Hold Your Applause

Up All Night On Summer Vacation

A little reminder that my other blog is coming out of hibernation. House Happenings is a blog all about the Big Brother season as it unfolds. It was around this time last year that we were finding out which former houseguests were under consideration for All-Star spots, but with just 2 weeks to go before the debut of Season 8, we're still totally in the dark, save for the traditional promise that this will be the wildest season yet. Which no doubt means the typical gaggle of twentysomething bubbleheads half comatose on slop and chatting endlessly about favorite places they threw up. (Gee, I usually don't get cynical like this until mid-August at the earliest.)

You Know She's Damn Good

Rock critics are used to seeing their recommendations ignored, especially when it comes to artists from outside the United States. So it's a bit of a surprise to see that Back To Black, the second album by British singer Amy Winehouse (but the first to get a wide release in the U.S.), has really caught on here. It debuted in the Billboard Top Ten, a fine showing for what was essentially a debut album. But instead of taking the quick tumble down the charts that's become commonplace for CDs in the iTunes era, Back To Black continued to sell steadily, and last week it jumped back to #6 on the Billboard chart. The record has gone gold, which has to be beyond the highest expectations of her label Universal Republic.

Winehouse is just now beginning to show up on the radio in a significant way, so how is it that she's sold so well, without an especially commercial (for 2007) sound? For starters, she's attracted a lot of attention outside the normal circles available for young musicians. This attention has come for what might be considered the wrong reasons in most contexts--her history of heavy drinking and onstage word-slurring (photos of her with an equally sloshed Kelly Osbourne on her first trip to the U.S. made the rounds of all the gossip blogs); and her on-again off-again on-again relationship with the boyfriend (and as of 3 weeks ago, husband) who inspired most of the songs on Back To Black. As far back as last winter, before the record was released over here, Winehouse was the subject of a long profile in the Washington Post, acknowledging her immense talent but setting her up as The Next Great Rock Tragedy in the making.

She's also been a hard worker in promotion of the record, popping up in nearly as many contexts as KT Tunstall did last year (Winehouse most recently had a high-profile appearance on the MTV Movie Awards, ironic since she's precisely the type of artist MTV shows no interest in these days). The Coachella Festival was another key moment in giving the album a second wind. For all her reputation for unreliability, Winehouse seems to have been more diligent about promoting herself stateside than fellow Brit Lily Allen, who hasn't made many friends with her frequent cancellation of shows (including in my city, dammit).

And of course, there's the record itself, which I won't necessarily call the best of 2007, but is certainly the one that's closest to my heart. I had been looking forward to this record since the first time I heard "Rehab" last fall; it's rare that I get this intrigued on a first listen to a song, but her voice insists you take notice (my biggest single oversight since I started this blog was not posting about Winehouse back then). Back To Black came out at an extreme low point in my life (a different sort of heartbreak than Winehouse sings about); and trite as it no doubt sounds, it was easy to imagine, as the winter lingered on, that she was singing for me. The album has the timeless sound of a true classic--unlike, say, "Umbrella", there's nothing about it that necessarily screams 2007--with its curious pastiche of '60 soul, Spectory girl groups, and jazzy phrasing supplied by Winehouse.

So will success spoil Amy Winehouse, or will a happy marriage turn her into a Spice Girl? It will be interesting to see; Back To Black was reportedly not an easy album to write, as Winehouse took an unusually long time between first and second records. Of course, she's still quite young (23), and might not yet have come into her own as a writer. The hope here is that she can put together the sort of decades-long career that's not dependent on chart fads (don't ask me how her tattoos are going to look 40 years down the road...shudder).

On The Lot: Out To Lunch

I was hoping that the "let's make a movie" show On The Lot, produced by Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg (two guys who know a little something about entertainment), would provide me with a reality fix this summer. The dog days used to be prime time for introducing new reality series, but picking have been a bit slim in recent years (Burnett's Rock Star having officially been killed off), and we've mostly had to stick with old standbys like Big Brother and Last Comic Standing.

On The Lot got a nice little lead-in from the final performance show of American Idol 2 weeks ago. The first hour introduced judges Carrie Fisher and Garry Marshall, and a low-key but likable enough host named Chelsea Handler; and appeared to be a cross between The Apprentice and Project Runway--we were going to see the behind-the-scenes of low-budget filmmaking, and at some point people would screw up and be told to pack their cameras and go home. I thought the show was pretty decent, but I was a bit concerned by the fact that after the first hour, I still didn't really know who anyone was (they began with 50 filmmakers, and several of the more memorable ones got that way for being so bad that we wouldn't be seeing them anymore). Fox couldn't have been happy that the show hemorrhaged most of its huge lead-in as the hour proceeded, indicating that people were giving it a chance and then bailing. The second show, 2 days later, began the process of fleshing out some personalities, as the young directors collaborated in teams of 3. Anytime in reality TV when players are forced to work together, you can expect drama. By the end of the night, we were down to 24 contestants, who were given an assignment to shoot a short movie practically overnight.

Which brought us to the first episode of On The Lot proper, which aired last Monday. All of a sudden, with no explanation as to the change of tone, we were now watching an American Idol of films, complete with a studio audience and the now obligatory 3-judge panel. The challenge mentioned at the end of the preceding episode was now totally forgotten, but the field had been reduced to 18, again with no explanation. Chelsea Handler was gone and a loud, annoying woman named Adrianna Costa was now hosting, complete with little note cards she read off of when ever the conversation got more involved than "hi" (I have new respect for Julie Chen after watching Costa).

To put it mildly, asking people to sit still for 2 hours and watch 18 short films, made by people no one had gotten a chance to know yet, and doing this on the evening of Memorial Day...well, there have been better ideas. The show's ratings were utterly terrible--too bad, because some of the films were really quite good and only about 4 qualified as awful. But while the Monday show dragged, the Tuesday hour-long results show was tedious on a level American TV rarely gets. Surely, I felt, they're not going to actually do the results for the whole hour--they will show some of the behind-the-scenes, or even go to the damn Farmers' Market like Ryan Seacrest. But no, Costa went down the rows and eliminated a filmmaker every 20 minutes, liberally stealing Ryan Seacrest's shtick such as "....after the break," while rewarding the directors who polled best with a second airing of their film.

I just can't imagine who thought this was a legitimate use of an hour's time, even by the standards of summer. Costa was totally out of her league, Marshall rambled on with patronizing comments about how much we need female directors, and even the certifiably witty Fisher couldn't breathe any life into the charade. The young directors mostly looked humiliated. And to top things off, the votes of "America" left a lot to be desired. The 3 directors eliminated were either foreign-born, female, or both, leaving several mediocre American white guys unscathed. And a kid from Kentucky who had made an amateurish bordering on offensive film that appeared to make a retarded guy the butt of its joke (despite the director's insistence he wasn't supposed to come across as retarded) was given one of the best scores of the night. Now that part did remind me exactly of Idol--the one person in the field explicitly labeled as southern getting an undeserved high score.

Fox has been known to pull underperforming reality shows after an airing or two, so we have to assume it's only the pull of Burnett and Spielberg that got On The Lot another chance. The revamped version aired tonight--from now on, there's just one showing a week. Of the remaining 15 directors, 5 got to show a film tonight, and America's phone calls will eliminate 1 (presumably to be announced at the beginning of next week). We got to see a bit more of the directors themselves this week (or at least the 5 whose movies were shown), and 4 of the 5 did a decent-to-excellent job (as for Hilary, who had one of the 2 or 3 weakest films last week but got to stay while stronger women with accents were canned, she really needs to never pick up a camera again).

I doubt this new format will help the ratings much; frankly, short films made by unknown directors and cast with fellow nobodies are not an easy sell ratings-wise. At least on American Idol, you can sing (or beatbox) along most of the time. And Costa is absolutely killing the show worse than Spielberg's wife killed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  But now that we're a few episodes in, I hope Fox lets things play out. I still question the pace of things--if they're going to get rid of only one person a week, On The Lot won't end for till late August and I can't believe that's on the agenda. Many of the critics of the show were disappointed by the shift away from the Project Runway tone, but they have to remember that that show is a big hit by the standards of Bravo--Project Runway couldn't survive on a network with its cable-like ratings, even in the summer. But at least they got rid of the results show, and that's a start.

Finding a way to display the mechanics of filmmaking while still providing the Idol pleasure of voting for your favorites is the way for On The Lot to proceed, but I don't know if they will have the chance to get it right.