Polar Opposites: Doctor Who and The Wire

            Albert Einstein and Kim Kardashian.  America and North Korea.  Men and women.  These comparisons can all be defined as “polar opposites,” two people, places, or things that share basic superficial qualities yet otherwise could not be more different.  Over the past week or so, I have been completely lazy and just sat around in my sweltering apartment watching two television shows that I have come to realize as polar opposites: The HBO program The Wire and the BBC programme Doctor Who.  Before I go into detail explaining why these two shows are so different from one another, I would like to start with their similarities.  Both are critically acclaimed television shows in the English language that have body counts too high to concern ourselves with.  Now comes the fun part.  I am going to list the five most important reasons (in no particular order) why Doctor Who and The Wire can be considered television’s polar opposites:

 Portrayal of Reality

This is the most obvious difference on the list, because while The Wire portrays a world as steeped in authenticity as any television show ever created, Doctor Who throws all concepts of reality into the loo.  I mean, for God’s sake, it’s about an immortal humanoid alien who uses a telephone booth to travel across all of space and time, encountering thousands of different planets and creatures along the way.  If The Wire had a character that was an alien, it would be the greatest “jump the shark” moment in television history.  The term “jump the shark” would have been renamed “cap the alien.”  Doctor Who takes the audience to all of these planets, but none of them, not even present-day Earth, can match the veracity of the world portrayed on The Wire.  The characters on Doctor Who do not have to concern themselves with the minutiae of everyday life with all of the aliens running around, yet one can argue that the characters on The Wire are in worse shape because their problems cannot be contributed to beings from another world.  They only have themselves to blame for the decay of their city.


Portrayal of Violence

Both shows contain a lot of violence, yet their portrayals of the violence could not be more different.  In Doctor Who, characters can die in all kinds of ways, but almost all of them leave very little mess.  Even when one race of aliens wears human skin as a disguise, when these creatures remove the skins, there is no blood.  Instead, it just looks like they are simply taking off their clothes.  By contrast, every death on The Wire is gruesome and brutal and, most strikingly, every death is shown to have a noticeable effect on another character.  Not every death in Doctor Who is important.  It seems like there are so many, that I can imagine that as a rite of passage, all wannabe actors in Britain must have a death scene in an episode of Doctor Who before they can move onto the next step of their careers.  Sure, some deaths resonate with the characters in Doctor Who, but on The Wire, every single death, even if it takes place off-screen, provokes a strong emotional response from at least one character, and eventually, every character in the show becomes hardened and cynical due to the rampant violence.  Doctor Who remains fun even in the face of a massive death toll.

Details

As I briefly mentioned before, one of the most striking qualities of The Wire is the show’s maniacal attention to detail.  In almost every episode, a character explains a process of some kind, whether it be legal procedure or how to operate a complex wire-tapping device or explaining the inner workings of how to run a mayoral campaign.  Everything has to be explained in detail to the point that it almost becomes a flaw of the show.  The audience has to retain so much information that it’s no wonder that this show had such a small audience.  Most people just want to sit back and escape into another world and not have their world thrown in their face, and that is where Doctor Who enters the picture.  The show cares so little about attention to detail that there is never a clear explanation of how the Doctor’s time machine actually works.  We see him pulling levers and pushing buttons, but it is never explained what any of those buttons and levers are for, they’re just there and they help him travel through space.  The writers of Doctor Who realize that if they try to explain the details of time travel and how the machine works, none of their viewers will understand or care, so they choose to ignore these big details and just expect the audience to play along.

  Pacing

Critics of The Wire have accused the show of being too languidly paced for mainstream audiences to enjoy, and while they are correct in stating that the show does move along at a modest pace, this actually helps the show instead of hindering it.  Creators David Simon and Ed Burns have said on many occasions that they consider each season like a novel, and novels are inherently more slowly paced than films or other television shows, but what novels and a show like The Wire may lack in pace, they gain in character development and world creation.  No show in the history of television has had as many incredible characters as The Wire.  In fact, it is hard to single out a poorly-drawn character from the dozens that populate the show’s universe.  In the vast Universe of Doctor Who, only the Doctor and his companions are given the same level of character development, but that is not necessarily a detriment to the show.  While The Wire is very deliberate in its pacing, Doctor Who is equally furious and lightning-fast in its pacing.  Every episode involves characters in high-pressure situations (usually the end of the world/universe) and a race against time to stop whatever malevolent force is threatening the existence of Earth.  In each season of Doctor Who, over the course of 13 or 14 episodes, there are roughly eight to ten different times where creatures are threatening to destroy the world or the universe and the Doctor always saves the day.  In the Wire, a problem might not even get solved over the course of a 12 or 13 episode season.

Tone

While the difference in each show’s portrayal of reality is most obvious, tone is the most striking and all-encompassing quality that indicates how these two shows truly are polar opposites.  First, Doctor Who is a family fantasy show (even though there is a lot of death), so there are little to no sexual references and the worst word uttered on the show is “hell.”  By contrast, The Wire is a gritty crime drama in which the characters use every bad word under the sun and take part in nearly every R-rated act one can think of such as drug use, homosexuality, graphic violence, adultery, and the list goes on.  Another tonal difference between the two shows that strikes me is how humor is used.  Both shows can be very funny but the tone of the humor in each show is completely oppositional to the other.  Doctor Who’s humor is very cheeky and whimsical while the humor in the Wire is very cynical and dark.  A third key difference in tone is the usage of music on each program.  Doctor Who makes great usage of score throughout each episode, manipulating the viewer’s levels of tension and excitement, while the Wire uses very minimal non-diegetic sound and the vast majority of scenes have no music at all, instead choosing to task the actors with conveying the appropriate tone of the scene.

I enjoy both of these shows greatly, and though I think when I measure them up against each other, The Wire is a better television show than Doctor Who, but both are equally enjoyable, even though they are polar opposites.  I could pompously attribute my enjoyment of both of these shows to my sophistication as a viewer of entertainment, but I think that it actually indicates that I, along with everyone who watches television, am truly blessed to have the choice to watch and enjoy such diverse programming instead of being one of those moronic vessels that watches “reality television” all the time.

They Got It Wrong: Anchorman

Welcome to They Got It Wrong, an weekly series where I look at films over the years that have either received too much or too little praise from critics and audiences and attempt to argue why the consensus is wrong.  More often than not, I will be examining films that are overrated by critics, but I will also attempt to give some respect to films that may not have received it on initial release.  The entire history of cinema is fair game, so expect to hear me talk about films that came out when even movie studios saw 3-D as a gimmick.  The first film I will be examining is the one that has given me the most grief from my peers through the years, the 2004 comedy Anchorman.  I remember seeing it when I was on vacation in New Jersey with my mom and brother and hating it, but I figured it was because they did not like it either, so I decided to give it another chance after taking so much ribbing in school (it worked for Dodgeball). Almost a year later, I saw it again with about twenty or thirty people who all loved the film, and I realized that I was mistaken the first time: Anchorman is awful.  

And yet, the film was both a critical and financial success, garnering a 63 rating on Metacritic and a user rating of 7.1 out of 10 while grossing 84 million dollars domestically from a miniscule 26 million dollar budget.  Almost everyone I know absolutely loves this film and cites it as one of their favorite comedies, and on the surface, I can understand where they are coming from.  The film has so many elements that should work.  The producer, Judd Apatow, had already been an instrumental part of three beloved TV shows (Larry Sanders Show, Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared) and with the release of his directorial debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin the following year, he would go onto become the biggest name in film comedy.  First-time director Adam Mckay was a long-time writer for Saturday Night Live and would go on to direct Step Brothers, one of the funniest films of this or any generation.  The cast was first-rate and up-and-coming, with stars such as Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, and the lead, Will Ferrell, who had just finished a legendary career at Saturday Night Live.  The premise was promisingly zany and original.  A parody of chauvinistic 1970s' newscasts?  Completely out of left field!  

Alas, none of these supremely promising elements contribute to a cinematic comedy experience worth a damn.  This film is messier than the NBA labor situation.  There is no semblance of a coherent narrative, and the film is 94 minutes of letting the actors improvise and hoping something sticks to the wall, and unfortunately, none of these incredibly talented comedians comes away unscathed in this film.  Will Ferrell as the lead seems to operate under the notion that smugly gliding through every scene, preening for the camera, and talking in a different voice is hilarious.  On the contrary, it's rather insulting to the viewer's intelligence and, most damningly, it's lazy.  The rest of the cast indulges in similar mugging with the exception of Steve Carell, who as dim weatherman Brick Tamland goes in the complete opposite and aims for over-the-top earnestness and naivete but actually becomes a vacuous black hole of humor, believing that saying something that makes absolutely no sense in the scene is somehow funny.

The one funny scene in the film is probably its big centerpiece: the epic street fight between all of San Diego's news teams.  It maintains a wonderful balance between absurdity and reality, and the cameos by Luke Wilson and Ben Stiller as anchors for other stations are fantastic.  This scene would have been great as a sketch on Saturday Night Live or Funny or Die, the website Ferrell and McKay co-founded a few years after this film.  However, once the fight ends, any momentum the film had built up in that brief amount of time came to a screeching halt as we returned to Ferrell and company mugging for the camera.

Of course, all of this would have been forgiven if Anchorman had followed the golden rule of comedy: it has to make the viewer laugh.  The only time I laughed out loud was during the aforementioned fight scene, and the rest of the time, I found myself looking at my watch wondering when the film was going to end.  

I am going to cite Step Brothers, the third McKay-Ferrell collaboration after Talladega Nights, as a film that is in many ways similar to Anchorman, but is a much more pleasurable viewing experience because it made me laugh until I could not laugh anymore, and then it made me laugh some more.  Both films have obnoxious premises with ludicrous protagonists and rely heavily on improvisation from the actors.  But what makes Step Brothers much more successful than Anchorman is the sincerity of the performances from the films leads, Ferrell and the great John C. Reilly.  Anchorman is a very cynical film filled with cynical characters, and while that can work in comedy (see: early Woody Allen), more often than not, it's condescending to the audience, and I feel that is Anchorman's greatest crime. The film is too in love with its premise to bother creating characters we can both laugh at and laugh with.  No character establishes an emotional connection to the viewer, and therefore, he or she has no investment in the eventual fate of Ron Burgundy.  Comedy cannot solely rely on gags for it to be funny (which is why The 3 Stooges does not hold up well).  What films like Anchorman fail to realize is that character development is not just important in drama, it is equally important in comedy as well.  A character can do crazy things and spout humorous lines, but without a narrative arc, those jokes are rendered irrelevant. 

The Truth about Bieber

Last Wednesday, with absolutely nothing better to do, I decided to watch the pre-show for the ESPY awards to see which athletes and famous people would show up.  While some of the sports world’s finest, such as Aaron Rodgers, Dirk Nowitzki, Ray Allen, and Jimmie Johnson showed up, the only person any of the broadcasters could talk about was not an athlete at all.  Sure, he had won MVP honors at the NBA Celebrity All-Star Game, but that was not on merit, but because the only people voting were 13-year-old girls.  Of course, I am talking about the biggest recording artist on the planet right now, seventeen year old walking hair product advertisement, Justin Bieber.  I found it absolutely stunning to see the likes of Hannah Storm, Erin Andrews, and Colin Cowherd bow at the altar of Bieber and throw all notions of objectivity to the wayside.  The way these professional broadcasters talked about him, one would have thought that Barack Obama was attending the event, but this unapologetic idol worship of this diminutive pop star got me to thinking about Justin Bieber, and I found myself asking this question: how could someone who so obviously lacked elite musical talent become the most popular recording artist on the planet?  This is a question that requires so much analysis and research that it could fill an entire book.  What is the impact this notion has on our society?  What is the significance of the fact that grown adults are obsessing over a child?  Is Justin Bieber the right person to serve as a role model for children?  All of these questions and countless others merit discussion, but none of them are really concerned with what made Justin Bieber so popular in the first place: his music.

            I decided to attempt to objectively listen to some of Bieber’s most popular songs, both recorded and live, to understand why so many teenage girls fanatically follow his every move.  Of course, I understand that I might not be the best person to judge Bieber’s merits as an artist.  I am a 22-year old male with a preference for classic rock and rap, so my taste in music does not reflect that of Bieber’s target audience, but I feel that my knowledge of musical forms that I have accumulated over the years can contribute to building an informed opinion of his work.  Also, it was just over ten years ago when I was the age that Justin Bieber’s fans are now, that I was listening to the likes of N’SYNC and the Backstreet Boys, arguably Bieber’s late-90’s equivalents from a popularity perspective.  However, after listening to some of Bieber’s biggest hits, I found that my initial judgment was in fact correct: he truly lacks extraordinary musical talent, or even average talent for that matter. 

In all of his songs, he uses auto-tune, the increasingly abundant crutch that many artists today lean on to correct their pitch to the right key.  However, what Bieber and other artists fail to realize is that while auto-tune might technically correct pitch, it removes the aspect of music that allows it to profoundly affect its listener: emotion.  Auto-tune makes the artist sound more robotic, as though he or she is merely singing in the style of a young pop ingénue instead of inflecting the song with true emotion that allows the listener to associate a feeling with the music. 

For example, the hit single “Never Say Never” is supposed to be a rousing motivational anthem encouraging the listener to follow their dreams and not give up.  However, the way Bieber sings, the message comes across as hollow because the auto-tune removes any semblance of conviction from Bieber’s voice, and the message of perseverance ultimately rings hollow. 

But a recording of a song can only measure the caliber of the artist to a certain extent.  What separates the ordinary artists from the extraordinary ones is their ability to perform live, and Justin Bieber’s skills in this department are not even average, they are undoubtedly abhorrent.  Even with auto-tuned microphones, as I watched several YouTube videos of him performing live, it became clear that Mr. Bieber even lacks the primitive ability to carry a tune for three minutes.  Yes, he occasionally hits a note on pitch, but the vast majority of the time, his pitch is excruciatingly flat, though judging by the cavalcade of cheering tweens in the audience, I seem to be the only one who notices something wrong.

Since Justin Bieber became a star back in late 2009, I have heard plenty backlash among my peers who share the same opinion of his talents as I do, but the media has failed to produce even one solitary voice of dissension against Mr. Bieber.  The broadcasters at the ESPYs should have made him a footnote and kept the focus on the athletes, but much like the minds behind the NBA Celebrity All-Star game, the only things that the brass at ESPN saw when Bieber decided to attend the awards ceremony were dollar signs.  His appearance on any talk show or at any arena brings extra money and, more importantly, ratings to anyone who can procure the pleasure of his company.  He can walk on stage without saying a word, and people of all ages will turn into teenage girls. 

But the idea that the media views him as a cash cow obscures the true reason that it avoids criticism of him, one that I can understand, even if I do not agree with it.  The real reason that the media does not criticize Justin Bieber’s talent is because he is a seventeen year old kid.  His youth makes him critic-proof because nobody wants to be the person who calls out a child for their lack of talent.  Adults would find it unfair to be so hard on him, and kids would just think it was wrong to criticize their idol.  For the media to cop out like this exposes a double standard.   An artist who is of age, like Britney Spears or Fergie, can be criticized for making bad music or having a bad live performance, but Justin Bieber cannot be accused of the same mistakes because of his age.  In all fields, as people climb the ladder to the top of their professions, prepare themselves for a greater level of responsibility and the criticism and increased focus on their every move.  Since Mr. Bieber is at the top of the music world right now, why should he be treated differently than a CEO of a Fortune 500 company?  We should be more critical of him because his level of exposure is so high, and yet the media has retreated from its responsibility as the dispensary of truth.  Hopefully, when he actually becomes an adult in five years and loses the safety net of childhood, critics will reveal their true feelings about Justin Bieber and recognize him as just another wannabe musician without the talent to stay at the top.

What Happened to Tom Hanks?

Last weekend marked the release of Tom Hanks’ newest starring vehicle and sophomore directorial effort, Larry Crowne.  While some people were excited by the prospect of Hanks and Roberts teaming up for a romantic comedy, it turns out that very few people were actually interested in seeing it.  The film garnered mediocre reviews and less than mediocre box office its opening weekend, grossing only $13 million over the holiday weekend while the latest Transformers sequel earned the equivalent of the entire GDP of Botswana.  This paltry showing from Hanks would not have seemed possible ten years ago, when Hanks was the king of Hollywood.  Throughout the 1990s, Hanks battled Tom Cruise for the title of biggest movie star on the planet, and while Cruise’s films made more money, Hanks’ films were not just financially successful, but critically beloved as well.  His consecutive Best Actor Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump are well-documented and cemented his legacy forever, but Hanks was also nominated twice after that in the same category for Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.  However, since the release of the latter film eleven years ago, Hanks has failed to garner an Oscar nomination and his filmography has been much more inconsistent.

            From the release of Catch Me if You Can on Christmas Day, 2002 to the current release of Larry Crowne, one could argue that the only film that truly lived up to Hanks’ untouchable run in the 90s’ was 2010’s Toy Story 3.  However, that film was the finale to one of the most beloved trilogies of all time and the first movie in the series since 1999, so the anticipation by fans and critics was enormous.  Other than that, the other films that he starred in which made money were not very well received by critics and audiences equally.  The aforementioned 2004 double bill of Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal and the Coen Brothers’ The Ladykillers were both underwhelming from both critical and financial perspectives, garnering Rotten Tomatoes aggregate scores of 60 and 55 percent and earning 78 and 40 million dollars respectively in domestic box office.  While one can consider The Terminal’s gross respectable, one has to factor in the 60 million dollar budget and the film’s other marketing costs, and all of a sudden 78 million does not seem that impressive.  The other film starring Hanks that was released in 2004, Robert Zemeckis’ animated Polar Express, grossed $180 million on a 150 million dollar budget and received a middling critical average of 56% and gained notoriety for its motion-capture techniques that made all of the characters look like soulless, murdering robots. 

For the first time since Hanks won his second Oscar, he was beginning to receive criticism for his performances.  While one can’t help but admire him for wanting to stretch himself and play honest-to-god “characters,” the reason that Tom Hanks became America’s Biggest Movie Star is because he was the next Jimmy Stewart: a true Everyman who could occupy the soul of the collective American spirit while never seeming to take himself too seriously.  When he played these types of roles, Hanks was unstoppable.  In films such as Apollo 13 and Saving Private Ryan, he was able to make people in abnormal situations relatable to audiences.  If we could ask for anyone to lead us through the horrors of World War II, it was Tom Hanks because we could look into his eyes and believe that everything was going to turn out alright (though in that movie, things didn’t turn out great for him).  We believed that no matter what his character did, the audience would go along with it because Hanks was something that actors are not supposed to be: sincere.

After 2004, the next role he took on seemed to be a step back into the kinds of everyman heroes he portrayed in his prime.  Based on the international bestseller, The Da Vinci Code was supposed to establish Hanks as the thinking-man’s action hero, and while the film made over 200 million dollars in the U.S. alone, many people were critical of the film, Hanks’ performance (as reflected by its pathetic 25% RT score) and, most deservedly, his hair.  Watching the film, it seems like Hanks is disinterested in the journey of his character.  The audience should want Robert Langdon to solve the mystery, but Hanks does not carry the same swagger and charisma that he would have had he played the role a decade earlier and for the first time in his career, one can argue Hanks phoned in a performance.

The next year, 2007, Hanks took the title role in the Aaron Sorkin-scripted Charlie Wilson’s War, and on the surface, it would seem like a home run: Hanks was playing a charismatic and capable authority figure with a wry sense of humor opposite fellow Oscar winners Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman in a true-life story.  It was positioned as an awards contender and seen as Hanks’ best shot at a nomination since Cast Away.  Unfortunately, while the film received an 81% aggregate Rotten Tomatoes score, it was unable to make back its $75 million budget and the only Oscar nomination for the film went to Hoffman for his supporting turn.

The next year saw the release of Angels and Demons, Hanks’ second go-round as symbologist Robert Langdon, and it was an even bigger disappointment than The Da Vinci Code, grossing little more than half that its predecessor did domestically from a $150 million budget.  With this and the box office disappointment of Larry Crowne, it seems like Hanks, at 55 years old, has lost the desire to play truly compelling characters.  His passion for moviemaking is still alive and well as evidenced by his involvement in several critically acclaimed HBO miniseries, but it just does not appear that he wants to really involve himself in a role like he did in Cast Away.  We can only hope that his next two projects, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Cloud Atlas represent a return to form for the actor America could once proudly say was one of its finest.

The Job-Search Paradox

Like many fellow recent college graduates, I have begun the long and arduous search to find a job.  Some seek out professions that will lead to a career while others are looking for part-time gigs just to have a little cash to spend.  I fall into both categories at the moment, though more of my focus is on the latter right now.  My feelings about the process can be summed up thusly: I hate many things in this world (bros, politicians, the New York Yankees to name some), but there are very few things I hate more than the job searching process.  Not only is it tedious, but, more importantly, it is also relentlessly humiliating.  I understand that rejection is a natural part of life, but walking into a potential employer knowing that will be the last time I ever see them is borderline unbearable.

One would think that bars couldn’t hire enough bartenders right now.  The country may be in a recession, but the bar business is taking advantage and making a profit off of everyone’s misery.  Whenever I walk into a bar or a nightclub at peak hours, customers are barreling over each other just to get to the bar to order rounds for their buddies and the bartenders look they wish they could grow two extra arms to serve everybody.  So one would think that the demand would be very high for someone who wanted to work as a bartender like myself, especially in the summer, when college students don’t have homework to worry about and they can instead go out drinking every night without having to suffer the consequences the next morning (obviously, many people do this during the school year anyway, but discussing the behavior of college students isn’t worth the skin on my fingers).  However, over the last month since I graduated from bartending school, I have probably applied to about a dozen places, only one of which I would venture to describe as “high-end,” and not one of them ever called me back for an interview or a job offer.  Of course, one might think I am just bitter about nobody wanting me to work for them, but in reality, the problem is much bigger.  The entire process is inherently flawed due to a paradox in the job-searching process.

I have looked at countless Craigslist ads searching for bartenders and about 75 percent of them ask that applicants must have a certain amount of experience before considering sending in an application.  This is quite problematic because due to the lack of jobs in this economy, it is remarkably difficult to find work. So the question becomes: how can a company seeking bartenders ask for significant experience when they aren’t willing to hire anyone and give them experience in the first place?  I feel that there are a couple of reasons that this paradox exists.  The primary reason is laziness on the part of the employer.  The less work the boss has to do, the better his or her job is.  They don’t want to hire someone who is passionate but green because that means that they would actually have to train their employees how to do their jobs better and make their business more efficient (in other words, make more money).  What potential employers fail to realize is that the “experienced” people that they hire had to start somewhere.  They were given the opportunity to gain experience so that when they wanted to move on to another job in the same field, people would be more willing to hire them.  Unfortunately, businesses like bars are unwilling to take a chance on someone who is a quick and eager learner who might have more potential to excel in that position, which leads to the other key issue for potential employers.  They do not want to hire someone who could take their job down the road.  Nothing scares employers more than ambition because they do not want to be passed over by someone younger and smarter than them.  Bartenders may have bubbly personalities, but there are very few bartenders who have much intellectual substance to them, and therefore, they do not pose a threat to the management team.  They just stand behind the counter and pour drinks for \people with money to burn looking to wind down after a long day, no questions asked.

Of course, this entire diatribe could be seen by some as coming from the perspective of someone who thinks too highly of himself and is just resentful that nobody else feels that way, and I understand that.  I am angry at the process and cannot understand why getting a job as a bartender should be so difficult.  I am bitter that I may have wasted a large amount of money on bartending school for no reason at all.  But this issue is way bigger than me.  People all over the country feel the exact same way that I do about the process, yet we keep on attacking it until someone finds room in his or her heart to hire someone who is actually capable and willing to learn on the job.  While I understand why some jobs would require a certain level of experience in a particular area of study (i.e. medicine), the vast majority of jobs are not intellectually taxing enough to pass over people who lack experience in that field.  The worst thing that can happen to an employer who hires someone inexperienced and trains him or her to do the job correctly is that the boss can fire the employee if they do not meet the basic requirements of a functional worker.  The business will not suffer in the long-term, and that should be the most important concern: long-term profits are the chief reason that businesses of all sizes stay open for many years.  Whatever happened to giving someone a chance?  These shortsighted employers seem to forget that they were once in the same position as the people walking through the door asking for a job (unless they were beneficiaries of nepotism).  Unfortunately, employers only look at the piece of paper that lists your job history and make their decision solely off of that instead of analyzing the potential employees as human beings.  Then again, that would be too much work.