Frasierquest 4.20: Daphne Hates Sherry

Daphne: I mean I have been keeping myself on the shelf lately. I'm feeling a little like the good china.

Niles: Someone should be eating off you every day.

The Niles and Daphne romance is mostly a classy affair. Oh, Niles may leer at his beloved and notice when she bends over, but until he's ready to actually make a move he's resigned to appreciating her like a rare and delicate flower, while she remains mostly innocent of the whole thing. But she's not really a delicate flower, and "Daphne Hates Sherry" takes their non-relationship into some tantalizing territory. If a cold winter's night in Season 1 inspired feelings of gooey sentiment between the two, a heat wave and some snappy fighting is sure to lead to hot times indeed.

The Top 10 Films of 2011 and Assorted Miscellany

After a weak 2010, 2011 proved to be a surprisingly good year for movies. To be sure, most of the problems that bedeviled Hollywood at the start of the teens are still there; studios are panicky and greenlighting properties that aren't really movies, distribution for indies is all out of whack, and the MPAA is still taking the bazooka-as-flyswatter approach to internet piracy. But actual filmmakers have risen to the challenge of an increasingly timid industry and turned out entertaining, smart, and sometimes even original films in a number of genres and on scales from the intimate to the epic. Sure, a lot of the good stuff was backwards-looking and nostalgic, but that doesn't mean it doesn't move the medium forwards at the same time. It felt to me that there were more surprises, and while there was surely a lot of crap, I found it easier to avoid.

I was encouraged to see a bit more variety of style. Action movies are apparently allowed to have legible action sequences again, though the Michael Bay approach is by no means dead. The "teal and orange" thing seems to have calmed down a bit. Directors are finding actual uses for 3-D. And the neglected opening credits sequence made a very nice comeback at the end of the year.

The film industry will always have problems and things may get worse instead of better, but at the end of the day, I had a hard time narrowing this list down to 10.

So, in ascending order:

In Theaters: A Dangerous Method

Some people have called A Dangerous Method a change of pace for director David Cronenberg, but I'm not sure that's true. He's a director who's done a lot with Freudian imagery, psychological themes, and sexual "abnormality", so a picture about Freud and Jung is, as far as I can see, right in his wheelhouse. Partly adapted by Christopher Hampton from his play "The Talking Cure" (which was going to be the title but just wasn't sexy enough), A Dangerous Method looks at the interactions and thoughts of the two greats as well as a third, largely unsung figure, patient-turned-psychologist Sabrina Spielrein. Though a bit too unfocused to be as successful as it could be, the film does justice to the intellectual struggles of a young discipline, and is one of those films about smart people doing smart things that's becoming pleasantly more common these days.

Frasierquest 4.19: Three Dates and a Breakup

 Frasier: Niles! I'd offer you a sherry, but I'm fresh out!

We arrive now at a milestone, the first of quite a few hour-long episodes the show would have over the years. These days it's fairly rare for a sitcom to get a bigger-sized slot, but back in NBC's heyday (and yes, such a rare and mythic time existed),  it was common for them to beef up installments of their hit shows by a little or a lot in order to grab more ad revenue. Frasier, being a hit show, got to stretch its legs a few times, and usually with good results; the writers generally used the time to let stories breathe and develop rather than simply cramming in more story. "Three Dates and a Breakup" is an organic use of the format; it doesn't feel padded, or for that matter overstuffed. Rather, it interweaves two storylines that could by themselves make for good episodes, and does so in a way that enhances both.

Random Movie Report #98: Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster

After Monster Zero, Ishiro Honda took a break from the Godzilla series, and the series itself took a vacation. In one of those great stories of Tinseltown, a script originally intended for King Kong was instead messengered over to Godzilla's people, deals were struck, and Godzilla traded Tokyo for the South Seas. It was a move that allowed Toho to save a little money on miniature city sets, and Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster, under the direction of Jun Fukuda, turned out to be a really neat change of pace. It's a jaunty, colorful romp in which four Japanese guys get mixed up with island natives, international terrorists, a giant dinosaur, a giant moth, and one very angry shrimp.

In Theaters: The Artist

The silent film is a form so distinct that it's a shame they just aren't done very often anymore. Whereas filmmakers sometimes will be able to use black and white as an artistic device, few have been able to go as far as eliminate sound. So The Artist is a welcome experiment, a look at vintage Hollywood through the lens of the goofy, sweet romances they made at the time. For someone like me, it's an irresistible approach and I have a hard time being truly objective. The movie just charms; it tells a sweet story with a sweet tone, using the tricks of the silent form without letting the self-awareness get in the way of the emotional content.

Random Movie Report #97: Attack the Block

I'm not sure why Attack the Block didn't get a better release in the US. Sure, it's uniquely a product of British culture, immersed in UK slang and the sensationalized chav gang culture, but alien monsters are a universal language and the hook of "inner city vs. outer space" (see above) isn't exactly hard to explain to a wide audience. In any case, it's a movie you should see, working both as a genre exercise and a riff on social issues. In spirit it hearkens back to the alien-monster epics of the 80s, but has a vibe all its own.