Tom's Media Round-up, Part 3

Television:

Samurai Champolo- The anime invasion into North America has left me mostly indifferent towards anime as a genuine creative outlet. You watch enough of this stuff and it all starts to blur together. My antipathy towards it is due to the utterly undiscerning tastes of anime fans. (I suspect Japanese fans are as low in their standards as audiences are over here.) Quantity over quality, as they say. Anyone wanting to see what all the fuss is about might watch, say, Yugi-oh, or Inayusha and quite understandably, give the rest of the subgenre a pass. Which is a shame, since Samurai Champolo isn't going to get the casual viewer as an audience that it deserves. It's a solidly crafted piece of work, about an unemployed waitress in 1880's Japan on a search for her father, accompanied by two very different swordsmen that she's hired as bodyguards.

The thing is, given the limited financial resources animation's given in Japan, stuff like Samurai Champolo and Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex wind up being the 'prestige' titles of animation studios, when ideally, they should be the meat-and-potatoes of the industry. Pandering to your lowest common denominator might pay off in the short term, but in the long run, you're only cutting off your nose to spite your face...

The Boondocks- "Did that little coloured boy just say 'Nigger'?" "Oh, it's okay if they say it!" Maybe it's my latent liberal sentiments kicking in, but Aaron McGruder's use of the 'n' word tends to grate on me after a while. He has to realize that racial slurs, used even in an 'ironic' context don't numb the impact of them after repeated use, as I had previously thought. Rather, it sends a message that it's okay to hurl hateful epithets at people to intimidate them, and then, when called on the rug to account for one's behavior, claim that you were 'kidding', and disingenuously attack your accusers of being 'overly sensitive pussies'. I suspect that one of the influences behind Dave Chapelle walking away from his massively successful t.v. show, besides the awesome responsibility Comedy Central was putting on his narrow shoulders, was the question that was his mostly white audience laughing with him, or at him? It's a tough thing to face for any black comedian, and the only one I've seen to even reach a stand-off was Richard Pryor. I'd be more ambivalent about Aaron McGruder, but the style choice he took in animating his comic (low-budget anime that rips off Samurai Champoloo in the opening credits) clinched the deal for me.

Deadwood- Well, it isn't 'Gunsmoke',for sure. Using the setting of the pre-annexed South Dakota gold-mining boom town, 'Deadwood', creator David Milch gives us one of the best shows on cable. It's a struggle for control between the aptly-named saloon-brothel owner/unofficial mayor Al Swearengen(Ian McBride) and upstart saloon-brothel owner Cy Tolliver(Powers Boothe). The pivot of the series is store owner Seth Bullock(Timothy Olyphant). Swearengen and Tolliver are respectively, a bad man and a worse man. While Swearengen is a thief, a cheat, and a murderer, he has an agenda to maintain order in Deadwood, mainly since too much stealing, cheating and killing is bad for business. Tolliver, on the other hand, is a locust; he swoops in from Chicago and is in the process of sucking the town dry. Tolliver is gratuitously cruel, as well. Seth Bullock, starting a drygoods store in Deadwood, falls into the position of the unofficial law in Deadwood.

Swearengen hates and fears Bullock, not only because Bullock interferes with Swearengen's plots, but because Bullock is the first real authority to make his presence in Swearengen's little corner of Paradise. For Swearengen, Bullock's arrival indicates that his days of limitless power and wealth are numbered. The series doesn't make it explicit, but I believe that America's taming of the west in the late 19th century was due to amoral dirtbags like Swearengen, but credited to decent,moral men like Bullock.

Deadwood's run into some controversy in regards to its use of foul language, and in Deadwood's case, harsh language is a vital component of the series. In the Victorian-era setting, and in the pre-civilized state it's set, swearing is done by uneducated men to denote their authority. (It's why series creator Milch put cussin' in N.Y.P.D Blue) Note how Swearengen curses the most of any other character. Note that when Bullock curses, we're genuinely shocked. I don't think the swearing in Deadwood is distracting, especially considering the care the characters put into their everyday conversations. The dialogue is literary.

Brasseye, Jam!, and Nathan Barley-the world of Christopher Morris- While 'missing the point' seems to be replacing baseball as the national pastime in the Colonies, 'taking the piss' is replacing football (that's British for 'soccer') in Dear Old Blighty. I suspect most t.v. people in Britain figure that since nobody really gives a shit about what England's point of view in global discourse is these days, British television's taken up the role of the disenfranchised A.V. high school nerd. 'Ali G' sets up the pompous to make retarded statements, and 'The Office' tore apart day-to-day workplace politics.

Dropped into this comes Christopher Morris, a acolyte of the late comedic writer Michael O'Donoghe's belief that 'making people laugh is the lowest form of humor'. Jam! was a collection of sketches so dark that light bent around them. (a six year old girl works as a Jean Reno-in-the-Professional-type cleaner, fr' instance) His most controversial series was a send-up of hysterical, melodramatic 'life-style' t.v.news magazines called 'Brasseye'. In the 'drugs' episode, he manages to get an actual m.p. propose a bill in the House to ban the made-up drug, 'Cake'. The delivery is so dry, dust hits you in the face. The most controversial episode, the special on pedophilia, essentially ended his career as a producer in T.V.

He bounced back, sort of, with 'Nathan Barley', a six-episode series depicting a column writer, Dan Ashcroft, for an urban weekly newspaper called 'Sugar Ape', Dan's sister,(a struggling documentary filmmaker) and the writer's nemesis, Nathan Barley, a self-obsessed, vulgar lout. Dan is in a constant struggle to discredit Nathan. The paradox of the tale is that whilst Dan dislikes everything about Nathan Barley, Dan achieves the least in his life and is incapable of staying true to any of his own morals making him the real 'idiot'. On the other hand, it's Barley with his own 'Jackass'-style website who's becoming more and more popular as the series continues. It's funny as hell, and believe me when I say that I've felt more and more like Dan Ashcroft as days go by...

Wonder Showzen- One of the most bizarre things I've ever seen in my life. The only way to understand it is this: Imagine a troupe of avant-guarde performance artists influenced by Amand Artaurd are approached by an NPR-type leftist production company to put on a six-episode children's t.v. show. After signing the necessicary contracts and receiving the budget, the troupe collectively realizes that they have signed a deal with the Devil and decide to put on the most vile, offensive, insane and mean-spirited t.v. show for children that has ever been conceived by the human mind. Their intent that if any human child glimpses even five minutes of their production, the child will look like a progeria victim. The production company will immediately cancel the contract, hire a Catholic priest to sprinkle the video tapes with holy water, and the avant-guarde troupe will keep what's left over of the budget. Fornicating puppets, blasphemy, and little kids asking inappropriate questions at the race track. ("Here's my impression of you, Mr. Race track tout.-'Gamble,gamble,gamble-Die.') It's got too much vitriol in it to last past a second season, but as they say- 'Take a long look at it, miss...You may never see it's like again..'(Addendum: I should, of course, point out that Wonder Showzen falls under the same category of 'shock humour' as 'Jackass' and 'the Tom Green show'. The comedy is based on 'oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-I'm-seeing-this-how-do-they-get-away-with-it?'. Once the shock wears off, the show wears somewhat thin after the first viewing.)

House, M.D. -Took me a while to watch enough of it to get an impression, but now I'm hooked. Hugh Laurie's anti-social doctor plays Sherlock Holmes while infectious diseases play Moriarty. What blew me away was Laurie's internalized performance. He's a miserable, rude, passive-aggressive asshole. When he gets shot at the end of the second season, your first thought is, 'Well, that figures..". I had taken him for granted in 'Jeeves and Wooster' and 'Blackadder' where his stock in trade was British upper class twits played for comedic value. I really didn't expect this type of performance from him. Usually in television, when you have a character like this, we get a glimpse of the soft, mushy center in the course of a show. Not in Dr. House's case. When he makes biting zingers, he's really being a prick.