With my shows coming up the next year, (see
http://www.unreliable-narrator.com.) (Unreliable Narrator: Sharp, Phlegmy Theater) I've gotten into the whole independent self-producing kick. Yes, I'm creating my own damn theater company, dammit, to bring joy to thousands and thousands of--well, tens and tens of people. Then after a couple years I'm going to give up 'cause it's too hard. After that, I'll be a withdrawn eccentric.
As it happens, two of my scribe heroes with names that start with 'J,' Joel Hodgson (creator of "Mystery Science Theater 3000") and Joss Whedon (creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") are on the same kick, only with more money, and the support of legions of fans from their previous work. Both have a strong grassroots cult and influential fans in the media. I don't think either of these projects got a bad review from anyone, which goes to show how faithful TV critics are--if, at any time, you show them something, anything, that they find better than the standard TV fare, they will remember you. They will reward you.
"Cinematic Titanic" is a version of MST which consists of, in place of the silhouette, five people standing around on railings watching a movie. (Why railings? Are they at Disneyworld?) The cast is Joel; the guy who played Dr. Forrester; the guy who played Frank; the woman who played Dr. Forrester's mother; and the guy who voiced Tom Servo back in season 1 when he sounded like he was going through puberty.
The movie is called "The Oozing Skull," and this is the plot: a "beloved dictator" of a Middle Eastern country is attacked by his political enemies. A supporter named Mohammed and a British doctor with a name I can't remember put their plan into action. The plan: transfer the dying monarch's brain into a new body. What body? The body of a fellow named Gor. Gor used to be a retarded hillbilly until some bastard hillbillies ganged up on him to pour battery acid on his face for fun. Also featured is the most Seventies-looking woman you've ever seen, chained in a basement for some reason. There are bloody, bloody surgical scenes where they try to pass off orange-pink paint as the bloody, bloody blood. Orange! And pink! Cripes, just go back to the paint section of Home Depot and look a little to the left. Finally, we are told that the British doctor arranged all this so that he could extort control of the Middle Eastern nation from the dictator and use it for scientific purposes. Dictator says okay, and the film ends with a public propaganda broadcast cloaking the shift of power. The movie ends when Gor goes off on his own to film "An Inconvenient Truth."
It is damned nice to have the Joel-era MST3K comedy style back; I was a fan of the entire cast, but I did feel that in the last couple of Mike Nelson seasons the show became less creative and more of a joke factory. Joel's style feels more countercultural and uniquely homemade. One thing we see here that I haven't seen on MST3K for a while is that sometimes, after riffing on the movie for twenty minutes or so, the comedians are allowed to say something organically true about the movie even if it's not a joke. Josh Weinstien (who clearly has been rewriting a lot of scripts since he was last Tom Servo) on the elegant dictator's characterization: "Well, at least they're not going for the same old Middle Eastern stereotypes." Which is true; "The Oozing Skull" does not commit that particular cinematic sin. So what?, I can hear you saying. But it's central to the way Joel works. I've read him a few times condemning the calculated nature of Hollywood, in particular the old "at the moment it's just a Notion, but with a bit of backing I think I could turn it into a Concept, and then an Idea" process of developing television programs. With the Joel method, you have to make the show for a while before you find out what it should be. And one of the best things about this episode is the comic experiments they try; a silhouette of Stephen Hawking appears briefly to deliver a terrible one-liner, and there's a cameo of a famous jazz musician throwing up at the movie's fake blood. One disappointing thing about this pilot is there isn't a backstory for who these comedians are or why they're watching a movie; unsurprisingly, Joel agrees, and he's mentioned plans to introduce one in a future episode.
"Cinematic Titanic" airs a new episode every six weeks, available for DVD or download at
http://www.cinematictitanic.com. This web site features the best creator-blogs I've ever seen, particularly Frank Conniff's scholarly clownish blog; here is his excellent take on a bizarrely obscure movie that I wish I could see:
http://cinematictitanic.com/wpmu/blog/2008/07/11/the-electric-kool-aid-acid-film/"Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," like all things written by Joss Whedon, has been swooped up by a legion of internet fans who have taken it upon themselves to be its marketers, promoters, and guys who serve free bottled water at its screenings. They'd be its DVD distributors if they could. I like this in theory, but I worry that as the years go by since "Buffy" went off the air the community is going to get a little stale. As much as I enjoyed "Dr. Horrible," there are no surprises in it for any Joss fan; he does it very well as usual, but it's all material he's covered before. Plus, love interest Penny hardly has any personality. This isn't actress Felicia Day's fault; she has good presence and a fine voice. She simply has nothing to do in this script; a feminist blog recently declared her a woman-in-refrigerator, and I can't argue.
But you know who's not in a refrigerator? Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible and Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer. Man, are they fantastic. Doctor Horrible-Pants is trying to get into the Austin Powers-esque Evil League of Evil, which requires that he pass muster with the city's most powerful supervillain, the evil Bad Horse. He's also trying to find love, mostly because it's a musical. Standing in his way on both counts is a self-thrilled Cap'm Nathan Fillion. I think that in every frame of his performance you can see shadows of the moment the actor got to read the script for the first time; there's a most pleasing undercurrent of "I get to do that? And THAT? YEAH!" throughout. "I get to blubber on a therapist's couch? BOSS! I'll do it like THIS! I get to taunt Neil that I'm going to sleep with his love interest (by the way, when he does that speech I swear that I can see him whinny)? KILLER! I'll do that THIS WAY! I get to pompously sing the line "So I thank my girlfriend Penny / Yeah, we totally had sex / She taught me there's so many / different muscles I can flex. / There's the deltoids of compassion / and the abs of being kind / it's not enough to bash in heads / you've also gotta bash in minds." SWEET! I'll nod my head like Mr. Rogers when I'm saying that."
If you can only see one act, see Act III. It has both the funniest and the darkest moments, and features Harris at his best; he looks just lovable enough that you believe he's a romantic, just neurotic enough that you believe he can do great things (only neurotics can do great things. That's my new theory) and just quippy enough that you believe he's hiding something very unpleasant about himself from the world. The New Republic says that the ending goes too dark for their taste, which is strange, because the New Republic supported the Iraq War (oh, I got them good). But they're wrong, and it's because they're ignoring Harris's nuanced performance. He is exactly like one of those guys you meet who is smart and appealingly strange, but who, when you read in the paper about him being thrown into prison, the first thing that comes into your mind is "Wow. For some reason I'm not surprised." And as a supervillain, who could be better than that?
Dr. Horrible is available on iTunes, or here:
http://www.drhorrible.com . And some guy put Act II on youtube: