"It might be malig-nant": When good actors pretend to be crappy ones

(Originally published on Metroactive's Movie & Television Arts blog.)

The breakout performance in last spring's little-seen, wildly funny indie movie The TV Set belongs not to its star, recent Golden Globe winner David Duchovny (although in The TV Set, he's pitch-perfect as a frustrated Hollywood scriptwriter), but to an unknown actor named Fran Kranz.

Loosely based on writer/director Jake Kasdan's own experiences in the TV industry, The TV Set (which I recently Netflixed) mocks everything that's wrong with the business today, from network interference--which Kasdan had to deal with while working on one of my all-time favorite cult shows, Freaks and Geeks--to the rise of reality TV to the power trips of self-absorbed, needy actors from scripted shows. Kranz (pictured below) plays one such self-absorbed, needy actor, the fictional Zach Harper, the scenery-devouring star of The Wexler Chronicles, yet another legal drama about a young lawyer in love with the one that got away (a network exec is overheard describing The Wexler Chronicles as "a little Northern Exposure, a little Ed," but the show looks more like Ed meets October Road meets Ally McBeal, except without the lame peeks into Ally's brain).

In one of The TV Set's funniest moments, Duchovny--whose writer character is The Wexler Chronicles' showrunner--watches in horror on the show's set as the inexperienced Harper overplays the anger during a subdued dramatic scene in which the show's hero has to mourn the death of a loved one. I haven't seen any of Kranz's prior work (he'll next be seen as the lead in an actual show, the CBS midseason replacement Welcome to the Captain), so I don't know how good of an actor he really is outside of The TV Set, but his humorous turn as an overemotive ham is already one of my favorite performances in which a decent or excellent actor portrays a far less talented version of himself or herself. Here are some of my other favorites.

Derek Jacobi, Frasier ("The Show Must Go Off")
The celebrated British thespian deservedly won an Emmy in 2001 for his hilarious guest shot as Jackson Hedley, a mash-up of William Shatner and future Frasier guest star Patrick Stewart. The episode involves the Crane brothers' reunion with Hedley, a stage acting mentor who introduced them to Shakespeare when they were kids. Because Frasier and Niles are elitist snobs, they're more familiar with Hedley's Shakespeare work than with his signature role, as the android sidekick on Space Patrol. The brothers are appalled to discover their acting idol has been reduced to a Galaxy Quest-like, post-show career of "hawking T-shirts and sci-fi gewgaws," so in another one of their misguided business ventures, they attempt to rescue Hedley from the sci-fi con circuit by bankrolling his stage comeback. But Frasier and Niles become even more horrified when they watch Hedley rehearse and realize maybe he isn't as great a thesp as they thought he was. Unfortunately, YouSued doesn't have any clips of this standout Frasier ep, so to give you a good idea of Hedley's atrocious delivery, think Dr. Orpheus from The Venture Bros. suffering from diarrhea--and if he had taken elocution lessons from Jon Lovitz's Master Thespian. Speaking of Galaxy Quest...

Sigourney Weaver, Galaxy Quest
Weaver's character is a biting spoof of the uselessness of the secondary actors on certain shows that carry titles that rhyme with "car wreck." The fourth-tier actress Gwen DeMarco had two functions on her old show: to serve as eye candy and to repeat whatever the spaceship's computer said. In director Dean Parisot's 1999 sleeper--a better Star Trek movie than the last two official ones--DeMarco amusingly undoes everything that Weaver worked to accomplish as the iconic Ellen Ripley, one of the fiercest female characters to ever spearhead a sci-fi franchise. Well, almost everything. The little-seen Galaxy Quest 20th Anniversary Special mockumentary--an uproarious Sci-Fi Channel tie-in that was stupidly left off the Galaxy Quest DVD--suggests that DeMarco's limited Tawny Madison role had some merits. The mockumentary discloses that Tawny's trademark karate kick (a nod to both Emma Peel and Erin Gray's Buck Rogers hottie, Col. Wilma Deering) inspired a whole generation of blond-wigged female "Questarians" to imitate the Galaxy Quest communications officer's fighting moves, and that maybe Tawny was a better role for DeMarco than the one she turned down, "a small part in a Woody Allen movie" (a sly reference to Weaver's appearance in Annie Hall).

Alec Baldwin, SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch
In a 1993 sketch that's funnier than his most popular SNL bit, "Schwetty Balls," Baldwin delves into his soap opera acting past (The Doctors, Knots Landing) to play Trent Derricks, the star of Doctors, Nurses and Patients. Actually, Derricks isn't that bad of an actor. That is if you overlook his tendency to give interesting pronunciations to medical terms ("We believe it might be a pole-yip. It might be the Big C: canker! It might be benig. It might be malig-nant.") and names of Ivy League universities ("There's no class at Yeah-leh Medical School that can prepare you for this!"). (The sketch can be found on the SNL: The Best of Alec Baldwin DVD.)

Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock ("Jack-Tor")
I know it's Baldwin again, but the guy just excels at pretending to be a subpar actor, or in the case of Jack Donaghy, a network exec with no clue about how to say a simple line or two in front of a camera. Lorne Michaels, whose company produces 30 Rock, must really be good-humored about himself because the "Jack's outtakes" montage in this ep is clearly star/showrunner Tina Fey's jab at Michaels' stilted cameos on SNL.

Any of the actors who played Jack Horner's porn stars in Boogie Nights
Almost everyone has a favorite moment from Boogie Nights. Heather Graham stripping to nothing but her roller skates. The shout-out to I Am Cuba. >Mark Wahlberg mangling that cheesy theme song from The Transformers: The Movie. The drug deal-gone-bad sequence. The end credits--for those of you with a weak bladder. For me, it's Graham stripping to nothing but her roller skates. Coming in a close second is any of the footage from Jack Horner's movies-within-the-movie, in which we glimpse the genesis of John C. Reilly's dimwitted comic personas ("Let's get some of that Saturday night beaver..."). Amber Waves' stilted delivery right before her first sex scene with Dirk Diggler always amuses me. Julianne Moore is a whiz at portraying vacant-eyed starlets like Amber. The character has never quite left Moore: a little bit of Amber seeped into a surprisingly funny SNL Ladies Man sketch in which Moore appeared as a ditzy spokesmodel, as well as into her Cookie's Fortune character, an amateur actress who participates in a cheesy production of Salome at the local church.

Does Walter Murch ever watch The Wire?

(Originally posted at Metroactive's Movie & Television Arts blog.)

One particular element of The Wire--my favorite show--that I love as much as the writing, the acting and music supervisor Blake Leyh's choices of diegetic music is the textured sound design. It's an often unheralded element that's as integral to the show as the novelistic writing (authors like Richard Price and George Pelecanos are part of the writing staff) and the continuity callbacks (the recovering addict at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting who spoke about turning tricks for a fix during the teaser of this week's episode is the same wealthy white lady who was briefly seen buying drugs in Hamsterdam two seasons ago and then showed up again as a hooker at a convenience store/stash house in season 4--and in another nifty bit of Wire trivia, she's played by Price's actress daughter, Genevieve Hudson-Price).

The Wire's attention to detail also involves the selection of background noises (police sirens, dog barks, stereos blaring DJs from "92Q," an actual Baltimore hip-hop/R&B radio station). I hate to use the "it's like you are there" cliché, but those five words best sum up how the series captures the sounds of city life. Walter Murch's groundbreaking sound design for Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation clearly influenced The Wire's sound department, especially during season 1, when the show was at its most Conversation-esque (the first year focused on the Baltimore Major Crimes Unit's surveillance of the Barksdale crime family).

To borrow the tagline from the show's season 1 promos, "listen carefully" to the background chatter during the scenes on West Balto's corners. A clever running joke on the show is the ripped-from-the-headlines names the Bodymore pushers (a.k.a. "hoppers") give to the drugs they sell. During season 3--when the Hamsterdam storyline served as a critique of Bush's war on terror--the hoppers in Hamsterdam could be heard hollering, "I gotcha WMDs!" (Other examples of background hopper lines from the season 3 corner scenes: "Pandemic!" and "I got them red-tops! Red-tops!" "Red-tops" is lingo for cocaine vials--anyone who's got Ghostface Killah's "Kilo" in their iPod knows that--while "WMDs" means heroin. I don't know what "pandemic" refers to.) In the season 5 premiere that aired two weeks ago, the WMDs have been replaced by "greenhouse gas."

The sound designers went crazy during this pivotal sequence from season 3:

The Wire has already spawned two soundtrack CDs. Too bad there won't be a Wire sound effects CD. I'd buy that too in a heartbeat.

Mike Reddy's DVD Series

While Googling for The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man the other day, I stumbled upon this artist's site and his "DVD Series," a bunch of awesome illustrations of Lost season 3, Purple Rain, Casino Royale, Idiocracy, Planet Terror and Reno 911!, to name a few.

The brilliant artist's name is Mike Reddy. Keep an eye on this guy's work. He's also done album artwork for the Fiery Furnaces.

I want his portraits of Lost and Planet Terror to adorn one of the walls in my new condo. Right now, the bare walls and minimal furniture make my crib look like De Niro's house in Heat--but without Dante Spinotti's knack for making an empty living space look cool.


It's doubtful we'll ever see Evangeline Lilly's buns on Lost, but thanks to Mike Reddy, we get to see them now. Sort of.


"You have to purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka."


Casino Royale


Children of Men


The Departed


"It's got electrolytes!"


Reno 911!

Happy New Year to all the ladies in the world

I haven't posted in a long time because nobody reads this blog. Then a few hours ago, I discovered 2 comments under my most recent entry, which I posted back in September. Two comments is a paltry amount of feedback, but hey, at least it's some feedback.

A lot has happened between September and now. I've become involved in a very exciting project for 2008 that I don't want to really go into detail about on this blog until the time is right to go into detail about it (my family and some of my friends, as well as a few AFOS listeners I've chatted with over e-mail, will know what I'm talking about because I've told them about my involvement in the project, and they're all excited about the project as well).

I haven't recorded a new episode of AFOS: The Series since August because in the past few months, I've been trying to save up for a new condo I've recently moved into, but the ep will eventually get recorded and it'll be streamed sometime in early '08.

Saving dinero has also meant that I've been renting DVDs more often than buying them. I've lately been Netflixing all kinds of things. Season 1 of Dexter. Joe Dante's Masters of Horror eps. Michael Bay's hit-and-miss Transformers (just to rewatch my favorite visual effect--Megan "Bodimus Prime" Fox showing off her bodimus while popping Bumblebee's trunk). Live Free or Die Hard. The early Alec Baldwin vehicle Miami Blues (I've been loving Baldwin's scenes on 30 Rock, so I wanted to check out this overlooked Baldwin movie, which features what a 2003 Entertainment Weekly article has called Baldwin's greatest performance). The Silent Partner, a 1978 Canadian crime flick starring Elliott Gould at his menschiest, Christopher Plummer at his batshit-craziest and a really hot French chick named Celine Lomez, who's so hot I had to CNdb her (I happened to watch The Silent Partner during the same weekend when legendary jazz pianist Oscar Peterson died--he composed the movie's score). The pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck movie Baby Face. Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Superman: Doomsday. Season 1 of Flight of the Conchords.

I skipped most of FotC's first season during its original airing because I didn't want to sit through yet another HBO sitcom about showbiz. But then I caught the "What Goes on Tour" ep late in the season and I became hooked. "What Goes on Tour" was a showcase for Rhys Darby, one of the series' many scene-stealers. Darby's a riot as Murray, the band manager who's so inept he makes Garrett Morris' Les Irving character from Jackpot look like Michael Ovitz. (I don't know if any of the FotC staff writers have ever seen the similarly deadpan Jackpot, which focused on the lower rungs of the music industry ladder just like FotC does, but it sure looks like the writers have taken some cues from that movie.) Only Darren Lamb, the manager from the now-defunct Extras, outdoes Murray in dumbassity.

I've caught up with the rest of the first season via Netflix and now consider the hilarious FotC to be my favorite HBO sitcom since Larry Sanders.

In a review I posted on Netflix, I took away one star for the Conchords box set's lack of extras--unless you count the Spanish audio track as an extra. For the Spanish track, Jemaine and Bret went through the trouble of hiring a pair of very good soundalikes to re-record their songs in Español, something that's not commonly done on the foreign-language tracks of DVD releases of musicals. Who knew these songs would be awesome in Spanish as well? On the Español track, "Business Time" and "Ladies of the World" now sound like the greatest Los Amigos Invisibles tunes LAI never recorded.

Posted below is not the dubbed-into-Spanish version of "Business Time" I'm talking about, but the original version (with Spanish subtitles). Es la hora/Es la hora de los negocios...

Hollywood, leave the '80s cartoons alone

Because of the success of Transformers, movie studios have moved on from filming mediocre features based on sitcoms (Bewitched, The Honeymooners) to making equally mediocre projects based on cartoons from the '80s, a rather lousy era for animation (except for Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, I can't think of an '80s cartoon that ever approached the caliber of later shows like The Simpsons or Batman: The Animated Series). New Regency wants to launch its own Transformers-like franchise with Voltron, while Italian Job remake co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Jason Statham are rumored to be reuniting for a G.I. Joe film. Tobey Maguire's production company just bought the film rights to Robotech, the Roots of mecha cartoons (trying to squeeze Robotech into a two-and-a-half-hour live-action feature would be like trying to make a two-and-a-half-hour film out of, well, Roots). News items about long-delayed Thundercats and He-Man adaptations continue to haunt viewers like me who grew up watching those cartoons but don't think they've aged well--or would make for great live-action films either.

The He-Man franchise already blew it once with Cannon Films' 1987 Dolph Lundgren vehicle Masters of the Universe. The Mattel higher-ups expressed their shame about releasing toys that contain dangerous amounts of lead. If only they were equally apologetic about the Masters of the Universe movie, which isn't as poisonous but can induce seizures in viewers who are unable to sit through a Cannon Film, especially one that features so many flashy and annoying laser ray effects.

Hollywood needs to stop turning to the RetroJunk site for movie ideas. If there's one animated series that I'd like to see adapted to film--hell, I'd just be glad to see it return in any form other than comics--it'd be the lesser-known Megas XLR (2004-05), a too-short-lived Cartoon Network giant robot spoof that was sharper and more entertaining than the '80s cartoons it parodied. (Titmouse, the studio that created Megas, is currently busy producing Adult Swim's delightfully gory Metalocalypse.)

Megas is the story of Coop Cooplowski, a Jersey schlub who stumbles upon the future's most coveted superweapon--a giant robot that its time-traveling female pilot, Kiva, hid in Earth's past from extraterrestrial baddies. A live-action Megas movie would be the perfect vehicle for Tyler Labine, a scene-stealing veteran of good but short-lived shows like Dead Last, Kevin Hill and Invasion (hopefully, Labine's much-buzzed-about Reaper won't join that list). Labine was born to play Coop, and he even sounds like David DeLuise (Dom's son), who voiced the lazy but bright gearhead on the cartoon. Megas' Kevin Smith-meets-Robotech premise has tons of potential as a live-action feature (unless any one of the filmmaking geniuses listed in the A.V. Club's "10 Directors You Didn't Know You Hated" article gets his mitts on Megas--then the movie's really in trouble), and unlike the overlong, overstuffed Transformers, it wouldn't take over an hour for the lead robot to finally appear.