TV Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine

'Brooklyn Nine-Nine': Cops and Recreation

The only thing that Brooklyn Nine-Nine doesn’t try to cram into the pilot is any sense of place. Sure, plenty of cop shows are located in New York City. That Brooklyn Nine-Nine zeroes on Brooklyn specifically seems like it should be significant, but the locations used in the pilot—a generic electronics store, an empty storage center—could be found in any city in America. (I fully admit that, as a Brooklyn resident, I might be overly sensitive.)

It’s not that the borough doesn’t have comedic or even scenic potential. Brooklyn Nine-Nine may have even attempted a joke at its expense in the pilot, one of the items stolen during a theft is, of all things, a really expensive ham. That seems like a crack at foodie culture and the proliferation of yuppy grocery stores in Brooklyn, but to make the parody land, the show could have pushed it further; the sham could have been an artisanally cured, hand-butchered ham meant for some kind of farm-to-table, nose-to-tail dining experience. And the thug who rips it off is your run-of-the-mill TV criminal, which leaves you wondering if he really has connections to the black market that would be interested in such a very expensive ham.

That said, even without exploring Brooklyn’s gentrification growing pains, the premiere covers a fair amount of ground in its half hour, however superficially. You get the basic outline of how the precinct works, some jokes, an open-and-shut case, and introductions to the main players delivered as Holt gets a rundown on each of the detectives from Sergeant Jeffords (Terry Crews, sadly underused in the first episode).

Click through to read the full review at PopMatters.




The Daily Traveler: Museum of the Moving Image


Why the Museum of the Moving Image is the Coolest Museum Ever

From its Breaking Bad exhibit to its vintage arcade and console games, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is one of the coolest museums in New York City. Here's why you need to visit ASAP.

REASON ONE: THE BREAKING BAD EXHIBITION
Admit it. While worrying about how the saga of Walter White will play out in its final season, you've pored over every frame of old Breaking Bad episodes, looking for clues to how it will all end. MoMI understands—and celebrates—your attention to detail. In its Breaking Bad-centric exhibition, the Museum lets you get a closer look at the props, costumes, color schemes, and other behind-the-scenes material that show White's narrative arc. "Our exhibition is all about process," says David Schwartz, the museum's chief curator. "We want to show what they do physically to bring about the transformation in Walter White."

Click through to see the full slideshow on the website of the Condé Nast Traveler.

Photo by Sam Suddaby/Museum of the Moving Image


DVD Review: The Great Gatsby


...But The Great Gatsby isn’t just about details. It’s about people. You’d think it’d be hard for any performance to punch through all that art direction, but the assembled cast succeeds in making an impression—not just the shining DiCaprio, who fully earns his reputation as a movie star. Cary Mulligan as Daisy makes for a beautiful object of adoration, but Mulligan also embodies Daisy’s flightiness and superficiality, while Joel Edgerton is a brutal, physical Tom Buchanan. Still, no one projects the sleek, slinky Jazz Age glamour as newcomer Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Jordan Baker.

Luhrmann doesn’t always get at the inner lives of all these characters. Poor Jordan is reduced to best-friend capacity, and her relationship with Nick is barely explored. That’s the other perpetual problem with The Great Gatsby adaptations—even at 142 minutes, your favorite part from the novel has probably been cut or altered. Luhrmann sneaks in as much as he can, but even he knows there has to be a limit somewhere.

But rather than mourning what has been cut, Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is worth it for what he’s able to keep in: the exuberance and longing of people living out their younger and more vulnerable years in a glitzy time. This version of The Great Gatsby is for those who are all about the riotous excursions, not those looking for the privileged glimpses into the human heart.

Click through to read the full review at PopMatters.

The Daily Traveler: NYC's Public Art

For the website of the Condé Nast Traveler, I put together a slideshow of the free, public art on view this summer in NYC.

Artist: Orly Genger
Location: Madison Square Park, Madison Ave at 23rd St
On view until: September 8

Undulating swirls of primary colors envelop the trees of Madison Square Park, courtesy of local artist Orly Genger and Madison Square Park Conservancy's Mad. Sq. Art program. Genger used 1.4 million feet of knotted rope for the project, some of it collected by lobster fishermen along the East Coast for reuse. When the installation has finished its run in Madison Square Park in early September, it will be shipped off and reassembled at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts.  

Click through to see the full slideshow on the website of the Condé Nast Traveler. 

Photo by James Ewing



Film Review: Prince Avalanche



'Prince Avalanche': David Gordon Green's Quiet Comedy

Prince Avalanche remains resiliently funny. If there’s one thing Green has carried over from Pineapple Express and Your Highness, it’s silliness. This even as the new movie also resists the conventional aspects of that lesson: it may be painted with the same buddy-comedy brush as those films, but the description would be inaccurate here, since Alvin and Lance never develop a friendship. Instead of a movie where two people learn to accept the flaws in each other, Prince Avalanche is a movie about two people inhabiting the same space who learn to accept the flaws in themselves, even if these flaws are made up. Lance observes that they’re both “old fatties” (not true), Alvin minces his way through what an intellectual’s vision of an outdoorsman would be, and both argue about the “equal time agreement” on their shared boombox and chase each other around the woods. It’s some of the most enjoyable bickering ever put to screen.

Click through to read the full review at PopMatters.


August Issue: YA Authors

Writing for the Teen Scene

A round-up of Q&As with local YA authors

Judy Blundell, Katonah
Author of Strings Attached and National Book Award winner What I Saw and How I Lied

What’s the biggest difference between the YA audience and an adult audience?

Their age. That might sound like a flip response, but it’s true—the boundaries can be so blurred now, and a gripping story that happens to a teenage protagonist can be just as resonant for an older reader.

How do you feel about vampires?

I tend to avoid vampires. Yes, they exist! I’ve met a few! They’re the people who suck life and hope out of any situation, poor things. Vampires are only glamorous in fiction.




The Daily Traveler: Classic Road Trips Slideshow


Best Drives: Iconic American Road Trips Worth the Gas Money

With the price of gas trending downward, there's no better time to jump in the car, put the top down, and head out for a drive. Here, we have ten itineraries for some of the country's most classic road trips.

Florida

What you'll see: Water, and plenty of it. You might not be able to walk on water, but with this strip of road traveling across the Florida Keys, connected by 42 bridges, you'll feel like you can drive on it. Instead of grass and pines, you'll whiz by seascapes and palm trees. The Overseas Highway is also a good complement to the Maine Coast, as it's the extreme opposite end of Route 1.

Cultural stop: At the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, you can meet dolphins and California sea lions and watch as trainers teach them new tricks—then head to the indoor, air-conditioned theater for educational presentations about the animals.

Roadside attraction: The famous Seven Mile Bridge connects Marathon to Little Duck key, with stunning ocean views the whole way. But if driving past just won't do, here's a good place to park the car and get out to walk or bike. The first Seven Mile Bridge—which was used by trains, not cars, until a hurricane wiped out huge swaths of the tracks in the mid '30s—is now part of the Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail and recognized by the National Register of Historic Places. Now closed to most cars, it's a good place to try and catch a sunset.

Grab a bite: A stop at the Holiday Isle Tiki Bar is almost obligatory when traveling through the Florida Keys. It has all of the grass-hut décor you'd expect from a tiki bar, but what sets it apart is that it claims to have invented the Rum Runner cocktail (made with banana liqueur, Meyers rum, brandy, and grenadine). After a couple, you won't care if it's true or not.

Click through to see the full slideshow at the website of the Condé Nast Traveler.

Photo: istockphoto



DVD Review: Oz the Great and Powerful

Sam Raimi Puts His Twist on a Classic with 'Oz the Great and Powerful'

Oz the Great and Powerful‘s origins are slightly ambiguous. It isn’t exactly a book adaptation. Baum wrote at least 14 books in his Oz series, and even after his exit, other authors took up Baum’s mantle. While Oz the Great and Powerful draws from details and characters in the books, it’s not an adaptation of any plot or combination of plots from the series, like Walter Murch’s Return to Oz was in 1985.

Nor is it a straight prequel to the MGM’s 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz movie. It hews extremely close, with a visual style that’s of a piece with that world. The Wicked Witch bears the same trademark green skin, the Emerald City has those familiar glowing skyscrapers reaching into the sky, and the Yellow Brick Road winds its way through the land. But Oz the Great and Powerful didn’t have the rights to some of that movie’s other signatures—the ruby slippers, for example, which are entirely absent from Oz the Great and Powerful. You can tell the movie was striving for continuity, but not everything lines up exactly.

Instead, the not-book-adaptation, not-movie-prequel has a much harder job at the start. It has to return to a beloved fantasy land, staying true to both Baum’s words and Victor Fleming’s vision while expanding both of them. It has to not only tell the story of how Oz, the wizard (James Franco), goes from a Kansas huckster magician to a Great Man (“Harry Houdini and Thomas Edison all mixed into one”), but it also has to fill in the backstories of all of Oz’s witches, including Glinda (Michelle Williams), Theodora (Mila Kunis), and Evanora (Rachel Weisz)—one of whom turns out to be the infamous Wicked Witch of the West. And it has to do it all on an epic scale, traveling through more than 30 sets; co-mingling live action and CG, animation and marionettes; and wrapping the whole thing in a unified turn-of-the-century stagecraft-meets-Hollywood-studio-glamour aesthetic. The only thing they didn’t throw at the production was musical numbers (though Danny Elfman does add a nice score).

It’s an extremely tall order, and it’s a shame that Sam Raimi didn’t record a commentary track to explain how he negotiated it all...Instead of hearing in-depth about the nuances of a new Oz film from Raimi himself, we can marvel about how much Raimi-ness he was able to add to such an iconic, established world. The twister that removes Oz from Kansas, with its speediness and slapstick, is quite possibly the Raimi-est act of severe weather ever brought to screen. Even Oz himself, at times, resembles Ash from the Evil Dead series—a stance of confident buffoonery described as “Charlie Chaplin meets Clark Cable”—that Franco doesn’t quite nail, but does well enough. (This is most evident in the character’s insistence on calling Glinda by the incorrect name of Wanda.)

Click through to read the full review at PopMatters.