Having just watched the season finale of “The Office,” I am rendered incapable of intelligible speech. All I can come up with is a word I learned recently from slightlyjillian: squee.
In fact, I was running around the house squee-ing until Porpoise did a blog search and showed me how many other blogging females across the country were squee-ing over Jim (John Krasinski). Ick. Very sobering to see how silly they are. I, on the other hand, have a completely rational and healthy admiration for my favorite Dunder Mifflin employee. Yes, indeed.
What has induced the squees? After two seasons of repressed tension, Jim confessed his love to Pam (who is engaged to someone else, which is a problem, because Jim and Pam are best friends and were clearly meant to be together). And then the episode ended with a somewhat ambiguous kiss.
Squee!
Now the episode was really gratifying for all us Jim-fans out there, but I’m worried about what they’ll do next season. We all knew something had to happen to stall the wedding, but I honestly didn’t expect this—yet. And that makes me fear that on-and-off relationship trauma between Jim and Pam will characterize the third season. There’s no way that could be fun–and we otters demand fun.
Maybe I’m just worried because Porpoise and I have recently watched (under partial compulsion) every episode of Aaron Sorkin’s dramedy “Sports Night,” a show that forgets that it needs to be funny and throws its characters into pointless emotional conflicts. Plus, all Sorkin’s characters speak identically, because the man can’t seem to write with more than one voice. (Sorry, Mr. Ectype and all you other Sorkin fans out there).
But “The Office” is not “Sports Night,” thank goodness. For one thing, lots of different writers work on the show, and most of them are also actors within it. Tonight’s episode was written by Steve Carell, undoubtedly the most famous cast member, who plays obnoxious boss Michael Scott.
Given Carell’s fame and many talents (one of which is singing “Age of Aquarius” while dancing around in pajamas), many of us were anxious to see how his screenwriting would fare. Now that I’m trying to think back to what happened before the “squee” moments, I recall lots of laughing by our assembled viewers. Lots of strange, eccentric, lovable things were said, but, as usual in “The Office,” one of the best characters was the camera, which, in faux reality-show style, makes silent commentary on the action simply by its timing and focus. Also, unlike Sorkin’s talky-talky shows, “The Office” knows what to do with comic pauses and facial expressions. And did I mention that it’s actually funny?
So, as long as the Jim-Pam plot hasn’t been set up for a train wreck, I think Carell did a pretty good job with his writing. Here’s hoping that Mindy Kaling (who also plays Kelly on the show) gets to do more writing in Season 3, because she’s written my two favorite episodes so far: “The Injury” (in which Michael cooks his foot in a George Foreman grill) and “Take Your Daughter to Work Day.”
Oh, and one more thing: Jim!
May 11th, 2006
The above line was our favorite moment in the laughably earnest Tristan + Isolde (2006). One of the Cornish warriors utters it, and then is immediately silenced by an arrow to the neck. We began giggling uncontrollably. It was like something out of Monty Python, only it didn’t know it.
We didn’t have high expectations from Tristan + Isolde. First of all, it’s kind of a dumb story, though it seems to have been the only story popular in medieval northern Europe (Tristan, Arthur, the Niebelungenlied—it’s all pretty much the same). T + I is obviously trying to cash in on the popularity of the doomed-adulterous-lovers myth (Did you notice that clever little “+” sign in the title? Did you notice how it’s copied from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet logo? Sophisticated movies like us don’t use ampersands.)
I knew to lower my expectations even further when the blurb on the back of the DVD claimed that the film was “in the spirit of Braveheart and A Knight’s Tale.” Now I know it’s just a blurb, and that people who write the blurbs haven’t necessarily seen the movie, but I was concerned that the blurber seemed to think Braveheart and A Knight’s Tale share the same spirit. Anyone who thinks that has the discernment of an Irish setter. “Yay, medieval clothes! And axes! Yay, axes! Pant, pant.”
Actually, Tristan + Isolde seems to be following most faithfully in the spirit of 2004’s King Arthur, which took all the myth out of the legend and replaced it with gritty, though absolutely historically inaccurate, “realism.” T + I is set in some mysterious period called the “Dark Ages,” which has the distinct advantage of being anywhere between 472 and 1400 A.D. Given that the Normans haven’t arrived in England yet, that narrows things down a bit, and since they give the Irish king the name Donnchadh, I’m guessing they were shooting for a vaguely 8th-century setting.
And yet Isolde has access to a volume of John Donne. Never mind that books were so rare at this time that wars were waged over copying them. Never mind that Donne wouldn’t be alive for another 900 years. “The Good Morrow” is a nice poem about love—let’s stick it in! Repeatedly!
I really don’t mind the historical inaccuracies all that much. I mean, it does allow me to feel superior and knowledgeable. And, after all, Braveheart played pretty fast and loose with history. But Braveheart did so to create a compelling story, an element noticeably absent from Tristan + Isolde.
Now I think adultery plots are stupid to begin with, but if you’re going to make a movie about one, you’d better make it apparent why the two protagonists are in love. No hints in T + I, other that they’re both young and pretty. Maybe Tristan really just wants Isolde’s books, which possess the magical property of letting you read texts that haven’t been written yet. Anyhow, as a reviewer quoted on Rotten Tomatoes said, “This couple has endured for over 900 years; the least Tristan + Isolde can do is show us a reason why.”
The movie tries to make up for the lack of depth in the romantic plot by feeding us all sorts of stuff about how all the “tribes” (Cornish, Saxons, Angles, etc.) need to unite to defeat the common enemy of Ireland. The lines in the political segments are just plain corny, though, as they were in King Arthur.
Why do I keep watching these mediocre medieval movies? I have to admit that they’re fun to laugh at, if you watch them with other people. Plus, they keep putting actors I like in them. NOT the interchangeable pretty boys Heath Ledger and James Franco. I am referring to Clive Owen and Rufus Sewell (who was in both A Knight’s Tale and Tristan + Isolde). If the filmmakers only gave these men some good lines, they could chew the scenery.
May 11th, 2006