The itsy-bitsy spider

There is a tiny brown spider running around the wall behind my computer.  It is smaller than a penny with tiny, delicate yet speedy legs.  As a fan of Charlotte’s Web (the novel, not either of the films), I can not help but wonder if this spider is up to something.

No cryptic messages have emerged in spidersilk in the doorway to my office, but this spider has a knack for appearing just as I am finishing something; sending an email, printing a document for my boss’s review, closing a window on the internet.  As I click the button to close the window, the spider starts racing up the wall from behind my desk.  It runs as fast as its eight little legs can carry it, in a rough half circle that from my vantage point, draws a little halo around my computer screen, before disappearing below the level of my desk again.  He or she seems to wait in the shadow between my desk and the wall, waits patiently until I have completed yet another task before taking off on another victory lap.

Here is hoping that the custodians, upon successfully emptying my trash can, don’t squish this cheerleading spider.  Maybe, in the spirit of mutual support and encouragement, I should at the end of the day, lift it up and drop it into the grass outside.

A case of the blues for Grey’s

Grey’s Anatomy used to be the flagship television show for ABC. Now, it is starting to feel a little like the Titanic. People I know who have watched the show religiously are deserting, leaping overboard. They aren’t waiting for a possible lifeboat (a new show) or waiting to see if all the water can be pumped out of the hull. They are simply deserting.

I nearly joined them this past week. The much hyped 2 hour episode of Grey’s was actually a supersized spin-off pilot episode crammed in between random scenes of a regualar Grey’s episode. As a writer, I am a big fan of pilots; there is an artform to starting stories in medias res, teaching the audience the rules of a new world and establishing forward story momentum, without adding lots of heavy exposition. I look forward to pilot season, because you can learn everything you need to know about a show from its pilot.

This spin-off is going to be bad. The pilot was awful. The dialouge was bad, the exposition obvious and the plot predictable. If you are predictable 30 minutes in to your television show, you will always be predictable. The premise could have been interesting, a medical co-op with different kinds of doctors working together on the same cases, if the medicine had been the emphasis, but it isn’t. The characters might have been interesting, if only they weren’t so self-aware and so willing to lay their most intimate of feelings out on the table for the audience, their co-workers and their new friend Addison, to see.

Part of the joy of a pilot is to become immersed in a new environment, a new set of relationships and complications. I never felt I had that opportunity, because in between scenes of this spin-off, was the regular Grey’s episode, squeezed and heavily cut down, until it felt like an afterthought. I thought the Grey’s episode was actually one of the first in awhile that held some weight, that wasn’t rocky and waterlogged, but this pilot was a distraction. Even the color palettes of the episodes clashed.

As bad as I thought the new spin-off was, it wasn’t until I read the “review” in the NY Times that I realized what had really bugged me about it. All of the women in this new spin-off are flaky, ditzy and lost. There is not a single anchor, not a single woman who is sure of herself. On Grey’s, the female characters all have their moments of doubt, in their personal lives or in their careers, but they take turns having these break downs, leaning on each other, and being the strong person. Even Meridith, to whom this review is not especially kind, has been a shoulder to cry on, especially for Christina. When Christina was pregnant and planning on an abortion, Meridith was “her person.” When Izzy was laid out on the bathroom floor after Denny died, it was Meredith that helped her up.

The women of this pilot are all floundering. Addision is running away from her ex-husband, her ex-dirty-mistress and a shot at becoming chief. She is hearing voices in the elevator and in the course of the episode, finds out that she missed her chance to have children. She is also letting a guy she just met stick needles in her face and his tounge in her mouth. Her med-school friend works with her ex-husband and denies that it is at all awkward. The third female lead, a pshycotherapist, not only has emotional issues due to her ex leaving her and marrying a 25 year old, but has a long conversation in which she declares “my profession is dying out out” and talks about all the ways in which her medical expertise is useless.

Yet, the writers expect us to believe that there is solace for these three women.  Every day, the young desk clerk (a fetus as he is later called), walks through the professional waiting room in swim trunks on his way to surf away his lunch hour. So much for “no shirt, no shoes, no service” rules; these three grown women sit and openly ogle, as close to the line of sexual harassment as possible, and in the parting shot, lounge as if in a sexual afterglow . Seriously?  All it takes to satisfy women facing personal, reproductive and professional crisis is a little young, bare skin?

I am disappointed. I am frustrated. I wish Grey’s could return to the intial premise- doctors in their internships struggling to find their way in a new place and a new career. Lost and searching for answers, the interns of Seattle Grace found each other and became a family.  It has been downhill from there.  That struggle was infinetly more interesting than a hodgepoge of sexual mishaps we have been stuck with this season and something the audience understood and gravitated towards.  Insane story lines like Denny’s cut LVAT wire and Meridith’s episode long brush with death aren’t helping.  Izzy’s encounter with her daughter, Meredith’s struggles with her family and even Cristina and Burke’s impending wedding woes are dynamic enough to keep us interested, so dear Grey’s writers, stop trying so hard and return to what you are good at.

Movie Review: Hot Fuzz

I didn’t hate Shaun of the Dead.

This should be taken as a glowing recommendation from me, as zombie movies in general scare the living daylights out of me. Something about the unceasing, relentless march of the dead makes me think a little too hard about the impending and inevitable end we all face. Or something. But Shaun of the Dead made me laugh. A lot. Almost enough to forget about the walking metaphors for the fragility of life.

So, Hot Fuzz, a new movie from the same group of people as Shaun of the Dead, this time without zombies, was an exciting prospect. Surrounded by a comedy loving cast of characters, I set out this weekend to see it. My sides still hurt from laughing so hard. The movie was excellent for all the same reasons as its predecessor; humor, farce, gross inappropriateness and a fantastic cast of characters working their asses of to keep the movie from ever getting to serious.

Synopsis: Nicholas Angel is a great cop. Top of his class, most arrests of anyone on the London force, enthusiastic about the law, even when wounded in the course of duty. So of course, the rest of the force hates him for making them look bad. As a “reward” for his outstanding service, Angel is given a promotion to Sergeant. The catch: his new office is in Sandford, a picturesque town, standing winner of “Village of the Year,” and with no reported crimes on the books in over 15 years. Angel’s new partner, Danny, is the son of the police chief and dreams of being the kind of cop usually played by Will Smith or Bruce Willis in action movies. As series of grisly “accidental deaths” brings Nicholas Angel and Danny closer together and further from the appearance of an ideal town, it becomes clear that it will take more than Nicholas’s usual brand of calm, rational and unarmed approach to police work to solve the case.

This movie has a number of highly quotable lines and a large cast of memorable characters. It was slightly challenging to keep ALL of the townspeople straight, but the really important ones stand out. There were also a number of references to great (and not so great) cop movies, some obvious and some very subtle, so I am sure that a true connoisseur of this genre will surely pick up more of these two-percenters than I did (I got the Chinatown reference! Yay for the classics).

The plot twists and turns, the way a good cop/mystery movie should and the friendship between the partners regularly skirts the homo-social line, (as it should). The pace is great and the jokes keep flying almost as fast as the buck shot and cutlery but even the resolution of the mystery was a hysterical send up of the entire genre. The spoof never became the spoofed, in my opinion, which made this film all the more successful.

Fellow contributors, any thoughts on a rating system we should use? I would give this movie two thumbs up, four out of five stars, a green light or whatever else we might want to use. Thoughts?