I’m sitting in for Alyssa a few times this week. Thanks to Alyssa–and you–for having me.

This year’s Grammy Awards were a little disorienting. Putting aside Lady Gaga’s red carpet entrance (and the downright uneventful performance she gave in contrast) and Lady Antebellum’s baffling tribute to Teddy Pendergrass, there seemed to be a weird tug-of-war between music and pop culture. American music has always influenced culture, but this is the first time I’ve watched a Grammys show that focused more on the personalities than the music. From the red carpet stunts to the performances and presenters, music took a back seat. But when musicians instead of walking cultural phenomena won awards, the disconnect was even more pronounced.

Watching the pre-show on E! made me uneasy–when one of the biggest arrivals at the Grammys is Kim Kardashian, something’s a bit off. From there, the show itself was a study in clashing aesthetics. The show’s opening number, a tribute to ailing (?) soul queen Aretha Franklin, was an ambitious mix of singers: Jennifer Hudson, Christina Aguilera, Martina McBride, gospel diva Yolanda Adams, and Florence Welch from Florence + and the Machine.

Other performances were less music and more spectacle: Justin Bieber holding a guitar for a few minutes and dancing with Will Smith’s son really isn’t the same as Mumford and Sons stomping the hell out of their stage platform and playing the hell out of their instruments. Then…there was Cee Lo and Gwyneth Paltrow. And Muppets. Still trying to figure that out. Throughout the show–from Barbra to Mick Jagger’s tribute to late soul great Solomon Burke–there was a pronounced difference between the musicians and the performers.

And when actual musicians won awards, there was confusion. The biggest of the night might have been the winner for Best New Artist, bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding; despite teaching at Berklee, releasing three damn good jazz albums and playing the White House–and the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony–all before turning 30, no one knows who she is. That Justin Bieber didn’t win Best New Artist was an outrage only to those whose musical tastes don’t stray beyond the boundaries of their radios. And Album of the Year winner Arcade Fire reminded viewers that big, noisy rock on a small label could still get attention from the Academy.

Watching the MTV Music Awards has become less of an imperative because instead of new music, we usually get that year’s hottest trend. The Grammys this year attempted to balance trend with talent. I still don’t know if it succeeded.

Russell Brand is your new Dudley Moore:

I remembered the first movie vaguely but fondly from my youth; Netflix obliged On Demand and I took another look at it last weekend.

What struck me immediately is how strongly the 1981 film plays against the tagline “don’t you wish you were Arthur?” Watch that trailer; Moore’s bray is as grating in the movie as it is there. Impressively, Moore’s drunk antics are rooted in frustration and imprisonment, and for the first ten minutes of the film (much of which is in the trailer) it’s obvious that he’s the only one laughing at his jokes and everyone pretends to like him because’s he’s rich. When John Gielgud arrives the following morning, we get to meet Arthur in a human relationship for the first time. It’s a complex relationship that forms the heart of the movie, and it’s impressive that we spend as much time with Arthur before we see him through the eyes of someone who cares for him beyond what he’s paid to do.

I can see Russell Brand playing unlikable, but I have a hard time thinking he’ll stay unfunny for that long. Brand on a rising arc of world comedy domination; when Moore made Arthur he was long past his sketch-comedy heyday (his early 60′s group Beyond The Fringe was the acknowledged ur-Monty Python). His Arthur lands somewhere between a dramatic role and a comic showpiece, and it’s stronger when it’s the former. I suspect Brand’s will be funnier but more slight.

I do like that the Brand trailer sets up his betrothed as too sexually forthright for Peter-Pan Arthur, and it’s of a piece that his object of desire would be the comparatively undersexed Greta Gerwig. (Think of her wonderfully awkward turn with Ben Stiller in Greenberg.) Jill Eikenberry’s Susan Johnson is WASPily frigid. It feels contemporary and insightful that Arthur would fear sex, although it may just be played as a cartoon.

***

Hi! I’m Josh K-sky. I also co-blog for my friend Joshua Malbin, where this and further entries will be cross-posted. I live in Los Angeles, where I flit about the peripheries of entertainment and politics. Thanks very much, Alyssa, for having me over. I’ll try not to mess up the hand-towels.

My main thought on the Grammys last night is that I would love to see Chrisette Michele, rather than Rihanna, facing off with Eminem. That, my friends, would be a contest of actual equals:

And apart from that, how terrific is this song? For those of you who aren’t so much with the Valentine’s Day, this is a great soundtrack to the holiday.

It’s the beginning of a crazy couple of weeks for me, so I’m bringing in some friends to help out. You all know BabylonSista from previous stints here. And if you read comments, you’ll know Lee and Josh K-Sky. I’ll be around, but they’ll be keeping it interesting with me.

Lux Alptraum and others have written better critiques than I could of Rihanna’s appropriation of S&M for her video for the song of the same name. I will say, though, that I actually found the video reasonably effective as commentary on the relationship between the Hollywood gossip press and the stars they cover:

Putting ball gags in reporters’ mouths isn’t a terribly subtle choice, but it’s also clear from the reporters continued scribbling in their notebooks that they aren’t silenced at all, just participating in the game they’re both playing. And I dug the odd riffs on the old-school newsroom towards the end, the desks of All the Presidents Men gone 80s-sherbert-colored and covered in latex. I think it’s telling that during the bridge, where she’s singing about the pleasure of her interactions, her body is covered in newsprint and she’s vamping like an old-school Playboy bunny.

Obviously there are situations where the paparazzi get wildly out of control, and I find stars’ courting of tabloids personally weird if professionally explicable. But there are negotiations and compromises and an outwardly inexplicable relationship at stake. It may not be incredibly respectful of S&M practices to employ them this way, but I think the video perhaps shows more respect for those practices than a simple aestheticization and coopting of them.

I forgot, as I was writing about Snow and the Seven yesterday, that there are two other Snow White projects in production, involving, apparently, Julia Roberts and Kristen Stewart. In between these and Red Riding Hood, we really are in the midst of a revitalization of passive gals in fairy tales, aren’t we? Snow White is up there on the passivity index. It’s hard to be more of an object than if you’re in a coma-like state in a glass coffin unless you prick your finger on a spindle and end up asleep in a tower for ages. I guess I wonder if the essence of these fairy tales is in the details of the set-up, or in the title characters’ role as objects of rescue. Are our fairy tales are our fairy tales if we make the prince, or poor woodcutter, optional?

I thought this feminist reading list from Bitch was interesting, in part because I think I’ve only read 18 books on it, and I sort of expected I would have read more of them. That’s probably a good thing—it means there are more, and more diverse, options out there for young readers.

One book I was sorry not to see on the list, though, was Paula Danziger’s The Cat Ate My Gymsuit. It’s a really marvelous book: the main character is overweight, and the book deals with her body image issues in a realistic, psychologically insightful way. She becomes politically active through a wonderful teacher (and it’s clear from the sequel There’s a Bat in Bunk Five that Marcy is on her way to becoming a good teacher herself). Boys and girls try dating, and end up choosing to be friends instead. It’s a book that assumes children and teenagers are smart enough to understand how adults and the institutions controlled by adults work, as is Nat Hentoff’s The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. And it doesn’t give the characters straightforward victories.

Danziger is, I think, overlooked in the pantheon of great girl-oriented YA fiction. Interestingly, she both collaborated with Ann M. Martin of Babysitters Club fame, and was friends with Bruce Coville, the man who is probably most responsible for getting me into science fiction, and author of perhaps the most sensitive story about what it’s like to be a gay teenager. Her characters are funny in the way smart kids really, genuinely are (I still regularly steal the answer one of her characters gives when asked what she wants to be when she grows up). I wish she got a bit more recognition, along with Patricia C. Wrede, who does make the list.

As yet another entry in the West’s attempts to figure out how China fits into our movies, be it as a replacement archenemy to fill the void left behind by the Soviet Union or as a land ripe for saving by dashing Westerners played by Christian Bale, I’ve been curious about the slow development of Snow and the Seven. The project’s been under discussion since 2002, and it’s (obviously) a retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a historical drama about an Englishwoman who discovers her Hong Kong-based stepmother (duh) means her all sorts of unpleasantness and flees to mainland China and takes up with a band of seven warriors. Now, apparently, one of Toy Story 3‘s writers is working on the script.

I was not wildly impressed by Toy Story 3‘s gender politics, even while thinking it was one of the better movies I saw in 2010. The treatment of Barbie and Ken was certainly of a piece with the fact that the toys have some origins in their making, but they were still sort of troubling, especially the treatment of Ken as either gay or insufficiently masculine. So I’m sort of curious to see what happens with this story. Snow is supposed to learn a few tricks of her own. Will this be a cliche story of girl-learns-things-from-dudely mentors? Another instance of Westerners becoming better at martial arts than the crafts’ originators? Or the movie I suspect a lot of us have been waiting for since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? That movie’s originality was so refreshing, I tend to think of it as a more emotionally engaged Inception. And the rage between the female characters was just beautifully done:

I’d really like to see Snow White and her grandmother actually have it out.

This Wonder Woman show? It sounds…not good you guys. Really, not good. Can we agree to a universal moratorium on the use of the phrase “you go girl” in scripts, at minimum? Nobody says this! It’s awkward phrasing! It’s kind of weirdly condescending, implying that women can’t really figure out how to be powerful without encouragement. And it’s bizarrely lazy shorthand for sass. Getting rid of the phrase doesn’t make me feel better, exactly the prospects for a Wonder Woman who spends a lot of time rockin’ out to the radio and pining over a dude. But it would be good for womanity in general.

Ah, the problems of happily ever after. What happens when you’re done unwrapping toasters with royal seals on them? What happens when the prince cheats on you with the baker’s wife? Hereville, Barry Deutsch’s totally charming and exceedingly Jewish fairy tale about an eleven-year-old’s quest to win her sword solves that problem rather neatly. The heroine is entirely too young for happily ever after. And the story’s really only the first part of a question.

Essentially, Mirka is a dissatisfied Orthodox girl. It’s not so much that she particularly has trouble with Judaism, or even with the expectation that she’ll get married at some point. It’s just that she’s too smart and argumentative for those to be the only things in her life. And the book doesn’t bother to pretend that she’s alone. Mirka’s stepmother Fruma is much the same way, except she’s of an age where she’s found an effective and satisfying compromise. I’d hate to think the book will be confined to the Jewish community, or even to certain segments of it, because it felt to me like training for reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and it’s really a wonderful story totally irrespective of your religious affiliation, age, or gender, as long as you like smart fairy tales.

In addition to Mirka’s age, the book ends with her having won her sword, but without setting her immediately on the road to use it. In fact, I think it’s equally possible that Deutsch could write a very good sequel or not write a sequel at all. Mirka’s a fun character to spend time with, and I wouldn’t object to more of it. But I also appreciate the ambiguity about whether she has future adventures. In this fallen world, is it enough to know that the world is more than it appears, and that you have the ability to triumph both among what you know and what you don’t? Do you have to keep on doing it? At some point, maybe it’s enough to be certain that you have the spark of the heroic in you, enough to keep you warm.

So, a major men’s magazine did this crazy thing where they asked me, and a bunch of amazing writers and actresses, to give men Valentine’s Day advice. I’m sure it will surprise precisely none of you that I went the nerdiest route possible (and, uh, also have the nerdiest head shot of the bunch). But check ‘em all out. It’s a great package. And a shoot out to the totally rad Mary Elizabeth Ellis, who rocks it on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and is redeeming Perfect Couples for me, and whose piece is right before mine.

I don’t think it will end up being substantively important to the Charlie’s Angels remake that the characters will end up having acquired their badass skills through criminal means—the characters were always going to have semi-dramatic pasts that came back to nip at them occasionally one way or another—in as much as I don’t think anything about the Charlie’s Angels remake is terribly important even though I think it will be fun. But I do find it slightly intriguing that they’re supposed to have acquired said ass-kicking skills illicitly. The first time around, it probably mattered that the women had at least gone through a male-sanctioned means of learning to fight crime, namely, police academies. Now, that societal barrier’s less important to have breached, especially in a world where women are closer than ever to seeing combat regularly in war. But there’s still something threatening about women with power, so the assumption is once they were bad, but now they’re tame.

I’ve written elsewhere about why I don’t really watch Mad Men, but for those of you who do, what do you think of Daniel Mendelsohn’s critique of the show in the New York Review of Books (which, on good weeks, is the best publication in the country, I think)? I thought Brian Moylan’s argument for why the show is emotionally compelling to him was a reasonably good response, but it still didn’t convince me about why I should care about it. I always felt like I was under some moral obligation to watch The Wire, as if being entertained by it was an act of bearing witness. But I just don’t feel as urgent about Mad Men, and for me, Mendelsohn crystalized why fairly well.

Dear Fairly Legal,

Large law firms tend to be focused on making money. It’s pretty stupid for you to assume otherwise, or to treat us as if  we should be shocked to learn that that is their goal. And it’s not exceptionally shocking that in mediation, people would assume that their side is right. The USA Network is smarter than this. Please catch up, or go away.

Cheers,
Alyssa

Well, this looks like it has the potential to be a singularly uncomfortable movie-watching experience!

Among the violations:

1. Taraji P. Henson is too wonderful to be reduced to the Earthy Working-Class Black Lady Who Rehabilitates a White Man And His Cold Family By Talking About How Her Cousins Shot Each Other And Got Over It.

2. Parents that aggressively neglectful and hurtful are actually really boring as characters. And most people don’t actually act that way in restaurants.

3. Sarah Silverman needs to grow up and stop playing dippy girl-women. She tapped something interesting and different and angry in School of Rock. That’s worth exploring.

4. It’s far too simple to give the character who wrote the tell-all book erectile dysfunction. People who steal from other people’s lives for fiction tend to have an audacity about them; they’re sort of the inverse of people who invent memoirs, and they’re rarely as apologetic when they get caught or accused.

But most of all, I’m a little exhausted by moviemakers and novelists who assume that making things unpleasant and awkward is synonymous with having something to say. A lot of life is niggling and frustrating and not a whole lot of fun, but that doesn’t make those difficulties inherently and globally meaningful. This looks to be a movie about a collection of tics and bad memories disguised as family. The two are not interchangeable.

I get that the folks behind Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, My So-Called Life, and The O.C. are very talented at making television. And I am genuinely glad that they are bringing those talents to Washington, DC. But why does it have to be, specifically, to Georgetown?

Other cities, perhaps because they’re bigger, get to have multiple neighborhoods that are used to signal different kinds of people. When Samantha moved to the Meatpacking District in New York, it meant something: she was the kind of person who could convert a bunch of drag queens and invite them to a barbeque in a subplot that was campy but also genuinely delightful. Shopgirl does an incredible, quiet job of contrasting Steve Martin and Claire Danes’ characters through their neighborhoods in Los Angeles. But Washington only ever seems to be in Georgetown (one of the reasons I like Bones is that it’s actually aped a real Washington restaurant, Founding Farmers, as its characters’ after-work hangout).

And the thing is, Georgetown isn’t that cinematically promising. It has incredibly gorgeous architecture that’s mostly occupied by families, so if you’re riffing on uptight right people, I guess it works for that. It has a lot of chain stores. It has some very good restaurants, but it’s not the hub of Washington’s restaurant scene. And there are a lot of young people who live there, but they’re mostly college students. What’s interesting, variegated, and the center of Washington’s hip young power brokers is elsewhere in the city, where things are much more visually and culinarily varied—not to mention more mixed-race. It would be good for Washington to show more of the city off. And more fun for audiences and directors.

Last week, I asked some questions about whether NBC should concentrate on its smart comedy brand. This week, it looks like they’re doing exactly that. They’ve picked up another show from Dan Goor, the producer behind Parks and Recreation, of which I very much like what I’ve seen, though I have to watch more to be able to write about it the way I’d really like to. Goor’s new show is apparently a semi-wacky medical drama, which will fill a hole in NBC’s prime time programming—the network won’t doesn’t have a medical show despite the popularity of the drama, and the USA Network’s done a nice job of proving, via Royal Pains, that medical drama isn’t the only way to engage audiences. I’ll look forward to NBC finding another way to put lots of fast-talking people together in small rooms and long hallways.

I absolutely love my dear friend who I am being a bridesmaid for this spring, but I will admit I laughed until I cried and sent this trailer to my fellow bridesmaid as soon as I saw it:

This is such a day of “I’m getting older.” But it is exhausting to watch movies about weddings all the time that are always from the perspective of the bride, or the Desperate Bridesmaid Just Waiting To Have Her Faith In Love Rekindled. As I’m sure those of you who have been in friends’ weddings know, it’s not so much about looking for a fella’. It’s about bonding with your friend, about navigating the same-gender group of people you’ve been thrown together with. How you relate to other women or other men seems to be vastly, vastly more important than how you deal with a potential partner.

And I’m glad that this movie gets the raunch and weird emotions of all of this. Part of a wedding is bonding together as your friend moves off into another life stage, sometimes not at the same time that you are. There’s a lot of joy and tenderness in that, but also some ribbing and a lot of nostalgia. One thing I wrote about in my sports dialogue with Hampton last week is that women are perfectly capable of raunchy fun, and I should have emphasized that there is a way of female raunchiness that really has nothing to do with imitating men or finding a place among them. This movie, though it’s directed by a man, is written by women, and seems to get that.

Because I need something to do in the half hour in between the end of Community and the beginning of Bones on Thursdays, I’ve found myself watching Perfect Couples. I thought the first couple of episodes of the show were awful—two of the couples, an alcoholic dude-bro married to an insanely controlling wedding planner played by the distasteful Olivia Munn, and two wildly irresponsible and impulsive adolescents in grown-ups clothing, were so unpleasant that I joked on Twitter that the normal couple, played by the inexplicably winning Kyle Bornheimer and Christine Woods were clearly going to end up killing them as a way to make their marriage perfect.

I don’t know that I think the show is getting better. But I found last week’s episode unexpectedly smart and winning. Basically, Rex (played by Hayes MacArthur, who sounds like he should have won World War II, but mostly is a supporting actor in mediocre rom-coms) and Leigh (Munn) have set up a Man Cave so that Rex can bond with his two best friends. They aren’t really feeling reliving their college days in a forced-march kinda way (Leigh has hidden German porn in the couch so it’ll feel naughty). But one by one, the men and their wives make their way to the man cave, whether to hide the result of compulsive shopping, to dodge a new diet, and to find answers. And of course they all discover that they want to blow off steam, but can’t really do it the way they used to any more.

I think that’s actually a smart thing for a show to take on. Growing up’s a weird process, especially when your body starts reacting against you. What does it mean to have a wild night when the consequences are more severe, when the outlets for behaving irresponsibly are limited because, say, you’re married and you want to stay that way. If Perfect Couples can moderate its characters ridiculousness with some real human feeling (and a montage of Rex spending so much time gathering the things he needs to have an illicit dudely night while his wife is gone that he forgets to have fun was actually fairly funny), it might be a viable show.

2. Partying is an act of feminist rebellion against the creeps who give you a hard time at bars:

3. After being denied the right to party, partying is a form of reparations:

4. Partying is an assertion of solidarity across lines of gender and sexual orientation:

5. Partying it will stick it to moralists:

6. And besides, it’s fun:

*Listen up, Caitlin Flanagan!