Open Questions: Proudly And Obstinately Proclaim Your Permanent Refusal

When Facebook tells me whether I like the same movies as my friends, one set of films causes more hiccups than any other. I like the same movies as this person, EXCEPT. I would be "Best Friends" with this person (movie-wise), EXCEPT.

The "except"? The Lord Of The Rings.

I'm just not a creature person. Hobbits, elves, animatronic doodads, The Dark Crystal, that Genesis video with Reagan and Brezhnev...it's not my thing. One of my friends -- and now I can't remember which one, so I'm unable to credit this rather fantastic and useful theory -- makes it a rule never to see or read anything where any character has inappropriate punctuation (like a randomly dropped apostrophe) in his name. That rules out much of the fantasy genre, as you know.

At some point, I just didn't make it on board the Tolkien bandwagon (those movies predated the time when I was doing much writing about anything other than television, among other things), and I'm not inclined to start now. I've made it this far, right? Someday, probably, when I'm trapped on a plane or I'm sick with the flu, I will be tempted, but you know what? I think I will still refuse. It's not a judgment either on the material or on the people who like it. It's just not for me. Think me a heathen; you won't be the first.

What have you made it this far without? It's okay if it's Casablanca or James Joyce; we won't tell.

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Open Questions: The Patton Oswalt Maneuver Of Involuntary Career Interruption

by Linda Holmes

On Patton Oswalt's gut-busting comedy record Werewolves And Lollipops, there's a marvelous bit about how he realized at one point that if he had a time machine, he wouldn't use it to meet Abe Lincoln or stop wars or anything like that.

Can this man be saved? If so, when? And who else deserves a career intervention? Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

No, he would go back and kill George Lucas before he had a chance to make the Star Wars prequels.

Now, I am not asking you to embrace bloodlust, even in jest. But I think we all have writers/actors/directors/musicians we would perhaps think of more fondly if we'd been able to go back in time and persuade them in a nonviolent manner to retire before they ruined themselves.

Stephen King before he became an Entertainment Weekly columnist? Ben Stiller after Zoolander? Perhaps Aaron Sorkin after the second season of The West Wing?

Feel free to argue strenuously — not only for your preferred candidate, but also for the precise correct moment for the nonviolent coaxing to occur in order to maximize the payoff.

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Why the Universe Owes 'The Dark Knight' a Frickin' Oscar

by Glen Weldon

Comic book fans, like most species of geek, treasure our outsider status. The fact that said status is largely self-imposed and self-perpetuated isn't so much important — we're all about the treasuring, over here. And the brooding.

Thus, as a species, we're given to snottily rejecting anything that smacks of the popular, of the cultural mainstream. You can always count on us to find a way to prize even the most ham-fisted tale of four-color adventure over, say, Gossip Girl. And to be kinda jerky about it in the process. It's reflexive and reductive and not remotely fair, but there it is.

So why, you may ask, are we comic book geeks now pulling so hard for The Dark Knight to receive an Oscar nod, of all things?

(Especially when we're the kind of schmucks who ruin your Oscar party by gobbling up the Funyuns while opining to all within earshot that the Academy Awards are an empty exercise in feeding the nation's collective middlebrow sensibility. And that, further, they certainly have nothing whatsoever to say about artistic merit.)

So why do we suddenly care so damn much about a stupid Oscar? Why do we feel we are owed one?

Four words: Legends of the Superheroes.

And, okay, five more: Charlie Callas in a bodystocking.

After the jump: The live-action superhero abomination that still haunts our unquiet dreams. (And no, it's not Elektra) ...

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'Scrubs': My (Probably) Final Appreciation

In stitches: The move to ABC gives the Scrubs cast another shot at comedy on its own terms.ABC

 

by Marc Hirsh

Scrubs begins its eighth, and in all likelihood final, season tonight at 9:00 — on ABC. I mention this because you might otherwise miss it, since you might have assumed that last year's doofy medieval-fantasy episode was the series finale.

Or you might remember that the show's returning, but accidentally tune in to NBC, where it spent its first seven years, and be faced with the second half of The Biggest Loser instead.

Or you might not watch Scrubs, might have never watched Scrubs, might not be inclined to start now, and might be quite sure you couldn't care less.

Any of those would be more or less par for the course. Since its debut in 2001, Scrubs has been very possibly the most underrated show on television; certainly it's the most under-appreciated.

Most obviously, it was under-appreciated by NBC. The network could never settle on a time slot. It dismissively burned off episodes two at a time on occasion (a habit that ABC has, for now, dismayingly picked up). It even switched around the running order so that, if ABC hadn't picked it up, the entire series would have ended with an episode that creator Bill Lawrence never intended as a finale.

NBC's meddling may not have even stopped with the network switch: Rumors abound that Heroes' Masi Oka and Chuck's Sarah Lancaster have been prevented from reprising their roles as lab assistant Franklyn and Lisa The Gift Shop Girl for the show's actual finale.

Why Scrubs never got enough love, after the jump...

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Open Questions: What Do You Shove Into The Hands Of The Unwilling?

by Linda Holmes

Open Questions Week continues, and today, I want to ask about pushing and shoving.

We all do it. "You have to watch this movie. Sit down. I'm putting the DVD in. Hey-hey-hey -- don't try to stand up. Sit down. On the couch. Stop talking. I'm pressing 'play.' Don't try to go to the kitchen, or I'll make you watch it twice."

Or maybe you do it with music: "I'm putting this on your iPod, and if you try to remove it, your iPod will blow up, and if you don't listen to it within a week, it will start destroying files. You don't want that, do you? I didn't think so."

This is cultural proselytizing by brute force, and you only do it with people you really like, because anyone else would probably be rather unsettled by it.

Frisky Dingo: You should watch. No, really, you should watch. Adult Swim

 

For me, on New Year's Eve, it was Frisky Dingo, an Adult Swim cartoon I discussed in the year-end TV-on-DVD piece. You almost have to force Frisky Dingo on people, because they will almost certainly have never heard of it, the concept (superhero parody) doesn't exactly sell itself, and the name sounds like it refers to either something very child-oriented or something very adult-oriented, depending on your point of view.

But it's riotously funny, and I find that most people can be hooked within one or two 11-minute episodes. It's just a matter of getting them into the handcuffs.

So what do you find yourself pushing most frequently? Is it something obscure? Something popular that most of your friends eschew as hopelessly middlebrow? A movie everyone else has forgotten all about? You never know; maybe you can pick up a convert, and isn't that what it's all about?

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A New Year's Resolution For The True-Crime Author

True crime? It is to laugh: David Samuels' The Runner is more a true-confessions kind of book. The New Press

 

by Sarah D. Bunting

A new year brings with it New Year's resolutions — to lose weight, to quit smoking, to cap the impractical-shoe budget once and for all. It's easy to make these resolutions, then break them as the second week (or hour) of January dawns.

It's even easier to suggest resolutions for other people, so I'd like to propose a New Year's resolution for David Samuels, the author of The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, to wit:

"The next time I write a true-crime book, I resolve to write an actual true-crime book, not pad a con-man profile I already wrote for The New Yorker with indictments of Ivy League admissions policies and our haves-versus-have-nots society."

In fairness to Samuels, such indictments have their place. And the book is not bad or anything; it's quite well written.

But I don't read true crime for good writing, and neither does anyone else. (Fortunately, because it's in short supply). I read it because I want to learn about a given case. Ann Rule hasn't sold a bajillion books because she's such a fantastic wordsmith; her prose is mediocre at best. But she knows how to identify a juicy story, she knows how to get access to everyone involved with it, and she knows how to keep it moving.

What happens when you don't keep it moving, after the jump ...

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Open Question: Are You An Outspoken Defender?

by Linda Holmes

I mentioned here last week that I have been, at times, an outspoken defender of Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew. Yes, it's the worst title in the history of reality television, quite possibly, and that's already a field with an impressive history of bad titles. Yes, the world might be a better place without either celebrities or rehab, let alone the meeting of the two.

But it's also a show where, every now and then, someone accidentally says something weirdly insightful, mostly because he or she forgot to be a self-centered yahoo for about ten seconds and a little window opened up that let a beam of light crack the otherwise impenetrable wall of superficiality. Intermittent reinforcement, right? The most effective kind of all.

I'm always fascinated by other people's "outspoken defender" experiences. It's not the same as "guilty pleasures," exactly -- guilty pleasures are the things you know have no merit but enjoy anyway. I'm talking about being the one person who truly found The Love Guru hilarious, or being the biggest fan that the ABC show Cavemen -- which was based on the insurance-selling cavemen, by the way -- ever had. The best thing you can bring to your consumption of popular entertainment is a genuine ability to think for yourself (as opposed to an ability to disagree with the majority, which is totally different, of course), so in some ways, this may be your mark of genius.

So let's throw it open: Are you an outspoken defender? Of what? Do you admit it to your family? Your friends? Have you suffered what one of my college professors would have called the disapprobation of your peers as a result? If I can admit to mine, after all, you can admit to yours.

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Best Movies of 2008: Your Picks

How about a magic trick? Heath Ledger's Joker helped drive The Dark Knight to the top of your 2008 list -- and the critics' lists, too. Warner Bros.

 

by Trey Graham

Nearly 3,500 of you weighed in, and your verdict was clear: With a solid 41 percent of the almost 7,500 votes cast, The Dark Knight was your favorite movie of the year.

Not that we disagree: It made Bob Mondello's list, too.

David Edelstein begged to differ — but then he liked Sex and the City and sniffed at Slumdog Millionaire, so make what you will of that.

Come to think of it: That's what keeping up with a critic (or two, or three) is all about. You don't have to agree with 'em. The idea is to get to know their taste, and figure out how it squares with yours. Disagreeing — without assuming that the other person is an idiot — is the name of the game. Unconvinced? Check out the chart below. Is of these three NPR critics more on your wavelength than the others?

Side by side by side: Disagree with our critics? Well, so did they ... Kirk Radish/NPR

 

But we digress. Wall-E was another movie that made your list and the critics' picks: You ranked it No. 2, and Mondello, Edelstein and Kenneth Turan all picked it for their Top 10 roundups. (Does that mean you're antsy about the, um, uuuuuupcoming release of Pixar's Up?)

I loved Slumdog, so I was happy to see it land at No. 3 on the user poll — especially since it was only in 10 theaters initially, and it's still playing at only 614 venues nationwide. That's real passion reflected in those poll results — and in Slumdog's per-screen average, which is higher at this point than the average for Yes Man (a newer film, playing on 3,400 screens, and a star-driven comedy besides).

The tally: Click for complete results.

 

Milk made your short list, too, which I'd argue says good things about Gus Van Sant, Sean Penn and the NPR audience too. So did The Visitor: Nearly 10 percent of you picked that unassuming but enormously affecting character study as one of your three favorite movies of the year — which pleased me and Mr. Mondello no end.

That's your Top 5 — you'll find the rest of the NPR Listener Poll's Top 10 Best Movies of 2008 in that bar chart at right, and the complete list of results in the widget over on the original poll page.

After the jump: Your favorite blockbusters ...

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The Year In Film

Before you get too down in the mouth over the state of popular entertainment, check out this lovely retrospective of 2008 movies, created by a guy named Matt Shapiro. It takes a lot of care to put something like this together so that it works, and this one is a great success. There truly were a healthy number of very, very good movies this year, and if you don't say to yourself, "Oh, right, that too!" at least once, I'll be surprised. Kudos to Matt.

Via Slashfilm (naturally) and Low Resolution.

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A 2009 Television Wish List

Neil Patrick Harris: An Emmy for this guy is on my list of 2009 television wishes. Michael Buckner/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Everyone agrees that 2008 was a difficult year for TV, which isn't too surprising when you consider that in late 2007 and early 2008, there were no writers on the job for three months. (It would be more depressing if they'd been gone three months and it didn't matter.)

So will 2009 be better? One would hope. How does it get there? Five things I'd like to see:

1. Learn the lesson that if a storyline sounds stupid, it probably is. There are exceptions to the general rule that where there's silliness smoke, there's preposterousness fire -- I have been an outspoken defender of, of all things, VH1's Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew -- but on the whole, a little more skepticism wouldn't hurt. Someone on the Grey's Anatomy staff could have simply said, "Sex with a ghost doesn't sound like a good idea," and it would have saved everyone a lot of heartache. In fact, "No sex with ghosts" wouldn't be a bad rule.

Four more choices, after the jump...

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