Late to the Party #11: HBO's War Trilogy

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around.

The miniseries is a slowly dying format.  They were first introduced to North American television around 1974 with the CBC's National Dream, and reached prominence with the format's first blockbuster hit in ABC's Roots.  For those first few years, the miniseries was primarily a way to adapt popular novels to the small screen, and they resulted in astronomical ratings success for the networks that aired them.  Through the 1990s, the format remained popular, especially during sweeps period, but around the 2000s they gradually started to wane as the television landscape changed.  Nowadays, you can still find a handful of them every year -- and some, like History Channel's Hatfields & McCoys, still produce high numbers -- but they've mostly been corralled to a very tiny number of networks.

One of those networks that still has the luxury of producing miniseries is HBO, whose latest foray into the form, Olive Kitteridge, premieres in a few days.  And when the words "HBO" and "miniseries" are mentioned in close proximity to one another, Band of Brothers is probably the first that comes to mind.  The Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg-produced series was a big deal at the time -- its budget of about $125 million made it the most expensive miniseries production at the time it was created -- and it was met with a popularity to match that hype.  In fact, its DVD box set is still one of the best selling of all time, having made approximately $250 million worth in sales.

True to its name, Band of Brothers is about brotherhood.  It tells the true story of Easy Company, a crew of paratroopers in World War II, following their journey from training in Curahee to victory in Europe.  Throughout its 10-episode run, we're constantly shown that the safety of the whole matters more than the safety of the individual.  These are men who will do anything to protect the guys they're fighting with, and no matter how dire any situation becomes, it's always slightly leavened by the fact that these people are in it together.  Though the cast is huge, and they initially seem like an amorphous mass of faces, the writers do a great job of giving each of them tiny flashes of characterization that are easy to identify with and latch on to.  (It certainly doesn't hurt that they're played by actors, such as Damien Lewis and Michael Fassbender, who would later go on to greater fame.)  These are high-stakes situations that Band of Brothers depicts, and seeing funny, likable characters thrown into them make them even more gripping.

There's an episodic quality to the series, passing from major military event to major military event with little interludes of downtime tucked between them.  It's in those action sequences where the Band of Brothers' blockbuster budget really starts to show.  There isn't much time wasted in getting to the fireworks factory either.  "Day of Days," the second episode of the series, depicts the events that occurred when Easy Company landed in Normandy, and it's a brutal, propulsive hour that features nonstop action.  All of it is excellently staged and edited too, as a flurry of bullets fly, dirt kicks up everywhere, and soldiers dash through trenches while dodging the carnage.  It hardly lets up from there either -- from the two big setpieces in "Carentan" to the botched operation in "Replacements," the first half of Band of Brothers is characterized by high-adrenaline, action movie running and gunning.

While the second half still contains some breathtaking action, it slows down and starts to really dig into single-character focus episodes.  Though every episode technically has one or two main characters, it's not until sixth episode, "Bastogne," that the format becomes sharper and more experimental.  The Battle of the Bulge is one of the most famous battles of World War II, so the choice to show it from the perspective of Easy Company medic Eugene "Doc" Roe was a risky, but ultimately successful one.  "Bastogne" gives an excellent insight into the difficulty of being a military medic.  Roe may not be a soldier, but he's right there running through the frontlines along with them, putting himself in harm's way to try and keep everyone alive.  But throughout the hour, the losses build (visually displayed by the pile of bodies that gets higher every time Roe returns to a nearby post), and it's clear how futile the effort to save everyone is.  It's an unrelentingly bleak job that gets a spotlight in this unrelentingly bleak episode.

"Bastogne" may be a grim affair, but most of Band of Brothers is rimmed with a golden glow, despite the body count.  That's where Spielberg's influence really shines through, in its depiction of World War II as the Great War we're always told that it is.  You can see it in the reverent introductory segments at the beginning of each episode, which feature interviews with the real life versions of the members of Easy Company who were still alive at the time.  Characters are given brief moments of unlikability, but the series ultimately underlines how heroic they were for fighting in the first place.  The war may have been perilous and terrifying, but it was also just and necessary.

If Band of Brothers was about why we fight, then 2010's The Pacific -- Hanks and Spielberg's spiritual successor to Band of Brothers, depicting the Pacific Theater of World War II -- is about why we shouldn't fight.  Fitting with the real history of the battles in the East, the depiction of war in The Pacific is far more brutal than in Band of Brothers.  At times, it feels more like a horror show than a war drama.  The malicious jungle, the endless rain, the torrents of blood, the piles of mutilated corpses, the small prospect of a victory -- every episode feels like 60 minutes of pure nightmare fuel.  It's so unrelenting and pummeling that it's hard to even believe that these events took place around the same time frame as the those portrayed in Brothers.

Narratively speaking, the series takes a different approach as well.  Where Band of Brothers told a story about a massive ensemble, The Pacific focuses on three main characters: Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), and John Basilone (Jon Seda).  The former may contain the more endearing characters, but the latter was able to tap into the psychology of its leads with far greater success.  Over the course of 10 episodes, the series digs into the poetic tortured soul of Leckie, the green timidity of Sledge, and the action hero valor of Basilone.  And they all have wholly satisfying arcs, particularly Sledge, who becomes the closest thing the miniseries has to a true protagonist, as he transforms from a fearful rookie to a hardened Marine who has seen too much.

The rhythm of the story is much wavier than the relatively straightforward Band of Brothers too.  Since Leckie, Sledge, and Basilone were all in different regiments in the 1st Marine Division, even entering the war at different times, they're rarely ever in the same location.  Episodes ebb and flow, shifting the proportion of time each character gets, or sometimes devoting an entire hour to just one character and his regiment.  While it may take time to get accustomed to The Pacific's bobbing cadence, it builds nicely, concluding with one of the most powerful episodes of television I've even seen.  It's a post-war denouement, showing how the weight of the previous nine episodes has affected these characters, and it's quietly moving in a way that television rarely is.

Different in intensity and trajectory though they may be, The Pacific still feels like it's of a piece with Band of Brothers.  It's got the same high production values (another record breaking budget of $250 million), the same talking head segments that lead in to each episode, the same sense of Spielbergian prestige.  The Pacific is like Band of Brothers' darker, more soulful brother.

On the other hand, 2008's Generation Kill feels like an entirely different entity than Brothers and The Pacific, partially because it's not a production from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.  This miniseries comes from David Simon, hot off the end of his towering masterpiece The Wire, and he brings his journalistic sense of hyper-realism to the story of the U.S. Marine Corps' 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the first phase of the Iraq War.  He even uses a Rolling Stone writer, Evan Wright (whose real-life counterpart wrote the book on which the miniseries is based), as his POV character.

Simon bring his worldview along as well.  If The Pacific questioned whether what the Marines were doing was worth it, Generation Kill is an interrogation looking to know if what these Marines had to do was even right.  Unlike World War II, the war in Iraq wasn't a just war, and David Simon uses that to his advantage, burying the series in the moral grayness he's so comfortable with exploring.  The enemy isn't just men in uniforms -- now there's the prospect of civilians pointing guns at the Marines as well.  Danger is at a higher level, which only widens the capacity for these men to do amoral or foolish things to score a "win."

With Generation Kill, David Simon took his pet themes about institutions and power structures and translated them to the Iraq War.  This is a world where there's a huge disparity between the people who make decisions and those who are ultimately effected by those decisions.  Leaders only care about numbers that will make them "look good," subordinates care about lives and making the smart move.  "Can you believe that retard is in charge of people?," one character says about his higher-up after a poor decision, and it's a major question that implicitly pops up throughout the miniseries.  Most of the people in a position of power in the 1st Battalion are hypocritical, clueless, and blind to the point where it seems impossible that they got anywhere in life.  But really, that could be extrapolated to be about the American government at-large at the time.  Simon's hatred of the Bush Administration is palpable in Generation Kill.  As a writer, he has a habit of becoming a little didactic, but here he smartly puts his opinions in the mouth of Ray (brilliantly played by James Ransone), the doofus to whom nobody lends much of an ear.  It's an effective, entertaining way for Simon to get his point across without being preachy.

Instead of the brave, affable heroes we meet in Band of Brothers and The Pacific, Generation Kill presents many of the Marines as a bunch of meathead jocks.  They joke about shooting dogs for no reason, spout racist invective, and have very few qualms about the idea of killing innocent Iraqi citizens.  In another context, these would not be good people.  With a big gun and an American flag stitched on their uniforms, they're the protectors of our nation.

But the series is also notable for the subtle things it has to say about warfare.  Where The Pacific throws the war in Europe in stark relief by showing the nightmare of the Pacific Theater, Generation Kill draws constant comparisons between the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Some of the characters even served in Afghanistan, and their time there never comes up without there also being a mention of how much smoother things ran there.  By comparison, the Iraq War is an absolute trainwreck.   When viewed in close proximity to the twin Hanks and Spielberg WWII series, it's easy to see how much war has changed over the decades.  The technology has advanced and the weapons have become so powerful that it's easy to kill an enemy without even knowing what they look like.  (It's ironic, then, that there aren't any deaths of any main or secondary characters in Generation Kill.  Lots of Iraqis sure do die though.)

With these three miniseries, HBO was able to make their own approximation of blockbuster action films, complete with expansive casts and expensive action sequences.  We've seen all of the themes they explore before, but Band of Brothers ("war is fought by heroes!"), The Pacific ("war is hell..."), and Generation Kill ("why are we even here?") had the liberty of being seven to 10 episodes, allowing them to stretch out and dig in to those themes.  You just can't get that on the big screen.

Late to the Party #10: Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)

Welcome to Gilmore Girls Week!  A new article related to Gilmore Girls will be posted every day at 8:00 AM EST until Friday.

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around.

When I was a little 11 year-old kid, I had a huge crush on Alexis Bledel.  (Who am I kidding? I still do.)  For that reason and that reason alone, I'd seen a few episodes of Gilmore Girls during its original airing.  Watching it was like doing spy work -- I felt like I had to "sneak" and watch only bits and pieces of episodes, lest I be caught viewing a WB show with "girls" in the title.  From those cursory viewings, along spending much of the following years reading pop culture websites, I knew many of the show's broad plot strokes.  It wasn't until Bunheads came around in 2012 that I was fully introduced to the work of Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.  Anybody who's been reading this blog long enough knows how much I loved Bunheads, and its cancellation left me with a need to satisfy my Amy Sherman-Palladino fix, a need that finally made me decide to watch Gilmore Girls in its entirety.

Because I worked backwards, it was interesting to see where the Amy Sherman-Palladino train first got moving after watching Bunheads.  All the signposts I became familiar with on Bunheads were there from the beginning in Gilmore Girls: the fast-paced dialogue, the primarily female cast, the arcane pop culture references.  Like Bunheads, Gilmore Girls was a balance between small-town drama and family drama, and as with all shows that fall into the former category, it made its setting -- the sleepy, quirky town of Stars Hollow -- a character of its own.  But its true strengths lied in the show's elements of the latter.

Gilmore Girls was a story of generational transference, and it contrasted the parental relationship between Lorelai and her parents, Richard and Emily, with that of Rory and Lorelai.  Lorelai's strict upbringing was characterized by a cold distance from her parents, so when she got pregnant at 16 and ran off to Stars Hollow, she decided to raise Rory in the exact opposite way.  Through Lorelai's relationship with her parents, the show explored how disappointment, regret, and pain could cloud things like love.  But through Lorelai's relationship with her daughter, they showed how unbreakable the bond between mother and daughter could be.  Close relationships between a parent and their child had been depicted before, but none as deeply or complexly as Rory and Lorelai's was.  In just one exchange of dialogue between the two of them, you could instantly see the years of rapport that they've built with each other.  They had the same mannerisms, the same reference points, the same tastes -- Rory and Lorelai weren't just mother and daughter, they were best friends too.

It's that kind of character relationship that carried the story even when the rest of the show was finding its footing in the first season.  Even still, it didn't take long to hit its stride, right around the time of the sixth episode, "Rory's Birthday Parties."  There's something very pure and simple about season one of Gilmore Girls.  It had that heartwarming quality that many WB shows of the time contained, a quality whose last vestiges can be found on a few ABC Family programs, but has otherwise slowly disappeared in the years since the show premiered.  People argue over which seasons comprise its peak phase, but the Chilton years (seasons one through three) are the chunk that feel the most like "classic Gilmore Girls," and the episodes that fans go back to the most are likely to appear in this portion.  In just those three seasons, the show exhibited so many different modes it was capable of operating in: it could do small-town charm ("Cinnamon's Wake," "The Bracebridge Dinner"), family drama ("Forgiveness and Stuff," "Secrets and Loans," "There's the Rub"), romantic entanglements ("Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers," "Teach Me Tonight"), breezy larks ("Road Trip to Harvard," "Richard in Stars Hollow"), and everything in between ("They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?").  But in all of them, you could find an easygoing, comfort food vibe that made each episode so easy to swallow.

Despite the light, airy feel that marks all of her work, Amy Sherman-Palladino knows how to pack an emotional punch when she needs to.  I learned that the hard way with the "My banana's name is Frankie" moment in the Bunheads finale, but Gilmore Girls is crammed with instances of heart-wrenching drama.  It mostly did so by mining conflict from its aforementioned themes of generational divide, both from Lorelai's struggles to reconnect with Richard and Emily but also from her dealing with the responsibilities of guiding Rory through the hardships and heartbreaks of adolescence.  The drama comes naturally on Gilmore Girls.  Characters don't get upset with each other just for the sake of having something to push the story forward; the conflict derives from a place of deep, genuine hurt.

The show faced a problem that all long-running programs that start with a teen in high school face, after Rory graduated from Chilton at the end of season three and headed to Yale at the beginning of season four.  But this was an especially dangerous move for Gilmore Girls, since the series thrived on its scenes of Rory and Lorelai bonding and bouncing off of each other.  Though the proximity of Yale and Stars Hollow allowed for the two of them to still see each other, their storylines began to develop into almost completely separate entities, an indication of the model the show would follow for its last four years.  Despite the danger of less Rory-Lorelai scenes, season four still managed to be pretty great.  It's the show's funniest season, featuring episodes like "Chicken or Beef?" and "Girls in Bikinis, Boys Doin' the Twist," and the entire back half is just a roaring stretch of television.

That stretch closes out with "Raincoats and Recipes," an episode that leads to the twin bombshells of Lorelai kissing Luke and Rory sleeping with a married Dean, the latter of which causes a fight between Rory and Lorelai that bleeds into the beginning of season five.  The fifth season is my personal favorite, mostly because of how dramatically satisfying it is.  It's almost as if Amy Sherman-Palladino and her crew of writers made season four so comedic and fluffy in order to turn things around and knock us off of our feet even more with season five.  This season was all about the show's ground shifting, and almost every relationship that stood upon it -- Richard and Emily, Lorelai and Rory, Lorelai and Emily, Rory and Emily, Lorelai and Luke -- was shaken up.  In doing so, the show finally started tapping into the visual and emotional poetry that Bunheads would later prove itself capable of achieving.

Most television shows, particularly network ones that have to craft 22-episode seasons, are a very collaborative process.  However, Gilmore Girls was so clearly the vision of Amy Sherman-Palladino who, along with her husband Daniel, wrote and directed many of the episodes, and even took passes at ones they weren't credited for.  By the time season six rolled around, the workload became overwhelming.  This led to some behind-the-scenes drama between the two of them and The WB, who wanted them to do more work instead of letting them hire more writers.  They couldn't come to an agreement, and the Palladinos decided to step down as showrunners for the seventh season while in the middle of writing the sixth.  There were some grumblings about the show losing its touch right around the start of the Yale years, but many fans consider season six to be a complete drop-off in quality, and some cite the fact that Amy Sherman-Palladino knew she wasn't going to come back while writing it as a reason for the decline.  To them, the events of "Partings," which included Lorelai breaking off her engagement with Luke and sleeping with Christopher, are an example of Palladino salting the earth for the new showrunners.

Others just think the show was running out of steam regardless.  However, I think we're in need of a critical reappraisal of season six, which isn't the show's finest year, but is still a good season of television.  Season six is basically divided in half by its two most divisive storylines: Lorelai and Rory's extended fight and the arrival of April Nardini.  I'll defend the latter first, since it's probably the most controversial thing the show ever did.  I understand the natural inclination to retch at the idea of Luke discovering that he has a daughter he never knew about, but the storyline skillfully took something that feels extremely soapy and made it very "un-TV."  It's a complicating factor, but one that is imbued with enough subtlety and honest emotion that it doesn't feel like just a plot device.  In its later years, the show got very good at long-form plotting, and the way that the April story added to the slowly accumulating problems with Lorelai and Luke's engagement made their breakup in the finale well built to.

The fight between Rory and Lorelai was an even greater example of the meticulous accruement of story during the Chilton years.  It may have seemed like it was forced and inorganic, until you realize that the growing distance between the two of them was something that began way back in season four.  The fact that their squabble didn't end quickly like it would've in the early years doesn't make the conflict out of character, it just makes the separation hurt more.

Staff writer David S. Rosenthal took over as showrunner as the Palladinos stepped down, and the biggest problem that the show faced in its final season was the question, "would Amy and Daniel have done this?" lingering around every plot point.  Clearly, Rosenthal and the rest of the staff were handcuffed by Christopher and Lorelai now being together, even though the show's end game was contingent upon a happy ending for Luke and Lorelai.  As a result, they had to figure out a reason to dissolve Lorelai's relationship with Christopher and bring her back with Luke, and the execution was clumsily handled.  Additionally, though the show was never heavy on plot, many of the episodes felt logy, a quality underlined by an absence of the quick repartee that marked the show's first six seasons.  Even still, season seven is not terrible, and once all of the wreckage from the season six finale gets cleared up, the show settles into a lovely run for the last handful of episodes.

Before the drama with The WB, Amy Sherman-Palladino once said that she could have seen the show lasting beyond seven seasons.  But it's good that it ended when it did, even if the final season had the misfortune of carrying on without her.  As it stands, Gilmore Girls is a perfect encapsulation of one girl's adolescence -- mapping out Rory's start at Chilton to her graduation from Yale -- and a mother fully growing into adulthood via the process of guiding her daughter through that coming of age.  They say that you prefer whichever of the Gilmore girls you're closer to in age at the time you're watching the show, and that theory holds for me.  As a senior in college at the time of burning through the show last year, I found that Rory's stories resonated with me far greater than Lorelai's did.  (Being in college could also possibly be the explanation for why I'm so fond of the Yale years too.)  Many people find Rory to be a character who's increasingly difficult to like as the show goes on, but I found her arc as the golden child who slightly flounders before finding her way again to be incredibly moving.

Like many other network classics of its era -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, The X-Files -- Gilmore Girls is unwieldy and bloated in a way that its cable contemporaries aren't.  It had a couple of lesser seasons, and many fans argue that it could've ended sooner, but when it was operating at the peak of its powers, it was an undeniable classic.  Its top tier episodes stand up there with the best television of the previous decade, and in a period defined by violent, dark shows, its family-friendly small-town drama made it stand out among its peers.  With Gilmore Girls, Amy Sherman-Palladino didn't just construct a story for one-time viewing; she crafted an entire world to come back to again and again.


Gilmore Girls Week continues tomorrow at 8:00 AM EST with a piece on season four's "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais."

Late to the Party #9: My So-Called Life (1994-95)

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around.

One of my biggest dreams, that I keep shoved down in the deep recesses of my mind because it's never going to actually happen, is to create a high school drama.  It's something I've thought about for as long as I can remember, and who knows, maybe I'll grow out of it when I get older.  But to me, there's no greater desire I have than to create something that has an emotional effect on others in the same way that my favorite works of art have on me.  (It's part of the reason why I write these blog posts, and look at me failing miserably!)  For better or worse, my high school years were the ones where I felt things the most deeply, and I'd specifically want to be able to reach those who are going through the same thing.

When you think about it, it's kind of crazy that television has existed as an art form for so long and we've gotten so few high school dramas, and even less truly great ones.  Still, even some of those only approach high school life in roundabout ways.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my second favorite show of all time, but the three seasons that took place at Sunnydale High buried metaphors about the high school experience in its monsters of the week.  Friday Night Lights, another great one, is more of a small town drama, and even a family drama centered around the Taylors, before it could be classified as a true high school drama.  Even the wonderful and also canceled-too-soon Freaks and Geeks pitches itself enough on the side of comedy to where it's certainly a high school show, but not necessarily a drama.  In that sense, ABC's cult hit My So-Called Life is the truest -- and possibility best -- example of the form.  It's so good that watching it has almost squashed my desire to create a high school drama of my own, because I can't imagine ever making something that surpasses it.

Where something like Freaks and Geeks was a nostalgic stroll through the pains and joys of high school, My So-Called Life is a headlong rush into the maelstrom of emotions that seem to be a part of adolescence's default package.  Never before have I seen such an accurate depiction of the teenage temperament in its fully saturated glory.  When you watch any episode, you run the risk of experiencing a dull ache wondering how the show can have a such a keen eye for internal details.  How the lust of a crush feels so raw and tangible, but how the pain of unrequited love feels even more so.  How friendships can be so mercurial.  How adults seem completely alien, to the point where it's basically impossible to imagine they were ever your age, or felt the same things you feel.

Of course, there are also so many things about it that are uniquely 90s.  Some of those elements date the show in a bad way -- Angela's parents freaking out in the pilot over Rickie being bisexual feels so hilariously antiquated, and at one point somebody says the line "that is like so known," which is a phrase that sounds painful to 2014 ears.  But in general, its 90s-ness gives the show even more texture and specificity.  Even from a structural standpoint, the show is indicative of the time period during which it aired.  The first and only season is definitely serialized, but it came before the post-Sopranos boom of heavily serialized storytelling, so the arcs sort of amble about in an oblique way.  The show is almost like a series of teen short stories that accumulate into an overarching narrative, a style that the television landscape has started to circle back around to with shows like Mad Men.  It was also very interesting stylistically, proceeding with a kind of daydream logic.  The hazy mood, the ubiquitous narration, the occasional reverie -- it all works so well because adolescence is almost like its own form of magical realism.  Even when My So-Called Life wasn't being "real," it still felt real.

It takes on this bleary, ruminative air because it's essentially the world as seen through the eyes of Angela Chase (Claire Danes).  Angela's more of a dreamer than a doer, and most of the episodes are framed around the observations she has about her life and the environment around her via narration.  It's a device that can be disastrous if employed poorly, but here, the narration is such an essential part of understanding who she is.  Sometimes it's so attuned to the small human behaviors that only teens notice because they spend so much time being self-conscious, but other times it's the kind of faux-profound musings we'd expect from a 15-year-old.  That balance is an important point, because when I was watching these episodes, I was struck by Angela's normalcy.  For the most part she's a regular, well-adjusted teen, and the show was never afraid to indulge in the emotional highs and lows that all teens face.  Angela is an extremely moody person -- not unlike Dana Brody on Homeland, or any other sullen teen that annoys most of the internet these days -- but it's not the only side of her.  She's capable of being taciturn with her parents, but then having a deep moment of understanding with them; she can sulk to a song by The Cranberries one second and giddily dance to The Violent Femmes the next; and she can show great kindness and great selfishness in equal amounts.  It's one of the most well-rounded depictions of a teenager that I've ever seen, and even when she's not likable, Angela Chase is always relatable.

Part of that comes from Claire Danes' skills as an actress.  It's hard to wrap one's head around the fact that she was only 15 years old during most of the filming of this show, because she's just so darn good.  Angela feels like a real, three-dimensional character because Danes is able to sell her emotions so effectively.  She's got such an expressive face -- to the point where her crying has become an internet meme -- and it's just fascinating to sit there and watch her gears turn.  The casting of Danes makes a strong case against the current CW model of casting, where all of the teenage characters are played by impossibly beautiful 24-year-olds.  Danes feels like a believable teenager mostly because she was an actual teenager at the time.  (Though to be fair to other shows, most of the other actors here were 19 or 20 at the time, and finding a 15-year-old as talented as Claire Danes isn't exactly an easy task.)

For as much as My So-Called Life is known for being a show about Angela Chase, it revealed itself as having a rich ensemble very early on.  The show was never afraid to put its main character on the sidelines for a little while, hanging the weight of important storylines on her friends at Liberty High, who evolved just as thoroughly as she did.  Rayanne's (A.J. Langer) arc throughout the season is a great example of this. At the beginning of the show, she's portrayed as the fun and wild type, and it's easy to see why Angela would find her alluring.  But the season goes on to show how frustrating and tiresome being around somebody like Rayanne can become.  She emerges as the most tragic figure of the series, forced to face the consequences of her lack of impulse control and general insouciance.  And while it may seem like a common archetype now, Rickie (Wilson Cruz) was a pretty groundbreaking character at a time where teenage homosexuality wasn't something that got examined to the extent that it did here.  All of the characters are placed in slightly different corners of the universe, and the season is all about the slow accumulation of connections between them.  Just look at the subtle friendships that form between Rickie and Brian (Devon Gummersall) or Rayanne and Sharon (Devon Odessa), both of which occur independent of Angela.

The show was always interested in taking a 360 degree look at all of its characters, probing deeply in search of what makes them tick.  "Life of Brian," the show's eleventh episode, takes this idea to its furthest extent.  The episode -- written by a young story editor named Jason Katims, whom you may recognize for being the creator of two of the greatest dramas of the past decade in Friday Night Lights and Parenthood -- offers a refreshing look into life from the perspective of the hapless Brian Krakow.  It even passes the reigns of narration over to him, where we learn that his concerns are much less flowery and soul-searching than Angela's are.  He's mostly self-deprecating and hilariously focused on the immediate goal of getting a girlfriend.  For an episode that could've just been a stylistic detour from the rest of the show, "Life of Brian" manages to strike an excellent balance between uproarious comedy and wistful melancholy.  It's one of the show's best episodes.  (If nothing else, it proves that Claire Danes is much better at voiceover narration than Devon Gummersall is.)

There's no better example of how well My So-Called Life handled its ensemble than its treatment of Angela's parents.  In fact, Patty (Bess Armstrong) and Graham Chase (Tom Irwin) might be the most interesting characters on the entire show.  Where other parents on teen shows are just there as decoration so we don't think the main character is an orphan, Patty and Graham were fascinating, fully-realized people.  They weren't just pesky deviations from the central narrative, but something that was essential to the show's grand scheme.  Most of their storylines focused on the two of them navigating the difficult terrain of married life, showing that just like parenthood, marriage is a constantly evolving process.  There's never any doubt of the love between the two of them, but their own individual grapples with middle age and the tiny disappointments they have with their lives have warped the edges of parts of them that used to connect perfectly.  I can imagine that teenagers in 1994 looked at their plotlines and thought, "why are we wasting time with this Baby Boomer BS?," but the Patty and Graham material is actually riveting stuff.

Series creator Winnie Holzman came up under the tutelage of Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, where she was a writer on the last two seasons of their classic, thirtysomething, so it's no real surprise that the stories about Angela's parents on My So-Called Life were so strong.  thirtysomething was revolutionary for the way that it opened an avenue for telling stories about the middle aged and middle class, and Patty and Graham feel like lost characters from that show.  But Holzman learned more than just that from Herskovitz and Zwick, who also served as executive producers on My So-Called Life.  She was able to mine conflict from the ordinary, channeling the everyday angst of being a teenager in the same way her mentors did for Baby Boomers on thirtysomething.  The drama of the stories on My So-Called Life turned the knob a notch or two higher, but they rang true because the core was lifted straight from life itself.

Is My So-Called Life the product of a bygone era?  You can certainly see some vestiges of the way it applied heightened emotion to relatively small scale issues in Friday Night Lights or Parenthood (which is no surprise, given that Jason Katims is another student of Herskovitz and Zwick).  But it's hard to even imagine a show like My So-Called Life existing on ABC today, or Freaks and Geeks on NBC.  After the failures of both of those shows, teen dramas were mostly ghettoized to The WB, and even now they've almost completely gotten phased out in The WB's transition to the increasingly sci-fi CW.  There are still some teen and family dramas that exist, they've just been pushed further to the fringes, as you can see a lot of My So-Called Life's mixture of earnestness and melodrama in ABC Family's Switched at Birth and The Fosters.

But still, there's nothing that has been as pitched down the middle to teens as this show was.  In a way the central story of "The Substitute," the show's 6th episode, is sort of like the ethos of the entire series -- showing that teenagers have a right to have their voices heard and their stories told.  Even in 2014, the frank discussion about sexuality in "Pressure" still holds up.  The show has made such a lasting impression because it gets at something deep within the human condition, showing how we all can be so stuck in our inner monologues that it's hard to have any real perspective on ourselves.  Even though it may be specific to the details of its period and the emotions of the age range it depicts, the themes are as universal as they come.  In that way, it serves as a bible for those still in the heat of adolescence, a comforting hug for those whose last embers just recently burnt out, and an old photo for the people whose youth has long since had its ashes blown away in the wind.

Ever since the show's cancellation in 1995, Winnie Holzman hasn't had much success anywhere else.  Her first post-MSCL project was a show that was going to air on HBO, until they decided to pick up a little show called The Sopranos instead.  (Do you ever lie awake at night wondering what the current television landscape would be like if they went the other way with that decision?  No?  Just me?)  In 2010, she co-created ABC Family's Huge with her daughter Savannah Dooley, but it was cancelled after one season, despite critical acclaim.  So who knows if she'll ever run another show and deliver the magic that she did with My So-Called Life, but I like to remain hopeful.  Until then, I'll be waiting with my flannel T-shirt and Buffalo Tom cassettes.


Essential Episodes

1. Episode 8, "Strangers in the House"
One of the best things about My So-Called Life is the great sense of history that it has.  We don't start the show at the beginning of any of these relationships between the characters, even Angela's newfound friendship with Rayanne and Rickie is something that happens a little bit before the pilot.  There's no relationship on the show with a greater sense of history than the fractured one between Angela and Sharon.  In the pilot, the writers don't feel the need to hold your hand and explain exactly why they're not friends anymore, because the pain of the distance alone is deeply felt.  The backstory of their relationship is doled out in piecemeal fashion: they used to be lifelong best friends because their moms are also best friends, but drifted apart once Angela started hanging out with Rayanne and Rickie.  "Strangers in the House," brings everything to a head, finally putting the two of them together when Sharon's father has a heart attack that lands him in the hospital.  Even though they don't instantly become best friends again, the mutual understanding that they still care about each other even though they've become different people is a powerful one nonetheless.  To me, Angela and Sharon are the heart and soul of the show, and this episode is easily my favorite.  If you don't bawl like a baby when the "squeeze my hand as hard as it hurts" moment happens at the end, then are you really even a human being?

2. Episode 3, "Guns and Gossip"
The show went to the "somebody brings a gun to school" well dangerously early, but they managed to pull it off spectacularly.  In many ways, this episode reminded me of one of my favorite Buffy episodes, "Earshot," where the idea of somebody bringing a gun to school is just a catalyzing factor for the episode's true aims.  Like that episode, "Guns and Gossip" posits that teenagers are just like vessels carrying all of this overwhelming pressure, occasionally intersecting and crashing into one another.  Nobody specifically knows what it's like to be anybody else, yet there's this unspoken connection between everybody at Liberty High.  Just look at the way information is conveyed through glances in this episode.  It's almost as if the suspicion that Rickie was the one who brought the gun to school is passed on through telepathic waves.  My So-Called Life was always good at having one event that affected every character in some small way, and "Guns and Gossip" is the first and best example of that.

3. Episode 15, "So-Called Angels"
Let's get this out of the way right at the top: this is technically not a good episode of television and I think most of us can agree on that.  If this was a list of the best episodes, I'd probably have "Life of Brian" or "On the Wagon" somewhere on here.  But whether or not "So-Called Angels," the show's Christmas episode, is good doesn't matter because it's important to understanding what My So-Called Life is all about.  This is a treacly, goofy, heavy-handed episode.  But somewhere underneath all of that is a beautiful story about people struggling for meaning in what they do and being forced to venture outside of their small cone of existence.  The message is essentially "help one another!," which may seem a little facile, but it's easy to imagine teenagers finding that idea extremely powerful.  "So-Called Angels" swings for the fences and lands somewhere in the dugout, but it's never not fascinating to watch.

4. Episode 17, "Betrayal"
Here's another one that's not one of the top 5 best episodes (although, like most episodes of this show, it's still terrific), but it's essential in that it shows how deftly the series dipped into melodrama.  The Angela and Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) arc is one of the show's many great curveballs.  It's basically a common tale of "girl attains the seemingly unattainable guy, but then he's not what she expects" that gets transformed from a cliche into something real and painful and complicated.  "Betrayal" intersects that arc with Rayanne's story, which had been bubbling under the surface for a few episodes.  Jordan is confused by Angela acting like she's over him and pursuing another guy and Rayanne is upset about her growing distance with Angela, one that was only temporarily mended in "On the Wagon," and the two of them are briefly united by the mutual cause of their dismay. When Rayanne has sex with Jordan in his car, and it turns out that Brian Krakow caught it on tape, it feels like a moment where the show could go completely off the rails.  And maybe the way that the episode juxtaposes that storyline with Patty suspecting that Graham is cheating on her with his new business partner, then sprinkles on top the element of Angela realizing what she's doing to Rickie is the same thing Rayanne did to her, is a little too neat.  But none of that matters, because any qualms fall away in that final scene, where Rayanne and Angela re-enact a snippet from the end of Our Town.  I mean, just watch this scene.  It's absolutely gutting.

5. Episode 18, "Weekend"
All of the rest of the episodes on this list are pretty heavy, but My So-Called Life was often very funny, and one of my favorite episodes is also the one where the show let its hair down the most.  "Weekend" is a great example of the short story structure that I referred to earlier in the piece.  It's framed around this weekend that seems like a fun little diversion, but it also sneaks some long-form plot momentum into the mix.  It neatly divides the episode into the teen half and the adult half, uniting the two storylines by having the Angela-Rayanne pairing and the Graham-Patty pairing both trying to address the underlying issues of their relationship without actually addressing them.  At first, Rayanne getting cuffed to Graham and Patty's bed seems like a hackneyed sitcom plot, but the story just slowly introduces every character into the mix, to the point where it's ridiculously fun.  Graham and Patty's story is a little more weighty, but even that one is pretty fun too.  "Weekend" may initially seem like a strange way to set up what would ultimately be the series finale, but it's actually a lovely and clever penultimate episode that subtly comments on the journey that these characters have been on over the course of the season.

Late to the Party #8: The films of Nicole Holofcener

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around.

One of my pop culture resolutions for 2014 was to be able to say I've seen the entire filmography of more directors.  There are so many Martin Scorsese movies and films by the Coen brothers that I still haven't seen (cut me some slack, I'm only 22), so I figured that those would be too daunting to begin with.  Instead, I opted to start small with Nicole Holofcener, partially spurred on by the fact that Enough Said was coming out on DVD soon and I was planning on watching it anyway.  When the year started, I'd never seen a Holofcener film.  In only a few weeks time, I devoured all five of them, and she's quickly shot up the ranks to become one of my favorite writer-directors.

All of her films have received general acclaim, but it's not hard to understand why she doesn't tend to come up in conversations about the best filmmakers working right now.  There's nothing showy about her movies -- the comedy isn't laugh-out-loud funny, the drama eschews any sort of histrionics -- but that smallness is part of their low-key charm.  Holofcener is a great translator of life onto screen, and there are few who have a better eye for the quotidian insights and occurrences of everyday life.  She's able to craft so many scenes that you would never think to put in a movie, yet they make perfect sense when you see them.  Her films are full of dialogue that feels natural, but very sharp, really getting at the rhythms of normal conversation.  Aside from Enough Said, her work is also refreshingly light on plot.  The true joy of her films exist between the plot points, where many scenes serve only to fill out her complex and lively characters.

Yet despite her films having a relaxed feel to them, the people who inhabit them are anything but.  Holofcener populates her stories with the restless and uncomfortable, people who can't quite get a handle on the tiny little things nibbling away at them.  A few of her detractors lobby the criticism that her work is based around people whose cozy lives are filled with "first-world problems."  To say nothing of the particular grossness of that phrase, making such a judgment ignores how much she's able to probe past the surface elements of her subjects' lives.  It's the illusion of comfort that runs through most of her movies -- her characters may be upper-middle class people, but their status is often the very source of the troubles they rub up against.  There seems to be a listlessness that comes with reaching a comfortable place in your life, as if there are no more goalposts to aim for, and Holofcener explores that complicated ground beautifully.  As Frances McDormand's character says in Friends with Money, "there's no more wondering what my life is going to be like."  Petty as their troubles may seem, every character is sketched with such fine detail that there's something universal about the malaise that they feel.

An even bigger source of unrest in Holofcener's characters is image.  Her films frequently feature women who are wrestling with uncertainty about how they appear.  Lovely & Amazing centers this concern around a family of four women, each of the them insecure about a different aspect of themselves.  Matriarch Jane (Brenda Blethyn) wants to get liposuction because she's not happy with her weight; while her adult daughters (Catherine Keener and Emily Mortimer) fret over their career and level of sexiness, respectively; and even her adoptive African American preteen (Raven Goodwin, in her debut role) is self-conscious about her hair not being straight.  The film bumps against -- while never explicitly stating -- the idea that Jane has passed down these deep insecurities to her daughters, even though one isn't related by blood.  In a way, all of these women seek the approval of others, most notably in the pivotal scene where Emily Mortimer's Elizabeth stands naked and asks Kevin (Dermot Mulroney) to critique her body.

These themes of beauty, womanhood, and fulfillment come up time and time again in Holofcener's filmography.  One of the central things driving her characters is that they're so concerned that others see them through the lens that they see themselves.  Their anxieties are so well-drawn that when you look at them, you realize that there's nothing superficial about being image-obsessed -- it's actually a deeply human feeling.  Age goes hand-in-hand with her concerns about self-image too.  These coming of middle age films examine life in one's 30s and 40s, when people have to reconcile with the fact that time has started to weather them away a bit.

Another one of Holofcener's recurring elements is her inspection of the way people communicate with one another.  Her films may be heavily conversational, but the people in them rarely ever communicate in a healthy way.  When Laura (Anne Heche) gets engaged to her boyfriend in Walking and Talking, their relationship quickly devolves into constant arguments and bickering.  She focuses her ire on the birthmark he refuses to get checked out by a doctor, but the real problem is that she's unsure about the entire engagement in the first place.  When pressed about whether there are any deeper complaints that she has, Laura lies and says, "It's just about the birthmark."  But it's never just about the birthmark in Holofcener's films, where characters say things to avoid saying what they really mean.  Notice how when characters psychoanalyze others in Lovely & Amazing, it's often an expression of their own qualities.  Or in Friends With Money, where every get-together is punctuated by car rides that show each of the ladies talking about one another to their spouses. In both cases, the characters are so busy assessing the people around them that they haven't really taken the time to look within and get to the root of what's eating at them.

The few lukewarm reviews of Enough Said complained about its "Idiot Plot," and how annoying it was that the entire premise of the film centered around something completely avoidable.  But that's the entire point of the film, that things would be so much easier if Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) would just talk to Marianne (Catherine Keener) or Albert (James Gandolfini) about what's going on.  That's the thing about Holofcener's films: when a character has something to say, they almost never actually say it.  On the rare occasion that they do, it's not toward the intended target.  It's no surprise, then, that the most powerful parts of Please Give come from little moments of unspoken connection: Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) providing a shoulder to lean on for a sister (Amanda Peet) she doesn't always get along with, or sharing an understanding glance with Kate (Keener) near the end of the film.

Nicole Holofcener movies are relationship films, but they encompass all kinds of relationships, including friendship and family.  Romantic entanglements do occur, but they're almost always secondary to the former two.  This ethos has been in her work since day one, starting with Walking and Talking, which features one of the richest female friendships I've ever seen onscreen.  We're shown that Amelia and Laura are lifelong best friends, spending all of their time together as kids and even calling each other multiple times per day as adults.  But when Laura's life slowly becomes more independent from Amelia's, she doesn't need Amelia in the same way that Amelia needs her, and their process of slowly drifting apart is small, but painful nonetheless.

In a way, Big Jeans, the cancer-ridden cat whose story takes up the film's C-plot, is like a symbol for Laura and Amelia's friendship.  They're both technically her owner, but Amelia is the one who keeps and takes care of her, while Laura rarely ever sees her anymore.  Neither of the two are seen as the bad guy in this scenario, it's just that adulthood has caused them to have different expectations of their friendship.  Films for and about women often put the status of one's love life at the forefront, but the way Holofcener focuses on the multitude of relationships in her protagonists' lives just makes them feel like fuller human beings.  It's very deliberate that both Amelia and Laura are only able to straighten their respective romantic lives out once they mend the thing that really matters -- the friendship between the two of them.

The one film where romance does get a spotlight is Enough Said, and even then it still isn't played like a traditional romantic comedy.  One of the things that sets Albert and Eva apart is just how tired they seem, as if they're sick of going through the motions of relationships.  There's something particularly moving about the way Albert says, "You broke my heart...and I'm too old for that shit" when he finds out that Eva has been keeping the fact that she knows his ex-wife from him.  And still, the film implies that these two characters looking for romantic fulfillment are unconsciously doing so in an attempt to fill the void that will soon exist when their daughters both go to college in a few months.  Even when tackling romantic relationships directly, Holofcener finds a way to hearken it back to her recurring themes of family and in particular, motherhood.  The film's subplot centers around Eva's relationship with her daughter's friend Chloe (Tavi Gevinson).  The accidental way that Eva ends up spending more time with Chloe -- and her inability to see how much it's bothering her own daughter -- is a development that bubbles so slowly it's almost imperceptible.  In a film that's full of big lies and misunderstandings, this subtle conflict is the one that cuts the deepest.

Much credit is deserved for the way Holofcener sketches her characters and constructs conflicts, but some praise is owed to the acting as well.  In just five films, she's been able to work with great actors like Rebecca Hall, Emily Mortimer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand and James Gandolfini; who all perfectly transfer the depth of their characters from script to screen.  She's even gotten a career-best performance from some, including Jennifer Aniston in Friends With Money.  All the while, she barely ever reuses actors across multiple films like you see many other directors do, somehow managing to always find ways to get new actors to fit her naturalistic style.

Of course, the one major exception to this rule is Catherine Keener, who has appeared in every one of her films so far.  Together, Holofcener and Keener are like a distaff Scorsese and De Niro, bringing out the best of each other in their collaborations.  There isn't a major variation between the characters Holofcener writes for Keener --  they're all women who are a bit prickly, yet hiding some deeper anxiety -- but it's less a sign of limitation for either two than it is evidence that they know the perfect use of each other's talents.  The time may come when Keener doesn't appear in one of Holofcener's film, but it's not one I'd like to imagine any time soon.

So attuned are they to each other that Keener's best work is in 2010's Please Give, which I'd also pick as my favorite Holofcener film.  All of her stories follow the same pattern of being somewhat light and minor (though always funny) before sneaking up on you and delivering an emotional wallop, but Please Give might be the most successful at it.  It's just such a structurally sound film, setting up these tiny little threads that run alongside each other like the two adjacent apartments the story is centered around, and letting them topple over one by one like dominoes.  It's got all of the concerns we've come to expect from her work -- age, self-image, self-doubt -- but it's also a lovely little story about people stopping and realizing there's all this life that's occurring outside of themselves.

If there's one out of the bunch that's deserving of a critical reappraisal, it's definitely Friends With Money, Holofcener's third film.  It's not like it got panned by critics when it came out in 2006, but it's her lowest scoring film on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, and is usually placed last when fans rank her work in comment threads or on message boards.  Those who were skeptics already tend to see it as Holofcener indulging her worst instincts, and even some fans feel like it's a misstep with nothing new to say.  But it's actually a keen look into how caustic a tight-knit group of friends can be sometimes.  The four protagonists have been buddies for years, but everyone's so critical of one another, particularly of the aimless Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), who can't quite attain the level of financial success that everyone else has.  At one point in the film, somebody wonders whether they'd even be friends with each other if they had met at this current point in their lives.  But they've been friends for so long that they don't really have anybody else.  As difficult as the relationships may have become, there's a comfort to them as well.  Friends With Money perfectly understands the way inertia factors into these long-term bonds.  Despite its reputation, it might be one of Nicole Holofcener's best films.

But really, everything she's done so far is worth watching.  It's hard to think of many other directors who've been this consistently excellent over the course of five films.  Her work isn't the kind that announces its greatness, but there's something to admire about the quiet profundity of the revelations in them.  She can find loveliness and joy in even the smallest moments, like two parents watching their daughter with low self-esteem finally finding jeans that make her feel good about herself.  I look forward to seeing her stretch her boundaries in the future, as she seems to be doing with the upcoming Every Secret Thing.  It's new territory for her in more ways than one: not only is it the first film that she's not directing, but the screenplay is adapted from a novel by Laura Lippman.  Whether or not it will be worthy of praise is unknown, but based on her track record, she's got a lifelong fan in me.

Late to the Party #7: Memories of Murder (2003)

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around, for some reason or another.

Korean director Bong Joon-ho just might be the master of tone.  Bucking the bleak trends of his revenge-obsessed compatriots, his films feature wild tonal shifts, veering from mood to mood at the drop of a hat.  His 2006 monster movie The Host warranted that mismash of tones, given its Spielbergian nature.  But his 2009 followup, Mother, was even more impressive for taking the story of one mother's quest to exonerate her mentally disabled son from a crime he's accused of, and infusing it with wonderful bits of slapstick comedy, without ever making it feel out of place.  In going back and watching Memories of Murder, it's clear that his handle on the shifting moods of his films was steady right from the beginning.

Though it might feature his most serious story, a Zodiac-esque look into the real-life serial murders that occurred in Korea during the 70s and 80s, it also contains some of the funniest moments in his filmography.  Watch Joon-ho's films and you can easily imagine him being raised on Keaton, Chaplin, and other silent slapstick comedy, because there's a broad go-for-broke sensibility to much of the comic relief in his work.  He loves scenes that slowly get blown out of proportion, like when two of the main characters in Memories meet because one beats the other up, thinking him to be a rapist.  Physical scenes like that -- and the many dropkicks that occur in his films -- are Joon-ho staples, but he also gets alot of mileage out of simple visual gags.  Characters frequently pop in and out of frame at just the right time, and his level of spacial reasoning makes everything feel both perfectly in place and out of place.

But his knack for comedy only serves to make the pieces of suspense in Memories of Murder even more frightening.  After all, it's no coincidence that the first attack we see from the killer is after a funny moment.  We're out of breath because of the laughter, but then for another reason in this suspenseful, predatory act.  The switch from being a comedy with splashes of drama to being a drama with splashes of comedy is a masterful one, as the police case drags, with tensions and the body count rising in equal measure.

What makes the case so interesting is the moral complexity of it all -- it's not content with delivering a standard black-and-white, "cops chase the bad guys" tale.  Here, Joon-ho makes the police squad a little rougher, undermanned, and under-skilled.  They're no strangers to resorting to dirty tactics to get their way, which leads to many of the case's dead ends, after their aggressive methods cause a handful of false confessions.  "Even the kids know you torture suspects," one of the town's denizens says at one point.  Yet the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from the investigation is that you can never truly know anything, that there's no room for certainty in every case.  Like the patterns of this uncaught serial killer, these three cops go through the endless day-to-day cycle of police work.  Eventually, an everyday grind wears you out, and all three of these men have their certitude tested -- along with their sanity -- in service of this grind.  With Memories of Murder, Bong Joon-ho crafted a procedural crime thriller and wrapped it up in a complex exploration of the elusiveness of certainty, the mundanity of evil, and the toll that cases like these take on those trying to solve them.

Late to the Party #6: Do the Right Thing (1989)

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around, for some reason or another.

You don't have to look very hard to see that there's an unfortunate lack of representation for African-Americans in film these days.  Really, Tyler Perry is the only director who's consistently putting out films with a predominant black cast, but those films are marketed to a niche audience (and are of questionable quality, some would argue).  Even still, I don't personally feel under-represented in stories.  There's so much more to me than being black, so I find representation in all of the other aspects of myself that appear on television and in film.  There are so many stories littered with male nerds, depressed people, and lonely indie music lovers that the lack of African-Americans, while troubling, was never something that I felt personally wounded by.  That is, until I watched Do the Right Thing for the first time last week.  Of Spike Lee's filmography, I'd seen Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man before, but I saw the first two at such a young age that I couldn't really process them and the third was outside of his usual style, so I never gave him much thought.  But everything started to make sense once I saw Do the Right Thing, and I realized how vital Lee is as a filmmaker for his efforts to shine a light on the lives of black people in America.

The film is such a great depiction of black culture -- all of the colors, clothes, and hairstyles so perfectly attuned to the details at the turn of the 90s.  Though I've never lived in a kind of neighborhood like Bed-Stuy as portrayed here, it feels so specific and tactile.  Just look at everything going on in the background of any given scene.  Mookie (played by Lee himself) and Buggin' Out (a young, completely unrecognizable Giancarlo Esposito) will just be talking in the foreground, but there's an endless amount of activity to look at on the periphery.  And it's not just the faked processes of paid extras; it feels like a living ecosystem at work.  Most of all, it just gets that ball-busting, "shooting the shit" feeling right.  Lee's work is known to be flabby, and some of the scenes might not contribute much on a plot level, but they're all so vibrant that it's hard to make a case for any of them being cut.

The hangout vibe benefits from the plot, which is mostly just about an entire neighborhood going through the hottest day of the summer.  Mookie, a black pizza delivery man working at an Italian family restaurant, is the closest thing the film has to a main character, but he's really only an entry point into this knotty world.  Stories start with him, then break off completely, and so many vivid characters get their own little arcs that intersect and accumulate.  In a sense, it's sort of like Jamie Hernandez's Love and Rockets stories in the way that individual parts form a composite piece.  Bed-Stuy is a mostly black neighborhood, but there's also a bit of a cultural blend going on.  As the temperature rises, so too do the closeted tensions between the different races.  It's a figurative melting pot in more ways than one, and like the atoms in a liquid boiling over, the entire neighborhood is gaining energy and knocking against each other.  You can just see the beads of sweat on people's faces increase as the film goes on, the waves of heat rise from the pavement.

Lee is on-the-nose about these tensions in the film -- and race issues in general -- but subtlety is not his intention.  It's all supposed to be fiery and in your face, aiming to work you up into the same frenzy that ultimately results at the end of the film.  There are numerous scenes where characters talk directly to the screen, like the infamous insult sequence, and it almost feels like Lee is urging you not to be a passive viewer.  Yet for all of its brazen blustering, the film is still able to sneak up on you.  At the beginning of the film, you'd hardly be able to guess that the seemingly minor conflict between Buggin' Out and Sal the pizza shop owner (Danny Aiello) would end up being the film's most essential plotline.  Early on, Buggin' Out gets kicked out of Sal's because he complains about the fact that restaurant's wall of fame has no black people on it.  His campaign against the restaurant is taken as a joke until it isn't, and eventually he gets Radio Raheem, the neighborhood's DIY DJ, in the mix.  This leads to the fight between the Italians and the blacks, which leads to a mini-riot that alerts the cops, which leads to Radio Raheem's death at the hands of one of those cops, which leads to an even bigger riot.  There goes those details again, always seeming to amass.

The almost accidental way things progress is one of the biggest themes of the film.  Lee does a great job of depicting how these kinds of things can just spin out of control.  Initially, Radio Raheem wasn't even mad at Sal for the wall of fame, but when Buggin' Out presents him the opportunity to channel his anger -- even if it's for something unrelated -- he takes up the offer.  Everybody in the neighborhood is fed up, and they might not know what it is that they're fed up with, but they all unite together against one target.  Like the city it depicts, Do the Right Thing is all about exploring warring impulses.  The love/hate scene, from which the picture at the top derives, spells it out in the middle of the film, arguing that we are not just one prevailing disposition, but a constant balance between multiple feelings.  When Sal says that he loves and appreciates the black community that has grown up on his food and helped his business thrive, he probably means it.  But in that moment where Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem confront him?  He can't contain his racist rage, even if he didn't know it existed at all.  And that's why I think Mookie's decision to toss a garbage can through the window of the restaurant, effectively causing the riot to swell, is much more complex than Spike Lee would later make it out to be in interviews.  According to Lee, questioning whether Mookie "did the right thing" is equivalent to thinking that a white man's property is as important as a black man's life.  But the film ends with contradictory quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, punctuating the idea that the true warring impulses are the ones that cause us to wonder what is the right thing.

When I saw the movie Fruitvale Station last month, I cried at the end.  It was less about the film being sad -- although it was unfortunate for Oscar Grant to die unnecessarily -- and mostly because it caused 21 years of being black to rush at me all at once.  I've lived a pretty easy life, and haven't faced many overt hardships, but even still, there are certain little things that can make being black feel so unfair.  Maybe I wouldn't have been stopped and searched by a cop in the middle of the street for no reason that one summer afternoon, or maybe a white girl I had a crush on would've been more inclined to like me back, or maybe I wouldn't feel like have to appear as nonthreatening as possible when meeting people for the first time if I wasn't black.  If Fruitvale Station made me bummed out about being black, Do the Right Thing made me fiery.  Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" plays multiple times during the film, and it's almost like an encapsulation of the movie as a whole -- brash, powerful, and completely unapologetic.

Late to the Party #5: The Weakerthans

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around, for some reason or another.

It seems like eventually, almost every person reaches a point where they stop seeking out new music and just keep going back to the what they're familiar with.  I don't think the time has come for me to stop searching for new music, but I sometimes do wonder whether the peak era of music has already come and gone for me.   There's still a wide array of music out there that I like, but most of my favorite bands are ones I started listening to in middle or high school, and it's rare that I get excited about a new band in the same way I did back then.  Is it just that I'm older and less inclined to be enthusiastic or that indie rock is genuinely not as good as it used to be back in the mid-2000s?  Well The Weakerthans serve as the perfect experiment for testing out this question.  Although they put out their first album in  1997, their most popular album, Reconstruction Site was released in 2003, right around the time I was starting to branch out from solely listening to rap music.  I'd always heard of the band, but somehow I just never got around to listening to them, which is especially strange given my love for other Canadian indie rock bands that were exploding around the same time.

Recently, I finally dove deep into their catalog, and found myself regretting going so long without having checked them out.  Right from the first couple of chords, I was amazed that despite never having listened to them in middle school, I was still hit with waves of nostalgia for that time period.  Their albums, particularly Reconstruction Site, just feel like adolescence.  Part of it comes from the level of earnestness in lead singer John K. Samson's lyrics, which are sung in a nasal voice that rests somewhere between Ben Gibbard and Colin Meloy.  Much like those two, he writes with eyes wide and heart exposed.  This style can often induce cringes, like looking back at an old diary, yet Samson avoids that pitfall because his lyrics have genuine humor and brains behind them.  There's a real emotional acuity to songs like "Letter of Resignation" and "Night Windows" that you don't get in other bands who go straight for the soft spots.

Another quality that Samson shares with Colin Meloy is that his lyrics are filled with dense allusions to history, mythology, art, and everything else under the sun.  Take "Without Mythologies" on Left & Leaving, which mixes several Greek myths together to paint a portrait of a dissolved relationship.  To use just one myth would slightly elevate the song above its well-trodden terrain, but the mix of metaphors serve to reflect the speaker's frazzled desire to piece things together again.  There's a deep sense of unrest in many of The Weakerthans' songs, most notably regarding place.  Lonely street corner pamphleteers, put-out businessmen, and lovelorn bus drivers inhabit their tunes, and listening to an album of theirs feels like navigating a restless world full of those who exist on the most solitary fringes of society.  Samson and the rest of the band hail from Winnipeg, and their songs remind me of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg in the way they describe the everyday grind of the province with equal amounts of longing and loathing.  The sarcastically titled "One Great City!" wraps up this conflict all in one song -- Samson closes out each verse with a defeated "I hate Winnipeg...," yet he describes the place with such tender detail nonetheless.

Samson originated in the punk band Propagandhi, and rebelliousness permeates through the sound of The Weakerthans too, especially on their debut record, Fallow.  It's at once their punkiest and folkiest album, and sometimes the restlessness doesn't mix with the sleepiness.  2000's Left & Leaving improves upon the band's formula, adding more punch to the fast songs and better construction on the midtempo numbers.  But their best album is definitely Reconstruction Site, which might be one of my favorite indie rock albums of the previous decade.  Samson's skills as a guitarist and band leader are at their peak here.  His riffs go a level beyond generic indie rock territory, and the rest of the band's interplay is better too, giving the songs a substantial boost of energy.  Many of them, like "Time's Arrow," have various instruments cascading together in all of the right ways, the band perfectly synchronized in dizzying fashion.  Some fans say that Reunion Tour (2007) is a step down in quality, but it's just as good as their other material, if not better than every album beside Reconstruction Site.  Although released only four years after Reconstruction, it feels like a greatest hits album, combining all of the classic elements of the band in one package.  There's the well-constructed catchy rock ("Sun in An Empty Room"); detailed character studies ("Elegy for Gump Worsely"); and meditations on death, illness and loss ("Hymn of the Medical Oddity," "Night Windows").

The absolute pinnacle of the band's discography is the two-song Virtute series, which starts on Reconstruction Site with "Plea From a Cat Named Virtute" and continues on Reunion Tour with "Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure".  Told from the perspective of a cat whose owner is severely depressed, "Plea From a Cat Named Virtute" manages to use the simple impulses and thoughts of a cat to beautifully mine the complexities of the owner's malaise.  If it was the same sentiment but from a human perspective, it'd be a fine song, but the fact that it's a cat imploring her owner to be happy makes it one of the most moving and uplifting songs of the last decade.  What's more, Virtute is the name of Samson's actual cat, which gives you a little insight into why the song feels so acute and personal.  The story is picked back up on "Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure," where it takes a dark turn, as she runs away from home and prowls the cold and lonely streets, eventually forgetting the sound of her owner's voice.  The ambiguity of Virtute's fate just adds more nuance to the song, allowing you to feel optimistic or bummed out by the ending depending on your mood.

It's that celebration of the downtrodden that makes The Weakerthans so special.  By spinning tales about the lonely, the weak, and the sad, they find strength in their chronicling of the smallness of everyday life.  They're the type of band who can write a song about a deaf girl ("Elegy For Elsabet") or a retired hockey player ("Elegy For Gump Worsely") and make it beautiful and wrenching.  There hasn't been a new album from them in 6 years, so we might have to assume that they're done making music together, but it'd also be just like them to brush themselves off and pull together another collection of stories from the scrappy and forgotten.

Late to the Party #4: Before Sunrise & Before Sunset (1995, 2004)

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around, for some reason or another.

While it may not be my favorite genre, there are many good romantic comedies out there.  Off the top of my head, a few of my favorites include: (500) Days of Summer, Love, Actually, Some Like it Hot, and Crazy. Stupid. Love.  However, I can't as readily think of any good romantic dramas.  There's a much higher degree of difficulty that comes with the romantic drama -- without a laugh, it's easy for all of that romance to feel cheesy, overwrought, or melodramatic.  Two romance films that seemed to be the exception were Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which frequently get praised for their level of naturalism and avoidance of the common pitfalls of the romantic drama.  Getting to the series has been on my to-do list for a very long time, yet despite all of the assurances that I'd love it, I always managed to find something else to watch when I had free time.  Well, the upcoming DVD release of the third installment in the series, Before Midnight, finally prompted me to watch the first two, and I'm happy to report that they're just as lovely as promised.

What a beautiful and sad feeling it is to know that you'll only do something once.  Before Sunrise is all about that feeling, telling the story of two people who have a chance encounter and know that they can only spend one night together before parting ways.  The film opens with Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) riding on the same train to Vienna.  After moving her seat to get away from a noisy couple distracting her from reading, Celine and Jesse strike up a conversation, and when the train arrives at Jesse's stop, he convinces her to get off with him and walk around the city.  This might sound like the kind of generic meet-cute that drives many films of its ilk, but Before Sunrise elevates past that because of how natural it feels.  It takes this random encounter and puts a spin on it, almost saying "what if this really happened"?

The easygoing nature of Jesse and Celine's initial encounter stretches through the entire film.  This is helped by Hawke and Delpy, whose organic chemistry really sells the mix of hesitancy and intrigue that both characters have regarding each other.  There's a scene early in the film in a record shop, where the camera just observes the two of them stealing glances at each other, one pair of eyes looking away just as the other finds its target.  It's entrancing to watch this play out, almost like a game, and although it's a still shot, the whole thing is absolutely electric.  For as exhilarating as that wordless scene is, the true spark of the film comes from the dialogue.  Linklater's script has a rambling feel to it -- the film is basically one long conversation segmented by varying locations -- and that'd be a problem if the dialogue wasn't so strong.  Instead of rely on incidents to drive the story forward, the film leans on Jesse and Celine just talking, and through these conversations, you learn so much about them.  You don't discover Jesse's cynicism through conflict, he just talks about his worldview after the two get approached by a fortuneteller.  Funny, engaging, profound -- there's a different gem for everyone to find in the interactions between the two leads.  For me, the scene where Jesse theorizes that people are so self-loathing because they always have to be around themselves, saying "I've never done anything where I wasn't in attendance," hit me particularly hard.  It packs an even bigger punch in the final shots, showing the city during the day, and how it takes on a different feeling without the magic of Jesse and Celine's presence.  The bond between the two of them is extremely relateable, and their separation at the end of the film is quite moving.  They agree to reunite at the same spot in 6 months, but as the credits roll, you can't help but feeling like any one of life's vicissitudes could thwart their plans.

And as we learn in Before Sunset, the two of them never did reunite as they promised.  The film picks back up 9 years later, where Jesse wrote a bestselling book based on the events in Sunrise and Celine is married and living in Paris.  Jesse is in Paris for a book signing, and Celine, after reading about his upcoming visit in the newspaper, decides to visit him.  Before Sunrise stood well on its own, but it's here in Before Sunset where the series goes from excellent to a monumental work of art, picking up the pieces from the first film and continuing to build them beautifully.

Like Sunrise, this one is a whole lot of walking and talking, yet the substance is completely different.  Where the first film was all about possibility, the presiding feeling over the sequel is regret.  As two complementary pieces, the films subtly point out the differences between being in your 20s and being in your 30s.  The conversations in Sunrise were all about Jesse and Celine ruminating on life itself, but the discussions in Sunset are mostly about their lives, almost as if time has dulled the skyward-looking, meditative nature within their younger selves.  Both seem to be changed by their experiences, but their underlying disposition is still the same, with Jesse being a bit of a cynic and Celine being more of a romantic dreamer.

Sunset is also haunted by the idea of memory.  So many of the conversations are about how memories form and what purpose they serve.  There's a deep longing to return to old memories that mixes with the frustrations of the expectations that those memories set.  9 years passed between these films, both within the story and outside of it, and Linklater smartly plays with this passage of time.  Near the beginning of the film, Celine takes Jesse to task for romanticizing their night in the book, stating he wrote that they had sex, when she claims that they didn't.  Jesse then insists that they did, and they go back and forth until neither is really certain what happened on that night so long ago.  Because I saw the second film the day after I watched the first one, I had a more vivid recollection of the events (it's never explicitly shown in the first film, but we're supposed to think that they did have sex), yet for people who had to wait 9 years to get a sequel, they probably had the same difficulty recalling what happened that the characters do.  The film has a few more instances of these kind of brilliant callbacks, like how in the first film, Jesse is about to launch into a story, but he prefaces it by asking "do you believe in reincarnation"?  Celine replies that she does, but when Jesse offhandedly asks the same thing in the second film, she says "no."  It's played like neither of them remember their initial conversation, and that Celine has just changed over time, to the point where some of her worldviews have shifted.

Once again, Sunset is stylistically sumptuous, like the first film.  Although it's shot a bit differently -- the warmer Paris contrasting with the cold, muted Vienna -- there's still a use of long takes to capture the unfolding conversations.  The same thoughtful, nuanced, and naturalistic dialogue is still there; and you become easily hypnotized by the words being spoken, falling back into familiar rhythms as easily as Jesse and Celine do.  Yet here, there's more baggage to their conversations, weighing the whole thing down with an aching solemnity.  As much as relationships end positively in stories, Before Sunset is more realistic about these sorts of things, and real life is much less neat than the movies.  What we got in Sunrise was only a glimpse at these people's lives, and their change over the course of 9 years goes to show how hard it is to arc out the path of somebody's life.

The arc of the film itself is beautiful though, concluding as Jesse and Celine have winded down their time together and end up at Celine's apartment.  Celine plays a song on the guitar that she wrote about their original night together, and it's a crushing wave of catharsis after about 70 minutes of barely restrained longing and loneliness.  That scene alone gives Before Sunset the edge over Before Sunrise.  But aside from that, while it may not have the beautiful romanticism of the first installment, Before Sunset's exploration of the overwhelming sadness behind missed opportunities eventually overtakes you.  I could easily just leave the series at that ending, with the uncertainty of whether or not Jesse decides to miss his flight to stay with Celine, but I'm excited to see Before Midnight, especially since it's basically the best reviewed film of the year.  With these films, Linklater has created something really powerful and ambitious, like Michael Apted's Up series for American audiences, tracking the trajectories of two people who occasionally collide and leave indelible marks on each other's lives.

Late to the Party #3: Undeclared (2001-2002)

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around, for some reason or another.

Earlier in the week, I wrote about Freaks and Geeks and everything I said in that introduction could be doubled here.  If Freaks and Geeks was perennially at the top of the list of shows that I wanted to see, then Undeclared was always firmly in the number two position.  Undeclared is a spiritual successor to Freaks and Geeks in more ways than one: it was short-lived, featured a few of the same actors, and always told stories that put character at the forefront.  Coming right off of the cancellation of Freaks and Geeks in 2000, Judd Apatow split off from Paul Feig to create Undeclared, which graduated from the high school setting of the former to the hallowed halls and dingy dorms of college.

Undeclared was much more of a straight comedy than Freaks and Geeks was, which was suitable, given the setting.  The show feels like college as you remembered it, whereas Freaks and Geeks felt like high school as it actually was.  Yet it still was never about the over-the-top partying that we see in other college stories, opting to find comedy in simple hijinx.  Characters play pranks on each other, come up with schemes to make their work or studies easier, and generally just laze around, giving the show a laid-back feel that made it so relateable.  If there's one main connecting thread that ties Undeclared to Apatow's previous work, it's how it showed that the anxieties and insecurities of your teens don't go away once you leave high school, they just transform.  Behind the laughs and antics, all of the characters are concerned with getting the girl/guy, looking cool, avoiding failure, and figuring out what to do with their lives.  That the main characters are funny is enjoyable enough, but their clearly defined tics make them exponentially more endearing.

Because of this strong stable of characters, the writers were able to have fun with their combinations of cast members.  Like all comedies, there were the common pairings -- Steven and Lizzie, Marshall and Rachel, Lloyd and Ron -- but some of the best stories came from when the dynamics of the group were mixed up.  It helps that they all feel like actual college friends -- forced together by proximity but growing on each other to the point of syncing up to a single rhythm.  One difference that comes from Judd Apatow having primary creative control is his famous improvised style, which is easiest to detect in the hangout scenes that give us a clearer picture of how these characters interact with one another.  Like Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared featured a stellar cast of actors like Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen, who are now mainstays in the comedy world, but it also had people like Carla Gallo and Monica Keena, who haven't been allowed to be as funny as they were in this show since its cancellation.  Another trait that Undeclared takes from its spiritual predecessor is its excellent world-building and use of recurring characters, making the main dorm hall feel full and real.  Many of the plotlines feature the usual checkmarks of college storytelling -- fraternities, parent's weekend, cheating on papers, etc. -- but the execution is refreshing, unique, and low-key.  Despite that, episodes can seriously bring monstrous laughs when they want to.  "Eric Visits Again" and "Truth or Dare" are the two funniest episodes, and they both feature hilarious comedic setpieces that are big and broad but still feel truthful to the heart of the show.

Watching this show in 2013, it's easy to get distracted by all the "hey it's that guy/girl!" moments.  In just 17 episodes, there are appearances from Amy Poehler, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Kevin Hart, Jenna Fischer, Felicia Day, Fred Willard; and with all of that talent, it's retrospectively clear that we lost a special show.  I chose the exact right time in my life to binge on Undeclared, because all of the college aspects of the show really resonated with me.  I can certainly see its bones in something like the UK's Fresh Meat, another show that's set in college and has a killer sense of fun and a great group of characters.  Although it's not as praised or influential as Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared is a fantastic show that's a must-watch for any fan of comedy.