Dear Fox Network:  I enjoy watching The Simpsons every week.  Actually, I WOULD enjoy watching The Simpsons every week, if it were on every week instead of every two to three weeks, whenever it conveniently fits in between sporting events and animal attack specials.  In short, I hate you all, and please have the decency to donate The Simpsons to NBC.

So, in movie land, I recently saw David Mamet's 2000 film, State and Main.  It's about a movie studio that heads to a small town in Vermont to film a movie (because they were kicked out of New Hampshire...).  As the screenwriter struggles to adapt to the circumstances beyond his control, and the directors and producers struggle with actors undergoing religious conversions and pedophiliac tendencies, things predictably spiral out of control.

Okay, so, it's a movie about Hollywood and making movies.  Pretty much any movie about Hollywood and filmmaking can be summed up in a single sentence:  god, what a horrible experience this is for everybody, we're all selfish assholes and we love money but not ourselves.  Why does anyone actually put themselves through this hell?  Because there is so god damn much money to be made.  And this is the plot and premise of every movie about movies, and it's the same thing here, but no matter how many times this plot is used (hell, I just wrote up Incident at Loch Ness last week), it's generally very entertaining.  There is just an endless amount of hilarity to be reaped from this storyline.

David Mamet (who wrote and directed the film) is also a cynical realist playwright, which means we have some cynical realist stuff here.  The loveable small-town townsfolk don't come together to warm our hearts and change our cynical Hollywood mindset (see Frank Oz's In & Out), they get sucked into it and become just as greedy and obsessive.  Most Hollywood films seem intent on trying to convince us that celebrities somehow operate on a different mental plane from "real folk," but as Mamet points out that's not even remotely the case.  We're all selfish assholes.  They just have the money to show it.

The cast is generally very good:  Alec Baldwin, William H. Macy, Sarah Jessica Parker, Phillip Seymour Hoffman... what's surprising and a little disappointing is that as good as the actors are, Mamet really doesn't get the most out of them.  A lot of their performances feel a little flat, not bad, but just not in top form (though Macy and Parker still manage to knock it out of the park most of the time).  Hoffman is especially bad, which is unfortunate because he's kind of our main character.  But it's not entirely Hoffman's fault, Mamet doesn't give the character a lot more personality than "sensitive and nice."  Writers, I suppose, will always tend to see other writers as the saintly hero of the story.

So one character I didn't really like, out of dozens populating the film.  These movies are always ensemble pieces, and Mamet fills the screen with a great mix of people:  the local city councilman looking desperately for some issue to boost his political career; the production assistant whose wife is giving birth and no one else cares; the mayor and his wife, and their elegant Victorian house which they're far too proud of; the local bookseller who, when asked if she ever wants children, replies "I never saw the point of them;" a persistent pothole on Main Street that provides a lot of visual jokes; and of course the Jewish agent, and a leather bag filled with $800,000 in cash so that someone will show her breasts on film.

Overall, a lot of fun.  I enjoyed it, but I wonder how much more enjoyable it would have been if the main character hadn't been so bland.  It occurs to me now, thinking back over it, that every scene I remember loving either did not feature the writer, or involved him in a minimal way.  Writers, let us all agree to acknowledge each other as human beings with real emotions in the future.  Okay?

Thanks to some awesome deals at mycomicshop.com and the dollar comics bins at Half Price Books (I LOVE YOU MYCOMICSHOP.COM AND HALF PRICE BOOKS!!!), I was able to bring myself some comic book joy this weekend.  I only had just a few issues from the Ultimate Comics line (Ultimate Marvel as it is known post-Ultimatum), and I was able to add more, along with a few more issues of Buffy Season 8.  So this weekend I re-read all the ones I have, Ultimate Spider-Man #1 and 2, Ultimate Armor Wars #1-4 (the complete miniseries), Ultimate Avengers #1, and 4-6, and Ultimate Enemy #1 and 2.

What's interesting to me, and why I felt the need to comment on it, is the evolution of the line following Ultimatum.  Back when the line was introduced in 2000, sales for Marvel Heroes books were pretty much horrific.  Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, The Avengers, Fantastic Four, these were all genuinely terrible books, and sales were awful.  X-Men was terrible too, but it still sold well.  The Ultimate line was created, then, to reimagine and reintroduce those characters to new readers, presenting the classic characters and stories in a new light.  Now, ten years later, every book on that list has been completely revitalized and is selling great (well, great for a comic book).  The mainstream Marvel Universe has had a serious shot in the arm.  So does the Ultimate line have a reason to exist anymore?

Ultimate Comics is a new deal, then, renamed not purely for the sake of the obvious bump in sales that any series gets from re-launching, but also for its new mission statement.  The line's initial ads carried a tagline, "There are no rules," and that sums it up pretty well.  Though there were still many classic characters to go around (this is Marvel, after all), each of the books I read also featured brand new characters with no analogue in the Marvel Universe.  That's new, because even though the old villains were usually changed beyond recognition, you still didn't often see new characters.  Some of the stories are based loosely on classic storylines, but most are all-new material.

I'm glad to see the line is resisting any sense of staleness.  I personally didn't feel any sense of declining excitement, but then again I don't have fifty years' worth of Marvel stories crammed into my head, so I was a good audience for the material.  For anyone who's been reading Spider-Man since the late 80s, on the other hand, Ultimate Spider-Man probably did feel redundant.  Now a reader who buys both versions of the character will really get something new.  Of course, with Ultimate Avengers having only five issues until its end, and Ultimate Spider-Man running a story boldly titled "The Death of Spider-Man," it's possible that in a year's time those readers will be back to one version again.  I guess it's hard to re-introduce characters to an audience that already knows them better than their own family.

One thing strikes me as funny, though.  As Ultimate Comics wanes away from its original intent, this years DC published Superman:  Earth One, a book set in modern times, re-introducing the character of Superman.  And it sold like crazy.  So maybe the Ultimate concept isn't so close to death after all.

One of the most famous films of the European canon is The Bicycle Thief.  Released in Italy in 1946, the film examines the economic disaster of post-WWII Italy, and the hopelessness of its poorest inhabitants.

The plot is actually fairly simple.  A man is unemployed, but is then offered a job where he needs a bicycle.  He had one, but he pawned it some time ago.  He returns to the pawn shop with his wife, where the pawn the sheets off their bed for the money to get the bicycle back.  On his first day of work, the man's bicycle is stolen, and he and his son begin an odyssey through the streets of Rome to find the stolen bicycle and bring it home.

This fairly simple plot serves as a framing device for a series of small moments that depict the absolute desolation of Italy's poor.  A pawn shop packed to the ceiling with sheets and blankets that people have sold; a church that refuses to feed the poor until they finish attending the religious service; genuinely helpful police officers who are nonetheless held back by their own impotence; scenes of child labor; and so on.  There are a lot of moments that stick in your mind.

What makes the film so famous is that it is so unflinching (especially for 1946).  These are not the joyful poor of It's a Wonderful Life, these are not the penniless citizens who come together and find hope and peace through each other's love.  Because that is, as the Italians might say, la horseshit.  The Bicycle Thief depicts genuine poverty with a genuine eye.  These people are miserable, their lives are desperate.  At no point are we comforted into thinking that everything will be all right for these people.  It won't be.  Also of particular note is that the film never resorts to melodrama or theatrics in order to dredge up a few tears (aside from a bit of soundtrack music, but it's not overbearing).  The facts are presented plainly, with no manipulation to make them seem worse than they are.  In the last ten minutes we are finally given a view of the city's middle class; it's a surprising encounter, because up until this point we've only seen the poor, and it's seemed as though everyone is poor.  The sudden and surprising contrast makes the ending more striking.

What surprised me, though, is for how depressing and stark and beautifully made the film is, it didn't really connect with me on an emotional level.  Intellectually I appreciated it, and I felt the requisite amounts of pity for the characters, but I never really felt empathy with their sadness and their desperation.  Maybe it's the effect of subtitles and poor film stock that lend a feeling of unreality to the realism.  Frankly, the actors aren't the best, and that probably contributes to.  But it might also be that the desperation is so complete and all-encompassing that I simply can't relate.  I don't know that feeling.  It's so deep and so disastrous that it's impossible to say what it feels like unless you've been there.

American Film Badger:  We're at #15 on the lists, and on the 1998 list it's good ol' Star Wars again.  I think I talked about Star Wars more than enough when it showed up on the 2007 list, so let's move on... #15 on the 2007 list is 2001: A Space Odyssey.  2001 was a collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick to make what had never really been made before:  a good science fiction film (this was 1968, so, you know, before Star Wars...).  And it is good, it's creepy and tense and very visual, and the ending is just intensely confusing if you don't read Clarke's novel version (which is really outstanding book, actually).  It's been a few years since I've seen it, but I remember liking it.  Always liked Clarke's book series a bit more, though.  I think the problem for 2001 is that it's tremendously innovative and unique for its time.  No one had made a really serious and well-constructed science fiction film before.  Now we have Star Wars, and Alien and Aliens, and The Abyss, Terminator 2, and Firefly/Serenity, and every other Star Trek film... "good" sci-fi is more plentiful, and so while it's easy to like 2001 today, it's hard to really appreciate just how revolutionary it was.  Suffice it to say, none of those other films would have existed without Kurbrick's phenomenal work.

This week's reading:  The continuing saga of Shogun.  John Blackthorne just found himself doomed to die in a Japanese prison!  How will he escape?????