Reassembled: AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

Avengers: Age of Ultron is noisy, colorful, brightly lit, mostly enjoyable comic book nonsense. It is, in other words, the latest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that mega-franchise of interlocking superhero series currently dominating a section of big budget filmmaking. This is only the second outing to bring together the now familiar team of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) to battle a foe no single hero could take on alone. But because producer Kevin Fiege and MCU screenwriters have allowed a great deal of cross-pollination in the interim, it feels like the Avengers have never left. In fact, the latest picture begins with the team in the middle of a mission, hitting the ground running.

Shorn of the need to endlessly introduce itself, this sequel launches right into its action, letting the group snatch a MacGuffin from the claws of evil HYDRA before the opening title card even appears. We know these characters, how they relate to one another, what their individual problems are, and how their personalities clash. Now it’s just a matter of sitting back and letting the plot carry them away. And, oh, does writer-director Joss Whedon supply the plot. There is a constant churn of incident and spectacle, new introductions, returning side characters, exposition, cameos, and foreshadowing. The Avengers banter, then cross in and out of the main action with their own throughlines, though some naturally get a little buried in the mix. (Sorry, Thor.) It’s dense with nerdy detail, yet aerodynamically simple in plot, ceaselessly hurtling forward.

Their big concern this time around is an evil robot named Ultron (voiced with funny pomposity by James Spader). He was created by Iron Man to protect the world and prevent further damage from cosmic nastiness like we saw in the first Avengers. But let this be a lesson: don’t expose your experimental artificial intelligence to an Asgardian mind-control staff. That’s what turns the robot evil, charging up his mind so much he thinks the only way to save the world is to rid it of those pesky people messing it up. I mean, he has a point, but that solution wasn’t exactly what Iron Man had in mind. At least it’s not another interchangeable grump looking for a glowing crystal or giant laser, which describes every villain in the last half-dozen of these things. Whedon mixes up the formula by finding the heroes the cause of and solution to their outsized problems, struggling to save the world from themselves. The action involves saving civilians from the path of destruction instead of merely letting collateral damage interminably rain down, a welcome change.

To stop Ultron, and his army of other robots he’s making in a commandeered factory, the Avengers trot across the globe, finding large-scale action set-pieces at every turn, each one better then the last. The filmmakers provide token downtime for feelings and expressions thereof – rivalries, romances, and the like – but wastes little time picking up velocity again. There’s a raid on a HYDRA base, a rampage through an African metropolis, a multi-vehicle chase through downtown Seoul, and a fictional Eastern European city imperiled in a clever high-flying climax. Whedon fills the screen with elaborate, CGI-heavy chaos. Laser beams zigzag across the frame as debris falls, sparks fly, robots swarm, vehicles soar, background objects go boom, and superheroes flex their powers. It’s recognizable characters doing their familiar Whedon quipping shtick while boisterously effective – if occasionally incomprehensible – excitement erupts around them. The funniest line comes late in the climax when the least superpowered among them takes stock of his contribution, says, “This doesn’t make sense,” then heads out to do his part anyway.

There’s lots of smash-bang popcorn entertainment to be had here, the screen bursting with dazzling movement, the sound mix booming to match. It’s hard to keep up. There’s also not room for the eccentric character work that’s usually my lifeline in these sorts of things. We meet new characters (a speedy Aaron Taylor-Johnson and witchy Elizabeth Olsen, and Linda Cardellini in a sadly under-powered stock role of supportive wife). We glimpse familiar faces from other MCU productions (Samuel L. Jackson, Idris Elba, Anthony Mackie, Don Cheadle, Cobie Smulders). But no one gets much of a chance to make an impact. There's not a lot of acting beyond personality and posturing. We’re too busy bustling to the next conflict, the next explosion, the next dropped thread or portentous reference as promissory note for More Excitement in Future Installments.

The Avengers franchise has fully disappeared into itself. It is the beginning and ending of its entire worldview, able only to refer back to itself or look ahead for future story. It’s a hermetically sealed alternate universe in which no glimmer of the outside world – politics, culture, emotion – is allowed. It’s a frictionless experience, big excitement without a need to think about it beyond the literal visual stimulation and basic story beats. Whedon brings a smidgen of personality, the actors project charm, and the gears of industrial strength effects work their light and magic. The ultimate Hollywood blockbuster as empty calories, Age of Ultron is an exciting experience of sugar and fat, but completely devoid of anything more sustaining. 

Too Wise to Woo Peaceably: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Some of the appeal of Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing comes from the story of its making. Exhausted from writing and directing the blockbuster capstone of the first wave of The Avengers movies, Whedon gathered up a group of his actor friends and threw what amounted to a Shakespeare party at his house. In modern dress, they acted out Much Ado and had such a fun time doing it, they've now invited the whole world to watch. It obviously didn't come together quite so simply or spontaneously, but it might as well have looking at the finished product, which feels so breezy and simple with undemanding black and white digital cinematography, a homey backdrop, and sense of actorly camaraderie. All involved are on a clear labor of love, and to that extent it’s a fun bubbly reenactment.

I think of Whedon as a writer first, director second. In everything from teen vampire slayers to superheroes to the Bard himself, every bit of his career reveals him to be a man in love with words, how and why people say them and what those choices can reveal and dramatize. It makes sense, then, that every choice he makes here is geared towards showing off the original language of the play. As near as I could tell, aside from some abridgment, he keeps the original text of the play, his actors' additional glances and gestures entirely nonverbal. The black and white look and matter-of-fact approach to setting - Whedon's camera regards the setting as one would one's own home, disinterested and familiar - strip away any interest in focusing on the mise-en-scene. Here it's all about the words, loud, clear, and classic.

Plucking the play out of its Elizabethan context and placing it largely unedited in modern day California is a process not without wrinkles. Little details like characters gesturing with a smart phone when talking about a letter or referring to a holster as a scabbard are easily self-explanatory, but the plot itself is an awkward fit in modernity. After all, the delicate social comedy of Shakespeare's plotting in Much Ado rests on notions of patriarchal honor, arranged marriages, and a dispute over the nature of a female character's virginity, concerns which I assume are of much less of an issue in today's society. This is where I found it easiest to think of the adaptation as the exercise that it is. Viewed through a three-sided prism - Shakespeare, and cinematic comedy both screwball and romantic - the film becomes a three-ring salute to silliness at its most literate and lovely. If the film plays like a sunny party that flirts with darkness before turning out fine in the end, that's because it's precisely the soufflé the play is already baked into. The characters move through the play flitting to and fro trailing quotable bon mots behind them.

 A main reason we, or at least I, don't mind returning to see a new staging of old material is to see how new players approach the old characters. Here the material seems, if not fresh, then at least tricky and invigorating. As Leonato, the host of this party, Clark Gregg, lately Agent Coulson in the Avengers franchise, brings a charm and gravity to the proceedings, inviting his guests to stay, sup, and woo under his roof. As the couple whose hate just might turn to love, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof bring broadness to their performances as Beatrice and Benedick, a big play-to-the-balcony prickliness that's pleasing. As Claudio and Hero, the couple who are negotiated together after some trickery, Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese bring a dewy glamour. They're fine poles around which the film rotates.

All, from Sean Maher's Don John and Riki Lindhome's Conrade to Ashley Johnson's Margaret and Spencer Treat Clark's Borachio, are fine, but let me single out Nathan Fillion's delightfully underplayed work as the constable Dogberry. He's the only actor in the whole production who made me snicker consistently with each line, helped, of course, by linguistic contortions provided him in the source material. Fillion takes a typical Shakespearian clown and gives him the beautiful dignity he might deserve, which makes him all the funnier in the process. It's a fine bit of interpretation and a standout performance in a film of nice interpretations. Dogberry, indeed, may be the most important character in the play. He comes along to keep things funny at precisely the moment the main storylines have begun to veer into territory that seems, for the moment, irretrievably dark. As scholar Anne Barton writes in her introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, the constable "reassures the...audience that comedy remains in control of the action, even when the potential for tragedy seems greatest."

The deliberate slightness of Whedon’s filmmaking heightens the "nothing" of the title. The whole thing is a froth that's not entirely helped by the indifferent approach to modernizing a dusty set of social norms. Still, Shakespeare is an awfully hard playwright to mess up. Even if one were to spend time burdening his work with post-modern curlicues from a stylistic bag of tricks, the sturdiness of the material would surely hold to some extent. There's a sparkle of genuine affection - for the material, for the production, and amongst the cast and crew - that lights up the screen here. The beautiful smallness of Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing simply allows it to feel most fully like the after-superhero mint it was for him and now to a mid-summer audience that I suspect may receive this feature most gratefully.

Superhero Supergroup: THE AVENGERS

The Avengers is not the greatest superhero film ever made, but it sure is a great time at the movies. It’s a high-impact spectacle full of loud, funny, and satisfying sequences that send characters slamming into each other into full-tilt superheroics in broad, bright, colorful collisions. We’ve met the characters in question before, which is just as well since that’s also where their characterizations reside. This isn’t a movie that’s about telling a story with much in the way of emotional character arcs or weighty personal journeys. It’s a movie that gathers up the main characters from recent Marvel Comics adaptations, the one’s they’ve had the exclusive rights to, that is, and teams them up to save the planet. Original, it’s not. (And not just in film. Comics have been orchestrating crossovers like this almost as long as comics have existed.) But the skill, energy, and good will of it all makes it fun all the same.

Marvel has been building to The Avengers for five years now, kicking off superhero franchises one by one with the express purpose of bringing them together for this one big blockbuster. And so, when Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the brotherly villain of Thor, comes shooting out of the vastness of space through a glowing portal into the middle of a top secret military installation and, promising war, makes off with a brainwashed archer (Jeremy Renner) and a volatile blue energy cube, the otherworldly MacGuffin from Captain America, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the connective cameo from all of the earlier films, assembles his team of avengers. The film takes its time – a bit too much, perhaps – reintroducing the superheroes one by one, and it’s a credit to the consistency of quality in this many-pronged experiment in comic book adaptation that it’s nice to see them all again.

Fury himself calls in super-strong Captain Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and dispatches right-hand man, Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), to round up the rest of the recruits. He has master assassin Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) pick up the cursed Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, taking over for Ed Norton, who took over for Eric Bana – maybe stretching into the Hulk causes slow shifts in appearance). Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) flies in with his high-tech suit of armor; Thor (Chris Hemsworth) thunders down from the land of Asgard swinging his mighty hammer. The gang’s all here, though not without some complications on their way to assembling as a group. With such variety in powers and personality, interpersonal conflicts are bound to arise even as Loki’s threat of intergalactic war draws closer to reality.

This is a movie juggling multiple characters (even Stellan Skarsgard and Gwyneth Paltrow return, briefly) while fitting them into one coherent film narrative. Even the tones these heroes bring from their separate films could have easily competed instead of blending. The sarcasm of Iron Man, the pseudo-Shakespearean goof of Thor, the earnestness of Captain America, and the brooding pulp emotion of Hulk gave their films a personality of their own. Removed from their solo efforts the supergroup as a whole has less emotional resonance, as this film is unable to fully explore their outsized, but recognizably human, personalities through the metaphors supplied by their powers. In that sense, the movie is thin. It’s a lot of fun, but the characters arrive fully formed from other movies and end this one with little in the way of growth or development. But, still, this is a movie that throws together great characters and watches them interact asking, “isn’t that cool?” And, yeah, it’s cool.

With so many characters it could have been nothing more than a clash of tones while characters jockeyed for the spotlight. Luckily writer-director Joss Whedon has given these characters a movie in which there is no need to compete for attention. It plays out like the work of a fan who deeply loves these Avengers, each and every one of them, and has spent time thinking about the ways in which the powers and personalities could clash and connect. It’s an affectionate film. Whedon has always had a warm wit which shines clearly through genre material and that’s certainly the case here. This is a movie just crammed full of one-liners that actually land. He seems most comfortable writing for Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, but the other characters certainly have funny moments of their own as well.

But it’s more than funny quips and clearly defined characters. It’s all about timing. There’s just enough room for the one-liners and amusing visual gags to breathe, but just enough concision to make them unexpected. That’s where Whedon’s pet theme – teamwork – comes into play. (His work, mostly and most notably in TV with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, consistently revolves around a group of people who must learn to work together.) This movie is filled with long sequences of the characters talking to one another, strategizing, arguing, joking, threatening, comparing internal struggles, and finding common ground. The actors are up to the task; dialogue pings around the room with precision. (It’s almost enough to make one think that if Howard Hawks had made a superhero movie, it might have looked a little like this.) Later, in the action scenes, the way characters spring into motion utilizes the best each has to offer in terrific synchronization. This is a film that plays to the strengths of everyone involved.

Like his fellow TV-to-film auteur J.J. Abrams, Whedon is a writer and director who has a way of injecting a serialized slam-bang cliffhanger style into a film. The Avengers starts with what is essentially a cold open, slams into a title card, and then moves from set-piece to set-piece finding some surprises along its fairly standard action movie path. It is an efficient spectacle delivery device. It’s a bright, loud, crashing crowd-pleaser, a blockbuster superhero movie with an impressive sense of narrative escalation. Each action sequence feels bigger and more complicated with higher stakes than the one before. By the time the film hurtles into a lengthy, chaotic, but coherent, climax (that has a few similarities to a similarly sprawling big-city brawl in Transformers: Dark of the Moon), it’s hard not to get swept up in it all. It is a movie designed to show off cool effects while likable, familiar characters clash and jest, explosions seasoned with genuinely funny one-liners, and some neat visuals, and, with a light touch and fondness for the material, Whedon more than gets the job done.

Cabin Fever: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Note: I did my best to discuss this movie without major spoilers, but if you’re avoiding even hints of twists, you best go see the movie first. It’s pretty good.

The Cabin in the Woods starts like any horror movie of its ilk. A group of frisky young people head off to a remote location for a raucous vacation. This time around, as so many other times around, the group consists of people who can be broken down into all the usual types: a good girl (Kristen Connolly), a bad girl (Anna Hutchison), a jock (Chris Hemsworth), an egghead (Jesse Williams), and a stoner (Fran Kranz). On their way to the jock’s cousin’s summer cabin, they stop at a dilapidated gas station where the grizzled creep owner (Tim De Zarn) spits out chunks of tobacco and warns them away. Getting to the cabin is easy, he says. “Getting back will be your business,” he growls.

Of course they go anyway, because that’s the kind of movie this is. But before you can say, “Stop. I’ve heard this before,” screenwriters Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly) and Drew Goddard (of Cloverfield) have something cleverer up their sleeves. In a pre-title scene we’ve met two middle-age white guys (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), each in shirt and tie, chatting all the way down a long, white and grey corridor, waving I.D. badges and getting in a couple of jibes at the expense of a coworker (Amy Acker). This seemingly unconnected scene is ultimately integral to what we’re about to see. This is no young-people-stalked-in the-woods movie like The Evil Dead or Friday the 13th or, or, or. There are definitely elements of that here, but Whedon and Goddard pull back and show us the strings. These guys have the cabin under close watch with a sharp eye for the expected.

You think you know where this is going. The characters are certainly familiar and won’t be explored for depth of characterization. You may even think I’ve spoiled things by revealing that the seemingly average bureaucrats have something to do with what’s about to go down in the cabin in the woods. But this movie’s better than that. It’s a work of supremely slippery genre craftsmanship with more twists than you’d think, that plays on what you think you know in order to double down on the unsettling dread that begins to sink in. When you go to a horror movie, you know things are going to go badly for the characters. When these young, vibrant people head down into the cabin’s mysterious basement and examine the creepy artifacts, yellowed photographs, and ominous incantations, you just know that soon it’ll be more than leaves rustling out there in the dark.

Because we know that there are others watching, we know that the characters are headed into a trap. This takes away some (but not all) of the scares from things going bump in the night, but it also proposes provocative questions of genre introspection. Why are horror movies capable of scares even when characters are driving headfirst (even knowingly) into predictable formula? And why is puncturing the illusion of these characters’ free will so destabilizing? You know going into a slasher movie that a masked killer’s going to hunt down some victims and the results will be bloody. Why, then, are these films still capable of great effectiveness and suspense? It’s all about the execution. When one of the bureaucrats says, “We’re not the only ones watching,” it’s clear that the movie is implicating us, questioning why we want to see what we’re about to see.

Goddard directs the script with confident genre expertise, staging jump scares with great playfulness. As the movie goes on, he and Whedon find ever more rugs to pull, ratcheting up the tension and dread. It’s all that I can do to restrain myself from writing in extensive, spoiler-filled detail about just how ingenious a genre deconstruction this film becomes. At one point, the chaos in the cabin – the running, the screaming, the hiding, the splitting up, the disappearing, the bloody implements of death – appears to be winding down to a grimly satisfying genre endpoint, the exact point that a lesser, even a slightly lesser, horror film would conclude with the feeling of a job well done. Indeed, I was prepared for the final freak out and the smash into the end credits. If they had arrived just then, I would have still found The Cabin in the Woods to be a reasonably clever genre exercise. But just as it’s coasting to a close, Whedon and Goddard tighten the screws and ratchet up the intensity one more time. The movie grows stranger, funnier, and bloodier, dissecting an impressive number of horror styles in a descent into the fiery pits of unsettling territory. The final twenty minutes or so are some kind of inspired genius.

However hugely entertaining, the movie is only about the essential nature of horror movies. The characters remain thin and, despite the cascade of topsy-turvy, surprising yet inevitable plot adjustments and a couple of killer cameos, it’s not exactly a movie of any deep humanity. (If it was, and just a little icier or more confrontational too, I’d call it popcorn Michael Haneke.) What Whedon and Goddard stage is an intense, oftentimes hilarious, slashing of expectations, a veritable thesis on the nature of point of view and audience identification in horror cinema. The final moments of the film have us asking anew whom to root for and questioning which outcome is actually the best outcome. It sets up the clichés so skillfully that, as the world of the film is so thoroughly ripped apart, subversion itself is ultimately the biggest source of both knowing winks and destabilizing fright.

Let Your Geek Flag Fly: COMIC-CON EPISODE IV: A FAN'S HOPE

“I want to die and go to Comic-Con,” says a grey-haired comics dealer towards the end of Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, a new documentary with a terrible title. We’ve been following him through the course of the movie as he and his staff lament that what started in 1970 as a dedicated comic book convention has become something akin to a geek pilgrimage for all types of media, leaving the lowly comics under-acknowledged. This year, they’re worried that lugging their wares to San Diego may not turn out to be financially successful. And still, he expresses his heavenly analogy for this, the biggest pop culture fan convention of the year.

He’s not the only one for whom Comic-Con is so important, either. Not by a long shot. This documentary tells some of their stories. It follows two men – one a bartender, the other a soldier – who place the final touches on their sample drawings, pack up their portfolios and head off to try and get discovered at the convention. There’s also a guy who plans on proposing to his girlfriend at a panel with director Kevin Smith and a group of garage-based amateur costumers who plan to blow everyone away with their elaborately detailed costumes inspired by the video game Mass Effect. (They even have a full-sized costume of a creature, complete with a fully functional animatronic head. Most impressive.)

Director Morgan Spurlock’s films are generally confrontational, though when he’s at his best it’s an entertaining form of confrontational. His documentaries like Super Size Me (not bad) and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (irritating) are gimmicky constructs devoted to telling us some fairly obvious truths. Super Size Me wanted to tell us that fast food isn’t something to eat for every meal of every day. That’s not too hard to believe. But he went ahead and did it, underlining his obvious point with obvious showmanship. It’s the same thing with product placement in Greatest Movie Ever Sold, except the point is even more obvious, and the execution a grating gimmick. Not so with Comic-Con, a documentary in which he never appears. He doesn’t even snark from the sidelines; his voice is never heard and his graphics are strictly stylistic and informative.

Spurlock is not out to explore Comic-Con’s history or its pop culture position and he’s certainly not in gonzo muckraking mode. He’s here to show us the convention floor, what seems like miles of memorabilia, panels with the artists and celebrities discussing their works (and their own fandom), and the thousands of fans in various levels of costumes and geeky T-shirts. Between the handful of fan stories he tells and the footage of this particular Con (I think it’s 2010, but there’s some 2011 mixed in with what appears to be second-unit material), he cuts to talking-head interviews with other fans and, more often, prominent geek icons like writer-directors Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith, Ain’t it Cool News creator Harry Knowles, and legendary comic-book writer Stan Lee. I particularly liked seeing Lee out on the convention floor. A fan shouts, “You’re my favorite!” He replies, “I admire your taste.”

Now, I’ve never been to Comic-Con. I have no particular burning desire to go, but I’ve nothing against it. I certainly hear enough about it in the entertainment press as that time of the summer rolls around. So as someone with no first-hand experience with the convention, I would have liked a documentary that was a little less of a pat on the back for those who already hold it dear. It’s way more of a celebration than an exploration of this event, but I’m okay with that. The press coverage focuses on the big studio events, the reveals of footage and news about upcoming movies and TV shows. It’s nice to see the ground-level fans that swarm in and make it what it is. The documentary may be light, slight, and indulgent, but it nonetheless makes for a pleasant surface look at the fans who make Comic-Con tick, people Spurlock clearly loves. 

Sing Sing: GLEE: THE 3D CONCERT MOVIE

I don’t write about TV shows here, but if I were to start doing so Glee would not be my first choice. I’d rather write about Breaking Bad, or Mad Men, or Louie, or Parks & Recreation, or Community, or The Good Wife, or, or, or. But, that’s neither here nor there. None of those great shows have a recently released 3D concert movie to their name. Which is just as well since Glee, a show about a bunch of misfit choir kids in an Ohio high school, has a concept ripe for cinema. The widescreen and big sound could have potentially given the show the fullest expression of its inconsistent and deeply flawed musical soul.

The show itself started promisingly enough, but by the maddening second season it became clear that showrunners Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, and Brad Falchuk were not making the show I was ready to like. (To be fair, Falchuk, more than any of the other creators, seems to be interested in emotional coherence and narrative momentum). I want Glee to be a heartfelt high school musical with characters using their songs to express deeply held feelings, for production numbers to bubble up just because regular old talking just can’t handle the emotions on screen. Actually, the show is sometimes just that, and that’s when it’s good. Ironically enough, the best episode the series has yet produced, season one’s “Dream On,” was that. It was directed by Joss Whedon, a TV auteur in his own right, creating what is perhaps the clearest and strangest example of an outsider coming in and showing a better understanding of what a show should and could be.

Most of the time, the show is miscalculated comedy and thinly written characters that change their circumstances and emotions whenever and however it best suits the whim of the week. It’s exhausting and dull with terrible teasing flashes of brilliance. It’s often one of the best shows and one of the worst shows on the air right now, usually in the same episode, sometimes at the same time. It has attracted legions of vocal and committed fans though, and Glee: The 3D Concert Movie is sure to make them happy. For a hopeful but discouraged Glee skeptic like me, it’s hard to get too excited about it.

The film is technically proficient, loud, glittery, high-energy, and short. It features the cast singing and dancing (though the editing doesn’t do the choreography any favors) and every-so-often talking backstage in character. Once in a great while, the proceedings pause to showcase real-life stories from fans who have found inspiration in Glee, even though said inspiration is mostly tangential and incidental. There’s lots of screaming and swooning going on – this is a very youthful audience – but, as if to prove that this is no Hannah Montana concert movie, we get strategic cutaways to middle-aged fans flipping equally out over seeing their favorite characters singing memorable songs from past episodes.

What makes the show itself so good in patches, the very good, even great, acting from Chris Colfer and Mike O’Malley and the terrific charisma from the likes of Darren Criss and Lea Michele, is missing here by the movie’s very nature. It’s just a string of performances and a bunch of self-congratulatory multi-media aggrandizement. I don’t doubt that people going to see Glee: The 3D Concert Movie will get exactly what they want to see. The movie is exactly what it set out to be, for better or worse. But couldn’t director Kevin Tancharoen, last seen trying to remake Fame, have tried to do something more with this opportunity? Maybe the constraints of being disposable between-season product, fuel for the money machine that is Glee, prevented him from doing so.