Wiggum and Scorsese

So, tonight's Simpsons was alright. Not great, but not terrible. In other words, like most of the recent episodes (except for the 90s episode, which was terrible). But the last line was tremendous. The episode was a send-up of The Departed, and at the end they did the shot of the actual rat. Then, Ralph Wiggum popped up and said "the rat symbolizes obvious-ness." It's funny because it's true.

Quick reviews of DVDs I've watched recently:
Michael Clayton- Really good movie. George Clooney is, like, the third or fourth best actor around, and the only real movie star we have these days. This movie should have been more popular, but I think a lot of people wanted it to be a kind of John Grisham legal thriller instead of a character study.

For Your Consideration- By the same people who did Best In Show and Waiting For Guffman and A Mighty Wind. All of those movies are better than this one. Missing from For Your Consideration: the mockumentary format and characters anyone cares about at all. the latter was more important to the other Christopher Guest films than the former. Fred Willard tries to save the film, but even he can't.

The Extras Holiday Special- Ricky Gervais is also in For Your Consideration, but he's better when he's back in the role of Andy. The (presumably) last episode of Extras is funny (although the celebrity cameos aren't as funny as Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan's roles were) but is intentionally pretty dark. When Ricky Gervais was David Brent on the Office, he regularly said things that made the audience uncomfortable, but when he does it as Andy, it is harder to know how to feel because he spent a dozen episodes making us like Andy. I wonder if the message about celebrities would be more resonant with the masses if Ricky Gervais was a bigger celebrity in the US? Which would be weird. Or I'm thinking about this poorly, maybe. On the commentary track of For Your Consideration (I listened to it hoping that Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy would explain why they made so many bad decisions. They did not explain.) Guest and Levy said that Gervais was nervous about appearing in the movie. Not because he could sense it was a train wreck, but because he didn't do improv or ad-libbing on The Office or Extras. And this blew my fucking mind. The notion that Merchant and Gervais wrote out every line of their shows is really stunning.

My goal had been to see Be Kind Rewind this weekend, but it's not playing in Apex or Cary. This is annoying. I don't really want to drive to the Raleigh Grand or Southpoint in Durham to see this movie. What's really vexing is that it's not playing at the art house theaters or the mulitplexes. It's as if Gondry's film is too big for the little guys but not big enough to wrest a screen away from the Bucket List or the latest terrible film about step-dancing that uses numbers instead of words in the title (I guess Prince also follows this unfortunate habit, but he's a genius, so I let it slide with him). The bigger problem for me is this: I don't really trust critics when it comes to Gondry. I just looked up what The Science of Sleep got on metacritic. You know what that beautiful little masterpiece's aggregate is? Fuckin' 7o! So while the reviews for Be Kind, Rewind have been mostly mediocre-to-good, as far as I can tell, I'm not sure if I should take this as meaning not to drive out of my way to see it or not. If you can see my meaning through poorly chosen words.

Fuck it. I'm going to bed.