What Hauled My Gravel...10/7-10/14/07

Here’s this week’s batch of things I found good enough to blog about:

Radiohead- In Rainbows (music)
Not only is Radiohead’s new album a pretty good one, but the inventive nature of its distribution (pay what you want---including $0.00 for the entire album in digital download form) makes it historical. Go here and see for yourself. Play it loud or with headphones for maximum effect.

30 Rock (television)
This show is probably my favorite comedy currently on the air and this week’s episode had the show in top form. Don’t believe me? Watch this scene.

In the Valley of Elah (film)
I never thought that Paul Haggis’ directorial debut Crash was a horrible movie. I never thought it was a particularly good movie either—and it certainly wasn’t the best film of 2005 (that would have been The Constant Gardener), despite it winning the Best Picture Oscar. Where Crash suffered from a heavy-handed approach to the messages it was trying to share and a seeming attempt to work every flashy director trick into one film, Haggis’ sophomore effort In the Valley of Elah benefits from much-needed restraint.

Part family drama, part crime procedural, Elah follows Tommy Lee Jones’ Hank Deerfield: a former MP officer and current gravel hauler who after receiving a call telling him that his son has gone AWOL, decides to visit his son’s military base. As Detective Arbogast said in Psycho: “If it doesn’t gel, it’s not aspic.” Since Deerfield didn’t even know his son had returned from Iraq, the AWOL thing doesn’t sit right with him- he decides to take manners in his own hands and find his son.

He’s assisted in his pursuits by a police detective played by Charlize Theron (glammed down again for Oscar season). The relationship between the two characters works because they don’t develop a trust immediately and are constantly questioning each other’s competence. In a supporting turn, Susan Sarandon appears as Hank’s wife. Sarandon is only in a handful of scenes, but is perfect in all of them.

Tommy Lee Jones is a fine actor, but he almost doesn’t need to be. His face says everything you need to know about his character---but it’s the same face he wears in all of his movies. It’s a role built around the Tommy Lee Jones persona, and for the first time in a long while, that’s a good thing.

Elah is not a perfect movie. While it’s not as preachy as Crash, it has its moments. I will warn you that the very last scene in the movie and the scene in the first act that sets it up are the two worst scenes in the film. While a pretentious air of importance may have been barely palpable through the rest of the film, for those two scenes it was choking.

Still, In the Valley of Elah is a good film that manages to be both patriotic and a polemic. Is it anti-war or just anti-this-war? If it wasn’t for the two scenes mentioned earlier, I wouldn’t have an answer---and I would have preferred it that way.
8/1

Kristen Wiig (television)
I just love Kristen Wiig, currently the second best thing about the current incarnation of Saturday Night Live (the first being The Digital Shorts). My absolute favorite of her sketches (her carpooling w/ Alec Baldwin) has been pulled from YouTube and unavailable on NBC.com due to (my guess is) music rights issues, but this week’s SNL featured Wiig doing a definitive Björk impression. I fell in love all over again. Watch it here.

Pushing Daisies (television)
I’ve been holding off on mentioning this show, hoping that the pilot wasn’t just a fluke. Well, after the second brilliant episode I’m still holding my breath, praying that it can keep this up. Bryan (Wonderfalls) Fuller‘s new creation is a combination of that show’s whimsy and the visual flair of Tim Burton circa Big Fish. It’s full of black humor (the main protagonist can resurrect the dead with one touch, but kills them again with a second) and pie---two of my absolute favorite things.

A murder procedural fairy tale, the pie maker with the magic touch (Lee Pace) uses his powers to solve crimes (with the assistance of a private investigator/gun cozy knitter played by Chi McBride). After awakening his recently deceased childhood sweetheart, his life becomes more complicated since the slightest touch will cause him to lose her a second time. I’m also a fan of pie shop waitress Kristin Chenowith (known to break out into a random musical number) and narrator Jim Dale (of the Harry Potter audiobooks).
This show isn’t for everyone—if you can’t accept the premise of, say, a car that runs on dandelions for fuel, then I suggest you skip this one.

Bummer of the Week:
Smallville’s new cast members
OK, so Laura Vandervoort’s Supergirl Kara is growing on me…slowly, but the actor who is playing the new Daily Planet editor Grant Gabriel, Michael Cassidy, sucks sucks sucks. I believe when I started blogging on this site I made an oath to accent the positive and these ‘Bummers of the Week,’ seem to go against that. That said, I’ll try and only point out truly egregious affronts to my pop-culture intake. Cassidy’s lame delivery—or maybe it’s just the sucky character he plays---is one of those affronts.