NOT A MOVIE

Believing their patriarch, George Sr., to be dead, the dysfunctional Bluth family at the core of the Fox sitcom Arrested Development, holds a wake. “Wow. He’s really gone,” says George-Michael, the youngest Bluth, when called upon to speak. “If he was here right now, I would probably tell him that it all worked out. And that um, I’ll be bringing you some salmon rolls right away. In heaven.” The show’s jerky, hand-held camera cuts to the attic where George-Michael has stowed his grandfather, who is enjoying his own funeral like a curious Tom Sawyer. “Goddammit,” he says as he peeks through the air-vent, “How many times I gotta tell this kid, chicken wings?”
Like George Sr., the sitcom Arrested Development both is and isn’t dead. On November 10, Fox swashbucklers announced they would cut back the number of episodes ordered without officially canceling the show—encouraging Arrested’s producers to shop to other networks. Rumors of buy-outs abound (Showtime, FX) but the general buzz agrees that the eight episodes to air starting December fifth are no better than a deathbed.
With a paltry audience of four million, Arrested Development could be treated as just another sitcom that will die quietly unwatched. But the show has garnered such unprecedented critical acclaim—top 10 lists, Emmys, SAG awards, a Golden Globe—that its end is being protested with petitions and op-eds. One militant fan-group is even shipping bananas to Fox, a snarky reference to the frozen banana stand operated by the Bluth family.
So why the ratings? First, the show is basically un-marketed. Second, it is too hard to jump into—the plot builds like a serial novel instead of supplying story-lines like lozenges, to be swallowed whole. Third, the humor is too dry and witty, too intelligent: “America is stupid,” said one freshman, “And it’s a show for smart people.”
Such explains why Yale is one of the nerdy strongholds where Arrested’s passing will be most mourned. At a Masters Tea this October, a writer for the TV series Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, asked his audience if they had ever seen his show. Of the forty wannabe-TV writers, perhaps three had seen a single episode. Incredulous, he asked: “What shows do you watch, then?” There was really only one reply: “Arrested Development?” Yale’s Facebook Group, “Arrested Development Devotion” (A.D.D.) can claim 55 members while “The Simpsons Fan Club” has only 25.
And it’s not just for the kids. In last spring’s American Literature after 1945, professor Amy Hungerford used the phrase “Use Your Allusion” to encourage students to speak up during lecture. Hungerford was, of course, “alluding” to the name of an Arrested Development character’s magic act. “I almost cut her off to ask whether I could be Chaucer or Poe,” said Maureen (“Fuck Mountain”) Miller ’06, alluding to the episode to which Hungerford had originally alluded.
On any Monday night at 8 p.m precisely, Teddy (“Chicken Dance”) Goff SY ’07 can be found with his feet propped on his common room coffee table. Dozens of fans seated around him mouth the opening theme they’ve already memorized: “And now the story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together…” They are this family. And this television show may just be the glue that has “no choice but to keep them all together.”
Over in Timothy Dwight, Simon (“How much can a banana cost—10 dollars?”) Heitin ’07—a die-hard who believes “There are only two kinds of people: people who love Arrested Development and people who have never heard of it”—wrote a letter to Fox. Jonathan (“I will be my dead father’s body”) Dach’s JE ‘08’s freshman Farnam suite bonded over the first season, while over the summer Erin (“Yes, we know your name is Annyon”) Kelly PC ’07 connected with her actual family by watching the fictional one. “Once I missed an episode,” Kelly recalled, “and my dad called to remind me it was on.”
Speaking of the show’s end, Christian (“The Bullet”) Nakarado SM ’07 describes “a great darkness [that] will spread across the land, extinguishing all hope for next semester, or the rest of my life, really.” One off-campus house is hosting a mandatory-black “Wake” after December 5th’s episode. Offerings will be burnt on a makeshift raft, which will float to its death in the bathtub. There will be smoothies.
“You have to have a certain amount of intelligence,” said Michael Cera, the actor who plays George-Michael, “to decipher [the joke] and know that it's just a dirty penis joke.” Certainly, this trickery is what Yalies treasure. To loyal fans, Arrested Development can never really die. We can only hope that this coffin, like Gob Bluth’s magical one, has a trap-door.

personal essay on sisterhood of the traveling pants

The harold needed me to write about what I hated most in 2005. It was upposed to be 150 words. I wrote this in 30 minutes without stopping. It is the pure essence of a hilarious summer. I will whittle it down to 1/6th the size some other night.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, June 2005

When I walk home past the shut-up York Square Cinema, beneath the doomsday lettering of SAYONARA, I want to cry. As if frozen under the hard ice like the upturned face of a dead child, the poster of the film that sunk with the theater stares out with a dreamy, unreal calm.

I didn’t see Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants at York Square. I saw it in New York somewhere, probably at Lincoln Center. I was a cub reporter there for the summer, and I was seeing a boy I kind of sort of liked who was leaving the next week. I did that thing I kind of always do—where I fear the goodbye, so I do my best to sort of ruin everything before it happens.

My two best girlfriends there that summer were both lonely, doe-eyed, set in their ways. Quiet, thin, tasteful—they were my opposite, and I did everything I could to get them to drink something without an olive in it. Or squeeze out a giggle. Or an unwitting fart. The tagline for Sisterhood was my best sure bet: “Laugh, Cry, Share the Pants,” sounded more like what my croaky jewish mother might yell through a department store’s changing-room swingdoors than the draw thought up by L.A. marketing execs looking to score with a feel-good teen drama. We would say it to eachother on subway platforms, jabbing elbows and pointing out the poster of a body-model's airbrushed ass. It was our lodestar.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is exactly what the title should suggest: It is the kind of movie so bad it doesn’t seem true. The film is quite literally about a pair of pants lent around a group of friends that happen to fit, equally, and for this achievement they take on a magical quality. “You think that a pair of jeans that fits all of you is going to fit all of this?” hawks Cuban sista Carmen, as she slaps her ass and gives the skinny-legged jeans a once-over. But when they’re on, all she can say is… “Noooo waaaaay.”

I would have said the same.

I promised the Gudruns I’d see it opening night. That was a Friday. Maybe I had also promised the boy I was kindofsortofseeing that I’d see him that night. It was his last weekend before he left sometime mid-week, but I had a job that took a lot of time, and he was working at a booth in the book fair down at the convention center early every morning. I did what any heinous bitch would do and forced him to come with.

I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I know we sat on the bed and fought about why I would rather go to a terrible movie than be with him. I felt indebted to my friends. I was the jet stream that gulfed their continents of quiet sadness. They could not go on without me. He was only angry. I made every wrong decision, my priorities were out of whack, I would rather go to shitty fucked up chick flicks than be together when we only had so many days. Looking back I see that he was probably just sad that I was doing what I always did, choosing my friends over him. Looking back I see that I did make the wrong decision, that I missed him so long afterward because I blamed myself for treating him the way I did. There were so many of these moments where I did not choose him, and he subtly twisted the knife to get me to regret every last one. At the time I said, “But you can sit next to me in the theater?”

I couldn’t bear to listen to him shift in his seat. I started to cry during the movie when the littlest girl caught Leukeumia, and then I was crying because I didn’t want him to leave. “Do you want to go, please?” I said. We left. We walked to my apartment for a long time without speaking. I could hear him huffing. I was still crying. I was sad for my aunt whose apartment we were walking toward, who was also dying of leukeumia. I was sad for my friends who I had left behind. I was very sad to think of him leaving.

But most of all, I was sad because the movie had been terrible. Not funny terrible. Its fault was that it had tried to be good. Where other cult films had triumphed with plots so kooky you laughed at the nature of cinema verite as heartily as you laughed at the foils of its actors, “Traveling Pants” showed me only what I had been doing wrong: I was trying to be good in the ways that others wanted.

pride and prejudice / orlando

The trees were puffs of smoke, frozen. They seemed to ooze in the wind like smudges of paint drawn across wax.
“You look cold,” he said, and sat down near me on the same bench. A wind shook the gazebo, fleecing through the slender lattices of the rail and rattling an upper piece of gingerbread to chatter like a tooth.
“I’m toasty.” I put my hand on the rail next to me and felt the wood there, the stretched pine had been nicked, as though etched once with the thin edge of a coin by a man who had been long waiting.
“I wanted you to be cold,” he said, “as I always want you to be. I want you always to be unhappy so I can make you change.”
In the field there was the low sliver of pond, grey with the sky, and a lazy goose pecked at its edge. Another bird slept in the brittle of the rushes, white against dark leaves. Morris removed one suede glove and smoothed it against the same rail. Then he took off the other.
“I am not unhappy or happy,” I said. “I am only cold.” I could see my mother’s soft face in a first floor window. Everything around her face looked dark. There was only black there. A painting had been painted of her once, a translucent silk veil shifted across her shoulders. Her face in the painting was pale peach, endangered as an egg. Father had adjusted it above the mantel one morning, I saw him touch it to move one sliver, a centimeter shift against the aquamarine wallpaper.
“Frederick, what are you doing,” she had said, lifting a forkjab of yellow egg. Chewing. Watching with the swallow.
“Fixing,” he had said.
This is what I think of with Morris in the garden, when I am watching Mother and she does not see me.

In the barn at dark a cow moans at the wall before its face. It flicks one tender eye at us and does not look away. A soft shadow falls. I can hear only Morris scrambling in the dried hay. He whispers to me to come here and I hear him fall and sigh. I carry the lantern and fix it on its hook. I do not have time to look around in the new light before I feel him tug at the back apron strap. Come here, he says, and we fall into the new hay. This is what I do to keep me busy when everything around me tells me I have nothing. The window of the barn look to the pond and the fields and a sky that would be gray but there is no sun to even see that. And there is the one window, a thing that lets out heat. Morris blows out the lantern. I could not reach it.

capote

Wheeling beneath the buttery light of 1959's smoke-swirled Manhattan lofts, debonair dandy Truman Capote hawks stories of cognoscenti friends, swills back his gin and tonics “like a famished water buffalo,” and never, ever lets his pinky touch the glass. Phillip Seymour-Hoffman’s baby-headed Capote is the gravitational center of nebulous crowds, where he tells big, fat jokes with stubby little hands, his nasal voice whizzing like a scoop of strawberries and champagne chortling in a blender. Describing buddy “Jimmy” Baldwin’s forthcoming novel, Capote stops his fluttering mid-flight with a dramatic plea: “Let’s be honest—Can’t we just be honest?”

It is this honesty Capote seeks when he flees the mish-mashed Kandinsky of New York for the quiet Hopper of Holcomb, Kansas, an American backwater where violet shadows creep across early morning roads, where whitewash clapboards stand cobalt against apricot sunsets, and where just two days prior, a staid family of four was murdered by two strangers passing through. The Clutter funeral is attended by a fistful of local farmers and the curious New Yorker writer, who in the interest of writing a piece, lifts each closed coffin to reveal bodies ensconced in their usual Sunday best while their heads are wrapped shut in white gauze, puffed up to twice the size of birthday balloons. Describing the funeral to his boyfriend, Jack, over the telephone, Hoffman’s Capote can only laugh and rub his temples. “It comforts me,” he says. “It’s so horrifying it’s a relief.”

Whereas a dozen folks actually laid flowers on the Clutter coffins, the first public reading of the “Nonfiction Novel,” In Cold Blood, which Capote will write of this scene, will be attended by thousands only three years later. In one sense, Capote is a biopic doing metaphorically just what Capote was known for—lifting the varnished, flower-encrusted coffin to find, underneath, a head swollen in a white cocoon—a truth horrifying enough to feel like a relief. Like those dead, Capote’s head is puffed-up: he pays train porters to compliment him in front of friends, wrapping himself in praise like white gauze. But whenever we think we’ve got Capote pegged, he slips and shows another side of himself. He might nurse murderer Perry Smith back to health after a death-row suicide attempt, but later that evening he’ll call his source “a goldmine” and pour his trademark Tanqueray into the same baby-food bottle he used to spoon-feed the convicted killer.

At once Hoffman is a caricature of a journalist who abuses the trust of his sources and a caricature of a lonesome boy-cum-lonesome starlet—who sifts through middle-America for his own lost Southern childhood, who sees in the murderers (especially the winsome Perry Smith) an image of his own tribulations. This is Hoffman playing Thoreau’s classic intellectual hypocrite: he is horrifying and relieving, worldly and small-town, always two things at once. And thanks to Hoffman’s portrayal the film emerges from the muck of the biopic genre—showing a man whose every decision feels both surprising and in character, a man who is not only double-sided, but million-sided—such that he gleams like a well-cut diamond.

“Jack thinks I'm using Perry,” Capote says to childhood pal-cum-research assistant Harper Lee (yes, that one), “But he also thinks I fell in love with him when I was in Kansas. How both of those things are true is beyond me.” Catherine Keener’s thin, deft Harper can only laugh back at Truman, pretending not to understand. But she knows, as we do, that both of those things are true.
Back in New York, surrounded by the usual literati in their kitten heels and cravats, who guffaw with little flicks of the wrist, Truman tells a witty cocktail-party story about giving advice to a friend and recalls how “He looked at me and laughed. Because he knew I was right.” It is with this same sort of a laugh—a laugh at something we understand, suddenly, to be true—that Keener chuckles; it is this sort of a gasp that overtakes the viewer who catches herself watching a film whose snide, critical vision of a real writer entertains because it feels true.

Narcissistic Truman, tugging for money from his editor, William Sean, said, “This is the book I was always meant to write.” The line could also apply to Hoffman who, reading the script, must have thrown it down barside and shouted, “This is the part I was always meant to play!” For when Sean finally reads the manuscript he paid Capote for, he bestows the highest compliment one could give to a writer: “This isn’t only going to change what people read,” Sean says, “This is going to change how people write.” Certainly, Hoffman’s quiet, needy Capote will do the same. He will change how people act.

not really a movie...

This doesn't really need an explanation except for those of you who don't go to Yale. Well, you know, fuck you. Basically, DPR wasn't allowed to print 6 interviews with porn stars in this weeks' a&e. Irrational!

Thanks a lot by the way for taking the time….Pirates XXX has become a huge phenomenon on campus…everyone’s watching it and we came out with a review of the movie a few issues ago…it was a big hit and so now we’re really pumped to interview you guys as a follow up. So here’s a few questions…it should be pretty brief.

JJ: Okay, great.

BZ: So, how was the production of Pirates unique?

JJ: It’s a lot of acting – we had to actually read the script, which is different I guess. There were a ton of different sets, and I don’t know it was just a lot of fun...a lot of hard work though. We actually had to practice sword fighting…yeah, just a heck of a lot more work. We shot in L.A. and Florida for it, and it was just really sexy and awesome.

BZ: So what was your favorite part/scene of the film?

JJ: I loved my scene with Carmen – I never worked with her, and our scene was just so hot. I liked fighting the skeletons too. That was fun. It was so hard trying not to laugh, sitting on the boat trying to top Johnny Depp.

BZ: So that’s a good transition to talking about your onscreen sex scenes. How is on-screen sex for you different from your personal life sex?

JJ: Well I always choose my partners, I need to have somebody that I have a chemistry with. I always get in trouble on set because I forget the camera crews are there and I get in positions they can’t film. I just get to crazy you know, you get really into it and you’re like lovin’ the sex, and you get too out of control, you know? I get crazier in personal life definitely because nothing is holding me back. I have a crazy sex life, just crazy. You know how it is…

BZ;L Yeah definitely, so do you ever watch your own films?

JJ: Well, I’m required to do audio commentary but I like watching myself, yeah… especially if it’s really hot. I pay attention to what I can do better, and criticize my performances.

BZ: So what’s the craziest place you’ve had sex?

JJ: Oh my god, there’s so many crazy places…um…I had sex on the highway in a convertible with the top down going about 90 miles an hour.

BZ: Woah, that must have been intense.

JJ: Yeah, I liked it.

BZ: Alright now, moving right along…What is your favorite position?

JJ: Reverse cow girl easy. I fuckin’ love it.

BZ: Um…What was it like having a candle stuck in your ass?

JJ: I loved it. I don’t do anal at all – the first and maybe only time for that. I like hot wax too. It’ so hot. And in that scene me and Janine were so into each other. The crews were holding us back forever. The chemistry just goes crazy, with the hot wax dripping down me – I just got really into the moment. I got with what I feel, you know. It was hot, I love Janine. That hot wax just did it for me you know.

BZ: Oh yeah definitely. What is more important – size or spirit?

JJ: Spirit – he just needs to be able to go. I mean obviously I like ‘em big, you know…I mean I love ‘em big, but you’ve got to be crazy…you gotta be a bad boy.

BZ: What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about Yalies?

JJ: “I hear they’re all really smart guys – they’re really bad boys.”

BZ: You know it.