A Statement About UP, But Really Partly Cloudy

So UP rocks, sparkling reviews, Oscar shoo-in.

Blahdy blahdy blah blah.

I don't really think you need a post telling you all of that, since there have been thousands so far, so instead I am going to use this space to mention the less-talked about Partly Cloudy, the short that appears before UP in the theater and will undoubtedly be nominated for an Oscar of its own.

Let's just get it out of the way to start that for me, Pixar can pretty much do no wrong in all aspects, but especially especially in the short film arena. In fact, I was almost more excited to see the short than to see the feature. Not going to lie.

Partly Cloudy is the story of how babies are made-- all kinds of babies-- by the clouds and carried down to Earth by storks. The pretty clouds produce pretty babies; kittens, puppies, chicks, humans, while there is one lonely, dark cloud below who creates the more-or-less undesirable babies; porcupines, sharks, rams, electric eels. And this cloud's poor stork is harried, bruised, battered, stabbed and swallowed on a regular basis. The conflict comes when our cloud produces what is obviously a baby shark, and the stork takes off in a panic to one of the friendlier clouds. A friendly cloud who has already proven itself to produce football equipment. The cloud gets upset by the abandonment, but soon recovers when his friend returns with pads and a helmet to keep him safe while he carries the shark down to its mom.

What can I say about this film? Per usual, frakking glorious. Just a little parable about how sometimes you have to do crappy things, but if you have a friend who can get you through (a loyal friend, natch) it'll be all good in the end. Teared with joy, sent a copy over to Lady Liberty to say je t'aime.

Up next? Probably a breakdown of a little film called Tranformers, which I will probably see at midnight, or at least on opening day, with a certain Transformers geek that I don't live with. And I'm not talking about my brother.

A Statement About How I Met Your Mother

Yes, again. Get over it.

So we were displeased with the finale (well not displeased... disappointed), but after many more reviews of previous shows, we (you know... me) have a couple of more things to share about what has to be the most underrated show on television.

Similar to the aforementioned Gavin & Stacy, the show has created such a strong ensemble simply because the most obvious people are not in the driver's seat.

It turns out that Alyson Hannigan is a pretty huge deal--cult actress with comic book likenesses and everything, and the woman can act. The temptation to put her front and center in anything would be strong, but is something the casting directors of HIMYM were wise to avoid. Her strength lies in being a supporting player, in maintaining the heart of the show, and in bringing the main characters down a peg or two when necessary (see: every interaction ever between Willow Rosenberg and Buffy Summers). To have put her in the role of Robin, the more-or-less main "love interest" on HIMYM would have been a colossal misuse of Hannigan's powers.

Ditto for Jason Segel, who plays Hannigan's on-screen husband Marshall. To look at him on the show, one would have no idea that he is one of the Apatow Gods of Comedy, and that he had one of the more vulgar and disturbing roles in Knocked Up. Not to mention the fact that he wrote, starred in, and did full-frontal nudity in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. His supporting role in HIMYM is in no way a reflection of his talent, and does no injustice to his ability to be a very very funny man. Instead he is allowed to create a character (a character, I suspect, who is closer to his actual personality than any of his other personas) and build it with his own specifications, without any of the pressure of having to actually carry the show.

This post would go on for far, far too long if I started discussing the merits of Neil Patrick Harris, but suffice it to say he's established a new Gold Standard for the term entertainer in the past year.

When the five leads in How I Met Your Mother sit around their favorite bar table, you know you're in for a laugh riot (or at the very least, a good giggle). It's hard to believe, too, that the people sitting around the table playing those characters are legends in the making.

A Statement About True Blood

Okie doke, so this is going to be a potential cross-over post with that other blog I'm working on, but bear with me, because my worlds are about to collide.

True Blood came out on DVD last week, and lo and behold, the best library in the state (HAPLR, shmAPLR, I say to you) instantly had it available for staff consumption. You know, because we're that good. I started watching it, as I do, and at about three-quarters of the way through, have formed what I consider to be an educated opinion.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, it's more vamps vamps vamps, this time in Louisiana, this time "outed" to society, this time drinking bottles of blood in bars the way humans drink beer. No more secret societies, just vamps looking to live as (sometimes) healthy and productive members of society. Sometimes.

Enter Bill Compton, Civil War vet-turned-vamp who comes Back Home, to his family plantation from back in the day. Enter Sookie (rhymes with cookie) Stackhouse, virgin, waitress, telepath, naive southern belle. They are surrounded by the requisite cast of characters-- Sookie's friend Tara (filling the role of the Angry Black Best Friend), Sookie's brother Jason (the Neglected Ne'er Do Well), Sam the bar owner (who is madly in love with Sookie, but sleeping with Tara to soothe his... pain) Vamps who are good (mostly just Bill) and vamps who are bad ("mainstreaming" is for losers). Are we all stocked up? Good. I'm glad we didn't miss anyone.

A word about Sookie. Over at that other blog, my partner in crime and I just had a (relatively) spirited discussion about the Heroine (let me back up: this show is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, which fall loosely between the romance and mystery sections at your favorite bookseller). The evolution of the Romance Heroine has been marked in the past decade. Virgins are out, relatively experienced, gutsy broads (with interesting occupations!) are in. Which means that poor Sookie is way, way out.

It's intriguing to me how literally HBO and the show's creator, Alan Ball, are interpretting the romance novel cliches. I mean, I swear to God, the last ep I watched had newly de-virginized Sookie asking Bill if it's "always this way," and insisting that he tell her if she's doing something wrong. Bor-ing. Not to mention the cliches she herself has racked up: virgin because she could always here the thoughts of the boys trying to get in her pants, sexually abused as a child by her grandmother's brother, suddenly intrigued by a pale and very (literally) cold stranger who has just strolled into town.

I have often said that the Black Dagger Brotherhood books are everything Twilight should have been if they had, you know... been better. True Blood is everything Twilight would have been if they had been written by a romance novelist and not a Mormon (not that romance novelists can't be Mormons, too, but the ones who aren't don't necessarily have religious strictures to adhere to).

As a show True Blood is hard not to watch, but just because it's crackalicious doesn't make it good, too.

A Statement About the Finale Fever (Mildly Spoilery. Beware, or something)

It's that time of year kids!
Upfront time, "will our show be renewed?" time, "who is going to die on my favorite show?" time, "will I still care when this show comes back on the air in the fall of 2012?" time.

Maybe that's an exaggeration, but in the case of shows like Lost, January 2010 seems like an awfully long time away. It might not be, considering it might take that long to find all of the pieces of the Island after it was blown up by, you know, a hydrogen bomb. Poor Juliet. Poor Sawyer. Poor us, who have to wait 7 interminable months to find out what the frak just happened.

I think the couple of months worth of brain regeneration (and charts!) will help us understand that the finale actually told us more than we think on initial impact. I have a feeling a review of the Jacob-y moments in each of our characters' pasts will yield a great deal of info (that will be helpful in the next season, without a doubt). I have not yet read the good Doctor's final analysis, but his points last week were both illuminating and so mind-bending I might actually be glad to have all this time off to rest my brain. It hurts, but in a good way.

Another finale I watched the other night was How I Met Your Mother, which makes for the twelve-thousandth time I've watched Alyson Hannigan this week (future posts will discuss how awesome she is, but for now that is neither here nor there). A couple of things struck me about the finale: First of all, I had read previously that they shot the scenes for the last show back in January so that Hannigan would not have to come back from maternity leave. A lot of bloggers have talked about how distracting the pregnancies of the two female leads have been, but I have to say it was more disconcerting for me to see them less pregnant last night than the week before. Cobie Smulders had no discernable bump in January, and even Hannigan looked less pregnant than she had when she stormed out of the bar after Barney's offensive joke a couple of weeks ago (this was the reason she was absent for several weeks-- she was mad at Barney).

The other thing that really got me about this finale was how much I was waiting for progress-- a great ending to the goat story, some kind of Robin/Barney closure (or opening) and for Ted to meet at least another potential "One." When his ex-fiancée Stella appeared a couple of weeks ago, fans went nuts thinking that she, indeed, comes back into Ted's life and is the mother of his long-suffering children. Let us be clear: she is so not the mother. But the ending to that episode, as misleading as it was, would have been a better place to end the season. A big "Huh?" would have sat better than me than the benign acceptance that Ted has a new job as a Professor, and that the Mother is one of his students. Eh.

I suppose that's all for now (I mean, isn't that enough for you people??), but look! It wasn't all shiny, "this rocks" pontificating. Glorious.

A Statement About the Star Trek

And so our love/lust affair with JJ Abrams and his sexy genius brain continues well into its seventh year.

Goodness, gracious. Where to begin?

As promised, Mother's Day was spent in the Lewis/Barstow conjoined household at the cinema, where glorious Transformers trailers and buttered popcorn were enjoyed by all. Except for those who didn't eat the popcorn and those who have no desire to see Transformers. But I digress.

I don't think I need to go into the whole "it's an origin story, starting at the beginning, rebooting the whole franchise which was sorely in need of rebooting." Do I? Well, tough. I'm not going to.

JJ Abrams, henceforth known to The Move Girl as God, was not a Trekkie growing up, and was in fact a Star Wars dork, and for that we love him all the more. It made it even more palatable for Star Wars dorks like me to have no qualms about going to see a Star Trek movie. If anyone was going to make us love the Trek, it was going to be God. Yay God.

So we'll skip to what God does best... cheeky geektastic dialogue, cameos by Meghan Rotundi Blumberg/Carrie Bowman Flinkman, Greg Grunberg, that lame chick from the last season of Alias, and the dude who played Andrian Lazarey. I somehow now have simultaneous crushes on Kirk, Sulu, and of all people, Spock, who a week ago you could not have induced me to touch with a ten-foot pole.

Having gone to the cinema with three generations of people, some of whom had seen previous Trek films and some of whom hadn't, and walking out with everyone raving like lunatics about how excellent it was, is no mean feat.

Go see Star Trek. Now.

Also, a few housekeeping notes:
Yay, Lady Liberty! We salute your blogging prowess.
And if you have a burning desire to read what I think about trashy romance novels, go here. If you don't, then don't.
I know I was supposed to write something critical, but since I didn't, just wait until next time! When we will inevitably talk about how awesome the Lost finale was... *sigh*...

A Statement About the Tone

OK, so way baaaaaack in the day, I wrote a post about how I had gone all negative, and I was sorry, and I was going to be more positive. It turns out I went extreme in the other direction-- it seems from the look of the most recent posts that I <3 everything.

Ha.

So I'm going to come back later this week, and will have something critical to say about... something. Time to flex the "actually, I didn't like this" muscle.

Also, Mother's Day in the Barstow/Lewis household (yes, it is ONE household these days) means STAR TREK. Because that's what happens when you give birth to geeks (or, as young Sam would have me say, a geek and a nerd). Anyway, since there could not possibly be ANYTHING wrong with that movie (to be discussed next week) I have to come up with something critical. Fast.

A Statement About the Gilmores

OK, so maybe I'm having some sort of johnny-come-lately WB experience, but in addition to the now decade old (!!) seasons of the Buffster, I also find myself watching the slightly younger, but no-less WB-in-its-heyday fantasmagorical Gilmore Girls. Having caught (and enjoyed) several individual episodes over the years, it is no surprise to find it, in its entirety, wholly enjoyable. What's even cooler, though, is that I have been watching it with my grandmother. NP's cool factor has been discussed over the years as being exponentially higher than most grandmothers, but this takes the cake.

I have to confess to having not seen any of Season 1 and only selected parts of Season 2 (including the "what the frak?" shocking finale), but Season 3 has been stellar. While totally unrealistic, the relationship between Rory and Lorelai is snap-crackle-pop effortless... For those not familiar with the story, 16-year-old Lorelai got pregnant back in the day, refused to marry the babydaddy, and now here we are, 17 years later, while her remarkably well-adjusted offspring (Rory) is preparing to go off to Harvard. Offsetting the mother-daughter dynamic is another mother-daughter pairing, the distinctly uncomfortable relationship between Lorelai and her own mother, Emily, and the often times icy interplay between Lorelai and her father.

Adding comic relief are the members of the small hamlet where Rory and Lorelai live-- town oddities, weirdos, and eccentrics that do nothing if not keep things interesting. And the relationship between Lorelai and Luke, the grouchy owner of the local diner where mom and daughter eat four meals a day, features some of the best chemistry (and unconsumated oompf) seen on TV in a long time. Like, a really, really long time.

The Gilmore Girls is 21st century comfort food-- smiles, stars and butterfly family relations... only not... but served with a lightness that makes you know that everything will be ok. No matter what. Now that's something I think we can all get behind.