Bunny is funny

A couple of years ago, journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece for Vanity Fair titled "Why Women Aren't Funny". As he no doubt intended, it stirred up a bunch of shit and prompted lots of rebuttals (just a sample from the first page of Google results), including one in VF itself. To me it seems like the kind of thing that's hardly worth the time and energy rebutting, since it's 1) clearly meant to provoke ire rather than thought, and B) stupid. I haven't read a whole lot of Hitchens's stuff, but what I have read has led me to think of him as the male Ann Coulter (insert, if you must, your own joke about how Ann Coulter is the male Ann Coulter): a writer who needs massive amounts of attention and has decided that being a humongous asshole is the way to get it

Anyway, he's certainly not the first guy to suggest that women aren't funny, a notion that's always mystified me. Besides the fact that there are lots of famous funny women, I've known plenty of non-famous ones personally. In fact, I dare say the funniest person I've ever known was a chick. But of course, I'm a chick. Hitchens is not, and it can't be coincidental that the only people I've ever heard claiming chicks aren't funny have been dudes. The real issue is not that women aren't funny, but that a lot of men--the majority of men, perhaps--think that women aren't funny. Of course, humor is totally subjective anyway, so how many people have to think you're not funny before you can be deemed objectively unfunny? I don't know. How many licks does it take to get to the center of the patriarchal paradigm? How many misogynists can dance on the head of Christopher Hitchens's tiny, flaccid penis? And while we're at it, why does the word "flaccid" only ever seem to be used in reference to penises? These are all unanswerable questions.

Hitchens does admit that "it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals." I believe this is true. I think most people believe it's true, whether consciously or (more likely) unconsciously, and it's the playing out of that belief that causes the general perception of women as unfunny. (I'm about to speak in rash generalizations here, but since that's the general tenor of discourse on gender relations, let's all just play along.) Men tend to view being funny like they view most things, as a competition. Moreover, it's a competition that every man believes he can win. Something like, say, physical attractiveness is largely a matter of genetics, so there's not a whole lot a man can do to change his place in the hotness hierarchy, but being the funniest person in the room is something every guy can aspire to. (Some of them, in my experience, aspire to an annoying fucking degree.) It's bad enough that they already have to compete against every other dude out there; adding women to the mix doubles the odds against any one dude being the funniest person he knows. The solution is denial and dismissal: women are not funny, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. Say it loud enough and long enough, and it becomes the truth. Or, I should say, "the truth".

For their part, women are culturally inculcated with the belief that their value is determined by how much attention men pay to them. They learn that they should never enter into direct competition with a man or men, as this will wound the fragile masculine ego--there is literally nothing worse for most men than to lose to a woman in any endeavor--and cause male attention to be withdrawn. It never fails to amaze me how even the funniest women tend to eschew humor when in the company of men. This, of course, only strengthens the proposition that "women aren't funny".

I'm thinking about all this in light of a movie I watched this weekend: The House Bunny. I rented it, even though the critical reaction to it was mostly negative, for one reason: Anna Faris. Actually, let's make that one and a half reasons: Faris and Emma Stone. Stone counts as half a reason because the only other thing I'd seen her in was Superbad, in which she had a minor role but definitely caught my eye as someone to watch. Based on her adorably dorky performance in THB, I now think she's a pretty good reason to watch a movie in her own right.

Anna Faris came to prominence (if you can call it that) in those Wayans Brothers Scary Movie movies, of which I have seen nary a one, but she first garnered critical notice in Lost in Translation, one of my favorite films of the last decade. Her role as a ditzy actress (purportedly based on Cameron Diaz) was small, but her performance was dazzling. Wanting to see more of her, I actually watched--and I know I risk being openly mocked for admitting this--the execrable Rob Schneider vehicle The Hot Chick not once but twice when it was on FX one weekend. Then, based soley on the fact that Faris was the lead in it, I rented the little-known and even-less-seen stoner comedy Smiley Face. As stoner comedies go, Smiley Face is no Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, but it was at least as funny as Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and as far as I know it's the only flick in the genre with a female main character (and heaven knows ladies like the wacky weed just as much as gents).

Which brings us to The House Bunny. As I alluded to above, my expectations for it were pretty low going in, so I was quite surprised to find myself laughing loudly and often throughout. Mind you, I'm not here to claim that it's on a par with Dr. Strangelove or Some Like It Hot or [insert other acknowledged comedy classic], but it's one of the funnier films I've seen in the past couple of years, and I watch a lot of comedies, because I like to laugh, and there's not always a lot to laugh about in quotidian life.

This woman is hilarious.

Given my reaction, I thought it would be interesting to do a little comparison between THB and a few of the more high-profile and better-reviewed comedies of the past few years. I went to Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates the reviews of major critics and assigns movies a "freshness" rating that represents the percentage of reviewers with a favorable opinion of them. While I was at it, I also looked at each movie's total box office gross. The movies I looked at were the aforementioned Superbad, Knocked Up, Tropic Thunder, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I picked these because I had seen them, and because I thought The House Bunny was funnier than all of them.

The critics, of course, disagree. I already mentioned that THB was largely panned; it has only a 40% freshness rating. And audiences pretty much stayed away: its total gross was $48 million. On the other hand, Tropic Thunder gets 83% and earned $110 million; Sarah Marshall scores 85% and took in $63 million; Superbad comes in at 87% with $121 million; and Knocked Up is the comedy king with a whopping 91% favorable rating and receipts of $148 million. That is one hundred freakin' million dollars more than THB, kids.

So what's up with this? Why did I enjoy the movie everyone hated (or at least was indifferent to) more than the ones everyone loved? Some of it, I'm sure, has to do with the heightened expectations I had for the well-reviewed movies, and the lowered ones for THB. Some of it could be due simply to the fact that humor is, as I said above, subjective. Maybe my sense of humor is just different. But I can't help thinking that the whole "women aren't funny" thing plays a role here. After all, THB focuses on female characters, with men relegated to small roles as potential love interests. The other movies are, as is the norm, just the opposite. (Tropic Thunder is pretty much just dudes, though that's understandable given its milieu.) Did THB flop, critically and commercially, solely on its merits (or lack thereof), or did the fact that it's about women--who you will remember are not funny--color viewers' perceptions, causing some to see the film itself as unfunny and many others not to see it all? I think you can probably guess where I come down on that question. Oh, it's also worth noting that the majority of film critics are dudes, and that one major defender of the film was Salon's Stephanie Zacharek (a chick, if that wasn't clear).

I don't want to belabor my point (and I know my posts are already too long), but just as a side note: when you look at the channel guide on Comcast, the movies that are listed have star ratings, OK? Well, did you know that Drop Dead Gorgeous gets only one star? That ticks me off every time I see it. For those who haven't seen it, DDG is a mockumentary about a Minnesota beauty pageant. Since Christopher Guest is the acknowledged king of mockumentaries, I tend to compare other entries in the genre to his films. DDG is not as funny as Waiting for Guffman, Guest's masterpiece, but it's as funny as Best in Show and funnier than A Mighty Wind. All of those get three stars from Comcast. Their casts are gender-mixed, but skew toward the male (and were written by a male--jeez, I haven't even gotten into the gender of writers. Suffice it to say that the two writers of The House Bunny had probably synched up their cycles by the end of the project), while DDG's cast is populated almost exclusively by women (and it was written by a woman). COINCIDENCE?! I think not. Plus, come on, there is no way a movie that has Denise Richards dancing with a life-size Jesus doll gets only one star.

I don't know, man. Maybe I'm making misoygnist mountains out of innocent molehills here. All I do know is that Knocked Up sucked ass, and that I'm looking forward to watching The House Bunny again.

I'm in a movie!

Not really. Well, you can see half of my face in one crowd scene if you know exactly where to look. But that's not important anyway. What's important is that Girls Rock!, the (tritely-titled, but still totally rad) documentary about Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls that was filmed in 2005 and released theatrically last year, is out on DVD today. I know Netflix has it; presumably local video stores will as well. It does a pretty good job of capturing the heady atmosphere of Rock Camp and its transformative effect on the girls, and you should watch it.

Well? What are you waiting for?

The Cult of Personal-ity, Movie Edition

When I was growing up in the swamps of Jersey, WABC-TV in New York, a.k.a. Channel 7, provided a huge chunk of my movie education. In the days when TV news consisted of a half hour at dinnertime and a half hour at 11, and the rest of the time we had no fucking idea what was going on, Channel 7 used to have something called the 4:30 Movie. In between The Edge of Night (one of the few 30-minute soap operas) at four and the news at six each weekday, Channel 7 served up a movie, edited to fit into a 90-minute time slot along with plenty of commercials. Typically each week had a theme, like Godzilla week, Elvis week, Beach Party week, or--my personal fave--Planet of the Apes week. For some reason I could not get enough of those damn dirty apes. Anyway, for latchkey kids like my sister and me, a glass of Hawaiian Punch and the 4:30 Movie meant afterschool heaven. (If you remember it as well and are looking for a blast of nostalgia, or if you’re interested in learning more, there’s a site dedicated to it here.) The theme song to the 4:30 Movie was particularly awesome. Check it out…

…and tell me that doesn’t get you TOTALLY FUCKING JAZZED to see a movie.

As I entered my teen years, I became less about movie-watching in the afternoons and more about movie-watching in the wee hours of the morning, particularly on weekends. Fortunately, Channel 7 also had the Late Movie.

The Late Movie seemed to have a fairly small library of films, since the same ones would show up time and again. There were a few that I developed a particular affection for and would watch every time they were on; eventually the rhythm and flow of their scenes became as familiar to me as the songs on a favorite album. I’ve come to think of them as my personal cult movies.

Note that I’m not talking about Cult Movies with a capital C-M, which is to say, movies that are well-known and widely regarded as such. There are certainly a number of films considered capital-C Cult that would appear on my list of favorite movies, like Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Warriors, Dazed and Confused, and Office Space, to give just a few disparate examples. But what makes personal cult movies personal is that while they’re movies that I love, and that I’ve seen so often they have permeated my being such that I still remember and think about them even though I might not have seen them for decades, they’re pretty much wholly unknown to your garden-variety movie-watcher. In other words, while I know that there are others out there who love these films too, I am, among the general populace, and for the intents and purposes of this post, a cult of one.

Whew. Okay, have I explained it to death yet? Anyway, this list was going to be a traditional Top Five, but I’m throwing in a bonus movie, because while I was conflicted about including it, I think everyone deserves to know about it. So here we go:

Top Five Six Personal Cult Movies

#6) Mazes and Monsters. Or, to give it its full title, Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters. Like we’re supposed to go, “Oh, Rona JAFFE’S Mazes and Monsters. I thought maybe it was Jane Austen’s Mazes and Monsters.” This is the one I debated about including, for two reasons: one, it was a made-for-TV movie. But then I realized that there’s another TV movie on the list that I have no intention of leaving off, so that can’t be a disqualifier. Two, it’s the only movie here that I love ironically, and if there’s one thing I don’t want this blog to be, it’s a dank pile of irony-sodden hipsterism. There’s more than enough of that on the internets as it is. The fact is, though, I do love this oh-so-’80s movie (1982, to be exact), from its hysterical premise--role-playing games are an express highway to psychosis for weak-minded youth!--which, believe it or not, was a serious discussion topic back in the day, to the presciently over-the-top lead performance of Tom Hanks, fresh from Bosom Buddies and essaying his first dramatic role. I swear, check out this scene: you can draw a direct line from this to Philadelphia.

Co-starring with Hanks was the apparently-abducted-by-aliens-in-the-mid-’80s Chris Makepeace, star of Meatballs and My Bodyguard, and also known as the poor man’s Robby Benson. Seriously, whatever happened to that dude? Anyway, what makes M & M such a treat is its deadly earnestness in dealing with a threat that is so clearly ridiculous. I can’t resist giving you another clip--it’s only 30 seconds and it neatly sums up the tenor and tone of the movie.

There's a handful of other clips on YouTube, all of which are highly entertaining, but the entire movie is impossible to come by. I am assuming that Tom Hanks has done his utmost to track down and destroy any copies that might exist.

#5) Almost Summer. When Bruno Kirby died a couple of years ago, his eulogists remembered him for a number of roles: as Billy Crystal’s sidekick in When Harry Met Sally… and City Slickers, as the Rat-Pack-loving limo driver in This Is Spinal Tap, as the young Clemenza in The Godfather Part II. When I heard he had passed, the first thing I thought of was this flick. It was released in 1978, and to give you an idea of the kind of star power that illuminated Hollywood in those days, its main draw was Didi Conn, just off her role as Frenchie in that year’s blockbuster, Grease (which I saw four times in the theater, a record that stands to this day). Kirby plays a high-school politico who, when his hot and brainy ex-girlfriend runs for student body president, decides to take a nebbishy outcast and transform him into a powerhouse opposition candidate. That sounds kind of serious, but it takes place in Southern California, so there’s also bikinis and whatnot. What I like about it is that while it’s essentially a teen comedy, it has some interesting things to say about political maneuvering and how candidacies are constructed. As such, it mines some of the same territory as (the far superior) Election, but it lacks the satirical and farcical elements of that film, and so offers a more straightforward take on the subject. Plus, there’s an awesome domino-toppling scene.

This would be a great flick to watch during the current election season, but it is, of course, unavailable. Well, there’s a guy on YouTube offering a free download if you subscribe to his channel, but since I'm both paranoid and a firm believer in the maxim of “You don’t get something for nothing”, I’m a little concerned that that nothing might turn out to be something--like malware, for instance. Anyway, there is this one clip, but be forewarned that the first four and a half minutes is the opening credits, in which nothing happens.

#4) The Last of Sheila. This one’s actually on DVD! Made in 1973, it boasts a cast of all-stars of the era, including James Coburn, Richard Benjamin, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, and James Mason. Written by the rather odd pairing of Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, it’s a fiendishly intricate mystery tale set against gorgeous French Riviera locales. Rich guy Coburn’s girlfriend (the Sheila of the title) is killed by a hit-and-run driver after leaving a party; one year later, he invites six friends who were there onto his yacht for a Mediterranean vacation. Turns out he knows that one of them was the driver who struck Sheila, and he’s created a sadistic game that will force the killer into the open. There are twists and turns galore, and the whole thing is smartly written, well-acted, and highly entertaining. It’s especially fun to watch multiple times, as you begin to notice the many clues, both obvious and subtle, strewn throughout the film. I highly recommend renting this for a rainy Sunday afternoon. There don’t seem to be any complete scenes on YouTube, but someone has put together a six-minute “trailer” that gives you the flavor of the film:

#3) A Little Romance. Sorry to get all girly on you guys, but...well, pardon me for a moment while I squee: *Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!*

OK, I feel better now. Anyway, this George Roy Hill-directed confection from 1979 is one of the most beguilingly romantic movies of all time, no less so for concerning the first innocent romance of two thirteen-year-olds. Diane Lane (making her first appearance on-screen, as well as her first-but-not-last appearance on this list) is an American schoolgirl in Paris, with a neglectful actress mom, a love of books, and an off-the-charts IQ. She meets her intellectual equal in French boy Thelonious Bernard, who uses his gifts to handicap racehorses, and they fall in love. They meet up with a never-hammier Laurence Olivier as an elegant old gentilhomme (or so ’twould appear) who fills their heads with tales of romance, including the Venetian legend that a kiss in a gondola under the Bridge of Sighs at sunset will seal their love for eternity. When Lane learns she’s being shipped back to the US, the trio sets out to fulfill the legend before the young lovers are separated.

I can’t even put into words how much I love this film, but I can tell you it was the first movie I ever bought for my personal library. It can be seen in its entirety on YouTube, but trust me, don’t watch it that way--with its spectacular French and Italian locations, it needs to be seen on a bigger screen than your computer monitor. It’s out on DVD and available through Netflix, and is more than worth a rental if you count yourself a lover of romance.

Oh, before I give you the trailer, I have to make note of the performance of Ashby Semple as Lane’s best friend. Apparently this is the only acting job she ever had, and man does she knock it out of the park, in one of the most hilariously genuine portraits of teen awkwardness ever drawn on film.

#2) Cotton Candy. This TV movie from 1978 (apparently a good year for personal cult movies) was the…um, illustrious Ron Howard’s directorial debut. It stars Charles Martin Smith (a truly underrated actor, if you ask me) as a high school loser who forms a band (called Cotton Candy) with a bunch of other outcasts--a nerdy keyboardist, a surfer-dude guitarist, a Chicano bass player, and a *gasp* girl drummer--in order to take on the local blow-dried, tight-panted, satin-jacketed rock stars at the Battle of the Bands. It also stars Ron’s brother Clint, who makes everything he appears in better, as Smith’s best friend and the band’s manager.

Now, that this movie is pure cheese from start to finish is inarguable. However, keep in mind that there are many types of cheese, and this is no cellophane-wrapped, neon-orange “processed cheese food”. No, not at all. This is like a top-of-the-line, well-aged, perfectly balanced, creamy French brie. It is the king of cheesy movies, and all other cheesy movies must bow to it. Cotton Candy may be an awful band, but they’re awful in the same way that Styx or REO Speedwagon is awful, which is to say that they’re not inept, or abrasive, or boring--they just write tepid arena-rock songs (minus the arena) that make you cringe when you hear them, or when, inevitably, you find yourself singing them days later. (I didn’t say they weren’t catchy. And I must admit, the last song they play in the movie, which I think is called “Born Rich”, is actually pretty rockin’.) On the other hand, their nemesis band, Rapid Fire, is just plain awful. But they’ve got the looks, whereas Cotton Candy, not so much.

It’s true that I will like almost any movie that concerns musicians, particularly if it documents processes like forming a band, writing songs, recording, etc. (except Once--man was that an overrated flick). It’s equally true that I’m especially fond of movies from the 1970s, so Cotton Candy already has two points in its favor. But there’s something special about this movie that’s hard to pin down. It might be that it’s just so genuine, proudly wearing its cheesy soft-rock heart on its polyester sleeve. It might be that the actors never take the project less than seriously--Charles Martin Smith gives an almost painfully real performance as the longtime loser who’s finally found something that he loves and is good at, and Clint Howard will kill you worse than corbomite with how hard he's selling it. Or it might be that this is a movie about something that holds deep meaning for me--the redemptive and transformative power of rock ‘n’ roll music. Whatever the reason, despite--and at least partially because of--its cheesiness, Cotton Candy is a movie that I love with all my heart. I’ve got a tattered copy of it on VHS that I finally transferred to DVD, and I still watch it at least once a year, preferably in the wee hours of a Saturday night/Sunday morning, as of old. It’s not available commercially, but you can watch the whole thing on YouTube--not my preferred method of movie-watching, as I mentioned, but if you can stand it, it’s totally worth it. In the meantime, here’s Casey Kasem with a 30-second rundown:

#1) Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. The movie that inspired this list, it was not a Channel 7 Late Movie selection. Rather, it appeared on Night Flight, a mishmash of music videos, weird shorts, concert films, and the like that ran late at night on the USA Network on Fridays and Saturdays in the 1980s. The way it worked, at least as I remember, was that a four-hour block would be shown twice on Friday, and then the same block would be shown twice on Saturday. This meant that when they showed L&G,tFS--which they did every few months--it would be shown four times in one weekend, and I would watch it all four times. Simply put, this movie changed my life. I went into it a metalhead burnout who thought you had to be touched by God--or perhaps Satan--to play rock music, and came out the other side a radicalized punk who understood that what you said--or even just the fact that you said it at all--was more important than how well you said it. I went into it a hopeless daydreamer and came out determined to make those dreams happen. I went into it with nothing and came out with everything.

If that all sounds a little hyperbolic...well, I was a teenager, so it came naturally. The plot of the film also concerns teenagers, specifically three young women--Corinne Burns (Diane Lane in her second film, following A Little Romance); her cousin Jessica (Laura Dern, also appearing in just her second credited role); and her sister Tracy (Marin Kanter, who sadly seems to have disappeared after this movie)--living dingy lives in a dingy Pennsylvania coal-mining town circa 1980. Trying to stave off the dinginess, they form a punk band called the Stains (and give themselves awesome punk names that sadly are never used after the opening scene: Third-Degree Burns, Dizzy Heights, and Dee Pleted, respectively). When UK punks the Looters come to town as the opening act for washed-up rockers the Metal Corpses, Corinne talks the road manager into putting the Stains on the tour, despite the fact that they’ve only had three rehearsals. The band’s subsequent rise and fall redefine the term “meteoric”.

I had never seen a movie like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains before--I had never even heard punk rock before--and I was totally electrified. There have been a few moments in my life, mostly music-related, where I swear I have actually felt my DNA being rewritten. The first time I saw the scene in which Corinne watches the Looters play was one of those moments. Even now it makes every fucking hair on my body stand on end. Watch this brilliantly shot and edited sequence, and watch the emotions that play across Lane’s face:

In case you weren’t sure who the band members were, that’s Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols on drums and guitar, respectively, Paul Simonon of the Clash on bass, and an almost unrecognizably slim Ray Winstone as Billy, the singer. Also featuring reggae artist Barry Ford as the tour manager, Lawnboy, L&G, tFS did not lack for musical credibility.

The film was never given a theatrical release, nor was it released on video. In the decades after its appearances on Night Flight, the only way to see it was on pirated VHS, or at one of its exceedingly rare festival runs. I never managed to catch it, and so, over the years, the memory of it grew great in my mind. I started to wonder whether, if I was someday able to see it again, it would live up to that memory. Would it be as good as I thought it was back then? When I read a few months ago that the film was finally, finally going to be released on DVD, I immediately pre-ordered a copy from Amazon. And seriously, I never get excited enough about stuff to pre-order it, so you know this was a big deal. It was released last week, arrived on my doorstep a few days later, and I watched it late on Saturday night, just like the old days. Was it as good as I remembered? Well, I have to say that it was not.

It was better. While the young punk inside of me still thrills to the music, the story, and the grubby punk aesthetic, the seasoned movie-watcher I’ve now become realizes that this is just a great fucking movie, on so many levels. Acting-wise, Winstone displays a swaggering confidence in what I understand was his first leading role, and Christine Lahti makes the most of her limited screen time with a gritty performance as Corinne’s white-trash aunt. Dern and especially Kanter ground their characters in teenage realism, David Clennon has a memorable turn as the Looters’ agent, and Fee Waybill of the Tubes is nothing short of awesome as the lead singer of the Metal Corpses. (On this viewing I also noticed for the first time a couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances by Elizabeth [E.G.] Daily and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Brent Spiner, hilariously mustachioed.) But it’s Lane’s movie, and she is absolutely riveting in a role that is diametrically opposed to her character in A Little Romance. If you’re a young actor, watch those two movies back to back and consider it a master class.

Equally impressive, though, is the screenplay by Nancy Dowd, which is littered with killer dialogue and insightful moments. It’s remarkable to realize that L&G, tFS precedes riot grrrl and subsequent movements by a decade, since it so clearly prefigures riot grrrl’s raw sound, confrontational politics, and deliberately contradictory aesthetic (see kinderwhore). Don’t watch expecting a screed or manifesto, though; Dowd’s script is much more sophisticated than that. While it lobs satirical grenades at the media (nothing new there, but I swear, it’s almost like a satire of media satires), music industry greed (see previous parenthetical thought), and bloated ’70s rockers (the scenes with Fee Waybill skewer rock-star stereotypes just as effectively as This Is Spinal Tap in like, one-eighth the time), the screenplay takes equal aim at the Looters, with their presumed genuine radicalism, and at Corinne and the Stains themselves. I don’t want to throw a bunch of quotes at you, but consider this exchange between Corinne and Billy after the Stains have leap-frogged the Looters to take over the headlining spot on the tour, and the multiple levels the script is working on:

CORINNE

You’re sooooo jealous. I’m everything you always wanted to be.

BILLY

A cunt?

CORINNE

Exactly.

The infamously jarring tacked-on ending, filmed when the actors were obviously older, still jars, but it’s one of the few missteps in this nearly flawless film. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains is obviously not for every taste, but now that it’s finally received a long-overdue video release, I feel certain that its cult is destined to grow. If you’re a fan of good acting, satire, swell trash, punk rock music, or all of the above, see it.

No one out here seems to know how to pronounce "Schuyler". What's up with that?

When actors from a TV show I really love appear in other projects, I'm always compelled to watch, for better or worse. Thanks to my abiding love for (the late, lamented) Gilmore Girls, not to mention my enduring crush on her, I've suffered through some pretty terrible movies for the sake of the beautiful and talented Lauren Graham. On the other hand, Scott Patterson's new sitcom on the CW, Aliens in America, has turned out to be surprisingly engaging, even a bit subversive, if not in the same league as the other comedies on my current Awesome List (to wit: The Office, which breaks my heart as frequently as it cracks me up; 30 Rock, whose wicked smart and incredibly dense episodes more than fill the void left by Arrested Development; and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is just fucking funny, though its season is now sadly over).

I've always found Alexis Bledel, the youngest Gilmore Girl, to be rather modestly talented, and her roles outside the show have betrayed a lack of onscreen charisma; nonetheless, it was because of her presence that I recently watched a movie called I'm Reed Fish. It's a pretty standard indie quirkfest that also stars Jay Baruchel (of Judd Apatow's short-lived TV series Undeclared, the follow-up to his equally short-lived Freaks and Geeks, which in case you didn't know is one of the best shows ever). Baruchel, with his skinny limbs, sunken chest, pasty skin, and hipster doofus hairdo, looks like he might have been hired as a low-rent Zach Braff, but is actually a lot more likeable and a lot less douchey than the Braffster. I went into the watching experience with zero expectations, which may be why I actually found the movie kind of charming, though I'm not saying you should watch it. You could get pretty much the same experience by putting Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite in a blender, plus there's a "twist" that the screenwriter clearly thought would lift his film above the indie pack, but which merely deflates its emotional tension.

Baruchel was good as the titular character and Bledel was a dud as his fiancée, but the standout performance belonged to Schuyler Fisk as his erstwhile sweetheart, newly returned from Texas to their quirky Northern California town. The only thing I'd ever seen Fisk in was The Baby-Sitters Club (shut up), which she made as a pre-teen, so this was my first time seeing her as an adult, and she was kind of the anti-Bledel, lighting up the screen with some serious presence. Baruchels' character was supposed to be torn between his two loves, but to the viewer it didn't seem to be much of a contest, unfortunately. I'll definitely keep an eye out for Fisk in future roles.

Anyway, what I really wanted to bring your attention to, gentle (and patient) reader, is not Schuyler Fisk's acting, but her singing. I was sort of peripherally aware that she'd been putting a music career together, in a "that girl from The Baby-Sitters Club movie plays music now? That's kind of weird. Is she doing the acoustic-y singer-songwriter thing? I can't imagine that's going to be any good" way. I have a low tolerance for acoustic-y singer-songwriters as it is, with their solemnity and their introspection and their mellowtude and their acoustic-yness. An acoustic-y singer-songwriter needs to be pretty awesome to catch my ear. So I was quite surprised to be watching an indie movie with zero expectations about anything and to have Schuyler Fisk sing a song in that movie and turn out to be pretty awesome.

Like I said, I'm not recommending you rent the movie, but I am recommending you watch the scene with Schuyler singing on YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=YhpuI8-Ew7g. I've watched it a bunch of times and I cry every time, not because it's a sad song but because it's a really good song, and because her voice is really lovely and pure like a church bell ringing across a wildflower meadow on a May morning, and because she smiles so sweetly when she sings. I'm a little bit in love right now.