Anatomy of a "Cold-Blooded Murder"

Based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady has that crackling dialogue, those sweeping melodies from Frederick Loewe, and the echoes of Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in every lyric. And on the whole, the lyrics they got to sing are expert. But I have a bone to pick with Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist: he's just not British. I listened to the London cast recording that Harrison/Andrews made and wondered just how the Brits reacted to their language being American-ized unwittingly.

Why Can't The English?
By right she should be taken out and hung
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue!
Just you wait, Henry Higgins. The irony is that Lerner murders the English tongue right here. She should be hanged with a noose, not hung like laundry.

Oh, why can't the English learn to
Set a good example to people whose English
Is painful to your tears?
It works when set to music; nevertheless, there are three "to"s here. And there's so much going on: are the "people" also English? "You" is the English people, suddenly in second person?

I'm An Ordinary Man
I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling
Than to ever let a woman in my life
Just like good deeds, one "as" deserves another. A "more than" comparison might have served our expert grammarian better.

I'm a very gentle man...
Who has the milk of human kindness
By the quart in every vein
People knew this even before Pulp Fiction: Europe's got the metric system!

On the Street Where You Live
The whole song, really. Freddy's a lightweight, but I reckon he still knows that in England, one is in a street, not on it.

You Did It
Higgins: "Thank heavens for Zoltan Karpathy. If it hadn't been for him, I'd have died of boredom. He was there, alright, and up to his old tricks."
Mrs. Pearce: "Karpathy? That dreadful Hungarian. Was he there?"
Higgins: "Yes."
There's no grammatical jumble here. Mrs. Pearce just sounds like she has a hearing problem. This exchange is captured for posterity on the original Broadway and London cast recordings, but was fixed for the film.

Show Me
Don't talk of June, don't talk of fall,
Don't talk at all -- show me!
The English prefer "autumn." Lerner actually revised these for the London recording in 1959. But when the 1964 film rolled around, "fall" returned to its post. Perhaps he thought the Brits wouldn't watch because of Audrey Hepburn. The revised London lyrics (on all counts an improvement):
Please don't implore, beg, or beseech,
Don't make a speech -- show me!


Get Me To The Church On Time
Drug me or jail me,
Stamp me or mail me
We can see the problem here. The film executives couldn't; they kept the Broadway lyric. My question is, wouldn't Stanley Holloway, or Julie Andrews in the example above, have mentioned that they as Brits find these lyrics odd? The revised, London-only lyrics:
Drug me or jail me,
Bond me or bail me

A Hymn to Him
The real lyric: What in all of heaven could've prompted her to go?
Rex Harrison reads it as "What in all in heaven" on both the Broadway and London albums. Quit, Professor Higgins. Maybe the grammar slips had vexed so much by this point that he'd grown accustomed to them.

This has been an update of Musical Theater Is An Important Art Form. Time for a PBS pledge break!

What The World Doesn't Need Now

a. Clue, the movie, the sequel! The press slogan is that Clue will be "a global thriller and transmedia event that uses deductive reasoning as its storytelling engine." So basically, it's going from a board game to a super-campy comedy with a crackerjack cast of weirdos (here's looking at you, Madeline Kahn) to another Jason Bourne movie. How global can Clue get? It all takes place in a house! When I play with Lauren and Amy, we always add in the bathroom for fun, but that's as far as I see it stretching. Let's not even talk about the updated board game, which decides those swanky '30s dinner parties just aren't that cool. The revolver has become a shotgun. Will the movie amp it up to bazookas?

b. Musicals based on action/superhero movies:

     Spiderman, the musical, will open on Broadway February 2010. (Please let them sing 

          "Spiderpig" at some point! "Can he fly? / No, he can't.")

     Star Wars: A Musical Journey premieres in London in April. (Hit song suggestions: "The 

          Moment, This Is," Yoda's big showstopper. "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Frozen" 

          when Han busts out of carbonite. When Darth Vader battles his demons at the end of 

          Jedi, he'll fly up into the air and sing "Defying Palpatine.")

Google Update: Just the way you are

This one's more interactive, because I don't have time for screenshots. Go to Google and type in "why do I have." The first two results are great juxtaposed.

Then try "you are a" and add random first letters for the next word. "You are a v" yields some pretty special things: "you are a very special person" is right above "you are a victim of the rules you live by." Maybe those rules mean that "you are a vampire," in which case you don't like sunlight... so -- more searching for you! -- "you are a victim of windows." I am sitting in my bay window nook right now and praying that they don't attack me.

"You are a c" might lead your mind to terrible places, but the real ones are loving: you're a chef, a child of God, a child of the universe even. "You," Google searchers say, "are a choir boy compared to me." Perhaps because the searcher is a vampire! The top two searches for just plain "you are": first you're beautiful, then you are what you eat. I guess you eat beautiful things.

All sorts of compliments roll out when people search for that mysterious "you." You, my friend, are a god and I am not, a fishmonger, a hard-working analyst in the office of financial operations. On the flip side, you are also "a jerk in Spanish" (just in Spanish) and a "rude thoughtless little pig." Did you make the Big Bad Wolf angry?

And what am I? I am America and so can you! I am a zombie and it's not so bad! I am a jelly donut; I am a eunuch (who shares that?).

I am a kitty cat and I dance. Dance. Dance.

A Google of Geese

Courtesy of Fail Blog (yes, it's true, go check it out):
Where Fail Blog leaves off, curiosity takes over. If 300,000 people are extremely terrified of Mao et al., what else stirs them up in cyberspace? (There's a word, btw, that went the way of "the Web".) What emotions are they dealing with amid their xenophobia?

Thank God for fat and sassy... but still, more of us are terrified of the Chinese. If you're feeling low, do you spend time on the Internet? It won't love you back.
Okay, we're depressed so we watch movies, ergo we are fat. Then we grow more depressed because we hated, hated, hated the movie we saw. Just so you know how emphatic we are:
'Net surfers need to let loose somehow. In our rough economic times, though, maybe it's just to hard to kick back. The community chest is empty, the utility tax slashes into your savings... the parallels seem all too real:

Mind If I Pontificate?

I was trying to recall my favorite words, and it turned out tons of them start with P.

Perspicacity. I first heard this word in a song from Anyone Can Whistle: "How you say, imperturbable perspicacity." When I learn new words, I try to use them in speech. My brain and tongue crossed signals, and for the first few days of acquiring this word, I pronounced it "per-scip-a-city." Not very shrewd of me.

Pusillanimous. Picked this up from The Wizard of Oz, when I was young and innocent, and didn't know what satire was. Imagine my excitement when I discovered it meant cowardly.

"Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.
Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning,
where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts
and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing
you haven't got: a diploma."

Now my favorite. Pulchritude. Be honest, you think of a corpse with empty eye sockets, rotting in a musty grave and covered in cobwebs. In actuality, it's a word for great physical beauty. You open your bedroom window and part the drapes for a sight of the sun rising behind mountains caked in white. It's one of those words that conveys something much more striking than I originally supposed. Kind of like the letter P; it's an ugly little bugger, but look at the great words it heads.

"Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."

I have this habit of reading acclaimed novels and then tracking down the film version afterward, to see how they even did it. Example: Michael Cunningham's The Hours, which is a nicely written book, though nothing earth-shattering, became a nicely crafted film, no more and no less. Similarly, Ian McEwan's Atonement, perhaps the best novel I've read from the last ten years, became quite a good film, though with some adequate-but-that's-all casting in the form of Keira Knightley. Both of these novels are very much about Literature and the Power of Writing, and so naturally they make more sense within a medium of words rather than images. That they worked well enough anyway is credit to the let's-leave-well-enough-alone strategy of adaptation: if it was good enough for McEwan, why change it?

We've all been taught from a young age, and just by inference, that The Book is Always Better. In many cases, yes. I just saw The Reader, subtitled The Movie Made Solely for Kate Winslet To Win An Oscar Even Though She's Merely Okay In It. I haven't read the Oprah-approved book, but it must be better. With all those fake German accents and all those baths, it felt at times like an unintentional comedy. Cue the violins for the unwarranted sudden-tragedy-but-wait-it's-really-about-hope ending, and you've got a mediocre movie made to capitalize on a bestseller.

Enough ranting. It's not frequent, but there are good books out there that are made into Better Movies. Yes, believe you me. I tried to come up with 10 examples and failed, so it's obviously a limited adaptation study, but here are classics and recent flicks that inhabited their celluloid reels vividly, that felt like they were always meant to be movies.

1. The Godfather Solid pulp fiction cast with a veritable actor's studio. From the clay and dust of America comes this living, breathing work of art so rich in its evocations of family, so thrilling in its intercutting of a baptism with gang warfare. Francis Ford Coppola, an up-and-down director, followed the book almost word for word (while expunging some ridiculous subplots).

2. Psycho (1960) The opposite: a classic thriller of suspense, unexpected violence, psychology, and claustrophobia adapted from a terrible book. It's not the knife that we remember; it's the leering boy-next-door trapped in that motel and that menacing cocoon of a house on the hill. Black-and-white, almost verite-esque, with those jagged high string lines and throbbing pizzicati.

3. Jaws Both the novel and the film adhere to their genre, but there's something about Robert Shaw's sobering speech between attacks, about humanity enduring against the caprices of nature. Peter Benchley's novel says "The shark did this, and the shark did that"; Steven Spielberg realized it's about the absence (and the impending threat) of the shark. John Williams's finest (least tacky) score.

4. Planet of the Apes (1968) Eww, you say, Charlton Heston chewing the scenery so ferociously? Those oh-so-sixties zoom shots? Yes, but the parable still works, amid barren landscapes and rabid percussion. The novel contains a pointless outer story in which two people reading about this planet turn out to be apes... oh, and the hero isn't actually on Earth the whole time, which takes away from the whole Darwinian survival throughline.

5. No Country for Old Men This is the kind of jaw-locked, white-knuckled experience only the cinema can do. It's a synthesis of rapacious editing, grainy long shots of the disappearing West, great character actors, and that ex-Beatles bowlcut. The Coens kept all of Cormac McCarthy's dialogue and story and rendered the bleakness in a visceral, no-man-gets-out-alive setting.

6. Little Children Tom Perrotta's novel was very good, following various characters in limited third-person perspectives. At the climax, suddenly, the narrator cheats and follows the nosy neighbor, as if she had a crucial role before that. The movie avoids this trap while focusing the suburban angst more acutely. The revised ending, Perrotta has even admitted, is better than his own. Beautiful camerawork considering the setting; great performances from Kate Winslet (she's just so present, so real) and Jackie Earl Haley.

7. American Psycho Possibly the most excessive and depraved book ever written. Purposefully, yes, but that doesn't make it art. Looking back on it, Bret Easton Ellis himself is shocked by it. Though it's not a great movie, it's impressive how Mary Harron streamlined it into a dark comedy.

8. Fight Club The movie apes Chuck Pahalniuk's book line by line, but when the Pahalniuk well runs dry (as it did years ago), and we question how good a writer he really is, the movie interjects with a hilarious performance from Edward Norton, a rockin' soundtrack, and some crazy visuals that put the fun back into Pahalniuk's narcisstic nihilism.

9. Casino Royale (2006) James Bond is what he is, on paper and on screen. But Ian Fleming was still finding his footing with his first Bond adventure, and he hadn't latched onto the glamour of a license to kill. Daniel Craig is, interestingly, the most like the Bond of the books, even though Sean Connery was iconic. Too many explosions, but yet, the novel just peters out, concerned less with intrigue and more with "character" and "motive" and things alien to Bond as we know him. (Great last line, though: "The bitch is dead now.")

Let the credits roll. Anyone have a 10th to add?

They shimmer and twinkle and buzz

Review: Milk + Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant, I'm glad you're trying to redeem yourself. My first exposure to the man was Psycho. The remake. The film that took a masterpiece of low-budget cinema, slathered it in honky-tonk neon, recruited a frat boy and Ellen's girlfriend to play iconic roles, and made one and only one update to the '90s: "Let me get my Walkman."

2009, even if the Oscars don't award it, is Van Sant's year. He's not going to be mainstream, but he's now Hollywood-friendly-indie. And how can you not feel warm and fuzzy after watching Milk? It's a love letter to gay activist Harvey Milk. The screenplay for the most part covers his zest, his chutzpah, his honesty. As he becomes a local hero, it doesn't shy from his difficulties with intimacy. Sean Penn deserves all the praise he's gotten; you forget you're watching a performance. Milk's stride and gesticulations may be alien to Penn, but he doesn't rely on the tics to find his character. Plus, it's nice to see him smile. It's a movie all about the men -- James Franco's coolness and Emile Hirsch's rebel-rebel vigor balance out well.

Van Sant prefers us to interpret psychology without showing it, a fine trick when it's about the people. But Dan White (Josh Brolin) gives us little to understand the progression from Point A, team player, to Point C, assassin. More probing might have kept him from seeming like the villain of this fairy tale.

Paranoid Park fits more into the dream-like state that defines most of Van Sant's films. A skater kid accidentally kills a security guard when hopping onto a train, and it stunts him emotionally until he gets it out, not with the police, but on paper. And really, on film. Some critics were in love with this film, maybe in response to the fear that this type of Sundance fare will be eclipsed by safe-indie Milk. Van Sant gives us internal conflict, again, without the psychology. In a cycle of disconnecting (starting with the severed guard's body) and reconnecting with the world and ordinary teenage-hood, the film veers around a lot. The acting's rough, the redemption's uninspired. What lingers are moments of clarity: the gracefulness of skaters in parks and city pipes, gliding along in a hallucination, swooping up to the heavens and returning to terra firma in a concentrated yet effortless descent.

After the accident, there's a scene in the shower (much stronger than Psycho 2.0's desecration of Hitchcock with comically red blood like Kool-Aid), where the kid responsible lets the water drip down his long hair for two straight minutes. Here's one scene where no words are necessary. Who knew a moment of such stillness could be so riveting?

Give up the ghost!

Did you know Hillary Clinton used a ghostwriter for her post-White House, round-one memoirs? Her ghostwriter reportedly received $500,000 for the job. Hillary's hubby had to work two years as the president for that dough.

Ghostwriters out there, take the money while you can, from whomever you can. With publishing what it is, the well may just dry up a touch. Christmastime 2008 saw decreased sales in Z-list celebrities, and I say it's about time people started spending money wisely. Sure, they're just not buying books at all -- though they are buying Kindles -- but I hope that when they choose to spend their $9.99 on a Kindle edition, they skip over Michael Phelps' How To Win More Medals Than Muhammad.

It makes it difficult to tell who's actually writing out there. Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer both released memoirs last year. There's no "with..." on their book covers. I'm going to assume they at least wrote drafts of their books, even if they were later polished (and how many nonfiction books aren't?). She's a well-received children's book author, and the excerpts I've read of his seem too witty and candid to be inauthentic. Besides, they both starred in my favorite childhood movie.

On the safe list: Barack Obama. First because he's Our Hero, but also he started before he was famous. Rachel Clayman of Crown Publishing confirms: "I've never worked with any other writer who needed less line editing than he did." Jimmy Carter was probably our last presidential booksmith, and he continues to publish. Ronald Reagan famously remarked of his memoir, "I hear it's a great book!" If John McCain had won, he could have tossed Faith of our Fathers into the ghostwriter mix.

The more we look into it, the more discouraging and farcical it becomes. Sarah Palin now seeks to broker a book deal. If we package it with the inevitable W memoir, the OED will commit suicide just to roll around in its 26-volume grave. And where does this madness stop? Wikipedia has the ultimate insight: "God could also be considered a ghostwriter of the Bible." Sure hope he got a great advance.

There's a Sucker Born Every Minute

Some days you get home and you need a glass of wine. I hope today isn't one of those days (though typeface searching gets to you) because Kate's gone and thus I would be drinking alone. But you know, it's not always the fact that your quick design assignments took over four hours or you spent the entire day at your internship folding 370 blads (like trailers for cookbooks!) into UPS packages and sending them out, making your mind numb to all that it sees.

I like to think of myself as an understanding person who doesn't create scenes. But I went to the food court for a break, ironically, from cookbooks. A $7 salad from Au Bon Pain? But where do they hide the dressing, and does it cost extra? A plate of greasy but delicious Chinese? On my way, I see Sbarro and a paper that reads: "Special on Philly cheese steak, stromboli, or stuffed pizza $4.99." Yeah, I have a weakness for stromboli... but what does this placard mean? The stromboli and stuffed pizza on the menu are $4.59... does the special come with a drink? With breadsticks? With a big hug? (It doesn't say.)

It's crowded, but I get in line and ask the guy for stromboli "like in the special," pointing at the paper. He points to the types I can get; I go with sausage. Next guy asks what side I want... does it come with the special? He assures me it does. Cash register time. I'm armed with my stromboli, my ziti side, and a Dr. Pepper poured when I asked if it came with the special and he concurred. A lady rings it up as $8.18. Which is not $4.99 plus tax. "Oh, isn't this the special? I was told that it came with a side and drink," I rebut. "No, this is the combo. Only number one is the special." #1 on the menu is regular pizza -- none of the three things listed on the paper at the front of the line. So I get angry and hold up the line and keep the next guy from getting his drink because I was only here for whatever the special might be. That's fine if that's not the special, but don't delude me along the way into thinking it was. I gesture toward the paper and read it aloud for everybody to hear (and again, I'm not a make-a-scene guy, but honestly). Nope; cash register KGB says "number one" is the only special.

I felt bad later for being so upset about it, and don't think that I'm hating on this cash register woman, who didn't really speak English and surely wasn't at fault. But attracting people with a deal and then not giving it to them? Duplicity is the American way. The reason I got in line was to avoid taking out a mortgage on lunch. Of course I gave up, meeting nothing but blank states behind the counter, even from ziti guy and Dr. Pepper themselves. I wanted food, so I paid all $8.18 for it. What happened to the tenet of customer service? In the move-'em-down-the-line formula, it's easy for people to get things wrong and then take no blame. I'm sure they get paid less than my lunch cost per hour, so I can't be angry at them. But I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. Moral of the story: Sometimes you just gotta suck it up. New plan: bring lunch to work on Monday and Wednesday. Buy a soda from the vending machine. At least if that screws you over, you can pound it to death.

If you give a mouse a cookie...

...he's going to want some milk.

But if you are part of this new eco-friendly 

     unplug-your-fridge movement,

The milk will be spoiled.

If the milk is spoiled,

The mouse will die.

If the mouse dies,

Future mice won't wheedle into your pantry 

     and rob you of cookies.

If you don't have to worry about wasting money on 

     mouse-eaten cookies, or an exterminator,

You'll be able to replenish your food supply daily.

If you go to the grocery store every day,

You might make poor decisions and buy the sample items 

     because they're so yummy.

If you buy too much food and worry it will spoil,

You're bound to gain tons of weight.

If you become a couch potato,

You'll grow too lazy to buy food daily.

If you stop eating so much food,

You'll probably develop an eating disorder.

If you have to see doctors to solve this problem,

Word will get out that you unplugged your fridge, 

     and the New York Times will write an article

     about you: Fridge-Less Men Deprived of Cold Beer.

If you're suddenly pseudo-famous,

You'll want to be more famous.

If you want to be more famous,

You'll want to be more wealthy.

If you achieve the topmost tax bracket,

You're going to spend your wealth.

If you buy what money can buy,

You're going to hire someone to buy you 

     fresh milk everyday.

If you have fresh milk,

You're going to have mice who just ate cookies.

If you kill the mice invading your home,

Isn't that worse for the environment than using a fridge?

Good Win, Good Singers, Good Commercials

Did anyone else feel the blink-and-you-miss-em one-second ads from Miller Lite were a little dubious? Whatever... I was already drinking beer, without any coaxing from their subliminal mind-shocks, but I was really dying for some Doritos after that game.

Using physical violence for humor during the Super Bowl? Good timing.

#1: Even better than a Magic 8 Ball.



#2: A tragedy of operatic proportions.


#3: Oh, and this Bud Light commercial. Potentially the most disturbing visuals of the night.