Quickie Reviews: Just some short comments on recently consumed art.
Superbad: There is raunch -- which I usually hate, for instance I didn't much care for Something about Mary or American Pie -- and there is Superbad which is brilliant. Seriously, one of the few teen comedies worth watching in the long and pathetic history of teen comedies. Funny, but with a purpose. Great nerd performances. The awkward raunch and profanity is sourced from adolescent pain, not from pointless toilet humor. Please do NOT make a sequel.
Mad Men: The new season just started and it could be awesome. Clearly this season is going to be about change and age vs. youth. As much as I loathe sentimental '60s hippie worship, it was a time of great change (not all for the better). As Gregg Easterbrook once pointed out, American Grafitti was made in 1971 out of nostalgia for 1960 (11 years in the past). Would anyone notice much different between today and 1997, never mind have nostalgia about it? At this point, it looks like we are going to get a take on that change from Mad Men. I hope this season moves me enough to write about it in full when it's over.
Burn Notice: Nothing but lightweight entertainment coolness. A throwback to '80s shows like Magnum, P.I. -- vacuous pseudo-action/detective-style plots, but perfect paced and executed with good humor. The shows are contrived especially to not require any thought (and if you did think about them, they probably wouldn't make any sense). It gets by on the good natured charisma and chemistry of the lead actors, including the redoubtable Bruce Campbell and the insanely hot Gabrielle Anwar. It's good to eat healthy, but sometimes you just need some ice cream. Burn Notice is perfect Pecan Praline.
Devil May Care: This book has been heralded as the return of "literary" James Bond. Sebastian Faulks, a well respected mainstream novelist, took up the mantle of Ian Fleming in an attempt to reboot the book series as Casino Royale did for the movie series. It works, to a point. First off, having read a number of Fleming's Bond novels I don't know that I would consider them "literary". They are exceedingly well crafted thrillers -- there isn't a thriller writer alive who couldn't benefit from Fleming's economy and sentence craftsmanship -- but it's a stretch, I think to call the "literary" if the implication of literary is something like "artistic insight into humanity". Anyway, what Faulks has done is write a Bond novel that Fleming would be proud of, in the style of Fleming himself. (In fact the cover says "Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming," which is precisely what is going on.) It is set in 1967, just after the last Fleming novel. It makes use of all the trappings of Fleming -- in fact, many of the events can be thought of as variations on Fleming-penned scenes -- without stepping into the cartoonism that so few can resist with Bond (although the pat ending where the arch villain returns to get his revenge for Bond foiling his plan plays out very over-the-top). Worth reading if you like the original Bond series. Not a reason to start if you don't.
Beautiful Jazz: Written in the Stars and Live from the Village Vanguard from the unbelievable Bill Charlap, are perhaps the most beautiful piano performances I have ever heard. Throw in Hey, Look Me Over by the Harry Allen-Joe Cohn Quartet for some exquisite saxophone and guitar work and it adds up to some of wonderful jazz listening. The thing about these two performers is that they have not forsaken beauty as the ultimate goal of music. So much music (especially jazz) seems to exist just to prove how far out of the mainstream it can go. Aesthetics are sacrificed for boundary pushing or technical flash, mopstly for the sake of self-definition. Both these performers find ways to be creative within the context of making beautiful melodious music and being true to the soul of the standards they play. The song comes first. Awesome. I hope it becomes a trend.
