Aaron Sorkin is officially an obsolete old man

Since watching seasons 1-3 of The West Wing in college, I've had a problem with Aaron Sorkin. I caught on to his writing tics - specifically, the carefully orchestrated crescendo and decrescendo of his Meaningful Speeches - pretty early, and once you're no longer delighted by his rhythms or nuggets of grammar trivia, all you can hear is his casual hatred of young women, his obsessive love for Bill Clinton, and his even more obsessive love for whichever character currently serves as his mouthpiece. No, I really don't care for him at all, and that a) put me in an extreme minority among young, college-educated DC residents; and b) really stacked the deck against his latest effort, The Newsroom. I'll admit that I haven't seen the whole pilot. Maybe I'm wrong about this one. But what I have seen - the YouTube trailer, and the centerpiece Meaningful Speech as delivered by Jeff Daniels - does literally nothing to change my opinion. What it does do is make clear what I've long suspected - Aaron Sorkin is nothing but a crabby old man who wants you damn kids to get off his lawn. 


Here is the main chunk of his Meaningful Speech:

None of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period... 

We sure used to be [the best country in the world]. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world's greatest artists and the world's greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn't belittle it; it didn't make us feel inferior. We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn't scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

 

So, in order: 


Anyone who declares the youngest generation to be the "worst generation ever" automatically surrenders their right to be taken seriously. Really? We're worse than the generations who were in favour of slavery? Or the generations who called a person 'nigger' to his face? We're worse? 


But I'll continue.


Anyone who longs for the days when we fought for "moral reasons" is longing for a simplicity that just could never exist. You know what America fought for for "moral reasons"? Segregation. You know what America fought against for "moral reasons"? Women's suffrage. 


Anyone who says we "never beat our chest" has some serious blinders on. Or am I just hallucinating the rampant propaganda of World Wars I and II?

The BEST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER.

Anyone who claims that "we didn't scare so easily" must remember McCarthyism, not to mention the entire 1980s, as a quite a lark. [Cocaine joke here.]


And anyone who misses the days when we made "ungodly technological advances" cannot possibly be serious when they make bombastically reductive analogies about today's technological advances like "socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality." 




I think it's about time to stop listening to Aaron Sorkin. Let him sit on his porch in his high-waisted slacks, drinking Metamucil and railing at the young punks who run past his house. 

Damn kids.

How the director's cut makes Aliens better

Aliens, as I'm pretty sure I've mentioned more than once before, is one of my all-time favourite movies, and the best sequel of all time. It's funny, deftly written and characterized, terrifying, and gross. There's nothing I can say about Aliens that hasn't already been said, in great detail, numerous times before. The only way James Cameron managed to top himself, as far as I'm concerned, is with his 1992 Special Edition. (Yeah, fuck The Terminator. I said fuck it.)


But apparently there's just this consensus out there in the land of cinephiles that the Special Edition, or director's cut, is worse than the theatrical version. This is just how people in the know feel. I'm still shocked, and I stumbled upon this information days ago. Fucking baffling. So just for my own well-being, here is a list of deleted or extended scenes that improve upon the original.

• We find out that Ripley has a daughter, who died at the age of 66 (Ripley had promised to be home for her 11th birthday). For one thing, this creates a past personal life for Ripley that we otherwise wouldn't know about. She's no longer just a person - she's a person who became untethered from her family, a person who had people waiting for her. She's a grieving mother. It also creates a better explanation for her maternal devotion to Newt other than "oh, she's a woman, and they're all basically moms, right?" Her determination to protect and rescue the little girl is a determination to not lose another daughter. 

By any badass means necessary.

• Ripley loses her flight officer status. Carter "Slimeball" Burke alludes to the fact that she can't get a better job than one on the loading dock, but I had assumed it was due to her reputation as an unstable headcase. It turns out that Ripley was officially displaced by her employers, which bolsters Weyland-Yutani Corp's cold, bureaucratically evil persona. 
• We see Newt's dad get facehugged. This is the inserted scene that gets the most complaints, usually saying that it ruins the suspense re: whether the aliens have attacked the colony. I'm sorry...the movie is called Aliens. This isn't like the letter-writing scene of Vertigo, which does ruin what could have been a legitimately bonkers twist that would've forced the audience to reconsider everything. This is not the same at all. That Ripley is right and the aliens are going to fuck some shit up is basically a foregone conclusion. 
• Hudson is the ultimate badass. This might out me as a sadist, but I love watching Hudson go from a puffed-up braggart to a pants-wetting coward (and then, finally, to an ultimate badass). 
• Hudson is also the smartest. He catches on to the ant-like hierarchy that the aliens follow, and posits that there might be a queen alien giving birth to the monsters they've had to face. I'd say this supposition contributes to more suspense, since we start to think that maybe there is worse, alien-wise, than we've already seen. 

Worse as in, some sort of horrible ant-scorpion-birthing sac hybrid that can use an elevator.

• "Dwayne. It's Dwayne." "Ellen." "Don't be long, Ellen." I love the Hicks-Ripley relationship so much I can't even stand it. I apologize for nothing. And them revealing their first names to each other, just before Ripley heads off to rescue Newt/raise hell/deliver famous lines, is basically their version of "I love you." "I love you too." 

In defense of: Smash

Almost a month after the season finale, I'm still thinking about Smash.


Now, let's be clear - I tuned in to the premiere armed to the teeth with my irony and derision, fully expecting to add this to my list of bad shows I "jokingly" watch. Weirdly enough, though, I didn't loathe it. I mean, there were absolutely things I hated, and those things mostly got worse as the show went on. But there was something endearing about it, and something truly interesting going on in it, that kept bringing me back every week. I looked forward to each new episode - with some dread, sure, because Katharine McPhee - but also with real anticipation. This wasn't hate watching. 


I'm sure I've lost some of you here, so let me put an example out there. 





So the song goes: blahblah, boringly shrill chorus girls, boring boring, Marilyn hates playing a dumb blonde, cliche cliche, what an expedient way to express Arthur Miller's concern for her drug abuse - now I can see how you can afford those lovely scarves, Debra Messing - snooze snooze. But about 90 seconds in, Megan Hilty gets to do what she does best - express a lot of nuanced emotions through a big fucking song. Her Marilyn slides between powerful, seductive, and overwhelmed; she's motivated alternately by fear or the adulation of lookers-on; sometimes she needs to be manhandled into position, others she glides across the stage with something bordering on elation. 


Unfortunately, the rest of the show struggled to meet the level of "perfectly adequate" reached by the first 90 seconds, and few performances are as complicated and interesting as this one. But still - what a performance, no?


Then, there's the Bollywood scene. In the middle of an otherwise hum-drum episode, Katharine McPhee unconvincingly begins to hallucinate, and suddenly the entire cast is performing an enormous, over-the-top Bollywood number that basically summarizes all of the plot arcs so far.

 

I have no idea. All I know is I went from confused and horrified to totally delighted in about two minutes. The irritatingly catchy chorus and general "let 'em riot; we're Sonic fucking Death Monkey" attitude totally won me over.


And it's stuff like that, and an argument about the sexless way that gay men view and portray sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe, that kept me from writing Smash off as a guilty pleasure, or understanding how people can call it the worst show they've ever seen. You don't find moments like that when you're watching something ironically, or when you watch something because you hate it and that hatred weirdly comforts you. (I'm absolutely guilty of both, by the way.) I mean, fuck, this isn't a Chelsea Handler show. Glimmers of intelligence and originality should carry more weight.


There's a world of difference between loving something because it's exquisitely bad, loving something even though it's bad, and loving some good elements you find in something bad. I'll never say that I love Smash, ironically or otherwise, but I will love and appreciate out the artistic moments that transcend its essential mediocrity. And it's those moments that keep the show in my mind, weeks after it's gone off the air. 

Also the moments involving this couple, because I LOVE THEM.