A Case for Sunday Mornings

There’s a show that I DVR every week that I love.  I hate missing an episode and while I'm watching I'm totally enthralled with what's being transmitted onto my TV screen.  I’m not anywhere close to the target demographic which means that none of the advertising is geared towards me nor is it on during a time-slot I would ever choose to be up at (hence the DVRing).  However, this show has provided me with more knowledge than almost any endeavor I’ve ever undertaken and definitely more than any other TV show.  I frequently reference the information I’ve garnered from it and impress my friends with my plethora of facts.  So, what show could possibly live up to this?  I’m talking about CBS’s Sunday Morning and it’s on (you guessed it) Sunday mornings from 9-10:30am.  If you’ve never heard of it, it’s that show with the iconic sun logo – sound familiar?  If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, ask your parents or grandparents about it, I’m sure they know it.  There’s no frills, no competition, no built in drama or conflict, no flashy graphics, but there’s a lot of heart to it and it's a quietly offers more honesty than anything else on television.

As a kid, nearly every Sunday morning I would wake up, wander into my parents room, climb into bed with my mom and dad, sometimes a sibling would join too, and we’d watch as Charles Kuralt took us through the segments of Sunday Morning.  My dad and I are both known in our circles as being the keepers of random information.  We love and absorb trivia – both trivial and significant - so this show is perfect for us.  We’d get a thorough insight into what was happening in America that week, but we’d also learn about interesting stories about celebrities, politicians, artists, and every day people that are making differences in their communities (like the woman who has sent out over 7,000 care packages to the troops overseas and the retired man who decided to start painting the houses in his poor, run down town to lift his neighbor’s spirits about where they live).  Additionally, Sunday Morning covers stories that the weekday news does not bother with, such as music, theater, and interesting architecture.  Occasionally they’ll even have entire shows around one specific theme.  For instance the money and design episodes have come to be annual events.  Now Sunday Morning is hosted by radio personality, Charles Osgood, and is just as engrossing. 

Conceived in 1979, Sunday Morning aimed to emulate the Sunday newspaper magazine section and, as opposed to the morning news shows, was meant to only focus on feature stories.  The show starts with a quick rundown of the week’s top stories, a national weather report and then goes into what is basically a table of contents for the rest of the show.  Admittedly, I fast forward through all of that so I can get to the good stuff.  Between the segments there’s weekly standards that punctuate the show every week they have the Sunday Morning Almanac, which is essentially a “today in history” segment which offers interesting milestones – for instance, did you know that earlier this month Silly Putty celebrated its 60th birthday?  Do you know how it was invented?  I do.  Fast Draw features two guys drawing pictures on a white board to inform audiences about a certain topic – recently why rain doesn’t actually “break” humidity (even though that’s what everyone thinks it does) it actually makes it worse. 

Each week there’s the Sunday Morning Cover Story which is usually the longest and most in-depth feature often about a timely issue and Sunday Morning Profiles offers a glimpse into the life of a celebrity or other public personality in an intimate interview.  Every couple of weeks Ben Stein offers his curmudgeonly advice on the economy, Mo Rocca and Bill Geist track down the random oddities in our country (like people who still build log cabins, the National Goldfish Competition or the Annual Betty Convention) which makes us unique.  Nancy Giles shows up every now and again to talk about her life, whether it’s anecdotes from when she was a struggling actress and how Nora Ephron inspired her to keep pursuing her dream.  And David Edelstein offers his reviews on that week’s movies with his wry and honest commentary.  Then, of course, there's the "Moment of Nature" which closes every episode.  Again, I admit to fast forwarding this part too, but before I do, I always wait to find out where they went this week to find that clip as it often amazes me just how diverse and beautiful the American landscape can be.

What’s special about the segments that Sunday Morning provides is that it often offers a different perspective on something which we thought we knew about.  Be it the smaller pieces or the bigger, central features, Sunday Morning offers a unique view into the world that I haven't seen offered in another context.  For instance, a couple of weeks ago there was a segment about a woman who, after six weeks of marriage, her husband was shipped off to fight in World War I.  Soon after he left he was reported missing and was never heard from again.  She called and wrote letters to the state department, congressmen, her local government officials, and nothing.  Recently her brother-in-law discovered some new information about him and finally found that not only had he been killed, identified and buried in a town in France, he was considered a hero by the locals as he gave his own life to save the entire town.  This man is a hero overseas and his widow only recently discovered this.  Now she makes a pilgrimage once a year to visit his grave, the town and it’s citizens, and the street that’s named after him.  It was a wonderful human interest story about resilience and heroism.  It also exposed a major failing of a government which is supposed to be supporting our war heroes.  In a television landscape that’s fraught with shouting it was a quiet tale that without Sunday Morning would have never been brought to the public.

These days, I no longer watch the show with my parents on snuggly Sunday mornings.  But I do watch the show every week and so does my dad.  While we don’t have a standing “recap” conversation after the show, we’ll often times find ourselves chatting about the random bits of information we’ve learned from the show.  In that sense it’s a special way that my dad and I connect with one another and always giving us something to talk about outside the normal parent-child conversations.  

The show continues to plod along, quietly and modestly, without fancy advertising or making much noise to beat out the rest of the clutter that’s out there.  But for those of us who do watch it (and don’t get me wrong, I know there’s a significant amount of us out there, I’m just a generation or two younger than them) it’s a gem of class and consistency in an otherwise bombastic and cacophonous television landscape.  So, even if it's outside of your normal viewing habits, give this show a chance - you won't be disappointed and you'll definitely learn something.

Brave

Disney has made a name for itself being in the business of princesses.  Specifically, in girly, frilly, boy-obsessed and dainty princesses.  I loved these princesses and wanted to be all of them, have their pretty palaces and most importantly their cute (often royal and always adorable) boyfriends.   In Disney’s Pixar’s new computer animated film, Brave, the princess is the Scottish tomboy Merida (voiced by Boardwalk Empire’s Kelly Macdonald), who’s strained relationship with her mother Elinor (Emma Thompson) and her disinterest in being married off to one of the lame suitors she’s offered leads her to escape to the Scottish highlands where she encounters a witch’s cottage.  Inside, the witch offers her a spell to “change her mother” and when Merida accepts, she doesn’t expect it to literally change her into a bear.   Having to escape the castle with her newly transformed mother the feuding pair must learn to respect each other’s personalities, perspectives and talents in order to break the spell.  Instead of this princess overcoming her own predicament to find love with her prince, Merida’s challenge is to learn to respect her mother’s perspective and role while in turn Elinor must learn that her daughter’s independence does not mean disrespect of her or of her tradition.

While visually arresting, as the rolling Scottish hills are delightfully presented, Brave doesn’t have the same nods to adults as other Pixar films traditionally have had.  It’s much more a throwback to the more traditional princess films – vaguely medieval times, royal families, mysterious and possibly evil witches and, of course, the independent and impulsive princess (with trademark hair, of course).  Yet the biggest difference is that there is no central love story.  Rather than making the character development and story predicated on her relationship vis a vis a guy she’s lusting after, it’s based off of her refusal to do just that. 

Further, the mother/daughter relationship has rarely been explored in these Disney princess movies as most princesses don’t generally have their mothers.  If you think about it in almost every Disney princess film (save for Sleeping Beauty) the princess only has one living parent.  Merida has both, alive and well throughout the whole film.  Her mother undergoes a physical transformation, but the emotional connection remains strong and it is the development of that relationship and the strengthening of it is what the focus of the film is on.  It is also the particularly closer relationship she has with her mother and her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly) that highlights the differences with her mother even further.  From external features like having inherited his bright red and unruly hair to her impulsive and carefree manner and her love of an adventure, she is directly aligned with her father and his very male characteristics (not to mention her triplet brothers also have those same personalities).  It seems like her mother is the odd one out in the family and she is desperately trying to get Merida on her side despite Merida’s constant refusals.

When Elinor tells Merida that the time has come for her to choose a husband, suitors which come from the far corners of her father’s kingdom to prove their worth to her.  They arrive and are most definitely all losers.  Arrogant, stupid, ugly, incomprehensible, useless, etc, none of them come close to being able a worthy partner for her.  These are the best her kingdom has to offer?  She understandably resents this process and refuses all of the men (boys, really) who have come to vie for her hand.  The movie’s message would have been strengthened if some she had marriage offers from Prince Eric lookalikes.  It’s not so hard to defy the advances of doofuses as a statement of female independence, but the film’s impact would have been even stronger if she had a great guy at her hands but said she had more living to do before she resigned herself to a life of needlepoint and public appearances.  In reality the tides are changing, women are getting married older after gaining success independently so it’s no wonder Disney is making the statement that this is an ok option.  It would just be nice to do so without disparaging the male counterparts.  In fact, all of them men in Brave are kind of doofusy.  Fergus is lovable and a great dad, but he’s kind of all over the place.  Merida’s brothers are little boys, but they’re huge trouble makers and the suitors, their fathers and their landsmen are all war-mongers with a penchants for violence.  Why must one gender gain independence and respect at the expense of another?  Unfortunately as media is showing stronger more liberated women, men are being disparaged and infantilized and that doesn’t isn’t really helpful either for maintaining a strong society.

Moreover, as I was watching this, I kept thinking to myself, how come the only way a girl can be independent and different is if she’s painted as a tom-boy, or more specifically, a boy?  The manner in which she is depicted as an atypical girl is doing things boys would do – archery, horseback riding (bareback, I might add), rock climbing, and going on scary adventures.  It seems to delineate gender roles even more strikingly than breaking down the barrier – if women can only break out of their proscribed roles by doing manly things (and assuming its vice versa) then it’s really just reinforcing what men’s roles are.

Also, total side note – as has become Pixar tradition, an animated short precedes the film.  This one is La Luna, the Oscar-nominated short that in only a few minutes provides visually arresting images and so much heart as three generations learn from one another in a magical setting.  If you go see Brave make sure to get there early so you can catch this short gem.

I enjoyed Brave, Merida is a strong (albeit sometimes stubborn) female role model that today’s generation of young girls can truly look up to.  She doesn’t allow herself to get pushed around or bullied by social norms (and by that I mean her mother).  At the same time she is open to learning about others and respecting their traditions while also forging her own path, and that’s a lesson everyone can learn from.

Rock of Ages

Converting a performance from stage to screen is not by any means uncommon, but that does not mean it’s easy nor is it always successful.  Such is the case with Rock of Ages. Not having seen the Broadway version I cannot comment on the quality of the show, but there’s no way it could be as bad as the movie translation.  When watching something on Broadway, the viewer allows certain suspensions of disbelief that moviegoers do not.  From the first frames when Sherri Christian (Julianne Hough), our lead protagonist, is sitting on the bus escaping her podunk life in Oklahoma to chase her dreams to Hollywood the needed suspension of disbelief is just too great.

The story is this: a lonely, small town girl  goes on a journey (see what I did there?) to Hollywood to explore her dream of being a singer after her grandmother tells her she has a great voice.  In the first moments of getting off the bus in what was then grungy 1980s LA she both gets mugged of suitcase filled with her most prizes possessions – her records (apparently moving cross country with actual clothing is not what was done back then) and she meets Drew (Diego Boneta), the bartender/rock star wannabe that will become the love of her life.  Drew works at The Bourbon Room, a legendary (code: grungy) bar that hosts rock icons and is preparing for the arrival of legendary (code: grungy) rock icon, Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise).  Jaxx is a whisky-infused, sex crazed and definitely aging rock star who still causes throngs of girls to faint at the mere sight of him.  Bourbon Room owner Dennis (Alec Baldwin) and his partner Lonny (Russell Brand) are relying on this concert to save the bar from bankruptcy and at the same time right wing, anti-fun politicians want to shut it down for being a harbinger of youth corruption. 

Rock of Ages has all the hallmarks of a run of the mill light fare musical romp/romantic comedy show.  It doesn’t offer anything really new or exciting to audiences and the filmmakers, namely director Adam Shankman was so lazy in adapting it from the stage to screen that you don’t need a lot of creativity to imagine how the original stage production was performed.

All that being said, Rock of Ages doesn’t claim to be a piece of cinematic marvel.  It’s campy and silly and it owns it, which almost makes the ridiculousness ok.  You’re immediately thrown into the 80s rock aesthetic from the hair and music to the clothing to the set design.  Honestly, that’s what I was mostly drawn to with this movie.  I wanted to all things 80s and in that regard the movie definitely delivered.  I was very pleasantly surprised by Tom Cruise’s performance – he totally pulls off the aging rock star image.  And (while I’m sure it was enhanced in post-production), he can actually sing.  The music was excellent – but that’s not surprising as they were all 80s-standards and rock classics.  I wanted to sing along and clap at the end of the big numbers, as I’m sure happened in the stage production, but alas, movies goers just don’t do that so I was left mouthing the words and sitting on my hands at the ends of the performances.

What I think was the most interesting thing about Rock of Ages was that it is the latest in a growing list of movies and TV shows which are curating our favorite songs for audiences.  Along with Glee, the upcoming Battlefield America, Pitch Perfect and not to mention musical remakes like Footloose old favorites from the original iterations are revamped in neat, easy to digest packages.  In a sense, television and film are putting together what feels like a modern day mix tape.  In today’s internet age, videos, songs, article, and pictures get shared in an instant across oceans.  However, through this, one of the most sacred sharing devices has been lost: the mix tape.  Mix tapes were given to friends, crushes, and family as a sign of affection and wanting to share something that was important to the person who spent painstaking hours waiting for songs to come on the radio and hitting “record” on their boom boxes.  Sometimes, if you were lucky enough to have the song on a preexisting tape you could record straight from there.  But in any case if someone gave you a mix tape it meant you were special to him or her and they wanted to share something sacred to them.  While the tape itself had meaning, the songs themselves were important as well.  Emotions and feelings of nostalgia are evoked by both the idea of curating songs and the songs themselves - and show runners and filmmakers know this.  By giving us music packaged in this way and as plot devices, audiences are naturally drawn to the vehicle in which they are being presented.  The music is likely the main (if not only) reason for any success of this movie.  The plot is barely existent, the acting is stilted and even the singing is generally weak but the songs are great, fun and familiar and people want fun and familiar.  Without them there’s no way it would have earned a respectable $29 million in under 2 weeks.   

There’s also something to be said about the draw that the 1980s has for people of a certain generation.  People like me, for instance, who were really children of the 1990s and only caught the end of the 1980s can still appreciate and nostalgize that era and for people who were actually teenagers in the 1980s and long for the time of their youth.  Nostalgia and a longing for the past when one can say “the good old days” is a powerful force and helps drive revenue, even if they weren’t really such good old days.  It is also for that reason that Rock of Ages, no matter how “bad” of a movie it is, had a built in audience base of people who will go see anything that can make them feel like they’re either reliving or reconnecting to their pasts.