A photo essay by John D. Moore

Fig. 1. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson twiddling his fingers

Fig. 2. The twiddled fingers of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

Labels: babbling about films, reviews

The landscape of late night television does not shift very often. But starting two weeks ago, the trigger for a massive upheaval was pulled. Conan O'Brien has left Late Night after a week of incredible farewell shows in order to take over Jay Leno's iconic The Tonight Show in three months, at which point Leno will transition to primetime. It's been long coming, as the shift was originally announced in 2004. And while Lorne Michaels had been talking about Jimmy Fallon assuming Conan's desk since around that time, Fallon was officially announced as the heir to the 12:37 throne in May 2008. This new Late Night with Jimmy Fallon premiered last night.

And for something that had apparently been in the works for so long, it's a shame that its first broadcast was really quite lame. There's been much ado about the weeks of preparations leading up to this debut, but it would seem that Fallon and his producers forgot to develop much of anything.

Fallon was just as nervous and jittery as he was during his most recent appearance on Conan. If he gets over this or figures out how to work it to his advantage, though, he has the potential to succeed on solely the strengths of his own attractiveness and self-effacing charisma.

His biggest problem is that the show has nothing to say about him and he has nothing to say about his show. Despite the presence of The Roots as house band, everything else feels like a cookie cutter late night show template. Fallon serviceably delivered a monologue with ripped-from-the-headlines jokes that were flatly generic and impersonal, and delivered against a garish blue curtain. The Roots accompanied him in an extended joke about the current stimulus package in a segment they called "Slow Jam the News," which was cute but overstayed its welcome halfway through its short length. After commercial, Fallon called some members out of the audience to play "Lick It for Ten," in which three young people licked things like fax machines and lawn mowers to receive ten American dollars.

David Letterman has been doing his job for over 25 years, starting in this very same time slot. He gets to do tired, self-aware shtick like this and his demeanor is ultimately what sells it. Seeing a fresh, eager face like Fallon attempting it just doesn't work.

After "Lick It for Ten," Robert de Niro gave an off-puttingly distant two-segment interview (opening with someone as guarded as de Niro was a poor choice; better to pair your new talent up with a talk show guest who always brings the goods like William Shatner), followed by a refreshingly lively interview with Justin Timberlake, whose instant injection of charisma and comfort suggested he might belong on a show like this some day.

There are some potentially good ideas here, though. Despite the dull thud that was "Lick it for Ten," Fallon seems genuinely interested in interaction with his studio audience. When Timberlake arrived for his interview, he improved some music to The Roots's music. Strong integration of both band and audience into the show may very well be something that the program could benefit from, but if it does, it needs to break free from the shackles of late night talk show, audience-facing-couch-and-chairs conventions.

This is not to write Fallon off just yet. As Time's James Poniewozik says in his write-up, "A late-night show is, in a way, one evolving performance; grading it after one day, or even a few, is like reviewing a movie after the first opening title." If Fallon and his crew figure out how to reinvent the talk show format to play to their own strengths and to deliver something that the other hosts don't give them, it could become something special. It may take a while to get there, though. And until then, I'll be sticking with CBS's Craig Ferguson, who did just that.

I'll check back in with Fallon next time Craig's in rerurns.

Labels: late night television, reviews, television

According to most media, kids come of age in or around adolescence, usually spurred on by some traumatic or urgent external force. But what happens to the awkward youth who is spared the death of a parent or a best friend moving away, who isn't forced to man up in high school? What happens when such a despair-born misanthropy goes unchallenged and unthinkingly supported from his inborn social supports?


I have recently finished watching Gonzo's 2006 anime series, Welcome to the NHK, based on the novel and manga series written by Tatsuhiko Takimoto (which I have not read). NHK is Japan's public broadcasting network, but the protagonist of the series, Tatsuhiro Satou, a 22-year-old hikikomori living on his own in Tokyo, comes to believe in another NHK, the Nippon Hikikomori Kyokai, a far-reaching secret organization that conspires to keep people like him sealed away from society with no education, training, or prospects. He at once sneers at and is deathly afraid of society.

The hikikomori phenomenon of youths holing themselves up in their parents' homes or (in Tatsuhiro's case) apartments, fearing the light of day and the eyes of others may be largely concentrated in Japan, but the fear and aimlessness is no less resonant to my Western, twentysomething ears. Indeed, it's not difficult for me to imagine an alternate past where, had the framework for such a lifestyle existed in my culture, I might've ended up a hikikomori; it was only through the inability to sustain such a lifestyle that I became a more functional, social person.


As the story progresses, Tatsuhiro ends up running into an old classmate, Yamazaki (an otaku and video game design student), and Misaki, a mysterious girl who initially meets Tatsuhiro while doing door-to-door religious solicitations with her aunt. Soon thereafter, Misaki declares to Tatsuhiro that she's going to save him from his hikikomori ways. Our hero is quick to deny that he actually is a hikikomori, even though he's more than willing to employ his hikikomori status as an excuse for any number of his behaviors.


If your magical pixie girl alert just went off, I don't blame you. When Misaki first made this proposition, I put up my defenses. The last thing I needed was another male fantasy about the mythical woman who just makes life work. Fortunately, the show's smarter than that, and even though Misaki continues in her attempts to "save" Tatsuhiro for her "project," (always reluctant to divulge any of her own personal information though she seems to know a little too much about him), the series savages the wrongheadedness of this notion. Still, that doesn't stop Tatsuhiro from fantasizing about Misaki masturbating in a nun's habit.

Indeed, through the show's progression, it explores and skewers that kind of male fantasy, with Tatsuhiro and Yamazaki collaborating on a galge (or eroge, a pornographic visual novel) loaded with moe clichés. While the show gives us a laugh about Tatsuhiro's initial infatuation with these games, it never gets too sanctimonious or judgmental about its characters' shortcomings. Interestingly, the game the guys create was eventually released, with a script by the story's original author.

The series isn't perfect. Sometimes the credulity of the show is stretched by the characters acting a bit too much like anime characters. A couple gestures are a bit too grand. There are limp montage sequences. The comedy is a bit front-loaded. And the series' midpoint has a major reveal that opens up a lot of questions that urgently need addressing but get put on the background as we approach episode 24.


But by the end of the series, I was very satisfied. Welcome to the NHK--perhaps better than any show I've seen before--deftly portrays the kind of drifting, awkward, post-adolescent malaise that is too often glossed over or solved neatly. As the cast of characters grows, the audience meets new failures, who struggle with and fail at life in different ways and in different places. At its core, amongst all the goofy pratfalls and screaming, it's a nuanced and compassionate story about three ordinary failures and how they struggle to find a way to succeed, or at least fail in peace.

Labels: anime, reviews, Welcome to the NHK

Ghost Rider
Written & directed by Mark Steven Johnson. 2007.



NOTE: I'm going to spoil a bunch of stuff.

I have no idea what the hell kind of movie Ghost Rider was supposed to be, but even from that position, I still think I've got a leg up on writer/director Mark Steven Johnson. I never did see Johnson's Daredevil, but generally gave it the benefit of the doubt when people told me it was misjudged and underrated. Still, after its terrible flop status, I'd assumed he would never get another break like he did at a major studio picture, let alone adapting Marvel characters again. I'm much, much more wary of Daredevil.

The structure of the picture is a mess. Its first twenty minutes are spent before the story starts properly in a very broadly told story of teen angst and love. Literally, Johnny Blaze carves his and his girlfriend's initials in a tree, turns around, and she tells him she's leaving town. Wow. That was actually a little impressive.

Flash forward to the future. The first fifteen minutes of this segment are spent with ridiculous, golden flashbacks to stuff we saw as little as five minutes ago. A friend of mine likes to call this storytelling for "the slows." I don't know if I've met anyone that slow. Naturally, the love interest from his youth resurfaces as a tonally inconsistent world famous reporter that will shriek like a little girl, show the mature sympathy of la belle, and have her obligatory half-assed girl power moment. It builds this love interest, but it only really does that to have two breasts to stand around and motivate the protagonist into action he probably doesn't have control over anyway. Or does he? I could never figure that out.

The romance is so perfunctory, and it stands in sick contrast to Johnny Blaze's, uh, roadie or business manager or technical adviser or something... at any rate, his name's Mack and he's apparently Johnny's only friend. Mack is nonchalantly killed--with nary a wince from either the film or Johnny--about thirty minutes from the end.

That brings into sharp focus one of the many problems with the film: there are no stakes. Roxie and Johnny are going to survive because they're going to. Ghost Rider will always be Ghost Rider because he has to be. He can't lose a fight, because he can't. Every time one of the weird elemental side-villains seems to have our hero does something we didn't realize he could do that makes no goddamn sense. The rules are made up from shot to shot. If there's any internal logic in this film, I can't find it.

Back to the genre confusion: Personal drama is abandoned in the first hour. There's hardly enough fun for this to be even a dark, campy comedy. And it's certainly not an action film (thought that's where your local video store will shelve it). It's a problem with a number of American studio products posturing themselves as action films: there's no fighting. Battles are decided by our bad guy initiating an attack against Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider pauses, then retaliates with the aforementioned something we didn't realize he could do. What I would give to see some punches and some fight choreography.

Is it ludicrous to complain about the moral palette in a film like this? Ghost Rider employs a move called Penance Stare (visualized in the worst visual effects attempt at a trip I've seen in a while) on some random mugger. At this point, I thought he was under the devil's control (oh yeah, he works for the devil because he signed a contract by accident), but this was soon celebrated as a heroic task. Everyone is apparently quite neatly categorized into "innocent" or "guilty," and it's pretty simple to make the distinction. Hilariously, the only black character (or extra) in the film (and apparently in all of Texas or wherever this was set) is an "innocent" in the jail.

Part of the blame for this pathetic clusterfuck of a movie must belong to the source material. Superhero comics aren't my forte, but I can't imagine this character or his ill-defined universe working well, like, at all.

There are precisely three good things about this movie:

1. Nicolas Cage shaking and drinking from a martini glass full of jelly beans.
2. Nicolas Cage and his Carpenters dependency.
3. Nicolas Cage enjoying stupid monkey videos way too much.



These things are all well behind us in the first half hour, though.

Okay, Sam Elliot's always nice to have around (and in this movie, he's exactly who you think he is and it's so not a reveal that it made me kind of sad), but that's all he really is: around.

Labels: babbling about films, reviews