Metal: A Headbanger's Journey

Like so many boys, I got into heavy metal as a teenager. I didn't do so because it gave me self-pity or a sense of righteousness -- as a teenager, I already had those traits. I really just enjoyed the songs, often had fun with the goofy lyrics and admired the talent of even the dopiest group of speed freaks.

It is that spirit that informs Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, the first documentary by Sam Dunn, who has since become the best cartographer of the genre on film. Dunn, a lanky Canadian with a friendly wit and an innate likability, could well have a film made about himself as the typical metal fan: not a Satan-worshiping, acne-covered misfit but a bit of a goof who found himself attracted to the fastest and heaviest music in the world.

Dunn confides in the audience at the start of the film that he majored in anthropology in college and even earned a graduate's degree and wrote a thesis. But here is his ultimate study, an overview of a small but intensely dedicated network of people around the world who speak different languages and have different perspectives but find common ground on one thing: metal.

So loyal are these fans, in fact, that heated debate exists over which bands can sport the label "metal." Dunn has great fun interviewing certified metal stars and throwing out names like Rage Against the Machine and Blue Cheer and seeing what happens. Slyly, Dunn assembles music historians who trace metal to down-tuned blues chords, tri-tones and even classical composers, leading to an ingenious fade from a recording of a Bach's harpsichord on "Prelude and Fugue in A Minor" into an Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption." There's no trace of irony in this comparison, nor should there be. Many of the more fantastical metal bands (generally lumped into a subgenre called "power metal") contains lyrics no more ridiculous than can be found in the mythologies in Wagner's Ring Cycle, and some players hone their craft as much as any virtuoso. (I would argue, however, that so many of these shredders lack the feel, which so many do not hear in classical music but is as evident as it is in blues).

The danger of a fan making a movie is that the temptation is often too great to simply sit back and enjoy the perks, to make a movie solely to get access to all the festivals and interviews a die-hard couldn't otherwise get. The flip side is that fans know more than a curious outsider, and Dunn exactly where to place the focus to wade through the tangled realm of metal and its endless off-shoots.

He provides a good cross-section of legends (Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, Alice Cooper, Ronnie James Dio), survivors of the '80s pop metal boom (hair metallers Vince Neill and Dee Snider) and the extremists of modern metal (Cannibal Corpse, Mayhem, assorted Scandinavian acts). Each interview develops some thread of metal's appeal, such as its confused sexuality, supposed moral evil and roots.

Dunn gets the best out of his subjects, who are so off-the-wall that the film works as a sort of all-star version of Spinal Tap. Dee Snider of Twisted Sister hilariously and shamelessly promotes his minor role in the fight against the Parents Music Resource Center in the '80s, explaining his thought process at the time thusly: "Carry the flag? Hell yeah! Braveheart, baby...Braveheart wasn't even out then, but that was the mentality."

He also chimes in on the advent of hair metal and the tendency of L.A.-based bands to cross-dress and wear makeup, correctly pointing out the sexual implications of men dressing that way to play before an audience consisting mostly of men. A metal DJ relates stories from the day, including the chestnut "There were guys on the strip who wanted to fuck the chicks in Poison."

Best of all, though, is Dunn's cheeky touch when it comes to those who take themselves too seriously. He meets with members of the band Mayhem, possibly the most infamous band in the various subgenres, with a vocalist who killed himself via a shotgun to the head (leading the surviving band members to make necklaces from skull fragments) and a bassist, Varg Vikernes, who not only burned churches but killed the group's guitarist partly in competition to see who was more metal (he won). All Dunn finds are two drunken slobs who sound more like rowdy fans, screaming the F-bomb to vaguely defined enemies as they continue to coast on the infamy of the previous members of the band.

When Dunn finally travels to Norway to interview the Satanic bands, the film becomes farce. Jørn Tunsberg, a guitarist for Hades Almighty, speaks approvingly of burning churches, but he looks so much like Chris Elliot I laugh hysterically every time I watch the movie. Then, he heads to a dark, closed tavern to speak to a man who goes by the name Gaahl (I can't believe he had the Gaahl to call himself that!). He ominously swirls blood-red wine in a glass and intones the name Satan as if summoning ol' Scratch. "What does Satan represent to you?" a cautious Dunn asks. *long pause, more swirling* "Freedom." Oh, I forgot: the guy is in a band called Gorgoroth which, for those of you playing at home, is taken from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, meaning these supposedly enlightened and brutal men get their inspiration from children's literature. Excessively well-written children's literature, yes, but children's literature nonetheless. I personally cannot wait to see the black metal band Azkaban kicking around Scandinavia one day.

Alice Cooper raucously points out the inanity behind all their corpse paint and attention-baiting arson, noting how many of these hard, "evil" guys trip over their tongues when they meet the man they rip off for a living. "'Golly, Alice Cooper, it's so good to meet you,' " Cooper sarcastically recreates. "'Would you mind giving me an autograph and my mom's over there.' 'Aren't you guys supposed to be Satan?' 'Well, we are, but...'" Cooper is a gold mine of quotes when it comes to any artist out to shock people, as he's been there, done that, sobered up and turned to golfing to get his jollies.

Yet Dunn has a way of gently exposing this gut-busting nonsense while still embracing the lunacy, just as any metal fan should. He cuts through some of the more aggressive reasoning for listening to metal and finds the core of the audience: those who consider themselves outsiders and find a kinship in a global network. Some of them might still brag about not conforming, but many openly embrace the idea of seeking out others like them to feel normal. "No one wants to be the weird kid," Rob Zombie says. "You just one day find you're the weird kid." This thread connects metal fans across the generations: the great and unkillable Lemmy from Motörhead mentions hanging out as a lad around the village phone box because it was the only public place with lighting, and the members of Slipknot jump forward to the present to discuss desperate ennui in middle America, where teens, as crazy and insulting as it sounds, really do need a way to vent the anger that comes with growing up in a place like Iowa that offers them so little.

The metal community becomes something of a support group for its members, fans working hard to promote both established artists and up-and-comers with homemade merchandise and self-printed CDs, while the bands show a genuine and deep appreciation for the people who can still pack open-air festivals to see them play. Ronnie James Dio, an immensely talented man who only got better with age until he tragically passed away only a few months ago, looks as if anyone could walk up and shake his hand and hear one of his fantastic jokes, and hopefully one of his many digs at KISS mastermind and professional prostitute Gene Simmons. I already miss Dio for his talent, but his charming interviews here re-opened those wounds and reminded me how kind so many legends of the genre can be compared to the rock gods elsewhere who wouldn't be caught dead with a fan unless he got something in return.

"It's so huge but some people don't even know it exists," Zombie says of the metal movement, which Dunn and his crew capture in all its contradictory glory. Neither worshipful nor condescending, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey achieves just the right balance of metal's various emotions, and the director's restrained but obvious enthusiasm makes for an hour and a half that passes in no time. It's no wonder two of Dunn's favorite groups -- Iron Maiden and Rush, both profiled here -- snatched him up to follow them on tour. It does not go into all the nooks and crannies of the genre and its sociological interpretations -- no one film could -- but Metal: A Headbanger's Journey is an excellent starting point for the mildly curious and a knowing bit of fun for the fans. Even if you hate metal, you'll at least laugh your ass off while watching

Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms: Possessive Adjectives

This is a great animated movie, especially because it talks about being different and fighting against prejudice. The music is great, especially if you like disco music. The scene is full of visual input, so it is perfect for beginners.

A. Watch the movie segment and complethe the blanks with possessive adjectives
(My, Your, His, Her, Its, Our, or Their).



1. The scene is about a worm. _____________ name is Barry.


2. Barry has an album. __________ name is Greatest Disco Hits 77.


3. Barry's mother is at the door. ___________ mother is not happy.


4. She talks to Barry. __________ voice is very loud.


5. Barry can't stop dancing. _________ tail is dancing too.


6. He's wearing a suit and a tie. __________ colors are black and white.


7. The books and records are __________ dad's stuff.


8. He lives with his father and mom. Barry lives in __________ house.


9. Barry's mother has a funny face. _________ eyes are big and ________ hair is brown.


10. - Do you like disco music? What's _________ favorite kind of music?

- ___________ favorite kind of music is samba.

Answer key; 1. his, 2. its, 3. his, 4. her, 5. his, 6. their, 7. his, 8. their, 9. her - her, 10. your - my.


WORKSHEET

Steven Spielberg: Empire of the Sun

Empire of the Sun is a greater indicator of Steven Spielberg's capacity to show mankind's darker side than Schindler's List. The latter is a film about a good man among oppressors, a diamond in the rough who stands up for what is right in the midst of unspeakable horror. Empire of the Sun, however, is a film about how good people can turn on each other in an instant, about the corrupt among the downtrodden. Where Schindler's List (thankfully) did not attempt to assign motivations for the German population's complicity in the Holocaust, this effort says more about the human condition precisely because the Japanese internment of prisoners of war doesn't carry the same weight in the public consciousness as the Holocaust.

However, for those who have read J.G. Ballard, the cold observer of extreme violence who wrote Crash among many other chilling works, this internment is no less horrifying. Ballard based Empire of the Sun on his own experiences as a child in conquered China during the war, and there can be no doubt that what he saw formed the man who would later write such disturbing fiction. The subject of lost innocence and the dividing line between liberated childhood and the responsibility of maturity is a common one in Spielberg's canon, but here it carries the darker importance of actually being true.

Spielberg opens the film with a graceful track-forward in a preparatory school, moving deeper into a chapel as pre-pubescent schoolboys sing soprano. Only when the camera cuts back to show plainly dressed Chinese people in some of the pews is the audience given any indication that it is not watching a film set in England.

The entire first act expands upon this idea, the total obliviousness of the British occupants of China in the face of Japanese invasion. The opening, somber text scroll notes the apathy of the British residents of China to the takeover, their arrogance blinding them from the possibility that someone -- especially non-whites -- would or could seize them. The parents of Jamie Graham (Christian Bale) take this view, the father casually chipping golf balls into the pool of his luxurious estate and reassuring his son, "China isn't our war."

Even Jamie fits into the mindset, exploiting the family's Chinese maid into letting him have late-night snacks by telling her she must do as he says. The boy is too young to realize the classism and racism in his words, and already Spielberg undercuts the idea of innocence and nostalgia for an era that raised children to views others as inferior based on ethnicity and birthright.

The cluelessness of the British bourgeoisie is highlight shortly thereafter when all the white families dress up for a lavish costume party as the mood in Shanghai darkens. A fleet of chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce cars drive through throngs of tired, dirty Chinese peasants who mill around restlessly as if they feel they should be fleeing but do not yet know why. The score in this section is haunting, lightly dissonant without being overbearing, perfectly matching the drab cinematography (a precursor to the desaturated tones of Saving Private Ryan). At the party, one guest slurs an educated, erudite Chinese man for being in attendance, as if the thought of Chinese running about in China was unspeakable and obscene.

Only when the Japanese at last strike Pearl Harbor do they fully drop the pretense of leaving the Westerners alone. Bombers descend on Shanghai, sending everyone into a panic and separating Jamie from his suddenly sobered parents as waves of fleeing Chinese pour through the smallest gaps. For the first time since Jaws, Spielberg manages to achieve a pure, raging terror in the shots of Jamie watching his mother swept away as he can do nothing to get back to her. A sense of abandonment runs through so many of the director's films as a result of his parents' divorce, but this condenses all such fears -- be it getting lost in a store or seeing parents separate -- and magnifies them in the crush of stampeding bodies.

As Jamie returns to his neighborhood in the hopes of his parents somehow returning home, Spielberg inserts horrifyingly surreal of the vacant streets in the wake of the mass exodus. Looted suitcases lie strewn about on the streets, mirroring later shots in both Schindler's List and War of the Worlds. When Jamie arrives home, he finds a sticker plastered in front of the door saying the house now belongs to the Japanese emperor, a darkly ironic subversion of traditional imperialism, which saw white casually claiming the land of other races as their own. Spielberg even inserted one such shot at the beginning after his marvelous, wordless setup of place and character, cutting from the idyllic British life to an overhead shot of coffins containing dead Chinese floating in the water as a boat lackadaisically knocks them aside. Late in the film, Japanese soldiers march prisoners across hundreds of miles of terrain, and they stumble across a field strewn with old luxuries -- cars, pianos, gilded furniture. It's a treasure trove, but no one gives a damn, tearing apart these items looking for food and drink.

Most disturbing is the coldly vacant interior of Jamie's abandoned house. Just as his parents ignored the terrifying truth at their doorstep, Jamie appears largely content by the whole situation, sure that his parents will return and enjoying free reign of the house in the meantime. He especially his parents' bedroom. Jamie there discovers his mother's footprint enshrined in spilled talcum powder. First, Jamie regards it with light curiosity, even pleasant fondness, an acceptable facsimile for his mother's presence. Then, his eyes scan over the whole room, revealing more urgent foot and palm prints and kicked up talc, suggesting a struggle. The implications finally hit the boy, who becomes so afraid he knocks open a window so the wind will blow away the evidence. In the process, of course, the draft erases the last vestige of his parents.

Eventually, food runs short, and Jamie heads out to find supplies, only to be robbed by a Chinese teen and taken in by Basie (John Malkovich), an American ship steward marooned in conquered Shanghai. Basie, however, proves more dangerous than desperate Chinese peasants or vindictive Japanese soldiers, immediately trying to sell Jamie to a peasant as a servant. Jamie indirectly gets his revenge when he takes Basie back to his rich neighborhood to loot the place, only for Japanese soldiers to jump out of the house and imprison Jamie and Basie's gang.

Up to this moment, Jamie has not allowed himself to process what he's been seeing, but Spielberg bucks expectations by actually enhancing this obliviousness as Jamie is shuffled from a holding area to an interment camp by an airfield. The director roots the atrocities Jamie sees in the boy's perspective, adroitly keeping enough horror off-screen to avoid a PG-13 rating while making the film that much darker by implication and the perverse, rotting innocence. of what we do witness.

Basie, the Fagin to Jamie's Oliver Twist, admires the boy's pluck and exploits the child's attempts to do anything to avoid reality by incorporating him into a complicated trading network that takes the place of money in the camp. In the first camp, designed to separate the able-bodied from the sick, Basie shocks and disgusts Jamie by stealing the shoes of a dying woman to give to the boy, and by stealing potatoes where possible. He's a man with nothing to live for, but Basie will do anything, absolutely anything, to survive. After spending three years in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, though, Jamie is inured to such sights, and he routinely helps out Basie, though he does balance his actions with a concern for the other prisoners' well-being.

He does so to make life seem as pleasant as possible, but we can see the atrocity through his perspective. The two times Basie is beaten by Japanese soldiers, the camera stays on Jamie's face as he watches his ersatz father figure take his punishment. His other parental symbol, Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havens), asks him for help in trying to revive a woman with no pulse. Jamie performs CPR frantically until the woman's straight-ahead stare shifts to look at the boy. He thinks he's saving her, but the doctor rightly says he simply pumped enough blood to the brain for one last nervous twitch. A nurse optimistically offers that the woman got the chance to feel as if she died in England by looking on the boy, but all he, and we, can see is her frozen rictus on her clammy face. In the film's darkest moment, Basie sends Jamie through the camp to set snare traps. Williams' score matches the imagination and sense of adventure with which Jamie takes to the task of sneaking around camp and even under the barbed wire that separates the camp from the airfield. Then the camera moves back to Basie and his American crew watching, revealing that the man really sent the boy in there to test for mines. Worse still, he and the others take bets over whether Jamie will trip one and kill himself.

The subtlest transition of the character from a fresh-faced innocent to toughened teen is in his name. When Basie takes James in, he dubs the boy "Jim," and the name sticks even with the British occupants of the POW camp. Jamie creates an image in the mind of the the upper-class, pampered boy that James is at the start, an effete, charming name for a like person. "Jim" is blunt and masculine, suggesting a person who can do much by saying little. When the Americans accept him following their deplorable mine experiment, the name Jim sticks forever, and James grows from the kindly boy still trying to help everyone out to a cocky brat who uses the same self-absorbed lines the Americans used to tell him on the other British children. It is a testament to the writing, Spielberg's pacing and Bale's performance that the shift is more than just nominal: by the end of the film, you'll think of the boy only as Jim.

The humanity of Empire of the Sun catches in the throat. The only bond Jim forms that comes with no strings is with a Japanese teenager training to become a pilot. Jim's love of airplanes gives them a connection that supersedes their language barrier. Their friendship, communicated only in waves and other signs of recognition, is undercut by the knowledge that the Japanese boy is part of the system imprisoning Jim and the others. What's more, he's training to be a kamikaze. But there's no moment in the film more affecting and beautiful than Jim singing the Welsh lullaby he practiced at the start of the film to honor his friend's graduation. Enraptured that someone he knows is becoming a pilot, Jim can't contain himself, but the song is so sad it speaks to the reality of the situation, that the boy will soon be sent on a one-way mission. Even the internment camp's overseer, Sgt. Nagata, is moved by the implications.

Ironically, Americans ruin each of these moments. The joy of watching his friend become a pilot is cut short by American P-51 Mustangs launching a surprise raid on the airfield. Their arrival brings back Jim's ethnocentrism, and he cheers the planes until Dr. Rawlins makes him take cover, at which point the sight of American saviors brings the revelation that Jim no longer remembers his family. When a sick woman, Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson), dies in the long march that ensues from the camp being destroyed, a blinding light fills the sky as Jim looks over her body. He believes it to be her soul ascending to heaven, only to learn later that it was the flash of the Nagasaki bomb detonating hundreds of miles away, the very opposite of a transcendental moment. How many souls are contained in that light, and could a blast hotter than the sun vaporize not only the flesh but the spiritual being as well? At last, Jim leaves the group to return to the camp, unwilling to hike so far for the slim chance of food, and he finds his friend, who offers him a mango. Then, Basie returns with his gang, and they shoot the teen dead before Jim's eyes.

Some bill Empire of the Sun as a coming-of-age tale, but that's not exactly true. Jim loses his innocence, to be sure, but he does not truly grow from it. As with A.I., the ending of Empire of the Sun is doomed to be regarded as sappy and upbeat. Jim is reunited with his parents as music swells, and at last the family becomes whole again. Yet the boy, even when he at last collapses into his mother's arms, is changed, and his eyes, hollowed out and filled with dulled pain, communicate that this boy cannot return to normalcy so easily as his parents, and something in him is broken forever. He does not recognize his parents, and when he finally does and falls into his mother's arms, he does so less out of joy than the desperate hope that, by doing so, he might revert to a time when everything he's seen wasn't true. If he can act like a normal child, perhaps he won't ever have to fully face what he's seen. This also explains why he pedals a bike around the empty camp in the wake of Basie and co. shooting his friend. He pedals with vacant glee, riding in circles not only to mirror his earlier bike tour through his empty house but also in a subconscious attempt to reverse the Earth's spin and turn back time to when all of this had not happened. Two images near the end sear into the brain: first, Spielberg shows Jim trying to revive his Japanese friend, splicing the image to switch between the boy and a vision of a dead Jamie, still clad in his schoolboy outfit. Second, Spielberg uses the final shot to return to a suitcase Jim took with him out of the camp that he finally threw into a lake when he realized how much it weighed him down. Both of these shots communicate one thing: Jamie died back in that camp. Jim is returning home with Jamie's parents, and it's only a matter of time before their uneasy reunion collapses. That will leave Jim truly alone, as his final response is not to grow up but to harden into chrysalis. Stunted and scarred, no amount of pampering will make him soft again.

The film is, however, a coming-of-age story for its maker, who at last finds a way to make serious movies within his style without rough disconnect. The darker moments of E.T. and The Color Purple too often clashed harshly with the director's old tricks, the slapstick moments of both undermining the severity instead of providing a more complete emotional range. Empire of the Sun may be more dour overall, but it's believable. It's odd to think, though, that this should be Spielberg's darkest film yet, as it's the first one where he finally trusts a child fully to tell a story about childhood. Bale gives one of the great child performances, and I don't think any young actor -- in an English-speaking film, at least -- matched it until Natalie Portman gave her first and best work in The Professional. Like the French dying on their plantation in the extended cut of Apocalypse Now, Jamie is a man without country: he's never even seen England, but he will never be considered Chinese. Bale captures this cultural disconnect perfectly even as he embodies the more immediate concerns of lost innocence and reaction to atrocity. It is no wonder that he would grow up to be one of the most intense actors working today.

The complexity of Spielberg's tracking shots for the first time take on a grace, no longer about speed and liberation but of elegiac observation. The camera gets one last good look at everything before it disappears forever. David Lean originally helmed the project, and when Spielberg took over he saw his chance to make his own Bridge Over the River Kwai. But Spielberg moves beyond simple imitation of Lean's grandeur -- a display of maturity in the face of his open quotation of old serials in the Indiana Jones movies -- into something more personal. The romanticism of Jamie's perception influences the direction, but so too does the reality, and when those American fighters strafe the internment camp as Jim watches with mouth agape, the two perceptions blur into overload. Fear and exhilaration, never that far apart to being with, become one, and in liberating Jim, the Americans also provide the final force that breaks his brain. This is not the Steven Spielberg who made Jaws. It is not even the one who made The Color Purple. This is a Spielberg in full and complete control not only of his craft but what he wishes to say with it. The result is such a dynamic leap forward for the director it took him nearly another decade just to catch up with himself.

Greenberg

Noah Baumbach may be the definitive observer of millennial life in bourgeois America, which is about as scathing an indictment as anyone can level at a group of people. Baumbach's characters are vain, neurotic, deeply unlikable and capable of meticulously enumerating everyone's character flaws but their own. As much as I hate them, I'm occasionally drawn in by the fascination of recognizing real people, even myself, in these characters.

There are moments in Greenberg where I fidgeted from the discomfort of seeing what could be myself and some of my friends 20 years from now, ranting vacuously about the most minor of inconveniences. But where The Squid and the Whale built its characters into something that stuck with me, Greenberg never coalesced into anything but a circular bore, looping around the same vignette over and over and changing only the setting to keep things fresh.

Baumbach makes a point of this initially, opening not on the neurotic Roger Greenberg who gives the film its title but Florence (Greta Gerwig), the personal assistant of Roger's brother Phillip. She drives around running errands for her boss, who's preparing for an extended business vacation in Vietnam with his family. While he's gone, Phillip will let Roger, freshly released from a mental hospital, stay in the place and look after the family dog, pretentiously named Mahler.

By focusing almost exclusively on Florence in the beginning, Baumbach slyly sets up the endless routine of her life, running errands for one Greenberg brother who treats her like family, then ultimately running around to care for Roger (who, among his other hangups, does not drive). The key difference is that Roger treats her not like a part of the family but a romantic interest, finding the middle ground between Phillip's tasking and the casual hookups Florence has to get over a vaguely defined "long relationship."

Florence is such an interesting character and played so brilliantly by Gerwig, one of the best and most under-appreciated actors of her generation, that the film loses its spark when it shifts to Roger's perspective. With no disrespect to Ben Stiller, who truly gives a great performance here, his character is so purposefully hollow that the tattered and frayed (and believable) humanity of Florence looks even more appealing but is held out of reach.

Roger spends his days attempting to do nothing, something we can intuit he has been preparing for these last 40 years. Stiller keeps his neuroticism in check, expunging Roger's quirks through letters to companies that annoy him. He even sends a letter back home to New York addressed to Mayor Bloomberg, calling for a ban on honking car horns save for "emergency situations." He meets old friends who may look down on Roger's inane life path but are no better; we first see them at a children's party lounging on sofas and drinking. His estranged best friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), still resents Roger ruining a record deal for their old band but works to get his own life back together and sees forgiving his friend as a way to move forward.

At times, Greenberg is hilarious in its deadpan style, such as Roger bitching about a man in a restaurant speaking loudly, only to scream obscenities in embarrassment when Ivan has the waiters sing him "Happy Birthday." The subplot involving the family dog's mysterious illness gets old, but the panic it gives Roger is amusing for a time. Best of all is the quiet humor of Roger and Florence's first hookup, involving two people so awkward that they end up having a frank discussion about relationships and sex without realizing it, then dipping back into their halting advances.

But so many other moments fall flat. Mahler's sickness drags on for the length of the film, to the point that I felt the dog was supposed to be a metaphor (and it is, in the most intangible and lazy way possible). Making a film about a man trapped in a cycle offers the dangerous likelihood of revolving around the same scenario, which Greenberg does ad nauseam. The film hits a nadir at a party Roger throws for his 20-year-old niece about to leave for Australia. As he snorts coke to feel cool again, Roger delivers a cringe-worthy monologue about "kids today" that is so bad I can only pray Baumbach intended it with an ironic bent but so sincerely presented and delivered that there exists the awful possibility he means it.

Stiller, good as he is, is stuck with a character whose quirks come off as quirks. His letter-writing, OCD and stunted adolescence never add up into a human being. Gerwig, on the other hand, gives the best kind of performance, the kind that is transparent and real. There's no distinction between Gerwig and Florence. Far from the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of most indie films, Florence is an aching soul, and even -- especially -- when she smiles, she conveys a sense of loneliness and pain that is rending. To look at her is to see that funny, sweet friend you had in high school who was so approachable you never really thought about dating her only to wonder about it after everyone went their separate ways. Without any big crying moments or monologues, Gerwig takes that person into her twenties, when it seems the world itself has taken the same approach as the guys in high school: everyone loves her, but in a way she's too real for anyone to handle. She isn't a projection, a fantasy, a charity case or any other distortion of reality. She's just her, and the world doesn't know what to do with such a phenomenon.

Gerwig captures this so flawlessly that, were the film about her, it may well have been my favorite of the year, or at least in the upper echelon. But even Baumbach cannot adequately give her the moment she deserves, instead focusing on the tired clichés of Greenberg's character. Roger has cynical truisms like "Life is wasted on people," but Florence cannot be summarized so easily. It's almost as if Baumbach made a great and compelling character in spite of himself and didn't recognize it until he could do nothing about it. Or maybe Gerwig's effortless naturalism made lemonade out of lemon seeds.

I found some of the lighter touches in Greenberg intriguing, such as the generational statement made by Phillip and his family going to Vietnam not only on vacation but to start a hotel chain there. Furthermore, Gerwig gives one of the year's best performances as Florence, and Stiller puts in some of his finest work. But it just doesn't add up. The subplot of Ivan's wife and Roger's old crush (played by Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also got a "story by" co-credit) fizzles, as does the Mahler story. Yet it is the failure of the narrative to progress until suddenly the protagonist jumps forward at the end that truly seals Greenberg's fate. And when the film ends on the suspense of listening to a confession on a voicemail, I could not bring myself to care even though Florence was directly involved. Perhaps what disappoints me most about Greenberg is how close it comes to being a unique and captivating film, only to pull away each time it nears the line.

Certified Copy

[Warning -- contains spoilers]

If there is a better film this year than Certified Copy, then I must rescind the statements I have made throughout 2010 of the abysmal quality of its cinematic offering. Thus far, the films that I have loved most I have embraced despite their flaws, falling in love with ambition (Inception), thematic richness (The Social Network) and plain ol' emotional attachment (Toy Story 3). Some of these works have at least flirted with the adjective "masterful," if for no other reason than some are the works of masters (The Ghost Writer, Shutter Island), but I had not yet seen a true masterpiece. Leave it to Abbas Kiarostami, the greatest living filmmaker in the world, to fill the gap.

While I rarely discuss any movie these days without going into spoilers (though I do try to save more elaborate talk for secondary reviews when it comes to new films), I must impress just how much of this film I will and must discuss in order to pen anything approaching a meaningful essay. I'm not talking about the questions over the film's real-or-fake narrative, which is as playful and exciting as it is wholly unimportant to gauging the film. I want everyone to go into this film with as little knowledge as possible, all the better to let its perfect blend of metafictional levity and insightful human drama hit with maximum impact.

At the halfway point of Certified Copy, the two main characters, an English art critic and writer (opera singer William Shimell, in his first movie role) and an unnamed French art dealer (I'll call her "Elle" like everyone else) enter an Italian café after debating the thesis of James' book. James steps outside for a moment, and the café owner remarks that they make a good couple; though the two just met, the woman does not correct the owner and launches into a discussion about the problems of keeping a marriage up after 15 years.

What sort of nonsense is this? Why would she do such a thing, and why would the man seemingly play along when he returns? In true Kiarostami fashion, these questions are indispensable to unlocking the central thrust of Certified Copy's intent yet pointless. There is a tendency for people to question which parts of a Kiarostami film are real and which are fake, which is a waste of time because it's all fiction. Granted, he blends documentary into the proceedings, but in doing so he makes reality fake. Of course, the flip side of that is that he makes falsity more real, and that dichotomy goes a long way toward building his status as the preeminent cinematic poet of his time.

Slyly, Kiarostami plants the idea that these two are a couple from the start. Binoche takes her teenage son to listen to James' lecture, but the spoiled brat complains of hunger and makes his mom leave almost immediately. She leaves her number with a friend to give to James, and when they meet, each comes off as slightly confrontational from the start. She attacks the premise of James' book, which stipulates copies of original artistic works have their own value based on the perspective of the copier. The discussion, framed, naturally, within a car traveling through the pastoral Italian countryside morphs from Elle asking for clarification on James' ideas to a debate about them to a more personal spat that frames the two as a stereotypical "old married couple."

Just as that thought enters your head, Kiarostami literalizes it by having Elle start the lie, which James bizarrely maintains. Suddenly, the aggressively flirtatious attitude between the two characters jumps into the advanced stages of a relationship, with Elle berating James for neglecting her and her son and him defending his absences as work-related. As they continue to walk around a quaint Tuscan village, the pair only get more savage, and both look increasingly immature. At an early dinner, Elle excuses herself and goes into the bathroom to plaster on lipstick and gaudy earrings, smoothing her face yet ironically robbing the 46-year-old of her ageless grace and beauty. She emerges as a child who got into mommy's accessories, and she might as well be going to a tea party with stuffed animals for the regression she displays. For his part, James turns into a petulant cad, flying off the handle for as innocuous a comment as Elle quietly saying she likes the wine he disparages.

Their bewildering behavior represents a stylistic departure for Kiarostami, as it enters into a melodrama far removed from the naturalism of his previous films. Rarely has Binoche been so animated, and she's one of the most effortlessly extroverted actresses on the planet. She's pushy, manipulative, happy, sad, quiet, loud, aggressive, defensive and various other adjectives to boot. She and Kiarostami have been friends since the '90s, and the director has been looking for the chance to put her in one of his movies for years. The wait was worth it: the idea that Kiarostami complicates the narrative just to make a cryptic puzzle have not addressed how openly and completely Binoche fits her performance to every twist and turn, clearly aware of what the director was trying to do.

For all her theatrics, however, Binoche continues a thread Kiarostami has been developing for years, that of the challenges facing women. Working in his native, restrictive Iran, Kiarostami bumped up against the lines of censorship with his depictions of women, but he never defined his female characters through anything as simplifying as region-specific oppression. When he examines the plight of women, he does not stop with the hijab and honor killings, he looks at broader emotional oppression by men. For James to so quickly defend leaving home for extended periods of time to leave Elle to raise their son by herself demonstrates how even the supposedly enlightened intellectual class can give career preference to men. After Shirin equalized Binoche with the cast of Iranian women and presented a universal male patriarchy as an enduring problem, Certified Copy digs deeper into the emotional tumult of not being openly oppressed or discriminated against but subtly manipulated for years, and the range of Binoche's expression reflects how complex the reactions to such confusing reduction can be.

At the same time, Kiarostami scores a coup with the film by setting it from the woman's perspective. The nosy, aggressive questions Elle's son prods his mother with at the start can obviously be explained by Elle's own confrontational nature. But Kiarostami is not blaming the mother for corrupting the son so much as illustrating the issues that can arise from a single parent situation, a subject that courts its own controversy until Elle tearfully speaks of how hard it is to play both roles to raise a child. Besides, for all the kid's distracted noodling with a cell phone, he's quite perceptive, and he realizes as he looks at his mom during the opening lecture that she is planning to seduce James. Her actions are manipulative, to be sure, but never cruel, and the director finds a way to deliberately pace what we know about the character without making her a bitch until the last 10 minutes. I've seen so many examples of this in contemporary cinema that I'm at a loss to explain just how Kiarostami brushes against the traps of Western filmmaking and casually inverts and subverts them. Here is a movie that answers the male gaze with the female gaze, replacing sexual lust with conflicting romantic emotions that seem to confuse more male critics than female ones because we're not used to this level of sophistication when thinking about an object of desire.

Binoche's performance is insightful and believable, but it also plays on the artifice of cinema. Shimell, on the other hand, is so stiff and unaccustomed to dramatic acting that he also points out the falsity of it all. Kiarostami slyly doesn't use Shimell's singing talents, nor even the melodramatic chops he no doubt he picked up performing opera. That would be too obvious. Instead, Kiarostami uses Shimell the way he does any nonprofessional actor, to get a more natural performance. Shimell plays the straight man off Binoche's complex emotional range, and even his broader moments of anger look simplistic compared to Binoche. This can partly be explained as the natural result of a person out of his element working alongside one of the world's greatest actresses giving one of her best performances, but it's also all part of the plan. If Binoche examines Kiarostami's divide between reality and fiction by keenly understanding what the director intended in nearly every shot, Shimell does so by being as lost as we are. If Binoche doesn't look like she's acting even while doing Sirkian cartwheels, Shimell makes it blindingly obvious, and that, ultimately, is the clue that decides whether the two are a real couple.

Yes, it's all a fake, as is revealed vaguely but unmistakably at the end. The ending snaps all the pieces into place, not of the film itself but of the clues that allow one to unlock its meaning. The question people should ask of the film is not whether Elle and James are for real, it's who was right about the artistic merits of James' thesis. The ending lets us understand that Elle planned her game to test James' contention that copies have their own worth, but also to get out her frustrations over being abandoned. When the game first begins in earnest, Elle jokes with the café owner that James does not speak another language. Yet when Elle gets so emotional later that she slips into French, and James responds in kind. By altering his language, James fits better as the copy of Elle's ex-husband, and his stiff movements are the sight of an unprofessional actor acting as a character who in turn acts for an audience of one.

By the end, the positions of the characters have reversed. In projecting all her hangups onto the copy, Elle falls in love again and desperately wants to rekindle her old relationship with this new copy. She has made James into a clone of her husband, but she and James have also made this replication different enough that she can fall in love with the man she hates. But James can see the emotional distress in her, and while he clearly feels tempted by Elle's seduction -- we are talking about Juliette Binoche here -- he cannot bring himself to torment her with a specter of past love. Where she at last believes in copies carrying their own emotional weight, James, who says at the beginning that he wrote his book to convince himself of his own idea, realizes that he cannot be someone else's copy without being their projection, not his own. Ironically, by rejecting his premise at last, he commits the final act necessary to make him a perfect copy of the ex-husband: he leaves Elle.

This driving conflict fits squarely within Kiarostami's canon, built upon the dividing line between reality and fiction. What is most amusing about Certified Copy is the way that he uses his first European film and the freedom it entails to make a movie that only looks different from his previous, restricted movies in the clothes that Binoche can wear. Marilyn Ferdinand, one of the best movie bloggers around, noted something I had to go back and check: when the two characters visit a church in Lucignano where loving young couples pledge eternal love on a gilded tree branch -- one of Kiarostami's more devilish touches, given the embittered duo he focuses upon -- a bride in the background squirts eye drops in her eyes. When James goes inside and the camera cuts back to the bench he was sitting on, that bride sits there now with tears rolling down her cheeks, but we know they're fake. It's a light touch, as nearly all touches in a Kiarostami film are, but it broadens the scope of his inquiry on fakes, not letting the entire story rest on the fractured perspective of a troubled woman. Even the content rearrange themselves to make copies of what they think they should be, the bride genuinely happy but wanting to seem happier to fit to the image of the wife who cannot contain her joy.

Actors will pick apart Certified Copy for years, because it says more about the profession than any film made in at least a decade. The caliber of Binoche's performance will certainly be studied, but more importantly, the film has a great deal to say about the profession. Actors play copies of people, either of real figures or fictional characters who are composites of real people (or of previous fictional characters themselves based on real people). But they are also human themselves. They process and perceive the fiction, thus aligning them with the audience, who become background characters, trying to figure out this couple along with everyone else. The most amazing aspect of Binoche's performance is not how well she follows Kiarostami's emotional and artistic themes but the manner in which she allows herself to lose the thread at the end as Elle's grand scheme falls apart when she gets lost in her own labyrinth. The bravest and most compelling thing she can do is lose track of where she's supposed to be at the exact right time.

"Art is not an easy subject to write about," James says in his opening lecture. "There are no fixed points of reference, no immutable truths to fall back on." Certified Copy is itself a sterling replication of the European, romantic art film, drawing on Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy and Richard Linklater's Euro-centric Before Sunrise. He even throws in a bit of Bergman's Persona into the mixture. In the process, however, he proves James' thesis by adding his own indelible spin on it. Using his usual shot/reverse shot structure, Kiarostami gently reconfigures the perspective of the film, starting with James speaking before cutting to Binoche arriving, then to the son's view as he watches his mom whispering conspiratorially to her friend. Yet when James arrives, the POV clearly shifts to Elle as she begins molding her image of James. Even European films, generally the ones with the best roles for women, are masculine, and Kiarostami makes a film some have misread as a sellout, festival-friendly movie into a more feminist movie than nearly all European romances of similar stripes. It's a bold response to those who say there are no more ideas for movies, that all movies are just rip-offs of something else: as long as someone brings something new to the table, it's valid and unique, regardless of whether it's "original."

And just as it is a copy of European films that differs slightly until everything adds up to a unique vision, so too is Certified Copy a typical Kiarostami film that is in no way typical. Shot on digital but printed on 35mm, the film blends the methods of capturing film, literalizing the artistic dichotomies the director's work embodies. Once again, the director uses a return to cinema to poke fun at those who wanted him to go back to making features instead of experimental ventures. But the biggest breakthrough, even for a director as emotionally attuned as Kiarostami, is the heightened humanity. After making so many films about people in cars, the world visible only as it rolls over a windshield vertically as if we're seeing film run through a projector, Kiarostami inserts a little joke to his knowing fans when the two get out of the car and join the world, making their story so much harder to untangle. But that's because he's finally inserting his characters into a larger story, a clear reflection of his own steps into a larger world by making films outside of Iran (he's already scheduled to make another film with Binoche). His films have never been insular, but that have been personal. Here, he realizes how much he can expand while still retaining the individuality of his emotional explorations. He already condensed the world's complexity into the sandy Iranian countryside; now, he throws away the microcosm and works within the real thing. And only Kiarostami could make such a transition and still give off the impression that the world cannot contain all that he has to say about it. Shirin dealt with the contrast of collective and individual reaction to film in minimalist terms, and here he explodes them in a narrative as complex, dubious, rewarding and frustrating as life itself.

Certified Copy probes at the emotions of a relationship, the pain of loss and the idea that there might only be one person out there for us. The idea of a soulmate is so romantic, but if you ultimately separate, doesn't the possibility exist not that the right person is out there, but that you couldn't even make things work with your fated partner? That is an excruciating thought, and one Kiarostami dispels only after he drains Binoche; only when we've all cried it out can we move on and realize that the most useless and unhelpful of breakup maxims is actually true: plenty of other fish in the sea. Church bells ring at the end, possibly funereal as James leaves. But the peals also emit a hopeful tone; it's the start of a new day, and perhaps another couple is getting married. I've heard some compare Certified Copy to the screwball comedies of old, The Philadelphia Story and so on. If there are any screwball antics here, they exist solely on the meta level as Kiarostami messes with narrative coherence and fulfills the wishes of his critics as he subverts them. But the comedy of the film is quiet, as is the melancholy, and when it all comes together in the final moments, Certified Copy stands as the latest proof that Abbas Kiarostami has no equal, and whatever else may be said about these sad times, we are lucky to be alive in an age where a master continues to work.

Shirin

It has been said many times over that the best seat in the house in a theater is at the very front, looking back at all the upturned faces. Truffaut best epitomized this in The 400 Blows with his evocative shot of kids watching a show. Shirin, at once Kiarostami's return to cinema after spending the first decade of the new millennium with increasingly minimalistic films shot on digital cameras and a continuation of those movies, takes this notion to an almost experimental endpoint.

Ostensibly a film about the classical Persian, romantic myth of Shirin and Khosrow, Shirin is instead a film about an audience watching a film about the romantic myth of Shirin and Khosrow. This setup naturally fits within Kiarostami's oeuvre of dividing the line between truth and cinema, yet Shirin does not employ the alternating documentary and fiction that complicates and deepens the narratives of his best work. Shirin is purely fictional, yet its falsity is more real than some of the genuine images Kiarostami has captured over the years.


Armed with 113 Iranian actresses (and Juliette Binoche, appearing in a cameo while she was in Iran to discuss working with the director on his subsequent feature), Kiarostami creates a film so simple that it borders on the avant-garde: we pick up the details of the movie from the soundtrack and, when that fails, from the reactions of the women watching the film.

In the process, he constructs a movie without really making one. Kiarostami shot the actresses without them knowing what they were meant to be watching; he even shot some of them in his house. He used similar techniques to get the reactions of characters in previous films, particularly in his many scenes in cars. And just as all of those sequences managed to convey a deep humanity and convincing emotional response out of a fabricated context, so too do the looks on the women's faces communicate a clear progression of shared yet isolated emotional reaction.

Understanding the strange dichotomy of viewing art, Kiarostami emphasizes the discrepancy of seeing a movie within an audience yet ultimately processing it alone. Filmmakers face that challenge all the time, either making their film broad to have the maximum impact or more personal to appeal to the individual internalization of a film's emotional projection. In the world that Kiarostami creates out of the darkness of his false theater, the unseen film manages to unite the two, with tears beginning to roll down the cheeks of the audience past the 30-minute mark, slight smiles tugging at the lips at the moments of quiet humor and the soft creak of shifting weight as the moviegoers lean forward in suspense. Each of the actresses gives a terrific performance of silent cinema, and David Bordwell is right (as ever) to note that their reactions to Shirin's martyrdom on the screen are so pure and empathetic that the best comparison is not with Godard's Vivre sa vie but the film that Anna Karina's prostitute watched in the theater, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.

The ties that bind all of these films are, of course, the female characters, and Shirin embodies the same martyrdom as the other two in much subtler ways. Through dialogue and narration, we pick up that Shirin, an Armenian princess, falls in love with the Persian king Khosrow, only for his bloodlust in battle to repulse Shirin and political opportunity to give his hand to a Roman princess in marriage. Dejected, Shirin manages to find love in the poet and carver Farhad, who displays more devotion and innocence toward the princess than the entitled Khosrow ever could.

As tears stream down faces, we realize that where the inference between Falconetti's Joan and Karina's Nana is open, the connection that links Joan of Arc and the women watching here is more obvious even as it is more nuanced. These women aren't doomed like Joan or Nana, but they are trapped in a patriarchal system that in the best of cases restricts freedom and, in the worst, harms and even kills women. As Khosrow interferes in Shirin's happiness to his own ends, the reactions of the women convey an emotion that runs deeper than mere involvement with the film. They see their own plight in Shirin's pain. Dreyer almost never showed Joan in a shot with a man, using shot/reverse shot structures to maximize the impact by isolating Joan in the frame and magnifying the effect of men looking down upon her. Kiarostami never even shows us the tormentor, as if the actions of Khosrow and, by extension, the patriarchy are so immense that they cannot be adequately squeezed into the frame. Here, Binoche's cameo fulfills a broader purpose: without makeup and scarved in a hijab, it's almost impossible to discern her from the Iranian women, and Kiarostami deftly uses her to globalize the issue into something that affects women the world over and not merely in openly oppressive regimes.

Never before has Kiarostami's feminism been more plain. He has had difficulty displaying it in the past, what with the Iranian theocracy's restrictive policies concerning women -- so many Iranian films are made out in the open and never in a house, in fact, because it's illegal to show a woman without her hijab -- but here he communicates volumes with only the slightest voiceover narration. The women reflect Shirin's disgust as they turn away from the sound of battles, a sharp contrast to the men in the audience, who look bored every time except when an action sequence is clearly playing on the screen. "Damn this man's game that we call love," comes an exasperated voice from the screen, and considering how Shirin finds herself in the middle of a struggle despite her clear preference for one man, it's not hard to see romance as a leftover of primitive territoriality among unevolved males while women are forced to wait for men to reach their level of sophistication and emotional maturity.

In broader terms, Shirin simply marks a master's return to true cinema, even if he takes the long way 'round. If it really does have a connection to The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent film, Shirin inverts the structure of that film by presenting blind cinema. We pick up the story from the soundtrack which is more nuanced and evocative than any of the boisterous blockbusters that take home sound editing Oscars year after year. Sounds you don't expect from a romantic melodrama appear in the mix, such as crows cawing, owls hooting, horses galloping, the battle sounds of clanging steel and the wet thump of blades carving into flesh. The orchestration can be teasing, bombastic, but also minimalistic, with a barely perceptible hum undercutting the sound at times. Most bizarre is the ambient noise of water dripping at several intervals, a noise that must be coming from the theater speakers but doesn't seem to have any reason to exist in the screened film. Maybe that dripping is simply the sound of tears pooling under the eyes before the audience finally sheds them.

As I watched, I couldn't help but wonder if, on some level, Shirin wasn't Kiarostami's sarcastic reply to colleagues and supportive critics who wanted him to return to narrative filmmaking after his experiments. Oh, the director returned to the cinema, alright, but he does so in a way that makes his digital movies look straightforward. There's no way to know where the film is at any moment, nothing to signify which face is the most important and thus the last to be shown. One can imagine him sitting his excited friends in a screening room, declaring "I have returned" and taken his spot at the front of theater to watch Shirin have its effect on them. By the same token, the movie is so emotionally resonant that, even if it is a joke, it is built on a foundation of sincerity that turns a movie with only the sparest parts into riveting cinema. Furthermore, the nature of its construction speaks to the power of film to generate meaning from nothing, and how editing is what ultimately tugs the heart.

What would such a film be like if it showed an American film to an American audience? This is cynicism speaking, but I imagine we'd see an audience of people focused on everything but the film, with people whispering, texting, checking watches. Then when the movie ended, a few would lazily turn to friends and mutter, "That was awesome" or "That sucked" with all the conviction of a porn star delivering a line of dialogue. Here, Kiarostami creates a shared experience, not simply among the fictive audience but those watching Shirin. But he especially speaks to the women, and if there's a driving force behind the film, it's the hope that women will realize how the issues that affect each of them affect all of them and have done for centuries. Is it any wonder, then, that Kiarostami had to head to Europe to make his next film? If he'd continued on this path in native Iran, he'd be imprisoned by now.

Shut It Down: On the Rise and Neverending Fall of 30 Rock

When it first premiered, 30 Rock promised to at least partially fill the gaping hole left by the cancellation of Arrested Development, the most brilliant sitcom that ever existed. Arrested Development marked the zenith of the "no hugging, no learning" style of situation comedy promoted by Seinfeld, its cast a hodgepodge of vain, arrogant and thoroughly unlikable people who were so uproarious together you couldn't help but watch. 30 Rock thus softened the approach, giving us a cast of characters who didn't really deserve love but were so goofy you gave it to them anyway.


For two seasons, it was the funniest show on TV, picking up the occasional slack in the American Office with a show revolving around meta-humor and a constant critique of the network that kept them on the air despite low ratings -- in the 30 Rock world, even allowing them to exist was proof of the infamous negligence and mismanagement that sent NBC into a tailspin these last few years even as some of its best programming ever has hit the airwaves. Yet as the show moves into its fifth season, there's a sad truth that must be acknowledged: 30 Rock is so far past its prime that the only humane thing to do is put it down.

Like Arrested Development and any other show that ignores emotion for laughs, 30 Rock excelled when the writing clicked. When a single joke failed, however, the dead air created was deadlier than a missed mark in a more lighthearted comedy.

In the third season, the cracks started forming. For every magnificent episode -- "The Funcooker," "Apollo, Apollo" -- there was a corresponding dud -- "The One With the Cast of Night Court," "Goodbye, My Friend." When an episode failed, it generally did so for one of two reasons: one, it reached too far within the meta framework of the show's humor, delving too far into esoterica while still remaining facile enough for the show's younger audience, almost none of whom would be familiar with something like Night Court. Two, it made the fatal error of assuming that anyone cared about the characters beyond their silly adorableness.

So when the show threw episode after episode at us about Liz Lemon struggling to adopt, or wanted us to empathize, even jokingly, with Jack Donaghy's stalled career ambitions. That these two stories represent 40 percent of the only narratives 30 Rock uses -- the others being Tracy's insanity, Kenneth's naïveté and Jenna's insecurity -- only compound the frustration felt when we must watch these stories over and over again.

30 Rock began to act like a character-driven show to stave off the burnout that comes with relentlessly writing jokes, an understandable fear. (Look at the writing staff across a few seasons of The Simpsons in its prime, or even now; the rate changeover is horrifying.) But you can't make two seasons of Seinfeld and then start making The Cosby Show; one is the direct and intended antithesis of the other, and to suddenly be expected to empathize with these two-dimensional punchline setups was absurd.

The writers understood this, but rather than go for broke in the Arrested Development fashion, they made the same lazy choice that so many do these days: pad their shortcomings with broad irony. "We really want you to care about the latest fight between Jenna and Liz, which is no different from earlier ones only we're supposed to feel good about ourselves at the end of this one, but since no reasonable person could expect that with these characters, we'll add in a wink at the end like a passive-aggressive emoticon at the end of a clearly insulting post."

Yet still, I watched, and I even bought the third season on DVD because enough episodes were gems. The fourth season, though, took a turn for the worse. The very first moments of the fourth season announced how tired its self-reflexivity had become, how the cheekiness of earlier broad references had given way to bored, limp looks to the camera. Even as Tina Fey was growing as an actress, her and her staff's writing abilities had hit the walls, and everyone started to suffer. No longer did Alec Baldwin come off as the offensive but affable version of the cardboard devil Republicans Aaron Sorkin used to prop up in The West Wing. Tracy Morgan lost his edge when his act just got old, while Jack McBrayer finally succeeded in making us feel the annoyance Kenneth's do-gooder nonsense engenders in other characters.

I could not even make it past the mid-season break, though the episode that preceded the Christmas special, "Dealbreakers," was easily one of the series' best, returning to the pure ridiculousness that made the show great. Watching Liz having to receive guidance on how to "wave your arms like a human being" made me cry with laughter in a way I hadn't with any comedy since 30 Rock's own "Rosemary's Baby." But that was the only episode of the entire first half that completely connected, and the Christmas episode was so uneventful that when the show finally came back, I'd just lost interest.

Still, I tried to give it another go when the new season started, and if they got back on track, I'd gladly fall in line once more. Sadly, the damage has been done. Though none of the episodes so far have been outright "bad" -- and there weren't more than a handful in the third or fourth seasons -- not one has the feel of what made 30 Rock so irresistible initially. That the show has devolved not into true badness but banality, it still has people hoping for the best. Even a critic as insightful and on top of things as Alan Sepinwall continues to let mediocre episodes pass because they're an improvement over some of the fourth season.

But I can no longer justify following around a show that has been on tenuous ground for half of its run, and not even the immense joy I take from the first two seasons can keep me coming back for another 22 minutes of faint chuckles and watch-checking. Even the live episode, the ultimate display of ratings-chasing desperation for any show, didn't pass muster, and 30 Rock had the advantage of being populated with a writing staff cherry-picked from live comedy television. Ultimately, I was only mildly impressed by the staging of the episode and the way the crew handled the show's typical cutaway format in a live setting. But I didn't laugh, and the tame sense of admiration I had for the gang not crashing and burning couldn't conquer the sense of ennui of watching them continue to peter out with a whimper.

I was struck recently by catching up on Community how a show can really deserve the reaction Sepinwall gives to lackluster episodes of the latest 30 Rock. When part of a Community episode misses the mark, at least one other aspect picks up the slack. The latest episode, for example, couldn't keep track of both Annie and Abed's stories and should have just focused on one without regressing both to their initial, more stereotypical personalities. Yet the episode itself was so damn funny that it genuinely excused what is hopefully nothing more than a momentary lapse in reason. On the other hand, the episode that preceded that one focused more on the heart than the laughs (though they were certainly there), and the results were moving without segueing too harshly from the irreverent tone of much of the series' comedy. Even when it doesn't measure up, some part of Community is so entertaining that it invites all those lazy add-ons of "but it's still better than 99% of what's out there."

When 30 Rock attempts to move out of the narrow box it built for itself, everything completely falls apart. And it's fallen apart so many times that I no longer care about the few occasions in which the writers get their act together. I love what Fey and the rest accomplished with the series' best moments, and it will be sad to see such a great cast go their separate ways, but I wish they'd go ahead and do it so they don't continue down this path until no one will shed a tear when they get canceled. Fey will rebound, Morgan will continue to capitalize on his remarkable mania and Baldwin can do whatever he pleases, secure in the knowledge that he reversed a decade-long slide into irrelevance with the most entertaining role of his career. That should be enough to lift the spirits of those involved. If only it could make me get over the crushing disappointment of 30 Rock's decline.