Preppies of the Apocalypse

Dragged into 2012, kicking and screaming.

2012-01-24T10:14:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year, everyone! New material is right around the bend, maybe, probably, just as soon as I figure out what direction I want this blog to take this year. (I'm currently thinking Miami Vice recaps, because it's always 1984 inside my brain.)

I will be joining you all in 2012 momentarily. Until then, I recommend amusing yourselves by visiting this cool little Tumblr: WTF is Duran Duran wearing? It's visual poetry.

Fun With Keywords: Awesome Taco Edition

2011-12-16T12:16:00.000-08:00

I’m a couple episodes behind on Psych recaps, I know. That situation probably won’t change before the new year: I’m feeling a little down on Psych after a string of mediocre episodes, and ever since finishing up my new book last week, I’m also feeling a little burned out on writing. To buy time while I recharge my batteries, here’s a look at some of the search terms visitors used to find this site over the past few months:

sherilyn fenn lara flynn boyle mädchen amick in jeans
You're thinking of the Twin Peaks-themed cover of Rolling Stone, October 4, 1990.

awesome taco
This search makes me nostalgic. While I’ve had more good Mexican food in New York than I would have expected, I haven’t had a truly awesome taco since moving from Los Angeles.

michael rosenbaum needs a girlfriend
You sound pretty convinced of that. Might want to check with Rosenbaum first. Maybe he already has a girlfriend. Maybe he doesn’t want a girlfriend.

john taylor hair
"hair gel" duran "john taylor"
john taylor from duran duran and his killer cheekbones
john taylor photos beautiful
is john taylor anteater
I get a lot of people looking for information on Duran Duran’s John Taylor. These searchers can pretty much be broken down into three categories: People who think he has great hair, people who are dazzled by his beauty, and people who are intrigued by rumors about his purported prowess in the sack. Hence, anteater.

miami vice john taylor
Okay, four categories: There are also the people who want to see his awesomely trainwrecky Miami Vice cameo. This is from the excellent season two episode “Whatever Works,” in which Power Station is (inexplicably) playing a gig at a local watering hole. John has since claimed he was suffering from a very bad hangover during filming; I’m more inclined to think his hangover is still a few hours off, if you catch my drift. The best part might be Don Johnson’s look of withering contempt for the way the gorgeous, giddy English pop star with no sense of personal space is mucking up his show. (Andy Taylor appears in this clip, too, though apparently nobody trusted him to deliver dialogue.)

why is miami vice so awesome
Here’s ten reasons.

a guy and a woman, they're driving in some european country and they get stopped at some sort of checkpoint, and they get through (i think he's a spy or something) and there are all these people getting killed at the checkpoint by soldiers
Sounds familiar (sounds a lot like Gotcha!, in fact, though I don’t remember anyone getting killed at the checkpoint), but I don’t know. Anyone have any ideas?

elle, an artist, finds an old canoe in woods behind her property. her neighbors consider it abandoned. elle cleans it, paints scenes on it depicting native american rituals, and displays it in her art gallery. flo, the canoe's original owner, claims it, but a court grants elle title. this is
This business again? After a year or so of silence, this search is cropping up once more, maybe a couple dozen times in the last few weeks. My best guess is that it’s maybe a question on a standardized test? It’s still a mystery.

"wild boys" video duran duran costumes
This gives me another excuse to link to that awesome/bizarre clip from the Making of Arena feature where Nick Rhodes, the weird little pixie, happily glues sparkly jewels all over his ruggedly post-apocalyptic leather costume for the “Wild Boys” video. Nick is a strange, dazzling, glorious creature.

battlestar galactica gaeta's gone crazy
Oh, yeah. Poor cute Gaeta went pretty much bonkers there toward the end.

chandra suresh age angela 1961 plothole
You mean the plothole that Erik Avari, who played Chandra Suresh in Heroes, was born in 1952 and Cristine Rose, who played Angela Petrelli, was born in 1951, and thus they would have been entirely the wrong ages in the (lousy) flashback episode “1961,” in which Angela was in her late teens and Chandra was already an adult geneticist? Fair enough, but seriously, man, that episode had much bigger problems than that.

spokane's ugliest building
My vote goes to the dauntingly ugly Sacajawea Middle School, though I’ve always been fond of that totem pole out front. Anyone else care to weigh in?

andy taylor's quotes about nick rhodes in his book wild boy
In terms of Andy's quotes about his acrimonious relationship with Nick in his autobiography, it's hard to top this one from page 266: "Fuck you, you Revlon-wearing tosser." Ouch.

how does duran duran feel about andys book
Good question. John offered up a blandly noncommittal assessment on Twitter a few months back; I can’t find the exact tweet, but the gist is that he thought it was okay. I don’t know if the others have weighed in on the subject or not. I’d be fascinated to know Nick’s reaction.

nick rhodes owns the name duran duran
According to no less of a source than Andy Warhol in his posthumously-published diaries, Nick is indeed the sole owner of the Duran Duran name.

cute mud girls
girls in bathing suits raised in the mud
ladies in mud
naked man getting straddled during massage
Blast it. My review of the “Girls On Film” video has opened the floodgates for massage- and mud wrestling-related search terms.

who does ioan gruffudd look like?
I’m going to go with… The Wire’s Dominic West, though your mileage may vary.

does ioan gruffudd speak in his native accent in the ringer?
Not quite. Andrew on Ringer is English, whereas Ioan Gruffudd is Welsh.

ioan gruffudd shows that men with big noses can be handsome
This is what’s known as a pitch-perfect backhanded compliment, folks.

mom wearing jeans outside
No reason she shouldn’t, is there?

nagel painting woman with sunglasses
Patrick Nagel did a whole slew of paintings of sexy sunglasses-wearing women, but I’m betting the one you’re looking for is this one, right? It’s titled, aptly, “Sunglasses.”

covert affairs jai's cologne
I’m far behind on my Covert Affairs viewing, so I don’t know if Jai’s cologne has been a focal point in recent episodes. I’ll speculate that his signature fragrance is something glamorous and expensive and wordly, with dark undertones and a faint yet lingering after-note of smugness.

sendhil amithab ramamurthy nude
I like the optimism of including the middle name: “Well, my search for ‘Sendhil Ramamurthy nude’ was a bust, but let’s throw in the ‘Amithab’ and see what comes up!”

who played nicky in death deceit & destiny aboard the orient express
That’d be the lovely Sendhil Amithab Ramamurthy.

why is jay wilcox in covert affairs black
Yeah, see, he’s… not. Jai Wilcox’s father is white and his mother is Indian. The Chicago-born actor who plays him, a certain Sendhil Amithab Ramamurthy, is of south Indian ancestry.

"morgan richter nude"
Huh. Well. I suppose I should just be thankful that this site is the first result for that particular search.

the best movie with thomas gibson
By a huge margin: Love and Human Remains.

what does i'm cereal mean, love and human remains
It’s mid-nineties jaded Canadian hipster-speak for “I’m serious.”

psycho beach party thomas gibson academy awards
Sadly, Gibson’s fine work as a domination-craving surfer in Psycho Beach Party went unrecognized by the Academy. He discusses this grievous oversight here.

voltron lassiter
lassiter voltron
You’re looking for my friend Alex Albrecht’s cool short film, which stars Timothy Omundson -- Psych’s Lassiter -- as a Voltron pilot.

jeanetta arnette shoe size
Sadly, not all information -- like, say, Jeannetta Arnette’s shoe size -- is available on the internet.

swinging married couples -- a good thing?
shirtless sailors drunk with black socks on
a childhood friend comes to spent time with now married friend and gets horny
only blind lady photos who are sitting in truck
adorable turkish guy sit on the stairs
haha im using the shaving creams
I’m throwing all of these searches onto the “unanswerable” pile, too.

Psych: In For a Penny

2011-12-01T09:33:00.000-08:00

A crew of masked men break into Lompoc and help a legendary safecracker named Jimmy Fitz escape. This, combined with a number of high-profile thefts of safecracking equipment, lead the Santa Barbara Police Department to believe someone’s planning a huge robbery.

Meanwhile, Juliet’s thirtieth birthday is fast approaching. Shawn and Gus secretly invite her estranged con-artist father Frank to her party. And it’s William Shatner! You know what Psych does better than any other television show? Awesome stunt casting. Shawn’s parents are, of course, played by Corbin Bernsen and Cybill Shepherd, Gus’s folks are played by Phylicia Rashad and Ernie Hudson, and now we’ve got Shatner. I mean, come on. That’s awesome. Anyway, Frank and Shawn immediately hit it off and form a mutual admiration society, while Juliet steams and fumes that Shawn went behind her back to seek out her father, whom she hadn’t seen in fifteen years.

Jimmy Fitz teams up with a ne’er-do-well named Chad Emigh, who used to be one of Frank’s old cohorts. Against Juliet’s explicit wishes, Frank tags along with Shawn and Gus and the SBPD to find out what mischief Jimmy and Chad are plotting.

Shawn figures they’re going to strike at the upcoming Santa Barbara Coin Expo, at which a 1943 bronze penny worth two million bucks will be on display. With Frank’s help, they figure out that a newly-hired electrician, Kevin, has been supplying Jimmy and Chad with information about the layout of the Expo.

While the SBPD is occupied with staking out the Expo, the penny gets stolen from a safe-deposit box across town. Shawn looks at surveillance photos from the robbery and recognizes one of the culprits as a friend of Frank’s. Realizing that Frank conned them all and stole the penny himself, Shawn and Gus confront him and give him until the next morning to return the penny. Sure enough, an anonymous tip the next day leads to the arrest of Chad Emigh and the retrieval of the penny. Even though Chad refuses to give up the names of his criminal associates, it dawns on Juliet that her father was responsible for the theft.

So Juliet has it out with Frank, and Frank reveals that even though he was mostly absent during her childhood he’s been secretly keeping an eye on her through all the important events in her life, and I swear, this scene takes about forty-eight minutes or something. Really, it’s long. And dull.

Chad gets released from custody due to the circumstantial nature of the evidence against him (I mean, they found the stolen penny on the bedside table in his hotel room, right next to his sleeping head, but apparently in Santa Barbara that’s not enough to hold him). Concert tickets found in Chad’s hotel room suggest to Shawn that Chad’s been staking out the Santa Barbara Bowl, probably for another big heist. So Juliet and Lassiter, plus Shawn and Gus and Frank, arrive at the Bowl and, with Frank’s invaluable help, arrest Chad and his crew.

And it all ends with a surprise birthday party for Juliet at the Psych offices, complete with a bouncy castle. Frank and Juliet repair their relationship somewhat, and Gus and Shawn convince Frank to return the valuable penny, which, it turns out, he’s stolen again.

Eh. Kind of a dull episode, honestly, despite the not-to-be-underrated appearance from Shatner. I don’t have cable at this time, and they’re not showing the latest episodes online for free anywhere, so I’ve been shelling out two bucks per episode to watch them on Amazon On Demand this season. I’m not altogether sure I got my money’s worth from this one; for anyone in a similar situation, I’d recommend you skip it and instead just listen to Shatner’s totally awesome cover (with support from Joe Jackson) of Pulp’s “Common People." You’ll be glad you did.

Gus’s Fake Name:
Ingle Woodz

Awesome Eighties Reference:
(Frank claims he’s giving up his criminal ways.)
Shawn: Do you honestly think we were born on the fourth of July?
Gus: Or yesterday?
Shawn: Or to run?

Psych: Shawn Interrupted

2011-11-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bernie Bethel is arrested for murdering his assistant. Lassiter, who single-handedly cracked the case, throws himself a victory party, complete with a crepe station and festive crime-scene photos hung above the punchbowl. His victory is short-lived, as Bernie is soon found not guilty by reason of insanity and is sent to a posh mental hospital instead of prison. Lassiter offers to go undercover as a mental patient (“I’ll grow a beard and wear nothing but tweed!”) to prove that Bernie is faking his condition. Henry decides to send Shawn in his stead, as Shawn could believably pass as someone in need of institutionalization (Shawn: “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Gus: “I wouldn’t”).

Shawn quickly makes himself at home in the luxurious hospital (“Dude, they have electronic bidets!”). Posing as an orderly, Gus goes undercover as well. He soon strikes up a highly inappropriate relationship with an attractive patient, Vivian (Julianna Guill), who is afflicted with multiple personality disorder. The hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Abel Elliott (Gerard Plunkett), is the only outsider aware of Shawn’s and Gus’s true identities.

Shawn befriends Bernie, who does indeed seem legitimately insane. This is because Bernie is played by Brad Dourif, who always seems insane. This is an overwhelmingly awesome bit of casting. Dourif has been in too many films to list here -- if you don’t know him from the Chucky films, you surely know him from Lord of the Rings -- but for the purposes of this episode, the most relevant gig on his résumé would be his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Fun fact: Brad Dourif also starred in Toto’s “Stranger in Town” video.

Awesome bit of casting #2: The hospital is run by the brusque and no-nonsense Nurse Lavender McElroy, who is played by Molly Ringwald. Molly Ringwald! Molly is squandered a bit in this role, actually, but it’s still awfully good to see her.

Shawn grows to believe Bernie is legitimately insane. More, he realizes Bernie’s degenerative arthritis means he couldn’t have strangled his assistant. He theorizes that Dr. Elliott keeps deliberately mixing up Bernie’s anti-psychotic medications to keep him incoherent, at the behest of an unidentified third party. Shawn’s theory is burst when he finds Elliott dead, hit over the head by an unknown assailant. Gus, meanwhile, has been fired for hanky-panky with Vivian. With Elliott dead, no one at the institution realizes that Shawn is only pretending to be insane…

…Y’all can see where this is going, right? Before you know it, Shawn finds himself strapped down to a gurney, bellowing at the top of his lungs to a couple of bemused psychiatrists about how he’s really a psychic detective working undercover for the Santa Barbara Police Department. Hey, I totally saw this episode of 21 Jump Street! It guest-starred Christina Applegate at the height of her Married: With Children fame. 21 Jump Street is one of those shows that really doesn’t hold up over time, but man, I loved it while I was growing up.

Anyway, with Gus’s help, Shawn manages to break Bernie out of the asylum. They confront the real culprit: Nurse McElroy, who, under the orders of Bernie’s devious younger brother Daniel, has been altering Bernie’s medication to keep him delirious. Daniel had tricked his mentally-ill brother into giving him control of his massive fortune; after Bernie’s assistant found out about this, he murdered her and framed Bernie. When Dr. Elliott uncovered this plot, he murdered him as well.

A gun-toting Daniel arrives at Nurse McElroy’s place and threatens to murder Shawn, Gus and Bernie to cover his tracks. Bernie’s diagnosed phobias include a severe fear of saxophone music, so Shawn slips a Kenny G. album on the CD player and blasts “Songbird.” Bernie freaks out and overpowers his brother.

And all ends well. Not one of the stronger episodes, actually -- is it me, or have we had a disappointingly high ratio of clunkers to good episodes this season? -- but I’ll give it a few brownie points for the casting of Dourif and Ringwald and call it even.

Psych: Dead Man’s Curveball

2011-11-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

When the hitting coach of Santa Barbara’s minor-league baseball team, the Seabirds, drops dead of a heart attack brought on by an amphetamine overdose, Coach Mel Hornsby (Danny Glover) hires Shawn and Gus to investigate. To get close to the team and uncover the source of the drugs that killed the coach, the guys go undercover: Shawn poses as the new hitting coach, and Gus as the mascot. Intermittent hilarity ensues.

While searching through the former coach’s home for evidence, Shawn accidentally drinks amphetamine-laced water (and begins acting only slightly more hyper and spastic than usual) from a water bottle belonging to hitter Izzy Jackson (Ken Luckey). Shawn initially theorizes that Izzy was trying to enhance his athletic performance with amphetamines and swapped water bottles with the hitting coach by mistake. Shawn and Gus hit the Seabirds’ favorite watering hole to find evidence that wild-child Izzy is doping. After hearing that Izzy has a habit of pissing his pants while drunk, Shawn and Gus buy him multiple rounds of drinks, wait until he passes out, and steal his urine-soaked jeans.

Izzy’s pants test negative for amphetamines. Suspicion next falls on genial Cal Eason (Battlestar Galactica’s Michael Trucco, the most ruggedly handsome Cylon of them all), Shawn’s longtime idol, who’s been kicked out of the majors and down to the minors for his bad knee and who openly resents Izzy’s unprofessional behavior. Then, for some reason or another, Shawn stops suspecting Cal and starts sort of randomly hurling accusations around the team, which results in a huge, messy, full-team brawl in the middle of a game, after which Izzy is found dead from a blow to the head with a baseball bat.

(Shawn isn’t really at the top of his game this episode. As near as I can tell, he spends the whole time accusing everyone he meets in rapid succession, until he more or less accidentally finds the right culprit. Not his best work. There is also very little Lassiter in this episode, and only a smidgen of Juliet, which is a crying shame. In spite of all that, it’s a perfectly agreeable little episode. Not the best, not the worst.)

The Santa Barbara Police Department takes kindly old Mel, who was last seen angrily heading after Izzy, into custody. However, Shawn (again) suspects Cal, who uses the same kind of bat as the one that killed Izzy and who has just been transferred back to the major leagues… look, once more, I find myself trying to recap a Psych plot in which I had zero vested interest. Again, this certainly isn’t a bad episode, but really, the plot isn’t worth much scrutiny. The culprit turns out to be the team’s general manager, Neil (Matt Kaminsky), who’d drawn up a short-sighted contract guaranteeing Izzy a transfer to the majors or a huge payout after sixty games. With the payout time rapidly approaching, Neil originally tried to sabotage Izzy with amphetamines in his water bottle; when that misfired, he resorted to murder.

A cornered Neil holds Shawn and Gus at gunpoint and threatens to kill them. He’s stopped by the timely arrivals of: a) a bat-wielding Cal Eason, b) Henry, and c) baseball legend Wade Boggs, who steps in to replace a fired Shawn as the hitting coach. I know zilch about professional baseball, but Boggs once did a funny turn on a long-ago Simpsons episode, so he’s okay in my book.

Awesome Eighties references:
Shawn does a long riff on Kevin Costner’s famous “I believe in…” speech from Bull Durnham., which manages to incorporate a Silk Stalkings reference. Oh, sure, Silk Stalkings aired in the Nineties, but didn’t it seem like an Eighties show?

In response to his rioting team, Mel mutters, “I’m getting too old for this crap,” a sanitized version of Danny Glover’s Lethal Weapon catchphrase.

Duranalysis: Girl Panic!

2011-11-08T15:49:00.000-08:00

Duran Duran just released their dazzling, gorgeous, nine-and-a-half-minute Jonas Akerlund-directed video extravaganza for “Girl Panic!”, in which a flock of big-name supermodels of days past -- Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova, Helena Christensen, and Yasmin Le Bon -- play John, Simon, Nick, Roger, and, uh, someone else. Meanwhile, the boys themselves portray an assortment of peripheral characters -- bellhops and drivers and journalists, etcetera. It’s cheerful, decadent, sleazy good fun.

Oh, sure, I originally intended to limit this Duranalysis series to the videos made between 1981 and 1985, but “Girl Panic!” is certainly worthy of an in-depth examination. Here we go:

Naomi Campbell, decked out in a leather corset and teetering stiletto booties and looking like a gajillion bucks, wakes up in a four-poster bed in an luxurious suite in London’s Savoy Hotel.

There’s an empty champagne bottle on a nearby dresser and a couple of scantily-clad women slumbering beside her. She slides out of bed and slinks her way through the suite, navigating around empty champagne bottles and several more passed-out scantily-clad women, most of whom are dressed in some combination of high heels and couture bondage gear. Somebody had herself a fun evening.

Meanwhile, Eva Herzigova glides her way around London, her glittery stiletto sandals dangling from one hand. This is intercut with a bit where she introduces herself as Nick Rhodes to an interviewer, who is played by the real Nick Rhodes. I was going to describe him as “the inimitable Nick Rhodes,” but Eva actually does a damn good job of capturing Nick’s odd mixture of wit and genial snobbery. Nick is still my dream dinner-party guest (just imagine the wine he’d bring!), but in a pinch, Eva could fill in for him nicely.

(While I’m willing to believe this video depicts Duran Duran’s day-to-day lifestyle with staggering verisimilitude, one detail rings false: Can anyone picture Our Nick padding barefoot along the banks of the Thames, the way Eva does here? Even if his feet really, really hurt, he’d keep his shoes firmly on. Suffering for fashion and whatnot.)

We’re introduced to the rest of the band: Helena Christensen, no stranger to starring in iconic music videos, plays Roger, while Naomi is Simon. Of course.

The real John Taylor interviews Cindy-Crawford-as-John-Taylor, who explains that, as Duran Duran has switched guitarists from time to time (Andy to Warren to Andy again to Dom), the band members never know who’s going to show up to play…

…Which segues into the introduction of Yasmin Le Bon. Yasmin informs viewers that she’s not a member of Duran Duran. She’s credited as simply “The Guitarist,” which is as graceful a way as any of getting around the whole Andy problem.

Eva-as-Nick tells Interviewer Nick, “I wrote the last song. I take full credit for it.” According to interviews on the nifty making-of DVD that came enclosed with the All You Need Is Now CD, the lyrics for “Girl Panic!” did indeed spring from Nick’s boundlessly entertaining brain. Nick, by the way, also came up for the idea for this video, which: no kidding. I mean, of course he did. The gorgeous extravagance, the hilariously louche behavior, the gender-bending, the mild kink, the vast amounts of champagne, the pretty sparkly things… this video has Nick’s impeccably-manicured fingers all over it. If you cracked open Nick’s head*, I’m pretty sure this video would spring out, fully formed.

*Please don’t crack open Nick’s head.

When informed by Interviewer Nick that there have been some “truly shocking reviews” of the band in the past, Eva-as-Nick replies, “Damn! I’d love to read all of those.” Oh, me too, Eva. Me too.

John Taylor chauffeurs Cindy-as-John around London in a Rolls. In the backseat, Cindy swills champagne straight from the bottle, sticks her head outside the window to let her glorious mane of hair billow in the breeze, and shows more vibrant personality in these few seconds than she did in all ninety-one exceedingly tedious minutes of Fair Game.

Interviewer Roger asks Helena-as-Roger, “Any addictions?” Helena blithely replies, “There were some episodes, but I’d rather not talk about them.” Cut to Helena-as-Roger passed out atop of stack of Louis Vuitton trunks on a luggage trolley, being wheeled up to her suite by Nick, who is kitted out in the fanciest goddamned bellhop uniform on the planet.

This could be a quick callback to the sexy bellhop in the “Union of the Snake” video, I suppose, though it seems far more reasonable to assume Nick was just looking for an excuse to wear a spiffy uniform and an adorable little cap.

Abandoned by Bellhop Nick, Helena-as-Roger tumbles off her stack of luggage. Finally awake, she looks around in confusion, then staggers to the phone and dials up room service for more champagne. She teeters drunkenly around the suite, taking Polaroid snapshots of the various passed-out girls. Oh, Helena. I think I love you. Or maybe I love Roger? It gets difficult to sort out after a while.

A room service waiter -- that’d be our man Simon Le Bon -- arrives. He’s bearing a champagne bottle and a tray of glasses. When Helena grabs for the bottle, the glasses topple.

The various passed-out scantily-clad girls in the suite begin to wake up. They stumble around with champagne bottles and trip over their high heels and grope each other. I can’t even imagine the champagne budget on this video, but it must have been staggering.

Cindy and Yasmin slink into an elevator with Roger, who’s clad in the livery of a hotel employee, and proceed to paw at him.

When the elevator reaches the appropriate floor, the doors slide open, revealing a stunned and disheveled Roger. You know, this video gets impressively weird when you start thinking about all the gender-reversal and role-switching. So, ah, John just got frisky with Roger in an elevator, right?

Nick -- the real Nick -- continues his interview with Eva-as-Nick: “Now, you have been described as the world's first metrosexual--” Eva cuts him off with a dismissive reply: “I don’t read that stuff, I don’t see that.” A pause, then: “I love my shoes.” Eva Herzigova, you just won the video.

Interviewer John proffers a few genial compliments about Duran Duran to Cindy-as-John; Cindy waxes nostalgic for the days of shoulder pads and big hair. Look, you two, you’re both gorgeous, you both have hair that could incite riots, and I love you both to bits, but compared with the drunken debauchery of Helena’s Roger and the smartest-airhead-in-the-room zingers of Eva’s Nick, you need to raise your game.

Helena-as-Roger: “I don’t really hang out with the rest of the guys all that often. They're a bad influence.”

The band -- the sexy supermodel version of the band, at least -- assembles for a photoshoot for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar UK, under the direction of fashion powerhouses Dolce & Gabbana.

In lightning-fast flashes, we can see that it’s actually Roger, John, Simon and Nick being photographed.

Post-shoot cocktail party: Roger fixes drinks behind the bar while John, Nick and Simon mill about. The party guests consist of their supermodel alter egos and, yes, scantily-clad women in lingerie. More champagne is consumed -- much more -- and the crowd becomes orgiastic. Of this video, a friend tweeted at me that he felt “kinda drunk after watching it.” To which I will now reply: Yes, exactly, but it’s a good kind of drunk.

The band -- the supermodel version -- perform on a Swarovski crystal-bedazzled set in front of television cameras, which are operated by sexy pantsless women in stilettos. No working model in London went unemployed on the day this video was shot.

As at the Harper’s shoot, we see a few ephemeral shots of the real band mixed in with all the footage of the supermodels. Check out the image in the monitor in this shot:

The snazzy and elegant end credits include this very important disclaimer: "NO SUPERMODELS WERE HARMED DURING THIS PRODUCTION."

And it all ends with Bellhop Nick wheeling a passed-out Helena-as-Roger through the Savoy’s opulent lobby on a luggage trolley.

Whew! Giddy stuff. After that super-saturation of glamour, I’m exhausted, a bone-deep fatigue that can only be driven away with vast quantities of champagne and a ride in the back of a chauffeured Rolls. Outstanding job, boys.

Psych: The Amazing Psych Man and Tap-Man, Issue #2

2011-11-03T11:09:00.001-07:00

Hey, I really, really liked last week’s awesome Halloween-themed Psych. I thought it was an instant classic, with one of the tightest, zippiest scripts we’ve had in a long time.

I mention this mostly because I was a little sour on this week’s episode, and I just wanted to remind myself that I really do love this show.

A masked vigilante known as the Mantis is in Santa Barbara, where he’s been befuddling the Santa Barbara Police Department by repeatedly beating them to crime scenes and apprehending members of the Camino drug syndicate. I don’t want to be too harsh on this episode, because it’s got some shining moments. Case in point: the snazzy revised opening credits, which are illustrated comic book-style.

Full stop, though: How is it possible this episode doesn’t contain a single overt reference to M.A.N.T.I.S., the mid-nineties Sam Raimi-produced FOX series, which starred Carl Lumbly as a vigilante superhero named, yep, Mantis? Under usual circumstances, M.A.N.T.I.S. is exactly the sort of odd pop-culture artifact that would be right up Psych’s alley.

Anyway, Shawn quickly becomes jealous of the attention the SBPD -- and Juliet in particular -- pays to the Mantis. (Naturally, he scoffs at this notion: “How insecure do you think I am? Seriously, how insecure do you think I am? I need you to tell me.”) Determined to uncover the true identity of the Mantis, Shawn initially suspects a new transfer to the SBPD, Officer Scott Reynolds. Hey there, Joey McIntyre! I’ve never had anything for or against New Kids on the Block (nice boys, I’m sure, but they’re no Duran Duran), but Joey, I have to say, looks pretty darn good these days. He’s sort of squandered in this episode, relegated to a not-terribly-uproarious recurring gag where he thinks Shawn is hitting on him (really, Psych, if you’re going to use “It Gets Better” as a punchline, make absolutely sure the joke is worth it) , but I’d be happy to see him stick around the SBPD for subsequent episodes.

There are some Psych plots I will lovingly recap in excessive detail, and then there are some to which I’ll just give a lick and a promise. This falls into the latter category. In brief: In retaliation, the Camino drug syndicate frames the Mantis for murder. In his quest to prove the Mantis is innocent, Shawn uncovers his identity -- the Mantis is Reginald (Miles Fisher), a handsome and distinctly Clark Kentish young reporter. With the help of Shawn and Gus, the Mantis takes down the Camino syndicate… but then absconds with ten million dollars of drug money. Gus and Shawn, disguised as their superhero alter egos Tap-Man (tap dances and throws sand in the faces of miscreants) and The Catch (wears a catcher’s protective gear), manage to bring the Mantis to justice.

There’s a whole lot of funny stuff in there -- for instance, there’s an adorably clever fight scene which takes place in front of conveniently-placed signs reading “POW” and “ZAP” and “BIFF” -- but too many jokes fall flat or, worse, grate on the nerves. You know how ninety percent of the time Shawn’s whole irresponsible man-child routine makes him seem endearingly flawed, but then there’s that other ten percent where he just seems like sort of a douche? Yeah. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Everyone’s allowed the occasional misfire. Next week, Psych. Next week. Bring your A-game.

Awesome Eighties reference:
Distracted by thoughts of the Mantis, Shawn fails to pay attention to Juliet. Juliet: “I just gave you a setup containing Mr. T, Crockett, and a word that rhymes with ‘Mork,’ and I got nothing. Not even a Battle of the Network Stars joke.”

Lassiter-based awesomeness:
Lassiter, expressing his reluctance to give Shawn credit for solving the case: “I would rather spend the rest of my life in Lilith Fair.”

Gus’s fake name:
Watson Williams.

Psych: This Episode Sucks

2011-10-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

So Lassiter is in a bar, swilling Jack Daniels and trying to unwind after a rough day, when a gorgeous blonde named Marlowe (Kristy Swanson, the original Buffy herself) sidles up to him and starts flirting outrageously. They bond over their mutual love of Clint Eastwood. While Lassiter orders another round, she slinks off to the ladies’ room… and slips out the window and disappears, leaving him devastated.

Shortly thereafter, a young man named Hamilton Dean is murdered by a hooded figure in a dark parking lot. In the morning, Juliet, with Shawn and Gus in tow, examines the crime scene. Hamilton’s body has been drained of blood through puncture wounds in his neck and both wrists, which leads a delighted Shawn and Gus to conclude he was attacked by a vampire. When a hungover and morose Lassiter arrives at the scene, he notices that Hamilton is clutching a necklace identical to the one Marlowe wore the previous night.

Lassiter heads to a local haberdashery shop, which, in one of this episode’s many moments of sheer brilliance, is named Bling Crosby. He talks to the young clerk (Van Hansis), but it’s a dead end: The necklace is a popular item, and there’s no record of past sales.

While investigating Hamilton’s murder, Juliet and the boys hit a gloriously decadent/campy/ridiculous vampire bar. Shawn is dressed as Tom Cruise’s Lestat from Interview With the Vampire; Gus is kitted out as Blacula (Shawn: “No one remembers Blacula, except for us and Quentin Tarantino”). Juliet grills the vamped-out bartender about any suspicious recent happenings; he tells them about a suspicious call he received from a customer looking to purchase a pint of blood. And hey, the bartender is played by Corey Feldman! Excellent. I’m pretty firmly pro-Feldman. He’s only got a quick cameo, but he looks good and does a fine job, which is great to see.

(Digression: Tuesday night, I was at the Duran Duran concert at Madison Square Garden, which, as you might expect, was pretty much nectar for my Eighties-loving -- and very specifically Duran-loving -- soul. Anyhoo, the opening act was the Neon Trees, whose video for their song “1983” features a cameo by Feldman, in character as Edgar Frog from The Lost Boys, which is very cool.)

Lassiter finds Marlowe’s address by pulling one of her fingerprints off the face of his watch. He arrives at her house and demands to see her necklace, which she produces without a fuss. When he grills her about her whereabouts at the time of Hamilton’s murder, she claims she was sitting in the parking lot outside the bar, silently watching Lassiter.

Juliet traces the call the mysterious blood-seeker made to the vampire bar, and discovers it came from Marlowe’s house. She and Shawn and Gus show up and surprise Marlowe and Lassiter. Since Marlowe has an alibi for Hamilton’s killing, they figure the call must have been placed by one of Marlowe’s three male roommates: Eddie, Jake, and Lucien. (Shawn and Gus and Juliet, all in unison: “Where’s Lucien?”)

Juliet interrogates Lucien at the SBPD headquarters. It’s Buffy’s Tom Lenk! Thus bringing the number of vampire-centric guest stars to three! Lucien also has an alibi for the murder: He was working at King Putt, the local mini-golf course. Suspicion turns to another of Marlowe’s roommates, Ed. During their search of the house, Shawn noted that Ed had an appointment at the local blood bank. Shawn and Gus drag Juliet along to investigate.

Whilst they’re all at the blood bank, a mysterious cloaked figure smashes a refrigerated case and steals a supply of blood, then escapes, leaving a press-on fingernail behind.

Once more, suspicion falls on Marlowe, who is now missing one of her fake nails. Juliet, Shawn and Gus, plus Henry and McNab, show up on Lassiter’s doorstep and interrupt his romantic evening with Marlowe (braised elk loin and candles shaped like hand grenades are involved). Another search of Marlowe’s house uncovers a supply of stolen blood in the freezer. She confesses to the blood blank theft, claiming she’s been selling it on the black market, but insists she’s innocent of Hamilton’s murder.

Even though Marlowe is now in police custody, a man named Ron gets attacked in the parking lot of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Bagels (Psych writers, you are on fire this episode) by a cloaked figure, who tries to steal his blood. While questioning an injured Ron at the hospital, Shawn looks at his medical chart and discovers Ron, like the murdered Hamilton, has O-negative blood, which Ron’s doctor (erroneously) claims is the rarest type. Okay, Psych writers, I’m going to have to retract what I just said about you being on fire, because that was a rookie mistake. People with O-negative blood types are universal donors, which makes it a highly sought-after type, and it’s certainly rare, but it’s not the rarest.

Ron’s doctor goes on to say that only about two dozen people in Santa Barbara have O-negative blood. Huh -- about six and a half percent of the US population has O-negative blood, actually, so unless there’s a grotesque statistical anomaly here, that means the population of Santa Barbara is… what, around 360 people? Anyway, the doctor brings up a list of the O-negatives, which Shawn covertly scans -- Marlowe’s brother Adrian is on the list.

Shawn (wildly) deduces that Adrian has Von Willebrand disease and thus needs frequent blood transfusions. Hence, he’s been stealing blood from all possible donors. Lassiter also has O-negative blood, which is why Marlowe attempted to seduce him in the first place; genuinely attracted to him, she was unable to go through with draining his blood, which is why she deserted him at the bar.

Adrian, who turns out to be the clerk from Bling Crosby, bursts into Lassiter’s house, chloroforms him, ties him to a chair, and prepares to drain him. When Juliet, Shawn and Gus arrive, they discover Lassiter has already easily overpowered and arrested his assailant (Lassiter: “I’ve slowly and methodically been building up a tolerance to chloroform over the past fifteen years”).

And Lassiter visits Marlowe in jail, where they bond some more over Eastwood films. Unable to come straight out and verbally express his feelings for her, Lassiter holds a sign up to the glass separating them: It’s a heartfelt note explaining that he’s willing to wait six to eighteen months for her.

Fine stuff. Plenty of Lassiter is never a bad thing, and when it’s combined with some fun guest stars and the sharpest script of the season thus far, it makes for one of the strongest episodes in a long while.

Lassiter-based awesomeness:
It was a Lassitercentric episode, so there were a bunch of gems. Here’s the cream of the crop:

Bartender: What’s your poison?
Lassiter: Humanity.

In answer to Marlowe’s request to tell her more about himself: “I’m somewhat recently divorced, I believe there’s no little to no room for interpretation when it comes to the United States Constitution, and I have an unusually high threshold for pain.”

Upon learning that Marlowe really does have feelings for him: “The only thing that compares is the rush I felt when I heard Chuck Norris speak at an NRA convention in Aberdeen.”

Awesome Eighties reference:
Juliet complains that she feels like she’s babysitting Shawn and Gus.
Shawn: That makes you Elisabeth Shue. Gus is Keith Coogan.

Psych: Last Night Gus

2011-10-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

So the entire Psych gang, including eccentric coroner Woody (Kurt Fuller), hangs out a bar to celebrate the retirement of an old duffer named Jim from the Santa Barbara Police Department. Shawn orders a round of shots for everyone, and the next thing you know, he’s waking up in the morning at his desk in the Psych offices, wearing a shower cap, a strange pair of sandals, and a bling-y gold chain. Gus is passed out on the floor, and Lassiter and Woody are zonked on the couch, improbably spooning. Lassiter also has a black eye; his gun, which is missing three bullets, is submerged in the fish tank.

And no one has any memory of the night before. Cue the Hangover tribute episode!

The gang tries to piece together the events of the evening. Shawn’s phone has a video of everyone at the bar, hanging out with an unknown man in a Hawaiian shirt. Lassiter’s car is missing; Gus’s car is (poorly) parked outside with a ginormous dent in the hood.

The man in the Hawaiian shirt is found floating in the water, dead from three gunshot wounds. Gus’s phone is in the man’s pocket, and Shawn’s shoes are found near the body. The dead man’s phone contains surveillance photos of a middle-aged blonde woman (whom Shawn describes as “Terri Garr-esque”). Urine tests reveal that Shawn, Gus, Lassiter and Woody were all drugged, presumably at the bar. Shawn has a fuzzy memory from the previous night of a man staring at a couple of attractive women; theorizing the guy might’ve intended to drug the women and simply slipped the stuff in the wrong glasses, Shawn drags everyone over to the bar to interrogate the bartender.

The suspicious man turns out to be the bartender’s boyfriend, who was presumably not at all interested in drugging the women. At the bar, Gus is accosted by a gorgeous young woman (Jessica Lucas), who kisses him enthusiastically and thanks him for the great time they had last night. Gus is pleasantly flummoxed by this.

Next stop: A doughnut shop, which showed up in the dead man’s photos. The cashier recognizes the whole gang instantly. He shows them security video, taken the previous night, of Lassiter crashing Gus’s car into Bobo, the store’s beloved doughnut mascot, then getting into a fistfight with an unidentified man. Shortly thereafter, the body of the man who scuffled with Lassiter is found in his car down the block from the donut shop. He’s identified as Scott Williams, the husband of the blonde woman in the photos, Gloria. Shawn deduces that the dead man in the Hawaiian shirt was a private detective, hired by Scott to keep an eye on Gloria.

Meanwhile, Henry wakes up in a hotel room, minus his pants and with no recollection of the previous night. He calls Shawn in a panic. When Shawn arrives to help his dad, he discovers that Gloria Williams is a guest at the hotel -- Henry had been helping the private investigator track her down. When Shawn, Gus, Lassiter, Juliet and Henry search Gloria’s room, a leaky gas pipe causes an explosion. They all end up diving from the second-story railing into the pool below to avoid getting blown to bits.

And then rapper/former MTV VJ Ed Lover randomly shows up at the SBPD and takes his bling-y gold necklace back from Shawn.

Shawn recognizes one of the men photographed with Gloria Williams from a wanted poster in the SBPD: Leroy Jenkins, wanted in connection with thirty-seven armed robberies. His nearest relative is Lilly Jenkins… the gorgeous woman Gus hooked up with last night.

Unaware of all this, Gus entertains Lilly in his apartment. She drugs his drink. A gun-toting Leroy arrives and demands that Gus give him the private detective’s phone with the incriminating photos. Leroy killed the detective and Scott Williams when their investigation into Gloria’s infidelities threatened to expose him; Lilly drugged the gang at the bar last night in a botched attempt to retrieve the phone and erase the photos. Lassiter, Juliet and Shawn burst in to save Gus from Leroy; a messy gunfight ensues, which ends when a blissed-out Gus whacks Leroy over the head with a bowl of taffy.

Well, huh. I’m curiously neutral-to-down on this episode -- scenes mysteriously vanished from my brain as soon as I was finished watching them, and I really can’t recall any big standout moments, much less think of anything remotely witty and/or insightful to point out. This is curious, though: After I finished watching, I headed over to IMDB’s Psych page, as is my habit, to make sure I had the correct spellings for the names of guest stars, etcetera. IMDB is somehow under the impression that this episode guest-starred Corey Feldman, Tom Lenk, and Kristy Swanson.

I assure you, it did not.

I can only assume we’ve got an upcoming Feldman-Lenk-Swanson extravaganza in the works, and that, my friends, will be something to remember.

Duranalysis: Sing Blue Silver, Part Two

2011-10-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Onward and upward! Let’s pick up where we left off in Part One, which, upon reflection, was a little short on gratuitous references to John Taylor’s jaw-dropping beauty. The above screengrab was chosen to rectify this oversight.

In Atlanta, the boys attend a banquet in their honor at the headquarters of one of the tour’s big sponsors, Coca-Cola. The event chairman spontaneously calls upon John to make some off-the-cuff comments. Always ready to add a fun chaotic element to any situation, a somewhat blurry John takes the stage and cheerily declares his preference for Pepsi.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s neither Coke nor Pepsi in John’s glass.

So after the show, Nick sits down with a couple of the lighting guys to hash out the problem with the overly-dark stage. The lighting guys -- you know, I really wish Sing Blue Silver had done a better job of identifying all the various staff and crew members running around, so I could refer to people by name and/or title -- do their best to placate him. They’re obviously treading delicately around their wee dainty 21-year-old millionaire pop-star employer, and thus their responses come across as a bit condescending: “You’re bright up there, I thought, so it is a psychological thing, too… Problem is, all night long we were taking readings with meters and stuff, and you’re the brightest one on stage 90% of the time.” Nick -- totally calm, totally polite, totally intractable -- goes straight to the heart of the matter: “But I couldn’t actually see.”

While this is taking place, Roger waltzes in front of the camera and, oh gee, his pants appear to be sexily unbuttoned.

Roger Taylor: Stealth exhibitionist.

The boys go on a tour of an FBI office/museum (are they at Quantico? One of the field offices? A bit more information would not be remiss here), where they’re treated to a lecture about the Bureau’s past accomplishments. The Durans all display varying degrees of polite interest and/or mild ennui. Except for Andy, who’s mesmerized. Andy is a heartbeat away from abandoning this whole guitar-legend-in-the-making business and embarking on a bold new career as a G-Man.

No. No. Jesus, no. FBI agents, mark my words: No matter how much they plead and whine and beg and bat their pretty eyes at you, do not let the gaggle of hyperactive, accident-prone pop stars handle your guns.

New Orleans: Nick and Julie Anne stroll around Bourbon Street, where Nick receives an impromptu tap-dancing lesson from a young street performer. I appreciate Nick’s moxie, but his dance skills have not noticeably improved since the “New Moon on Monday” video.

It’s the home stretch of the tour. Irrepressible prankster Simon feigns a broken arm during rehearsal.

Afterward, he reveals the charade. The Durans find it uproarious. Well, sixty percent of the Durans find it uproarious, anyway -- Nick is nowhere in sight, and as for Roger…

Yeah. Not too hard to tell what he thinks of all this.

Okay, this part is sort of ghastly: During the last leg of the tour, John had some kind of accident in his hotel room that resulted in a badly lacerated foot. The exact cause is still shrouded in mystery, but let’s clear our brains of speculation and accept John’s explanation in an article in the April 1985 issue of, ahem, BOP magazine (“John Taylor: ‘I Nearly Killed Myself!’”): “I had been dancing on broken bottles without realizing it and I had to have 20 stitches in my foot.” Dancing on broken bottles! Could happen to anyone! After that, John was in no shape to prance about the stage, but they couldn’t afford to cancel the gig and reschedule the very expensive shoot for the Arena concert film, so… well, here’s a quote from Andy’s memoir about how they got John ready for the show:

“In the end, John had to be fired up at both ends. The doctor gave him huge amounts of morphine in the foot. Then John took pharmaceutical cocaine through the nose to keep him awake. It was the only solution; otherwise, the morphine would have knocked him out.”

I was originally going to remark that you can’t tell the difference between the performances where John is uninjured and the performances where he’s tripping balls to take away the crippling foot pain, but then I started sorting through screengrabs, and…

Yeah. Yeah, you sort of can.

Backstage after the final concert, an emotional Simon and John and Andy all mash themselves together into one big, clingy, sweaty, meaty, tear-soaked mess.

Once again, Nick is nowhere to be seen (teary, sweaty, shirtless group hugs are not, repeat, not his scene). Roger glances at his hugging bandmates, then opens a beer and sacks out on a nearby couch, looking like he’s had quite enough of Duran Duran, thank you.

And that’s pretty much it. Entertaining stuff. It’s strange: As glamorous and exotic as they all seemed during this time, for all the weirdness that came with their monstrous fame and fortune -- the drugs, the egos, the excesses -- they still basically come across as a bunch of nice kids. Kids with great bone structure and awesome hairstyles and flashy wardrobes, sure, but nice kids nonetheless.

Duranalysis: Sing Blue Silver, Part One

2011-10-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

Duranalysis is back! Let’s take a look at Sing Blue Silver, Russell Mulcahy’s 1984 documentary about the 79-day North American leg of Duran Duran’s 1983-1984 world tour. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the rarified lives of the band on the road, which seemed to consist mostly of performances and photo ops and interviews, to say nothing of endless hours spent moving from gig to gig in limousines and private planes. And being screamed at by teen girls. Oh, lordy, plenty of screaming teen girls. It’s a hoot.

There’s far too much material here to go over everything, but I’ll try to spotlight some of the highlights. Here we go:

The tour kicks off with a press conference, in which Andy gets the ball rolling when he gives a cheeky, innuendo-laden response to a soft-lob question (“When did you learn an instrument?” -- you can sort of guess where Andy takes it from there). The remaining Durans follow his lead and chime in with naughty replies… until it’s Roger’s turn. Being naughty and cheeky is not in Roger’s wheelhouse, at least not during a blasted press conference. He looks panicky and embarrassed, until Andy jumps in and bails him out (“Roger needs two hands for his!”).

Props to Andy for bringing the awesome throughout this entire documentary. While some of the Durans appear to be fast running out of enthusiasm for life on the road (hi, Roger!), Andy’s clearly in his element.

Showtime! The Durans cease their green room hijinks (helium-sucking and general chaos-making) and head for the stage. Except for Nick, who refuses to abandon his terribly important game of Galaga for something as trivial as a live performance. A member of their inner circle (who surely has a more important function than Official Nick Wrangler, but he’s never identified by name or purpose, so I have no clue as to his identity) comes up behind Nick, grabs him around his tiny chest, and lugs the wailing pixie off toward the stage. The enduring weirdness of Nick Rhodes continues to be a source of great joy in my life.

I won’t dwell too long on Sing Blue Silver’s excellent performance scenes, of which there are many. Both the video for “The Reflex” and the Mulcahy-directed concert film Arena (An Absurd Notion) were filmed during this tour, so if you’ve seen either of those, you know what you’re in for. Because it will become relevant later, I’m just going to quickly point out how Nick is off in his own little corner of the stage, surrounded by his synthesizers and sundry equipment (including his then-state-of-the-art Fairlight CMI synthesizer, which came complete with a light pen and monitor). For parts of the show, he’s standing in total darkness. Anyone who thinks Nick is going to sit back and quietly accept this situation is unfamiliar with the ways of everybody’s favorite high-maintenance pixie.

This is Roger’s special post-performance ritual:

1. Walk directly in front of the nearest camera.
2. Whip off shirt.

Why, thank you, Roger. Much obliged.

Backstage, the boys are introduced to Mike Davis and Marcus Allen from the Raiders. This is worth seeing for: a) the fetishistic sight of leggy knockout John Taylor in a football jersey, and b) the shots of Andy and Nick playfully roughhousing with each other.

B) is significant in light of Andy’s memoir (Wild Boy: My Life In Duran Duran), in which he depicts his relationship with Nick as an unbroken series of snubs, slights, shouting matches, passive-aggressive bitchery, icy silences, and hurled pork pies. I don’t doubt Andy’s account -- I’m sure it was all of that -- but from what we see throughout Sing Blue Silver, their dynamic was more complicated than simple mutual animosity. Unless they’re keeping up an elaborate masquerade for the cameras, Nick and Andy seem to genuinely get a kick out of each other. They even appear to be -- brace yourselves -- buddies. It’s cute.

Hotel room interviews. This is what John Taylor looks like when he first rolls out of bed.

Disgusting, isn’t it?

The boys have some free time in New York, so Nick dons his best French Foreign Legion hat, grabs his best girl (future wife Julie Anne Friedman), and strolls off on a magical adventure down Fifth Avenue. Much of the tour takes place in cold, wintry cities, which provides Nick with the opportunity to sport an amazing array of outerwear: crazy hats and scarves and bulky layered coats with huge padded shoulders.

Andy, meanwhile, hoofs it to the nearest pool hall and has himself a fine old time playing billiards. We don’t get to see how the other Durans enjoy their downtime, but I’m betting Roger’s day involved a locked door, an unplugged phone, and earplugs.

The tour continues. Another city, another performance. Nick is still plunged in darkness, and seriously, I’m half-convinced at this point that someone’s just screwing with him. And who could blame them? It’d be fun to mess with Nick’s head. Muck up his lighting, leave him groping around for his keyboards in the darkness, then sit back and wait for the fireworks.

(A quote from Simon, taken from a 2003 Tatler profile of Nick, about his bandmate’s legendarily control-freaky nature: “He's very analytical and that can be a pain in the arse. He cares about everything, and I mean everything. He feels it's his business to choose my socks and underwear.” Along those same lines, here’s a quote from Nick, as related in Steve Malins’s Duran Duran Notorious: The Unauthorised Biography, as to why he’s the scourge of lighting directors everywhere: “I’m horribly particular about colours. The arguments I’ve had with lighting designers about shades of magenta…”)

Backstage, Nick goes full-tilt Norma Desmond about the lighting: “It’s so depressing, that black stage. It’s terrible. Horrible. Vile. It’s got to go. I kept looking at it all through the set. Horrible. Horrible.” In the background, his bandmates quietly get snockered, as though the thought of getting through one of Nick’s tirades cold sober is too much to bear (Roger’s thousand-yard stare is especially poignant). Andy backs Nick up on the lighting situation: “It’s turning me to drink. I never usually drink.” This is what I mean about Andy bringing the awesome.

While the boys get ready for a shoot with famed photographer Francesco Scavullo, Simon ruminates on the dangers of getting undressed when journalists are in the vicinity: “‘Cause if you take your trousers off in front of people, they’ll write things like, ‘Simon Le Bon wears yellow underwear,’ and they’ll accuse you of having chubby legs and a gut.” This is in reference to a cover story on the band in the February 2nd, 1984 issue of Rolling Stone, in which journalist James Henke writes, of seeing Simon sans pants, “It was not, frankly, a particularly awe-inspiring sight. Le Bon, you see, is no John Travolta when it comes to physiques. Not a slob, just slightly chubby legs, a little bit of a gut.” Oh, ouch. Knife to the heart! Not that anybody should ever lose sleep fretting about long-past blows to Simon’s robust ego, but it’s hard not to wince at that.

Especially considering how whippy and lean he was in 1984. “Bit of a gut,” nothing doing.

There’s too much goodness here to be contained in a single blog post, so Part Two will continue in the next section.

Psych: Shawn Rescues Darth Vader

2011-10-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

Hey, Psych is back for a sixth season! Good news. There’s a comforting sameness to Psych -- it’s only occasionally great, but for the most part, it’s pretty darn entertaining. While this isn’t one of the great episodes, it’s a pleasant way to kill an hour.

The episode opens with a tuxedo-clad Shawn slinking about the rented mansion of the British Ambassador, who’s been staying in Santa Barbara while trying to clear an English exchange student, Colin Hennessy, of charges of strangling his girlfriend to death. The charges were recently dropped, so the Ambassador is throwing a celebratory bash, which Shawn is in the middle of crashing. Shawn and Gus, it seems, were hired by a bratty neighborhood kid to break into the mansion to retrieve a mint-condition 1978 Darth Vader action figure (complete with double-telescoping lightsaber), which the Ambassador’s twerpy son had stolen. To avoid getting caught by security guards, Shawn ducks under the Ambassador’s bed… and finds the strangled corpse of a young woman.

(And that’s it for the Star Wars theme. A few quick jokes about the prequels, a “Luke, I am your father” gag, and that’s it. A pity -- Psych usually does so well at taking pop-culture topics and running away with them. Remember the episode-long homage to the entire John Hughes oeuvre? I was expecting something similar here, but no. Life, it is full of disappointment.)

Unwilling to confess to sneaking into a diplomatic residence under false pretenses, Shawn slips out of the mansion, then convinces Lassiter and Juliet to return with him to investigate, claiming he’s had a psychic vision of the dead woman.

Lassiter, meanwhile, is still in a deep, angry snit over last season’s discovery of Juliet and Shawn’s affair. Never one to suffer a snit in silence, he straps Juliet into a polygraph machine and tries to get her to confess to the relationship. Juliet is having none of this.

(Hey, speaking of Lassiter: My friend and fellow aficionado of 1980s pop culture, Alex Albrecht, just directed a short Voltron-themed film starring Tim Omundson. It’s very cool. Watch it here. I mean, Voltron! Lassiter as a Voltron pilot! That’s an undeniably weird bit of casting, right? I always thought the pilots were feisty Japanese teens with awesome spiky hair and sensitive bone structure. But Omundson is so inherently cool that it sort of works, and besides… Voltron!)

Anyhoo. They all head over to the Ambassador’s residence to search for the body. Oh, hey, the Ambassador is played by Malcolm McDowell! Awesomesauce. Malcolm McDowell can do no wrong. Which is not to say he never appears in bad projects -- he’s got a whole lot of crap on his long and distinguished résumé -- but he tends to be the very best thing about a lot of very bad films and television shows. They also meet his Vice-Consul, who is played by the slinky and awesome Polly Walker. Long story short: The dead woman is no longer under the bed, but Shawn correctly deduces that her corpse has been shifted to the swimming pool. The dead woman is identified as Annabeth York, a member of the Ambassador’s staff, who had recently uncovered the evidence that cleared Colin Hennessy’s name. She was strangled to death in precisely the same manner that Colin’s girlfriend Sarah Peele had been murdered.

Shawn theorizes that Annabeth and the Ambassador were having an affair. Anxious to find proof, he steals a key from the Ambassador’s twerpy kid and sneaks into the mansion. He discovers the Ambassador was in Zurich at the time of Sarah’s murder. He also overhears the Ambassador telling his Vice-Consul that he wants to let the police know about his affair with Annabeth.

Figuring this makes it unlikely the Ambassador murdered Sarah and Annabeth, Shawn volunteers his services to track down the real killer. Annabeth had received a cryptic text the night of the murder -- “The witnesses were right” -- suggesting Colin was indeed guilty of Sarah’s murder… okay, you know what? No one ever gained anything by scrutinizing the ins and outs and whys and wherefores of a Psych plot too carefully, so let’s wind this up fast: The murderer turns out to be Colin’s host father, an embassy employee with a dangerous fascination for Colin’s girlfriend. Annabeth uncovered evidence suggesting he killed Sarah, so he strangled her as well. And the Vice-Consul moved Annabeth’s body to the swimming pool in a misguided though well-intentioned attempt to shield the Ambassador from suspicion.

Worth noting: At one point in all this nonsense, Lassiter straps Shawn into a lie detector and grills him on whether or not he’s really psychic. Shawn passes with flying colors. The episode ends with a childhood flashback, in which Henry teaches young Shawn how to beat the machine, telling him it might come in handy some day. In some ways, Henry’s an awful father. In many others, he’s awesome.

Awesome 1980s reference:
For an episode with Star Wars in the title, this episode was awfully short on pop-culture references, Star Wars-themed or otherwise. There was a quick bit in which Shawn started babbling on about diplomatic immunity in an egregious Russian accent, leading Gus to snap, “The guy from Lethal Weapon 2 was not Russian, Shawn!”

Moment of Lassiter-based awesomeness:
(Lassiter straps himself into the lie detector machine to demonstrate to Shawn that he’s telling the cold, solid truth through all this.)
Lassiter: If you don’t treat O’Hara with the respect she deserves, I will discharge my pistol.
Shawn: Are you saying you’ll shoot me?
Lassiter: Repeatedly.

Oh, Lassiter. How I missed you during Psych’s long. lonely hiatus.

I was a weird kid…

2011-09-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, my dad mailed me a bunch of my old grade-school papers and report cards and drawings and such. The true gem amongst these is this series of color sketches of “Movie Previews” (or rather, “Preveiws”) I drew when I was seven. I’ll present these largely without comment, other than to point out the following:

1. My spelling has improved since 1981. Curiously, my handwriting has not.

2. “Cathy Crack” is the name of an intrepid girl detective who first appeared in a lavishly illustrated (and totally bonkers) short story I wrote in 1981, The Case of the Crystal Cat. It should be noted that my sister Ingrid also churned out an illustrated story featuring an intrepid girl detective. Hers was named Peggy Paint. We were heavily into alliterative names at the time.

3. I think The Land Where Yesterday is Tomorrow is a decent enough title -- kind of wistful and melancholy, kind of enigmatic -- but Who Killed My Boss? is freaking genius.

Coming soon!
Cathy looked as a powwerful young girl peeked from behind a clothes dummy.
(Cathy Crack 2#)
P.S. not out yet!

Cathy stared at the picture over her bed.
(Cathy Crack 2#)

SPECIL
The Miricale reached up and caught the ball.
(from "The Miricale")
Comming soon!

The Miracle handed me a picture.
From "The Miracle"

Coming soon!
"Forgive me," Kathleen whispered.
From The Land Where Yesterday is Tomorrow
Sequel to "A Dragon's Haloe"

Paisy stared at the scetch in her hand.
From "Who Killed My Boss?"

Ringer: She’s Ruining Everything

2011-09-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

We pick up where the pilot left off, with a gun-toting Bridget standing over the corpse of her would-be assassin in her unfinished Manhattan loft. She calls her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor back in Colorado, Malcolm, and leaves him a teary voicemail summarizing everything that happened at the end of last episode. She then reconsiders and deletes the message.

Well, that was pointless.

For crying out loud, Ringer, we’re off to a half-assed start already. I assume the show wanted to ensure that any viewers who missed the pilot could dive into the second episode and get immediately up to speed. Totally unnecessary. Piecing together this straightforward and undemanding plot isn’t a huge challenge, even without Bridget explicitly spelling out everything that took place up to this point.

In any case, much of what happens in this episode rehashes everything we learned in the pilot (Andrew’s wild-child daughter Juliet is still a spiteful twit, Siobhan’s friend Gemma is still convinced, correctly, that her husband Henry is having an affair, Henry is still trying to figure out why Bridget-as-Siobhan is avoiding him, and everyone still thinks Bridget/Siobhan is pregnant), so I’m going to gloss over huge chunks of it and go straight to the new stuff, most of which centers around a gala cocktail party Andrew is hosting with his slinky, bitchy business partner, Olivia (Jaime Murray). While Siobhan/Bridget is ostensibly planning the event, her participation seems to be minimal (Olivia purrs to Andrew, “I let her pick out the cocktail napkins”). Olivia is either sleeping with Andrew, or has designs on him, or is making a big show of toying with him just to mess with Siobhan/Bridget. It’s too soon to tell, but Olivia might be a good time. Compared to dour, nigh-somnambulistic Bridget, she’s a barrel of monkeys.

Victor and his magnificent eyelashes drop by the loft to chat with Siobhan/Bridget about Bridget’s disappearance. Bridget, who is smack in the middle of trying to figure out how to dispose of the hitman’s corpse, acts squirrelly and twitchy and makes a big show of giving him the brush-off, thus ratcheting Victor’s mild suspicions into high gear. Back at the FBI headquarters, Victor asks a colleague to investigate Siobhan and Andrew, paying particular attention to their unfinished loft. The FBI’s files, by the way, reveal that Andrew’s favorite movies are Raging Bull and Singin’ in the Rain. Andrew has untapped depths.

…You know, after two episodes, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that Ringer drop this whole dreary Bridget/Siobhan nonsense entirely, in favor of focusing on Andrew and Olivia instead. That’d be a much better show. Bridget is glum and twitchy, whereas Andrew and Olivia are slinky and bitchy and icy and English. No question who I’d rather watch.

Figuring she’s in over her head, Bridget decides to cut and run. Malcolm offers to help (much is made of Malcolm agreeing to meet her halfway, and, improbably enough, it seems through the dialogue that we’re meant to take this literally. Bridget is in New York and Malcolm is in Colorado, so… Illinois?). Bridget withdraws all available cash, including the entire balance in a secret account Siobhan recently set up, and heads to the airport.

Her attempt to flee is interrupted by a call from Andrew, who informs her the venue for the gala has plumbing problems, so he’s relocated it to the loft. Bridget rushes to the loft, which is already swarming with the event staff. She lures them out of there with promises of bacon sandwiches (this seems entirely plausible, really -- everybody loves bacon), then stashes the hitman’s corpse in a decorative steamer trunk.

And for whatever improbable reason, Bridget decides to go to the gala instead of heading for the airport to rendezvous with Malcolm as planned. Also for whatever improbable reason, she decides to dress as Cleopatra, paired with Madonna’s hairstyle circa the Blonde Ambition tour. Oh, hell, I’m all for it. At least Bridget’s clothes are vibrant and flamboyant.

The gala is a comedy of errors -- party-crasher Victor arrives just as Bridget is dabbing up blood leaking from the trunk, and the corpse’s cell phone starts ringing from within the trunk while Andrew is giving a speech. It’s cute. I like this show when it embraces the zanier possibilities of its absurd premise. Bridget retrieves the phone from the corpse, but a sinister random party guest lurks in the background and watches her.

Back at their apartment, Andrew compliments her on how well she handled herself during the party. He shows definite signs of softening his strong anti-Siobhan stance, especially when he spots her comforting a drug-addled and distraught Juliet.

Bridget calls Malcolm and tells him she can’t meet him -- she’s going to continue to impersonate Siobhan for a while longer. Back in Colorado, Bodaway Macawi, the drug lord whom Bridget was set to testify against, secretly stalks Malcolm.

In Paris, Siobhan -- the real Siobhan -- attempts to withdraw money from her secret account and finds Bridget has drained it dry. She calls someone and mutters, “She’s ruining everything.”

And Bridget returns to the loft, opens the steamer trunk, and finds the corpse has vanished.

Oh, Ringer. You’re not without your moments -- that ending was pretty good -- but overall, I wish you were more fun.

Ringer: Pilot

2011-09-14T09:27:00.000-07:00

The new fall shows are here! Let’s check out The CW’s Ringer, shall we?

We open with things already in full swing: In a vast, unfurnished loft, a young woman hides from a burly masked man. The woman is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, erstwhile Buffy star, making a much-ballyhooed return to network television. Good to see you back on the small screen, Gellar; hope you stick around for a while. While hiding from the man, she accidentally hits the power button on a CD player. Patsy Cline’s “I Fall To Pieces” begins to play, thus alerting her pursuer to her presence. She makes a dash for it, dodging through scaffolding. He tackles her to the floor. Struggling beneath him, she shouts, “You have the wrong girl!”

And now we flash back nine days, to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting somewhere in Wyoming. Gellar is Bridget Kelley: current waitress, former stripper, and former addict (as she has an outstanding charge for solicitation on her record, we can presumably add “former prostitute” to that list as well). Post-meeting, Bridget indulges in a little flirtatious banter with her sponsor, Malcolm (Mike Colter), before she’s distracted by the arrival of a mysterious man in a dark suit. Ah, it’s Lost’s Nestor Carbonell, he of the striking dark eyelashes and the perpetual aura of bemused menace. This is a promising sign.

Carbonell plays Special Agent Victor Machado, a Fed charged with protecting Bridget before she testifies against a fearsome crime lord named Bodaway Macawi. Skeptical of Machado’s ability to keep her safe from Macawi’s wrath, Bridget slips out of his custody and secretly meets with her wealthy and polished twin sister, Siobhan. Siobhan, naturally enough, is also played by Gellar.

Huh. Here’s the thing: I’m pro-Gellar. A great deal of credit for the success of Buffy rests on her tiny shoulders. And yet… Remember that Buffy episode where Faith and Buffy switched bodies, which should have resulted in much gleeful mayhem but instead fell flat because Gellar and Eliza Dushku only took glancing stabs at mimicking each other’s salient characteristics? The same thing happens here: Gellar isn’t trying hard enough. In terms of appearance, it’s easy to tell Siobhan from Bridget (frosty Siobhan is well-heeled and glamorous; dour Bridget is ragged and ratty), but in terms of mannerisms, there’s not enough difference to make it fun to watch Gellar flip between roles. Siobhan is just Bridget with better hair.

Siobhan takes Bridget to her empty beach house in the Hamptons. She confesses her husband of five years, Andrew, doesn’t know about bad-seed Bridget’s existence. Bridget stammers out an apology for some tragic past incident -- “I think about Sean every day,” she says -- but Siobhan cuts her off and assures her she’s already forgiven.

While out boating with Siobhan, Bridget wakes from a nap and finds herself alone on deck, the boat bobbing in the waves. She finds a prescription pill bottle, which turns out to contain Siobhan’s wedding ring, but there’s no sign of Siobhan.

Presuming her twin drowned, a frantic Bridget decides to impersonate Siobhan, figuring she’ll be safe from Macawi that way. She arrives at the lavish Manhattan apartment Siobhan shares with Andrew. Hey, it’s Ioan Gruffudd! I’m delighted to see him, though it’s slightly disappointing he’s not using his weird-and-wonky Fantastic Four-era American accent. Andrew is icy and English and bitchy, and he clearly doesn’t think much of Siobhan. He also fails to notice that his wife of five years has been replaced by an untrained imposter. Andrew is not terribly bright and kind of spiteful, but at least he’s very cute. And he tends to whip off his shirt and walk around bare-chested at the slightest provocation, so that’s certainly a point in his favor.

Anyway, Bridget calls Malcolm and tearfully briefs him on her situation. While all this happens, a super-breathy, super-special, super-ghastly cover of “25 or Six to Four” plays in the background, and I consider stabbing forks in my ears to make it stop.

(Bridget is a glum, dour, dreary little thing. This might be the single biggest problem I had with this pilot: As both Siobhan and Bridget, Gellar exerts the barest minimum amount of energy required to remain upright and breathing, like she picked exactly the wrong week to give up her morning coffee and stop taking her vitamins. Come on, Gellar! Look sharp! Shoulders back, chin up! I’m in your corner here. I want this show to be great, and I want you to be great in the role, but this is a rocky start.)

After a frosty night (upon seeing Bridget curled up in their bed, Andrew narrows his eyes and slithers off in a huff to sleep somewhere else), Bridget wakes to a phone call from Siobhan’s best friend, Gemma (Tara Summers). Still pretending to be Siobhan, Bridget meets her at a penthouse loft Gemma is renovating for Siobhan and Andrew. Gemma confides that she’s worried her husband, Henry, is having an affair. Clueless about all of the intricacies of Siobhan’s social life, Bridget looks gloomy and fakes her way through her end of the conversation as best she can.

Bridget and Andrew attend an opera recital, which is being held smack beneath the huge blue whale at the Natural History Museum. In public, Andrew is sweet and charming to his wife. Bridget slinks off to the Hall of African Mammals -- okay, I’m showing off my museum knowledge; I was just there on Monday -- where she’s grabbed and smooched by a mysterious well-dressed man.

There might be too many mysterious well-dressed men on this show.

The surprise smoocher is Gemma’s randy husband, Henry (Kristoffer Polaha), and yep, Siobhan is the Other Woman. He arranges to meet Siobhan/Bridget at a hotel on Thursday afternoon; Bridget wanly agrees.

First impressions? Henry’s a creepy, bullying jerk. Hopefully that’s what viewers were supposed to take away from that scene, because if it turns out he’s meant to be sympathetic, the writers really botched his introduction.

Back in their apartment, Andrew reverts to being icy and bitchy. Confused and distressed by this mood swing after his public show of affection at the gala, Bridget stammers out, “I thought we were cool.” For one shining moment, Bridget seems very likeable and genuine, like there might be a real person hiding beneath that dour, low-wattage exterior. She asks Andrew if they can continue to be nice to each other. This makes Andrew deeply suspicious.

After sneaking off to an NA meeting in Brooklyn, Bridget returns home and finds Siobhan’s teenaged stepdaughter Juliet (Zoey Deutch) in bed with a blindfolded and naked hunk. While I can appreciate a good sleazy character introduction, Juliet turns out to be a spiteful little snot. There’s some tedious inter-familial stuff with Andrew squabbling with Juliet, who got kicked out of boarding school for drugs and who wants to go live with her mom. Unfathomably, Andrew seems opposed to this.

And then Victor Machado and his Eyelashes of Doom show up at Bridget’s door. Assuming she’s Siobhan, he fills her in on Bridget’s disappearing act. Bridget claims she hasn’t seen her twin in years.

Bridget meets Henry at the hotel for their rendezvous, but tells him she can’t jeopardize her friendship with Gemma by sleeping with him. Henry does not take this well.

Meanwhile, Bridget gets a call from Siobhan’s doctor, informing her that she -- Siobhan, that is -- is four weeks pregnant. Argh. There’s going to be a fake-pregnancy plotline, isn’t there? I fricking hate fake-pregnancy plotlines. I stopped watching Glee in the first season because of that feeble, contrived plotline with Terri’s fake pregnancy. Andrew and Bridget meet Henry and Gemma for drinks to celebrate; Henry, who is convinced he’s the father, takes Bridget aside and begs her to leave Andrew for him.

Andrew has a terse and ominous phone conversation with an unknown party: “I know we negotiated that, but I want out.”

Gemma calls Bridget and asks to meet her at the loft. And now we’ve finally caught up to the opening scene, which is shown once again in its entirety, Patsy Cline music and all. You know, showing the same exact (lengthy) scene twice in one forty-four minute episode is not a great way to hold viewer interest. In fact, it screams of padding, since there was no justifiable plot-based reason to first show the scene as a teaser.

After the masked man tackles her, Bridget kicks him off, then grabs a gun she stole when she escaped from federal custody and shoots him. She assumes he’s one of Macawi’s henchmen, sent to kill her so she won’t testify against him, but when she searches his body, she finds he’s carrying a photo of Siobhan.

And in some unidentified location, we find Siobhan, alive and well and wearing a slinky dress.

Hmm. There’s unrealized potential here, but right now, it needs to be more: more complex, more devious, more layered, more engrossing. I’m willing to give it another week to see if it gels together (and to see if Gellar boosts her caffeine intake), but based on this, it’s probably best to keep expectations low.

Travelogue: Seattle and Spokane

2011-08-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

Nothing but tumbleweeds around here, huh? I have an excuse this time, above and beyond my inherent sloth: My sister Ingrid and I were tromping about the Pacific Northwest, off on a madcap vacation that encompassed my twenty-year high school reunion, two cities, four flights, four hotels, multiple forms of mass transit (subway, bus, taxi, light rail, monorail), enough walking to destroy a brand-new pair of shoes, a whopping load of nostalgia, a dose of melancholia, some excellent food, some mediocre food, and not nearly enough champagne. Here’s how it went down:

Tuesday, August 9th: After an early morning scramble involving inexplicable subway delays and a frantically-hailed taxi on a dark street corner somewhere in Jackson Heights, Ingrid and I fly from JFK to SeaTac, then hop the light rail to downtown Seattle. Seattle is crisp and cool, though dismayingly sunny. Being Gollumesque by nature, we eschew sunlight and seek out damp, rainy weather. Seattle is determined to thwart us in this regard. Blue skies and plenty of sunshine for our entire visit, blast it.

For the first leg of our trip, we’re staying at the Moore Hotel. Downtown Seattle hotel rooms tend to be a mixed bag -- always overpriced, often underwhelming -- but the Moore is a longtime favorite. It’s basic, but it’s clean, it’s cute, it’s cheap, and it has a fantastic downtown location, right near the Pike Place Market. We hike to a grocery store on First Hill for the components of a hotel picnic: French bread, brie, fresh fruit, champagne. Champagne, we’ve found, is the perfect beverage for drinking in hotel rooms -- it lends a celebratory air, and there’s no corkscrew required.

Wednesday, August 10th: We get up far too early, as is our wont, and have our first of what will be many cups of Seattle’s justly-famous cappuccino. Seattle cappuccino is a work of art, often literally.

We wander over to the Space Needle and surrounding areas, then meander back downtown along the water. A gorgeous Russian tall ship, the Pallada, is docked at one of the piers. We watch dozens of uniformed sailors scrambling up the masts and swarming around the rigging in some kind of elaborate drill. For the next few days, downtown Seattle will teem with Russian sailors on shore leave. They’re adorable, all of them, clean-cut and apple-cheeked and grimly purposeful. We develop an unhealthy fascination with their shopping habits and covertly scope out their purchases: flannel boxer shorts from Ross, tins of butter cookies from Walgreens.

Seattle’s famous Market is glutted with tourists (like us!) all throughout our visit. Navigating the twisty corridors of tiny shops and stalls of local goods is an exercise in frustration. We brave the stampede to scamper into a shop for sandwiches, then beat a hasty retreat back to the hotel.

We’ve packed a chess board. Over the course of our vacation we will play, at a rough estimate, eight billion games in our various hotels. Ingrid and I are dangerous chess fiends.

Thursday, August 11th: We trek out to the University of Washington, stopping along the way for breakfast at an organic café. The place is super-cute; the food is god-awful. I order apple-topped French toast, which is loaded with enough brown sugar to make my molars rot with every bite. As a dessert, it’d be merely excessive. As a breakfast, it torpedoes my blood sugar all to hell. By the time we reach the campus, I’m grumpy and moody. My bad disposition spreads to Ingrid. Only a rousing chorus of Depeche Mode’s “Wrong,” which gets stuck in our heads after we make a number of grievous navigational errors, gets us through the morning.

It is impossible to be unhappy while singing Depeche Mode. Counterintuitive, but true.

After a lengthy and exhausting detour through the Arboretum, we hike it back to downtown, where we sit in a theater and watch Attack the Block. Awesome movie. Seriously. Loved it to pieces. See it, see it, see it!

We brave the Market once more and hit an Italian deli for emergency provisions: salad and panini and an excellent Prosecco.

Friday, August 12th: We board a tiny propeller plane for the quick hop over the Cascades from Seattle to Spokane. The flight tends to be a bit on the bumpy and precarious side, but the good folks at Horizon Airlines ease the trauma by passing out free Columbia Valley wines and local beers. I love Horizon. We catch a city bus and arrive at our hotel in downtown Spokane shortly after noon. Here our trip hits a snag when the harried desk clerk informs us that we can’t possibly check into our room until after three o’clock. Fair enough, but she doesn’t even take a cursory glance at our reservation or check the status of our room before sending us on our way.

A bit stymied, we lug our suitcases down Third Avenue to kill some time over lunch at the Ming Wah. Ah, the Ming Wah. Our Spokane trip is entirely nostalgia-driven -- I was born here and lived here until my high school graduation. We rarely get back to this area, so we’re revisiting places that were important to us in our childhood. Ergo, the Ming Wah. We haven’t been here in probably twenty-five, thirty years, but we both have fond memories of great family-style dinners here with our parents: sweet-and-sour prawns, beef with pea pods, eggrolls, almond fried chicken. Almond fried chicken, which is served in a heavy white sauce, is found in Chinese restaurants almost exclusively in the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South. Couldn’t find it in Los Angeles, can’t find it in New York. It was the stuff of dreams in our formative years, so eating it here is important.

We order the chicken and the prawns, which come drenched in a thick sauce the color of fresh blood. No vegetables were harmed in the making of our meal. It’s pretty awesome.

Tired of hauling our bags around town, we slink back to our hotel. There’s a different, more helpful clerk now on duty. He cheerfully pulls up our reservation and assures us there’s no problem with checking into our room early.

Cute hotel. Snazzy décor. Comfy beds. Worth a little hassle.

The first of my scheduled reunion activities is a tour of our recently renovated high school, Lewis and Clark. Ingrid graduated from there as well, two years before me, so she tags along. It’s a great old building with a lot of history -- back in 1911, at the start of construction, Teddy Roosevelt laid the cornerstone (he laid it backwards, actually, but it’s the thought that counts).

After the tour, Ingrid takes off on her own to have dinner with old friends, while I walk out to a brew pub for drinks with my fellow alums. It’s located in a pedestrian-unfriendly, sidewalk-free area on the north side of town. To avoid traffic, I take a Byzantine detour through Riverfront Park, along the Centennial Trail, and across the Gonzaga University campus.

The shortest distance between two points is never through Gonzaga.

Some of my former classmates seem alarmed when I mention I walked to the pub. I’m told it’s not safe to walk at night in Spokane. “This isn’t New York,” someone tells me.

(I don’t know whether it’s safe, honestly. They might be right. I don’t live there anymore, and I respect the judgment of those who do. It felt safe to me, for whatever that’s worth, and anyway, I’m sort of mean and scrappy, especially when I’m out by myself. Regardless of everyone’s well-intentioned warnings, I did a fair amount of night walking in Spokane.)

Saturday, August 13th: Ingrid and I trek over to the west side, almost out to the airport, then climb a big hill to our childhood home. We haven’t been there since… 1987, maybe, and the area has seen a whopping lot of development since then. At the start of the walk, I facetiously predict we’ll need to whip out Ingrid’s GPS before we make it to the top of the hill to figure out where we’re going. We whip it out twice.

Our childhood home was a log cabin that our parents designed and built in 1978. It has changed since then. A lot. The once-bare logs are now covered in green aluminum siding (once you buy a house, of course, you have every right to fix it up any damn way you’d like, and I have no business getting outraged, but… who does that to a log cabin?). We stare at it for a while. There’s no sense of nostalgia here. It’s changed too much. It doesn’t mesh with our memories in any way.

Except for one: The mailbox is the same. It’s gigantic, almost novelty-sized. Now a solid brown, it was originally hand-painted with an elaborate eagle mural by an artistic friend of the family thirty years ago (eagle murals were hip then). There’s no way to discreetly check the underside, which has probably been painted over as well, but there once was a message painted there: “I love you, Ingrid and Morgan.”

On the way down the hill, I wear quarter-sized holes in the soles of my shoes, which I bought in New York the day before we left for Seattle. There’s an obvious pun here about Spokane being hard on the sole.

We hit Boo Radley’s downtown for novelty gifts. We pick up a Spokane Ninja Society t-shirt and, on an impulse, a DVD of Spokanarchy, a fascinating documentary about the fledgling punk scene in Spokane in the 1980s. I have a difficult time explaining to outsiders what growing up here was like, or what the defining characteristics of the city might be. It’s too big an issue, with too many variables, and it’s too complex to boil down into a succinct précis. From now on whenever the question is raised, I’m just going to hand over Spokanarchy (or suggest the asker add Vision Quest to his/her Netflix queue. Not a great movie, but it does have an authentic vintage-Spokane feel).

Tonight is my reunion dinner and dance. Once again, it’s located on the north side of town. A close friend from high school picks me up at my hotel and gives me a ride.

The event is low-key and angst-free. Most of my former classmates look good, like they’ve spent the past twenty years eating the right foods and getting plenty of exercise. Smart and interesting teenagers have evolved into smart and interesting adults. Some have done nicely for themselves in Spokane, whereas some, like me, have flung themselves around the country: Kim is a professor at Pepperdine, Ben is a preservation specialist at the Library of Congress, Michelle is an attorney in New Orleans, Lisa is a police officer in San Antonio.

My classmates vote me Most Likely to Still Listen to Duran Duran. Guilty as charged.

It’s a fun evening, but I’m feeling a little run-down and low-wattage, so I call it an early night. Once again, friends are outraged at the idea of me walking to my hotel. I blithely lie about calling a taxi, then walk across the Spokane River and back to downtown.

Sunday, August 14th: Ingrid and I hike up to our old grade school on the South Hill, then lurch back downtown and check ourselves into a swanky suite at the Davenport Hotel for a single luxurious night. Oh, lordy, the Davenport. A world-class hotel in the middle of Spokane, it’s gorgeous. We drink gimmicky cocktails in one of the lounges, then pick up bad champagne from a local market and order Cougar Gold cheese dip from room service. For the uninitiated, Cougar Gold, manufactured by the creamery at Washington State University, is one of the finest things ever to come out of eastern Washington.

Monday, August 15th: The Davenport is lovely. Our suite is lavish. The customer service is impeccable. The food in the main restaurant is scrumptious. The coffee, however, is burnt and bitter. As we consider coffee a vital and necessary food group, we head to a nearby coffee shop, where a tattooed Shaun Cassidy doppelganger fixes us a couple of excellent cappuccinos. We resist the urge to hum “Da Doo Ron Ron” within his earshot, then catch a bus to the airport.

We are, frankly, a little bit over Spokane by this point. It’s not you, Spokane, it’s us.

Back to Seattle, on an Alaska Airlines flight this time. It’s a much bigger plane, which makes for a smoother ride over the mountains, but unlike our Horizon flight, there is no free beer and wine. Advantage: Horizon. We check into a weird little hotel near the Space Needle.

The Russian sailors have left the city. This makes us sad.

Tuesday, August 16th: We meet a childhood friend for Thai food at the (still-crowded) Market, then slink off to see Attack the Block again.

Attack the Block: Still totally awesome.

Wednesday 17th: We check out of our hotel, catch the light rail to SeaTac, and fly to New York. En route, I play four hours of computer chess on the in-flight entertainment system.

New York is muggy and sticky and stinky. Back home, we find our fuses blown, our refrigerator making ominous noises, and our cat preparing to launch into an epic hissyfit.

Good to be back.

(Special thanks to Ingrid for letting me use her photos. Despite my film-school background, she's the better photographer by far.)

Fun With Keywords: Trampy Snakes Edition

2011-08-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

Well, this is embarrassing. I’ve never done back-to-back keyword posts before, because... well, it’s lazy. However, I’m strapped for site material, and I wanted to have something fresh up before I leave for vacation next week (it’s my twenty-year high school reunion -- very exciting! And possibly a little traumatic! But mostly exciting!). So here I am, dipping from the keywords well yet again.

Site business first: Summer is always slow around here. This one is slower than usual, as I’ve dropped Covert Affairs recaps from my rotation and haven’t found anything to fill the void. Things will pick up soon: Psych recaps will resume, plus I’m going to take a look at a couple of the new fall shows. Thus far, I’ve pegged two strong early contenders: Ringer on The CW, which has the strange-yet-irresistible cast of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ioan Gruffudd, and Nestor Carbonell, and ABC’s Once Upon a Time. Until then, expect to find sporadic posts on random topics.

On to the keywords! Here are some of the search phrases people entered into Google that led them to this site during the past month:

garbage goat
garbage goat wiki
The garbage goat in Riverfront Park in Spokane is very cool. It sucks down garbage! Practical and decorative! Every city should have one! When I’m in Spokane for my reunion, I’ll be sure to visit it, just to make sure it still exists.

trampy snakes
Love it. Don’t know what it means, but I love it.

"criminal minds" poorly written
Yeah. Not always, certainly, but this most recent season had more poorly-written episodes than solid ones. Perhaps the series will regain equilibrium when Season Seven kicks off in the fall, but I’m not optimistic.

duran duran women rumors
The general consensus of the rumor mill is that all the band members really, really like women. For those interested in investigating further, Google can direct you toward an appropriately tawdry website called GroupieDirt (really, the name is self-explanatory), which provides some purported firsthand accounts of wild nights with the boys from Birmingham. It’s all very salacious and scurrilous and sketchy, and nothing on it should be accepted as gospel truth, but if you’re in the mood for some juicy unsubstantiated rumors (sample: John Taylor is compared, favorably, to an anteater. Just ponder that one for a while), that’s one place to visit.

"madeleine farley"+fangs+boots
Hey, speaking of “duran duran women rumors”… This must be referring to a 2003 Tatler article on Nick Rhodes, in which his ex-girlfriend Madeleine Farley provided some insight into her life with him. Full quote: “He taught me how to wear make-up, how to dress. He's the closest link between gay men and straight women. He was the woman in our relationship. I had a pair of couture fangs surreptitiously made for him - the dentist and I were in cahoots. He'd always wear them in bed, and I'd have on my six-inch Manolos.” See, this sort of thing is exactly why Nick is my favorite Duran. John may be an anteater, but Nick’s the one with the fangs.

archie kennedy+trousers+what the hell
Huh. I don’t remember much about Archie’s trousers in Hornblower. I think I was too dazzled by his assortment of cute hats to even notice his bottom half. Hornblower: Come for the swashbuckling action, stay for the wacky hats.

who was ioan gruffudd in the titanic
He’s Fifth Officer Harold Lowe. He appears sporadically throughout Titanic, but his big moment is at the end, when he rescues Rose from the icy water. Gave him good practice for his starring role in Hornblower.

"what happens at home" criminal minds "silence of the lambs"
The business with Cadet Seaver running the obstacle course at Quantico, then being pulled out of training to track a serial killer? Yeah, I’m still not sure whether that was intended as an homage to Silence of the Lambs, or was just a straightforward rip-off. Either way, it had to be deliberate.

claire bennet is stupid brat
Yep. I gave up on Claire in the final wretched season of Heroes when she spat out her food in the Indian restaurant and made giggling remarks about how it was icky and weird. That’s pretty much pitch-perfect stupid-brat behavior, made all the more remarkable in that viewers were clearly intended to find her sympathetic in that scene. Note: Seeing a college kid spitting out food in public is neither cute nor sympathetic. Factor in some weird xenophobic overtones (it’s not standard American food; ergo, I can make fun of it with impunity), and it becomes kind of despicable.

what is the story behind the union of the snake video by duran duran
Good question. Couldn’t tell you. My best guess: A bunch of pretty English pop stars got drunk in Australia and decided to make a nonsensical -- yet awesome! -- video.

all about jai wilcox
Smoking-hot. Pretty hair, nice cheekbones, snazzy suits. Kind of cocky. Tends to sulk a bit. Looks particularly good whilst scampering on rooftops in pursuit of miscreants. Has an evil dad. Probably a good guy at heart, but the dark side is strong in him.

canadian actor thomas gibson
He’s from South Carolina, actually, though he starred in a couple of excellent Canadian films early in his career: Love and Human Remains and Stardom.

criminal minds behind the scenes drama
Waaaaaaay too much drama -- controversial firings, controversial new cast members, controversial changes to the creative staff, dangerously prolonged salary negotiations, the works. The ship seems to have righted itself in time for the new season -- both Paget Brewster and A.J. Cook have been rehired, hooray, and both Shemar Moore and Thomas Gibson have finally signed new contracts -- but wow, that was one messy season.

criminal minds sexiest episode
Despite the super-attractive and charismatic cast, Criminal Minds is not a sexy show. Really. Not sexy. At all. No.

duran duran arena tied up lingerie
I got all excited for a moment, thinking this was in reference to some awesome photo shoot, maybe circa the Arena album, featuring the Duran Duran boys posing in handcuffs and fishnets and lace teddies. Then I remembered the part in their Arena concert film involving lingerie-clad women in bondage, and I was very disappointed. Honestly, though, if anyone could’ve mainstreamed lingerie for men, it was Duran Duran in the early 1980s. If Simon and John had stepped onstage in, say, satin corsets and lace-trimmed tap pants, sure, a whole lot of guys would’ve made snickering comments… but sooner or later, some of those same guys would’ve given it a whirl for themselves. Because that’s the power of Duran Duran.

duran duran funny
Oh, man, they’re hilarious. Sometimes even on purpose! If Duran Duran had first achieved their worldwide fame now instead of in the 1980s, there’s no way they wouldn’t have their own awesome reality show to showcase their deliriously over-the-top exploits. At least we have Sing Blue Silver.

duran duran early pics
Few things in the world bring me as much joy as looking at awkward early photos of Duran Duran, back before they nailed down their whole sophisticated and worldly image, back when they still wore a lot of flouncy ruffled shirts, back when they all sported really unfortunate hairstyles. Here’s a good one. I particularly adore poor Roger’s bemused expression: “Can you believe Nick’s making me wear this shirt?”

duran duran video with water gets wet people
Can you narrow it down? “Wild Boys,” “Rio,” “Save a Prayer,” “The Reflex,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” and “Girls on Film” all feature people getting wet in water.

juan lava's lactose free eggnog
That’d be a Psych reference. I miss Psych. It’s nutty.

least favourite criminal minds episode
“The Thirteenth Step,” by a landslide.

guy off criminal minds bad guy on flintstones movie?
Oh, yes. Yes, that’s Thomas Gibson, Criminal Minds’ ultra-stoic Hotch, smirking and sneering his way through The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, and he’s fabulous in it. Equally fabulous: Duran Duran’s beautiful John Taylor wincing throughout his mortifying cameo as the Keith Richards to Alan Cummings’s prehistoric Mick Jagger. Rent it, now!

thomas gibson looks depressed
Well, Hotch certainly does. Hotch, with good reason, might be the saddest, gloomiest, most emotionally-drained character on television. Dude’s been through a lot. Cut him some slack.

miami vice was awesome
Yes.

miami vice is awesome
Yes.

mohinder and eden
Sexy and adorable together. Just the sight of these two gorgeous kids reminds me that I didn’t always hate Heroes. By the way, Nora Zehetner -- Eden -- is awesome in Brick, which is one of those extremely cool little movies that almost no one has seen. It also stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Haas and Lost’s Emilie de Ravin. Highly recommended.

nick rhodes hair color
Brown, white, red, orange, black, black-and-blonde, and, for a thankfully brief spell in the nineties, purple (Quoth Nick in Attitude magazine: “It was a problem with my red wardrobe. All my red items were put on emergency hold”). He has since defaulted to being a full-time platinum blonde.

psych episode where gus has a sitcom family
In “The Polarizing Express,” Shawn imagines Gus as the star of a UPN sitcom, Wilin’ With Da Gusters. As with many things about Psych, it is equal parts awful and brilliant. View the clip here.

sendhil ramamurthy girlfriend
Wife, actually: He’s been married to gorgeous actress Olga Sosnovska for over a decade. They’ve got two adorable kids. I saw Sendhil out walking with his toddler son at a farmer’s market in Los Angeles last year, and my mad crush on him pretty much shriveled up and died right on the spot. Sendhil is so, so incredibly beautiful, but it seems faintly wrong and self-defeating to lust after somebody’s devoted husband and dad.

was thomas gibson nude in love and human remains
Nope. He stripped down to his extra-long boxer-briefs, but no further.

wesley crusher lucas wolenczak
Pretty much the same character, weren’t they? While both Wil Wheaton and Jonathan Brandis did what they could with the material they were given, both these teen-genius characters -- Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher and SeaQuest DSV’s Lucas Wolenczak -- are blown out of the water by Max Headroom’s Bryce Lynch, television’s all-time most awesome teen genius. Teen genius characters are tough to successfully pull off. (The complete series of Max Headroom is now available on DVD. I give it my highest possible recommendation.)

the woolfman even men who is pur in his hart and his pray i like may become
Huh?

thesis duran duran
Ha! If anyone ever writes a thesis on Duran Duran, please send me a copy.

Fun With Keywords: Cruel, Cruel Summer Edition

2011-07-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

So, this whole “summer” business. It’s really going to stick around for another ten weeks, huh?

Awesome. Excuse me while I perspire in an unladylike and frankly disgusting matter. I’m going to go listen to some Bananarama until the world looks better. Fresh site content will arrive after I get myself all sorted out. In the meantime, here’s a fresh crop of search terms visitors have used to find this site in recent weeks:

jai wilcox shirts where
Someone’s probably just wondering where Sendhil Ramamurthy’s sexy character Jai buys his impeccably tailored shirts on Covert Affairs. However, I haven’t watched the past few episodes, so there’s always the tantalizing possibility they’ve introduced a new subplot where Jai’s shirts have mysteriously gone missing, forcing him to wander around Langley shirtless and confused. If this is indeed the case, I will happily start watching the show again.

sendhil ramamurthy sexy
And how!

covert affairs auggie sexy blind
Eh. Sure. Auggie is sexy and blind. I’ll agree to that. Granted, I’m a little less committed to Auggie’s sexiness than I am to Jai’s, but… sure. He’s sexy. And blind. Sexy blind Auggie.

what episode of miami vice is morgan freeman in
Was Morgan Freeman in a Miami Vice episode? On the one hand, it wouldn’t surprise me -- sooner or later, everybody showed up on that show -- but I don’t recall Freeman ever making an appearance (and trust me, I am well-versed in all matters pertaining to Miami Vice). Nor does it show up in his IMDB listing. Still, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

adrianne palicki criminal minds stupid episode
Very stupid. Still, it’s not poor Adrianne’s fault she got stuck in the Most Wretched and Ill-Advised Criminal Minds Episode of All Time. She was fine; the episode was crap.

andy
Okay, I just Googled “Andy” and got over five hundred million results. I imagine this piddling little site is ranked very, very low on that list. Whoever sorted through all those results to get here, color me duly impressed by your diligence.

andy taylor the quotes from his biography wild boy
Here’s one, from his section on filming the video for “Save a Prayer”:

Special bonus! Just because that scene is too adorable not to reference again and again and again, here’s yet another shot of John and Nick boldly going where Andy feared to tread. Possibly homoerotic, definitely cute.

criminal minds episdode filmed in spokane
was any episodes of criminal minds filmed in spokane washington
Sadly, no. The two episodes that took place in Spokane -- “The Thirteenth Step” and “Open Season” -- were both filmed in the greater Los Angeles area.

why thomas gibson never appears in the dvd specials
The special features on the Criminal Minds DVDs, you mean? Yeah, I’ve noticed that, too. I don’t know why -- he commutes weekly to the Los Angeles set from his San Antonio home, so maybe he doesn’t have much free time to participate in the production of the DVD extras. Or maybe he doesn’t like talking about his work. No idea. For what it’s worth, he crops up in the blooper reels, at least.

thomas gibson mustache
You can check out Gibson’s unfortunate ‘stache in Far and Away.

the hardy boys 1990's seriers epidoe guide
The Canadian version, with Paul Popowich and Colin Gray? Aw, I liked that one. Didn’t last very long, but it was cute and fun. I don’t know where you’d be able to find an episode guide, and I don’t even think it’s been released on DVD. Sort of a shame -- I’d like to watch it again to see if it holds up.

new moon on monday video horses
It’s a horse-heavy video: The lightsaber-wielding soldiers (sigh) charge into the courtyard on horseback, while glamorous smugglers Nick and John transport their dangerous cargo into town in a horse-drawn carriage.

criminal minds heroes crossover
I was trying to think of actors who’ve appeared on both Heroes and Criminal Minds and stalled at Leonard Roberts and Robert Knepper, though I’m sure there are others. Then it occurred to me that the ghastly trainwreck that was Heroes is no longer taking up much space in my memory -- heck, I even had to look up Knepper, because I couldn’t quite remember his name. And that made me feel sort of grimly satisfied.

dodge cannibals hilltop catering-videos
Two words that should never be used in the same phrase: “cannibals” and “catering.”

i slept with thomas gibson
Er… congratulations?

jonny lee miller weird facial expressions
Marvelously weird. Here are a few choice ones, all from Trainspotting.

miami vice heart of night lyrics one day i'll find it's so nice someone thinks you're special treat them right
Joan Armatrading's "Dark Truths." Beautiful, ominous song. Great choice for that episode. Thanks for tipping me off to this one; I wasn't familiar with it, but now I've been listening to it all afternoon.

white collar makes me wanna go to new york
Oh, yeah. White Collar makes New York look shiny and dazzling. Hey, has White Collar been any good this season? Much as with Covert Affairs, I’ve dropped it from my regular viewing schedule, though I’m still downright fond of it. Back in May, I spotted Tim DeKay at LAX, and I have to say, I was a little star-struck.

spanking stories spankinglife.com
No first-hand experience here, but I’d hazard a guess that any website named “SpankingLife” would be an excellent place to find spanking stories.

who played the girl in hardy boys hong kong episode
Jean Marie Hon.

nick rhodes view to a kill
Gorgeous. Glamorous. Glorious. As hilariously over the top as Duran Duran’s resident magical pixie could be in the mid-1980s (I direct you once again to the awesome series of jaw-dropping wedding photos on his ex-wife’s website. The pink satin! The live flamingos!), he’s essentially ridicule-proof, simply because: a) Nick has never seemed to give a crap what anyone thinks of him, so there’s no earthly point in mocking him, and b) even at his strangest, he always looked fantastic.

please explain "wild boys" by burroughs
I couldn’t possibly. I don’t take nearly enough drugs to understand Burroughs. This site takes a valiant stab at a comprehensive explanation.

what was the first zombie music video duran duran
Duran Duran’s zombie-filled video for “Night Boat” was filmed in May 1982, which means it beat Michael Jackson’s zombie-filled video for “Thriller,” which was shot in October 1983, by a year and a half. I can’t definitively say “Night Boat” was the first music video to ever feature zombies, though that seems like a logical enough assumption.

duran duran nightboat video released before mtv
No. MTV launched in the summer of 1981. While the song “(Waiting for the) Night Boat” was on Duran Duran’s 1981 debut album, the video was shot in 1982. Anecdotal evidence suggests “Night Boat” received some airplay on MTV, though it remains one of the band’s lesser-known videos. Too bad -- it might be their very best.

what is the funniest criminal minds episode
Oh, man. Criminal Minds is not exactly chock full of laughs. Amidst the unrelentingly bleak subject matter, it does have some light moments -- I like the start of “Open Season,” where Prentiss, J.J. and Garcia cheerfully humiliate some schmuck who tries to impress them by posing as an FBI agent.

is nick rhodes the one with the headband in hungry like the wolf
While Nick wore his share of headbands throughout Duran Duran’s Golden Age of Video, lovely John Taylor is the one in with the headband (and minus the shirt) in “Hungry Like the Wolf.”

can chloroform be traced to a victim
Lordy. I’m going to assume (and hope) whoever entered this search phrase into Google is writing a mystery novel and thus is not actually plotting to chloroform someone. I’ll sleep better that way.

80's tv movie where to nerds get makeovers and pretend to be from europe
Student Exchange. Given my well-documented weakness for cheeseball films from the 1980s, I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never seen this.

about hardy boys the mystery of the blowing chunks
Funny. Very funny.

my darling archie said holding horatio close to his chest
Huh. Granted, I haven’t read all of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels, but I’ve definitely missed the one where Archie and Horatio indulge in a bit of canoodling.

not another teen movie banana in butt scene video
Here it is. This is a poignant cautionary tale about how early roles can come back and haunt young actors: No matter how many big-screen superheroes Chris Evans plays -- he’s been the Human Torch, he’ll be Captain America -- a certain section of viewers will forever know him as the banana-in-the-butt guy.

skulky the turtle wonder likes naked woman wrestling
This comes as no surprise.

preppies of the apocalypse always shine
Not always. The preppies are feeling a bit grubby and bedraggled and sad and not at all shiny these days. Or maybe that’s just me. But I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.

Duranalysis: Girls on Film

2011-07-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

Duran Duran traditionally conclude their concerts with an encore performance of their 1981 hit “Girls on Film,” so it seems only fitting to wrap up this whole Duranalysis nonsense with an examination of that video. I’ll be analyzing the uncensored Night Version, which is the porny version with all the bare breasts and whatnot, so if you’re reading this at work or in a public space, maybe you should plan accordingly.

Still here? Let’s do this:

The video for “Girls on Film” was directed by Godley & Creme, who would later direct the boys in “A View To a Kill.” It kicks off with a montage of workers rigging lights and building the set, which consists of a platform stage for the band and something that looks like a boxing ring with a long catwalk leading up to it.

This guy is probably just spray-painting the ring, but I prefer to think he’s dousing it with Lysol. Given all the unhygienic behavior that will soon take place here, disinfecting everything in sight seems like a necessary precaution.

There’s also a montage of the band primping before their performance. If, like me, you don’t have much interest in nude women yet have a fondness for watching pretty boys fuss with their hair, this will probably be your favorite part of the video. I admire the in-your-face way this video establishes Duran Duran’s credo: They like naked girls, they like sleaze, they like wearing makeup, they like looking beautiful and glamorous, and if you have a problem with any of that, they’re not going to lose sleep over it.

First up with the primping is the awesome and hilarious performance-art exhibit known as Nick Rhodes. Nick looks fantastic here, with two-tone hair (fiery red in front, jet black in back) and flawless makeup. After looking so painfully young and awkward in the videos for “Planet Earth” and “Careless Memories,” he’s finally grown into his glamorous and flamboyant magical-pixie persona.

This video marks the final appearance of the platinum locks Andy sported in “Planet Earth” and “Careless Memories.” After this, Andy will officially stop giving a crap about his hair.

And here we have John, in the process of getting his beautiful, beautiful face touched up. This is pretty much the textbook definition of gilding a lily.

There is no shot of shy, enigmatic Roger primping, which comes as no surprise. Roger probably does his fair share of primping. Just not when there’s a camera pointed at him.

Headbands! The iconic Duran Duran headbands make a triumphant debut in this video! Simon wears his trademark white one, while Nick sports a leopard-print one during the performance scenes. So help me, I love those headbands. Fashion-wise, this video is a huge leap forward for the boys. They’ve finally ditched those huge, frilly poet shirts, the ones that made John look like a runway model and made everyone else look stumpy and sad, in favor of a more tailored, high-fashion image. This video brought the band into the public eye in large part because of the over-the-top sexual content, but even without it, audiences would have taken note of the boys. They’re too glamorous and gorgeous to ignore.

The bulk of the video consists of a series of sleazy vignettes, which take place in the boxing ring while the band performs on the stage in the background. Sleazy Vignette #1: Two women in black teddies, their hair in rollers, slink down the runway amidst a flurry of flashbulbs from an unseen audience. They enter the ring and approach a long horizontal pole, which is covered in shaving cream. The women straddle the pole on either end, then slither their way through the shaving cream until they meet in the center. It’s more tasteful than it sounds.

Ha ha, no. No, it’s not. It’s every bit as tacky as you’d imagine. A referee hands the women pillows, which they use to vigorously whack each other while still straddling the pole. This sorely taxes the structural integrity of their flimsy teddies. They kiss beneath a shower of feathers from the destroyed pillows, then saunter back off down the runway.

Backstage, the women celebrate in the traditional manner, i.e. by pouring champagne over their breasts. Great merciful Zeus, is that a bottle of Veuve Clicquot? Veuve Clicquot is my bubbly of choice for super-fancy occasions. In the hilariously decadent and excessive world of Duran Duran, it’s the stuff best suited for dumping over the chests of scantily-clad women.

Sleazy Vignette #2: A cute girl in a mawashi -- that’s the combination belt/loincloth that sumo wrestlers wear -- paired with a transparent mesh shirt and a samurai-style topknot squares off against a sumo wrestler in the ring. Even though he’s easily twice her size, she applies a judo hold and flips him onto his back. She gives a formal bow and retreats.

Is “stylishly tacky” too much of an oxymoron? Because that’s the best way to describe this video: stylishly tacky. It’s all very early-1980s, with the sleekness and aggressive sexuality of a Patrick Nagel painting mixed with a healthy dollop of camp.

Sleazy Vignette #3: A woman in a sexy white nurse costume, complete with white stockings and a garter belt, enters the ring and approaches a towel-draped man, who lies on a massage table. She gives him a thorough massage, which seems to involve an abundance of baby oil.

Once finished, she strolls off, leaving the man sprawled across the table, limbs dangling over the sides, evidently dead. These women are not only sleazy, they’re dangerous.

Sleazy Vignette #4: A blonde in a white cowboy hat and skimpy cowgirl duds takes a ride on the back of a muscular black man, who gallops around the ring while wearing a horse mask and a skimpy thong. At the conclusion of her ride, she scrubs him down and leads him offstage by his harness. Yeah, this isn’t offensive much. Nosirree, no cringe-worthy racial stereotypes here.

Let’s move on quickly and pretend this didn’t happen.

Sleazy Vignette #5: A sexy lady in high heels and a one-piece bathing suit tumbles into in a kiddie pool and appears to drown. A lifeguard in mirrored sunglasses comes to her rescue with a judicious application of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. As soon as she’s successfully revived, it turns into a full-on makeout session, which culminates with the lifeguard lying dead in the pool while the lady strolls off in triumph.

There are two prevalent themes running through this video:
1. Women have breasts.
2. Women are dangerous.

In reinforcement of Theme #1, we now see a shot of the backstage area, where a naked woman -- probably the sexy lady from the kiddie pool, though it’s hard to recognize her without her bathing suit -- runs an ice cube over one perky nipple. Totally understandable. Luring a hapless lifeguard to his doom can raise a girl’s core body temperature to dangerous levels.

Sleazy Vignette #6: Everybody loves mud wrestling!

Yeah, so these two nice young ladies (one topless, one in a bodysuit) grope each other in the mud for a while, then someone sprays down the victor with a hose while she sashays off the stage.

So that’s the naughty version. Because the Duran Duran boys are never satisfied until they’ve re-cut and re-released each video multiple times, there’s also a sanitized-for-MTV version, in which all the nudity has been replaced with some ridiculous footage of well-heeled people dancing around the boxing ring under the watchful glare of a burly masked man. In addition, there’s a slightly different version of the original video, which concludes with the boys standing behind the mud wrestlers while holding a sign reading, “SOME PEOPLE WILL DO ANYTHING TO SELL RECORDS.”

Bingo! Points for honesty. This shot was probably scrapped from the original video for being a little too on-the-nose: Yes, making a naughty video was a shameless (and successful!) ploy to drum up controversy and thus spark interest in the band -- all involved parties have been pretty open about that -- but it was maybe smarter not to cheerfully trumpet that fact within the video itself.

Or the shot could have been removed due to how crappy that sign looks. Look at it -- it’s horrible. Did the boys make it themselves? Based on how pleased they all look, I’m inclined to think Godley and Creme handed the boys a roll of butcher paper and a box of Magic Markers and set them at it, just to keep them out from underfoot while the grownups were setting things up.

And with that, I have now reviewed all of Duran Duran’s videos from 1981 through 1985 (with the notable exception of “The Chauffeur,” which does have a sleek and elegant video, but the boys don’t appear anywhere in it. No Durans, no Duranalysis. That’s the rule). To commemorate this occasion, here’s a montage of Nick’s awesome video hairstyles, in loose chronological order:

Wow. Yeah, that pretty much looks like a whole bunch of entirely different people, doesn’t it?

On the other end of the spectrum, here’s Roger:

Hmm. Not exactly a shocking amount of variety here. Well, he sported some vaguely blondish highlights in “Union of the Snake,” right? Roger is a man who values consistency.

Here’s the ludicrously pretty John Taylor:

Yep. Just a whole lot of nice hair and great bone structure going on.

Apart from some slight variations in shade and length, Simon’s hair changes surprisingly little from video to video. Still, his wide range of facial expressions more than compensates for his lack of tonsorial creativity. Simon is, as always, a one-man party.

Andy’s hair is a linear progression from fussy to indifferent to awful. Or, if you prefer, from “This whole bleached look isn’t really my thing, but I guess it’ll keep Nick happy,” to “Come to think of it, I don’t give a rat’s ass whether Nick is happy with my hair,” to “Nick will hate it; therefore I love it.”

Or at least that’s exactly how it’s going to play out in the histrionic and highly libelous screenplay for the made-for-basic-cable Duran Duran biopic that I’m currently writing in my brain (working title: Dance Into the Fire: The Duran Duran Story), an idea which has been festering ever since I read Andy’s account in his memoir of that time he and Nick hurled pork pies at each other during an especially acrimonious tiff. The screenplay would burst at the seams with glitter and champagne and scuffles and hair gel. It’d be deeply superficial and baffling and ludicrous, and yet would somehow consist of pure awesomeness. Just like Duran Duran themselves.

Duranalysis: Arcadia’s Goodbye is Forever

2011-06-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it’s all about Nick.

My apologies in advance to Simon, who is doomed to get a little shortchanged in the praise department this time around. I’d feel worse about that, but I’ve already given him plenty of tongue baths -- strictly in the metaphorical sense, alas -- in earlier reviews. Simon does a fine job here, but really, Arcadia’s video for “Goodbye is Forever” belongs to the lovely and strange Mr. Rhodes.

The original plan was to give this one a pass and wrap up this whole Duranalysis business this week with “Girls on Film.” Because the Duran Duran universe is a never-ending rabbit hole and because time is finite, I’d intended to stick to the videos produced in their Golden Age (1981-1985) and, with the exception of Arcadia’s “The Flame,” which is far too much fun to ignore, skip over all the later albums and side projects. Then someone suggested I tackle this one, which turned out to be a great idea. There's nothing quite like a whopping dose of pure, uncut, pharmaceutical-grade Nick.

Nick, as I’ve mentioned before, is magical.

“Goodbye is Forever” was directed by Marcelo Anciano, who also wrote the treatments and made the storyboards for the earlier videos Duran Duran shot with Russell Mulcahy. While Roger plays drums on the track, he doesn’t appear in the video. And unlike “The Flame,” there’s no surprise John Taylor cameo. It’s just Simon and Nick, nothing more. In this case, that’s enough.

The video opens on an enigmatic title card, which adds a stylish touch. Whatever your opinion of Arcadia, it’s hard to deny they put out some graceful, polished videos.

Nick and Simon sleep in ornate, high-backed chairs, which are mounted upon rollers on a long track and adorned with suns and crescent moons. Nick wakes and looks around, perplexed. He glances at his watch, which runs backwards.

Oh, man, I love Nick’s whole Arcadia look, with the dark suit and the gobs of eyeliner and all that crazy, gorgeous, jet-black, Jo-Polniaczek-in-later-seasons-of-Facts-of-Life hair. He’s mesmerizing in this video, hyper-alert and dazzling and delightfully weird. All the traumatic memories of his awful “Planet Earth” hair have been expunged from my brain.

In the chair behind Nick, Simon is still fast asleep. A white feather, held by white-gloved mechanical hands extending from the back of his chair, tickles his nose until he wakes.

Simon, blessedly, has finally ditched his unfortunate “Wild Boys”-era mullet in favor of a close-cropped, freshly-brunette ‘do, paired with a tasteful hoop earring. It’s a good look for him -- streamlined and unfussy -- but he’s blown out of the water by the full-tilt glamour and glory of Nick. Nick doesn’t often grab the spotlight from Simon, but when he does, it’s hard to wrestle it away from him.

The chairs lurch forward, wheeling along the track. Nick and Simon look startled, though not especially concerned, at finding themselves suddenly in motion. They glide up an incline toward an archway, then enter into a dark chamber filled with floating timepieces, calendar pages, and heavenly bodies.

Next, the chairs rise up into the air, suspended on chains. The boys float in front of a chaotic, crazy, colorful backdrop of clockwork and tangled pipes.

What does it all mean? You’ve got me. If there’s more to this video than maybe a hazy theme of Time, it’s gone completely over my head. Doesn’t really matter -- the charm of this video rests largely with the gorgeous production design, not with the plot. Between the vintage clock gears and the puffs of steam and the floating celestial objects, there’s almost a cool Victorian/steampunk vibe to it.

Simon, always ready to add a fun random element to any situation, launches himself out of his chair. With the aid of some sketchy special effects, he plummets to the ground.

He lands on an inflated mat lining the bottom of a makeshift wire cage. Nick follows his example and flops on the mat beside him. They both seem absurdly pleased with their current predicament. You’re in a cage, boys. I don’t know that you should look happy about it.

Durans-in-gratuitous-bondage alert! Simon is now tied to the hands of a clock rotating above a gigantic dial, while above him, Nick is bound to a swinging pendulum. It’s not quite in the same realm of kink as that scene in “Wild Boys” where John writhes helplessly while strapped down across the hood of a car, but I appreciate the spirit behind it nonetheless.

Nick seems delighted about this unexpected foray into bondage. In fact, Nick seems downright chipper throughout the whole video, which is a refreshing change of pace; I adore Nick at all times, but he tends to default toward pouting and glowering whenever he’s on camera. There’s a brief behind-the-scenes segment on the making of this video, in which both Nick and Simon appear to be having themselves a fine old time during filming. At one point, director Anciano stands beside Nick and, while the camera rolls, gives him instructions: “You’re having fun! You’re having fun!” In response, Nick flashes his lovely and too-rare grin. This makes me wonder: In all the fifteen or so videos Duran Duran made prior to this, did no one think to simply tell Nick to smile?

Then the boys fall through the air some more (special effects: still dubious) before finding themselves back in their chairs. The white-gloved mechanical hands pop up again for the express purpose of totally wrecking Nick’s meticulous makeup job. Aw, don’t mess with Nick’s face! It’s pretty!

(Full points to Nick for always being the first to joke about his makeup, by the way. There’s a good article about him in the June 1985 issue of Spin in which, upon showing up for an interview with smudged eyeliner, he quips, “Although I’m vain enough to wear it, I’m not vain enough to carry it around with me to touch it up,” which is sort of awesome. The same article, which features some great photos of Nick with crazy black-and-blonde hair, also compares him, aptly, to an expensive kitten. “Expensive kitten” replaces “magical pixie” as my new favorite two-word description of him.)

Still in their chairs, Simon and Nick roll through another entryway into a chamber filled with languid, glamorous women dressed in satin evening gowns. Nick and Simon stare at the women in baffled wonder. Visibly bored, the women can’t be bothered to spare them a glance. Just a couple of gorgeous Durans in magically rolling chairs. Yawn.

The track next leads them in front of the face of a gigantic cuckoo clock (alternate theory: the clock is normal-sized, and Simon and Nick are just really, really tiny), which strikes twelve just as they pass it. Somebody involved with this video had an unhealthy fascination with clocks.

A quick roll through a gauze-draped fairytale garden with softly-falling snow and urns of flowers, and then their chairs come to a halt in front of a brick wall. When Simon and Nick rise from their chairs, the wall dissolves away, revealing the outer world.

The boys gaze wistfully behind them, then stroll off into the sunset together, which is dreamy and poignant and even sort of romantic. Then Simon succumbs to an inexplicable urge to end the video on a jaunty note. He hops into the air and clicks his heels together. Fade to black.

A lovely video, strange and melancholy yet oddly good-natured. Good stuff.

Duranalysis: Planet Earth

2011-06-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

Here we are, back where it all began. “Planet Earth” was Duran Duran’s very first video from their very first single off of their 1981 debut album. It also marked the beginning of their long and successful collaboration with director Russell Mulcahy. While less ambitious than their expensive, expansive later efforts (no cavorting on yachts, no exotic locales), it does a solid job of introducing the band to the world. It’s slick and fun. Somehow, though, the process of analyzing it here -- watching it multiple times, searching for fun facts about it, grabbing screenshots -- has left me a little cranky.

Frankly, I blame Nick’s hair.

The opening image features Roger, shirtless and smoldering, his upper torso emerging out of some kind of primordial haze with the Earth glowing behind him. This video is an excellent showcase for Roger. He’s so quiet and low-key that it’s sometimes easy to overlook him; shots like this serve to remind everyone that, while he may be less flashy and mouthy than the rest of the boys, he’s still a stone-cold fox.

The boys perform on a platform on an upside-down pyramid made of ice. Or maybe it’s made of diamonds! We’re talking about Duran Duran here (glamorous, frivolous, drawn to sparkly things…), so a diamond pyramid is not out of the question. It looks like they’re performing in a vast, icy chamber, like they’re the house band at the Fortress of Solitude, though I would’ve pegged Superman as more of a Springsteen man.

Even from a distance, Simon’s outfit looks awesomely bizarre. Poet shirt! Enormous jodhpurs! Huge leather belt! Weird knotted rope-thingy dangling around his neck!

John, as always, looks elegant and lovely, albeit a little on the pouty side. And those bangs are crazy. John probably spent much of 1981 walking into walls and tripping on the sidewalk, unable to see anything through that heavy shock of magnificent hair. Great beauty comes with a price.

Oh no! Poor Nick’s being strangled by a frilly white boa constrictor! It climbed up his chest and is throttling the life out of him!

…Yeah. Nice shirt, Nick. I’ll address that hairstyle a little later on. I have to give myself a pep talk first. It’s too demoralizing otherwise.

By the way, check out Nick’s one-handed technique in this video. Nick, of course, is an influential and respected synthpop pioneer/keyboard artiste, but in the early years of the band, learning how to, like, play the blasted thing seemed low on his list of priorities. Here’s a fantastic quote from Nick, extracted from the cover story (“Nick Rhodes: The Dashing Duran”) of the May 1984 issue of some odd teen-geared publication called Tiger Beat STAR (which is not to be confused with plain old vanilla Tiger Beat), explaining why simplicity is the key to successful Duran songs: “I have to be able to play everything with one finger. If it’s two fingers, it’s too complicated.”

Just to drill the point home, here’s an Andy Taylor quote from a gleefully spiteful interview he gave in 1986 after he’d quit the band for the first time, as recounted in Steve Malins’s Duran Duran Notorious: The Unauthorised Biography: “I taught Nick the difference between a major chord and a minor chord. I couldn’t get him all the way to diminished, but I did teach him the difference between major and minor.” Bitchy! But funny, and maybe kind of true! But still, bitchy!

Simon lies on his side, shirtless, his arm tucked beneath his head, giving the general viewing public a provocative glimpse of his armpit. In his autobiography, Andy claims Nick was highly disgruntled about this shot. Nick evidently has strong negative opinions about visible body hair. This comes as no real surprise.

In case anyone was wondering, there’s no plot to be found anywhere around here. It’s just a bunch of performance footage mixed with a series of tableaus, all sort of loosely centered around a general theme of, yep, Planet Earth. Here, Simon cuddles with a terrified blonde, who’s wearing a hat worthy of the Royal Ascot. They’re standing in front of a blue backdrop with flashing lights and moving patterns, and I have no idea what’s going on. I’m just wildly guessing, but it seems to be either the birth of the world, or the end of the world. Or both. Or neither.

Now Simon's lying on his back, his hands upraised, with water streaming up from his face to his fingers in flagrant defiance of the laws of gravity. Spending too much time puzzling out the images in this video is a sucker’s game.

And then there’s a bunch of shots of the boys striking dramatic poses while a glowing digital display of random numbers and bits of trivia flicker across the screen. Holy hell, Nick, what’s going on with your hair? I can ignore it no longer. Nick’s hair makes unicorns weep. Here are the levels of wrongness: 1) It’s been bleached into straw. 2) There are strange pinkish patches. 3) Some misbegotten soul has taken a crimping iron to it. Wars have been started for less.

Given my giddy delight at All Things Nick, it seems blasphemous to even type this, but Nick looks like hell in this video. I mean, sure, he’s still just a kid here, so it’s understandable. By the time the Rio album came out the following year, by the time he turned twenty, Nick had transformed himself into the sleek and dainty magical pixie we all know and love, but it didn’t happen overnight. His gorgeous, glammed-up public image came about as a process of trial and error. Thanks to this video, some of those errors are preserved for eternity.

On the flip side: This is an amazing shot of Andy, all pale eyes and platinum hair, paired with that wide-eyed, unearthly expression. He looks startling and doll-like and unreal, like he’s the android cousin to Pris, the pleasure-model Replicant played by Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner. And if you’d ever asked me to pick the Duran who could most convincingly look like a sexbot, Andy would have been a distant fifth on my list.

While John and Simon pose in their fancy ruffled blouses, a pair of punk-haired folk dancers cavort in the background. In his memoir, Andy claims one of the dancers is Sigue Sigue Sputnik frontman Martin Degville. Which goes a long way toward explaining the fantastic gravity-defying hair.

While the dancers cavort about, factoids flash across the screen: “1,003.5 MEN ON EARTH FOR EVERY 1,000 WOMEN,” and “THE OLDEST KNOWN SONG IS THE SHADUF CHANT.” I was lost at sea about that last one, so I did some digging: A shaduf is a rod-and-bucket contraption used in ancient Egypt to lift water; the Shaduf Chant was sung by workers along the banks of the Nile.

I learned something from a Duran Duran video. That doesn’t happen every day.

The video ends on a freeze frame of Simon flinging himself off the ice pyramid into the abyss, which seems 100% like something he’d do. Over on Duran Duran’s official website, Simon gives a totally bonkers response to a fan-submitted question about an anecdote involving falling out of a window. His reply manages to encompass two entirely separate incidents, one which took place following a ménage-a-trois with a beautiful French woman and an unidentified rock star, and another which involved fifteen naked girls in Nick’s hotel room and far too much tequila. As a general rule of thumb, it’s best not to regard anything Simon says as gospel truth, but still, this sort of thing is exactly why Duran Duran is the greatest pop group ever.

And that was “Planet Earth.”

Covert Affairs: Good Advices

2011-06-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

Okay! That was approximately eighty times better than last week’s episode!

Annie goes on a mission in Paris to meet a young woman named Salma, who works at the Syrian Embassy, in the hopes of cultivating her as a CIA asset. Paris! Annie’s scenes were actually shot in Paris, which was a good call -- for once, this show actually looks like a real, grownup spy series, instead of a pretty good pretender. After much dithering around, Annie manages to orchestrate an encounter with Salma: She secretly exchanges Salma’s ridiculously expensive handbag with her own exact duplicate. When Salma contacts her to arrange a trade, she coerces her into sharing a bottle of wine, engaging in some giddy girl-talk, and accompanying her to a fancy-dress event later that same night. When Annie gets herself in gear, she works fast.

At the event, Annie and Salma run into Eyal Lavin, the dashing and roguish Mossad agent whom Annie had tangled with last season. Oded Fehr! Very pleased to see you here again, sir. Please show up on as many episodes as humanly possible -- heck, if Covert Affairs wanted to make Eyal a regular character, I’d have no complaints -- because you brighten up this show whenever you’re around.

As Mossad also has a keen interest in cultivating Salma (her job puts her in close contact with a Syrian figure of great interest to many governments), Eyal has been romancing her under false pretenses. This ruffles Annie’s feathers, as Eyal is essentially beating her at her own game.

Salma, who turns out to be no fool, almost immediately picks up on Annie’s and Eyal’s respective ruses. She coolly outlines the deal: She’ll become an asset to the highest bidder.

Back at Langley, Joan gets called into jury duty, which she does not handle with grace and dignity. During her absence, she leaves Auggie in charge of the DPD, in a move expressly designed to annoy Jai. No worries. Jai is extra-sexy when he’s annoyed.

A bidding war erupts between the CIA and Mossad for Salma’s loyalties. Auggie, through Joan, authorizes Annie to offer Salma fifty thousand Euros. Salma accepts the deal and agrees to meet with Annie at a café to complete the transaction. Salma stands her up; Annie and Eyal later find her dead in her apartment. When her murderer tries to flee the scene, Eyal chases him across rooftops (Covert Affairs has had some pretty good foot chase scenes, this one among them. Certainly better than their car chases, which tend to bring episodes crashing to a halt). Salma’s killer falls to his death from a high rooftop to avoid capture by Eyal.

While Annie was in possession of Salma’s expensive handbag, she’d taken notice of a Post-It Note listing a train route number and arrival time. Even though her mission ended with Salma’s death, she stakes out the train station in the hopes of spotting Salma’s mysterious Syrian contact. Thanks to a surprise bit of assistance from Eyal, Annie manages to snap a valuable photograph of the man. However, when she goes for celebratory drinks with Eyal afterwards, Eyal swipes her camera’s memory card and takes off.

Dashing and roguish spies. They’ll lead you into trouble every time, Annie. It’s what they do.

Annie chases after Eyal. She spots him being bundled into a van, presumably by the Syrians. She follows them to a cabin in the woods, torches the van, creates a big messy disturbance, and, after a series of hijinks and foibles and crackling romantic sparks, manages to get both herself and Eyal to safety.

Covert Affairs? Forget Ben. Eyal is where it’s at. Trust me on this.

Annie returns to Langley, her mission a success, except for the part where her would-be asset got totally murdered. Acting on Eyal’s advice, she comes partially clean with Danielle, who thinks she was on an innocent trip to Topeka for the Smithsonian. She doesn’t go as far as to tell her sister she’s a CIA operative, but she does explain that she was actually in Paris, so… baby steps.

Excellent episode. For once, the main plot, while a little lightweight, didn’t seem like an afterthought. Annie and Eyal are fun together, and Joan and Auggie and Jai were delightful. No progress was made on any of the long-running plots -- the Ben situation, the mole, the negative campaign against Arthur -- but the episode itself was brisk and breezy enough to stand up on its own. Let’s hope they keep this up.

Duranalysis: Lonely In Your Nightmare

2011-06-10T14:43:00.000-07:00

Of the three videos Duran Duran shot with Russell Mulcahy whilst in Sri Lanka, “Lonely In Your Nightmare” is both the least known and the least impressive. Granted, the standard set by “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Save a Prayer” is pretty high, but still, this one’s a dud.

At least… well, one version of this video is a dud. You know how Duran Duran kept tweaking and revising their videos, to an extent that even George Lucas would consider overly fussy and excessive? (You know how there’s five different versions of “New Moon On Monday” floating around out there?) Two significantly different versions of this video exist: There’s the original, which was cobbled together entirely from footage shot in Sri Lanka, and a later version, which also contains a bunch of scenes shot in London. The revised version, while not among the all-time best Duran videos, has some good moments. The original version, on the other hand, is… how shall I describe it? I’m going to go with “unwatchable.”

Yeah. That pretty much sums it up.

The original version focuses on a leggy brunette, who is played by Vanya, the model who dances with Simon in the “Save a Prayer” video. In the original version of “Lonely In Your Nightmare,” Vanya writhes around in a gauze-draped four-poster bed while dreaming of frolicking with Simon. That’s pretty much it. The video clocks in at just under five minutes, and almost a minute and a half of that features the same quick snippet of Vanya tossing and turning in bed, over and over and over again. It’s almost farcically repetitive and mind-numbingly dull.

The revised version takes the bare bones of the original and adds a framing device, which is set in London. It’s shot in black-and-white and is shown mostly from Simon’s point of view. Wise choice -- Vanya is lovely, but she can’t hold the screen as well as Simon can.

In the opening scenes, “Planet Earth” plays faintly in the background as Simon prowls around an abandoned apartment. It almost seems apocalyptic -- the apartment is fully furnished, but piles of dust and signs of decay are everywhere. Simon unearths a stack of Polaroids from beneath an inch of dust on a dresser. He flips through them while looking anguished and glamorous.

He leans against the wall and stares out the window. He catches a glimpse of a dark-clad woman -- Vanya -- walking down the street, away from the apartment.

Simon lapses into a daydream about his past with Vanya, and here’s where the Sri Lanka footage first appears. Vanya writhes around in bed, deep in troubled sleep. Simon slinks up to her side and nuzzles against her forehead.

He also reminisces about seeing her draped in a white gown and veil, almost like a wedding dress. She’s standing in the carved archway of what looks like an outdoor shrine, while he approaches her, dressed in a white suit. This is from the original version as well; as dull as the finished video ultimately turned out, at least it had all that gorgeous Sri Lankan scenery working in its favor.

In London, Roger and Andy hang out at a produce stand at an outdoor market. Roger spots Vanya. She’s now bundled up in heavy dark clothes, in marked contrast to the filmy dresses she wears in all the Sri Lanka scenes. Roger nudges Andy to alert him to her presence, but when Andy turns to look, she’s nowhere in sight.

Andy and Roger both look ridiculously wholesome and cute here. Sometimes these two rival the formidable John-Nick team in terms of overall adorability. Remember “New Moon on Monday,” where Roger and Andy scurry down cobblestone streets while toting their special moon-powered, laser-shooting kite? Yeah, this is approaching that level of cuteness.

(Ah, that moon-powered, laser-shooting kite. Even by Duran Duran’s standards, “New Moon on Monday” is pretty much bonkers.)

Back in Vanya’s flat, Simon stares at the Polaroids again. They’re shots of Vanya in Sri Lanka, no surprise. He lapses into more daydreams: of Vanya at a colorful outdoor festival, of Vanya cavorting on the beach with a couple of small Sinhalese children… Yeah, you know what? Even the revised video uses that shot of Vanya writhing around in bed far too many times. At least it’s padded out with a bunch of other scenes.

In London, Vanya sits outside, still bundled up in her heavy black clothes. John plops down on a nearby bench, then looks up and recognizes her. He’s distracted by a flock of pigeons; by the time they fly off, Vanya has disappeared. John looks… surprised? Thoughtful? Sleepy? Sometimes it’s tough to suss out what’s going on inside John’s pretty, pretty head.

While Simon is obviously Vanya’s former lover, the connection between Vanya and the rest of the Durans -- Andy, Roger and John at least, since thus far Nick has been sadly MIA -- is more nebulous. Also, is she even really there, or are the boys just seeing things? The combination of her dust-covered apartment and the way she keeps vanishing makes me suspect she’s not really around. Factor in how it looked like she and Simon were getting married in Sri Lanka, and there’s actually sort of a cool, creepy little mystery emerging here, which was entirely absent from the original version.

Back to Sri Lanka: Simon wanders around a beach while wearing a natty suit and tie. He spots Vanya standing at a railing, staring out at the sea. Her dress billows up behind her, giving her a marked resemblance to a Maxfield Parrish painting.

A gala outdoor festival takes place at night. All the Durans are in attendance, looking sunburned and sleepy and dopey. Except for Nick. Nick! The last thirty seconds of the video, and Nick finally puts in an appearance! Nick looks hilariously pissed off, like he’s on the brink of pitching a full-scale pixie hissyfit. By multiple accounts, most notably his own, roughing it in Sri Lanka while filming these videos did not make our fussy, high-maintenance Nick a happy little pixie.

The line between “magical pixie” and “malevolent gremlin” is sometimes a fine one.

In the original version of the video, for some unfathomable reason, the face of one of the dancers at the festival is briefly superimposed over Nick’s face. I can’t even take a stab at unraveling the thought process that led to this bit of bizarre whimsy. Unless it was done just to mess with Nick, in which case I can sort of understand and even respect it.

London: Nick, who has been reunited with a working blow dryer and his full array of high-end hair care products, looks sweet and beautiful and not at all like he’s thinking of murdering someone. Nick doesn’t serve any purpose in the new footage other than to look doe-eyed and lovely while giving sexyface to the camera, but really, isn’t that enough?

Sexyface is contagious. Even camera-shy Roger gives sexyface. Roger!

Now it’s John’s turn. Wow. So pretty! John is the unparalleled master of the fine art of sexyface. Young twentysomethings everywhere looking to update their Facebook profile photos could learn much from him.

And then there’s Andy. There is not enough cash out there to get Andy to pout sexily at the camera. Sexyface is not in his genes. Nonetheless, he looks pretty damn great here. All the guys look great in the London footage, which is good, because they were starting to look a little rough toward the end of their Sri Lankan jaunt.

The video ends with some footage of Simon leaving Vanya’s apartment and walking down a flight of stairs, the Polaroid photos clutched in his hand. Funny -- the revised version of Duran Duran’s “Careless Memories” video also begins with a scene of a Polaroid-clutching Simon descending a staircase. The exact same scene, in fact. Recycling! If the boys are ever feeling especially self-amusing, they should release freshly-revised versions of all of their videos and include this shot somewhere in each.

And that’s the video. Quick added bonus: The awesome Classic Albums episode about Rio contains some cool behind-the-scenes footage of the boys in Sri Lanka while they were shooting this video. Here they are, filming the outdoor festival scene. Nick and Vanya engage in a bit of canoodling, which is sort of fascinating right there, while Andy and John look baked, in every possible sense of the word.

It also has more footage of John and Nick having a blast on that elephant from the “Save a Prayer” video. It’s all too adorable for words, though I question Nick’s decision not to wear pants that day. Rough elephant hide plus water plus sun plus pasty English skin plus a long day of filming can only equal horrible, nasty, painful chafing. No wonder he looked so venomous and cranky during much of the trip.

Even better: There’s footage of multiple Durans on elephants! All of them! I can’t believe they shot this, then didn’t manage to shoehorn it into at least one of the three Sri Lanka videos.

By my way of thinking, if you have footage of Durans riding elephants, you pretty much have a sacred duty to show it to as many people as possible. That’s gold right there.

Covert Affairs: Begin the Begin

2011-06-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

Season Two of Covert Affairs kicks off with this adequate yet unspectacular installment. Some quick notes right at the start:

1) If this episode title is any indication, it looks like they’ve moved off of Led Zeppelin songs and moved on to R.E.M. this season. Excellent choice.

2) Peter Gallagher is now a full regular cast member instead of a guest star. This is good news for the show, as Gallagher is a force of great awesomeness.

3) The animated opening credit sequence has been tweaked to include Gallagher and to show images of Sendhil Ramamurthy and Anne Dudek instead of merely name-checking them.

4) Sendhil Ramamurthy is still smoking-hot.

The episode opens in Guam, where Annie tends to a wounded Ben in the hospital. Ben, who was shot at the end of last season and appeared to be hovering on death’s door, seems pretty healthy and chipper now, at least judging by the way he enthusiastically canoodles with Annie. Their canoodling is interrupted when gunmen randomly burst into his hospital room and open fire; Annie and Ben barely escape with their lives.

In other news: Annie and Ben still make for an extremely insipid pairing. It’s a shame. Annie has so much personality and spark with almost everyone else she encounters -- Auggie, Jai and Joan in particular -- that it’s weird and depressing to see her formidable charisma sputter and fizzle whenever she’s around the great love of her life.

Ben gets transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda. Sexy Jai makes his first appearance of the season when he brings Ben a Sudoku book and growls at him for being an asshole. Oh, Jai. How I’ve missed those outstanding cheekbones and that weird sexual tension you bring to all your scenes. Welcome back, babe.

Annie returns to the home she shares with her sister Danielle, who believes Annie has been spending the past several weeks in Missouri as part of her cover as a mild-mannered Smithsonian employee. Danielle offhandedly mentions that their garage was broken into during Annie’s vacation. Combined with the still-unexplained gunmen in Guam, this makes Annie very, very nervous. Auggie arranges to have CIA technicians, posing as carpet cleaners, sweep Annie’s house for listening devices. The sweep comes up clean.

(Auggie, by the way, doesn’t do all that much this episode other than act supportive of Annie and make a few wry quips and do some chin-ups in a totally unnecessary scene set at the gym, but it’s good seeing him anyway. I like these characters an awful lot, even if my enthusiasm for the show itself has waned a great deal since last season.)

Liza Hearn releases a series of damaging investigative reports about Arthur. He’s being advised by Langley’s in-house counsel, though Joan, fearing the CIA will cheerily throw her husband to the wolves at the first opportunity, urges him to retain his own high-priced and flashy lawyer. Arthur protests at first, but eventually follows Joan’s advice. Yeah, you know what? As much as I love Arthur and Joan, I kind of hope they find a more exciting ongoing plotline than Arthur’s ongoing struggles to retain his job.

Annie’s new assignment: making contact with a tennis pro named Nadia, a CIA asset who has missed her last couple of information drops. Nadia is the mistress of an Estonian mobster named Morozov, whom the CIA has under surveillance for his shady dealings with the Russians. When Annie meets with Nadia, Nadia gets flustered and botches their ritual protocol. Although Nadia insists nothing’s wrong, Annie believes she’s in danger. Joan is skeptical, but agrees to let Annie follow her hunch and trail Nadia.

This Nadia plotline is a little on the dusty and hackneyed side, so let’s check in with lovely Jai. There’s nothing dusty about Jai. Jai and his cheekbones are having a clandestine meeting with his boss/surrogate daddy figure Arthur. Even though Jai’s original assignment -- get close to Annie to draw Ben out into the open -- has reached a natural conclusion, Arthur orders him to remain with the DPD instead of transferring back into Arthur’s own department. Thanks to Liza Hearn’s damaging articles, Arthur believes it’s best for Jai to maintain some distance from him. “Funny. Someone just gave me the same advice,” Jai snarks, referring to the way his evil (and awesome!) father Henry Wilcox advised him to steer clear of Arthur at the end of last season.

You know what this episode needed? A healthy dose of Henry Wilcox. This show always perks up enormously whenever he’s around, engaging in verbal jousting with Arthur and not-so-subtly undermining his son.

After Ben mysteriously vanishes from Walter Reed, Annie confronts Joan. Joan, who is her usual crisp and competent self, manages to reassure Annie that no harm has befallen Ben without divulging any concrete information about his status.

Through the usual muddle of exposition and coincidences and staggering leaps in logic, Annie figures out that Nadia is in no danger from Morozov. It’s the other way around, in fact: Nadia is being coerced by her tennis coach, at the behest of sinister Russian forces, to assassinate him. While Auggie whisks Morozov to safety away from Nadia’s tennis match, Annie tries to escape with Nadia. Nadia’s coach opens fire, the requisite car chase ensues, my eyes glaze over a bit with the tedium, and the evildoers are thwarted.

Denouement: The CIA agrees to give Nadia asylum in the United States, but not protection from the Russians, which means her professional tennis career must come to an early end. Auggie poses as a lawyer and interrogates two troublemaking urchins who have been arrested for the break-in at Annie’s house. And Auggie and Annie meet for drinks at their favorite local watering hole.

Hmm. This episode was no stronger or weaker than any given episode from the first season. That’s a bit of a problem: The first season, while entertaining and fun, was all about unfulfilled potential. The self-contained plots last season were the show’s biggest weakness, and just going off of this premiere, that problem hasn’t been fixed. There’s plenty of room for this series and these characters to evolve and grow, but as of yet there’s no indication that’s going to start happening any time soon.

Duranalysis: Is There Something I Should Know?

2011-06-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

You know, I planned this all wrong.

Back in March, when I first embarked upon this ongoing analysis of Duran Duran videos, I opted to tackle them in random order instead of knocking them out chronologically. So, naturally, I ripped through all the fun, juicy videos right at the start, both the ones I shamelessly adore (“Wild Boys,” “Night Boat”), and the ones I enjoy mocking (“View To a Kill,” “New Moon On Monday”). My mistake. Now that I’m fast running out of material from the band’s Golden Age of Video, I’m stuck with the dregs.

Hello, “Is There Something I Should Know?”

Let’s put this video into the proper historical context: “Is There Something I Should Know?” was a stand-alone single, not part of an album. It hit airwaves in 1983, after the release of Rio but before Seven and the Ragged Tiger, and became the band’s first number one hit in the UK. The video, which was directed by their frequent collaborator Russell Mulcahy, was crafted with no shortage of effort. It’s stylish, it’s slick, it’s attractive, it’s witty, and so help me, it bores the snot out of me.

The bulk of the video features a bunch of surreal stuff happening inside a white room. Here, for instance, we have four Simons wandering about. Not that Simon isn’t awesome, but one Simon Le Bon is really the maximum any universe can be reasonably expected to contain.

Simon seems to be toting around a fork. It might have some deep symbolic significance. It might also mean he was hauled off to the set to start filming while he was smack in the middle of his lunch (I’m going to guess… lobster thermidor, washed down with an excellent Beaujolais and a handful of gummi bears).

For this video, the boys all wear cute matching outfits -- blue shirts, white neckties, black pants -- perhaps as a nod to the Beatles, to whom they were frequently compared during this time. It’s preposterous for any band to rank themselves alongside the Beatles, of course, but in the case of Duran Duran, there’s some (slight) weight behind the claim. Thanks in large part to the Beatles’ films like Help! and A Hard Day’s Night and to Duran Duran’s high-profile music videos, all the members of both bands cemented themselves as individuals in the collective pop-culture consciousness in a way very few other bands have managed. Simon, John, Nick, Andy and Roger don’t have anywhere near the same level of widespread first-name recognition as John, Paul, George and Ringo… but they come a whole lot closer than most groups.

Something else they have in common with the Beatles: Chicks dig them. Like, a lot.

Simon climbs up a staircase while John toys with a sextant in the foreground. Here’s my personal interpretation of this video, which may be wildly off base: It’s about charting a course from childhood to adulthood. Hence, John is fiddling around with a navigational instrument. Later, we’ll see an old man -- an aged version of John, perhaps -- sitting at a dust-covered table, upon which rests the same sextant. Tempus fugit.

Remember back in my “Rio” analysis how I mentioned that John and Nick sometimes have a weird, magical ability to look like each other? They’re doing it again. I thought this was Nick at first until I took another gander at the hair. Nick’s hair has gone through a wide array of colors over the years, but he’s rarely a brunette.

You can see the influences of various artists in the set design -- there’s clearly some Magritte, and a whole lot of Escher, and probably some other artists my single art history course didn’t prepare me to identify. Pour a few champagne cocktails into Nick, and I’m sure he’d be happy to point out all the homages to various artists in this video, most likely in great and comprehensive detail.

Hmm. Getting drunk on champagne cocktails with Nick Rhodes just became one of my new Wildly Improbable Life Goals. That’d be awesome. Oh, sure, he’d probably chide me for the gaps in my knowledge of the art world and make withering comments about my cheap shoes, but it’d totally be worth it.

I’m going to rip through a bunch of scenes pretty quickly, so hang on: We see some shots of a baby watching Duran Duran videos, “My Own Way” and “Save a Prayer” in particular. I’m guessing we’re meant to interpret this as the baby catching a fleeting glimpse of his possible future, but mostly this just reminds me I’d rather be watching “Save a Prayer.” Or hell, even “My Own Way.”

Also: Out of all the bare asses that could possibly be flaunted in this video, this is entirely the wrong one.

Simon climbs the staircase leading out of the surreal white room and finds himself on the front steps of a building, surrounded by briefcase-carrying men in bowler hats and suits. Everything’s now shot in dreary black and white.

He winds up in a wooded area, where a toddler carrying a red ball is chased by a cluster of other children. The men in bowler hats perform a bunch of fussy measurements on trees and create some kind of triangular vortex. The toddler stares at the vortex, then chases the red ball back into the white room.

It’s all subject to personal interpretation, but here’s my take on all this: Both the baby and the toddler represent young versions of Simon, who is serving as a surrogate for the viewer. We see various pathways leading to adulthood -- the baby could join the glorious Technicolor lifestyle of Duran Duran, flamenco dancers and all, or he could grow up to wear a dull suit and a bowler hat and lead a drab life of nine-to-five drudgery.

Tough call.

Let’s check in with the rest of the band: They spend a lot of screen time looking up at a high window, singing in unison while looking super-earnest. Heh. All the time and care that went into making this video, and no one bothered to fetch an apple crate for poor wee Nick so he could be properly seen in this shot. It looks like John’s shoulder has sprouted a crazy tuft of vibrant orange hair.

For some reason, we’re treated to the sight of Roger, Nick and Andy crowding around an old-time microphone while doing a finger-wagging synchronized routine to the famous/infamous “You’re about as easy as a nuclear war” lyric. Er… they’re also dressed in fancy 19th Century French military uniforms. Yeah, I don’t know.

(There’s a cute and far too short clip on YouTube in which Simon and Nick watch their old videos while making sarcastic quips and going into fits of mad giggles at the absurdity of it all; I have no idea where the footage originally comes from, but it’s adorable. Anyway, here’s what Simon had to say about this shot: “I’d asked for West Point military uniforms for that. Officer and a Gentleman. What’d we get? Napoleon Bonaparte!” Yes, because West Point uniforms would have made complete sense.)

Nick somehow manages to look simultaneously ethereal and sinister here, which is a neat trick. It is not altogether easy for a fine-boned, pocket-sized pixie with tangerine hair and matching lipstick to look gritty and tough, but damned if he’s not pulling it off. If he were a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, Tyra would call him “Fierce!” and hand him his photo first.

(Guilty secret: I watch a lot of America’s Next Top Model. I’m reasonably certain Nick does, too.)

And we get a flashback to what I’m guessing was picked as Nick’s single most iconic moment in their videos up to this point: It’s the bit in “Night Boat,” pre-zombie attack, where he’s slinking around the dock and peering into windows and generally acting odd. Excellent choice.

John, while heart-wrenchingly lovely as ever, is a little low on energy and star power in this video. Under usual circumstances, John’s phenomenal beauty torpedoes all his bandmates out of the water, but I’m going to have to award the Prettiest Duran title and tiara to Nick this time around.

John’s most iconic moment: Getting his makeup applied in “Girls on Film.” Eh, sure. Why not?

And here’s Andy. Oh, Andy. I’m not going to comment on the hair. I’ll limit myself to saying this: Andy is even shorter than Nick, and almost as slight, and yet I’ve never even considered referring to him as a “pocket-sized pixie.”

Let’s see what they’ve chosen as Andy’s iconic video moment. Ah, here we go, it’s him flipping over a table in “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which totally seems like something he does on a semi-regular basis. The small problem with this, of course, is that he didn’t do it -- it was Simon, not Andy, who flipped the table. It’s sad to realize that Andy has been too under-represented in these videos to have any single defining moment to showcase here.

Last up, as usual, is Roger. On Duran Duran’s official website, when asked by a fan if there were any video moments he regretted, Roger picked this business here, where he’s singing to the camera: “I look very uncomfortable doing this and cringe every time I see it to this day.” Aw, Roger.

Roger’s iconic moment: the opening shot of “Planet Earth,” where he’s shirtless and sculpted and gorgeous. Yeah, that’s a good one.

Simon is not given a single iconic moment, probably because, as I’ve pointed out before, Duran Duran videos tend to be All Simon, All the Time anyway. Fair enough.

And… that’s the video. Whenever I watch it, it’s always with a faint sense of irritation, because at this point in their career, they had the resources and energy and enthusiasm to pull off something bigger, wilder, splashier, sillier. They could have posed as… I don’t know, space explorers. Vampires. Pirates. Circus performers. Mercenaries. Film noir detectives. Drug lords. Edwardian prostitutes. Anything! Instead, they stood in a white room and sang earnestly at a window. If that doesn’t rate as a missed opportunity, I don’t know what does.

Duranalysis: My Own Way

2011-05-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

Am I really going to drum up a thousand words or so on Duran Duran’s “My Own Way” video? I am, aren’t I?

Egad.

Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with “My Own Way,” which was the first single released off of the 1982 Rio album. It’s a fun, throwaway video for a fun, throwaway song. It’s a little surprising to discover that Russell Mulcahy, the man behind the epic mayhem of “Wild Boys” and the large-scale exotic spectacles of “Rio” and “Hungry Like the Wolf,” directed this agreeable trifle, which looks like it was shot in a couple hours in a high school auditorium on a shoestring budget (expenses: red and black paint, confetti, glitter, headbands…). Like “Careless Memories” and “Night Boat,” the video for “My Own Way” didn’t make it onto Duran Duran’s 2003 Greatest DVD collection. It’s neither a mild embarrassment like “Careless Memories,” nor an overlooked gem like “Night Boat.” It simply exists, in an inoffensive and modestly entertaining kind of way.

“My Own Way” is a straightforward performance video with a few extra frills thrown in for good measure. Frill #1: We open with a cape-twirling matador, who is played by Adrian Paul, the handsome star of Highlander: The Series. Apart from helming a buttload of Duran Duran videos (that’s a technical unit of measurement, I believe, buttload), Russell Mulcahy is still best known for directing the first couple of Highlander films; I don’t know anything about Mulcahy’s level of involvement in the subsequent television series or whether Paul’s presence here had any bearing on his future casting, but at the very least, it’s a fun coincidence.

Wow. Check out the amount of makeup on John! He’s tarted up like the Whore of Babylon, and I highly approve. While I have no proof, I somehow suspect this was Nick’s doing. Not long after this, when Rio broke through in a big way and the band became a worldwide phenomenon, most of the Durans, John included, backed off a bit from the whole pretty-boys-in-heavy-makeup image. Nick, of course, cheerfully started wearing even more makeup, just to compensate for his slacker bandmates. This is why Nick is now and ever shall be my favorite Duran.

John looks smoking-hot here. Kind of aloof and snooty, but smoking-hot nonetheless.

There’s a parakeet running amuck (is that a parakeet? It is, right? I don’t know my exotic birds). The parakeet settles on Roger’s drum kit. Roger, aware that small living creatures and wildly pounding drumsticks make poor bedfellows, regards it with due caution.

You don’t have to look far for reasons why Duran Duran captured the public’s attention so fiercely in the early 1980s: They were talented, they were beautiful, they were charismatic, they wrote catchy songs, they made dazzling videos… Not of least importance, they also had crisply-defined and very distinct public personas: You had Simon, the flirty daredevil; John, the sensitive dreamboat; Nick, the oddball diva; Andy, the feisty rebel; and Roger, the sensible wallflower. It made them more than just members of a famous pop band -- they were also characters in a glamorous and larger-than-life ongoing drama. So while Simon, John, Nick and Andy, all of whom seemed to have the common sense of coked-up chipmunks during this time, were probably all in favor of having parakeets flapping around the stage, it would fall to poor stalwart Roger to explain how none of them really needed feathers and bird crap all over their expensive instruments and equipment. And the others probably bobbed their pretty heads in feigned agreement while paying no attention whatsoever.

The parakeet next decides to pester Our Nick. Nick is totally chill about this. Bird hanging out on his synthesizers? Not a problem. It’s all good.

Then the bird tries to peck off his synth-playing fingers.

And Nick is charmed and delighted by this. Nick, who tends to be a moody little thing, doesn’t smile much in videos (for starters, smiling messes up his signature pout). A notable exception would be “Save a Prayer,” when he’s riding the elephant with John while having the time of his young life. Elephants, parakeets… Nick seems relatively indifferent to most humans, his bandmates included, but he sparkles around animals.

(Digression: This is only tangentially related to Nick’s love of animals, but it’s kind of cool, so bear with me. Nick’s glamazon ex-wife, Julie Anne Rhodes, has a website, and it’s fabulous. She’s now a personal chef in Los Angeles; her blog is a glorious mishmash of recipes and anecdotes about her glamorous life with her magical-pixie ex-husband during the peak of Duran Duran’s fame. For Duran fans or general 1980s pop-culture aficionados, it’s a must-read. Anyway, in her post about their legendarily extravagant nuptials, she mentions how Nick had to be talked out of having panthers at the reception (he eventually settled for pink flamingos instead). Words to live by: If you ever find yourself being talked out of having live panthers at your wedding, it’s a sign your lifestyle might be careening wildly -- but fabulously! -- out of control.)

Throughout the video, a cluster of pretty flamenco dancers strut and twirl around the stage. As if that’s not flashy and colorful enough by itself, it turns out their skirts are filled with copious amounts of glitter. A glitter battle ensues.

This video might be kind of cheap, but it sure does sparkle a lot.

Er… Andy’s hair isn’t really blue, is it? That’s just some weird trick of the stage lights, right? Sure, this was filmed back in the days when Andy was still being a good sport about letting the rest of the band (read: Nick) dictate what he wore and how he styled his hair, but I’m pretty sure he would’ve threatened to break some adorable pixie fingers if Nick had come charging after him, armed with rubber gloves and a box of Rit dye in Prussian Blue. It’s hard to picture Andy reacting any other way.

Then again, his hair does look mighty blue. Yessirree. No way around it. Blue.

While John and the others flirt with the pretty dancers, Simon wriggles around on his belly, snarling and gnashing his teeth in a rabid manner. When Simon decides to chew some scenery, he does it in an astonishingly literal way.

The pretty dancers flock around Roger and Nick, who are now clad in classic tuxes. The dancers plop in their laps and cheerfully molest the boys for a while. Roger seems mildly bemused by this.

A freshly-kissed Nick looks delighted. Aw, man, this is now officially the most Nick has ever smiled in a video. Set him loose with animals, or send in a pretty girl to smooch him. That’s how you make Nick happy.

Confetti fight! Simon skips around the stage and hurls confetti. Everybody dances up a storm.

And… yeah, that’s it. That’s the video. Confetti, glitter, pretty dancers, and a scene-stealing bird. It is what it is. It’s cute. Not every video aims to be “Wild Boys,” and that’s probably just as well.

Fun With Keywords: Special Moving-Is-Traumatic Edition

2011-05-20T18:04:00.001-07:00

Duran Duran reviews will return in a bit, but I’m taking a quick break to: a) recover from a grueling coast-to-coast move (blood, sweat and tears have all been involved, in significant quantities), and b) take an overdue look at some of the search terms visitors have used to find this site recently. Here we go:

what gives, wyoming preppies
I’m dazzled by the concept of Wyoming preppies. I’m picturing crew-necked sweaters and tennis skirts paired with bolo ties and hand-tooled cowboy boots. If done correctly, it could be awesome.

prentiss crush hotch
Heh. I realize this is probably intended to mean Emily Prentiss has a secret crush on Hotch, which is a popular theory among some Criminal Minds fans, but there’s a fun “Hulk smash!” air to the phrasing: “Prentiss crush Hotch! Prentiss strong!”

power station cocainey
By multiple reports and general consensus, extremely cocainey.

thomas gibson villain
Gibson’s very best villain role was in the miniseries Tales of the City (as well as its sequel, More Tales of the City). Honorable mention goes to his excellent work in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. No, really. Crap movie, but he shines in it.

what movie was thomas gibson when he played the devil
The Devil’s Child. Note how I didn’t include that in with his best villain roles. This was not an oversight on my part, I assure you.

"i felt very grown up when i was wearing makeup thank you very much"
That’d be a quote from Mr. Nick Rhodes, who tends to speak in extra-quippy bon mots. (My personal favorite Nickism: “Pretentious? I should jolly well think so!”.) Nick’s lack of a Twitter account continues to be a source of great sadness for me. It would either be brilliant or insufferable. No room for middle ground there. Either way, I’d totally follow it.

15 minute video version of new moon on monday
It’s an Easter egg on the Duran Duran Greatest video collection, which features the most monstrously irritating and ass-backward layout of any DVD set ever. To access it, click on the “S” in “GREATEST” on the main menu on Disk I (which is inexplicably marked as Disk II on my set). Click on “New Moon on Monday.” Watch the video all the way through four complete times -- it’ll be a different version each time. According to Wikipedia, the versions are as follows: the “Dancing on the Valentine” version (which is the silly one where Simon wields a bow and arrow and poses dramatically in front of a full moon, plus they’ve added some incongruous footage of a nekked woman in chains), the original MTV long version, the alternative MTV version, and the MTV short version. The fifth and final version is the seventeen-minute movie version. By the time you finally reach it, you’ll feel like you’ve earned it.

…Or you can just watch it on YouTube. Whichever.

"new moon on monday" worst video
Yeah, you know those five different versions I mentioned? None of them sparkle. Still, it’s hardly the worst video. It’s not even Duran Duran’s worst video. Granted, there’s a whole lot to mock about it, but up until the part where Andy and Roger whip out the kite that shoot lightning bolts, and then the lightsaber-wielding occupying soldiers ride into town on horseback, and then the boys wave celebratory sparklers around while awkwardly dancing, it’s pretty solid. Even the awful parts are at least entertainingly awful.

what is the symbol in new moon on monday
It’s sort of a stylized “Z” with lines through it. A version of the same symbol shows up on Simon’s belt buckle in the anime video for “Careless Memories.”

a view to a kill video model
Gail Elliott played the slinky brunette model Nick was photographing at the Eiffel Tower. Fun Duran-related fact: Yasmin Le Bon was a bridesmaid at her wedding.

model arcadia the flame video
According to Nick, his glamorous blonde companion was played by Denise Lewis.

crimial minds why in north korea prison
Excellent question. I feel fairly certain no one on the entire Criminal Minds writing staff had any idea why IRA member Ian Doyle was sent to a North Korean prison, either. While that episode, “Valhalla,” was far from the worst offender in the wildly inconsistent sixth season, it was the one that finally broke my spirit and made me give up on watching/recapping the show.

is duran duran's theme girl panic related to any anime
This doesn’t appear to be the case (to hear the boys discuss it, the song seems to be entirely about, like, girls), though “Girl Panic!” sure has a nice anime-style ring to it.

is alexandra daddario related sherilyn fenn
Evidently not, though there’s definitely a resemblance between these two gorgeous brunettes.

how self absorbed is claire bennet?
How much time do you have? Remember way back in Volume Two of Heroes when she decided to expose her super-powers to the world even as her mother begged her not to because it would place her entire family in grave and immediate danger? Remember in Volume Six when she sliced open her arm with a carving knife at the Thanksgiving table because she didn’t like her mom’s new boyfriend? Holy crap, remember the scene where she spat out her food in the Indian restaurant? Claire had some good moments over the course of the series, and Hayden Panettiere is a cutie, but crikey, for someone who was supposed to have the audience’s support and sympathy, that was one poorly-handled character.

gus: did you just use the characters from
On Psych, Shawn invoked characters from the 1983 Burt Reynolds/Loni Anderson film Stroker Ace. Gus was not impressed by his partner’s pop-culture prowess.

duran duran videos sri lanka three
“Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Save a Prayer,” and “Lonely in Your Nightmare” were all shot during the same visit to Sri Lanka.

guy in white jacket in hungry like the wolf
While both Simon and Nick are also seen wearing white in “Hungry Like the Wolf,” you are almost certainly referring to John, whose white jacket/no shirt combination is one of the most, er, memorable parts of the video.

in duran duran’s “save a prayer” video, who gets sprayed directly in the face with water by the elephant while sitting on its back?
John does, and it’s glorious.

duran duran with crabs video
…Okay, that just sounds wrong. Ahem. Anyway, a crab seizes hold of Roger’s toe in the video for “Rio.”

did patrick swayze ever star in criminal minds season 2 episode 14?
Nope. That was Don Swayze, who bears a marked resemblance to his late older brother.

dance on the table while singing hungry like the wolf
Yeah, that’s pretty much every Friday night around my place.

the best miami vice episodes
This is by no means comprehensive, but my favorites include: “Brother’s Keeper,” “Evan,” “Whatever Works,” “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run,” “Junk Love,” “Definitely Miami,” “Payback,” “Little Miss Dangerous,” “Trust Fund Pirates,” “El Viejo,” “Theresa,” “Lend Me an Ear,” “Death and the Lady,” “Love at First Sight,” “Blood and Roses,” “Hostile Takeover,” and “Redemption in Blood.” It’s no accident that many of those are from the excellent second season.

criminal minds; shemar moore looks foolish with his sculpted eyebrows
Shemar Moore is too beautiful to ever look foolish, exactly, but the sculpted eyebrows he’s been sporting recently don’t do too much for him.

sendhil ramamurthy captain dimple
“Captain Dimple” is an excellent nickname for Sendhil, though personally I’m partial to “Commander Cheekbones,” or maybe even “Admiral Outstanding Bone Structure.”

everyone wants to cuddle sendhil ramamurthy
Of course they do. He’s Captain Dimple!

senator jellyfish from x men man
I’m thrilled to find someone else who refers to Bruce Davison -- the gelatinous Senator Kelly in the first X-Men movie -- as Senator Jellyfish.

mom jeans are evil
Not evil. Just deeply unflattering to everyone, everywhere. Which I suppose, in its way, is a form of evil.

mary lightly psych
Jimmi Simpson played the deeply odd Mary Lightly on Psych. He now plays the deeply odd Lloyd Lowery on Breakout Kings, where he’s pretty much running away with the whole damn show.

preppies of the apocalypse trailer 1980s
“Preppies of the Apocalypse” does indeed sound like a fabulous 1980s film, but no, the concept is all mine. (Oh, dear lord. I just did a Google Image search for “Preppies of the Apocalypse,” just to confirm that all the results somehow pertain to this site, and it’s like looking at a weird cross-section of my brain. My shallow, shallow brain.)

That’s all I’ve got. Duran Duran reviews return next week; Covert Affairs recaps pick up when the second season kicks off in June.

Duranalysis: Save a Prayer

2011-05-13T16:10:00.000-07:00

Duran Duran’s 1982 video for “Save a Prayer” was directed by Russell Mulcahy and shot in Sri Lanka at the same time as their videos for “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Lonely in Your Nightmare.” I don’t know if Sri Lanka saw an upswing in tourism after this hit the airwaves, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s a land of majestic beaches, epic sunsets, and scantily-clad pop stars! Hard to resist any of that.

There's no plot, but there sure are a lot of pretty images. Let's get to it:

Simon loiters on a bench and sings to himself. Ah, this again: He’s shirtless under his nice suit coat, just like John in “Hungry Like the Wolf.” It looks somewhat more natural on Simon, probably because he’s indoors by himself and thus isn’t letting his nipples play peekaboo with the locals while he scampers amuck through crowded city streets. Maybe Simon just stepped out of a shower, felt a bit chilly, and threw on the first covering he could find. Perfectly understandable.

…I mean, it’s still not a good look, but I’ll give it a pass under these circumstances.

We get a lot of gorgeous shots of boats and fishermen and frolicking children as the boys stroll on a picturesque beach. Images dissolve into each other, hazy and dreamlike; it’s a lovely effect, although here it seems like Simon is lost in wistful daydreams about John, which was maybe not the intended result.

John strums his guitar on the sand while ghostlike Sinhalese children frolic in the background. Yep, John is shirtless underneath his peach linen suit. I’m ignoring it. It’s just better that way.

There are some astonishing aerial shots of Simon and Nick loitering around a stately hilltop structure (is it a temple? just a cool hangout carved into the top of a mountain?), surrounded by panoramic views. I only know that’s Nick and Simon because Nick, as is his wont, happily complained up a storm in interviews about being flown to this location by helicopter. (Nick complains a lot. As Duran Duran’s former manager Michael Berrow once put it, Nick “could be a bit of a whinger.” Because Nick is beautiful and magical, I find this endearing. My affections are illogical and capricious.) At this distance, though, it’s really impossible to tell who’s up there. Mulcahy could’ve dressed a couple of production assistants in immaculate white linen suits and dropped them on the hill, and viewers would be none the wiser.

Later, Simon dances with a leggy brunette while singing his famous lyric, “Some people call it a one-night stand, but we can call it paradise.” In the Classic Albums episode about the making of the Rio LP (which is well worth a gander, by the way -- chock full of interesting trivia), the boys all pretty much go crazy praising the romantic sentiment of that line, which… huh? Mind you, I think it’s a great lyric, catchy and evocative. However, it’s never struck me as an especially romantic lyric. He’s putting her on notice that this is a one-time deal: “We’ll have a mind-blowing evening, but just FYI, don’t create an awkward moment by slipping me your phone number in the morning, because I kind of do this sort of thing a lot.”

His date doesn’t appear to find the lyric all that romantic, either. As soon as he sings it, she stalks off, leaving him stranded on the dance floor.

“Hey! I even put a shirt on under my jacket for you!”

Durans in trees! Ah, now this video is really picking up steam. The boys hang out in the branches above an elephant lagoon. They look sort of glamorous and wild, like they’re posing for an ill-conceived Lord of the Flies-inspired fashion spread. I’m particularly enchanted by Nick’s pants-free Slutty Huck Finn ensemble, floppy straw hat and all. Nick, babe, you’re flashing an unprecedented amount of leg there. This has to be the most flesh he’s ever bared in a video, right? Nick tends to stay demurely bundled up, collar to cuffs, at all times.

(Anyone ever see that segment on a mid-nineties episode of MTV’s House of Style where Cindy Crawford takes Nick and Simon on an improbable shopping spree at Sears? When Cindy tries to convince Nick to model a tank top, he expresses horror at the idea of exposing that much skin. Fine stuff.)

According to Andy’s memoir (Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran, which, if anyone hasn’t read it yet, is a most excellent way to blow twenty bucks at Amazon), during the filming of this scene, Andy drank too much Jack Daniels, lost his balance, tumbled from the branch into the lagoon, swallowed some elephant-befouled water, and contracted a debilitating tropical virus, which ultimately resulted in a hospital stay and canceled gigs. Just another day in Duran Duran.

The guys slowly congregate around a temple. I know I tend to grouse about videos that don’t have plots, but in this case, it was the right call. It’s a dreamlike and meditative ballad. Throwing in mutants or zombies or setting it in a post-apocalyptic wasteland wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.

We take a break from all this contemplative reverie for some gratuitous Duran flesh. The head of this Speedo-clad Duran is cropped out of every frame, but by process of elimination, that torso can only belong to Simon: lankier than Andy, less gaunt than John, less muscular than Roger (who appears to be bobbing around in the background anyway), and less ethereal than Nick (who’d sooner amputate both his keyboard-playing hands than frolic about in the sun and water whilst wearing a Speedo). Ergo, that’s Simon.

You know, whichever of Simon’s delightful little bandmates nicknamed him “Lardo” on the basis of his physique during this time period deserves a firm swat on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. Lardo. Really.

I’m going to dip once more into Andy’s bottomless well of anecdotes about this video: It seems Andy refused to participate in a proposed scene featuring him getting sprayed with water from the trunk of an elephant on the grounds that it could be construed as homoerotic. Or, as Andy put it, “There’s no way I’m doing that gay thing with the elephant.” Oh, Andy, Andy, Andy. Gliding over the dense layers of wrongness in that statement, I’ll just say that John stepped up to the plate and, with assistance from nubile young Nick, did the gay thing with the elephant. And I’m ever so glad he did. The end result is the cutest damn shot in any Duran Duran video, ever. This is adorable. Look how happy they are!

As John later described it, "We've got these guys in eyeliner and crazy colored hair, and they're on the backs of elephants! It was so bizarre, but you know, it was kind of irresistible." Indeed it was, John.

On that high note, we now return to the meditative part of the video to wrap things up. The boys stand in silence at the base of a large statue carved into the cliff, lost in silent reverie. It’s a majestic shot, though Nick’s hand placement is a little odd.

Great video. Makes Sri Lanka look like the most epically beautiful place on earth. Outstanding.

Duranalysis: Rio

2011-05-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

Oh, Rio, Rio, hear them shout across the land…

The video for Duran Duran’s 1982 hit “Rio” is a dazzling, much-loved spectacle that cemented the band’s (hard-earned and richly-deserved) reputation as a bunch of worldly, decadent, hilariously excessive playboys. My film-school training prohibits me from counting “gorgeous nitwits cavort on a yacht” as a legitimate plot, so I have to dock the video points for the absence of a cohesive narrative. Still, what it lacks in plot, it makes up for in witty vignettes and vibrant images. It’s a riot of colorful body paint and spilled champagne, set against blue Caribbean waters and white sandy beaches and endless violet skies.

It is, in short, totally awesome.

In the opening moments, a broken full-length mirror magically reassembles itself until it reflects the image of a leggy brunette -- the titular Rio, one presumes, who is played by a gorgeous model named Reema. This whole business with the shattered mirror is reminiscent of the opening scenes of Duran Duran’s “Night Boat” video, which the band shot with director Russell Mulcahy in Antigua simultaneously with “Rio.” Of the two, my heart belongs to “Night Boat” (it has zombies!), but it’s impossible to resist the joyous, multi-colored charms of “Rio.”

While Rio sunbathes on the dock, Nick, the adorable little letch, lies on his stomach a short distance away and focuses his binoculars squarely on her ass. Nice, Nick.

Nick, Roger and John, all clad in bright designer suits, loiter on a yacht and roll little red balls around the deck. They look like a cluster of spoiled, pampered housecats, beautiful and lazy and waiting to be petted and adored.

On the beach, Rio strides out of the waves. She’s clad in a one-piece bathing suit cut almost down to her navel, with a sheathed knife strapped to her thigh. There’s every chance she’s far too much woman for any of the boys to handle. Roger bravely decides to give it a shot anyway. He swaggers up and starts putting the moves on her (Roger has moves?). Before he can get very far, a crab attacks his foot and clings to his toe, which pretty much blows his ultra-suave façade to pieces.

Rio rolls her eyes, raises a shapely leg, and kicks Roger back into the water. This seems like a wild overreaction to his klutzy yet endearing attempt to pick her up, but I like her anyway. While there’s never a shortage of gorgeous women in Duran Duran videos, they often turn out to be blank slates (the three lovely yet wholly interchangeable brunettes in “Union of the Snake” spring immediately to mind). Rio, however, has enough vibrant personality to make her a fitting romantic interest/adversary for the boys.

The boys swarm around the deck of the yacht, which is sailing at a fast clip through the water, and sing their hearts out. It’s iconic and decadent and fun. Fans of Andy had best get their fill of him here, because he’s going to be MIA for most of the video, apparently by choice (quote from Andy on filming “Rio”: “That’s when I really started my video avoidance phase”).

On the beach, pretty peacock Nick preens in a mirror. Rio slinks up behind him and spies on him, probably as payback for his voyeur act in the opening. It’s the strangest thing -- that’s very obviously Nick there (flame-colored hair, check; flame-colored lipstick, check), but damned if he doesn’t look a whole lot like John at certain moments in this video. I can’t understand it. Apart from both being pale, pretty English boys with fabulous hair, John and Nick don’t look much alike. For starters, one’s a leggy beanpole, while the other’s a wee, waiflike pixie.

Rio sunbathes on a raft. A pink phone on a silver tray is ferried to her across the water. On the line is a noticeably sunburned Simon, who’s calling her from the nearby yacht. Like Roger before him, he attempts to sweet-talk her.

Ever capricious, Rio yanks on the phone cord and sends him tumbling into the drink. Luckily, Simon has prepared for just such an eventuality by wearing flippers. Rio, who is a cold, cruel woman at heart, laughs and laughs and laughs.

Meanwhile, John curls up with the latest issue of Fightin’ Army comic. Can’t say I’ve ever pegged John as a rough-and-tumble army-comic aficionado. Still waters run deep, I suppose.

He drifts off into a weird black-and-white military-inspired fantasy of storming the beach, rifle in hand, where he lands on the sand next to a bikini-clad Rio. Champagne spills from the heavens and fills the glass resting on her abdomen.

Magical champagne showers. I swear, this is the happiest, giddiest, silliest video in the world.

Rio tosses one of the little red balls at a Speedo-clad Simon, who scampers to the end of the dock to fetch it for her, puppy-like. He slips on a banana peel and tumbles into the water.

When next we see Rio, she’s hauling a fishing net out of the ocean. There’s a Speedo-clad Duran caught in the net, and my linear brain naturally assumed this was Simon (one Speedo-clad Duran falls into the water, one Speedo-clad Duran gets yanked out of the water. Makes sense, right?). However! We have a mystery on our hands! In his memoir, Andy insists that he’s the Duran in the net, while the official Duran Duran website adamantly maintains that it’s actually Roger.

Then there’s a bunch of lively nonsense with Simon drinking brightly-colored cocktails under water. A whole lot happens in this video that I’m zipping past, mostly involving buckets of paint and colorful drinks and vast expanses of tanned flesh. It’s all mighty entertaining.

Back on the yacht, Nick lounges in a cabin, toying with one of those omnipresent red balls. It takes every ounce of good taste and decorum not to make a crass joke about how he’s lying on a bunk and fondling his balls.

Rio, covered in flamboyant head-to-toe body paint, creeps about the deck. She peeks in on Nick through the cabin window, which both startles and annoys him. Nick, my love, you were shamelessly ogling her ass earlier. It’s only fitting she harasses you a little in turn.

Then for some reason, we spend about forty-eight minutes watching Nick and John pretending to play saxophones, which pretty much brings the video to a huge crashing halt.

Back on the yacht, someone unseen -- oh, let’s just say it’s Simon -- tries to pour a glass of champagne for Rio. He does a rotten job of it, thanks to the way the boat rocks and bobs in the waves. This is the sort of problem that keeps Duran Duran awake at night.

Rio looks exasperated and annoyed by all these repeated attempts to charm her out of her bathing suit. Guys, look, you’re not getting anywhere with her. Cherry ice-cream smile or not, she’s immune to all of you. It’s time to cut your losses and move on.

Oh, and then Simon rides a horse on the beach. Just because.

Rio slathers her entire body in pink shaving cream. In the background, one of the Durans stands in waist-deep water and adjusts his collar in a mirror. Yet again, I can’t tell who it is. Andy? Nick? This is really making me doubt myself. I don’t even have the excuse of a poor-resolution copy to fall back upon -- crystal-clear copies of “Rio” are widely available.

Everybody cavorts on the yacht and sings some more. John and Nick are looking strangely like twins again.

Aha! We have a rare confirmed Andy sighting! John and Andy play dueling air-saxophones on the deck.

Then, as the yacht zips through the water, John cheerfully tosses Andy overboard. And no, that wasn’t a planned part of the video. John just decided on the spur of the moment to try to murder one of his bandmates. You know, just as a lark. Sometimes it seems like a miracle the boys all survived the decade.

And off they sail into the sunset, with sensible Roger at the helm and the rest of the boys still cavorting about the yacht, glamorous and gorgeous and happy.

A brilliant video. Nothing in there to unduly tax the brain cells, but it’s sheer, delightful fun. I love it to pieces.

Duranalysis: The Reflex

2011-05-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, I didn’t have much use for Duran Duran’s video for “The Reflex.” After all, it consists entirely of concert footage, which, to my way of thinking, is the laziest and least interesting way of doing things. When it comes to music videos, I’m a big fan of strong narratives. Strong, weird, overblown, confusing, crazy, awesome narratives. Still, while I’d rather watch the boys fending off zombies or stumbling around bleak apocalyptic wastelands, I’ve since learned to relax and embrace “The Reflex.” It’s a concert video, yes, but it’s a pretty damn entertaining one.

Directed by the great Russell Mulcahy, “The Reflex” was filmed in 1984 during the band’s Sing Blue Silver world tour. While it may not be my all-time favorite Duran Duran video, there’s an awful lot to like about it. I like the gleeful synchronized hop Simon and Andy and John all take upon hitting the stage. I like Simon’s infectious enthusiasm. I like the preposterously high energy level. I like the shots of all those ecstatic, overwhelmed young audience members, particularly those two dudes who stand on their seats and bop around proudly as if to proclaim to the world, “Look, we’re guys, we’re at a Duran Duran concert, and we’re having ourselves a fantastic time, so all you haters out there can suck it.”

The video features a simple, uncluttered set, which gives Simon plenty of room in which to cavort madly about. At the back of the stage, there’s a row of stately Doric columns, like a Greek amphitheater, only, y’know, in chartreuse neon. For more detail, I’ll turn it over to Andy, who discusses the filming of this video in his memoir. Quoth Andy, “The set was based on something extravagant that Nick had sketched out while we were in Montserrat together the previous summer.” Now, there’s a sentence that somehow manages to encapsulate the entire Duran Duran mystique in a few simple words. Andy doesn’t elaborate further, but since we’re talking about Nick, let’s assume it was sketched with a Chanel eyeliner pencil on a damp cocktail napkin, which had been used to mop up a spilled bottle of Krug. Because that’s just how Nick rolls.

There’s an enormous screen at the top of the stage, which projects footage of the concert to the nosebleed seats. On occasion, the screen also displays silhouettes of people indulging in various energetic leisure-time activities, most of which involve nudity and chains. In the silhouette below, some nice young man appears to be giving a naked lady a pony ride. One of the things I admire most about Duran Duran, apart from their staggering good looks and their lively pop tunes, is the way they careen between wholesome and kinky without pausing for breath. It’s a delicate balance, and they maintain it well: They’re just a bunch of fun-loving English lads who are irresistible to pre-teen girls and who also might, on occasion, enjoy being ridden like ponies.

At one point, a gigantic CGI wave appears to flood out of the screen and drench the audience below, which.... well, it’s a sad truth that special effects that looked totally cool in 1984 rarely rate very high by 2011 standards, so we’ll gloss over this part of the video and move right along.

Simon looks the best he’s ever looked. He’s always been an attractive bloke, but here, he vaults into the elite realm of the smoking-hot. Hair, makeup, wardrobe, all of it looks great. This is a concert video, and yet everyone looks consistently daisy-fresh and impeccably coiffed. Don’t bands always look wrecked during live concerts? Sweat-drenched clothes, smeared makeup, lank hair, lots of flying spittle? Not here. Not Duran Duran. They’re above such mundane human considerations as excessive perspiration.

You know what might be the very best part of this video? The way Simon leaps and bounces and springs around the stage like a live-action version of a Dragonball character. I stand in awe of his energy and verve. I know I gave Simon a hard time last week for his hilariously dramatic poses and gyrations throughout the “Careless Memories” video, but here, his instincts are bang on. He moves well, he covers the stage from end to end, and it all looks very natural and graceful.

It probably goes without saying, but you know what I mentioned earlier about everyone being impeccably coiffed? Yeah, that doesn’t apply to Andy. There are only so many times I can grouse about Andy’s hair, and I feel like I’ve comprehensively addressed that subject in my earlier posts, so I’ll limit myself to pointing out that he looks pretty good here. At the least, he looks healthy and happy, which, for Andy, is not always a given. He’s not scowling from behind dark sunglasses, which is a step in the right direction. His color’s good, he grins a lot, and he seems to be having a fantastic time.

John looks beautiful. Yes, yes, John always looks beautiful, but, like Simon, he’s kicked it up a notch or two above his usual high standard. Hopefully the boys kept the hair and makeup people from this video on retainer, because somebody -- presumably multiple somebodies -- sure knew what they were doing.

Look, it’s a concert video. John doesn’t do much other than play his bass while looking unfathomably lovely, and that’s enough. I don’t have a whole lot more to say on the matter. I just like looking at pretty photos of him.

Of all the Durans, Roger gets the least amount of screen time, and that probably suited him just fine. Here’s how you keep Roger happy: Stick him in a shadowy area of the stage, keep the cameras mostly out of his face, and just let him bang on his drums in peace.

And then there’s Nick. Ah, Nick. Glowering from behind his barricade of synthesizers and monitors and sundry equipment, Nick looks gorgeous and terrifying and unearthly, like he’s the malevolent apprentice to David Bowie’s Goblin King from Labyrinth. Hair: fiery. Makeup: flawless. Demeanor: frosty. Mood: dangerous. In contrast to hyperactive Simon and happy-go-lucky John and revved-up Andy (and nigh-invisible Roger), Nick spends most of the video trying to shoot bolts of fire from his eyes at the audience. Nick is always gloriously, gorgeously weird (key quote from Simon about his first-ever meeting with his future bandmate: “I’d been told that Nick was a bit of a weirdo…”), but he’s never weirder than when he’s performing onstage. And I mean that in the best possible way.

Interesting tidbit: In his memoir, Andy brings up the theory that “The Reflex” is all about Nick. Simon denies this, though if you look at the lyrics, it makes a certain amount of crazy sense. While Nick might raise an imperious eyebrow at being compared to a child waiting by the park, it’s true that every little thing he does leaves me answered with a question mark, starting with his fashion choices in this video. Take a look at that sweater: It’s made from bulky tweed, it has that strange leather cutout in front, it’s got puffy princess sleeves… It is, in short, the ugliest, most wretched sweater imaginable, and it’s probably miserably hot and itchy when worn under scorching stage lights… and yet Nick makes it look appropriate and stylish, as though wearing a bulky, scratchy tweed sweater was the perfect and most logical option under the circumstances. This is the magic of Nick.

So, “The Reflex.” A perfectly decent video, a downright awesome concert video. Would it have been improved with the appearance of zombies, a la the “Night Boat” video? Hell, yes. But in terms of how it achieves what it sets out to do, I’ve got no complaints.

Duranalysis: Careless Memories

2011-04-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

“Careless Memories” was one of three singles released off of Duran Duran’s 1981 debut album. While the other two, “Planet Earth” and “Girls on Film,” were big hits for the boys, this one sputtered and went nowhere. This is a shame, as it’s one of their best, darkest, angriest songs. Of course, the other songs were helped up the charts by their sexy, iconic videos: “Planet Earth” has lots of stylish New Romantic weirdness, and “Girls on Film” has lots of bare breasts. “Careless Memories,” on the other hand, just has Simon hurling tulips around a white room. No wonder it couldn’t compete.

Nick has referred to “Careless Memories,” which was directed by Perry Haines and Terry Jones, as “the worst video we’ve ever made.” I don’t know about that, Nick, have you watched “A View to a Kill” recently? Nick’s claims to the contrary, “Careless Memories” isn’t wretched. Quality-wise, it’s indistinguishable from a lot of the videos that came out during this time, which makes it disappointing only by the lofty standard the boys would soon set for themselves.

We open with a scene of the boys driving around. Simon sits in the front seat, while John and Roger and Andy are wedged together in the back. There’s nary a glimpse of Nick, and the universe is just a little less dazzling and glamorous in his absence. Roger and Andy whisper and snicker to themselves. They’re probably gloating about how they’re the only Durans in this video who didn’t get stuck wearing flouncy white peasant blouses.

Next to them in the back seat, John looks mighty pleased about something. John, we’ll find out later, has reason to look pleased.

Wow, they all look like adorable little puppies here. They’re so young!

In a stark white apartment, we see a fleeting glimpse of a lovely dark-haired woman -- Simon’s girlfriend, it seems -- walking out the door. Simon is feeling very dramatic about this turn of events.

Actually, you know what he’s doing here? You know the line in the song that goes “…but it always takes so damned long before I feel how much my eyes have darkened”? He’s feeling how much his eyes have darkened. No, really. That’s what he’s doing.

Keep watching. It gets worse.

There’s not much plot to this video, so it’s padded out with lots of performance footage. Dig the way Simon dramatically poses with finger guns when he sings the “Fear hangs a plane of gunsmoke…” line.

Back to Simon’s apartment. Roger and Nick sit at a table and look over a sheet of photographic negatives. Nick! At long last, Nick! Oh, man -- they all look really, really young in this video, but Nick, the baby of the group, is practically embryonic. Aside from the performance footage, Nick spends most of his scenes either partially or entirely hidden behind Roger. This marks the first and only time in Duran Duran’s thirty-year history that Nick will be stuck in Roger’s shadow.

The plot, such as it is, thickens: On a city street, Simon’s girlfriend secretly canoodles with a leggy bassist. Heh. John, you dog. No wonder he was looking smug in the opening scene.

Simon sits on the couch in his apartment and angrily shreds a letter written on pink stationary into tiny pieces. While he emotes in anguish in the foreground, the rest of the band sit at a table behind him, having themselves a fine old time while ignoring Simon’s latest personal drama. Andy talks on the phone, John looks smug, and Nick and Roger still pore over those all-important film negatives. Simon flings the shredded pieces of the letter onto the coffee table, just as he sings the lyric, “On the table, signs of love lie scattered…” This is the most painfully literal video ever.

In a fit of pique, he yanks a bunch of pink tulips out of a vase and hurls them around the room.

It’s a fair guess the pink letter is from his girlfriend, who’s obviously breaking up with him. It’s also a fair guess that she left out the part about how she’s been seeking comfort in the arms of a leggy bassist, or Simon would be hurling those tulips at John. Actually, that might have perked this video right up. Some vigorous Duran-versus-Duran fisticuffs could’ve sent this video hurtling into the realm of the awesome, especially if it had then degenerated into a hair-pulling, chair-throwing, vase-smashing, multi-Duran brawl.

But no. ‘Twas not to be. Simon throws tulips around. The rest of the boys continue to pay him no mind.

Yeah, it’s kind of a dorky video, huh? At least Simon appears to be having a good time. If he’s embarrassed by any of this nonsense -- the tulip-hurling, the finger guns, the super-dramatic emoting -- he sure doesn’t let it show. Just to make this all about me for a moment: Whilst sorting through my worldly goods last week in preparation for a cross-country move, I came across a box of dusty, decaying VHS tapes of my old appearances on Talk Soup from when I worked on the show in the late nineties, back when staff members got routinely dragged in front of the camera because the E! network was too cheap to hire real actors. While this could be exciting and glamorous, it all too often turned into a grim exercise in ritual humiliation. I recall one episode in which I was forced to wear frozen turkeys on my feet (it was our Thanksgiving special, natch). It wasn’t an especially hilarious sketch to begin with, and no, I did not soar above the material. This is because I am not Simon Le Bon. You could stick a pair of frozen turkeys on Simon’s feet, and he’d sell the crap out of them without a trace of embarrassment or self-doubt. Born performer, that Simon.

Ah, there, see, he’s whipped out his special "Fear hangs a plane of gunsmoke" finger guns again. Never change, Simon.

My fierce admiration and respect for Nick is not going to stop me from mocking his outfit here. Within a few short years -- months, really -- Nick would evolve into a sleek, stylish fashion icon with the magical ability to wear any awful garment (his nubbly pink princess-sleeved sweater in the “Reflex” video springs to mind) and look like the most glamorous pixie in the room. At this early stage, however, the kid’s not quite there yet. Notice how in the performance footage Nick and John are dressed almost like twins (frilly white blouses paired with billowy white pants tucked into ankle boots), but while tall, willowy John looks catwalk-ready, tiny, fragile Nick looks like he just stepped out of the pages of Elfquest.

Some may disagree, but to my way of thinking, it is never a good thing to be compared to an Elfquest character.

Back at the apartment, the guys are still sitting around the table. Andy still yammers on the phone; John still looks smug. Everybody’s still ignoring Simon’s mad burst of tulip-hurling. And Roger is still blocking poor Nick. Nobody puts Nick in a corner.

Bereft from being dumped, Simon flings open the door of his apartment and walks out into the sun while singing, “I walk out into the sun, I try to find a new day…”

…which is immediately followed by, “But the whole place, it just screams in my eyes.” See? His eyes, they’re screaming.

Yeah, it’s probably for the best that Duran Duran quickly dropped this business of having their videos serve as line-by-line reenactments of their lyrics. Wild Boys, for example, would have been very, very different. I’m just picturing Simon pantomiming his way through, “Your telephone’s been ringing while you’re dancing in the rain…”

In the backseat of the car, Simon’s girlfriend tries to nuzzle with him. He’s either asleep, or ignoring her, or is just being an ass. In any case, he blows her off.

So she shrugs and turns toward the other window seat, where John appears to be perfectly willing to join her in some nuzzling.

Simon pops into his apartment one last time to drop to his knees in the doorway and shoot off more super-dramatic finger guns.

And… scene!

That’s the original version of the video. There’s also a slightly less dorky version in which some of the cheesier moments have been replaced with added footage of Simon walking down a flight of stairs. Wow, the boys just loved doing alternate versions, didn’t they? I’ve seen two versions of “Wild Boys,” two versions of “Union of the Snake,” three versions of “Girls on Film”… Counting various Easter eggs, Duran Duran’s Greatest DVD, which features a compilation of their best-known videos, contains a staggering five different versions of “New Moon on Monday.” (Curiously, there seems to be only one “A View to a Kill,” which is a video just screaming out for some judicious re-editing.)

But! Here’s a very special “Careless Memories” bonus! It’s the animated video the boys whipped together in 2004 to display onstage while performing the song in concert, in which cool anime (Duranime?) versions of the boys wage war against ninjas, UFOs, robots, Godzilla, and, er, the EMI building. The animation is a little on the cheap side, but still, it’s plenty awesome.

Oh, sure, the lyrics of “Careless Memories” aren’t really about a ninja massacre, but all the same, doesn’t this fit the song’s angry, urgent mood better than some dreary fluff about how Simon’s girlfriend maybe secretly prefers John? Viewer warning for copious amounts of animated blood (as in, blood, blood, blood, blood, blood), but if you’ve ever wanted to see Simon wielding a microphone stand like a samurai sword, or sweet-natured Roger slaughtering a ninja with a cymbal to the brain (and come on, who hasn’t wanted to see that?), this is going to be right up your alley.

Duranalysis: Arcadia’s The Flame

2011-04-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

It’s The Nick and Simon Show, with a surprise appearance by John!

Brief spurt of backstory here, for those who aren’t hip to this whole Arcadia business: In 1984-1985, at the peak of their wild success, the Duran Duran boys briefly split apart into two separate side projects: John and Andy teamed up with Robert Palmer and Tony Thompson to form The Power Station, while Simon, Nick and Roger banded together as Arcadia (Roger, ever the neutral party, also performed on some Power Station tracks). The differences between the two groups are most eloquently summed up in this excellent recent interview with the boys, in which it’s established that Arcadia produced “the most pretentious album ever made,” whereas Power Station produced “the most cocainey album ever made.” As I’ve always been far more pretentious than cocainey, I’m partial to Arcadia. Also, their videos were better.

Roger didn’t appear in any of Arcadia’s videos; in fact, by the time the video for "The Flame" was shot in 1986, Roger had already left Duran Duran, with Andy following him out the door shortly thereafter. “The Flame” was directed by Russell Mulcahy, the man responsible for Duran Duran’s huge, awesome, epic monstrosities (“Wild Boys”) as well as some of their lesser-known gems (“Night Boat”). This falls into the latter category. It’s a fun, fluffy trifle of a video -- it’s a little Rocky Horror Picture Show, a little Agatha Christie, and a whole lot of Nick and Simon being hammy and adorable. Damn good song, too. Let’s get to it:

Ooo, opening titles! Fancy! Yeah, I should warn you, much as with “Night Boat,” my screenshots are going to be pretty muddy. The more obscure the video, the longer the odds of finding a crisp, clean copy anywhere.

On a dark and foggy night, Simon and his girlfriend approach a mansion. A sign reading “BEWARE” hangs on the gate; Simon checks a slip of paper to confirm they’re in the right place. Simon is in full-tilt geek mode: glasses, curly hair, sweater vest, bow tie. His date, while cute as a button, is a far cry from the sultry, sophisticated minxes who typically slink about in Duran Duran videos. For starters, she’s wearing an orange tie-dyed sundress. It’s as awful as it sounds.

They bumble their way inside the mansion, bumping into doors and tripping over their own feet while gawking at their opulent surroundings. Established: They’re dorks. The lavish dining room is populated with the usual assortment of grim-visaged servants, crusty old gentlemen, dowagers in funny hats, and glamorous blondes. First and foremost amongst the glamorous blondes is the extra-pretty, extra-petite lord of the manor. Hi, Nick!

Oh, this is worth seeing: After spending most of the previous year hanging out on the super-girly side of the androgyny spectrum, Nick has undergone yet another metamorphosis. He’s chopped off the luxurious mane of jet-black hair he sported for much of his Arcadia phase and peroxided the bejesus out of it, and it looks fantastic.

Quick comparison study: This was Nick’s starting point. When Nick gives himself a makeover, he doesn’t muck about.

While Nick’s guests regard the newcomers with disdain, Simon and his date fumble around the dining room and act like rubes. A dowager hands Simon a glass of wine (note how he’s interrupted every time he tries to take a sip). When his date drops her handkerchief, Simon bends down to pick it up… just as an archer pops in through a window and riddles the wall with arrows right where he’d been standing.

Simon seems mildly affronted by this blatant attempt on his life, but mostly takes it in stride.

Still marveling at the posh surroundings, Simon’s date stumbles against the wall, which swivels open and sucks her into darkness. Simon looks vaguely confused by her vanishing act, but before he can investigate, he’s distracted by the pair of gorgeous blondes -- Nick and his elegant female companion -- who are now reclining in armchairs in the library attached to the dining room.

Forgetting all about his date, he heads off to join them. The creepy servants watch him and whisper amongst themselves; the glowing eyes of a painted portrait follow him.

By the way, Simon will continue to forget about and/or ignore his date for the rest of the damn video. Simon is a terrible boyfriend.

In the library, Simon loiters by the fireplace and tries to look casual. Nick and his companion seem amused by his attempts to fit in with the cool kids. When Nick yanks a lever beside his chair, the entire mantle swivels around, and Simon disappears, just as his date vanished earlier.

He finds himself on a moving train. Being a plucky sort, Simon is unfazed. He hands his still-untouched drink off to a random lady and bops his way through the train car. I envy Simon’s ability to dance around while walking without looking like a complete jackass.

Nick, disguised in a trench coat and hat, hastily slinks into a compartment and scrunches down to avoid being spotted by Simon.

…You know, it’s very difficult to suss out the whole Nick-Simon dynamic in this video. Do they know each other? Nick has been doing a bang-up job of snubbing Simon up to this point, but now he’s secretly following him? Odd.

Back to the dining room, where everyone, Nick and his blonde companion included, is now seated around the table. The dowager who handed Simon her wine at the beginning furtively passes a small bottle to one of the servants. While it’s not completely clear, I think we’re meant to assume she poisoned Simon’s drink earlier. For reasons unknown, everyone’s trying to murder Simon. Except for Nick, who doesn’t seem to care overmuch whether Simon lives or dies.

Simon emerges onto the balcony running around the dining room and, while Nick and his glamorous blonde look on and snicker, swings down from a rope conveniently dangling from the ceiling. Any old loser could take the stairs, but that’s not the Simon Le Bon way.

Simon overshoots the dining room and crashes through the patio doors. Very calmly, Nick rises from the table, flings open the doors, and releases the hounds on Simon. All of this seems very natural, actually. Hell, at this stage in his career, Nick was probably releasing the hounds on overzealous fans who trespassed on his property on at least a weekly basis.

While the hounds chase Simon about the courtyard, Nick opens up a closet. Out pops the lovely John Taylor, who is brandishing a contract.

Various YouTube commenters have already plucked all the low-hanging jokes involving Nick and John and closets, so I’ll just skip over all that and get to the point of this scene: Apparently (i.e. “according to Wikipedia”) John’s contract is a reference to the legal wrangling the band went through with Andy to get him to fulfill his obligation to work on the Notorious album. I have no idea whether this is true (Wikipedia, you know), but I love the idea of the boys throwing a quick “suck eggs, Andy!” moment into this video.

Anyway, a somewhat mauled and bedraggled Simon climbs onto the roof of the mansion to escape the hounds. He crashes through the ceiling, where he lands on top of a woman in a bathtub, which then crashes through the floor and lands in the dining room.

Simon brushes himself off and plops down at the table beside Nick’s blonde. A blowpipe extends from a wall-mounted tiger’s head and fires a dart at him; Nick calmly reaches over and smashes Simon’s face into his bowl of soup to save him. The dart strikes the butler hovering behind Simon.

Having thus saved Simon’s life (and doomed his butler in the process), an unruffled and implacable Nick sips champagne. This is probably the best video ever for exploiting Nick’s strange, contradictory aura of benevolent malice (malicious benevolence?). I have no idea what’s going on in this video, or who’s trying to murder Simon, or whether Nick is a force of good or evil, and you know what? I don’t care. I’m just enjoying the show.

Blinded by the soup, Simon stumbles around the dining room. Nick twists a dial, which opens a trapdoor. Nick’s mansion is awesome. Simon tumbles through it and lands in the basement.

Nick, ever inscrutable, whips out a blindfold and ties it onto his glamorous blonde. Hmm. Nick and blindfolds go pretty well together.

If you watch a bunch of Duran Duran videos, it’s only natural to start idly speculating about Nick’s sexual habits (…that’s not just me, right?). Luckily, Nick’s former longtime girlfriend Madeleine Farley helpfully weighed in on that very topic in an interview: “I had a pair of couture fangs surreptitiously made for him -- the dentist and I were in cahoots. He'd always wear them in bed, and I'd have on my six-inch Manolos.”

Couture fangs, people. Couture fangs.

In the basement, Simon staggers past a fuse box and gets zapped by bolts of electricity.

This shorts out the lights upstairs. Everyone from the dinner party arranges their chairs into a circle and sits in the dark while a freak storm blows open the patio doors and send the curtains billowing.

Simon rejoins the party. Simon’s date, you’ll be glad to hear, is amongst the assembled guests, so she didn’t meet some kind of unspeakable fate at the start of the video. No, Simon doesn’t pay her a lick of attention.

Nick and Simon and the blonde stand in the center of the circle of chairs. Everyone in the room simultaneously collapses into a lifeless heap; only Simon and Nick and the blonde get back up on their feet. It’s deeply strange, but for all I know, this might be a typical evening’s entertainment at Casa Rhodes. Look, everything I’ve ever heard about Nick suggests he’s both glamorous and weird, and that’s how I prefer it. If it turns out he spends most of his evenings playing computer solitaire and microwaving Lean Cuisine entrees, I don’t ever want to hear about it.

Simon, Nick and the blonde tromp out of the mansion hand in hand, having apparently formed some kind of weird, fabulous, sexy ménage à trois.

The video ends on a “To be continued..?” title card, which, sadly, is nothing but a tease. Following this, Nick and Simon joined back up with John and continued on as Duran Duran, and the strange world of Arcadia and this video was abandoned forever.

Duranalysis: A View to a Kill

2011-04-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

Back in 1985, when I was young and the world was dazzling and new, I thought Duran Duran’s video for their hit single “A View to a Kill,” the theme song for the James Bond film of the same name, was really, really cool.

As it turns out, I was mistaken.

The video was directed by Lol Creme and Kevin Godley, who were also responsible for the boys’ extra-sleazy 1981 “Girls on Film” video (and who, performing as the pop duo Godley & Creme, had their own big hit in 1985 with “Cry” -- you remember, “You don’t know how to ease my pain…” In the realm of weird Duran Duran-related music trivia, this is right up there with Nick Rhodes producing Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy”). The “View to a Kill” video features the Duran Duran boys as a quintet of gorgeous, glamorous spies who swarm around the Eiffel Tower and try to kill each other. Conceptually, this is a goldmine. The execution, however, is… problematic.

I should be clear: It’s not a disaster. In fact, there’s some pretty good stuff here. Overall, though, it’s a little lame and a little smug, and it isn’t clever enough to support the smugness. The video is interspersed with scenes from the film -- specifically, the sequence where Roger Moore’s Bond and Grace Jones chase each other all over the Eiffel Tower -- cobbled together to make it look as though the Duran Duran boys are interacting with the Bond characters. Fun concept, but it doesn’t quite mesh.

The video opens on a catering van (“Chez Tayloire,” geddit?) parked at the base of the Eiffel Tower. Roger, who is sitting in the driver’s seat, teleports himself into the back of the van.

Yeah, Roger can teleport. Just shrug it off and move on. We’ve got a lot of material to cover, and if I stop down to scrutinize every last example of nitwittery, we’ll be here all day. Anyway, he’s got a cool super-spy control room set up in his van, featuring lots of big, clunky artifacts of Eighties tech.

Aw, no! What have they done to our fresh-faced, adorable Roger? Sure, it’s just the unflattering lighting, but he looks haggard and unwell. Not long after this video came out, Roger quit Duran Duran and went into semi-reclusion until he was coaxed back into the spotlight some fifteen years later; I’m not suggesting that seeing how ghastly he looks here drove him into hiding, but it surely couldn’t have helped his mental state.

Roger sends a camcorder sailing out of a hatch on the roof of his van. It flies up the side of the Eiffel Tower and hovers in the air, monitoring the action on the upper decks. I will not be discussing the special effects in any detail. They haven’t stood the test of time; I’ll just leave it at that and move right along.

Simon leans against the wall on one of the observation decks and listens to his Walkman. With his striped shirt, white trench coat (collar popped), and beret (tilted at just the right jaunty angle), he looks like a million francs, the world-famous pop star disguised as a secret agent disguised as an everyday French tourist. All he needs to complete the image is a glass of red wine and a pack of Gitanes.

John saunters around the deck, trying to look casual and doing a terrible job of blending in with the other tourists. John is really, really beautiful. Has anyone ever noticed this before?

In strolls Andy, who is sporting dark glasses, a white cane, and a monstrous mane of gigantic, snarled, ratty hair. I’d say the hair was just to lend credence to his role as a spy disguised as a blind accordion player, but I’ve seen the video for “The Reflex.” Hair aside, I don’t want to bag on Andy (I say blithely, having just bagged on Andy), because he’s kind of awesome and hilarious here. When he has something concrete to do in a video, instead of just being The Guy Hanging Out in the Scaffolding (“Union of the Snake”) or The Guy Making Awkward Small Talk With Nick (“Hungry Like the Wolf”), he can steal scenes away from his glamorous show-pony bandmates.

Speaking of glamorous show ponies… Andy throws a covert glance over at fashion photographer/spy Nick, who is snapping pictures of a gorgeous model. At this point, we only get a tantalizing glimpse of Nick’s hair (spiky, streaky) and makeup (smoky), but it all looks very, very promising.

John skulks around the observation deck and watches through a telescope as Roger Moore and Grace Jones get into a big shootout on the upper deck. Gunshots ring out, but the tourists thronging about the tower don’t seem to notice. Yeah, this is sort of what I mean about the film footage not meshing well with the video footage.

From his super-awesome control room, Roger sends up three more cameras.

Simons whips out his Walkman. Inside, instead of a cassette, there’s a little control panel with the word “HELICOPTER” flashing at the top. Simon pushes a button, and we see footage from the movie of a helicopter crashing and exploding in an arctic area. So Simon’s just loitering around the Eiffel Tower, blowing up stuff halfway across the world. Simon is a menace to polite society.

Roger picks up his enormous phone and mutters something in a foreign language to Simon, who receives the message over his Walkman headphones.

Roger, honey, please take a hot bath and crawl into a warm, soft bed. You’re scaring me.

Oh, wow. We finally get our first up-close look at lovely Nick, who is giving directions to his model while not-so-secretly snapping photos of Grace Jones and Roger Moore. This was worth the wait. A 1985 People magazine article on the boys describes Nick’s makeup job in this video thusly: “plum blush, black eye pencil and liner by Clinique and coral lipstick by Christian Dior.” Details are important.

Simon whips out his Walkman again and uses it to blow up a blimp that’s floating over the Golden Gate Bridge, and really, I still don’t have any idea why he has to do this from the Eiffel Tower.

From his control room, Roger gets on the phone and barks orders to Nick, who receives them through an earpiece. Much as this video makes me wince in parts, I dig the idea of shy, enigmatic Roger turning out to be the shadowy behind-the-scenes mastermind of Duran Duran.

(I recently browsed through some reviews of Steve Malins’s unauthorized biography of Duran Duran over on Amazon -- one reviewer complains that the book contains “…too many weird descriptions of Nick Rhodes as some kind of alabaster-skinned alien.” While at first this seems like a very valid and reasonable criticism, after watching this video, I’m not sure one can ever make the point too many times about Nick looking like an alabaster-skinned alien. A very pretty alabaster-skinned alien.)

Nick then starts secretly photographing John. Presumably Nick is following Roger’s orders, but really, if I spotted someone who looked like John Taylor and I had a camera handy, I’d probably start snapping away, too. I gravitate toward pretty things.

John inserts coins into the slot at the base of the telescope. A gun barrel slides out. He swivels it around and starts firing up toward the top of the tower, where Roger Moore and Grace Jones are still battling it out. Oh, dear. Whose brilliant idea was it to arm Duran Duran? This will end in tears. John manages to shoot down one of Roger’s cameras, which he seems far too pleased about.

Let’s sort out some loyalties: Simon and Nick are taking orders from Roger, and John, if he’s aiming at Roger’s cameras, is definitely their foe. And Andy? Why, surely he’s nothing more than a harmless blind accordion player! Andy looks around in apparent confusion as tourists scurry in panic at the gunfire.

Nick snaps a photo of Andy. Bad move. Andy, who is very plainly Not Really Blind, spots Nick and goes for the kill.

He plays his accordion, which turns out to be an Accordion of Death. When Andy presses a special red button, Nick screams in pain. His camera glows ominously, then explodes in a burst of flame, killing him.

Oh, Andy.

Sheesh. Nick might’ve been an enemy spy, but after all, he was just taking a few harmless snapshots. It’s not like he was blowing up helicopters and blimps, Simon. Murdering Nick -- tiny, pretty, glittery Nick -- is beyond the pale. It’s like stepping on Tinker Bell (here, my literate and high-minded sister would be quick to point out that, in the original J.M. Barrie books, Tinker Bell was a vicious and vindictive little sprite. I maintain the analogy still holds. Despite his dainty appearance, Nick has always seemed like the Duran most likely to wreak terrible vengeance against anyone who crosses him).

I feel like I just watched a Duran Duran snuff film. Oh, sure, there’s been a Duran body count in other videos -- all the boys except for Roger meet a bad fate at the hands of zombies in “Night Boat,” and it’s up in the air whether Andy and Nick make it out of the exploding underground fortress alive in “Union of the Snake” -- but this video marks the sole foray into the disturbing realm of Duran-on-Duran violence.

And Andy has never looked happier.

Andy packs up his accordion and triumphantly saunters off over the final chords of the song. There’s still twenty seconds left in the video, but do yourself a favor and stop watching right here. It’s just better that way.

…Still watching? Okay, let’s get this over with: A beautiful blonde strolls up to Simon and tugs on his arm. “Excuse me. Aren’t you..?” she asks. With an unsettling mixture of smug and goofy, Simon responds, “Bon. Simon Le Bon.”

Ugh.

It gets worse. Simon glances down at his Walkman and sees that it’s now flashing “EIFFEL TOWER.” He grows alarmed (in a goofy way), but there’s no need for panic -- on a rack at a souvenir kiosk at the base of the Tower, a postcard of the Eiffel Tower explodes. Fade out.

I repeat: Ugh.

After that, I need a quick palate cleanser: The official Duran Duran website has some gorgeous behind-the-scenes video of their cover shoot for this month’s issue of L’Uomo Vogue, in which the boys, minus prodigal-son Andy, wear sumptuous tuxedos and loll about on a four-poster bed at the Duke of Northumberland’s majestic estate. Nice work, if you can get it.

It’s been thirty years since the boys first rose to worldwide prominence, and time has been kind to them: Roger has transitioned gracefully from looking like someone’s super-cute brother to looking like someone’s super-cute dad, John still has those killer cheekbones, Simon is rocking his new beard, and there’s still more than a little of the alabaster-skinned alien about Nick, who, naturally, managed to snag the shiniest, flashiest tux for himself. I would expect nothing less.