A Horrible Crunching Sound

My favorite response so far to my Slate piece conflating Harry Potter and Tony Soprano comes from blogger Harry Pata, who patiently lists the reasons why my proposed ending to the series obviously wouldn't work at all:

"Do the Hippogriff" is non-canonical; if you're gonna parody the ending of the BOOKS, don't steal shit from the MOVIES.

Awesome.

Here's a little bit that was cut from the piece for space:

Harry was tired – tired of everything. He walked into the Three Broomsticks and took a seat in a booth near the back, still shaken by his visit earlier that day to Gilderoy Lockhart at St. Mungo’s Hospital – Lockhart, who nearly killed Harry once in the catacombs underneath Hogwarts, but was now demented and sad, with no memory of the power he’d once held.

The Sanjaya of His Era

Don Ho, who died of heart failure Saturday at 76, was inarguably a terrific entertainer. In many ways, he was his era's Sanjaya: a crooner, a showman, a lover boy. Like the ponyhawked American Idol contestant, he could connect directly with an audience, whether on TV or live; like Sanjaya, he also represented to mainstream America the harmless exotic, the "other" who was safe to admire from a distance. Ho's long and happy career should serve as warning to those who dismiss Sanjaya as a flash in the pan whose fifteen minutes are about to run out. (It's not hard to imagine a 76-year-old Sanjaya playing to packed houses in Vegas, as Ho did in Waikiki; all he needs to find is his signature song.)

For his whole career, Ho represented a certain image of Hawai'i: the islands as vacation mecca for haoles from the mainland, a kitschy paradise of co-eds, beach boys, and tiny bubbles. Despite his outdated act, and despite the fact that few locals attended his Thursday-night shows at the Waikiki Beachcomber, he's being canonized in Hawai'i today. The flood-the-zone coverage in his hometown paper reflects the state's love for any native son, no matter how little he has to do with everyday Hawaiians, and no matter how skilled he actually is. (I still remember the 2000 World Series, in which local boy Benny Agbayani was the lead story in the Honolulu papers, not the Mets or the Yankees or even the games themselves. AGBAYANI HITS DOUBLE, the headlines would scream, and then in tiny type underneath: "Mets Lose 6-5.")

Ho began and ended every concert with his signature tune, "Tiny Bubbles" -- a song he professed to hate but nevertheless played twice, once early for the audience members who had to go to bed, and once late for the audience members who wouldn't remember he sang it the first time. I prefer to remember him for his jaw-dropping 2002 cover of Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey." It's not that good, but he sure sounds like he's having a great time singing it. Me ke aloha pumehana, Don Ho.

TropeWatch: Putting the "Sex" Back in "Sexagenerian"

1/15/2007
Me, watching the Golden Globes pre-show: "Holy crap, Helen Mirren looks great."

My wife: "Wow."

Me: "Is she kind of... totally hot?"

My wife: "I think she is."




1/15/2007
Defamer.com, as Mirren wins the first of her two awards: "Two words: unexpectedly doable."

1/16/2007
The Hollywood Reporter reveals Mirren's bawdy post-Globes comments:

...Backstage [Mirren] was working blue, cracking jokes about what it means to be an Essex girl ("You know when an Essex girl has an orgasm, she drops her fries"). In fact, the joke carried on to her prospects for an Oscar. "I've never had an 'O.' They said the earth moves," she said. "I can't wait. I'll definitely drop my fries for that."

Mid-January 2007
Mirren appears in a sultry, breast-baring pose on the cover of the February issue of Los Angeles Magazine.

1/23/2007
From ABCnews.com story headlined "Senior Sex Symbols Steal the Screen":

Some might say that no one does a plunging V-neck justice like 61-year-old Helen Mirren.

1/25/2007
Dame Helen is the star of the British Sun's collection of topless shots of all five of Oscar's Best Actress nominees. (Link NSFW.)

Writer Derek Brown, his lust overwhelming his ability to construct a recognizable sentence, pants:

Representing a poignant metaphor of a pair of Wombles’ noses snuffling at a plate of truffles, this modern classic is glandular history at its best on the big screen.

2/4/2007
Damon Dash (!) on Helen Mirren: "She is super, super cute. I tell you, she's just lucky I'm married."


2/25/2007
Michael Sheen on E!'s Oscar pre-show:

She attracts a lot of men and she certainly attracted me. It was a very odd feeling playing scenes obviously with the Queen when you're kind of going, 'She's sexy.'

2/25/2007
The Helen Mirren Is Hott trope reaches its apogee during the Oscar ceremony as Jack Black breaks into his song-n-dance with Will Ferrell:

Helen Mirren? You are just hot. What party are you going to?

The song ends with Black, Ferrell and John C. Reilly singing:

Helen Mirren, and an Oscar, will be coming home with me!

2/26/2007
The trope achieves supersaturation as ESPN's Pardon The Interruption begins with hosts Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon discussing the Oscars:

Wilbon: Tony, the Oscars went almost four hours last night. What was your favorite part?

Kornheiser: The part where Helen Mirren undressed me with her eyes.

The White Blazer

James has a fantastic ode to the majesty of Miami Vice's gun battles over on Moistworks today:

What really left me flush was gun play. The mad dance of exit wounds, muzzle flash, spent casings pinging off the warehouse bitumen. No one choreographs this dance in the editor's suite quite like Michael Mann. For Mann, the bullet in flight is an Objet d'Art. Mann loved the MAC-10 too. With its short barrel and protracted magazine, the MAC-10 could introduce bullets into a scene faster and more inaccurately than any other weapon. And with Mann, the mastery was in the bullets that missed as much the ones that found the mark.

The music in Miami Vice was famously sleek and crucial to the show's moods, and James nails a bunch of the iconic songs from the show. But as a kid, I played and replayed one particular track from my copy of Miami Vice II, the sequel to the soundtrack: "Crockett's Theme," by Jan Hammer. More stately and elegant than Hammer's famous title music, "Crockett's Theme" played, a cursory Google search reveals, during many episodes of the show. I particularly remember the song, though, as playing during a climactic night-time shootout in, I don't know, some episode, in which the girl Sonny Crockett loved was killed. The shootout was shot in gorgeous slow motion, complete with Crockett yelling "No!!!" and the episode fading to black.

As a kid, I spent hours in my room, re-enacting this shootout alone, "Crockett's Theme" on endless repeat on my first CD player. For maximum verisimilitude, I used my best water gun, a jet-black plastic Uzi manufactured in the days before fear of hooligans rendered all water guns bright orange or cartoon-shaped. In slow motion I would aim, shoot, dive for cover, shout out to my beloved, take a bullet to the chest, scream "No!!!", all synched perfectly to Jan Hammer's synthesized beats. I must have been around twelve, and (I realize now) weirdly preoccupied with the artful choreography of death scenes.

Sadly, my love of Miami Vice extended past solitary, imagined shootouts in my bedroom; when my dad invited me to accompany him to the Wisconsin Press Club's annual dinner, which he was hosting, I wore a terrible outfit that appears to have been inspired by Miami Vice, with an added dash of Midwestern style:

Circa 1986, with Milwaukee radio personalities Reitman & Mueller

Tragic.

Jan Hammer: "Crockett's Theme"
from Miami Vice II (1986)