I always felt that thirtysomething, the zeitgest-reflecting, essential-viewing yuppie series that ran from 9.87 through 5.91, was too sensitive-wimpy. As honestly written and impressively acted as it often was, the show suffered from an almost oppressive self-examination syndrome — a constant exercise in fault-finding and angst exploration — among its boomer characters and their difficulties in managing and/or growing into adulthood and parenthood. To varying degrees everyone on the show wore a hair shirt, suffered or caused suffering, and was afflicted (if not wracked) with self doubt.

(l. to r.) Timothy Busfield, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper, Mel Harris, Ken Olin, Melanie Mayron, Peter Horton.

I forget who said “an unexamined life is not worth living” but thirtysomething sure as hell put the wisdom of that statement to the test. The women (Mel Harris, Melanie Mayron, Patricia Wettig, Polly Draper) were constantly fretting and kvetching over some crisis of the spirit, the bedroom, the bankbook or whatever. Always something darkening, taunting or haunting their brow.

And the guys especially (Ken Olin, Timothy Busfield, Peter Horton) — those poor Hebrew rock-pounders, bent and sweating under Pharoah’s lash! — were always being busted, picked apart and de-balled for this and that profound failing.

I hated Harris’s character, Hope (who played Olin’s wife), most of all. I remember being told by a cast member in ’88 that Hope was referred to by others on the show as “mope.” Everyone hated her. I’m certain she brought tens of thousands of watchers down every week. For all I know she may have inspired real-life fights, separations, divorces. (Or maybe people saw her personality as a cautionary tale and tried to be unlike her as much as possible.) Either way she was a huge drag to be around.

I related to what the show was, of course. I began watching just before getting married to my ex-wife Maggie in October 1987. and we both both became fairly devout fans (Maggie wore a gray “thirtysomething” t-shirt that I bought her) until the end of the run, during which time Jett came along in June 1988 and then Dylan in November 1989. It wasn’t a portrait of our marriage in every last respect, but there were certainly echoes.

And it happened during the bulk of our time together (we split up in the fall of ’91) so it became — in my head, at least — a kind-of running commentary on not just our life but all yuppie life in the late Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years and yaddah-yaddah.

And that’s what we were, all right — 30ish yuppies with kids and two cars living a nice Los Angeles life. We lived in the top half of a house in the West Hollywood hills (with a great view) and then in a nice Spanish home in Venice. We did volunteer work for Michael Dukakis. We took our kids to Gymboree. We threw parties about twice a year, and often flew east to see the parents (or we hosted them in LA). In Venice we had a backyard jacuzzi, a brick patio and an ivy-covered privacy wall.

But — I need to say this again — I really didn’t care for the show’s guilt-trippy tone. It got so bad that I began to look forward to episodes with David Clennon‘s Miles Drentell, a close-to-blatantly-evil zen mindfucker who ran the successful Philadelphia ad agency that Olin and Busfield worked for. He was a truly rancid fellow, but at least he wasn’t depicted as getting henpecked and nagged to death all the time.

So if the show bothered me so much why did I keep watching for four years? Because I felt in the end that I needed the affirmation. It felt important (and maybe even a tiny bit flattering) to commune with a weekly nationwide psychiatric/group encounter session that was more or less about me and my kind. Watching it felt healthy on some level. It was almost like attending a kind of non-denominational church service or AA meeting.

And I always liked the opening-credits theme music (composed by W. G. Snuffy Walden), and hearing it really brings back those times. I would have them again.

Anyway, the show is finally being issued in a series of DVD box sets. The first season (1200 minutes) is making its appearance on Tuesday, 8.25.

Here‘s a N.Y. Times piece on the show (written by Ari Karpel) with quotes from its creators, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, and some of its costars.

My favorite quote is from Mel Harris, to wit: “You learned very quickly that if you didn’t want a portion of your life to be broadcast to 30 million people, you didn’t share it with Ed and Marshall.”

I haven’t been able to precisely feel one way about the drunk-driving tragedy that befell director-writer Roger Avary (Beowulf, Pulp Fiction) last year, and which killed a 34 year-old friend named Andreas Zini when Avary piled his car into a telephone pole in Ojai. Avary, a friend and a great spirit whom I’ve known since the Pulp Fiction/Killing Zoe days, pleaded guilty last Tuesday to DUI and manslaughter. He’ll face sentencing sometime next month.

My basic feeling is that after a certain interval of mourning and atonement, you have to move on and make the best of your life in the aftermath of such an event. A writer like Avary should write or create something. I only know that no single event defines a life and that the only way to deal with monumental tragedy is to say, “Yes, that happened and I’ll deal with it for the rest of my life, but we all need to turn the page and try to strike a match.”

I also think it’s fair to ask anyone who’s ever known Roger and worked with him if they’ve ever driven with a buzz-on or worse, God forbid. Let he/she who is without sin throw the first stone. I’m ashamed to admit that I drove stinko a couple of times in the early to mid ’90s when I had a vodka-and-lemonade problem. One of those times resulted in a banger, and I can only get down on my knees, look up and cross myself in thankfulness that nothing worse happened. (I faced my problem and dealt with it to my personal satisfaction in ’96. My inspiration was Pete Hamill‘s A Drinking Life: A Memoir.) I’m basically saying that I was lucky enough to wake up or be given a break by fate or what-have-you, and when I think of poor Roger I think, “There but for the grace of God…”

I can’t explain how or why I find the substitute song track in this scene from The Apartment oddly hilarious, but I really do. On top of which it’s perfectly mixed in (just the right sound levels, cuts out at the right instant) and it doesn’t get in the way of what’s going on in the scene.

Congrats to the Weinstein Co. marketers for yesterday’s Inglourious Basterds haul of $14,350,000, which will probably translate into a $35 million weekend haul by Sunday night. Unless, of course, Saturday’s business suffers a sharp drop. Which could happen if the Joe Popcorn-Eloi reactions are similar to what a significant portion of the critics have said. But if it hangs in there, great. The Weinsteins will have earned themselves a breather. Nobody wants the Weinsteins to go away.

There were two things different about last night’s 3D IMAX previews compared to the San Diego/ComicCon footage shown last month. The reel I saw here was, of course, shorter — 15 or 16 minutes compared to 24 minutes in San Diego — and the ending has a hurried montage ofAvatar‘s second half (the clash between Stephen Lang‘s military commandos and the Na’vi with Sam Worthington‘s Na’vi hybrid sure to take sides against his own). But there was another distinction. Actually a distraction.

The Avatar footage, projected onto the huge IMAX screen inside Leows Lincoln Square, wasn’t quite as vivid and needle-sharp looking as the 3D San Diego reel. And yet LLS projects “real” IMAX (i.e., on super-sized film) vs. the digital “fake” IMAX-on-smaller-screens that other NYC theatres were showing. What gives? My semi-educated guess is that Avatar looks better with digital projection since it’s been an all-digital show from shooting to FX to post. Transferring to film (even IMAX film) just degrades. I know that what I saw wasn’t as on-the-money so what other conclusion could there be?

Beyond this I was feeling a little Avatar-ed out after it ended. I walked out saying to myself, “Hmmm….no bump-up. Same as before only less so.” Obviously because of the tech/focus issue but also because an Avatar visual highlights reel (i.e, the Na’vi/jungle monster/flying reptile-bird whoa stuff aimed at 12 year-olds) only takes you so far. It doesn’t wear well the second time. I need story, soul, structure, music, wit, great acting, etc.

Why does Worthington’s Jake Sully, a paraplegic military guy, act like an incorrigible 13 year-old when he wakes up from his Na’vi transformation operation and finds himself 10 feet tall and full of energy with two good legs? He didn’t anticipate that it would be a huge shock to suddenly find himself able to walk around? The laboratory authorities didn’t talk to him about adjusting before he went under? It’s kind of stupid that he just gets up and goes “this is really cool!” and lumbers out of the recovery room with the physicians warning him to stay put or else. I didn’t believe it. It felt bullshitty.

Plus the CG of his backside (including a tail) as he leaves the room looks too cartoony.

Down on Pandora the second monster (i.e., the big black one Scully is told to definitely run from) is right on top of him during the chase sequence. Why do big scary predators have to be within a step or two of their prey all the time? Why does every movie chase have to be so skin-of-our-teeth close? It gets old. Plus the monster moves so fast that his moves blurred out for me. My eyes couldn’t follow each and every whip-snap movement.

Paramount standee on second floor of Leows’ Lincoln Square — Friday, 8.21, 8:35 pm.

And how does it work exactly that Zoe Saldana‘s Na’vi character — a strong, fierce-eyed warrior named Neytiri — can speak English? She’s a Pandora native whose fellow Na’vi tribesmen speak in their native tongue with subtitles, so I don’t get it. I’m sure it’ll be explained down the road but it was one more thing to scratch my head about.

The 8 pm show was maybe 25% full, if that. A female Leows usher screwed things up in the early stages, telling people who showed their print-outs (like me) to go straight up to the fourth floor without telling them to get their orange wristbands from the Avatar/Fox guys on the main level. So a lot of us went up to the fourth floor only to be told to go all the way back down again.

I’m just going to take an Avatar break in my head until they start showing the full-length film to press sometime in November or whenever.

Okay, DVD Beaver has convinced me. Paramount’s upcoming Sapphire Series Blu-ray of Mel Gibson‘s Braveheart (out on 9.1) is a knockout. The DVD vs. Blu-ray frame-capture comparisons make this clear. The problem…I don’t know that this actually is a problem, now that I think of it…is that I’m not sure I want to watch Braveheart again.

DVD Beaver frame-capture of new Paramount Home Video Blu-ray of Mel Gibson’s

Seeing it once 14 years ago may have been sufficient, I mean. I don’t think I can take watching Gibson yell “freedohhm!” again. I’d watch a bootleg DVD of him saying “sugar tits” to that Malibu sheriff — that I’d pay to see.

“Power is not a toy we give to good children. It is a weapon. And the strong man takes it and uses it. And the man who doesn’t use it has no business in the big league. Because if you don’t fight, the Presidency is not for you. And it never will be.” Tough words that arguably apply to President Barack Obama in light of his apparent “knee buckling” on public option health care and trying to “nice” the Republicans into being cooperative and bipartisan.

The tough words are from Franklin Schaffner‘s film version of Gore Vidal‘s The Best Man. The speaker is President Art Hockstater (Lee Tracy), who’s trying to wake up the brilliant and charming but just-not-scrappy-enough presidential contender William Russell (Henry Fonda). If you haven’t seen this 1964 film (which isn’t on DVD), do so. The parallels between Obama and Russell are immediately apparent.

The more I think about public option going down the drain, the angrier I get at the wildebeest card-holders in the U.S. Senate who are standing foursquare against it, but I’m also feeling angrier and angrier at Obama for…I don’t know, radiating that irritating Zen placidity thing he does and, to go by impressions I’ve been getting, not playing this as toughly and shrewdly as he could. Don’t ask me for particulars because I can’t name them, but my Paul Krugman-fed impression — hell, everyone’s impression — is that Obama isn’t being sufficiently tooth-and-nail on this thing. Sometimes you have to be hard. There comes a time when you have to use muscle and twist the screws.

What did Arianna Huffington say about Obama on Charlie Rose two days ago (i.e., Thursday night)? That he’s too much into compromising and “a little delusional” and lacking a willingness to fight? Another thing Huffington said gave me the willies because it confirms what I’ve been fearing all along: “Temperamentally [Obama] doesn’t like confrontation.” Oh, to have a little Lyndon Johnson-style arm-twisting, horse-trading, brow-beating and old-fashioned threatening going on right now!

As Counterpunch‘s Michael Green has written (and I’m quoting him without endorsing his view that Obama is a “terrible president”), “Does this guy who seems to want, more than anything, for everyone just to be happy and sing along in the same key, still really believe in bipartisanship, at the very moment when the very people with whom he is negotiating are reinforcing the most absurd and inflammatory lies asserting the elder-cide intentions of his health-care bill?”