Meaner is better

I'm watching Hell's Kitchen UK right now - Fox's replacement for the Gordon Ramsay Hell's Kitchen, which ended last week with an entirely unconvincing win by Christina. The British show has a celebrity spin - instead of aspiring chefs, the contestants are celebrities - boxers, models, TV presenters and the like. The only names I recognize are Kelly LeBrock (anyone remember The Lady In Red?) and singer Paul Young (I'll never forgive him for his cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart.)

The chef in charge isn't Ramsay but his mentor, Marco Pierre White, a man whose reputation as an authoritarian and bully actually exceeds Ramsay's. White retired at the top of his game years ago, after realizing that his third Michelin star signalled how little fun he was getting from cooking, and retired to a montage of fishing and shooting - killing stuff, basically. He's a broody, unhappy looking man, redolent of curdled testosterone.

He's described by Piers Morgan of Celebrity Apprentice fame as "the only man, to my knowledge, who's ever made Gordon Ramsay cry."

"I didn't make Gordon Ramsay cry," White rumbles. "He made himself cry."

That's a line I've got to use, with almost limited variations.

"I didn't punch him in the face. He made me punch him in the face."

"I didn't crash that car. The car made me crash the car."

"I didn't make that owl extinct. The owl made me make it extinct."

Gold. Pure gold.

Why I'm Here - The Dark Knight round tables

I arrive at my round table room fifteen minutes early to find that every seat at the table has already been taken, and that a second row of chairs have been dragged into the hotel suite, for a second tier of interviewers now hugging the walls. I haul another chair into the room and find a position off to the side, then settle into to listen to my fellow junketeers - faces I recognize from previous months of this sort of thing - gossip and complain. At one point, one of Warner's press girls comes in and summons the woman sitting directly to the right of where our subject will be sitting to come with her and move to another room.

As soon as she leaves the rest of the room explodes in relief - it seems that she's foreign press, not domestic, and notably unloved by the other junket veterans, who tell each other how much they were dreading her apparently aggressive questioning style and preoccupation with the more gossipy, personal questions that the European press lives on. One of the veterans - a white-haired older gentleman I see at most of these things - admits that he was the one who alerted the Warner press girls to her presence in the room and got her moved, for which he receives a round of congratulation. The junket press is an organism, timidly but functionally self-policing, which deals with threats and irregularities like an immune system, isolating infection in the interests of self-preservation.

Or at least that's how I see it. I wonder how long I'll be able to cultivate - at least for myself - a provisional outsider status on the junket circuit. I'm probably already fooling myself.

The afternoon goes smoothly, after the almost ritual 15-minute delay in starting. We get Dark Knight's producers first, then director Christopher Nolan, then the stars. Gary Oldman is funny, adopting a perhaps-calculated blokey persona peculiar to some English actors to a subtly distancing effect, and uses his familiarity with some of the veterans to buy himself some happily-proferred goodwill, just a little gesture of recognition flattering them into docile interrogators - not that an L.A. press junket is HUAC, exactly. Christian Bale is intense, his eyes hooded and almost expressionless, and he's clearly thought his way through his interpretation of his characters with a thoroughness that would do a critic proud. He's a real oddity in Hollywood today - someone known entirely for his work, with a personal life about which not a single detail comes readily to mind.

I've gotten used to discovering, with few exceptions, that too many female actresses are much prettier onscreen than in real life. The pounds - 10-20 depending on which truism is being invoked - that the camera really does add (it looks more like 30 to me, going by my handful of TV appearances) suggest flattering curves on actresses who look dangerously underweight in real life. I recall being surprised at how attractive Diane Lane was in person during a junket for Untraceable last year - she's done her level best to look haggard in several recent roles - and I have the same reaction to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has the sole female role of any real size in Dark Knight.

Onscreen, Gyllenhaal is often cast as the oddball - the eccentric girl, the smart and randy weird chick in a larger group of women (see Mona Lisa Smile.) At the junket, her appeal is as much personality as looks - she comes off as amused, engaged and confident, and the assembled press fall into the approved rapt attitude. She ends her stint in our room - her handlers practically tugging at her shirt - telling us that the Hollywood indie film is dead, and that there is no way she could make the films that made her name just a few years in today's harsh entertainment economy. An interesting statement to make at an event for a movie whose budget - never mind potential earnings - could probably fund a whole city's elementary school budget for a year.

Almost everyone makes a point of talking about the late Heath Ledger, whose absence is noted continually all afternoon, in nothing but the most glowing of language; many even conspicuously use the present tense when referring to him. All of them make a point of insisting that he didn't seem in any say depressed or emotionally fragile while making the film - there are rumours that Ledger's portrayal of the Joker absorbed him to an unhealthy degree. His death, they all insinuate, was misadventure - an accident, not a suicide. This is clearly a message we're supposed to take away from this afternoon.

Why I'm Here: Dark Knight

Back in the '50s, and then again in the '70s, when the movie industry was suffering at the hands of television or simply in a creative doldrums, there was an explosion of new formats and gimmicks - VistaVision and CinemaScope, Technirama and Cinerama, 3-D and Sensurround. For some reason - which might be obvious - we're seeing that again, with the sudden viability of IMAX theatres and the return of 3-D. I couldn't help but think of this as I sat down in the The Bridge IMAX Theatre at the Howard Hughes Center to watch a screening of The Dark Knight.

At first, it looked like Chrisopher Nolan's sequel to Batman Begins was simply going to be a bigged-up print splashed across the centre of the IMAX screen, but then suddenly the frame expanded to fill the whole expanse in front of us, with an establishing shot that felt positively vertiginous. The film would do that again and again, returning to regular widescreen then blowing up again, with a noticeable change in image quality; anyone with a fear of heights should be given fair warning about one particular shot, with Christian Bale in Batman drag standing on the top of the Sears Tower while the camera swings around him, then settles next to him on the ledge. I actually felt a bit queasy myself.

In a summer full of box office monsters, Dark Knight is potentially one of the biggest of them all, and I see no reason to see why it won't. I also see no reason why it was given a PG-13 rating, considering that it's probably one of the darkest films anyone will see all summer - a 2 hour and 32 minute downer delivered at maximum volume and velocity.

It's also goin to get the late Heath Ledger an Oscar nomination, in all likelihood; a lot of pretty astounding things happen onscreen, but his performance is probably the most memorable thing overall. Nolan has managed to do what Ang Lee failed to do with The Hulk - depart from the essential silliness of the comic book film, but mostly by banishing anything resembling levity or satire; it's no surprise that the painted-on smile on Ledger's Joker is the closest thing to humour in all of its 152 minutes.

Back to L.A. - the Dark Knight junket

There was a crowd staring through the windows of an opticians' shop on North Beverly Drive yesterday, on my walk back to the hotel from the Paley Media Center. Some of the crowd had cameras - big cameras, with flashes - so I had to assume there was a celebrity sighting in progress, but I didn't stick around to find out more. The crowd was small, and I assume this sort of thing isn't uncommon around here anyway.

I'm in L.A. - again - for the Dark Knight junket, two nights at the Beverly Wilshire hotel and an afternoon of round table interviews with the stars. In the meantime, I'm here with a front row seat on Rodeo Drive, the white hot epicentre of conspicuous consumption on this side of the continent. In the meantime, I'm holing up in my hotel room with a copy of the Mad Men box set, hiding from the California sun with stories of early '60s ad executives in the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan at the dawn of the Kennedy administration.

The Paley Media Center was my only extracurricular destination on this trip - no lightning shopping excursions this time. There are two Paley Centers - one in New York, one here, whose lobby most people might be familiar with from a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry gets into a feud with Ted Danson about his anonymous donation of a museum wing. I shared a plane here with Norm Wilner, Metro's former movie reviewer, and we split a cab to the hotel and discovered we had hours to wait for our rooms, so after lunch in the hospitality suite, my trip to the Paley got bumped to the top of my schedule.

The Paley is a different sort of museum - its collection is mostly TV shows, stored in a library somewhere in the building accessible in a room of little TVs with headphones. You could probably lose yourself in this sort of thing - I know I could - but something tells me that the basic idea could be moved online at considerable savings in real estate and maintenance.

I don't think Norm wanted to hang around and share some vintage William F. Buckley with me, so he heads off to find the LaBrea Tar Pits while I start the Firing Line 20th anniversary special from 1991. A copy of Buckley's last book was a Father's Day present from my wife, so I'm on a bit of a Buckley jag these days - three months late, with my usual perfect timing.

If you go by what you read, Buckley's show was a political bull-baiting ring, and I have only the vaguest memory of ever seeing anything but glimpses of it during its long run. I think that reputation is probably due to Buckley's own reputation, which is based - for most people with the merest cursory knowledge of who he was - on a famous clip of him and Gore Vidal coming close to blows during their televised debates during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

The truth is far from the image. At least from the shows I watched at the Paley, the pacing of Firing Line wouldn't last on cable news today - it's slow, even leisurely, the pace set by Buckley himself, who checks his notes frequently, pauses to find the right word, and lets his guests hold forth for far longer than any news chat show would tolerate today - in one of my favorite clips, he smiles brightly as Alan Ginsberg picks up his little harmonium and chants a sutra.

Never mind how literate and substantial the show sounds now compared to, say, The Capitol Gang or The Daily Show, to name some very disparate examples - Buckley's cordiality is wildly at odds with his reputation for arrogance and high-handedness, especially when faced with less than politically sympathetic guests. It seems like an anomaly, unless you remember that his peers - interviewers such as Dick Cavett or David Susskind - employed the same sort of patient, convivial tone. No matter what you might feel about Buckley, you actually feel smarter when you watch the show, or at least feel a compulsion to rise to its level. More proof, if it were needed, that we are probably well down the steepening slope into grunting political inarticulacy.

So you think I wish I was deaf?

Alright then - one more So You Think You Can Dance post. Can't help it - this and Hell's Kitchen are my shows of the summer, and if I can't devote as much space to either show as I'd like in my column, I might as well bore you to death with it here.

My beef of the night: I must really love this show, because most of the music is effing dreadful. I mean punch-to-the-temple, chopstick-in-the-ear dreadful. Tonight the lowlights on the elimination show were tunes by Ani DiFranco and Jason Mraz, chosen as the soundtrack to the routines the bottom six dancers danced to convince the judges not to eliminate them. The song choice alone would deserve a ticket home if I were Nigel Lythgoe. I'm just sort of a jerk that way.

Why does no one choose Dylan, or the Gang of Four, or Black Flag, or Tim Buckley if they feel an overwhelming need to seem sensitive or somesuch? Why is whiny, amelodic, rhythmic twaddle pop to the top of the queue when dancers choose tunes? It isn't a rhetorical question.

The Birds

Totally off-topic post here, just to test out the system on our new address, but bear with me, people. (That is, if anyone is reading out there - you know you can leave comments here, if only just the occasional "Get bent, McGinnis" or "I hate your picture.")

I work at home, in an office that affords a second-storey inner-city view of trio of trees - a maple, a weed-like false sumac, and some third arbor of indeterminate provenance. In the winter, the view of leafless branches can be pretty bleak, but in the summer I have a nice, leafy canopy to gaze at while trawling for inspiration - a view that, until recently, was usually populated by squirrels and little else.

This year, however, has seen an explosion of bird life; the usual sparrows and grackles, but new additions like robins and blue jays and another stranger - a black bird, smaller than a crow, that reveals upon closer inspection an irridescent blue-green head. (Look, I'm no Audubon - that I can identify anything more than a seagull and a pigeon is a minor miracle.)

My wife swears it's the result of the city ban on pesticides - a sort of bird dividend. I've also noticed a lot more sightings of avian predators - hawks circling high overhead. I'm sure the local cat population is a lot happier, as well. Any theories, folks?

(UPDATE: A casual web search reveals that the black bird with the blue head is a common grackle. Just what the bird with the dark plumage covered in a lovely pattern of dots is remains a mystery to me. I've got to buy a book or something, I guess.)

So you think I'm obsessed?

Perhaps because I'll be watching So You Think You Can Dance three times this week, I'm getting a bit too into the show right now. Right now I'm watching as the likely standout routine of tonight's show is turning into this weird debate, based on the fact that Mia Michaels has misunderstood some very basic bit of information about the paralyzed daughter of the choreographer. For not the first time, Nigel Lythgow has felt obliged to step in and correct her, to which she's retorted something about "freedom of speech" that sounds more than a bit petulant. It's all dragging on a bit too long for anyone's comfort, particularly the choreographer and his wife.

I'm reminded how much I dislike Mia Michaels at moments like this - her routines, her attitude, her "it's all about me" worldview. That's the great thing about the media, isn't it? There's nothing like having strong, negative feelings about strangers.

So you think I can remember?

My wife was nice enough to TiVo last week's results show for So You Think You Can Dance while I was in L.A., and we're watching it tonight. I know we're only in the first week of the finals, but I'm having a hard time remembering any of the names of the dancers this year. It doesn't help that there's a Chelsea and a Chelsie, a Courtney and a Kourtni, in addition to all these creatively spelled names - Kherington, Rayven, Katee. All those Ks and stray H's definitely aren't helping these names stick in my mind.

It also probably means that none of them are standing out for me from the first glance - there's no Benji Schwimmer in this group - though it looks like the girls are a stronger bunch than the guys. My wife is enjoying it, notwithstanding - I think this is her favorite show, ever. I definitely can't complain about watching it twice this week, and not just because of Cat Deeley.

Internets, I love you

I'm sitting here trying to get a column done on Swingtown, CBS' new summer sitcom with a quality cable kind of vibe. It's a post I've been meaning to write for a few days now, based on the critical response and the Parents TV Council's protests to the network, calling for it to be preempted. Of course I haven't actually tuned in to watch the thing when it debuted a week ago - I pride myself on watching as little TV as possible to actually do this job. Trust me, that would only make it harder.

Which brings me to the second most valuable tool I have to get this job done, after tvtattle.com - bittorent. I was able to find a massively-seeded copy of the first episode before I left for L.A., and I've literally just been alerted that episode 2, which aired this week, has just finished downloading. This would, no doubt, give someone at CBS a major case of the vapors, but it's made my job so much easier. YouTube used to fulfill this function, but you can only get so far on 5-10 minute segments, with spotty availability and YouTube's frequently dodgy connections, not to mention the big fat sunburned target they've become for the legal departments of the networks.

Still, as long as the studios refuse to build digital pressrooms, and cling obstinately to the ad-time revenue model, this is the best way to consume TV I can imagine right now. One day, somebody is going to get it.

Goodbye, L.A.

Disliking L.A. is made eminently easier by the efforts of its main industry. I decide to spend my last night in Four Seasons making my way through the DVD set of season one of Californication, David Duchovny's Showtime series. Duchovny plays a writer, a transplanted east coaster lured out to L.A. by the promise of lucrative work after his latest novel is optioned for a movie. He's managed to lose his girlfriend and develop a ferocious case of writer's block in the time he's there, and is drinking and screwing his way to the bottom with a vengeance.

Duchovny does self-satisfied the way Cary Grant did charming, which is more than occasionally annoying. He also attracts women - attractive, even intelligent women - despite obviously being what one of them describes with pitiless accuracy as a loser. It's hard to believe that a raging alcoholic would look as good, or pull as effortlessly, but it's TV after all, and Hollywood is full of people who like to imagine that they'll look keep their looks and wits on the way down that they all fear is waiting for them up ahead.

Whenever he's given an opening, Duchovny's character describes L.A. as a wasteland, a soul-sucking hell-hole that kills talent and love, and implores his girlfriend, both before and after they've split up, to come back with him to New York. He ends up writing a blog for the website of something called Hell-A magazine, where he rhetorically asks why the city seems intent on destroying its young women, knowing full well that he won't get an answer, since that's simply what the city does, an essential part of its nature since Fatty Arbuckle rogered some poor starlet to death with a champagne bottle.

The city comes off a lot like Duchovny's character - a mixture of smugness and self-loathing that can probably go to its grave without doing anything to resolve the contradiction. I get hooked on the show at some point early in the morning, order room service breakfast and plunge ahead through all 12 episodes while packing, leaving with just enough time to make my flight.

My major sense memory of this trip will be two smells - pee and woodsmoke. For some reason, both odours linger over the city while I'm here, their scent thick in the air at the open air gym by the hotel pool, and as I'm driving through Culver City on the way to the airport. (Confronted by the smell of piss while working out, I wonder whether it might even be me, and discreetly sniff at my clothes and shoes when I'm back in my room. Getting old is murder.) Could there be some horticultural reason? Does the  urine tree bloom in early June in Southern California? I'll probably never know.

I am, nonetheless, haunted by the smell of wee-wee as I leave the city, knowing as I go that I'll be back again, in two weeks, for the Dark Knight junket.