Tom Green, by Greg Beato
Imagine Andy Kaufman plumbing the shallows of his deadpan obsessive-compulsiveness. Add a rancid dollop of John Waters' least-inspired experiments in bad taste. When Tom Green made his American debut on MTV in 1999, his show was an instant hit. But even though my inner 14-year-old has always exerted an embarrassing degree of influence on my taste, I didn't like him much. Romancing dead animals, pestering live Canadians? In theory, it sounded at least mildly compelling; in practice, it just seemed lazy, sloppy and obnoxious. Where was the craft? The desire to hone a comic premise until it reached its full potential? Green just turned on his video camera and started throwing shit at the wall. If it stuck, great. If it slid, great.
It was the late-'90s, though, and the Internet was destroying whatever vestiges of my attention span the television remote control had left intact. The Tom Green Show was perfectly calibrated to take advantage of that—before Jackass, before Fear Factor, Green (who'd first started doing his show on Canadian public-access in 1994) had figured where 21st-century entertainment was headed. Punchlines weren't necessary. Plots weren't necessary. Even the relatively complex pranks of Candid Camera or the themes that unified clip shows like World's Wildest Police Chases weren't necessary. All you needed, really, were a handful of visual, visceral moments to arrest a viewer's attention. Green, it turned out, had a knack for this—and whenever I came across him seeing how far he could push his faithful punching bag Glenn Humplik, or rubbing his ass against distressed bystanders, I stopped the endless clicking and watched. These days, Green is an occasional correspondent on The Tonight Show, but his profile has dropped so low in recent years that it's easy to lose sight of just how popular he was in his heyday, and how influential. But if it's been surprisingly easy to forget him, that's only because his descendents are everywhere now.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Sam Sacks
High-school English classes can create a lot of enemies. I remember leaving them with a fierce enmity against Hawthorne, Hardy and Eliot, as though these authors had written their books purely from the malicious urge to bore and bewilder me. The grudges might have stuck, but thank God these names are all established enough that I've had no choice but to go back and discover their greatness. But Annie Dillard isn't nearly so canonized, so it's a miracle I tried Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a second time. Almost no book is less suited to a high-school junior with a perpetual hard-on. First time around, its endless digressions, Eastern philosophizing and unabashed lyricism filled me with incredulous hilarity. No way was she still talking about a tree.
But Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is like nature-watching: All it takes to love it is the ability to sit still. True, there's little narrative, but there isn't in the Psalms either. Dillard's rhapsodic essays—shining Blake's visionary light on Thoreau's rugged woods—are about the religious possibilities in nature. They somehow combine science and spirituality without compromising either. The book is extremely beautiful; but I only thought so once I was willing to concede beauty to a tree.
The Shins, by Andy Wang
The Shins were always one of those bands I was supposed to love but just never understood. I listened to their supposed masterpiece, 2001's Oh, Inverted World, and nothing moved me. Everything sounded flat and not pretty enough and unnecessarily cruel to animals. I saw the Shins live and was thoroughly bored. And then, well, Natalie Portman told me they would change my life, and I reconsidered, and now I love the band (two songs, at least). That's not quite how it happened, but Garden State did somehow transform my relationship with the Shins. Now, when I hear "Caring Is Creepy," I think of Zach Braff on that motorbike with that ridiculous sidecar, all young-adult angst, knowing that going on this joyride is the closest thing to carefree he'll ever know, until, of course, he falls in love with Natalie Portman. The lyrics still make no sense to me, but I've now put "Caring Is Creepy" on a playlist of songs I listen to when I want to be cheered up. "It's a luscious mix of words and tricks that let us bet when you know we should fold," James Mercer sings, and I can't tell whether this is about playing online poker, hitting on models or reading real-estate prospectuses about houses in New Mexico. But I know Zach Braff understands, and it sounds like bliss.
Will Oldham, by Spencer Patterson
The first time I heard Will Oldham's voice, I'm pretty sure I laughed out loud. A buddy sent me a mix tape that included "I Am a Cinematographer" off Palace's second album, 1994's Days in the Wake. As Oldham's vocal crackled and broke at key moments throughout the song, I presumed him to be some Appalachian backwoodsman who'd wondered into a recording studio for kicks and lucked into some sort of cult following in the process. Who would have guessed that 12 years later, my CD racks would include an entire shelf dedicated to Oldham, now known by the moniker Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. What I initially perceived as flaws in his singing instrument have become treasured irregularities. Where many so-called trained vocalists begin to sound glossy and dull, OIdham's raw, affecting approach keeps me coming back again and again to I See a Darkness, Viva Last Blues and many other favorites. Who's laughing now?
What Dreams May Come, by Matthew Scott Hunter
The year was 1998. At cineplexes everywhere, Bruce Willis was saving the world from falling rocks, Judi Dench was generating Oscar buzz for a Shakespeare in Love cameo and Robin Williams was starring in a little tearjerker called What Dreams May Come. I saw that one and declared it a masterpiece—a touching tale of love in the afterlife told with vivid, memorable images. Three years later, I recommended to my girlfriend that we rent it.
I wish I could say it merely lost something in its translation to the small screen, but it was all there, and I'd seen more impressive representations of heaven and hell on South Park. The weepy sentiment was unbearable. First the kids die, then the father dies, then the mother dies. Even the freaking dog dies. I cringed at every overblown onscreen teardrop, and then cringed again when I realized I'd inflicted this upon my girlfriend. Perhaps my tastes had grown more sophisticated, or my vision had cleared up, or I'd confused this atrocity with another film. I think I gave my girlfriend that last excuse. One thing's for sure: I'll never again recommend a film unless I've seen it within the last two years. Two months if it stars Robin Williams.
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, by Scott Dickensheets
Like Hemingway's own fabled lost manuscripts, mine are out there somewhere—six or seven handwritten stories that constitute my Hemingway Phase. Here's hoping they're in a landfill, where they'll outsmell the rotting coffee grounds. The big fella exerted a mighty pull on me in those days: I admired the way he figured the precise longitude and latitude of every word before he set it down; the way his ruthless suppression of affect amplified what little he let through; the way his merciless reduction of the language—because writing is thinking, right?—defined the world in clear distinctions, like good and bad, made it a place of earthy wisdom, all very testosteroney. At 20, that was my kind of world. And so, in my grubby apartment on Van Wagenen Street in Henderson, I read Hemingway and composed stories I thought were like his, squeezing my little tales until all the compound adjectives were dead.
But what Hemingway said of journalism was true (for me) of Hemingway himself: It can be good for you if you get out in time. So, while his stories taught me to write and think more clearly, at some point I realized I adore bullshit words like "testosteroney," which Hemingway would have hated, and I love loose, headlong sentences like this one, clause-heavy and spontaneous and not entirely sure where they're going. I don't want to live in a world without compound adjectives. What can I say—I'm a maximalist. And after a while, I couldn't read Hemingway anymore (still can't), which certainly meant I couldn't read me, either (and how!). So I filed those stories in a drawer, and later, I think, in a box, and after that, I pray, in a trash can. But I don't remember for sure. If you come across them, in an old storage unit, maybe, or in a hole in the wall on Van Wagenen Street, consign them to the trash. I never want to see 'em again.
Jackie Brown, by Jeffrey M. Anderson
After 10 years and a couple thousand movie reviews, several opinions have come back to haunt me. I wildly overpraised Saving Private Ryan in 1998 and didn't quite grasp Olivier Assayas' demonlover (2003) on the first viewing. But movies are an organic thing and subsequent viewings can reveal many new layers.
My biggest failure to date, however, has to be Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown. I saw it during the bustling December movie season at an evening press screening, where its 160-minute length eventually became burdensome. I was wary of Tarantino's skill at adapting outside source material, in this case Elmore Leonard's heist story, and I originally decided that he spent too much time yapping and not enough time heisting. I recorded Jackie Brown as a vaguely interesting failure, and wondered if Tarantino had burnt out.
However, curiosity won me over, and I looked at the film again on laserdisc and then a third time on DVD. I realized that the heist was not really the movie's point; Tarantino was more interested in the rhythms of his characters and the flat, dingy spaces of Los Angeles. Samuel L. Jackson's Ordell Robbie could have been a one-dimensional thug, but Tarantino gives us an idea of this man's inner life. And when has Robert De Niro given a better performance in the last decade or so? His Louis is so thick that he constantly struggles to keep up with the plot; you can actually see De Niro's eyes working on this. Not to mention that the sweet, tender relationship between Pam Grier and Robert Forster remains a beautiful and unique thing in cinema. These are people that I now like to revisit at least once a year.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, by Ian Grey
Buffy, the Vampire Slayer was only one of two movies I've ever walked out of in my life. Then the TV show came on and I was like, "Great—a series based on that horrible movie." Then I saw parts of a few episodes and already the show was so steeped in its mythos I had no idea what was going on—but it sure seemed silly. Then I was housesitting for my girlfriend, a DVD was laying around and I watched a few episodes. Then a few more. Now I own five of the show's seven seasons and have seen all 144 episodes. In retrospect, it's no mystery why a writer would love the show: The dialogue would make Howard Hawks jealous (if he got all the savyy pop culture references); creator Joss Whedon's sense of shamelessly grand melodrama evokes the tearjerking best of Douglas Sirk; the show presents research—research!—as a downright romantic group activity. All this and way progressive politics, TV's only believable lesbian affair and fearless engagement with mortality (the episode where Buffy's mom dies is elegantly devastating.) Cute girls and monsters. What's not to love?
For a show about super-powered people, Buffy is finally about how power only exacerbates your human flaws. Buffy's ability to save the world from apocalypse only enhances her isolation and tendency towards gloominess; best pal/witch Willow's inability to deal with grief almost creates Armageddon. In the show's finale, Buffy realizes the peril inherent in unilateral world-saving and passes on her powers to girls all over the world. Aside from the episode's au currant resonance, it's the sort of typically over-the-top romantic, egalitarian gesture that turns the dubious into dedicated fans.
Live theater, by Chuck Twardy
TWARDY [speaking wistfully]: When I was 15, an English teacher took a chance and cast me as Nickles, the devil's-advocate character in J.B., Archibald MacLeish's nuclear-annihilation of Job. That I never got another featured role should have cued me that I had chewed enough scenery for a lifetime. Writing and literature pulled me through subsequent years of six-line buffoonery, but plays were among my favorite literary works: Macbeth, Long Day's Journey, Virginia Woolf. The summer before college, I couldn't shake the sense that I had the boards in my blood, so I abruptly enrolled as a theater major. After a year of mime exercises that only confirmed what I should have learned from Mr. Nickles, I reverted to English. [Demeanor warms] I loved Chicago theater, though. A heady time for it, too. [Slumps slightly] But later, reviewing theater in a small town got me. College productions, the kids who had what I'd lacked, occasionally redeemed the plastic chairs. That was 20 years ago. I'd be surprised if I've seen a dozen stage productions since or read a play outside Shakespeare. [Grimly chuckles] I guess I'd hung around the stage door long enough to part without regret.
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, by Josh Bell
A friend of mine always pulls out a certain trump card when we are having a particularly heated discussion about the merits of a movie: "Well, you gave Charlie's Angels 2 four stars."
While it doesn't negate the validity of my opinions on any other movies, I have to admit that my friend is right: I did give Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle a four-star review in 2003, in these very pages. And although I am loathe to give in to my friend's persistent argument questioning my taste, I have to acknowledge what I now know to be true: It's not a very good movie.
The truth is, I probably knew it at the time as well, but I loved (and still love) McG's first Charlie's Angels film so much that I wanted a chance to write about that, and I probably transferred too much of that affection onto the not-nearly-as-good sequel. Full Throttle is repetitive and nonsensical, with characters who have no reason to exist just kind of standing around (what does Shia LaBoeuf add to the story?) and most of the best jokes recycled from the original. The gleeful abandon of the original film curdles into a plodding sense of trying way too hard. I, too, tried way too hard to like it.