and auteur of the Bourne franchise and USA’s Covert Affairs) have been clear from the get-go that their film isn’t ripped from the headlines. Thank God, I say, since the Wilson-Plame story is a cautionary tale about headlines if ever there was one. The Butterworths based their script on Plame’s and Wilson’s memoirs and make no bones about it. In my view, asking the two of them to be unbiased and objective about their own lives is like asking med students to dissect the cadaver of a loved one without flinching—in human terms, an unrealistic expectation.

So, if you’re still reading, you’re willing to accept the artistic validity of first-person narratives as not inherently worthless pieces of propaganda. Congratulations, you get a cookie.

The first thing you’ll notice about Fair Game is, of course, Sean Penn’s now-trademark intensity as ex-diplomat Joe Wilson. When, in the second half of the film, the inimitable Sam Shepard (woefully underused as Wilsons father-in-law, Col. Sam Plame) refers to Wilson as one “stubborn son of a bitch,” it’s as if he’s bestowing on Penn his own imprimatur of a tough-guy’s rough brilliance upon the next generation. Though it’s hard to take Penn as seriously; unlike Shepard, he seems to be a one-trick pony. The second thing you’ll notice is how quickly Naomi Watts’s own ferocity as Plame sneaks up on you. At first, she’s a little too much like a soccer-mom version of Piper Perabo’s character on Covert Affairs, doggedly pursuing intelligence data without messing up her hair. In spite of this, the pleading eyes that chide Joe for calling an acquaintance a “racist pussy” for making a Juan Williams-times-ten remark at a bar after 9/11 are soon locking onto the face of an Iraqi-American doctor in Cleveland, prodding her to make contact with her brother in Baghdad in the run up to the war. It’s the same expression of gentle reproach, but this time Watts uses it to show how quickly and effectively someone in Plame’s job must identify and exploit human weakness to obtain information.

At heart, the film’s strength is also its greatest narrative weakness, because Fair Game refuses to pick a hero: Valerie, the committed and unbreakable operative, or Joe, the righteous and resolved husband, who dives headfirst into a media assault putatively in defense of his wife. Though both Penn and Watts turn in bravura performances, we’re still left with two warring protagonists and an incomplete story. Though perhaps that’s the point, some of the gaps, can’t be overcome. For instance, Wilson’s fateful decision to go public in the New York Times takes ten seconds and comes off like the opening scene of Jerry Maguire—a man face-to-face with his ego in the form of a late-night computer screen who can’t face who he’s become. This Joe Wilson, writing “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” while his wife sleeps, isn’t a career diplomat or family man. He’s a pissed-off egomaniac, facing off against all the president’s men rather than accept his role as a cog in the intelligence machine. As such, even Penn’s talent couldn’t entice me to accept Wilson’s pronouncements about democracy in the closing scenes of the film as anything more than self-indulgent bloviating. Which is too bad, because they’re set up to be the moral of the story.

The film does better in the smaller moments, when the shaky camera’s abrupt angles force the viewer to confront and witness vulnerability. When Plame assures one asset that he “has no idea what we can and cannot do,” it’s not a subtle point. But it’s deftly turned back on us by the Iraqi doctor, whose brother, a scientist in Saddam’s weapons program, is Plame’s objective and ultimate failure in the story. Staring us down, the doctor rejects her handlers’ suggestion that she lacks the capacity to memorize all the information they need from her brother. Her eyes burn holes in the screen as she says with steely calm, “There are 206 bones in the human body. Would you like me to list them in English, Latin or Arabic?”

Fair Game gets huge points for standout performances in smaller roles (Shepard, David Andrews as Scooter Libby, Liraz Charhi as the Iraqi-American doctor) and its portrayal of Wilson and Plame’s marriage. If you’re looking for the “real” story of the leak and its relationship to the war, look elsewhere. This movie won’t give you that but it will offer you a rich (if uneven) set of stories about the human cost of CIA work. MF Score: 6.5/10

MF Caption Contest: Lost Childhood/Lowering Our Cholesterol Edition

2010-11-05T14:22:00.000-04:00

MF Caption Contest: Costumes Edition

2010-11-05T14:21:00.000-04:00

MF Caption Contest: Fun with Glitter and Paint Edition

2010-11-05T14:18:00.000-04:00

MF Caption Contest: Illicit Activities Edition

2010-11-05T14:16:00.000-04:00

Caption Contest: Nice Folks With Punch and Pie Edition

2010-11-04T13:21:00.004-04:00

Alternative Edition Title: If We're Nominating Nice Dead People for President, Let's Have Fred Rogers/Jim Henson 2012

Caption Contest: Power of Positive Thinking Edition

2010-11-04T13:19:00.004-04:00