I like Stephen King.  I like Maine in theory.  And while waiting for Fringe to return in the fall, I could use something reminiscent of The X-Files and every other crime fighting science fiction show ever.   Plus, Haven has that one actor from Six Feet Under and 24 with the great goatee that I saw in Santa Monica the other weekend.  Consider me sold.

Ten minutes into the pilot, our fish out of water FBI agent is having a somewhat heated conversation with the local police chief because this murder just isn’t making any sense.  That’s when I recognize the police chief.  He’s the actor who played the coroner and title character in the Canadian crime show Da Vinci’s Inquest.

He’s a little grayer and puffier than when I last saw him bucking the system and fighting for his dead victims in Vancouver, but it’s definitely him.  Although I lived in Canada for several years, the only reason I know and love Da Vinci’s Inquest is because my Canadian grandmother stumbled across it at 4pm everyday on A&E.  The show was amazing, and not just because in Canada, the coroners are a cross between a homicide detective, American coroners who conduct autopsies, and judges who get to hold their own trials otherwise known as inquests.  Every episode was reminiscent of Homicide:  Life on the Street or Law & Order in it’s prime when Sam Waterson aka A.D.A. Jack McCoy played the system anyway he could to get justice.  And Da Vinci himself was a brilliant alcoholic misanthrope who could banter up and down a scene with his teenage daughter.  Anyway, the show was amazing until Da Vinci got into politics, but back to the point– this actor my grandma loves shows up in the middle of a crime scene on this new show Haven.

I immediately call my grandpa’s cell phone, and when he answers and explains that they’re out to lunch with some visiting family, I assure him it’s an emergency and I need to talk to Grandma now.  Very confused and a little concerned, she takes the phone, and I start heatedly describing to her what I’ve just witnessed.  Da Vinci is on a new show that they absolutely have to start watching immediately, like during lunch if possible.  You see, not only do I watch too much television, but I know far too much about other people’s viewing habits.  I know that my grandparents love procedurals, but especially the kind that are a little tongue in cheek and on the quirky side.  Haven is set in Maine with an absurd recurring cast of locals and the occasional death or dismemberment is seen as puzzling and troubling rather than earth shattering, and that’s perfect as they really enjoy something with a body count and a sense of humor a la the long dead Nash Bridges or more recently Castle.

Doesn’t get much better than Don Johnson and Cheech

Except for maybe Nathon Fillion and… can we replace her with Cheech?

Grandpa also has a thing for young, pretty professional woman who are too smart and too sarcastic for their own good.  This describes the blonde protagonist in Haven to a tee.  And Grandma loves paranormal undertones, but nothing as frustrating or vague as the supernatural on a show like Lost.  The strange phenomenon in Haven have a logical and clear if still fantastical explanation by every episode’s end.  PLUS, there’s a recurring role played by Da Vinci!  If the start of a television show tailor made for them isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is!!!!

Grandma laughed, explained to visiting family what my call was about, and handed the phone back to Grandpa.  Grandpa laughed and asked me to email him the name of the show and when it aired so he could record it on his DVR.   A few days later, he emailed me back to say they loved it.  Just as I was starting to feel proud of my recommendation, my television viewing prowess, it hit me.  I watch way too much damn television.

M. Night Shmyalan had his cake, ate it, and threw it up all over the Avatar: The Last Airbender fan base.

The discussion is long over, (after wasting ninety minutes watching this monstrosity who’d want to keep talking about it?), but I’m not over it.  Let’s move past the inert plot, and this is simple as the plot was so inert it’s difficult to remember what happened between Aang breaking out of the ice and Aang scaring off the Fire Nation with a big scary wave.  Let’s forget the horrible casting, and not the token white kids in the clearly Inuit tribe but the fact that every actor was either horribly miscast or horrible.*

*The guy playing Sokka, famous for being part of the sullen Cullen clan in the Twilight movies, didn’t smile once.  This is Sokka, the character responsible for every bad, nay every brilliantly bad pun, failed rescue attempt turned hillarious bit of slap stick, butt of all the best jokes and you cast a kid who can’t smile without risking his entire angsty fanbase!

Finally, let’s set aside the complete lack of character development and pretend it’s convincing when characters become best of friends or fall in love because the segue in the constant  voice over narration tell us they do.

Insta-true love, just add earnest voice over

Based on his earlier films, these are things I expected when I heard M. Night was writing and directing the live action version of one the best television series’ of all time. The Last Airbender was never going to be as epic as say the Lord of the Rings trilogy or even as mildly distracting as the first two Christopher Columbus-helmed Harry Potter films.  But at the very least, I was hoping that M. Night would follow the example set by Tolkein and Rowling camps and realize his job was to do the source material justice as best he could.  But no.  M. Night took it upon himself to “improve” upon the original series.

First, he “improved” upon the pronunciation of nearly all of the main characters names.  Aang rhymes with bang became AHng rhymes with gong.  My heart broke for the two little girls sitting behind me when I heard them whisper, “It’s not AHng, it’s Aang!  Why are they calling him AHng?”  Sokka like “Ima gonna sock-a you!” became Soookah, which reminded my way too much of Bill’s heated pronunciation of Sookie on True Blood.  The most obvious problem with this is he’s not adapting a novel or a comic book where there’s room for interpretation as to how you pronounce Iroh. (Eye-row in the television series where as it sounds like “Emo” with a rolled “r” instead of an “m” in the film.)  In each episode over the course of three seasons, Aang’s name is said about a half dozen times, and that’s a conservative estimate.  The audience knows what these names are supposed to sound like.  Now, I’ve read that M. Night is hurt that people didn’t appreciate his take on the names because he believes he was simply making them more authentic.  “Improving” them if you will.

Next, M. Night took it upon himself to “fix” Aang’s backstory, motivation, and thus, the makeup of his entire character.  In the series, Aang runs away because he doesn’t want to bear the responsibilities inherent in being the next Avatar.  He’s a scared kid who’s not at all ready to grow up and maintain the balance between the four tribes.  This defines who he is, his journey throughout the show, and how he must change and grow to literally save the world.  This didn’t work for M. Night.  If Aang’s biggest problem as a character is that he just wants time to be a kid, to have a childhood, that would have required M. Night showing Aang having fun, goofing around, and playing pranks when he should be training, meditating or visiting the spirit world.  There is no room for any such shenanigans in M. Night’s film.  The simplest way to negate any and all moments of whimsy and child-like wonder are to change Aang’s reasons for running away.  In the movie, Aang flees to the South pole because he learned that being the Avatar means he can never have a family.  Now Aang can be serious and dour, with nothing in his character that allows him to blow off some angst now and again, because he was grown up when he ran away.  He’d just rather be a good father and provide for his hypothetical spouse and children than save the world.

M. Night didn’t stop with redefining the very nature of the main character, in fact, he changed the very nature of the world itself.  In the film, fighting is bad.  Period.  Aang over and over again bemoans the fact that he must fight the Fire Nation.  In the show, fighting is awesome.  It’s not simply a necessary evil.  The main characters either are or become incredibly skilled fighters and they enjoy defending themselves, their friends, and the defenseless.  They enjoy taking on the power hungry Fire Nation.  They’re young and for the first time in a hundred years, they’re leading a rebellion against evil forces that once seemed untouchable.  There’s tangible joy in their struggles, their combat, and yes, their violence against other characters.  In the film, Aang is so overwrought and upset that he has to raise a finger against his fellow man that we’re robbed of the penultimate moment in the final battle where Aang creates a giant water monster and destroys a bunch of Fire Nation ships.  Instead, we get a tidal wave that once it’s scared the Fire Nation ships into retreating, falls with barely a ripple back into the ocean.

Although my expectations for The Last Airbender were low, very low, they weren’t low enough to accommodate for M. Night’s compulsion to fix things that weren’t broken.  I thought the bending fights would look neat rendered in live action, but M. Night’s pension for close-ups with no depth of field rendered them flatter than when they were animated in 2D.  I hoped that the film would renew interest in the original show, but I fear that its unintelligible plot alienated anyone who wasn’t already fan.  Finally, I wanted to see my favorite Sky Bison, Appa.  And maybe I can try to get past “AHng” and the fact that none of the kids ever smiled and the simpering tidal wave at the end, but Appa was in two and a half scenes maybe and we only got one lousy “Yip, yip.”   How do you ruin an effing Sky Bison, M. Night?  HOW!?!

My obsession with Greek started out as a day long marathon on some random Canadian channel when there was thirteen inches of snow on the ground and nothing outside my apartment worth wading through the weather for anyway.  Growing up, I completely missed out on the WB’s golden era, and maybe I’m just making up for lost time with these crazy college kids and their beer pong, but as overthinking often follows obsession, I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that.

For one, the characters are awesome because the writers and actors embrace what is most cliche about them but then also find the person at the root of that cliche.  There’s more to every drunk frat boy and bubbly sorority girl than meets the eye.  Let’s take Dale, for example.  He starts out as Rusty’s Jesus-freak roommate on the Honors Engineering floor Freshman year, and although he preaches against the evils of sex before marriage and homosexuality, he does so not out of a sense of self righteousness, ignorance or arrogance, but because he’s genuinely worried about his buddies going to hell.  It makes him this really sweet character that even when he’s at his most misguided, you root for him to figure out the error of his ways.

Then there’s Ashley, Casey’s best friend and at the start of the series, her second in command at the ZBZ house.  Ashley embraces everything sorority, girly girl, and fashion related.  She firmly believes that Clueless is the greatest movie ever made, that leg warmers can also be worn on your arms, and a bowl of Cheetaritos (I love their fake names for everything) can cure what ails you.  Her boy drama, friendship drama, life drama on many other shows would be flat and superficial, but here it’s not because although Ash has an obsession with accessories, she’s like, the best best friend ever.  She’s loyal and honest and trusting, and for all her naivety, she resents being patronized more than anything.  Like Dale, she’s written as a real person who happens to be into sorority life and big plastic earrings.

Then there’s one of my all time favorite characters on television, Calvin, the gay frat guy.  He’s not awesome because he embraces cliches but because he undermines it every single episode.  The episode where his dad comes to visit him could have been the Calvin comes out to his parents episode.  Instead, they use the same sort of emotional arc, but it’s Calvin coming out to his dad about what he doesn’t want to be anymore.  In high school, he was an all-star athlete, but in college, he doesn’t want to be defined by his hockey skills.  AND his dad wants him to come out to his brothers.  His dad thinks he’s underestimating them, and that if he wants to take full advantage of being in a fraternity, he should trust them so that he can forge relationships that will last a life time.  There are about seventy billion (or maybe more like seventeen) awesome Calvin story lines like this.  His character alone is reason enough to watch this show if you’re not already.

Plus, all the literal one note characters are super awesome.  It’s a really deep cast, and not every character can be uber nuanced, and so we get Kappa Taus like Beaver.  Yes, he’s a dumb, big, frat guy who loves drinking more than anything, but they twist the one joke that defines his character is so often and so well that I love every scene he’s in.  Beth, the ditzy dance major in the ZBZ house, was a little more annoying as the painfully dumb, always smiling sorority girl, but again, they’ve started really mining her character’s potential.  I think the reason that both Beth and Beaver work so well too is that the jokes are always rooted in character driven conflict rather than just set pieces.  Beaver’s one liners often reflect whatever turmoil the KT house is in, and Beth is the obvious mouth piece for the IKI/ZBZ rivalry.

And the ode to Greek will continue on Wednesday with a post about character arcs and the dialogue that surprises me every time.

For the past five weeks, Sundays have been Spielberg Nights with an hour and a half of Taken, the 2002 miniseries about alien abductions as experienced by three families over three generations, followed by The Pacific, the unflinching WWII miniseries set on islands I haven’t had to pronounce since AP U.S. History.  While Taken started out incredibly strong, the transition from the fifties and into the eighties has been rough in such a way that begs this question: With multi-strand, multi-generational stories, do they feel convoluted because they’re rushed or do they feel rushed because they’re convoluted?

The series had me with Dakota Fanning’s precocious voice over, almost lost me with the cheesy CGI little pale green men, and then had me again with the disturbing, shocking end of the first episode.  (Out of nowhere, the military guy who’s been desperate to take over the alien investigation beats his girlfriend’s head in with a rock so that he’s the only one alive with certain evidence of their existence.  It was so brutal that I had nightmares for three days. THREE.)  Everything that happened in the forties and the fifties was beautifully developed, and no matter how many years or major events a single episode spanned, the pacing felt really organic.

For example, the same evil, rock-wielding military guy enters into a loveless marriage with the general’s daughter.  At first, he plays the love-struck young man in complete awe of her, and she, a character who could only be more innocent if she were wearing a nun’s habit, is the utterly charmed. (Seducing her was just a power play to take the alien investigation away from her father.)  Then over the years and just a few episodes, realizing that their marriage is based on lies and deceit, she becomes a bitter alcoholic that he eventually chooses to murder because she’s unstable and knows far too much.  The entire arc of their relationship is portrayed in a few short scenes, and yet we feel as if we’ve suffered through the deterioration of their marriage right along with the alkie wife.  In a word:  awesome.  The character arcs in the seventies and the eighties?  Not so awesome.  They’re poorly plotted, feeling rushed in certain segments and painfully slow and repetitive in others, and it’s never clear why we should care about certain characters one way or the other.

I think the pacing and clarity problems mainly stem from the fact that we’re meant to care about the next generation because of who their parents were rather than because of who they are.  (I think the generation following the baby boomers probably felt the world cared more about who their parents were than who they were as well.  Oh, intergenerational neurosis, you’ve inspired Matthew Weiner so.)  In fact, there’s a secret tryst between members of two families that have hated and punished one another over the years and abductions.  Not only do they lack chemistry, but all the conflict in their relationship rests on the how the man’s father treated the woman’s mother and half-brother while neither the man or the woman seems to care much about how their relative relatives were treated.  So any dramatic tension there rests completely on how invested the audience still is in characters that are no longer on screen.

Also, it doesn’t help the seventies and eighties that we lose Anton Yelchin, the adorable half-alien spawn from the earlier generation, and gain a painful to watch child actor who is clearly not up to the task of running from the government and alien abductors.  In that same family, the wife refuses to believe her husband’s stories about being abducted, and she dismisses his delusions as post-Vietnam trauma finally manifesting.

Is anyone else very, very tired of wives doubting their husbands and parents doubting their children in sci-fi and fantasy worlds?  I think that the stories can go much more interesting places when wives and fathers and brothers believe the people they love.  It’s the harder and more interesting choice.  In this specific instance, it was a mistake to place another doubting wife this late in the series.  We’ve already met one in the same family the generation before, and the dynamic made sense there because the husband she loved went away to WWII and came back damaged and crazy.  In this generation, the husband and wife met in a VA hospital when he was already pretty crazy.  He hasn’t changed.  He’s the same man she fell in love with, and he’s opening up to her.

Whether convoluted or rushed, it all comes down to character.  It feels convoluted when we don’t understand why they’re acting the way they are, and it seems rushed because we feel as if there was a scene that fully explained what was happening left on the cutting room floor.  This middle generation needed its own singular wants and motivations that were in greater conflict with that of its parents’.  They needed to do what that generation tried to do in real life, get out from under the colossal shadow of the baby boomers.

I’m hoping that the second half of the series redeems the murky middle.  Plus, I already know they won’t make the mistake of having lesser child actors follow the brilliant young Yelchin because Miss Fanning is up in the next.  If her fantastic voice over is any indication, she won’t disappoint.

I have a minor obsession with Jaime Oliver’s Food Revolution.  The first thing I do on Saturdays is make a pot of coffee, head to hulu.com, and watch the newest episode.  Over a homemade nachos and Castle Crashers, I was singing the show’s praises to my friend Amanda when she criticized the program for being incredibly exploitative.  She cites the episode where Jamie is appalled when elementary age school children can’t name their vegetables, and her point was that children that age are still learning to put names to all kinds of concepts and objects.  Was he in fact being exploitative?   Am I a fan of one of those reality television shows that entertain their audiences at the expense of the their subjects?

In the most recent episode, Jamie is trying to raise the one hundred and fifty grand it will take to keep the school lunch programs going after he heads back to England, and he approaches Doug Shiels, “the big boss” of Cabell Huntington Hospital, which is the biggest employer in Huntington, for the money.  He too, is very concerned that Jamie is exploiting his town and it’s citizens and says, “It’s good television but it’s done at our expense.”

When he and several board members meet with Jamie in person, Doug Shiels admits that he doesn’t doubt that Jamie’s heart is in the right place, but he doesn’t want the world at large to view Huntington as the fattest city in America and finds it incredibly problematic that the misinterpretation of the 2008 CDC report used to give Huntington that label is what brought Jamie to town. Then, he and his associates lament the fact that he hasn’t approached them for help sooner.  When Jamie emphatically states that he asking for their help now, they’re too upset over the fact that he looked for oversized coffins in local mortuaries to offer any. At this point, Jamie buries his face in his hands and says, “You’re missing the whole point.”

These people concerns with how their town is going to come off in this series and how it’s reputation may suffer further are completely justified.  However, the governing body that dictates which foods are served in school lunches says that french fries are a vegetable.  The kids in the elementary school aren’t given knives and forks, because it’s thought they won’t know how to use them, and so they’re only served finger foods or dishes that can be eaten via spork.  They may not know the names of vegetables yet, but they can name pizza, nachos, burgers, and chicken nuggets because that’s what they’re served day in and day out.  The dominant color in all the school kitchens is golden brown.

This isn’t to say that Jamie doesn’t use exploitative tactics, or that the ends justify the means because it’s incredibly obvious that things need to change.  I for one hate that in the talking head segments, he’ll play up how apprehensive he is about the latest part of his plan working, and then we see it work out beautifully.  Anyone who’s the least bit savvy about how television is made knows these talking head segments are filmed long after the fact.  Moments like those feel incredibly disingenuous and played up simply to generate dramatic tension, but frankly, I don’t think this show needs them.

Although Doug Shiels and his associates are concerned about Huntington’s image, I feel the town comes off very well in the series.  Several of its citizens are defensive to be sure, but Jamie never attacks them and acknowledges that they have every right to be so.  He simply works really, really, really hard to win them over to his side.  (See last week’s episode where he taught a thousand people to cook stir fry in a week to win over the local radio host who flat out hated him.)   The teacher in the classroom where he’d quizzed the kids on their vegetables decided to take matters into her own hands, and when Jamie came back a week later and the students could name each and every piece of produce, he praised her and them.  When he organizes a fund-raising dinner for the school lunch program, instead of cooking the meal with professionals, he asks his local student chefs to prepare the meal.  Gimmicky?  Maybe a little, but he inspires a group of high school students, and he gives them each a moment to shine in the kitchen.  I don’t know that it hurts Huntington’s image to show teachers willing to teach and students willing to learn about food and healthy choices.

While I cringe at certain moments where Jamie is clearly hamming it up, I never feel like I’m watching an episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. He may have chosen the town for it’s nasty label as the fattest city in America, but it wasn’t as if he showed up there and didn’t meet middle schoolers who weighed over three hundred pounds.  And he’s constantly saying that this is a problem throughout the country just as it continues to be a problem in his own.  He very clearly points out that Huntington is a freak accident of a town but endemic of an entire culture.  Plus, it’s pretty hard to argue with someone who wants to take chicken nuggets containing a laundry list of hard to pronounce ingredients with fresh chicken.  I personally find it impossible not to get frustrated along with him when the lunch room serves strawberry and chocolate milk because it’s proven that kids will be more likely to drink milk if it’s sweet.

Exploitative or not, Jamie is figuring out why kids are eating the food they’re eating and how he can change the menu.  He works in the school cafeterias, talks with the frozen food distributors, and recruits high school kids and local families to teach other how to cook simple, fresh meals.  He recognizes the complexity of the issues he’s dealing with, he comes at the problem from all angles, and maybe it’s a good thing that it makes for good television if it gets people thinking about what’s on their plates and in their children’s lunches.   Although, I’d be very happy if he’d stop sullenly saying, “I don’t know if this is going to work,” when he’s got footage in the can proving it does.

The original Parenthood with Diane Wiest, Tom Hulce, a young Martha Plimpton, younger Joaquin Phoenix, and Steve Martin is one of my favorites.  It used to be on TBS or TNT or one of those other cable channels that was around before cable channels were ubiquitous, and it always sucked me in.  Even before I understood exactly what the photos Diane Wiest’s character developed showed her daughter doing with Keanu Reeves, I found it hysterical, heartbreaking and totally honest.  The new NBC series is getting there with the hysterical and the heartbreaking, but they often miss the mark in the honesty department.

While I continued to watch for scenes like the one where over pancakes, Crosby uses all of his good kid material on a very confused Jabar (“You married?” and “What kind of car do you drive?”), somewhere around episode four or five the show found itself.  The conversations were about something, the plots were denser, and there were fewer extended family celebrations.  (With a family that large, there’s no way their schedules would align that often.)  The characters became people instead of characters, and the plots became reminiscent of actual familial struggles rather than of the issue-driven plots of shows 7th Heaven.

“The Big O” was the first episode where I noticed that the show had gotten really good, and I’d have nothing but high praise for that hour of television were it not for the story line from which the episode draws it’s title.  Adam (Peter Krause) and Kristina (Monica Porter) discover that their son has Asperger’s in the pilot episode, and in this episode, Kristina is so overwhelmingly concerned for her son that she admits to his helper she can’t enjoy anything, not even sex.  Adam finds out that she not only talked about their sex lives, but that she said she wasn’t having the greatest time ever, and when he presses her, she admits that she fakes it sometimes.  He obsesses over the idea of her faking it for the rest of the episode.

At this point, Adam and Kristina lose all believability as a married couple.  They’re acting like a couple that’s been intimate for two months, not a couple that’s produced two children.  He really wouldn’t know almost twenty years into their marriage that sometimes his wife fakes it for any one of thousand reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with him?  Even in the actual episode, she tells a near stranger that she can’t let go enough to enjoy anything in life, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Adam, but she doesn’t explain this clearly to Adam himself.  Story wise, I think they make Adam obtuse and offended so that he’ll ask his sister Sarah (Laura Graham) if she’s ever faked an orgasm, she’ll say never, then backtrack when she realizes she’s said the exact wrong thing, and it will be a great scene.  Even the funniest joke in that scene, however, reads false because this is the family that articulately over-shares.  It would have made more sense if she’d punched him in the arm, and said, “Don’t be an idiot,” because of course his wife fakes it every now and then and he should know that by now.

Now, Adam and Kristina being open and honest about their sex life doesn’t really make much room for conflict.  However, what if instead of obsessing over how often Kristina has “lied” to him in bed, he obsesses over trying to help her relax and enjoy sex and it completely backfires.  He makes her self conscious, uncomfortable and even more tense than she was before.  There’s plenty of humor to mine in Adam’s over the top attempts to arouse her or in wanting to talk about their sex lives too much.  She’s harried and frazzled over their son’s well being while he’s obsessed with new positions.  It isn’t until he finally helps her relax about the non-bedroom stuff that she gets her “Big O.”  Maybe I’m overthinking the sex lives of two fictional characters, but that seems more honest.

Adam’s and Kristina’s sex life story line went to all the expected places.  He misunderstood, got offended, and didn’t get over it until he’d proven himself with great sex.  The Julia (Erika Christensen) and Joel (Sam Jaeger) storyline, however, did the opposite.  (Julia is the working mom with the amazing legal career, and Joel is her too perfect house husband raising their daughter.)  Joel spends a lot of time with the mother of their daughter’s best friend, and Julia has been threatened by this super mom from the beginning.  When Julia confronts him about whether or not this woman is flirting with him, Joel admits that she tried to kiss him.  And that is how a married couple is honestly portrayed.  If he’d lied or mislead her in any way, they’re getting divorced.  You don’t have a working marriage, and their marriage has been consistently portrayed as working, and lie or omit anything related to cheating.

The easier thing to do for the conflict of the show would have been for Joel to keep the almost kiss to himself.  Then when the truth gets back to Julia, drama!  Instead, they move past the obvious, and Julia tells Joel that this woman has to be out of their lives for good. Joel points out that their daughter will lose her best friend., to which Julia says, “She’s five years old.  She’ll make a new best friend.”  They didn’t yell, and he didn’t berate her for being heartless because she had a point.  She shouldn’t be expected to live with the idea that he and this woman spend so much time together no matter how faithful Joel is and will always be.  Then when Julia sees her daughter and her best friend with their arms around one another, realizing how genuinely close the two are, she agrees to allow the evil super mom to stay in their lives anyway.  Because this is the more interesting way to play a threat to their marriage, even though Joel and Julia are my least favorite couple on the show, this was one of the strongest episode arcs to date.

This is why it was kind of upsetting this week when they used sitcom plot devices in one of the story lines leading one character to omit the one thing she needed to say in every single one of her most dramatic scenes.  (When I say sitcom plot devices, I mean stories that revolve around miscommunication, not jokes.  See every episode of Friends and Seinfield ever.)  Sarah, the single mom starts dating her daughter Amber’s (Mae Whitman) teacher (played by the adorably awkward and sincere Jason Ritter).  Meanwhile, Amber, who’s had a lot of trouble in school, is inspired to apply herself and study for the SATs because she has a huge, painful crush on this same teacher.

Sarah tells Amber she’s dating the teacher, hears Amber crying through her bedroom door, breaks up with the teacher without explaining why, doesn’t tell her daughter she dumped the teacher, and Amber runs off with her sketchy boyfriend without taking her SATs.  The conflict turns on what Sarah isn’t saying, and it feels completely and utterly false.  She would tell the two people she cares about, Amber and the teacher, exactly what’s going on.  It’s funny how seven episodes in and all that complaining about how much the characters were talking about their feelings, I’m now frustrated by what they don’t say.

In Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen’s head was beautifully bulbous, Alice’s size and dress fluctuations were incredibly fun, and the tea party with its flying flatware was mad indeed.  But did the movie have to be about a dragon and a sword?  There are many great stories about the child who must become the hero capable of slaying the ultimate evil, but Alice’s tale never struck me as one of them.

When Alice arrives in Wonderland, she’s shown a scroll that predicts she will slay the Jabberwocky with the Vorpal Sword on Frabjous day and free all of Wonderland’s anthropomorphic creatures from the tyranny of the Red Queen.  This is a world known and celebrated for its nonsense and absurdity, but this incredibly linear, rigid plot device makes all the really great whimsical story elements feel like dead weight.  What does a tea party with the Hare, Hatter, and Dormouse matter if Alice is no closer to the Vorpal Sword?

Not only do the tea parties, croquet matches, and word play drag because of the Frabjous day prophecy, but Alice herself seems to be going through the motions.  She doesn’t particularly want to kill this thing called a Jabberwocky, but she doesn’t seem interested in doing much else either.  She follows other characters from one stylized set piece to another, blandly shocked by the strange creatures all around her.  Even when she tries to rescue the Hatter midway through the film, she doesn’t seem to care much one way or the other about busting him out of the castle once she’s infiltrated the Red Queen’s entourage.

Most detrimentally of all, the Vorpal sword and the Jabberwocky render the violence less scary.  A final battle between good and evil explains away the bloodshed because killing becomes necessary and right.  In the original stories, however, the violence is truly horrifying because it defies logic.  The Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen behead their minions and subjects at whim.  This is what makes Alice’s adventures different.  She’s not defending Middle Earth or Narnia or Wonderland for that matter.  She’s trying to survive in a world that doesn’t make sense to her and very well may destroy her for no reason at all.

Without this whole sword and dragon business, however, the film lacks direction, structure, a build toward something, and this is the challenge inherent in dramatizing Alice and Wonderland.  As a kid, this was not my favorite Disney cartoon.  Even then, I felt that the story was unsatisfying because it just sort of ended.  Alice doesn’t do anything all that special.  She almost loses her head and then she wakes up.  She didn’t realize that she didn’t need a magic feather to fly like Dumbo, and she didn’t rescue her father from the belly of a whale like Pinocchio.  She just woke up.  I did that every day!

Some kind of narrative must imposed, and here’s an alternative narrative journey for our pale blond heroine.  When the film starts, she is on the verge of adulthood, which in Victorian England means a loveless marriage to a guy with poor digestion.  In the current version, she’s already questioning society and her place in it.  Though her rebellion is subtle (she won’t wear her stockings or a corset and she questions that which she’s supposed to numbly accept), it’s begun before she falls back down the rabbit hole and leaves her less room to change over the course of the film.

What if instead, this almost adult Alice was doing her best to accept her place in the world?  She denies her nature and tries and fails to conform.  When faced with the proposal in front of that horrifyingly white crowd (Tim Burton really knows how to bleach a scene), she panics, flees the gazebo, and falls in after the rabbit.  Then the fact that at first she doesn’t remember her adventures as a child  make sense because she blocked them out trying to become the meek Victorian bride.  Her time in Wonderland is then spent re-embracing the nonsense.  She remembers that her father, “used to think six impossible things before breakfast,”  and realizes she doesn’t want to be meek, subservient, or worst of all, practical.  She becomes the innovative, imaginative, and slightly mad woman she was always supposed to be.

This would also allow all of the other characters in the film to have unique, strange motivations and goals.  Right now, they’re only slightly more animated set pieces than the castles themselves.   They serve to remind Alice of what she has to do on Frabjous day or to try and behead her before she can face off against the Jabberwocky, and that’s pretty much it.  But if there is no looming battle, they could all make a varied and ridiculous demands of her according to their character, and in turn, Alice could realize that their demands aren’t all that more strange or absurd than the demands the real world placed on her. After she’d stood up to the Mad Hatter, Blue Caterpillar, and Red Queen, she’d pinch herself back into the real world, ready to tell all those horribly pale faces to go to hell.

When Alice tells her father-in-law-never-to-be at the end of the film that she wants to explore trade routes to China, I don’t really understand why she didn’t approach him before the engagement party with this idea because she really doesn’t seem that different for having slain the Jabberwocky.  But if she’d been doing her best to embrace the idea of marrying that troll of a man at the start of the film, her decision to travel to China would render her a radically different Alice who doesn’t simply wake up from a nap but becomes a hero capable of slaying anything.

Also, if it hadn’t happened so late in the film, Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter’s CGI-enhanced break dancing was enough to make me leave the theater.  If only the Red Queen had succeeded in beheading him before that terrible, terrible scene.