Meandering: Magic Mike

Steven Soderburgh has so many wonderful facets but regularly fails to deliver a fully developed movie on all fronts.

I'm always struck by the visuals of his movies and their boldness.  Few filmakers find the sweet spot between documentary verite and big budget unreality the way Soderburgh does.  The movies feel real without being too much so.

There's a wonderful artistic feel to much of his camera work.  Showing us shots and angles we've not seen before (so we're not used to them) but which seem so much better suited than the normal coverage to get his point across.

There's so much moment to moment virtuosity in his movies.  The shooting/editing never fails to grab me.  Hard cuts to title cards, glamorous dance sequences, quiet backlit moments.  But the essential dramatic storytelling of the movie fails.

Through much of the movie I would have thought that he wasn't overly interested in emotional storytelling - however the false feeling conclusion of the movie tell me he obviously was.  The emotion/love story of the movie almost feels tacked on - as if the studio decided it needed more heart.  I would have rather he kept thing slightly more at arm's length.

Meandering: Spider Man

I came away from the new Spider Man with a distinctly "meh" feeling.  It wasn't bad - I know a bad movie when i see one.  It wasn't overly long...which is always a positive factor.  It just wasn't particularly good.

The myth of spiderman doesn't seem to work in modern day.  In the 1960's i can see it as being very cool to have a guy who can make homemade web to stop villains.  But the necessity of amping up the action for a modern audience just doesn't sit naturally with the original story.

To mythologize a character the origin story needs to be air tight emotionally and almost air tight technically.  In 2012 it's not the super powers resulting from a spider bite that are the problem - it's the homemade web spinners that are able to hold falling cars.  There are just two many elements which are kept in the realm of logic that, if placed more in the supernatural/science fiction/ultra/bio-technology sphere, would allow us to concentrate on the myth rather than on the specifics.

Cinedigm CEO - Indie film renaissance

Cinedigm CEO Chris McGurk broke from the traditional gloom and doom many Los Angeles Film Festival keynoters have expressed regarding the future of showbiz. Noting that one previous speaker said, “and I quote: “The sky really is falling”, McGurk pointed out that “the only thing Hollywood has done better than building an industry is predicting its imminent demise.” Once again “doomsayers seem to be proclaiming the Seven Signs of the coming Indie Apocalypse” but McGurk said he sees “the Seven Signs of its Renaissance” — thanks to lower production and distribution costs because of the “digital revolution.” Despite having what he described a reputation as being “a suit” he said “I think I’ve actually become somewhat of a softie in regard to at least one aspect of the film business. Somewhere along my corporate ride in Hollywood, I fell in love with independent film.” McGurk sees enormous targeted opportunities for filmmakers, distributors, marketers and exhibitors. And variety that can satisfy broadly different kinds of people who love movies.

Summarized and paraphrased, here is McGurk’s speech:

My current role again has me highly focused on independent film, as chairman and and CEO of Cinedigm, an end-to-end digital distribution company for indie content. Digital distribution is a godsend, McGurk maintains, and not the enemy as some content.

“It is estimated that by the end of THIS year over 80% of theaters in the U.S., and over 60 percent of theaters in the world will be digital. For you, the audience, the big advantage of digital theaters is that every print is as pristine as the ones that studio executives see in their screening rooms. And those digital prints will ALWAYS remain that way. No more movie experiences where the images are so scratched, the entire movie looks like the climactic scene in The Shawshank Redemption.

But, digital goes way beyond improving the look of films. It will soon be key to delivering a far greater and more vibrant variety of content into theaters.

The studio system deteriorated in the 1960s because the huge overhead of backlot filmmaking was making movies prohibitively expensive. Expenses soared again in the early 1990s resulting in 1991′s Katzenberg Memo, which cautioned against what he called the Blockbuster Mentality that was driving runaway production costs. He was motivated to write the memo because of the enormous budget of the Disney film, Dick Tracy, which cost a grand total of … $46 million.”

These days, the major studios consider $46 million an arthouse budget. Tentpole film productions routinely run $250-$300 million, with marketing costs to match. As a result, even major blockbusters are only generating single-digit returns. And when one of those films tanks, the write-offs can be devastating, and we have seen a couple of instances of that recently.
…
There a signs that this business cycle is once again repeating itself, setting the stage for the Seven Signs of the Renaissance of Independent Film, which I would now like to share with you.

Sign Number One: The Production Revolution. High-resolution digital cameras and computers mean that the cost of of making a theatrical quality movie has plummeted.

Sign Number Two: The Distribution Revolution

Just like the indie boom of the 80s and 90s, new forms of distribution are central to the coming resurgence. Digital is the friend and not the enemy of the filmgoing experience. It has done much more than give you scratch-free prints. It is also the enabler of Sign Number One – the drop in production costs. And it is underpinning Sign Number Two, which is completely transforming distribution.

First of all, there is digital distribution into theaters. Massive numbers of film prints — at $1200 a pop plus freight charges — are no longer necessary. The process has been replaced by satellite and hard-drive delivery at less than one-tenth the cost.

The impact of digital distribution goes far beyond the theaters … and into the home and mobile platforms. There is cable and satellite Video on Demand, Amazon, iTunes, Xbox, Hulu, Vudu, Netflix, TVOD, AVOD, FVOD, SVOD, regular VOD — All those VOD acronyms that everyone talks about and very few understand what they really mean.

This “digital revolution” means that, just as happened in the ’80s, there is an exploding demand for filmed entertainment and huge competition among digital retailers. It’s an “arms race” to ensure that each one has a high quantity of high quality content to drive viewership, whether ad-supported, subscription-driven or transactional.

Margin Call as a landmark example. It wasreleased last October 21 on just 199 screens. That same day, it was also released on VOD, allowing in-home viewing for about $8. Two months later, it was put out on DVD. The movie cost $3.5 million to make and took in $4 million on VOD, $5 million in domestic theaters and another $5 million internationally. So it was solidly profitable before it even went into other ancillary markets… something that rarely happens with major studio releases. Margin Callprovides a glimpse of the kinds of distribution opportunities that are now available for independent films.

The coming renaissance of indie film will be advanced by the same driver that propelled the first one in the ’60s – lower production costs – and also the same driver behind the second one in the ‘80s – expanded distribution platforms. That’s an incredibly powerful combination.

On to the third sign: Big Talent is Into Small Films. There’s been a very interesting phenomenon underway recently. Bigger and bigger stars are willing to make smaller and smaller films. In addition to Margin Call, which starred Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore and Jeremy Irons, there’s Bernie with Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey, or Hysteria with Maggie Gyllenhaal, or A Dangerous Method with Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen or Melancholia with Kirsten Dunst or the upcoming360 with Jude Law and Anthony Hopkins or The Paperboy with Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey.

Major talent behind the camera is also attracted to indie production, including directors such as Ron Howard, Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aranofsky, and screenwriters like Scott Frank, Mark Boal and Peter Morgan.

One reason is the dramatic drop in the total number of theatrical releases. In 2010, about 100 fewer movies with budgets above $1 million were produced than in 2008. This is almost a 25% decline. Unavoidably, fewer movies result in fewer jobs. Talent at all levels has to look beyond the major studios for work.

Secondly, the emphasis on big budget comic book films has actually reduced the demand for big name actors. When you’re counting on Thor to open a movie, you don’t need Tom Cruise.

Third, actors want to, well, act. So, even if they get a high-profile part playing a Marvel character, they often still want to take on the challenge of something less … muscular. So, many are willing to take serious pay cuts for the chance to play a more complex, challenging and less mainstream role.

All of this increases the viability of independent films.

Then there is the Fourth Sign of the Indie Renaissance: Exhibitors want independent films … desperately. Less than 5% of seats are occupied in theaters Monday through Thursday … and only about 15% on an annualized basis. Yes, over a 12-month period, movie theaters are 85% empty! This resulted in the two largest theater chains – AMC and Regal – forming a new indie studio, Open Road Films.

Exhibitors also will need to be more flexible about release and DVD windows. Blockbuster franchises need a longer theatrical window, but indie films that are released on a few hundred screens need quicker transition to ancillary markets to survive.

Which brings me to the Fifth Sign of the Indie Renaissance: Narrowcasting. For the right program and the right price, those empty seats can be filled and that popcorn can be sold. He cited the record-breaking performance of The Avengers. An incredible 22 million people in the U.S. and Canada saw the film during its first week. But that leaves 323 million people who didn’t!

There are a whole lot of people who aren’t so excited about watching highly pain-tolerant men save the world. They are instead interested in a wide variety of other subjects that they’d like to see up on the big screen. Look at the success of live, digitally-delivered productions of the Metropolitan Opera, which have been booked into targeted theaters near where opera-lovers live. Or, at the other end of the branding spectrum, there is the Kidtoons series, which our company distributes, that are targeted to children and their families and play exclusively at weekend matinees.

The creative possibilities are endless: Action sports series, comedy nights, educational extension programs during the day, ballet, Broadway and other cultural programming, and so on. The idea is to fill seats by precisely aligning content with avid audiences in a communal setting.

In essence, the strategy is to program a targeted digital theater footprint by day and daypart almost like a TV network.

And it doesn’t have to be top-down programming. There are innovative new services like Tugg, Gathr and Cinedigm’s own crowd-sourcing platform that allow people to vote online for content they’d like to see in theaters. Once enough people sign on, the movie is booked and seats get filled.

All of this will require a modification of expectations on the part of filmmakers. They have been conditioned to believe that getting “validation” for their films requires a release into more than 500 screens. That model rarely works anymore because it’s very unlikely there will be a financial return on the cost of the big national TV media buy that’s required to support such a wide release.

The new narrowcast release strategy, combined with the kind of creative windowing we saw with Margin Call, will get filmmakers access to more eyeballs under an economic model that is more likely to generate real rewards.

Of course, narrowcasting won’t replace blockbuster filmmaking. The 20 million people who want to see Avengers 10 during opening week can still get their fix. But there are millions more who want something else. And they want to see it together in a theater. We can give it to them.

The Sixth Sign of the Indie Renaissance complements the Fifth: Targeted Marketing

Once you narrowcast into a theater, it is invaluable to then use targeted marketing to make the right people aware that the right programming for them is in their local theater.

And the best tool for doing this is social media.

Or, let me put it this way – Those of you who bought the Facebook IPO, hold on to your stock. Social media is still the future.

And movie marketers have a big advantage in this space. Just consider old-fashioned TV commercials. Nowadays, millions of people speed through them on DVRs. However, there’s one kind of commercial for which viewers regularly hit the stop button on their DVR – ads for upcoming movies.

This is because everybody hates commercials, but everybody loves movies. That’s why people stop to watch the spots for upcoming films. And that’s why people will also stop what they’re doing on a computer or mobile device to click on an appealing piece of movie marketing.

And that brings me to the Seventh Sign of the Indie Renaissance:

More dollars … and, by the way, more euros and yen and pounds and pesos and rubles. Because, make no mistake about it, the same hopeful signs that we are now seeing at work in this country are at work around the world.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the truism that cinema exists at the intersection of commerce and art. Well, I’m originally a numbers guy and, in our business, there’s a foolproof equation: More commerce equals more art.

So, if you like the art of film, you should like anything that helps the commerce of film. And that’s what all of the other six signs of the Indie Renaissance do: They help generate more of the money filmmakers need to make films.

• The first sign makes it cheaper to shoot a film,
• the second makes it easier and more efficient to distribute a film on multiple platforms,
• the third brings in bigger stars to act in a film and better writers and directors to create it,
• the fourth addresses exhibitor demand for independent film,
• the fifth makes it possible to narrowcast a film into high-yield theaters,
• and the sixth allows for targeted marketing directly to the people most likely to go see a film.

All of these add up to a more profitable business, which inevitably adds up to a more productive and expanded business. Which means that, as in the first golden age of independent film that started in the late ‘60s and in the second one that started in the late ‘80s, all of you movie lovers will have more movies to love at the multiplex … or on your TV or your computer or your iPad … or other devices yet to come that will provide even more digital canvasses for today’s cinematic artists.

Because we’re dealing with a bright Renaissance and not a dark Armageddon, I’m going to depart from apocalyptic tradition and add an eighth sign.

It’s really nothing new, and that’s why it’s so important. I hinted at it when I was talking about marketing, and it’s simply this: People love the movies.

This is why the Oscar broadcast is still one of the highest-rated shows every year.
This is why magazine covers still feature movie stars. This is why, even with our big-screen high-def, surround-sound TVs, we still want to go out to watch a movie in the dark with a bunch of strangers who BOND with us over the film… laughing, crying, being scared together … in a social experience that is almost tribal in nature.

So, I will confidently predict that we are about to see cinema history repeat itself yet again. In the past, whether it was the arrival of sound or TV or home video, each time new technology came on the scene, it was initially viewed as the enemy. Instead, each time it led to new paradigms of success. I am confident that the same will be true of digital technology … and the sky will continue to remain right up there where it belongs.

Meandering: Season 2 Game of Thrones

Overall I found the second season lacking.  There were fewer engaging characters with strong arcs.  Less movement of plot.  And a general sense that the whole season was a place holder - feeding out tidbits of information without really moving anyplace.

Whether this is objectively true or not I don't really care.
Winterfell is burned.
Jon Snow is with the wildings
Rob is married.
Dinklage is now on the outside looking in.

And I just didn't find myself caring.

Meandering: Lola Versus

Greta Gerwig is Lola.  About a woman getting dumped three weeks prior to her wedding and the ensuing few months of her life.

I haven't seen the director's first movie - but it was evidently a well respected indie movie.  So - I think it sad that his second effort was so..."blah."  I have two major points of contention with it.

1) The lack of structure.  There really is not second act to this movie - at least not in any story kind of way.  The main character just sort of wanders about, getting herself into trouble.  The main character just sort of wallows in self obsessed early adult melancholia.  The second act doesn't go anywhere - it just sort of loops constantly back on itself.  She falls for her friend, she sleeps with her ex, she dates her friend, she gets high with her ex, etc, etc

2) If you're stay away from a more structured movie - at least give me an interesting voice in which to tell your story.  There are plenty of amusing moments and clever turns of phrase.  But in the end the dialog and the filmmaking do not stand out in any meaningful way from so many other failed romantic comedy attempts.

So the movie is neither Hollywood enough, nor indie enough and as a result it's just not particularly good.  It simply wallows.

Meandering: Chronicle

For so many reasons this movie shouldn't work.  The plot is aimless.  The supporting characters thin.  The emotional beats unconvincing.  But - obviously - movie goers really enjoyed the movie.  I am only luke warm on it.

But the movie did a number of things right:

83 minutes
The promise of the premise was paid in full - friends exploring their new found super powers in fun ways.
High school - a milieu we all know and identify with.
A believable friendship-
An effective - albeit unconvincing in my mind - story arc for the lead character.

Meandering: Girls 1-5

I like the show Girls.
But I rather hate the girls themselves.

Angst runs through me as I watch them complain, whimper and "suffer" through their daily lives.
The only obstacles these women face are of their own making - but man are they hard to overcome.
How does one overcome being a snobby, self-involved idiot.
And why do I enjoy watching it.

The only answer I can come up with is that every time they seem to learn a little bit about themselves - they suffer all the more for it.

I'm watching this show because it's one step forward and two steps back and they'll get somewhere eventually.

Meandering: Avengers

What a fun movie.  Even though weighed down by burdensome action sequences the juggling of characters and story lines was so deft as to keep me involved throughout.  Certainly Whedon is good at character moments - witty character moments in particular.  Aside from Batman - this is the high water mark for summer superhero blockbusters.

Meanderings: Elena

Saw the movie Elena last night.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1925421/

It's Russian, very slow paced and (excluding a few minutes in the middle) quite watchable.
The movie involves an older woman (Elena) who recently married an old, rich guy and wants him to support her shiftless adult  son from a previous marriage.  He's reluctant.

Though the situation of the film is quite clear, there's a distinct lack of plot or forward movement - quite intentionally so.  This entire movie is basically the first act of a Hollywood movie.

Nevertheless - I'm interested in the fact that I found it so watchable.  The movie was pointedly meditative. There's no dialog for the first six minutes and in fact the opening frame is a two minute static frame of the apartment in which the couple live.

There's something potent that comes from simply observing characters.  My brain fills in all the small spaces where plot and activity would usually be.  I've just mentioned The Assassination of Jesse James in a previous post - it does the same thing - allows each individual audience member's psyches to fill in the space.  I love it.

I moved through a phase wondering if I'd filled such blanks incorrectly.  If i'd missed something and ended up liking a character I'm "supposed to" dislike or vice versa.  As if there's an exact answer.  But in my ego-laden old age I enjoy being given the space to meditate on characters without being force fed a feeling about them.  Indeed, the movie as a whole embodies that idea - as the plot's "climax" does not prescribe and audience reaction.

Elena kills her husband, steals his money and give it to her shitty family.  But the husband was essentially cutting her out of his will and leaving his money to his own good for nothing offspring.  This kind of reminds me of the TV show Girls - full of unlikeable characters but really engaging to watch.

Andrew Dominik

I am very excited about this movie from Andrew Dominik who made The Assassination of Jesse James.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1764234/

Meandering: Mr Foe

directed by David Mackenzie
A slightly unbalanced boy/man is obsessed with his mother who died when he was a teenager.  The boy, an amateur voyeur,  has a strange sexual/maternal fixation with first, his step-mother (whom he, in his paranoia, thinks murdered his mother) and then with a young woman who looks much like his mother.

The boy, Hallam, is in dire need of some kind of closure over the death of his mother.  That unstable ground tilts him into the sexual desire he feels for these two different women.

We watch his fixation with the young woman hotel manager in awkwardly as it's unclear of how he's reconciling the maternal feelings he's having for KaTE with his obvious relationship/sexual interest in her.

It all resolves when Hallam tries to kill his step Mom and Daddy tells him that his mother loved him - even though it wasn't enough for her to want to stay alive.


I found this movie watchable - but it did not blow me away.
I'm always slightly less interested in movies in which the main character is mentally unbalanced...and the conclusion of the movie will involved him coming to terms with/being healed of that imbalance.  Good Will Hunting somehow escapes my disdain for this - I'm not sure why.

I did like the examination of maternal/sexual fixation.  However, fot such dark and subversive themes to work i think the movie needs to remain more outwardly subtle.  When one of the story lines involves the son trying to kill his step Mom, an act which triggers the emotional cure for the son - it's all too out in the open.  He was sick - he tried to do something horrible - realizes his wrongs - starts to get better.


This is one of those movies that makes me realize just how hard making a good film of this kind is.  There needs to be an examination of themes - but at the same time an A story that moves things forward - but isn't too on the nose.

I'm trying to think of a movie that does this well. Two movies jump to mind, though I don't think they're the answer but....nevertheless.  One Flew over the Cuckoos nest.  The Beat my Heart Skipped.

Again - very difficult to have basically a crazy person - perpetrating crazy actions - as the main character.  How can this resolve itself in a meaningful and believable way?

Why is gay love so damn cute...

I have a soft spot for gays in love.   I find it both ridiculously cute and highly admirable...far more so than hetro relationships.  I'm wondering why.

The originality of gay relationships, the fact that I've grown up with almost no mythologized narrative of its kind, makes it new, intriguing and far more interesting than straight love.  This is so, even if in the end there's no tangible difference between the two, aside from the genders of the people involved.

At 40 years old I've got an encyclopedia of romantic story lines embedded in my brain.  Movies, books and magazines have trumpeted the wonders of love.  Whether Harry and Sally, Jane and Rochester or Brad and Angelina - we've seen hetro love affairs over and over and over.  We've seen every permutation of how a man and a woman can fall in love with one another.

Look - a gay relationship doesn't contain some unique element of love that we've not seen before.  There's nothing mysterious about two people, even of the same sex, falling in love with one another.  But for me - it's a new version of a love story that the media, which has inundated my consciousness for the last 40 years  with stories of straight people, has yet to bombard me with.   That newness makes it far more exciting, audacious and interesting than what I've seen a million times before.

Meandering: Good Dick

A movie I started watching because of Dick Night.  However, this dick movie went to Sundance.  I think ours was better.

Good Dick started out well - but never evolved enough- rather it wallowed in its subject matter - occasionally making unbelievable jumps which further undermined it.

They ellipse the woman skeptical of Ritter - to the two of them sitting together.  It rung false.  Ritter seems to be a completely unbelievable character through the whole thing - as if he's playing a persona - which is fine - but that persona has to crumble at some point.  It never really did.

The movie simply repeats the same moments over and over

she: I want you out - i hate you

him: no i'm staying

That's it - for a solid 45 minutes of the movie.  There needs to be more.  Something must evolve - something that will hold my interest. 

Note: (A lesson I too have learned) - if you're going to call a movie "Good Dick" and have it involve porn as much as this one does.  There better be some nudity!!!

Meandering: Homeland EPS 1-4

I really enjoyed the pilot episode.  Two obviously damaged people leading the show.

Boyle
Fucking his wife for the first time - dispassionate, brutal, unfeeling.  There's obviously something wrong with the guy.  We've seen sex used this way before - but it's not all that common so it still maintains its integrity.  I think of Michael Douglas fucking Jeanne Tripplehorn in Basic Instinct (http://fooooo.com/w/cbc1b907084f2e99249462b8ab369f14)  - though upon rewatching it - that's more a weird rape thing he's working on.  Nevertheless - sex style - a fascinating way to look at a character's psyche.

Carrie
For Clair Danes - she comes home - tosses an obviously faux wedding band into a dish, washes between her legs and heads out for work.  Pretty awesome.  The duality of her former status as innocent Angela Chase - now grown up and fucking random guys is wonderful.  There are three things that combine adeptly to make Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) work so well.

Her Age - she's no longer an ingenue. Is she 30 or 40 - kinda tough to tell.

Her Looks - she's....pretty?? - But not really.  She was as a young girl, but now looks much more like a real person - a woman who might actually be a CIA analyst.

Her Past - she played one of the iconic virgins in TV history.

Combined - this makes for a great character foundation.

Through four episodes I'm totally onboard and very interested to see how the two characters now start to interact with each other.  I can't see them ever having a relationship - but we shall see.

A side note: Manny Patinkin is unbelievably good at acting!

Blade Runner and P.K. Dick

BLADE RUNNER

What Philip K. Dick upon seeing Blade Runner for the first time.
http://www.philipkdick.com/new_letters-laddcompany.html

Public Musings: That Whole Next Generation ThingThere was this m...

Public Musings: That Whole Next Generation Thing

There was this m...: That Whole Next Generation Thing There was this moment in the early 90s when all sorts of new American filmmakers emerged onto the scene - ...

LOGGING: FOR LOVERS ONLY - by the Polish Brothers

A super low budget movie that takes place in Paris involving two people who were once in love, moved on and each got married to others - before running into each other so we can watch them in this movie.

A lovers lark in Paris full of boring, cliched dialog, no obstacles what-so-ever and not enough nakedness on the part of the gorgeous Stana Katic to keep me interested.

It seems like such audacity to make a movie which unabashedly luxuriates in a single topic for so long without advancing it in any way.  Do the filmakers think what they've written (or in this case probably ad-libbed) is so fascinating that we don't need any plot development?  That they're such charismatic people to watch that we don't need any visual storytelling?  That just watching them in the same frame kissing is the equivalent of showing an audience a loving relationship?

I used the word luxuriate...but really the movie just wallows in its imagined self importance with the filmmakers obviously thinking so much of themselves and their work that they fail to think for a moment about entertaining the audience.

Two Hour TV Shows-

Mad Men launches into its fifth season this Sunday with a two hour premiere.  Very few tv series can support a 2 hour episode.  I'm betting even Mad Men won't be up to the challenge.

Thoughts on "Wanderlust"

I didn't see Role Models.

I love Wet Hot American Summer.

I hadn't realized going in that Wanderlust was a David Wain movie.

I'm assuming this is a classic example of what happens when a funny, independent, creative director - qualities I'm assigning to David Wain sheerly based on my obsessive love of Wet Hot American Summer -  comes under  the studio system's thumb.  Or perhaps script sucked all along...

Aside from the bad script the main thing that struck me was that Jennifer Aniston constantly fails to be a movie star.  Her presence does not hold the big screen - it never has.  Even the small screen challenges her.  It was the ensemble nature of "Friends" which made it fun to watch - and truly any time Ross and Rachel were left alone on the screen the charm of the show fizzled.  Neither one is particularly funny (although David Schwimmer does an excellent job being an ass hole in Kissing the Fool).

Anniston exists solely to be the paradigm of airbrushed pop/glamour magazine cover girls.  There's a fascination with her in that medium that fails to translate to any other.  

The big problem - as desperate as she is to be funny, she isn't.  There's a seriousness to her that no end of "I'm letting my hair down and showing the world my wild side" roles will alleviate.   We've all known people who think they're funny but are not.  They try so hard.  It's an awful thing to watch - particularly in women.

But what's most interesting to me is my desire to watch Anniston's characters (or ostensibly her)  suffer.  I mean truly suffer in a "beneath this put together exterior I'm a fucking wreck" kinda way.   And I think it might be the one element to her character that would be both truthful and watchable - if she could just get to that place.  I think I need to see "The Good Girl"

I dated a woman with low self-esteem.  She was (and remains) beautiful, smart and an exceptionally social being.  But after a time - her self-esteem issues began to erode the foundation of our relationship - and by the end -  I'd become an out and out ass hole to her.

I don't think I'm usually an asshole  - and I don't generally like to make people suffer at my hands.  She liked me.  We were connected in a relationship.  And her lack of self esteem reflected on me.  It was a warped mirror in which i could see my own reflection.  And in that reflection I was a man who had allowed himself to become engaged and connected with a woman who didn't think very much of herself.  In fact, a woman who saw me as a better person than she was.  I was dating somebody "less" than I was.  I didn't think that.  But she did.  And it pissed me off.  And after a while I wanted to teach her a lesson - I wanted to hurt her.   So on our final night dating we went to West Hollywood together - and could there be any more apropos place to reveal one's inner sadist than West Hollywood.

All this is to say - some part of me wants to see Jennifer Aniston in real pain.  Everything else she does is fake.  Sometime it's necessary to wallow in doubt and self loathing…I think she's actually full of it.   But it's okay to hate yourself a little bit from time to time.  And if you're able to wake up the next day and go on - you'll know there's some inner element of ego or pride you can use to pull yourself up out of the muck and start to believe you're as good as any other mother fucker out there.

Reading Greg's blog (http://publicmusings.blogspot.com/) made me think comparatively about my two favorite shows on TV - Justified and Downton Abbey.

Greg writes well about Justified - effectively examining the grand scope of Justified's storytelling arsenal.  Justified doesn't fit neatly into any one genre definition.   The show dabbles in procedural (its weakest suit in my opinion), character profile, hardened bad ass criminal fun and, though Greg refers to it as Michael Mann mano vs. mano stuff - I believe he's really referring to its roots in westerns (a genre from which M. Mann has mined untold riches).  All of this is rightly true and and does make Justified one of the best show on TV.

So then what similarities does Justified share with Downton Abbey?  It must share something for me to like them both so much - but I'm having a tough time seeing it.

Downton Abbey's greatest strength is planting in its audience's mind the exact wants of each character involved.  This can come into play on both a micro or a macro level.  We know what Thomas wants - we know what Mary wants - we know what Matthew wants and all the show does is keep throwing up obstacles to keep our characters from getting to whence we know they're destined to go.

Some of these story lines have run out of believable obstacles to utilize - the audiences emotions having been frayed so thin countless times - there's no longer so much depth to plum.  For how long can Anna and Mr. Bates continue to toy with our emotions?