I don't want blood, I do want accountability.
-- C.I. on the Cult of St. Barack, "Iraq snapshot."
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Truest statement of the week II
It was easy to champion single-payer when the Republicans were in power and health care reform wasn't on the national agenda, but the minute it was, with the Democrats in control of Congress and the Whitehouse, Conyers collapsed like a house of cards. Every now and again he howled about something. In one article he declared, "I'm tired of saving Obama's can" but it never occurred to the doddering old fool to stop.
-- Helen Redmond, "Beware The Progressive Democrat" (Old Elm Tree).
-- Helen Redmond, "Beware The Progressive Democrat" (Old Elm Tree).
A note to our readers
Hey --
Another Sunday, a long one. There was talk of some of us taking the weekend off; however, the problem (you know the one) developed. So we turned out in full force.
Along with Dallas, the following helped on this edition:
The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, and Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Trina of Trina's Kitchen,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.
We thank them all. We also thank Betty's kids for the illustration for the roundtable. But let's get there bit by bit. What did we come up with?
Truest statement of the week -- Kat led the charge mid-week for this to be a Truest. Even so, this might not have been picked if the writing edition hadn't lasted over sixteen hours. C.I. didn't even care at the end, "Let's just finish it."
Truest statement of the week II -- Helen Redmond on the 'progressive' Demcorats.
Editorial: 'Universal' health care -- There's no universal health care but when insurance companies pay your bills, we guess you'd be inclined to call it that.
TV: That fall season -- Ava and C.I. We had one big request (Dona and I), that Ava and C.I. write long. We wanted a major essay. We knew there was a lot to tackle and hoped to do as many short pieces as possible. Ava and C.I. tackled the fall season and so much more. This is epic.
Barack and Bush: Separated at Birth -- A short feature. As one of the very few sites to call out -- and to strongly and repeatedly -- call out Barack's broken pledge on public financing, we found it very interesting just how 'tight' Bush and Barry are.
Must see film for 2010 -- Stan and Ann are going to do some sort of a DVD feature this week which we may repost here. As a result of that, I (Jim) started saying we should kill our planned movie feature for the end of the year. Jess pointed out that it didn't have to be what we usually did. Which stuck in my head when Dona and I watched More America Graffiti.
Iraq: The War Continues -- A very short feature.
The Best Actress of the 20th Century -- We've been talking about this feature for weeks. Generally when another woman mentions, "Hepburn, she came on to me too!" We're not sure how successful she was, but she was certainly the pitcher. Sadly that doesn't come across onscreen where she's the eternal virgin and just gets worse year after year. The best actress in films? Not Hepburn. And we're serious that Joan Crawford was a better actress than Hepburn.
Ty's Corner -- Ty's mega piece that we all love. Except Ty. He'd planned to go back in and put in various links. Why spoon feed? And that last sentence? I thought it qualified for a "Truest" of the week.
Roundtable -- We roundtable the week's big issue.
Idiot of the Week -- He really is an idiot.
Highlights -- Mike, Elaine, Wally, Cedric, Rebecca, Ruth, Betty, Kat, Marcia, Stan and Ann wrote this and we thank them for it.
And that's what we came up with. If you found something that made you laugh, great, ditto if made you mad. But, if you're not getting it, we don't support sexism. And we don't support silence in the face of sexism. And we don't support attacking your own readers (or erasing them) because they won't go along with sexism. See you next week.
-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.
Another Sunday, a long one. There was talk of some of us taking the weekend off; however, the problem (you know the one) developed. So we turned out in full force.
Along with Dallas, the following helped on this edition:
The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, and Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Trina of Trina's Kitchen,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.
We thank them all. We also thank Betty's kids for the illustration for the roundtable. But let's get there bit by bit. What did we come up with?
Truest statement of the week -- Kat led the charge mid-week for this to be a Truest. Even so, this might not have been picked if the writing edition hadn't lasted over sixteen hours. C.I. didn't even care at the end, "Let's just finish it."
Truest statement of the week II -- Helen Redmond on the 'progressive' Demcorats.
Editorial: 'Universal' health care -- There's no universal health care but when insurance companies pay your bills, we guess you'd be inclined to call it that.
TV: That fall season -- Ava and C.I. We had one big request (Dona and I), that Ava and C.I. write long. We wanted a major essay. We knew there was a lot to tackle and hoped to do as many short pieces as possible. Ava and C.I. tackled the fall season and so much more. This is epic.
Barack and Bush: Separated at Birth -- A short feature. As one of the very few sites to call out -- and to strongly and repeatedly -- call out Barack's broken pledge on public financing, we found it very interesting just how 'tight' Bush and Barry are.
Must see film for 2010 -- Stan and Ann are going to do some sort of a DVD feature this week which we may repost here. As a result of that, I (Jim) started saying we should kill our planned movie feature for the end of the year. Jess pointed out that it didn't have to be what we usually did. Which stuck in my head when Dona and I watched More America Graffiti.
Iraq: The War Continues -- A very short feature.
The Best Actress of the 20th Century -- We've been talking about this feature for weeks. Generally when another woman mentions, "Hepburn, she came on to me too!" We're not sure how successful she was, but she was certainly the pitcher. Sadly that doesn't come across onscreen where she's the eternal virgin and just gets worse year after year. The best actress in films? Not Hepburn. And we're serious that Joan Crawford was a better actress than Hepburn.
Ty's Corner -- Ty's mega piece that we all love. Except Ty. He'd planned to go back in and put in various links. Why spoon feed? And that last sentence? I thought it qualified for a "Truest" of the week.
Roundtable -- We roundtable the week's big issue.
Idiot of the Week -- He really is an idiot.
Highlights -- Mike, Elaine, Wally, Cedric, Rebecca, Ruth, Betty, Kat, Marcia, Stan and Ann wrote this and we thank them for it.
And that's what we came up with. If you found something that made you laugh, great, ditto if made you mad. But, if you're not getting it, we don't support sexism. And we don't support silence in the face of sexism. And we don't support attacking your own readers (or erasing them) because they won't go along with sexism. See you next week.
-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.
Editorial: 'Universal' health care
Thursday, apparently wanting to stuff Barack's stocking, NPR actually hailed Barack's BigBusinessGiveAway as "universal health care" and gushed that he had managed to deliver "health care to all Americans." Really?
Well we would like to congratulate the United States government for ending murder.
If you are found guilty of murder in the US, you will go to prison and may get the death penalty.
That really hasn't stopped murder, however.
And Barack didn't 'give' health care to anyone.
He mandates that you purchase health insurance. He forces you to purchase the insurance or you'll be fined for breaking the law.
All he did was push a law that makes it illegal for anyone not to have health insurance.
Having delivered 'health care' for all Americans, we look forward to 2010 when the Congress will make all US citizens millionaires.
Through aid and subsidies? No. But they could pass a law requiring every US citizen to be a millionaire and fining those who 'refuse.'
It makes about as much sense as forcing Americans to buy insurance or pay fines.
What the Senate and the House are proposing is disgusting and if the insurance lobbies hadn't bought off the MSM (and if Panhandle Media wasn't still wet dreaming over Barack), you'd know that.
Americans are not being served by the Congress, the insurance companies are. And anyone who can't tell you that either has cognitive issues or pockets stuffed by the insurance companies.
TV: That fall season
Sometime ago, one of the many members of Terry Gross' all male harem was ripping apart Sandra Bullock and her massive hit The Proposal, leading one of us (C.I.) to call out that nonsense and to note how Terry rides (side saddle) with an all male posse. We had no idea what a breath of fresh air (the real stuff, not Terry's canned nonsense) that was for so many but Ty repeatedly would tell us about e-mails that came in wondering if Terry Gross' posse contained one damn woman? Of course not. Ugly girl can't be belle of the ball otherwise.
Terry decided to bring on one of her many male TV 'critics' (yes, she has more than one) and, as readers Sally, Cameron, Rico and Beverly all e-mailed to note, no woman accomplished a damn thing in 2009. The man was supposedly reviewing the 'year in television' and had much praise for many, many men (including men who had no programs on the air in 2009) but he had not one kind word to say about women.
Could it be true?
We called NPR friends and were informed that was incorrect. Along with the many, many men he praised, he worked in a bit of praise for the very tired Tina Fey.
Of course he did. Fey's been playing for the Boys Club for sometime -- not that it's helped improve the ratings of her awful sitcom any.
In terms of 2009, Tina Fey had nothing to offer. Not one damn thing. She was about as pertinent to this year in TV as Hal Linden. As we thought about the women doing outstanding work since the start of the fall season and grasped that, yet again, they were being slighted, we knew we had to write a look-back piece.
First off, two guest stars stood out in the fall. The first was Martha Plimpton who showed up for one episode of Medium (CBS, Fridays) playing Rosemary -- a woman Alison (the always amazing Patricia Arquette) befriended during her hospital stay whom Allison was now dreaming about. Rosemary dies early on which allows one more scene where Allison has to explain to her that she's dead. Though it was a very small role, the three time Tony nominee Plimpton not only stood out but meshed perfectly with Arquette's own amazing rhythms.
The other guest star who gave a performance worth noting also appeared in only one episode. This time the network was Fox and the show was Fringe (airs Thursdays). Walter Bishop (John Noble) is the 'mad scientist' of that show. He's harmed not only his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) but also FBI agent Olivia Duham (Anna Torv) whom he drugged when she was a child. It's a complicated part and bringing on a woman he had once drugged provided the show with another complicated part. As written, the woman was not upset about the drugging and had fond memories of Walter Bishop and a lasting attraction to him. On the page, the character offered a few laughs, none of them especially deep.
In a casting miracle, Rebecca went to the always amazing Theresa Russell who not only found every nuance on the page, she created a few of her own. She added nostalgia and regret to the underwritten role and, most of all, warmth. When Walter leaves her at her house, viewers are probably filled with more regret than the script intended but that's due to the fact that Rebecca was probably the most lived in new character Fringe came up with this fall.
In a just world, 2010 will see Plimpton and Russell both receiving Emmy nominations for their roles.
Fortunately, they were not the only women giving full bodied performances during the fall season. The best news for TV was that comedy was back. Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to amaze on The New Adventures of Old Christine (CBS, Wednesdays). So much so that two weeks ago a well known stand up comic called us to say he'd finally caught the show, that he'd avoided it (despite our praise) because he really didn't care for her as Elaine (on Seinfeld) but he was amazed to "find something I could actually laugh out loud at" and praised Louis-Dreyfus for creating "a real character." In this decade, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has often been the only woman with the lead in a sitcom and, we'd argue, it's been her amazing work that has consistently reminded network execs that women can be funny and carried on the tradition of pioneering work by women in sitcoms -- women like Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance, Mary Tyler Moore, Marlo Thomas, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Sally Struthers, Jean Stapleton, Bea Arthur, Marla Gibbs, Nell Carter, Susan Saint James, Jane Curtain, Roseanne, Laurie Metcalf, Rue McClanahan, Betty White, Candice Bergen, Shelly Long, Jasmine Guy, Cybill Shepherd, Helen Hunt, Courtney Cox-Arquette, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Ellen DeGeneres, Debra Messing and Megan Mullally.
One of those women, Courtney Cox, returned to sitcoms this fall. Cougar Town (ABC, Wednesday) and like most good sitcoms starring women, she's not the 'token.' Jules has two close friends brilliantly played by Christa Miller (The Drew Carey Show, Scrubs) and Busy Philipps. If you haven't caught the show yet, it's hilarious and your first clue to that is the war conducted against it by a certain number of women (none of which are feminists, see Ruth's "Eilene Zimmerman Is No Feminist").
When TWO BIT Guttersnipes come out in packs, your gut should tell you some IDIOT at The New York Times is behind it. In this case it wasn't The Idiot Bellafante (whom ABC never does corrections for), it was The Idiot Warner. Judith Warner's a real piece of a work and, yes, a real Bitch. It takes a Bitch to rip apart a woman for things she never did. Zonked out on who knows what this time, Warner typed:
And, of course, we had Jules, Cox's alter ego, 40-ish, recently divorced, really pretty, really well-groomed, well-dressed and strikingly well-off for a woman paying alimony and selling real estate in bust-time Florida -- and, above all, eager to take her revenge on an unfair world by getting a pretty young man to call her own.
Getting such a man passes for some kind of empowerment on the show and is accompanied by all sorts of pseudo-feminist language. Which is why, I suppose, the temptation to find something meaningful in all the froth feels so compelling.
[. . .]
A woman like Cox's Jules -- visibly vibrating with self-doubt and thinly-veiled self-loathing, is, it's fair to say, probably the least likely figure of fantasy to be conjured by women Cox's age. In fact, she'd be more of a nightmare. But this Cougar beast -- sexually aggressive, ever-available, a woman beating a man at his own game -- is a fantasy that seems to be selling pretty well right now, at least to (mostly male) studio heads and TV execs and advertisers. Maybe that's because she's such a twit: so narcissistic, so superficial, so stunted emotionally,
Poor, Judith, we'll stop her raving there. See, the "Twit"? It's Judith. She's not describing Cougar Town. She's only demonstrating she didn't even watch the first episode (that would be the one she's 'writing' 'about'). Talk about superficial, talk about emotionally stunted.
The New York Times would do well to begin fact checking their TV pieces. Judith Warner would do well to issue an apology for LYING to readers that she watched a show she never watched. If we can't make it through a show, we'll tell you. We'll tell you, we found it so bad, we couldn't watch it. But Warner wants readers to believe she watched Cougar Town when she didn't.
Jules did not end up with a young man in the first episode because she went after him and took him home. Her friend dropped him off at her doorstep. As for being all the things that Warner's describing, Jules is a working woman, the mother and primary care-giver of a teenage son. If someone's life is empty, it may be Judith Warner's but it's not Jules'.
It appears to be 44-year-old Warner's own fears (yes, we've all heard talk about the marriage -- we just didn't know she was aware of the talk) and it's a real shame that she elected to take her own problems out on a TV show.
We don't see a great deal of difference between a hate monger like Judith Warner and one like Terry Gross. In both cases, they're all about hurting women.
Terry brings on 'critics,' 'experts,' in the arts -- including TV, movies and music -- and we're never supposed to notice that Terry can't connect with any woman, we're never supposed to notice that to be an expert in Terry's world is to be a man.
Judith wanted to write about TV and what did she offer? An attack on women.
At a time when women are fighting to regain the positions they had in the 90s on TV, Judith comes along to attack them. To attack with lies. Now she could have hated the show and we would have rolled our eyes but to lie about it? To write a piece that demonstrates she was unable to invest 24 or so minutes into watching the show she's ripping apart?
We slammed Two and A Half Men sometime ago and our warnings came true over the holiday. But we notice there's no cry of "Cancel the show!" And we're reminded that there never is.
Roseanne sings off-key and there are efforts to take her show off the air. Cybill Shepherd and Brett Butler and Lynn Redgrave (among many, many others) are targeted and demonized for being strong women while many of their male peers get caught drunk driving, busted for drugs and much more and it's never, "We must cancel this show!"
You better believe if Julia Louis-Dreyfus had been the one arrested this holiday season, CBS would already be whispering to the press (which would be amplifying it) that it might be time to end the show.
We're not saying Charlie Sheen should be fired or his show cancelled. We've got nothing against Kelsey Grammar or Tim Allen (to note two other men who got away with everything no woman would have) either. We're making the point that men get passes while women get cancelled.
And we're making the point that women who are not feminist -- especially at The New York Times -- repeatedly attack women on TV. Where have they been this decade as the networks followed Bully Boy Bush's lead and 'machoed' up? As women were absented from leads (except the 'straight woman' in a comedy)? Judging Amy, a great show, was cancelled, and where were they?
Oh, that's right, they were picking on Patricia Arquette. They were attacking her and her show. It's really hard to figure out what The New York Times GutterSnipes want women to be because it's never good enough. To read Warner, they want something more along the lines of Patricia's Allison. But Allison was ripped apart. A working woman, a mother of three kids, she failed because it was 'supernatural.' Strangely, the paper's never gone after the show entitled Supernatural. But that show stars men.
And it's a different criteria, now isn't it? No woman ever meets the 'standards' of The New York Times. The character Judith Warner is describing, for example, isn't Jules. It does sound a great deal like Dr. Fraiser Crane but that show (and the lead character) never got ripped apart by the paper.
Jenna Elfman returned to sitcoms this fall with Accidentally On Purpose (CBS, Mondays) and it's a delightful confection. She's wonderful in it and hitting every note required. But the reviews of it were these awful, savage attacks.
For the longest time, we wondered if our own knowledge of the battle she and others with the show had to fight to get it where it is were influencing our judgment of it? Even grasping that opinions can differ, the show we saw and the ones so many critics described were worlds apart. But if you look at those reviews, you grasp they aren't addressing the quality of the show or its merits, the reviewers are all in the midst of their own panic. Which can be entertaining and might even qualify for enlightening . . .
Some other time.
Not now. Not when women are attempting to regain ground. Think about Saturday Night Live for example. This decade it's not considered alarming or appalling that they've done full seasons (including the current one) where only one woman is in the cast. The show that, when it debuted in the seventies, featured three strong women in the cast (Gilda Radner, Jane Curtain and Laraine Newman).
As we've documented here in countless pieces over almost five years, offline we have begged, pleaded, advocated, yelled -- done whatever we could to get various network suits to beef up women's presence on TV. Fall 2009 was probably the strongest fall season for women of the decade. And we watched amazed as critics -- including female ones -- ripped apart shows starring women. We watched amazed as everyone decided they were Maureen Dowd and that what happened onscreen wasn't as important as what it reminded them of from their own lives. Like Dowd struggling to write about politics and turning the entire thing into a joke, the Water Cooler Set demonstrated they couldn't write about TV.
Offline, before the fall season started, we picked the show we were going to support on each network. On ABC, it was Cougar Town and we went to lunches and parties with various ABC suits to talk that show up like crazy. At NBC, we did the same for Mercy. At CBS, we worked Accidentally On Purpose and The Good Wife. We'd go to lunches and parties and we'd talk 'shop' (we have no financial stakes in any of those shows) and, once the fall season began, there would usually be a guest who was passionate about the show we were talking up. We'd be able to point and say, "See, there's an audience. You just need to keep it on the air, you just need to give it a fair shot."
And while we're doing that, the GutterSnipes are going around trashing these same shows. Those 'reviews' would appear and there would be momentary network panic. We'd have to do a walk through on why the Water Cooler Idiot(s) didn't get it. And, in doing so, we probably undercut any power the Water Cooler Set might have had left (good!). At ABC, for example, in programming, they now rip the Water Cooler Set reviews apart worse than we ever have.
And for what reason did the Water Cooler Set attack?
We've already pointed out that Judith Warner's 'critique' of the character of Jules sounded like she was describing Fraiser (she certainly wasn't describing Jules). Why is there this need to rip apart women? Why is there this need to insist that a female character be just like you (Judith Warner)?
Maude never would have stood a chance in today's environment.
Now we chose four shows to champion that we thought held the most promise for women onscreen. If we'd been able to champion more, we would have. And it's a real shame that no one else did. Eastwick, for example, was a very solid show.
Our only negative critique of it (offline) was: "Cut Paul Gross' hair."
It was a fast-paced show with some strong writing and some stronger acting. It starred Rebecca Romijn (hitting all the right notes from her very first scene), Jaime Ray Newman (remember that name) and Lindsay Price. And the three of them not only held their own individually, they managed to get a group rhythm going as well. Our problem with Eastwick (other than Gross' hair -- which did get cut and he looked so much better after) was: Where is this going?
And that's the only thing that may have hurt it with audiences. Some viewers may have felt, "Well the women discover their power, all get pregnant by Darryl and then defeat him." In other words, it was probably necessary to make clear that this was based on the movie but it was not the movie. (It wasn't based on the bad book by the bad writer John Updike.) But viewers who gave it a chance would have quickly seen it was creating its own world.
It really was something to watch (ABC has canceled it) and it could have used support. It didn't get it.
We're not really sure what a Judith Warner or a Terry Gross believes they accomplished this year but we know they made life harder for women. They did that by consistently undercutting women. They did it by refusing to applaud or even note the amazing work of women in front of the cameras.
Along with Cox, Louis-Dreyfus, Elfman, Miller, Philips, Russell, Plimpton, Price, Newman and Romijn there was Julianna Margulies turning in an incredible performance and the Water Cooler Set really couldn't wrap around that, they were too busy dissecting the title (The Good Wife, CBS, Tuesdays). They were too busy telling you what the title meant in relation to their own lives. (Kind of like Warner with Cougar Town.)
Terry Gross and her Posse Don't Pee Sitting Down were trashing Sandra Bullock and The Proposal earlier this year. They were trashing it because they didn't think Sandra was playing a role model and they didn't think it was this or it was that. It's always so amusing to hear a man tell you what feminism is really about.
And as he wound down, smart people noticed that he never drags that same criticism out when he's reviewing the latest Tom Hanks film. He's never concerned about sexism then. He's not concerned about it with any film starring a man. Here's reality boys and girls, feminism matters. Sexism matters. And if you're going to sit there and trash a successful film starring a woman -- in a decade when few women were able to carry a film -- then you better be prepared to also offer a similar critique of the latest film you just loved, you know, the one where the man had a gun and he did this and he did that and the woman had three scenes, an overdeveloped chest and an underwritten role.
That's not how it works, though, is it? A woman's largely ignored unless she's successful -- at which point, she's ripped apart.
And it couldn't happen without a lot of women -- Terry Gross and Judith Warner are only two of them -- taking part.
Terry decided to bring on one of her many male TV 'critics' (yes, she has more than one) and, as readers Sally, Cameron, Rico and Beverly all e-mailed to note, no woman accomplished a damn thing in 2009. The man was supposedly reviewing the 'year in television' and had much praise for many, many men (including men who had no programs on the air in 2009) but he had not one kind word to say about women.
Could it be true?
We called NPR friends and were informed that was incorrect. Along with the many, many men he praised, he worked in a bit of praise for the very tired Tina Fey.
Of course he did. Fey's been playing for the Boys Club for sometime -- not that it's helped improve the ratings of her awful sitcom any.
In terms of 2009, Tina Fey had nothing to offer. Not one damn thing. She was about as pertinent to this year in TV as Hal Linden. As we thought about the women doing outstanding work since the start of the fall season and grasped that, yet again, they were being slighted, we knew we had to write a look-back piece.
First off, two guest stars stood out in the fall. The first was Martha Plimpton who showed up for one episode of Medium (CBS, Fridays) playing Rosemary -- a woman Alison (the always amazing Patricia Arquette) befriended during her hospital stay whom Allison was now dreaming about. Rosemary dies early on which allows one more scene where Allison has to explain to her that she's dead. Though it was a very small role, the three time Tony nominee Plimpton not only stood out but meshed perfectly with Arquette's own amazing rhythms.
The other guest star who gave a performance worth noting also appeared in only one episode. This time the network was Fox and the show was Fringe (airs Thursdays). Walter Bishop (John Noble) is the 'mad scientist' of that show. He's harmed not only his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) but also FBI agent Olivia Duham (Anna Torv) whom he drugged when she was a child. It's a complicated part and bringing on a woman he had once drugged provided the show with another complicated part. As written, the woman was not upset about the drugging and had fond memories of Walter Bishop and a lasting attraction to him. On the page, the character offered a few laughs, none of them especially deep.
In a casting miracle, Rebecca went to the always amazing Theresa Russell who not only found every nuance on the page, she created a few of her own. She added nostalgia and regret to the underwritten role and, most of all, warmth. When Walter leaves her at her house, viewers are probably filled with more regret than the script intended but that's due to the fact that Rebecca was probably the most lived in new character Fringe came up with this fall.
In a just world, 2010 will see Plimpton and Russell both receiving Emmy nominations for their roles.
Fortunately, they were not the only women giving full bodied performances during the fall season. The best news for TV was that comedy was back. Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to amaze on The New Adventures of Old Christine (CBS, Wednesdays). So much so that two weeks ago a well known stand up comic called us to say he'd finally caught the show, that he'd avoided it (despite our praise) because he really didn't care for her as Elaine (on Seinfeld) but he was amazed to "find something I could actually laugh out loud at" and praised Louis-Dreyfus for creating "a real character." In this decade, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has often been the only woman with the lead in a sitcom and, we'd argue, it's been her amazing work that has consistently reminded network execs that women can be funny and carried on the tradition of pioneering work by women in sitcoms -- women like Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance, Mary Tyler Moore, Marlo Thomas, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Sally Struthers, Jean Stapleton, Bea Arthur, Marla Gibbs, Nell Carter, Susan Saint James, Jane Curtain, Roseanne, Laurie Metcalf, Rue McClanahan, Betty White, Candice Bergen, Shelly Long, Jasmine Guy, Cybill Shepherd, Helen Hunt, Courtney Cox-Arquette, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Ellen DeGeneres, Debra Messing and Megan Mullally.
One of those women, Courtney Cox, returned to sitcoms this fall. Cougar Town (ABC, Wednesday) and like most good sitcoms starring women, she's not the 'token.' Jules has two close friends brilliantly played by Christa Miller (The Drew Carey Show, Scrubs) and Busy Philipps. If you haven't caught the show yet, it's hilarious and your first clue to that is the war conducted against it by a certain number of women (none of which are feminists, see Ruth's "Eilene Zimmerman Is No Feminist").
When TWO BIT Guttersnipes come out in packs, your gut should tell you some IDIOT at The New York Times is behind it. In this case it wasn't The Idiot Bellafante (whom ABC never does corrections for), it was The Idiot Warner. Judith Warner's a real piece of a work and, yes, a real Bitch. It takes a Bitch to rip apart a woman for things she never did. Zonked out on who knows what this time, Warner typed:
And, of course, we had Jules, Cox's alter ego, 40-ish, recently divorced, really pretty, really well-groomed, well-dressed and strikingly well-off for a woman paying alimony and selling real estate in bust-time Florida -- and, above all, eager to take her revenge on an unfair world by getting a pretty young man to call her own.
Getting such a man passes for some kind of empowerment on the show and is accompanied by all sorts of pseudo-feminist language. Which is why, I suppose, the temptation to find something meaningful in all the froth feels so compelling.
[. . .]
A woman like Cox's Jules -- visibly vibrating with self-doubt and thinly-veiled self-loathing, is, it's fair to say, probably the least likely figure of fantasy to be conjured by women Cox's age. In fact, she'd be more of a nightmare. But this Cougar beast -- sexually aggressive, ever-available, a woman beating a man at his own game -- is a fantasy that seems to be selling pretty well right now, at least to (mostly male) studio heads and TV execs and advertisers. Maybe that's because she's such a twit: so narcissistic, so superficial, so stunted emotionally,
Poor, Judith, we'll stop her raving there. See, the "Twit"? It's Judith. She's not describing Cougar Town. She's only demonstrating she didn't even watch the first episode (that would be the one she's 'writing' 'about'). Talk about superficial, talk about emotionally stunted.
The New York Times would do well to begin fact checking their TV pieces. Judith Warner would do well to issue an apology for LYING to readers that she watched a show she never watched. If we can't make it through a show, we'll tell you. We'll tell you, we found it so bad, we couldn't watch it. But Warner wants readers to believe she watched Cougar Town when she didn't.
Jules did not end up with a young man in the first episode because she went after him and took him home. Her friend dropped him off at her doorstep. As for being all the things that Warner's describing, Jules is a working woman, the mother and primary care-giver of a teenage son. If someone's life is empty, it may be Judith Warner's but it's not Jules'.
It appears to be 44-year-old Warner's own fears (yes, we've all heard talk about the marriage -- we just didn't know she was aware of the talk) and it's a real shame that she elected to take her own problems out on a TV show.
We don't see a great deal of difference between a hate monger like Judith Warner and one like Terry Gross. In both cases, they're all about hurting women.
Terry brings on 'critics,' 'experts,' in the arts -- including TV, movies and music -- and we're never supposed to notice that Terry can't connect with any woman, we're never supposed to notice that to be an expert in Terry's world is to be a man.
Judith wanted to write about TV and what did she offer? An attack on women.
At a time when women are fighting to regain the positions they had in the 90s on TV, Judith comes along to attack them. To attack with lies. Now she could have hated the show and we would have rolled our eyes but to lie about it? To write a piece that demonstrates she was unable to invest 24 or so minutes into watching the show she's ripping apart?
We slammed Two and A Half Men sometime ago and our warnings came true over the holiday. But we notice there's no cry of "Cancel the show!" And we're reminded that there never is.
Roseanne sings off-key and there are efforts to take her show off the air. Cybill Shepherd and Brett Butler and Lynn Redgrave (among many, many others) are targeted and demonized for being strong women while many of their male peers get caught drunk driving, busted for drugs and much more and it's never, "We must cancel this show!"
You better believe if Julia Louis-Dreyfus had been the one arrested this holiday season, CBS would already be whispering to the press (which would be amplifying it) that it might be time to end the show.
We're not saying Charlie Sheen should be fired or his show cancelled. We've got nothing against Kelsey Grammar or Tim Allen (to note two other men who got away with everything no woman would have) either. We're making the point that men get passes while women get cancelled.
And we're making the point that women who are not feminist -- especially at The New York Times -- repeatedly attack women on TV. Where have they been this decade as the networks followed Bully Boy Bush's lead and 'machoed' up? As women were absented from leads (except the 'straight woman' in a comedy)? Judging Amy, a great show, was cancelled, and where were they?
Oh, that's right, they were picking on Patricia Arquette. They were attacking her and her show. It's really hard to figure out what The New York Times GutterSnipes want women to be because it's never good enough. To read Warner, they want something more along the lines of Patricia's Allison. But Allison was ripped apart. A working woman, a mother of three kids, she failed because it was 'supernatural.' Strangely, the paper's never gone after the show entitled Supernatural. But that show stars men.
And it's a different criteria, now isn't it? No woman ever meets the 'standards' of The New York Times. The character Judith Warner is describing, for example, isn't Jules. It does sound a great deal like Dr. Fraiser Crane but that show (and the lead character) never got ripped apart by the paper.
Jenna Elfman returned to sitcoms this fall with Accidentally On Purpose (CBS, Mondays) and it's a delightful confection. She's wonderful in it and hitting every note required. But the reviews of it were these awful, savage attacks.
For the longest time, we wondered if our own knowledge of the battle she and others with the show had to fight to get it where it is were influencing our judgment of it? Even grasping that opinions can differ, the show we saw and the ones so many critics described were worlds apart. But if you look at those reviews, you grasp they aren't addressing the quality of the show or its merits, the reviewers are all in the midst of their own panic. Which can be entertaining and might even qualify for enlightening . . .
Some other time.
Not now. Not when women are attempting to regain ground. Think about Saturday Night Live for example. This decade it's not considered alarming or appalling that they've done full seasons (including the current one) where only one woman is in the cast. The show that, when it debuted in the seventies, featured three strong women in the cast (Gilda Radner, Jane Curtain and Laraine Newman).
As we've documented here in countless pieces over almost five years, offline we have begged, pleaded, advocated, yelled -- done whatever we could to get various network suits to beef up women's presence on TV. Fall 2009 was probably the strongest fall season for women of the decade. And we watched amazed as critics -- including female ones -- ripped apart shows starring women. We watched amazed as everyone decided they were Maureen Dowd and that what happened onscreen wasn't as important as what it reminded them of from their own lives. Like Dowd struggling to write about politics and turning the entire thing into a joke, the Water Cooler Set demonstrated they couldn't write about TV.
Offline, before the fall season started, we picked the show we were going to support on each network. On ABC, it was Cougar Town and we went to lunches and parties with various ABC suits to talk that show up like crazy. At NBC, we did the same for Mercy. At CBS, we worked Accidentally On Purpose and The Good Wife. We'd go to lunches and parties and we'd talk 'shop' (we have no financial stakes in any of those shows) and, once the fall season began, there would usually be a guest who was passionate about the show we were talking up. We'd be able to point and say, "See, there's an audience. You just need to keep it on the air, you just need to give it a fair shot."
And while we're doing that, the GutterSnipes are going around trashing these same shows. Those 'reviews' would appear and there would be momentary network panic. We'd have to do a walk through on why the Water Cooler Idiot(s) didn't get it. And, in doing so, we probably undercut any power the Water Cooler Set might have had left (good!). At ABC, for example, in programming, they now rip the Water Cooler Set reviews apart worse than we ever have.
And for what reason did the Water Cooler Set attack?
We've already pointed out that Judith Warner's 'critique' of the character of Jules sounded like she was describing Fraiser (she certainly wasn't describing Jules). Why is there this need to rip apart women? Why is there this need to insist that a female character be just like you (Judith Warner)?
Maude never would have stood a chance in today's environment.
Now we chose four shows to champion that we thought held the most promise for women onscreen. If we'd been able to champion more, we would have. And it's a real shame that no one else did. Eastwick, for example, was a very solid show.
Our only negative critique of it (offline) was: "Cut Paul Gross' hair."
It was a fast-paced show with some strong writing and some stronger acting. It starred Rebecca Romijn (hitting all the right notes from her very first scene), Jaime Ray Newman (remember that name) and Lindsay Price. And the three of them not only held their own individually, they managed to get a group rhythm going as well. Our problem with Eastwick (other than Gross' hair -- which did get cut and he looked so much better after) was: Where is this going?
And that's the only thing that may have hurt it with audiences. Some viewers may have felt, "Well the women discover their power, all get pregnant by Darryl and then defeat him." In other words, it was probably necessary to make clear that this was based on the movie but it was not the movie. (It wasn't based on the bad book by the bad writer John Updike.) But viewers who gave it a chance would have quickly seen it was creating its own world.
It really was something to watch (ABC has canceled it) and it could have used support. It didn't get it.
We're not really sure what a Judith Warner or a Terry Gross believes they accomplished this year but we know they made life harder for women. They did that by consistently undercutting women. They did it by refusing to applaud or even note the amazing work of women in front of the cameras.
Along with Cox, Louis-Dreyfus, Elfman, Miller, Philips, Russell, Plimpton, Price, Newman and Romijn there was Julianna Margulies turning in an incredible performance and the Water Cooler Set really couldn't wrap around that, they were too busy dissecting the title (The Good Wife, CBS, Tuesdays). They were too busy telling you what the title meant in relation to their own lives. (Kind of like Warner with Cougar Town.)
Terry Gross and her Posse Don't Pee Sitting Down were trashing Sandra Bullock and The Proposal earlier this year. They were trashing it because they didn't think Sandra was playing a role model and they didn't think it was this or it was that. It's always so amusing to hear a man tell you what feminism is really about.
And as he wound down, smart people noticed that he never drags that same criticism out when he's reviewing the latest Tom Hanks film. He's never concerned about sexism then. He's not concerned about it with any film starring a man. Here's reality boys and girls, feminism matters. Sexism matters. And if you're going to sit there and trash a successful film starring a woman -- in a decade when few women were able to carry a film -- then you better be prepared to also offer a similar critique of the latest film you just loved, you know, the one where the man had a gun and he did this and he did that and the woman had three scenes, an overdeveloped chest and an underwritten role.
That's not how it works, though, is it? A woman's largely ignored unless she's successful -- at which point, she's ripped apart.
And it couldn't happen without a lot of women -- Terry Gross and Judith Warner are only two of them -- taking part.
Barack and Bush: Separated at Birth
The similarities between Bully Boy Bush and Bully Boy Barack just keep coming. The two War Hawks may as well have been conjoined twins separated at birth for all their shared qualities.
Peter Overby (NPR's Morning Edition), in an aside, noted one shared trait last week:
Then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush took the first step by rejecting public funds in the primaries. He said the system was old and underfinanced.
Last year, then-Sen. Barack Obama took the final step and became the first candidate to turn down public funds for the fall campaign.
Last year, then-Sen. Barack Obama took the final step and became the first candidate to turn down public funds for the fall campaign.
Surprising only if you weren't paying attention.
Sisters Under The Skin, Barack and Bush.
Must see film for 2010
This time of year, we generally look back at films or DVDs of the last twelve months. At the last minute, we decided to go the other way.
Most film lovers have seen American Graffiti. Fewer are aware of More American Graffiti.
Mid-week, Jim and Dona were looking for something different to watch and found the DVD in C.I.'s collection. They'd love the earlier one, they'd read criticism that termed the sequel (at best) disappointing. But they were bored and they figured they'd give it a try. After watching once, they gathered as many people as they could to watch a second time.
American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas, is a one-of-a-kind classic and deservedly so. But More American Graffiti (produced by Lucas and directed by Bill L. Norton), is a minor classic. Norton directed and wrote the screenplay which attempts to update the characters from the first film. Candy Clark, Paul Le Mat, Cindy Williams Ron Howard, Charles Martin Smith, Bo Hopkins, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford return from the original film. Ford plays a new character (a police officer who pulls over Clark and her new boyfriend) while Phillips plays her original character (for one scene only) and a flower child named Rainbow.
Some wrongly state that the only major cast member who doesn't return is Richard Dreyfuss. Wrong. Suzanne Sommers, infamous as the The Blonde In The T-Bird in the first film, isn't back in the 1979 sequel.
The film covers New Year's Eve in 1964, 1965, 1966 and 1967. In 1964, the start of the film and the basis for the story for John Milner (Le Mat), Debbie (Clark), Terry (Smith), Steve (Ron Howard) and Laurie (Williams) show up at a drag strip to congratulate John on what looks like a lucky break. They can't stay long because Debbie, Steve and Laurie have to see Terry off -- he's going to Vietnam.
1965 is Vietnam where Terry and Little Joe (Hopkins) are in the same medivac unit and sick of being almost killed repeatedly so that their lying superiors can look better. Jim Houghton will join the team and express distaste for Terry and Little Joe; however, when Little Joe is shot dead and they're left stranded because their superiors won't rescue them, he'll realize how right Terry is. Terry will get his revenge on the higher-ups (and a US Congress member) as well as stage his own death while announcing he'll go off to Europe. This section is subversive and probably much too threatening for many in 1979 as the efforts to launch a wave of revisionary history on Vietnam was really taking hold. Too much truth in this section which is shot like the hand held camera news reports from Vietnam.
It's got humor and pathos and tension. And we've spoiled it for you because, early on, Debbie's explaining, in 1966, that two of her friends died on New Year's Eve -- one being Terry. She doesn't know he's faked his death.
In 1966, Debbie's living in San Francisco, in a crash pad with many other flower children and hippies -- including Phillips' Rainbow. She's got a boyfriend who plays . . . An instrument? We see that once and, no, he's not as amazing as Debbie thinks he is. But he does play the field. They're toking up as Debbie's driving along and talking about marriage when Harrison Ford's cop pulls them over. He busts the boyfriend for pot -- the boyfriend who needs Debbie to bail him out and is suddenly interested in getting married.
Terry picks Debbie up in the first film by telling her she looks just like Connie Stevens. In the sequel, she's adopted a flower child look to go with her existence. Her story is photographed like any musical sequence from a late sixties TV show (split screens, various angles -- think The Smothers Brothers for one example). Debbie ends up at a concert and spending all of her time trying to sell the band on using her boyfriend. At a performance at a dive in Oakland, she'll see her boyfriend dancing and romancing another woman. It's a major moment for her character and the scenes following her rage show a slow dawning that all the time she spent in promoting the deadbeat boyfriend could have been spent improving herself. The where-are-they-now ending will inform Debbie became a country music singer.
New Year's Eve 1967 finds Steve and Laurie furiously fighting over Steve's insisting that Laurie cannot work. Laurie is just as adamant that she will work for three hours each day at a doctor's office and she storms out to her brother's. Her brother's in the midst of a campus demonstration against the war. He doesn't want Laurie around but ends up needing her when he wants his wallet. She arrives on the campus and discovers he plans to burn his draft card. Appalled, she tries to talk him out of it. She can't understand his objection to the war. She can't understand anything going on around her. When the police charge and she sees them clubbing students, she begins an awakening. Steve will show up and say she can work . . . in a few years. Not good enough for her and she stands her ground but does so as the police rounds them all up.
The women are put on one bus and the men another as they're hauled off. On the women's bus, two young women sing the Supremes "Baby Love" which leads a police officer to club one of them. As everyone falls silent, Laurie's fury will spill over and she'll begin singing "Baby Love" and clapping along until all the other women arrested join in and the police officer, frustrated and angry, will be forced to let it alone.
In 1964, John learns his big offer from a major racing team is a joke. He'll be left to compete that day while also dealing with a foreign exchange student (Anna Bjorn, dumped on him by Mary Kay Place's character). He'll end up the big winner at the drag race and also successful at wooing the foreign exchange student. It's a big day for John Milner, one that ends with him being killed when a drunk driver hits his car.
Milner's dreams (and success) were simple and basic and can be seen to be the American Dream which dies in 1964. 1965 (Vietnam sequence) is the death of the American Youth. 1966 is about shaking off oppression and renewal. 1967 is the rebirth of Young America. The film works thematically while also providing four satisfying stories.
Paul Le Mat maintains John Milner -- no easy feat because now he's not only James Dean-like, he's, in effect, James Dean. But the film really belongs to four others. Though the opening credits imply that Ron Howard does a cameo, he actually has a major role and performs in multiple scenes. It's the finest acting of his career and Cindy Williams is far, far from Shirley and reminding you of how she came to work with Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola in the first place.
Charles Martin Smith and Candy Clark are just amazing and all the more so when you grasp how they do this without playing off each other -- after the opening, the two have no scenes together despite the fact that their chemistry carries over from the first film.
American Graffiti was art and was watered down to become bad TV (Happy Days). As with most TV ratings successes, more people saw the cheap knock-off than the actual art. And the backlash for More American Graffiti, no doubt, included some TV goers who thought they were going to spend two hours at the Drive-In. But equally true is that More American Graffiti attempts to capture a time that many work hard to deny ever existed and a great deal of the hostility towards this minor masterpiece has to do with the fact that it addressed those times.
Some DVD sets of American Graffiti contain More American Graffiti on the flip-side of the disc (if it does, the packaging will note that both films are on the set). However, you see it, make a point to see More American Graffiti in 2010. We think a rebirth, similar to the one charted in the film, is about to happen.
Iraq: The War Continues
Like the illegal war itself, the violence continued last week.
Sunday, 4 people were reported dead and 6 wounded; Monday 9 were reported dead and 18 wounded; Tuesday 6 were reported dead and 7 injured; Wednesday 8 were reported dead and 54 wounded; Thursday 36 were reported dead and 123 wounded; Friday 9 were reported dead and 25 injured; and Saturday 11 were reported dead and 36 reported wounded for a total of at least 83 reported deaths and at least 269 reported injured.
News emerged of various leaders (political, religious, educational) being targeted for death, of election workers being confined (for 'safety') to Baghdad, and much more. But everyone was supposed to pretend this was a new and secure Iraq. And, on Inside Iraq (Al Jazeera -- which began airing each Friday), it emerged that the new oil contracts may not be binding:
Jasim al-Azzawi: Issam, how dangerous is it for Iraq to sign these contracts and Memorandum of Understanding with no oil law in place.
Issam al-Chalabi: With all due respect, Dr. al-Shahristani seems to be moving on a shaky ground. I think he had fallen in his answers to your question, had fallen in the conflict between the Constitution and the existing laws. The Constitution says that, the two Articles about the oil and gas ought to be explained and there will be separate law to be issued. Until then, in a very clear, separate Article, it says that all existing oils will remain valid. Hence Law 97 of 1967 is valid as he mentioned and he ought to abide by it. That means, yes, the Minister of Oil is authorized provided they go and seek endorsement from the existing legislative body which is the Parliament for each case.
Jasim al-Azzawi: So far they haven't done that. Is that a reflection on the lack of oversight by Iraqi Parliament about this huge and overreaching contracts?
Issam al-Chalabi: No, the Oil & Gas Committee and many Parliamentarians have sought that and they have asked him, they have subpeoned him, that they should look into the matter. In fact, one particular member had gone to the federal court. And you asked about the dangers of these new contracts, I do say that it is very possible that in the future these contracts could very well be under questioning and somebody could question the legitimacy of these contracts and maybe they would be required to be amended or maybe anulled.
Issam al-Chalabi: With all due respect, Dr. al-Shahristani seems to be moving on a shaky ground. I think he had fallen in his answers to your question, had fallen in the conflict between the Constitution and the existing laws. The Constitution says that, the two Articles about the oil and gas ought to be explained and there will be separate law to be issued. Until then, in a very clear, separate Article, it says that all existing oils will remain valid. Hence Law 97 of 1967 is valid as he mentioned and he ought to abide by it. That means, yes, the Minister of Oil is authorized provided they go and seek endorsement from the existing legislative body which is the Parliament for each case.
Jasim al-Azzawi: So far they haven't done that. Is that a reflection on the lack of oversight by Iraqi Parliament about this huge and overreaching contracts?
Issam al-Chalabi: No, the Oil & Gas Committee and many Parliamentarians have sought that and they have asked him, they have subpeoned him, that they should look into the matter. In fact, one particular member had gone to the federal court. And you asked about the dangers of these new contracts, I do say that it is very possible that in the future these contracts could very well be under questioning and somebody could question the legitimacy of these contracts and maybe they would be required to be amended or maybe anulled.
In addition, Thursday Free Speech Radio News offered the following special half-hour broadcast:
Iraqis make up the world's largest population of refugees. The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq released a wave of violence and economic instability and brought with it the destruction of key infrastructure and the near-collapse of basic services. More than 2.7 million Iraqis have been displaced within their borders and another two million have fled their country, largely to Syria and Jordan. Today we bring you a special FSRN documentary called, "Guests in the Waiting Room: Iraqi refugees in Jordan," produced by Hanan Tabbara and Salam Talib.
If you missed it, you can catch it at the link.
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