To write a successful storyline for this season of “Gossip Girl” is to have multitasking skills that would put a single parent octopus to shame. Though the show has a main ensemble cast of  between 6 and 10 characters, each individual member of the show follows their own journey, a journey that will, at season’s end, culminate with all the independent narrative threads being woven together to make one complete story quilt. Add in the fact that the show’s primary audience is as diverse as Blair’s collection of head gear, and you can begin to see what a tough task lies ahead for these valiant wordsmiths. With this week’s episode, “Portrait of a Lady Alexandra,” the writer’s of “Gossip Girl” tried very, very hard to keep all their dramatic juggling balls in the air. Unfortunately, the effort was palpable.

In reality, the ‘no child left behind’ act might be viewed as a highly desirable move towards a better future. In TV land, however, not so much. “Portrait of a Lady Alexandra” simply took on a bit more than it could chew in its attempt to keep a number of extraneous story-lines perpetually moving forward. Sure, no character, and no demographic, was left behind– but it really felt like some of them should have been.

At this point, there are 4 clear divisions in the relationships of the show. In one corner, we have Nate and Serena bound together by their deeply inappropriate (and related) sexual partners. In another, Georgina and Dan make it their business to lose friends and alienate people. In the third corner rest Rufus and Charlie, intertwined in an eternal game of ’7 Minutes in Heaven.’ Finally, Chuck-Blair and Lilly-Bart occupy the fourth corner, supposedly brewing a multi-offensive war campaign, but actually just staring out of windows and brooding over glasses of scotch. In “Portrait of a Lady Alexander, ” many of these groups were brought to the same place at the same time and forced to interact. The thing with pulling threads in, however, is that it places equal emphasis on all the characters. And the thing with “Gossip Girl” is, some of these characters’ stories are just not that interesting.

To be more specific, Nathaniel’s financial strife and role as unwitting vessel for scandal– a position once taken up with great aplomb and unnecessary puns by Gossip Girl herself– is not only barely relevant, but also gives Chace Crawford more screen-time to be a terrible actor. Meanwhile, Rufus and Charlie took up some space on the episode, but the impact of their movements was both negligible and immediately reversible. Same for the complicated story involving Serena, her newest undeveloped love interest, and her mother.

Essentially, all the action was up to Blair-Chuck and Dan-Georgina. The latter pair made their big play only in the last five minutes. The former, on the other hand, were gifted some Big Themes– we’re talking politics, economics and (give it a few episodes) no doubt religion too. In any other show, Big Themes would indicate the potential for Big Payoffs. However, in a show where the action is also split between Serena’s vaginal inmates and Nate’s tragic lack of business acumen– surely caused by the fact that he doesn’t appear to have gone to a single class while he was registered at Columbia last season– really Big Themes most likely indicate a Lack of Substance.

Ah well, at least everyone looks good.

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There is nothing that the CW’s “Gossip Girl” does better than a finale, and nothing worse than an opener. As the first episode for the shows 7th and last season, ‘Gone Maybe Gone’ was, in a way, the opener to the grand finale. However, in order to assess what promise the future holds for our favourite espresso chugging, Prada shopping, beret wearing Manhattan megalomaniacs, one really ought to look at this season’s second offering too: ‘High Infidelity’. While ‘Gone Maybe Gone’ answered a few of the questions season 6 left hanging in the Upper East Side air, ‘High Infidelity’ posed a whole new set. And, buried deep among them is: will this once glorious show end with a bang, or is this going to be another interminable season of half-baked plot-lines saved only by Serena’s magnificent and highly visible cleavage?

Let’s discuss.

At the end of season 6 we were where we’d been a thousand times before, each character going their own way for the summer; Blair pursuing Chuck, Chuck pursuing his father’s legacy, Serena spiraling out of control and Dan sporting the hair of a much, much cooler person. Bring on Season 7 and the gang re-unites, with lovable bad-girl Georgina in tow, as so often before, in the search for missing Serena. However, part of “Gossip Girl”‘s charm is its strict adherence to its own traditions; so what ‘High Infidelity’ brought to the fore was an indication of new factors that might shape the show’s progression. All of which are coalesced around the various relationships being torn down and rebuilt.

On one hand we have Blair and Serena– not besties anymore, but not all up in each other’s respective grills either. Could it be that our trust-fund babies are handling themselves like young trust-fund ladies now? Highly unlikely. In fact, like many of the choices behind the relationship dynamics for the season, Serena and Blair’s feud makes barely any sense. After years of saying unconscionable things to each other, and more than one fight that would put the Real Housewives of New Jersey to shame, it seems highly improbable that ‘I never want to see you again’ was the straw that broke the Serena-Blair camel’s back.

Same thing applies to the bizarre pact between Chuck and Blair. There is no earthly reason why Chuck and Blair cannot be together. Indeed, all obstacles have been taken care of: Louis, Dan, the unborn heir assumptive of Monaco. However, instead of each episode beginning with Limo-sex and La Perla, the writers of “Gossip Girl” have decided that Chuck and Blair have to find themselves before they find each other — the implication being that they will eventually do just that, and end the show collapsing into an Iranian cushion of young love and light bondage. For the viewer, it’s the tantric sex of prime-time television (Chuck and Blair would approve).

Last but not least, Dan and Georgina are together and up to no good. Throughout the show, Dan Humphrey has prided himself on being the only moral character in a society that would make Patrick Bateman shiver in his over-shined dress shoes. Sure, at times Dan’s great morass of moral superiority manifested itself in twisted ways and his aborted relationship with Blair undoubtedly left him in a fragile state. But never in his wildest dreams would Dan Humphrey be keeping prolonged and voluntary company with a girl whose idea of a fun night out involves a sex-tape and a bit of light murder. After she destroyed his relationship, fake-carried his child and almost ended his budding literary career, it’s safe to say that beneath all that rakishly curled hair, even Dan would know better than to hop on the Georgina train again.

So there we have it, three sets of inexplicably feeble relationships defining the narrative arc of the grand finale season of what was once called the defining show of our generation. It seems “Gossip Girl”‘s writers were faced with a decision: to create plausible TV, or make TV as juicy as possible. If we’ve learned one thing from the first two episodes of the season, it’s that the choice has been made.

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Over the course of a film career spanning more than thirty years, Adam Sandler has developed into quite the comic obscurant. On the one hand, Sandler has signed his name to half a dozen sophisticated, relatively subtle, indie comedies, such as “Spanglish”, “Punch Drunk Love” and “Funny People,” even delving into the realm of politically charged drama with 2007′s “Reign Over Me.” On the other hand, though, Sandler must also be held responsible for some of the most asinine, sophomoric, underdeveloped schlock-fests that have ever entered the suspiciously sticky DVD players of pimply, teenage, glue sniffers. Having established the development of these two aesthetic extremes in Sandler’s extensive catalogue, it is only fair to point out that 90% of his movies sit comfortably in a middle-of-the-range space between “artful” and “vomitous.”

And yet, no-one would dare accuse Happy Madison Production’s newest offering, “That’s My Boy,” (directed by Sean Anders) of cinematic fence-sitting.

The plot of the movie, without giving away the twist– and it is a doozy– is this: mathematically gifted, 12 year old delinquent, Donny Berger is involved in a sexual liaison with his 22 year old teacher, Mary McGarricle, the products of which are a son, Han Solo, and a brief period of gainful notoriety. Skip ahead twenty years or so, and Donny (Adam Sandler) is estranged from the renamed, and very successful, Todd (Andy Samberg) and living in obscurity with an enormous debt owed to the IRA. To ease his financial troubles, Donny brokers a deal with a talk-show host to organize a reunion between himself, his son and his imprisoned ex-lover (Susan “what was she thinking?” Sarandon.) Seeing a notice in the paper advertising Todd’s impending wedding to WASPish socialite Jaime (tragically underused Leighton Meester), Berger decides to reconnect with his son in the hopes of tricking him into the show. The rest of the movie is 114 minutes of sperm jokes, violent diarrhea, and rampant racism, sexism and a host of other “-ism”s that might, if listed in full, have prolonged Ferris Bueller’s seminal shower by a good 20 minutes.

But, leaving aside the smaller problems of the movie– not that Sandler’s inability to follow-through with a single potent punchline in a film that markets itself as a goofball comedy is by any means a small problem — “That’s My Boy” has one, major flaw that doomed the movie even in its most fledgling stages of development. And that is this: statutory rape is not hilarious.

The thing is, irreverence and the tackling of taboos through humour can be well done. In recent times, Hollywood has produced a number of extremely funny and often beautifully made, dark comedies that tackle sensitive, socio-historical issues head on. Standout examples of semi-recent subversive laugh-a-minute films include, Morris’ “Four Lions”, a riotous indie film about Muslim-English suicide bombers, Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” a movie that dared to poke fun at the Third Reich, and, most topically, Reitman’s “Juno,” which revolves around the subject of teen pregnancy.

Yet, there remains a vast difference between any one of the movies above and ‘That’s My Boy”– quite apart from the fact that those films are hilarious, and the only funny thing about the Sandler movie is that anyone with functioning eyes and ears paid to see it– because, where the other movies have the good sense to not make fun of the central kernel of struggle within the movie, the characters of “That’s My Boy” barge into the dark world of sexual abuse and bumble about in there without the weakest flashlight of self-awareness. To put it another way, “Four Lions” makes jokes about acts of faith, but not faith, “Inglorious Basterds” mocks Hitler but not the holocaust, “Juno” plays with the physical state of pregnancy in high-school, but not the emotional toll of growing up fast. By contrast, “That’s My Boy” does not discriminate between pressure points within the incredibly traumatic subject of statutory rape and its consequences, and makes the entire underage teacher-student relationship — the inciting incident that creates the tension for the whole film– into a big, colossally unfunny, joke.

Somewhere, very, very deep down inside the soul of this uncharismatic well of one-liner ejaculate, there is something that needs to be said. Indeed, Sandler manages to pull off a few, incredibly sparse, genuinely touching incidences between himself and Samberg in which there is a momentary glimpse into the unique perspective of a tragically young dad trying valiantly to bring up a son while going through his own, rocky, coming of age journey. Those flashpoints of honesty between parent and child, in conjunction with a series of scene stealing performances by the utterly charming Vanilla Ice– who should have “[flown] like a harpoon daily and nightly” away from this movie–, may almost have redeemed the rest of the film. Unfortunately, they are, more often than not, quickly smothered by shots of obese prostitutes firing pool-balls from their hoo-has at mentally challenged yokels.

Previously, I had assumed that Sandler continued to produce this kind of movie, the kind of movie firmly entrenched within the “vomitous” camp of his stylistic spectrum, because he has no respect for his audience beyond the money they persist in offloading into his already overflowing pockets. Now, post-”That’s My Boy,” I know this to be the case, and, perversely, this knowledge makes me feel both better about this specific movie and about Sandler’s movie making career as a whole. Ah, yes indeed, free market capitalism is alive and well.

Grade: 1/5

Image Courtesy of  That’s My Boy

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