My 9-year-old son and I had just finished dinner last week and were doing the dishes when he uttered this odd question, “Who do you think would win in a fight, Voldemort or Sydney Bristow?”
The kid knows that I have a soft spot for the fictional, super-CIA spy Sydney Bristow from the TV show Alias. We’ve also, along with my husband, been reading the Harry Potter series together out loud, so his mentioning Voldemort wasn’t out of the blue.
But to combine Sydney Bristow with Voldemort in the same breath, well that took me by surprise.
I told him I thought that in a battle, Sydney would prevail, but I don’t really think she could beat Voldemort as he wouldn’t allow her to lay hands, or one of her vicious kicks, on him.
My 9-year-old then added a twist, “Who’d win if it was Voldemort vs Yoda?”
I'm not sure about this one. Yoda’s pretty quick for a little guy and he is pretty smart, smarter than Voldemort, I’d venture to guess. This one had me stumped but my choice would have to be Yoda.
His final question: What if the battle were between Dumbledore and the Emperor? Who’d win then? I said Dumbledore would but only because I like Dumbledore and want to root for the good guys. (Saying The Emperor would win is like rooting for Arvin Sloane or Bellatrix Lestrange.)
Who do you think would prevail in these battles?
(FYI – Speaking of Sydney Bristow, the AV Club is reviewing the entire Alias series, starting with its amazing pilot with Sydney Bristow’s crazy red hair.)
Image credits: ABC via USA Today, Warner Brothers via MTV.
The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, which is on stands now, has this great reunion package where the casts of favorite TV shows and movies (like Back to the Future) were brought together for new photos, interviews and the occasional video.
My favorite video – unavailable for embedding on blogs – was the Jennifer Garner/Victor Garber Alias reunion video where Garner and Garber (sounds like the name of a law firm) sadly, batted down any talk of an Alias movie (Garber said everyone’s too old) while they fondly remembered the hellish long days of filming the pilot episode. Garber, who officiated Garner's wedding to Ben Affleck, said he stays at Garner's house whenever he's filming in Los Angeles. They're so cute together.
Meanwhile, Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel from the Gilmore Girls also addressed the rumor of a Gilmore Girls film and reminisced about the season four episode "The Festival of Living Art" where they both posed on stage as famous works of art.
My other favorite EW reunion was seeing many of the castmates from The West Wing talk about what the show meant to them. I didn’t realize that Elisabeth Moss -- who played Zoey Bartlet and is now Peggy Olson on Mad Men -- was 17 when she started working on the show. And sometimes I forget that Kathryn Joosten was Mrs. Landingham before she was Karen McCluskey on Desperate Housewives.
Among the shows for which I have high hopes this fall is the new NBC drama Undercovers, created/produced/directed by J.J. Abrams of Lost, the most recent Star Trek movie and Alias. After reading about the show and seeing the preview I thought: Alias, minus Rambaldi, Jack Bristow, Arvin Sloane and baby Bristow/Vaughn.
The premise of Undercovers is like an after-Alias: These married caterers, who used to be CIA spies five years ago, are called back into the fray, just when they were looking for something to amp up the excitement quotient in their marriage. What better than espionage to get the juices flowing?
Several of the scenes in the preview reminded me of Sydney and Vaughn – which is good because I miss Alias – like seeing Steven and Samantha Bloom fleeing a building while wearing jump suits (I thought of Syd and Vaughn in the Vatican), Samantha in the black lingerie (Syd on the SD-6 plane with the master computer) and Samantha stomping on a guy (Syd in the pilot episode in the parking lot after she’d been pursued by SD-6 goons).
Last week, Coach Eric Taylor attempted to address some of the dire financial needs of his ragtag, upstart (0-2) East Dillon football high school team by organizing fundraisers and writing a personal check to cover the initial installment on the team’s new uniforms. On this week’s installment of Friday Night Lights, “A Sort of Homecoming,” Coach Taylor was trying to bolster the morale end of things, trying to rally the community behind his team, rendering him looking awfully, earnestly ham-fisted at times.
Who knew that ex-Panther booster Buddy Garrity would be his saving grace in luring former East Dillon players who’d won the State Championship in 1983, to appear at a pep rally/homecoming Eric organized? Or that Jess Merriweather would be the person who'd convince her former football star father to reluctantly offer up his restaurant for the rally? (Can't wait for more backstory on that family.) I loved watching how this all came together -- as well as the speech about a “pride” of lions -- knowing that nothing, it seems, is coming as easily for Eric as it had back in West Dillon.
The other two threads that interested me during FNL's new episode this week: Matt Saracen realized that perhaps he made a mistake in passing up a golden opportunity in Chicago in order to stay in Dillon with his high school girlfriend Julie, who's mulling college opportunities on both coasts, and Tami Taylor continued to endure all manner of harassment (character assassination on the radio, vandalism to her car) for simply enforcing the school rules by sending football star Luke Cafferty to the proper school.
As this season has unfolded, I’ve been wondering if Eric really understands the magnitude of the malice that's been directed his wife or whether she’s keeping a lot of it from him, as he’s been so completely absorbed with his job that he doesn’t see what’s happening with his own family . . . other than whether Tami would be willing to cook dinner for former East Dillon football champs.
A Retooled Alias?
I was a major fan of Alias. Became quite fond of J.J. Abrams, Jennifer Garner and Victor Garber while watching this smart and thoroughly entertaining (in the first three seasons anyway) espionage drama which was at its greatest when Garner’s Sydney Bristow was working as a double-agent for the CIA while serving the evil international crime syndicate, SD-6, run by the nefarious Arvin Sloane. (The show launched not only Garner’s career, but Terry O’Quinn’s -- aka Lost's John Locke -- and Bradley Cooper’s, he of Hangover fame.)
When I got word that people have been buzzing about what they’re calling a “reboot” of Alias – an E! report called labeled it an “initial talk” about a newly revised Alias series, sans the Rambaldi element – I was skeptical. Abrams is already working on a new NBC show, Undercovers, that’s slated to begin next fall about a married couple who met while working as spies and are re-activated into the espionage game, adding a dash of excitement to their marriage, now that they're boring, staid caterers. Wouldn’t a new version of Alias be too similar? Would any of the old characters be involved? Could you really call it Alias without them?
EW Top 100 Characters List
If you were to sit down and make a list of the top 100 fictional characters from the past 20 years, who’d be on it? The editors and writers at Entertainment Weekly took up this challenge and put together a rather eclectic list. Why certain characters rank higher than others, and why certain ones were selected over others – like Tim Riggins making the list as representative of FNL and NOT the Taylor family? – remains a mystery to me. Kind of like the Lost finale. The EW top 10 of the past 20 years:
1. Homer Simpson
2. Harry Potter
3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
4. Tony Soprano
5. The Joker (Heath Ledger’s version)
6. Rachel Green from Friends
7. Edward Scissorhands
8. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs
9. Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City
10. SpongeBob Squarepants
FYI: Some of my favorites made the list: Sydney Bristow (42), Jack Bauer from 24 (44), John Locke from Lost (63), Lorelai Gilmore from the Gilmore Girls (65), Don Draper from Mad Men (74) and Gregory House from House (84).
Sex and the City 2
I went to see Sex and the City 2 on Friday and dedicated this week’s Pop Culture column to it over on Mommy Tracked. While I’m not going to tell you that it’s absolutely fabulous – I called it an “over-the-top, junk-food-binge of a film,” a bad-good movie you can enjoy with friends and share a laugh – I was steamed by the language some reviewers used when writing about the characters and the women in the film, everything from “shrews” to “harridans.”
Given that it's almost time for the new fall TV shows to commence -- the notion of "fall TV" almost seems retro, given the new, re-jiggered TV landscape where new shows now premiere throughout the year -- the Boston Globe's TV critic Matthew Gilbert was thinking about pilot episodes recently and comprised his own list of favorites that aired in the past 10 years.
The best one, in Gilbert's judgment: Freaks and Geeks, which premiered on NBC a decade ago. Gilbert said: "It so perfectly captured the relative innocence of the pre-MTV world, before kids were media-bound and ironic. Each of the indelible characters -- the cool kids and the geeks, all of them on the high school fringes -- was in place from the beginning."
Rounding out his top 10 were:
2. Lost (2004) 3. How I Met Your Mother (2005) 4. 24 (2001) 5. Mad Men (2007) 6. The West Wing (1999) 7. Arrested Development (2003) 8. The Sopranos (1999) 9. Action (1999) 10. Friday Night Lights (2006)
I would've make a different list, although I wouldn't quibble with the inclusion of Lost, 24, Mad Men, The West Wing and FNL.
One of the best pilots I'd ever seen was for Alias(2001) -- which received an honorable mention from Gilbert -- which set the stage for a powerhouse of a first season, and was gripping, dramatic and soulful at the same time, launching the careers of Jennifer Garner, Michael Vartan and Bradley Cooper, who played a reporter who was in love with Garner's character. Garner's character's finance was murdered early in the first episode and she later learned that not only was her standoffish dad a CIA agent, but that the off-book, clandestine CIA group she thought she worked for was not connected to the U.S. government. She worked for the "bad guys."
I'd also include one of my perennial favorites, Once and Again(1999) whose pilot episode about the impact of two divorces on suburban Chicago families was raw and honest. This show's cast included Sela Ward, Shane West, Evan Rachel Wood and Patrick Dempsey.
Two more favorite pilots: Six Feet Under(2001), which introduced us to the freaky Fisher family on the day the family patriarch died, and the poignant season one opener for Rescue Me(2004). To round it out to an even top 10 pilots from the past 10 years, I'd throw in Big Love(2006).
If you were making a list of the best pilots that aired between 1999 and now, which ones would you say kicked some serious behind?
It was with tremendous pleasure that I read a recent column in the New York Timesextolling the virtues of re-reading books. Columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg, who said he's fond of re-reading some of his favorite books rather than instinctively moving on to new material, wrote:
"Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading Middlemarch, for instance, or even The Great Gatsby, I'm able to pay attention to what's really happening in the language itself -- a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.
The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does."
This was a wonderfully simple, yet insightful observation. We readers change all the time, influenced by our life's experiences. The books don't. I re-read The Scarlet Letter last year in preparation for a column and found Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic to be nothing at all like I remembered from my earlier readings of it while in high school and college. From my new perch -- as a married mother of three -- it almost seemed like it was a new book altogether. The story held more meaning for me than it did for me when I was 15, or 20. Ditto for Gatsby, which I recently read again. As with Letter, it seemed like a fresh literary experience because I have a more experienced point of view than when I first met F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby.
As for Klinkenborg's comment that when you're re-reading something you're no longer distracted by finding out key plot points, the same reasoning applies to re-watching movies or TV shows, particularly complex programs with layers of allusions like Lost, Alias and Mad Men.
Take the densely written drama Lost. When I watch a new episode for the first time, I focus almost exclusively on the plot, how the storylines fit into the meta-story of the show and whether they jive with past episodes and character backstories. Once the major twists and turns have been dispensed with, I can dive back into the episode during a later viewing and comb for hints, layers and connections while reveling in the subtleties I missed when I was busy obsessing about the storylines.
On this practice, I differ with The Spouse, who believes that once he's seen something he moves on. Been there. Done that.
Over the weekend, the movie American Beauty was on cable TV. I first saw it in the theater in 1999 with a friend. When it came to VHS (when everyone was still watching tapes), I got a copy and watched it with The Spouse who thought it was just "okay." In the years since, whenever I've suggested that we re-watch the movie, The Spouse has declined. However when we watched the last quarter of it this past weekend together, we noticed new things mostly due to our different perspectives, particularly because we're both in our 40s and the lead character, Lester Burnham is 42. (The experience didn't convince The Spouse to re-thinking his stance against re-watching TV shows and films.)
As far as the books I've read in the recent past which have thoroughly entertained me (such as The Time Traveler's Wife and the Harry Potter series I read last summer), I know that if I allow myself the luxury of re-reading them -- having already satiated my greediness to know what happens -- I will be able to, as Klinkenborg said, "pay attention to what's really happening in the language itself."
Are you a re-watcher/re-reader? If you're a fan of a complex show like Lost, how many times do you re-watch something? Is once enough?
