Game of Thrones

Littlefinger never trusted Rob Ford, but then again, he never trusted anybody.

“Tell me, where have you hidden it?” He hissed at the stout, bastard Stark warrior.

“I’m not answering your dumb face questions.”

“Always the wily fellow, you are quite the adversary, Mister Ford, quite the adversary.”

Littlefinger, his hands pressed together in contemplation turned his back to the great man. “Perhaps these ladies will help to stir your memory?” He clapped his hands together and two of the most stunning women Rob Ford had even seen in his life walked so softly, so beautifully into the room as to be practically levitating. “Jesus,” Ford stammered, “are they models or cheerleaders or something?” Littlefinger snorted, “They are from the land of Seks Guzellik, home to the most breath-taking women the world has ever seen, trained in the arts of love from, oh, a very tender age. They are yours, Rob Ford, yours, all you have to do is tell me where it’s hidden.”

A look of uncertainty came across Ford’s porcine features, “Frig,” he said, “frig.”

Homeland

It was completely quiet. That was the first thing Carrie noticed, the complete noiselessness that enveloped her, enveloped them. It was awkward. She felt that he was maybe giving her the silent treatment, which was odd, because Rob Ford had invited her into his Escalade. It was also eerie—a sense of foreboding seemed to loom.

She was always thinking of him. She thought of him when she woke in the morning, when she took her pills after she showered, as she picked out her clothes, as she passed through the security gates at Langley, as she came home in the evening, as she lay in bed trying to sleep. RobRobRob. She could not remember the last time she wasn’t thinking about him, and in that way she believed that she knew him intimately. They had been driving for ten minutes—although it seemed more to Carrie—before he said something, “You need to meet my brother, Doug.”

Crepúsculo (Twilight)

Etobicoke es un lugar hermoso, aunque algunos lo ven como una ciudad sangrienta. Soy Rob Ford y yo 26 y tener un corazón del tamaño de una pelota de fútbol. Tengo ojos rojos y mi sed no es agua en absoluto, sino más bien precisa sangre. Yo soy un vampiro, una manera diferente, alrededor de uno. Tengo una dieta muy baja en la sangre comparada con otros vampiros, mientras que matan cinco humanos para satisfacer su sed diaria, estoy satisfecho con la sangre de un humano y puedo vivir con eso durante dos días. Vampiro Rob Ford, tengo un montón de autocontrol y soy muy selectiva con mi presa. Yo puedo ser un vampiro, pero tengo sentimientos.

The Flintstones

Roughly, Rob Ford took Wilma by her red bun. Wilma shrieked, but nobody came to her aid. Fred and Barney were bowling. Rob Ford laughed, high-pitched and nasally, and put his hand on her breast, palming it like a football. He thrust his tongue, that golden tongue that through great oratory had so often dazzled Bedrock, into her ear. “No, Rob Ford,” Wilma whispered, and then even quieter, “no.”

I’m a huge fan of Homeland, the show in which she’s the star, and it was startling to see her. I think that the thing that was most surprising was that she looked exactly like she did on TV.  This shocked me, as I always imagined that in real life celebrities were somehow unrecognizable. You know, they were all much smaller than you would have imagined, much more average and disappointing– just less.  However, Claire Danes looked exactly as she was supposed to look.

She was in a bit of a hurry, like she always seems to be on Homeland, and was rushing to add some sort of “healthy potato chips” to her checkout pile. Nobody else in the place seemed to be paying any attention to her, but I was trained on her like an owl. I was giving her a suspicious look (are you actually Claire Danes?) while also trying to give her a receptive, warm invitation to small talk. No doubt, she had seen my type before, many thousands of times, I suspect, and managed to avoid creating anything that might be misinterpreted as space in which a conversation might open.

It was driving me fucking crazy, that.

She was just four feet away from me and when I felt the moment slipping away, I blurted out, “That Mandy Patinkin (one of her co-stars on Homeland) sure can sing!”

I wasn’t quite looking at her when I said this and the declaration clearly caught her off guard. She gave me a quizzical look, like she does on Homeland when she’s trying to figure out a complicated mystery, and then nodded her head, a wary smile on her face, “Yes, yes he can.”

“It’s like God just filled the man with talent,” I continued.

Claire Danes gave the cashier a look that suggested it was very difficult to be a star, and then handed her a credit card.

“Personally, I think he should be doing the Super Bowl halftime show and not Beyonce.”

As she was passing by me she said in a clipped and sarcastic voice, “I’ll pass that on to him.”

“Enjoy your Super Bowl party!” I shouted cheerfully.

Claire Danes did not look back at me.

However, soon enough I found myself distracted, focused more on placing the actors in their previous incarnations than whatever was unfolding on the screen.

“Look, there’s the guy from Parks and Recreation!”

“There’s Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights!”

“I think the guy from The Sopranos is wearing a fake nose.”

“Man, that Jessica Chastain looks exactly like a young Julia Roberts!”

I don’t typically do this sort of thing when I’m watching a movie, so I figured that there must be something about Zero Dark Thirty, in particular, that was calling forth such a response. It was simple, I guess, the actors seemed more real to me than the characters that they were playing.

There was nobody in the movie that I liked or was particularly interested in, everybody seeming little more than a collection of suits doing their jobs. This might have been the directorial intent, but it kept me at an emotional and visceral distance, and the entire movie seemed procedural rather than human.

It was hard not to think of the TV show Homeland while watching, and how much of a better, deeper exposition of similar terrain it was than Zero Dark Thirty. I mean, I really, really liked Homeland, and had all sorts of feelings about the characters in the show, rather than about the actors hired to be those characters. Cable TV, with long narrative arcs, has become like reading a novel, while movies, with just 90 minutes or so, (or in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, 157 minutes) has to tell you a kind of hieroglyphic story, one that has to have an immediate commercial punch. And so TV shows, now digested slowly, as seasons rather than episodes, are like novels, and movies are more like an episode of a TV show, bound by all the limits of the prime time formula. It’s ironic, this, but such is life, and it is funny to observe that the consensus best movie of the mainstream this year, pales in comparison to one of the best TV shows of the year.

Sententious films like Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty–arguably made for critics and awards shows– rarely end up serving the audience, whereas films like Pitch Perfect or The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, that are built to serve the audience, are actually much greater critical accomplishments. When the intent is to create something serious for an audience, or the critics that hover above the audience, rather than something authentic or organic within the artist, the results are always distant and insufficient, a suggestion of intent rather than the realization of it, and that artifice will always keep the true audience at bay.