Jon stewart Rolling Stone

Content Creation: What the Shutdown Meltdown Says About Us

For those of us who loathe the modern GOP with as much vehemence as they loathe the Obama Administration — with the notable difference that our loathing is rational and based in verifiable, substantive fact — the latest shitstorm out of Washington has ceased to be boring business as usual with this do-nothing GOP-led Congress; it’s becoming something of a cause for celebration. Or it would be if it isn’t seeming that the inexorable decline of the GOP,

Laura Dern Enlightened

‘Enlightened’: The Dark Side of Spiritual Awakening

Before I launch into an appraisal of Enlightened—part of my on-going series about HBO dramas while we wait for cinemas to recover from the summer crap fest and play something worthy of reviewing—let me say a few words about the season finale of another show of theirs I reviewed a few weeks back, Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.  In an ideal world—the sort of upright, conscientious world Republicans dream of and fancy they can create if, like characters in an Ayn Rand novel, they stubbornly resist the misperceived evils of liberalism for long enough, but which in reality is a world that will forever elude them if they keep up these shenanigans—the last episode would be mandatory viewing at the RNC this week.  It would be just an hour taken away from all of the tacky hoopla while conventioneers turn their sights from willfully deluding themselves that Romney is worthy of being the President and focus on what that episode has to say about who they have become as a tribe, spoken from the point of view of Republican In Name Only (RINO) Will McAvoy.

Of course, few conventioneers will watch it, and only RINOs among the GOP like David Frum will agree with the message, I hope with wistful tears of remorse for where their party has gone, although I suspect they will be more like the tears my father shed when Richard Nixon resigned.  As I commented on HuffPo today with regard to the “Jewish” Hurricane Isaac upsetting the convention: “This has gone from a traveling clown show, to a farce with duplicity as its core theme, to a classic Greek tragedy complete with Athena and Poseidon making a pact at the beginning to teach the Republicans a lesson for their crimes against reason and for denying global warming.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus Veep

‘Veep’: High Heels and Yoghurt with an H

I have to confess I’m having some scary revelations about myself as I ditch movies for the rest of the summer and delve into TV.  For instance, I don’t see anything wrong with anti-heroes Walt from Breaking Bad or Dr. House from House M.D., which I have only recently started watching despite the fact it is eight seasons old.  I think they’re not only completely relatable, but absolutely right, from their behavior under the circumstances they are put in, to the things they say and the way they say them.  But when I read comments on forums, many people consider these guys to be arrogant, egotistical, utterly lacking in humility or sensitivity.  I think I even read somewhere that House is supposed to be autistic.  To wit, when we were considering Hugh Laurie for a role in something I was working on, a producer said, “You know, he plays that crazy doctor on House.”  How puzzling.  Worse: how troubling that I don’t see them that way at all.

In ‘The Newsroom,’ the Art of Arrogance

The title of this piece not withstanding—and it pays to understand that this is written by a man who has himself been tagged with the adjective ‘arrogant’ since his voice broke and he discovered how to talk down to people—I am not jumping on the Aaron Sorkin-bashing bandwagon.  Not that I didn’t want to.  Since watching Sorkin’s fluid, articulate acceptance speech for the Best Screenplay Oscar for The Social Network, he’s been in the crosshairs of my resentment.  When my agent said to me a couple of years ago, “The only writer booking jobs these days is Aaron Sorkin,” I almost broke my BlackBerry in frustration.  And when I read that he was under fire in the press recently for purportedly having fired his entire writing team on HBO’s The Newsroom (a story that was untrue), I was positively bilious with schadenfreude.

I’ve only watched a few episodes of Sorkin’s The West Wing, but I liked what I saw; it aired during years I didn’t live in the U.S., which fell in the middle of the twenty-year period I didn’t watch TV at all.  But who didn’t like The West Wing?  Well, I’m sure people with no engagement in politics or human relationships weren’t interested in it, who might be more inclined towards costume-driven supernatural shows, or sitcoms, but even if your tastes ran to something else, nobody could fault its production, its scripts, its performances.