by Linda Holmes

Today's big question is this: As between mid-'80s special-effects monsters and mid-'80s puppet monsters, which are more menacing?

Ghostbusters, of course, has more of the former. While you get some "real" monsters as well (mostly in the "Okay, so she's a dog" depictions of the gargoyle-ish creatures), you get a lot more of the straight-up drawn-on-the-screen guys, like the one Bill Murray encounters around the five-minute mark here.

Gremlins, on the other hand, has primarily puppets. And they're very puppety-looking puppets, too. About half the time that Zach Galligan, who plays Billy (a weirdly ageless character who has a job as a bank teller but still lives at home and acts like he's fourteen), is carrying around little Gizmo, they look quite a bit like a ventriloquism act from Star Search.

It also must be said that the gremlins in Gremlins are a lot meaner than the ghosts in Ghostbusters. In spite of all the damage done to a perfectly nice Central Park West apartment building when the (to put it generously) perplexing plot of Ghostbusters leads to the opening of the pathway between Sigourney Weaver's refrigerator and the Temple Of The Demonic Aerobics Instructor, the ghosts aren't really that malevolent. In fact, it's kind of quaint, the way their opening gambit consists of, "I am a GHOOOOOST! I will go to the library and PULL ALL THE DRAWERS OUT OF THE CARD CATALOG BOOGEDA-BOOGEDA! I will EAT ALL YOUR HOT DOGS NOM NOM NOM!"

The gremlins are worse.

Puppet-on-human violence, a Santa tragedy, giant men made from marshmallows, dogs and cats living together, self-defense with a canister-vac, and more, after the jump...

The gremlins specialize in both pranksterish vandalism and merciless killing -- both colloquial and traditional mayhem, as it were. This is the thing about the movie I either never knew or didn't remember (I can't remember if I ever saw Gremlins as a kid or not): it has a tone that's very, very hard to pin down.

For a movie produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Chris "I directed Mrs. Doubtfire and also Home Alone" Columbus, of all people, Gremlins is pretty heavy on the actual horror, but always with a strangely detached wink. If John Krasinski had gotten up in the middle of License To Wed and beaten Robin Williams to death with a tire iron, it would have felt a lot like this movie does, at times.

Never is that more clear than in the scene where the sweet young thing played by Phoebe Cates explains why she hates Christmas. You sort of think you know where it's going, and then you totally don't, and when you bust out laughing, it's hard to be 100 percent sure whether you're laughing with or at the movie. I think it's about 85 percent "with," probably? (The audience I was with didn't care, but found it hilarious either way.)

It's certainly "with" during the flat-out fantastically great sequence in which Billy's mother (Frances Lee McCain) fights off the gremlins in the kitchen. It's just so brilliantly disgusting, the way she keeps finding new forms of violence to inflict with the things she already has on hand. It's like a twisted, mangled version of one of those Kitchen Of The Future black-and-white movies where the housewife can do just about anything using her wonderful array of appliances.

Gremlins finds a remarkable number of creative ways to go over the top. As I wrote on Twitter last night, it's definitely the best movie I've ever seen in which a movie theater full of drunk Muppets is burned alive. It gleefully messes with its own rules -- I don't think you can make a monster movie where your monster would ever resort to carrying a gun, or it's not really a monster movie anymore -- to marvelous effect.

It's surprising, in retrospect, that a movie this hard to pigeonhole made so much money. It was the fourth-highest-grossing movie of 1984, and it made a lot more than movies that perhaps get more play in the nostalgia industry, like, The Karate Kid, Footloose, and Police Academy.

In the end, I found it periodically incoherent, occasionally scary, mildly deranged, and a very good time.

While I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Gremlins, I was less surprised by how much I enjoyed Ghostbusters. The special effects (as, again, I mentioned on Twitter) are like nothing you would ever see anymore outside of a video made in one day for posting on YouTube. Not only because the cartoon ghosts look so cheap, but because of the hilarious array of implements the guys are carrying around, all of which look like they were cobbled together from barely-disguised everyday items. ("You will never defeat me and my slightly modified canister vacuum! Not once I add...the crevasse attachment!")

But it all still fundamentally works. If it's been a while since you've seen it, you might be surprised how small a lot of the comedy is, especially coming from Bill Murray. Despite its many quotable lines (many of which were enthusiastically spoken along with the film by the guy down the row from me, which: Don't do that at a movie, ever, because nobody is impressed by you except you), it's not that much of a setup-punch kind of comedy. (Which is not to say there aren't great lines, as in this clip, which I will caution contains the original, non-office-appropriate language of the film.)

Murray, here, has a great deal of confidence in the audience to know things are funny, and very often, he holds a look that's not particularly broad, understanding that just the held look is funny; that the lack of reaction is the best reaction. Certainly, there are plenty of elements heavy on the mugging -- I find Dan Aykroyd hard to take in this movie, compared to the more restrained work Murray and Harold Ramis are doing -- but that persistently deadpan feeling returns over and over and plays very nicely against the amped-up effects.

Furthermore, I don't necessarily think of myself as a Rick Moranis person: I wasn't an SCTV viewer, and when the Honey, I [Blanked] The [Blank] movies began to proliferate, I filed him alongside latter-day Eddie Murphy under Unfortunate Presences I Try To Ignore. But he is really, really funny in this movie. The nerd/geek axis is tough to play, because it's been done so much (Ghostbusters came out the same year as Revenge Of The Nerds), but he's so authentically bizarre and looks so much like a wind-up toy that I did laugh just about any time he ran anywhere -- which, fortunately, happens a lot.

And let me say this: I don't care if you know it's coming, I don't care if you know what it's going to look like, and I don't care if you consider it an overexposed iconic image of the '80s. When the Stay-Puft Marshallow Man comes lumbering around the corner for the first time, it's funny. Maybe especially on a big screen, where he's so huge. But it works.

So which is more menacing? Well, the puppets are more menacing, but that's because they're doing more menacing things. If the puppets ate hot dogs and the animations killed old ladies, it would probably be the reverse. All in all, a highly enjoyable kickoff to the Summer Of '80s Movies. More to come.

Ghostbusters: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis will be welcoming us (and you) to The Summer Of '80s Movies. Courtesy of Sony Pictures

 

by Linda Holmes

One of the advantages of living in the D.C. area is access to the AFI Silver Theatre And Cultural Center in downtown Silver Spring. They run current movies, but also old movies, and this summer, they're running a series called "Totally Awesome 3: More Films Of The '80s," which I'm taking advantage of for a summer-long nostalgia explosion called The Summer Of '80s Movies: A Possibly Terrifying Look Back.

Interestingly, this third installment is the first one I'm in town for, but it's also the one I'm happiest to get to see, having looked at the previous lineups. They've now sort of burned through the most overexposed and overdiscussed movies (This Is Spinal Tap, The Breakfast Club, Say Anything, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, etc., all of which many of us have discussed to death) and are moving along to ones that, in some cases, haven't been so ubiquitous on cable.

Tonight, I'll be seeing a double-shot of adorable monsters: Ghostbusters and Gremlins. Over the rest of the summer, I intend to revisit River's Edge, Footloose, Edward Scissorhands, Heathers, Some Kind Of Wonderful, and others.

(I withhold comment on Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, for the sake of my dignity. I mean, even if I were going to do that, you wouldn't want to know now, would you? It might keep you from taking me seriously.)

So come back tomorrow, when I will tell you all about cute monsters and Bill Murray, and will undoubtedly make some seriously ridiculous jokes involving the question, "Who you gonna call?" Because I'm pretty sure that's the law.

by Linda Holmes

After last year's very bad decision to turn the Emmy telecast over to the five nominated reality-show hosts -- all of whom flopped, with the exception of the always-lovely Tom Bergeron -- the show planners seem to have regained their senses: Reports say they're trying to make a deal with Neil Patrick Harris to host the show in September.

While he didn't get to do as much at the Tony Awards as I was hoping -- with the exception of the fantastic closing number, which you can watch above -- Harris was a lovely host and would undoubtedly make the Emmys a whole lot more watchable.

He also probably won't be upstaged this time by a guy who gets clocked by the scenery, so that's good news.

Make that deal, Emmy planners! If I have to liveblog three hours of Ryan Seacrest, I will be very upset.

by Marc Hirsh

It's a slow news day in Cleveland. How slow? Slow enough not only to spend a solid two minutes (out of what, 22 minutes of newscast?) on a non-story about a non-attack by a non-bear, but to take the time to make props and costumes. Who knew that WJW even had an arts and crafts department? Special kudos to Cleveland Metroparks naturalist Carly Martin for her insights into bear scat, and to the reporter who provided such an enthusiastic simulation of ursine climbing.

NPR's weekly arts podcast takes a turn towards the 1980s this week, with a couple of reflections upon important anniversaries. And you can listen right here.

Spike Lee's seminal film Do The Right Thing turns 20 this summer, and the classic Prince tune "Purple Rain" celebrates a quarter of a century. We take a moment to reflect on both, assisted when it comes to Prince by an appreciation from Maroon 5 members Jesse Carmichael and Adam Levine.

Meanwhile, Nate DiMeo helps us remember why exactly we should respect big cartoony movies designed around Hasbro toys. Sure, little about the new Transformers movie, or the upcoming G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra may appeal to aesthetes, but the two films will probably be among this summer's top moneymakers. The first Transformers movie made nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars at the box office. Boom!

(Linda also mentions a conversation that took place at Monkey See last week about potential new movies based on toys; you can find that one here.)

We'll also learn about a Princeton sociologist's sobering findings about the status of women playwrights in the American theater and hear a review of the gripping new movie The Hurt Locker.

And that tootle you'll hear comes from an instrument made of vulture bones and mammoth tusks. It's the oldest musical instrument ever found.

Finally, there's no denying that the most talked-about pop-culture event of the week was the death of Michael Jackson, and Linda talks this week about finding something to say about a guy who's so hard to talk about.

Check out Culturetopia right here, or subscribe to the podcast, to hear all of the pieces.

Supergirl: Doesn't she look happy about the news that she gets to wear pants now? DC Comics

 

by Glen Weldon

Last week, we learned about a man possessed of a bold and praiseworthy vision. With a single editorial edict, this brave iconoclast dispensed with venerated tradition and blazed a new path, knowing only too well that his decision might unleash a frothing nerdstorm of outrage.

The man in question: DC Comics editor Matt Idleson. The pronouncement he issued was just eight words long, but such is its paradigm-shattering power that it will surely stand one day in the annals of comic book history, alongside "With great power comes great responsibility," "Truth, Justice and the American Way," and "Shazam!"

Thus spake Idleson:

"I never want to see Supergirl's panties again."

And with that, the character of Supergirl — in a stark departure from many years of institutionalized cheesecakery — started wearing red shorts under her skirt.

It's not a big deal, but it's a pretty big deal, and here's why:

1. The decision suggests that superhero comics may at long last stand ready to evolve beyond the adolescent objectification of the female form in which they have so gleefully wallowed for long decades; and

2. Supergirl flies, duh. She hovers over people's heads. In a skirt.

After the jump: Hot pants, headbands, belly-shirts and other petty indignities foisted upon the Maid of Might over her long and storied career.

It's important to fit this latest development in its proper historical context. Unlike her cousin Superman, who's trounced around in the same circus acrobat number since the 1930's, Supergirl has changed her costume many times over the years. Maybe because she's ostensibly a teenager, and thus eagerly adopts the fashion of the times? Yeah, I don't know.

This has led to a series of predictable, but no less aesthetically punishing, sartorial decisions. I'd walk you through these myself, but the Internet's a big place, and this job has already been done, with considerable wit and grace, by Girl-wonder.org.

You'll need to keep clicking through to get up to the present, but it's worth it. I'd urge you to really linger over the second page, if only to let the sheer ineluctable suckiness of the 80's frizzy perm/headband costume sink in.

While you're there, spend some time on comics artist Dean Trippe's livejournal page, which offers links to many alternate Supergirl costume designs from a 2007 contest co-sponsored with www.projectrooftop.com, a site entirely devoted to superhero fashion. (See above, in re: Internet, size of.)

As the girl-wonder folks note, when Supergirl was reintroduced into continuity back in '04, she wore an outfit that might as well have been designed by a committee of pimps and 14-year-old boys, complete with a miniskirt that was somehow permanently stuck in Seven-Year-Itch mode.

It was little more than a thin bolt of blue fabric — the comic-book equivalent of those long white banners that forever fluttered in the air above Renaissance Italy to keep folk from glimpsing the full cherubim monty.

She was also drawn in a manner openly defiant of the physical laws of human anatomy: Girlfriend was basically an esophagus with hip bones.

But things have been looking up for her of late. In her current series, the fantastically named writer Sterling Gates is doing good work supplying the character with depth and intelligence while downplaying some of the vampy-trampy aspects she got saddled with upon her return.

Meanwhile, artist Igle has given her a real, physiologically plausible body, outfitted in a costume that is growing steadily less, in the artist's words, "hoochie."

We've discussed the whole women and comics thing before, and as much as I'd like to believe that the advent of super-bike-shorts signals a industry-wide shift toward the Something-Less-Than-Cringeworthy, there is still Witchblade.

And there's the fact that she's still wearing a skirt at all. Can someone not hook this young woman up with something in a nice athletic pant, already?

Still and all: We salute DC Comics editor Matt Idleson and his creative team, for their dedication to creating something that's proven maddeningly elusive, something we've needed for years: a Supergirl comic you can recommend to a teenage girl without feeling the least bit To Catch a Predator about it.

by Linda Holmes

On last night's edition of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart spoke to Mike Kim, the author of Escaping North Korea: Defiance And Hope In The World's Most Repressive Country. Kim spent four years helping North Korean refugees who were leaving the country through China, along a "modern-day underground railroad" that stretches 6,000 miles from Pyongyang to Bangkok, Thailand.

It's not uncommon for Jon Stewart to have interesting guests, or guests with great stories, but I think from the show's perspective, this particular conversation was almost a Platonic ideal of a Daily Show interview.

Why getting your news from The Daily Show is more complicated than it sounds, after the jump...

It can sometimes be tough to wrap your arms around the position that The Daily Show occupies as entertainment and the role it plays as journalism. There's a constant drumbeat of surprise over the fact that it serves as an actual source of information for people, which is often misunderstood to mean only that people use the jokes as news or don't know the difference.

For some reason, the interviews are often left out of those discussions. It doesn't always make it into the analysis that a comedy show demonstrates a particular brand of confidence when it devotes a third of its running time to a guest the vast majority of its audience has never heard of, whose entire agenda is, for instance, international human-rights issues.

There are liberties taken here -- I don't know that a more traditional interviewer would (or should) feel as comfortable as Stewart does telling a guest flat-out how brave he is -- but the full picture of The Daily Show as a phenomenon has to include this kind of discussion, which really has very little to do with cracking wise.

by Linda Holmes

I first came across the site There I Fixed It via Metafilter, and then through the comments there, I found the Home Inspection Nightmares section of the site for This Old House, and then I spent about an hour there, looking at stuff like this home repair, which is -- spoiler -- not an approved use of a two-liter Coke bottle.

Both sites are lovely afternoon-brightening bursts of silliness. They will also make you want to be really careful about any homes you might purchase in the future, because people are not to be trusted.

by Linda Holmes

Tonight marks the return of PBS's Nova scienceNOW (hey, that's how they type it; I don't know), the science magazine show featuring host (and astrophysicist, and Stewart/Colbert favorite) Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The season premiere includes a discussion of synthetic diamonds; a visit with Luis von Ahn, the computer scientist who developed those little pictures of squiggly letters that you have to type in to prove you're not a robot; a look back at the anthrax attacks of several years ago; and -- best of all -- a close-up look at AutoTune, including the AutoTuning of Tyson's own very bad singing. The von Ahn and AutoTune segments are both utterly charming, and Tyson is a marvelous sport.

Check your local PBS listings, but Nova scienceNOW is generally airing alongside the regular Nova season premiere, "Musical Minds," which Oliver Sacks discussed on The Daily Show last night. I haven't seen "Musical Minds" yet, but I have read the Sacks book Musicophilia on which it is based, and The New York Times, while expressing some reservations, calls it "full of fascinating information."

So if you're the kind of person who likes to sit down for a little nerd viewing, this might be your lucky evening.

My Dinner With Andre: Are you finding it a little loud at the multiplex? A good conversation might be just the thing. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

 

by Glenn McDonald

If the world were at all fair, or even moderately discerning, Michael Bay would not be a movie director at all. Instead, he would be where he belongs, as technical supervisor of an industrial demolitions crew, blowing stuff up for a living. As is stands, however, Mike is still making "movies" such as the new Transformers sequel, which if I have my notes right, is actually titled Transformers: Assaulting Your Senses for 147 Minutes.

Summer action blockbusters, with their aggressive FX and frantic editing, are migraines waiting to happen. If you're looking to go the other way for an evening, may I suggest the new Criterion edition of My Dinner with Andre, director Louis Malle's 1981 indie triumph. Here's a movie that more or less does the impossible: It consists entirely of two friends having a quiet conversation over dinner, and it's riveting.

What the new release can give you, and what's been in the movie all along, after the jump...

The actors don't just play themselves, however. Rather, they play versions or aspects of themselves, exaggerated for dramatic and comic effect. Gregory, or "Gregory," has just returned from a five-year global walkabout, seeking spiritual enlightenment. He invites his old colleague and friend, Shawn, to dinner at an upscale New York restaurant.

And that's it. The rest of the movie features the two men sharing an intimate conversation. But what a conversation it is! Gregory, who does most of the talking, is impassioned and articulate. Shawn, more inhibited that his old friend, mostly asks questions -- until the end, when his own turbulent feelings pour out.

Much of the pleasure of the film is simply drifting along with their conversation. Let yourself fall into its rhythms, and marvel at how utterly evocative the spoken word can be. When Gregory describes his experiences -- wandering through Tibet, dancing in the woods of Poland -- the visuals conjured in your mind are more vivid than anything you will ever see on the screen. Watch how director Malle (Au revoir les infants) uses mirrors, or when he chooses to turn up the volume on ambient noise. Everything is deliberate and carefully composed.

So, yeah, if you want a break from all the summer bombast, My Dinner with Andre is out this week in a fabulous new two-disc package, with a beautifully restored high-definition digital transfer, in the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio, and remastered sound. The second disc consists of new, exclusive interviews with Gregory and Shawn by filmmaker Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), discussing the fascinating genesis of the film.

If nothing else, you can enjoy how the camera stays still, how the average shot length isn't 1.2 seconds, and how the director refrains from detonating anything.

The remote DVR: The Supreme Court yesterday cleared the way for a new cable option. iStockphoto.com

 

by Linda Holmes

One of the few drawbacks of watching television on a DVR rather than live is that you have to have a physical device -- either a separate product like a TiVo or a hard drive within your cable box -- that stores the programs you want to watch. Yesterday, that drawback got a step closer to elimination when the Supreme Court declined to consider a legal challenge from content providers to a plan for the "remote DVR."

Cablevision in New York is preparing to launch a program where, instead of a hard drive in your house, your recorded programs would be stored on your cable company's remote servers, so you wouldn't have to have a physical hard drive. Cablevision says it will make DVR use easier and less expensive.

And the network and cable content providers seem to agree, given that they're pursuing a legal challenge, claiming that it's one thing for you to record and save their programs in your house for personal use (not something they always admitted you had any right to do, by the way), but it's another thing for Cablevision to save the programs for you offsite. That, they say, violates their copyright.

(Interestingly, it looks like one of the important features of this program is that Cablevision won't simply store one central copy of something that can be accessed by any of the people who have asked to record it. In order to preserve this idea that it's just off-site storage and not unlicensed on-demand programming, they have to store a separate identical copy of the same show for each subscriber.)

The broadcasters lost the last round of maneuvering and asked the Supreme Court to intervene, which, yesterday, it decided not to do. That means Cablevision gets to roll out the remote-DVR option for its subscribers later this year.

That could mean big changes for the existing viewership model.

The possible effects of remote storage and the hard life of a broadcast (or even cable) network, after the jump...

Obviously, this is all very bad news for networks, which already struggle with the implications of DVR viewing, where ads can be skipped, and which are already trying to adapt to online viewing and every other technological change that's trying to kill them.

Moreover, imagine what unlimited storage might mean to DVD sales and online sales of episodes, which have become significant revenue streams. A curious viewer could potentially save an entire season of a show to watch later -- maybe in the summer, or in a year, or in two years. Or own your favorite show forever, just by storing it with your cable company. Why buy it on DVD? (Yes, it wouldn't be the same as ownership, in that it would simply be licensed and not owned, but for a lot of people, that difference won't drive them to pay $50 to own a season on DVD when they can just watch it whenever.)

It seems that hardly a day passes without a big fat dose of bad news for people who make ad-supported television. Skipping commercials gets easier, watching online gets easier, and everybody hates product placement. And now, the DVR may be about to take a giant leap forward in both convenience and capacity. You've got to think there is some serious yoga for relaxation going on in a lot of executive offices these days.

by Linda Holmes

Having just seen My Sister's Keeper, I feel I am perfectly situated at the moment to work on the development of a taxonomy of crying in the movies. This movie -- and if this is a spoiler for you, then I cannot help you -- contains a great deal of crying.

My Sister's Keeper: If you want to study movie crying, you could do a lot worse. New Line Cinema

 

Not all crying is the same, of course. Some crying is pitiful, while some crying is angry. Also, some crying is well-acted, while some crying is Luke Skywalker saying, "That's not true...that's impossible!" with all the authentic, raw emotion you would get if you were to cast Ryan Seacrest in a production of King Lear.

So let us review. We will look at examples where available.

The Brave Lip Quiver Of The Apparently Doomed

There's actually a lot of this one in My Sister's Keeper. This is how you cry when you are very sick, but you don't want anyone to worry about you. It involves quite a bit of tearing up and a break in your voice, but no sobbing. For you are brave. Very often, the effect is to make the other person burst into wet, sloppy tears through the sheer force of your noble bravery. At which point: you win.

The Masculine Welling-Up That Doesn't Make You Any Less Of A Dude, Man

Think of John McClane in the bathroom in Die Hard. Sure, he's picking glass out of his feet. But the real reason he's weepy is that he's begun to realize that he truly loves his estranged wife and regrets that he may be massacred at Christmas by a colorful band of international terrorists before he gets a chance to confess that he shouldn't have been such a jerk about her taking a new job. The worst thing about dying at the hands of a colorful band of international terrorists: unfinished conversations.

The Soft Whimper Of True Love

I apologize for reminding you of "You had me at hello," which we are so close to being entirely finished with, now that it has had its full run of regular overexposure followed by its full run of ironic overexposure, but this is the form of crying you get right when Renee Zellweger says, "You had me at hello." Earlier in the movie, she cried the Happy Tears Of Hooray, Hooray, I Am Glad You Proposed, but only true love makes her whimper. (Note: she is responding to a Masculine Welling-Up, see above. You can tell that's what it is because he cries while saying "tough competitors.")

Major breakdowns, Meg Ryan, human biology, and much more, after the jump...

In Steel Magnolias, Sally Field chooses a funeral, which is as good a place as any, to completely collapse and sob uncontrollably about fate, the cruelty of the universe, and so forth. This requires a good bellow and is therefore a little exhausting, but the upside is that it is highly likely to result in an award. Restraint is not called for. You are railing at the universe; if you are not loud enough, it may not hear you. No, louder.

The Chest-Beating Shriek Of You Just Killed My Brother

At about 3:30 in the above clip from West Side Story, you will see Natalie Wood attempt to hang on to her Puerto Rican accent while simultaneously crying and beating on the chest of poor Richard Beymer. Fortunately, it does not go on very long. Killer killer killer killer killer. Fortunately, while I'm not sure I remember the exact ending of this movie, I think the tragedy is behind her and it's blue skies after this, right?

The Lonely Tear

A great builder of tension. At the end of Ghost, as Patrick Swayze's Sam is being carried off by a four-thousand-watt floodlight, Demi Moore manages to leave her tears snuggled against her eyeballs for most of the scene, while the viewer watches patiently to see when one will finally make its escape, which it does at just the right moment. This can also happen when you are very sad about litter.

The All-Too-Authentic Drainage Incident

It's not too obvious when you look at the clip this way, but during the single scene that earned Viola Davis her Oscar nomination for Doubt, she's crying in a very realistic fashion that involves a seriously runny nose. When her nose was several feet high in the theater, it was a little bit conspicuous. If done well, however, it really sells the product.

The Delicate Shimmer That Says, Blink-Blink-Blink, Really?

Here, Meg Ryan doesn't cry during the fighting part of the end of When Harry Met Sally. She cries only after Billy Crystal gives her the "I love you because you are extremely strange in a way I at least recognize as unique" speech. Blink-blink, says Meg Ryan! Really? Oh, really? Tears of joy! Little tears of joy!

I encourage you to add your favorite and least favorite instances of movie crying in the comments, as we move toward a more complete understanding of this unappreciated art.

by Linda Holmes

I'm not going to beat around the bush: I can't remember the last time I wrote so much about death over a five-day period. But interestingly enough, of all the celebrities who have died recently -- Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson being the most noted ones -- the one I was watching in a current project was Billy Mays.

Mays, who died on Sunday, was one of the two stars of Discovery's Pitchmen, which followed the adventures he had with Anthony "Sully" Sullivan, another ubiquitous infomercial star. Each week, they'd find a new product and try to help develop it for direct-response sale on television (that's pitchman-speak for "infomercial"). Last week, Billy and Sully helped Survivor winner Ethan Zohn develop his idea for a two-chambered cereal bowl that holds the milk separately from the cereal to keep the cereal from getting soggy. Seeing a guy get all excited about how his invention is going to revolutionize cereal eating, only to test-market it and find that everyone says, "Looks like a dog bowl"? It's not meaningful, but it's a little entertaining.

I'm not trying to make Billy Mays more than he was; he made ads for OxiClean and the Awesome Auger, and he yelled, and he was sort of goofy and obnoxious. He was a huckster, but an unapologetic and good-humored huckster. In the above clip from The Tonight Show just last Wednesday night, he has great fun with Sully and Conan O'Brien demonstrating his total faith in the stuff he sells, along with his touchy feelings about the Shamwow.

Not an artist, but a guy I'd grown sort of fond of, and one I'll miss watching.

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: Is there a gap between audiences and critics, or do they just have different jobs? Paramount Pictures

 

by Linda Holmes

An AP article argues today that Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen "sets a new standard for the gulf between what reviewers and mass audiences like."

The film is on its way to make insane amounts of money, while critics have mostly hated it. Rob Moore, vice-chairman of Paramount (the movie's distributor), offers the smug claim that audiences "kind of roll their eyes at the critics and say, 'You have no idea what you're talking about.'"

But is that right? That audiences read reviews of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen and think, "You don't know what you're talking about"?

Or do audiences understand what critics mean by "good," and simply think that's not the kind of "good" they're looking for on a Friday night?

Imagine a restaurant review of McDonalds. Now think about how much money McDonalds makes. It seems like a stretch to assume that the disparity means that people who eat at McDonalds are rolling their eyes at restaurant critics and thinking they don't know what they're talking about.

That's because not every purchase is conceived as an attempt to buy quality, either with burgers or with movie tickets. Sometimes you just want what you want.

Moore insists that critics "forget what the goal of the movie was. The goal of the movie is to entertain and have fun." This is a common argument leveled against movie critics — awfully common, for one that's so easy to prove false.

Some counterexamples, after the jump...

For heaven's sake, Drag Me To Hell got very good reviews; does anyone think critics were crediting it for being anything other than a very well-executed holler of "BOO"? Many, many films that have no higher purpose than to entertain receive excellent reviews and develop enduring reputations as terrific movies.

So unless we have reached a point where discussions of mass entertainment are going to be so reductive that quality and commercial viability are by definition the same thing, it's possible for audiences to embrace something and for critics to reject it, and for them both to be right. Just as critics acknowledge that some movies are likely to make enormous amounts of money despite being terrible, audiences acknowledge that some movies are likely to be terrible even as they're standing in line for a ticket.

There's a big difference between audiences thinking critics don't know what they're talking about — which goes to whether criticism itself is considered credible — and audiences thinking they simply aren't looking for critical quality — which goes to whether criticism is, as regards a particular movie, relevant.

It's not that audiences conclude that the criticism is inaccurate, so much as it is that the box-office fate of the movie is immune to even accurate bad reviews. There are good movies where stuff blows up, and bad movies where stuff blows up; some people enjoy stuff blowing up whether the movie is good or bad, and they'd tell you so.

Figuratively speaking, movies show up with a variety of ribbons pinned to their chests. One of them is "Contains Critically Evaluated Quality." And lots of people look for that ribbon, but other people don't. Other people are looking for "Contains Zac Efron." Or "Really Loud." Or "Not Very Demanding." Or "Includes Giant Robot Fights."

Criticism is there to comment on the subjective things about the movie; some people are going because of the objective things: what it is, as opposed to how it is. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But it seems like a leap to turn that old, old truth into a new chasm yawning between audiences and critics. In a world where critics gave hugely positive reviews to Borat, it's nonsense to argue that they hated your robot movie because it wasn't Shakespeare.

by Marc Hirsh

Unless you're a weird-rock aficionado, it's likely that you've only heard of the Monks (if at all) if you shelled out the big bucks for Rhino Records' Nuggets boxed set from 1998. There, in the midst of all manner of garage bands trying their damnedest to ape the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds, was "Complication," a sonically aggressive, sloganeering, borderline fascistic stomp that sounded like nothing else on the collection's four discs.

It'd be hard to find four discs of anything that sounded like what the Monks were throwing down in 1966. The Monks -- five American servicemen stationed in Germany who helped pioneer the concept band by performing in robes and points-for-commitment tonsures -- couldn't pull it off themselves, folding after a single album.

But Black Monk Time (newly reissued) made the most of the Monks' one shot at glory. The beats anticipated the Stooges in their focused primitivism; Gary Burger's raspy tenor would have sounded amiable if he weren't so unsettlingly weird; the songs were built around bitter satire, cross-linguistic puns and, most disturbing of all, sex; and Dave Day's electric banjo was... wait, what?

Anyway, it was brilliant and fleeting. So what better way to toast the Monks' renewed availability than by celebrating the one-album wonder? Below, we honor those performers who were limited to a lone full-length release and took the opportunity to burn brightly before burning out. Or breaking up. Or vanishing. Or dying.

Note 1: This is not about releasing one good album during the course of the band's lifespan. It's about releasing one album, period. Accompanying the rerelease of Black Monk Time is a collection of unreleased Monks demos. Doesn't count. Nor do compilations of singles, B-sides, live performances or what have you. If it was put together after the fact to capitalize on an act's popularity or importance or continuing contractual obligation, it doesn't count. In terms of going into the studio for the purpose of recording and releasing a record, it starts and ends with one.

Note 2: This is not intended to be any kind of definitive list. It suffers from being limited by my own biases and tastes. So there's no claim that these are the best one-album wonders, only that one-album wonders exist, and these are some of them. I invite you to list your own favorites in the comments.

With that said, let's hear some music, after the jump...

These two albums get the nod for both including Eric Clapton, who seems to have a knack for supergroups. (Cream was also one, in its way.) Also, it doesn't hurt that Layla is a stone-cold classic of unrequited, fever-dream passion and Blind Faith includes both the majestic "Presence Of The Lord" and the quietly nerve-wracking gorgeousness of "Can't Find My Way Home."

The Sex Pistols, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols (1977). The Sex Pistols were pretty much designed (and managed) with their ultimate implosion in mind. Honestly, what's most surprising is that they managed to pull out a complete album at all before their expiration date. Original bassist Glen Matlock may have had something to do with that, thanks in part to his being enough of a music nerd to get booted from the band before he made them too good.

Countless repackagings followed, but Never Mind was the only album to come from the Pistols as a working band. If you don't know that it was the equivalent of a massive tectonic shift that reshaped rock and roll (as well as sizable chunks of pop music) from 1977 on, then for Pete's sake, go find a copy and listen to it right away.

The Swingers, Counting The Beat (1982). A veteran of the hyper-visual, prog-rocky, pre-Neil Finn incarnation of Split Enz, Phil Judd took to his newfound freedom with apparent glee, falling in with the New Zealand punk scene and driving entirely in the opposite direction: sharp, hooky, bouncy and tense. Boy howdy, were the Swingers tense. Here's the single version of "One Good Reason." To get a sense of the version on the album, imagine taking a socket wrench to this song and cranking it about eight clicks tighter.

The rest of Counting The Beat follows suit and adds a goofball humor that does nothing to dissipate the band's anxiousness. Even the track that most dates the album -- the Khomeini-targeted "Ayatollah" (whose lyrics, skittish modern Westerners will be relieved to learn, focus exclusively on dictatorship, not religion) -- comes complete with a nervous chug and an indelible, anthemic chorus that makes the most of the vowel-filled title.

The La's, The La's (1990). The first time I heard pop masterpiece "There She Goes," unidentified, on the radio, I immediately knew (having just read an article rhapsodizing over the band) who it had to be. I ran out to buy The La's, put it on and was in love by the second damn note of opening track "Son Of A Gun." In terms of their position on the quality/short-term popularity/long-term popularity axes, the La's were pretty much the Big Star of the 1990s.

That comparison comes complete with a cranky, self-destructive frontman. Lee Mavers famously loathed the record's production (that first article that tipped me off to this band was entitled "An Album Only They Could Hate") and played the misunderstood-genius card convincingly enough to break up the band not long after touring the U.S. and then vanish into rumor-laced seclusion. There have been sporadic shows over the past ten years or show as well as a handful of pre-debut demo collections, but nothing yet to properly follow up their one perfect album.

"Feelin'" (Unfortunately, we can't embed this one.)

Milla, The Divine Comedy (1994). The key to being properly shocked by this record is to know that the singer's last name is Jovovich and that her claims to fame at the time were a modeling career and Return To The Blue Lagoon. Two or three years earlier, she was telling any music magazine that would listen that she had music in her that she just wanted to share with the world. In response, the world rolled its eyes.

Then Jovovich released the folky, Kate Bush-influenced The Divine Comedy and confused everyone who heard it by being "unexpectedly interesting" and "[n]ot just good for an eighteen-year-old model, but good for anyone."

The whole thing came off like a defiant challenge to anybody who refused to take her seriously, and Jovovich, having made her point rather successfully, returned, rejuvenated, to her acting career and sidelined music as little more than a hobby. Despite some copies of 1998's unauthorized The Peopletree Sessions sneaking out into the wild, there's been no official followup, but Jovovich continues to offer scads of free songs on her website.

Propellerheads, Decksanddrumsandrockandroll (1998). Along with the Prodigy's chart-topping 1997 album The Fat Of The Land, Propellerheads were supposed to help signal a shift in popular taste towards electronica. That, I probably needn't mention, didn't happen. The Shirley Basseyfied "History Repeating" tried its darnedest, but it was quickly eclipsed as the techno tune lodged most firmly in the mass consciousness by Fatboy Slim's "The Rockafeller Skank," which... failed to signal a shift in popular taste towards electronica. Seriously, folks, it just wasn't going to happen.

Maybe that was as good a reason as any why Propellerheads just sort of ground to a halt after Decksandrumsandrockandroll. But with pounders like "Bang On!" and "Take California," a propulsive hip-hop cut in "You Want It Back" and a spy fetish that culminated in a foreboding version of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," it was a heck of a party while it lasted.

So, taking into account that anybody whose sole album was released in, say, the last ten years could just be dragging their feet, who'd I miss?