The Smackdown

Some movies take place in a world that we’ll call “comedy reality.” This is clearly not the real world, nor is it quite the anarchic spoof world of, say, Airplane! or Scary Movie, but it’s an unabashedly silly alternate reality — one in which a man can kick someone with both feet simultaneously, a fire can be doused with a hose full of hummus, and a cell phone can get left in a woman’s womb as she gives birth.

We come to you today from a different world, one of competitive film criticism, where two vaguely similar movies can wrestle each other for Smackdown supremacy! In today’s matchup, our opponents both feature beloved comedy stars playing arrogant and/or ruthless Middle Easterners who come to New York and are humbled and redeemed by hard work and a star-crossed romance. As everyone knows, you don’t mess with Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, but Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator is gonna give it a shot anyway…

The Challenger

The Dictator eschews the episodic, semi-documentary, Jackass-ish style of Borat (2006) and Bruno (2009) for a far more conventional, scripted approach. It’s a fish-out-of-water tale, with Cohen donning another fake foreign accent and even faker facial hair as General Aladeen, the megalomaniacal military head of the fictitious nation of Wadiya.

Shortly after arriving in America, Aladeen is betrayed by his henchman Tamir Ben Kingsley — sorry, make that just Tamir (Ben Kingsley) — who replaces him with a slow-witted lookalike (also Cohen). Aladeen soon finds himself homeless and penniless in New York, where Zoey (Anna Faris), an outspoken feminist who runs a vegan co-op, takes pity on him. He also reunites with his old weapons expert Nadal (Jason Mantzoukas), and the two plot to restore him to power. But will his gradually developing feelings for Zoey change his heart?

The Defending Champion

Israel’s greatest counter-terrorist agent has a dream. Bored with the endless cycle of violence between his country and the Palestinians and also with the near-superpowers he possesses that make his job all but effortless, he decides to fake his own death and start fresh in America, where he can pursue his dream of becoming a world-class… hair-stylist.

He eventually finds himself working and falling for a Palestinian salon owner (Emmanuelle Chriqui), specializing in haircuts and backroom romps for elderly clientele, but his past threatens to ruin him when his new-found fame catches the eye of his old rivals.

The Scorecard

The Zohan is actually one of Sandler’s more endearing characters, a heroic, good-hearted guy who is genuinely happiest when he’s pleasing others, be it with his scissors or his… other talents. By contrast, Aladeen starts out as easily Cohen’s most despicable character, neither as lovably bumbling as Borat nor as bravely flamboyant as Bruno. He’s a narcissistic, chauvinist, anti-Semitic monster who orders executions at the drop of a hat.  The Zohan comes to America to escape his bellicose past; Aladeen has been ejected from a similar past and is desperately trying to return to it. First, Aladeen has to hit bottom so he can start over and slowly evolve into a decent man; Zohan is already quite evolved when we meet him (other than his overwhelming machismo), and his main purpose is to help those around him evolve. Notably, those would include an old nemesis played by John Turturro with his usual zaniness, and a cab driver with a score to settle, played by the reliably unfunny Rob Schneider.

But for the most part, we’re talking about two pretty similar cinematic experiences here. Both have a popular comic doing a silly Middle Eastern accent and bumbling through New York. Both are crammed with broad sight gags, quick verbal interplay, and crude sexual humor. Zohan‘s raunch mainly springs from the notion of Zohan pleasuring scores of libidinous middle-aged and elderly women (which would be laudably progressive if the movie itself didn’t seem so grossed out by it). Dictator relies less overall on sex jokes, but when it does, its R rating enables it to be a tad more outrageous than the PG-13 Zohan. Each puts its protagonist in the most unlikely romance possible with characters played by former Entourage actresses — Zohan with a feisty Palestinian portrayed quite likably by the gorgeous Chriqui, and Aladeen with hippie-chick Faris, an annoying, scratchy-voiced perfomer whose appeal remains lost on me.

Both movies are interested in making you laugh and little beyond that; the main difference is how they try. Almost all the jokes in Zohan can be divided into a short list of categories, each less funny than the last:

1. Old women being naughty

2. Broad physical gags (iterally no laws of physics apply to the Zohan’s powers)

3. Tweaking Middle Eastern cliches (electronics store haggling, cab driving, hummus, etc.)

4. Terrorism as a banal bureaucracy (Schneider puts his network on a conference call)

5. Celebrity cameos, ranging from the predictable (Chris Rock as a Jamaican cab driver) to the pointless (Mariah Carey as herself) to the unexpectedly effective (Dave Matthews as a white supremacist for hire) to the downright weird (Michael “Let’s get ready to rumble!” Buffer as the corporate villain)

Dictator offers its share of cameos as well, including John C. Reilly as an out-of-his-league torturer and Megan Fox playing herself (unconvincingly). But unlike Zohan, its jokes are all over the map; the movie (like Cohen) will do literally anything for a laugh. Which is why it’s so disheartening to report how rarely it actually gets one. Aside from the occasional chuckle, I spent a lot of its measly 75 minutes or so) waiting for the funny to kick in, and it never did. Its best moments feature the heretofore unknown Mantzoukas making an ideal no-nonsense straight man to Cohen’s useless idiot, but those scenes are too little, too late.

Cohen is an immense talent and an engaging performer, but his biggest laughs have been hugely bolstered by his singular method of getting them, by putting his brand of nuttiness in the context of reality. Even in his best scenes, such as his pantomimed “encounter” with a spirit in Bruno, what elevates them into comic genius is our awareness of a real-life psychic watching this and reacting to it (or trying not to). Picture that scene, or any of Borat‘s most memorable scenes, written as fiction, and you’ll get an idea of what’s missing here. That, and it’s basically pretty stupid.

The Decision

Two fairly similar movies in plot, theme, and disappointing lack of laughs. Zohan‘s main edges are due to its casting, with Sandler somewhat more charming than Cohen, and Chriqui infinitely more appealing than Faris. But beyond that, as little as The Dictator did for me, I’ll take its R-rated go-for-broke audacity and occasionally amusing Cohen-Mantzoukas pairing over Zohan‘s repetitive sniggering and phony can’t-we-all-get-along sentiments. Dictator is also a whole 40 minutes shorter than Zohan, so as flaccid an experience as it is, at least it’s a briefer one. I’d recommend practically any of Cohen’s other movies over either of these, but since, as always, there are no ties in Smackdown, the winner, by a beard, is…The Dictator.

The Smackdown

Can Barnabas suck the blood out of Buffy or can this tough vamp of a fighter slay the hell out of this unchained vampire? While that alone might be enough of a question to guide a Smackdown, this one gets complicated by history.

Dark Shadows, as people over fifty know, began as TV then became a film. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as people under thirty know, began as a film and became a TV series. The former, in theaters now, is a derivation of its former glory, while the latter is an inspired evolution of its big-screen debut.

Considering them for this Smackdown, you realize how far Joss Whedon has come. He wrote a script two decades ago and had to turn it over to a director who did what he would with it, but now he’s not only the writer of The Avengers but its white-hot director.

After seeing all of this in short order recently, my mind started drifting to what Whedon could have done with Dark Shadows, but that pretzeled my logic to such a degree that I’ve come back to the safe confines of Smack to sort out the flesh-and-blood winners in the ring today.

The Challenger

Let’s review. Dark Shadows, as a TV series, was originally about a newly hired governess who comes to live in Collinsport, Maine and is soon caught up in fresh mystery when a “cousin from England” named Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) comes to live with them and turns out to be a vampire. This afternoon soap opera was quite a sensation during its run from 1966 to 1971.

Movies get right to it, and so, after a short preface in this new version, construction workers find Barnabas, now played by Johnny Depp, wrapped in chains inside a sealed coffin after being buried for almost 200 years. As in, emerging into the light of 1972, a time of transition that is post-hippie ’60s and pre-disco ’70s. Can anyone say fish-out-of-water or vampire-out-of-coffin?

Well, the Collinswood Estate is pretty shabby, the family fortunes have gone south, and Depp’s Barnabas approaches the problem as any proud 1700s merchant of menace would. He moves in and tries to rally everyone to the family cause. Everyone includes Elizabeth Collins (Michelle Pfeiffer), who manages the family’s dwindling fortunes; her attitudinal teen, Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz); a drunk hanger-on (Jackie Earle Haley); and a live-in shrink, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter). And there’s a kid and a brother who don’t do much.

Depp’s skin looks the color of skim milk, his fingernails are talons, and his manner is courteous. It’s quite a character for him to sink his teeth into.

The Defending Champion

Forget all you know about Buffy from the TV series. It had years and years to add the details and to find out what works and what doesn’t and to hone its fantasy and delivery system. Go back to the source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the original, unfiltered, baseline film.

In that telling, we meet high school cheerleader Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson) who’s dating the captain of the basketball team, and shopping with airhead friends. This creepy old guy Merrick (Donald Sutherland channeling his best Van Helsing) shows up with bad news. She’s the Slayer, one of the Chosen Ones from every generation, picked to defend the world from vampires. Eventually, even SoCal ValGal Buffy can’t fight the truth of the matter and embraces her new reality, loses most of her old friends, makes a few new ones and does mortal combat with another old guy who’s not Donald Sutherland, the ancient and powerful Lothos (Rutger Hauer).

Buffy is, like, a total warrior princess butt-kicking vampire-hunting hottie. It looks good on her.

The Scorecard

Dark Shadows has the fish-out-of-water fun while Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the clash-of-culture fun. Both the characters of Barnabas Collins and Buffy Summers have some adjusting to do in their respective films: Barnabas to the New World Order and Buffy to her One True Calling.

Both films offer some fang-sharp humor. The audience where we saw Dark Shadows laughed a lot, but these were screenwriters at the WGA Theater who were getting a free screening and are in a very festive mood. I remember lots of laughs in the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer from audiences who were surprised and amused at its fusing of the teen sex-comedy and horror genres.

Let’s talk about what they (the film versions) don’t have. Dark Shadows doesn’t have much plot. Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn’t have much of the scary atmospherics that the TV series was known for.

Direction is another issue. Obviously, Shadows‘ Tim Burton does things his way and some people don’t like it. I thought this was easily one of his most accessible films. Then there’s Buffy‘s Fran Rubel Kuzui who paced up Whedon’s jokes and action and kept the dark contained and the light maintained. Honestly, as someone who is not a Burton fan, I still think he probably wins this one.

The lead characters are as great as the actors behind them. This is the eighth time Burton has directed Depp, who commits completely to his characters, including Barnabas. He’s experienced, in the hands of a friend, and confident enough to let it rip. He’s awesome, although his character is one-note, even though it’s a great one. And, let’s face it, almost nobody in any prime demographic has seen Jonathan Frid (who died recently) to compare the performances. This is so not true in the Buffys. Sarah Michelle Gellar owns the role in 99 percent of the viewers’ minds, and even though Kristy Swanson is actually quite good, she suffers in comparison. Plus, one has to consider that it was probably easier for her to find a Valley Girl performance than it was for Depp to go revived vampire.

After considering this, I’ve realized that both of these projects were more involving to their audiences in their TV series versions than in their film iterations because viewers got to live with the characters longer and the writer/producers got to fine-tune their product. Still…

The Decision

In the world of TV, Buffy slays Barnabas. I’ve actually seen some of the original Dark Shadows and I’m convinced that the people who remember loving it haven’t seen it recently and they are loving memories of youth more than anything.

In the world of film, which is how this Smackdown is tilted, it’s another result — Barnabas sucks the blood out of Buffy. It’s Depp, baby. The plot’s paper-thin, the other characters don’t quite fit in the same world as he does, there’s tons of nonsense. But he’s got a lock on Barnabas that can’t be picked.

And the sex scene in Dark Shadows has got it going on. That’s all I’m saying.

The Smackdown

If one super-powered super-hero can fuel a super-blockbuster, just imagine what a half-dozen of them in the same movie can do.

A few years ago, Marvel Studios did just that. After giving movie-length origin stories to its key players, Marvel now brings all their power-hitters together into the ultimate superhero combo group — The Avengers. Imagine this group fighting not just evil but each other for screen time: Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Iron Man and a couple of second tier-types, the token hottie, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, the guy with the bow and some very fancy arrows.

But they’re not the first powerful and popular Marvel assembly of super-humans to hit the big screen. That distinction belongs to The X-Men, who have managed three mega-films since 2000.

Our Smackdown pits the origin of The Avengers, which opens this weekend, against last year’s blockbuster origin film, X-Men: First Class.

The Challenger

For many comics readers, The Avengers heralds the time when Marvel truly became Marvel. The great Stan Lee and the talented Jack Kirby were like two athletes in their prime — graceful and powerful at the same time, and they moved with precision and finesse.

It was a combination whose impact has never been matched. The world has since split between Avengers fans and X-Men fans.

It’s been quite a thrill for me to have become friends with creator Stan Lee since moving to Hollywood. We met doing an NBC pilot together, Missing Link, more than a decade ago and have stayed friends. He even signed my Avengers #1 issue, which I’ve scanned here.

At the neighborhood comic book club (Stan would prefer it written as ”comicbook club”), we used to debate who should be in a film version of The Avengers if ever dreams did come true. Most of the actors we thought of back then are, shall we say, no longer fit for duty on this one. Still, we’re pretty happy with what we’ve ended up with today: Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Chris Evans (Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) and Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye).

There isn’t a lot of plot in the latest film. Basically, Loki (from Thor) is back to threaten global safety and security. This causes Nick Fury, the director of the shadowy, high-tech agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., to recruit a team to save the world. It is no secret that the film structure is: introduce the team members individually, bring them together, let them fight each other, watch them put aside their differences to kick Loki and ET ass, roll credits.

The Defending Champion

X-Men: First Class earned our Defending Champion title in this Smack, having dispatched the original X-Men film from 2000 in Kevin Wohler’s spot-on head-to-head battle.

This film is an origin story with a twist, being set in the past, specifically the 1960s during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This gave the studio the chance to cast all the lead roles younger than before. Instead of Patrick Stewart as Charles “Professor X” Xavier, we get James McAvoy. And instead of Ian McKellen as Erik “Magneto” Lehnsherr, we get the spellbinding Michael Fassbender. This allows them to go to the well of one of the oldest and most successful story devices — showing us two friends who end up mortal enemies.

You see, before they were enemies, Charles and Erik were newly discovered mutants (from Nazi experiments as well as genetic anomalies), recruited by the CIA to help defend the country. They find themselves contending with a bizarre group called the Hellfire Club (Dick Cheney would have been comfortable there), whose leader Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) is trying to ignite a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia.

The fact that X-Men: First Class is a period piece gives it a vibe that is perfectly in tune with its origin as a Marvel comic. Given that the early ’60s are the Platinum Age of Stan Lee’s amazing run of creativity and invention, it’s a beautiful homage. It’s a politically thrilling espionage story merged with the high camp of comic book adventure. It’s full of vibrant back-story going back to Nazi-occupied Poland in 1944 and wonderful friendship-building between young people who share the pain and angst of being mutants.

Oh, and we get to see a great origin for the early blue and yellow X-Men uniforms from the first run of comics. Great fan cred there.

While we’re here officiating over the battle of the super-teams on the silver screen, Marvel has their own Avengers -vs- X-Men battle royale going on in the pages of their comic books.

In this year’s company wide crossover event appropriately titled ‘Avengers Vs. X-Men’, Captain America’s squad of superheroes are forced to fight Cyclops and the remaining mutants. This 12-issue crossover just hit the stands (or wherever comics hit these days) as “Avengers Vs. X-Men”, otherwise known on the streets as “AvX.”

Normally, we’d call out those Smackdown imitators and impersonators — wait!, oh, yeah, it is Marvel, these are their characters — well, anyway, we just wanted to say how much we like the concept!

Like Marvel’s ‘Civil War’, both sides are interested in saving the world and the well being of those living on it, but they come to blows because they can’t get on the same page and agree on one singular plan of action.

If you thought that there’s some slobberknockers on the big screen in ‘The Avengers’ or ‘X-Men: First Class’, you’re in for a treat when you see some all out no holds barred action in the pages of ‘Avengers Vs. X-Men’. In fact, there’s so much action that the fighting spills out of the main book and into a separate series called ‘AVX: Versus’, which features individual battles from the war, like Iron Man vs. Magneto and The Thing vs. Namor, the Sub-Mariner.

The most compelling part of all this is that there’s no bad guy in this fight, and these are key moments on the page and on the screen. For example, in ‘The Avengers’, Thor versus Iron Man or Thor versus Hulk. They’re on the same side, but they’re so different that they have difficulty working together. Why they fight kinda doesn’t matter that much, but we love to see it because we see that even Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have their own human-like flaws. We see good guys fighting bad guys all the time, but in the real world, it’s not so cut and dry. Even though we look to these things to escape the real world, why they fight kinda doesn’t matter that much.

Anyway, we digress. Back to the review…

The Scorecard

The superhero team film is a tricky affair. In solo efforts, there is always plenty of time to explore secret identities, relationships with the opposite sex, and the motivation of the villains. But in the group pix, the emphasis shifts. Each hero must get his or her due in terms of screen time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The worst example of all-time is from the first Fantastic Four film where, during the fight with Dr. Doom, Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and the Thing each take their time watching the others fight Doom, one after another. Truly awful.

Fortunately, in this Smackdown, both films are in the hands of adept directors. Bryan Singer brought the X-Men to life and Joss Whedon does the same with The Avengers. Each was up to the challenge.

The other thing about a group of superheroes is that the stakes have to be pretty high to justify the gang approach to crime-fighting. Pick your poison between these two films — either extraterrestrial invasion (The Avengers) or nuclear armageddon (X-Men: First Class). Either way the stakes are as sky-high as the fate of the world and life as we know it.

Ask any consultant to any organization what they do and in the first five minutes they will mention “group dynamics.” These two films are full of them. There’s little doubt that the X-Men are the more organic collection — they’re all mutants, brought together by society’s distrust of them. Their difference is what makes them the same. The Avengers, on the other hand, are bigger stars in their own right, but their group is less cohesive because of that. It’s a collection of Alpha males, literally locked up together in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s giant floating battle station.

In X-Men: First Class, the filmmakers take the time to introduce us to the main characters’ back-stories because they have to — because of the period setting, we do not know them yet (at least in this incarnation). But in The Avengers, each character has been meticulously set up in his own world through previous films, and it’s assumed we already know them. Aside from three or four people in parts of North America still waiting to get on the electric power-grid, this is a safe assumption. This latest film then is all about using shorthand to get into the story.

The Avengers is a great kick-ass film and will make a trillion dollars or so at the box office but it is all about fights. They fight each other. They fight Loki. They fight ET. It is a loud film, what with all the super-fist on metal coming from it. If it can be said of a superhero movie that it is “thoughtful,” then that is the advantage of X-Men: First Class. The question really is, however, does that even matter?

The Decision

You really have to wonder what the execs at DC are thinking right about now. They’ve made the decision not to co-mingle the worlds of their various heroes, keeping their film worlds separate, even though the comic worlds collide all the time. Are they dreaming about the box-office grosses for the Justice League film featuring Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman?

That will be a Smackdown for the ages when it comes: The Justice League -vs- The Avengers. It’s probably inevitable, but it ain’t here yet.

Marvel beat DC to the punch, gambled on weaving the Marvel world into one cohesive comic/film universe, and that bet is paying off big-time. That leaves us where we are today, with the Smack pitting two Marvel teams against each other.

X-Men: First Class is a first-rate origin story. It’s the best in the class of X-Men films. But few of the X-Men characters can carry a film all by themselves (including, apparently, Wolverine).

The Avengers, on the other hand, is chock full of stand-alone heroes like Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. These guys stand pretty damn tall on their own. Standing together, well, they’re just unbeatable. Not only are they “Earth’s Mightiest Super-Heroes,” they’ve also taken this Smackdown by a knockout.

Avengers, Assemble!

The Smackdown

It’s the lucky ones among us who get the luxury of a “do over,” a chance to take the road less traveled. Poet Robert Frost isn’t the first person to actively wonder what lies on the other side of the life we’ve made. A pair of admired TV programs work that street of possibilities, although maybe not for long.

Let’s touch on the newer and more endangered series first. NBC announced Awake as a mid-season replacement for 2012. This is a cop show with a twist that marks it as a fresh entry in a tired, overplayed genre. Propelled by advance hosannas at the Critics’ Choice Television Awards, the series premiered on March 1 to more than six million viewers, but despite the healthy start, low ratings may put Awake to sleep before it gets a shot at Season 2.

Squaring off against Awake is Fringe, which Fox just announced it is renewing for a final thirteen-episode season, its fifth, after which it will be exiled to a parallel universe known as syndication. Even though  Awake is a cop show and Fringe is science fiction, they have similar appeals: Protagonists seek clarity from paranormal confusion that affects them personally, triggered by the death of family members.

With Fringe, the protagonist is a scientist pulled from a mental hospital amid a rising storm of unexplained phenomena for which he bears some responsibility. The stakes are extremely high: existence or planetary destruction. The crisis facing the main character in Awake is different, but potentially destructive in a highly personal way. It stems from wildly shifting, troubling uncertainties in his day-to-day life. His coworkers and the police psychiatrists he’s required to see spread the confusion even further, offering few satisfying answers. Reality is an elusive, moving target on both shows.

Central to this Smackdown: Which series has the better handle on the do-over needed to redeem its central character, not to mention its creative team. (Awake’s creator Kyle Killen explored a similar double-life premise on Lone Star a while back. The standard-bearer in the genre is probably Lost, whose driving force, J.J. Abrams, co-created and runs Fringe.) Each show’s protagonist wants a better hand than fate has dealt. Can the eccentric scientist go back and save the universe and his peace of mind? Can the police detective save himself?

The Challenger

Conflicted cops are nothing new on TV, but Detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) takes this to another level. If anything, Awake may not be groundbreaking so much as a respite from the unrelenting shooting, rough talk and formulaic plotting that color so many cop shows. The guiding premise of Awake has Britten surviving a horrific car accident. His wife, Hannah (Laura Allen), and their son, Rex (Dylan Minnette), are riding in the car. In one version of two competing realities that forever fight for dominance in Britten’s traumatized brain, Hannah survives the accident but Rex does not; in the other, Hannah dies and Rex lives. Britten exists in one world when he’s awake and another when he sleeps, and both are equally real to him.

In each life, Britten visits a different shrink, each of whom argues that his/her world is real and that Britten has concocted the alternate version to keep his familial relationships nearly intact. Interestingly, Britten has no desire to be “cured”; he doesn’t want to let either reality go. This creates complications at work, where Britten uses clues developed in one world to help him solve cases in the other—a premise that he can’t share with his colleagues without being judged emotionally unstable and suspended.

It’s a sort of earnest dramatization of the old joke quoted in Annie Hall about the guy who thinks he’s a chicken. His brother knows he’s crazy but can’t turn him in because they need the eggs. Britten may be crazy too, but he can’t tell anyone he’s using information gleaned from two competing realities, because he needs the clues.

The Defending Champion

We’ve had four seasons of getting to know Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), institutionalized for nearly two decades. He and research partner William Bell follow an inquiry described as fringe science. They discover a parallel universe, but the acclaim that follows comes at a fearful cost, and neither can leave well enough alone. When Bishop’s son dies, he crosses to “the Other Side” and kidnaps his son’s double, throwing the cosmos out of whack. Bell makes matters worse by helping get Bishop committed and using his knowledge of the parallel universe to enrich his technology firm, Massive Dynamics. Bell crosses over so many times it destroys him.

On a different track, FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) needs Bishop’s unique background to crack an unusual case. As the series develops, their history together comes out: Olivia was guinea pig in a set of clinical trials conducted by Bishop. She has him declared the ward of Peter (Joshua Jackson), his reluctant son from the Other Side. Very soon, the results of Walter’s tinkering with the parallel universes begins to manifest. These universes are unstable, and there are bad guys who want to bring them down. Each week we see their hand at work.

Observers can be spotted if you look closely, usually deep in the background of each episode. They come from the Other Side and arrive wearing dark suits, fedoras, shades and thin black ties. Really, they wouldn’t seem out of place on the set of The Blues Brothers, although they provide no music or comic relief. The observers are mortal (during an episode, one dies). They monitor events over here and lend a certain continuity to the series, while adding to the general weirdness. They love spicy food. Their real purpose, apart from commenting on events, is not explained. Along the way, we’re introduced to romantic attachments, hints of buried liaisons, and oh yeah, that alternate universe.

The Scorecard 

Awake and Fringe both satisfy on several levels, but both can be confusing to the uninitiated viewer. Awake provides helpful visual cues to keep things straight. Its color tone is warm and reddish in one reality, cooler and blue-gray in the other. Several characters populate these realities separately. In the blue one, which features Rex, Britten works cases with partner Isaiah Freeman (Steve Harris from The Practice); within the Hannah reality, Freeman has transferred out and Britten is breaking in rookie partner Efrem Vega (That ’70s Show’s Wilmer Valderrama). Both partners are meant to keep an eye on  Britten, who’s recovering emotionally from the accident and is not exactly doing by-the-book police work.

Fringe uses different techniques, visual and otherwise, to tell us where we are and who we’re watching. When Walter and Olivia travel to the  other Side and interact with their doubles, the show helps us keep these doppelgangers straight by referring to them by different, but similar names—Walternate and Fauxlivia. Other characters have the same names on both sides, but different job titles distinguish their identities. The producers also provide a few handy visual cues: different colored hair, altered personalities, different settings for those familiar faces wandering across the reality divide.

Both dramas benefit from talented supporting casts: In Awake, kudos go to Laura Allen (Mona Lisa Smile), Harris, Valderrama, B.D. Wong, who played a different police psychiatrist all those years on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Cherry Jones, much more convincing as the other shrink than she was as the president in 24. The show is smartly written and requires active watching to follow how the different waking realities alter the events on screen.

Fringe offers a different sort of ride. The larger cast of characters populating the parallel universes allows for more flexibility in developing storylines. Talented support players (Jackson, Lance Riddick, Jasika Nicole) have vivid moments. Anna Torv gives off a slightly damaged vibe as Olivia/Fauxlivia that feels like a natural fit with John Noble’s Walter/Walternate. But ultimately, just as Isaacs dominates Awake, Fringe utterly belongs to Noble. His character is funny, aggravating, thoroughly eccentric and keeps the storyline from drifting out of orbit. You never lose sight of Walter’s regrets, which drive him to kidnap his son’s stand-in from the Other Side, and set loose a sequence of events that may destroy the world. Unraveling the paranormal story twists will remind viewers of episodes from of The X-Files and Lost, co-creator Abrams’ previous series. There are even echoes of the movie Altered States, whose female lead, Blair Brown, has a continuing role in Fringe.

The Decision

This Smack presents a dilemma. Awake is smart and intriguing, but could be cancelled shortly after you read this. Fringe is barreling toward its final, abbreviated season. Both should be remembered long after you’ve moved past the junk gumming up the bandwidth on your cable. Awake suffers in this comparison from its short timeline. I’d like it even more if I could live with it longer. We may never know, in this universe, if Awake can find a consistent voice and a way to keep telling compelling stories for years. Our winner, Fringe, has already done so.

The Smackdown

Who needs humans for a Smackdown? In this bout, our contenders will be lumps of plasticine. England’s Aardman Animation has been entertaining audiences for years with its claymation shorts and feature films showcasing the studio’s fresh, imaginative brand of stop-motion animated comedy. Its most recent offering Pirates! Band of Misfits is a typically off-kilter, spoofish take on pirate movies, featuring an underachieving crew of buccaneers caught up in adventures at sea and onshore.

The same light, unserious approach to the material is used in one of the studio’s earlier features, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Like its pirate cousin, it’s about the misadventures of several clay misfits. In this case, said misfits are the title characters from its series of poplar shorts—a genteel, naïve inventor and his very smart but silent dog.

The Challenger

The ambitions of the pirate captain (voiced by Hugh Grant) far outpace his abilities and those of his ragged crew. This doesn’t stop him from hungering for the Pirate of the Year award, the coveted trophy he has never come close to winning in his long career. He steps up attempts to plunder the seas but he only succeeds in raiding ships with little or no treasure. It becomes painfully obvious that he won’t collect enough booty to qualify for the prize… until he happens upon the Beagle, the flagship of ambitious young naturalist Charles Darwin (David Tennant from Dr. Who). The scientist discovers that the pirate captain’s beloved parrot, Polly, isn’t a parrot at all; rather, she’s the only living dodo bird in existence. The two hatch a scheme to display Polly to the Royal Society in order to win the award for discovery of the year.

Their plan is a success, but it goes awry when notorious pirate-hater Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) arrives to congratulate the winner and quickly discerns that our hero is a buccaneer only disguised as a scientist. It looks like the end of the plank for the captain, but he makes a deal with the queen to leave Polly as an attraction for London’s Zoo in return for a royal pardon and an immense haul of treasure. With that pile of booty, he nearly claims Pirate of the Year, but at the ceremony it’s revealed that he’s been pardoned. This means, technically, he isn’t a pirate anymore and is thus ineligible for the award.

Wracked with guilt, the pirate king returns to London and reunites with Darwin to rescue his beloved bird. They discover a horrifying secret—the queen is a member of a covert society of gourmands that meets occasionally to make a meal out of rare animals. Polly is to be their next main course. With the aid of Darwin and his crew, including the naturalist’s loyal chimp assistant Mr. Bobo, the pirate captain tracks the queen to her luxury liner, but she proves to be a more formidable opponent than her obese figure would suggest. 

The Defending Champion

Something is amiss in the normally sedate English countryside town of West Wallby, home to brilliant yet sheltered inventor Wallace (Peter Sallis) and his faithful and often very clever dog Gromit. A pack of marauding rabbits is decimating the town’s well-tended vegetable patches, and no one can figure out a way to limit the destruction. This becomes a pressing issue when one of the pests, a mutant nocturnal beast dubbed the “were-rabbit,” starts to chomp on big comestibles. Worse still, it happens just as the town is about to host its prestigious giant vegetable growing competition, which can bestow immeasurable horticultural renown on the winner of its Golden Carrot award. The contest is hosted by the sympathetic Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter), who also happens to have obvious romantic chemistry with the shy inventor.

Wallace and Gromit’s current business venture, Anti-Pesto, seems to be having some success with a humane approach that involves relocating the offending rabbits to communities where they can’t do as much damage. Wallace’s rival, the rich and callous Lord Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes), prefers a different kind of pest-control—the homicidally direct practice of shooting the critters.

Soon it becomes apparent that the were-rabbit might be a creature associated with the eccentric inventor and his dog. If so, the two will have to find a way to keep the beast from devouring the super-sized food, while at the same time escaping Quartermaine’s guns. Meanwhile, they have to make sure the giant vegetable competition goes off without a hitch.

The Scorecard

It’s hard to get more value for your entertainment buck than with an Aardman movie. Generally created and filmed by a core group of company founders and longtime collaborators, the studio’s shorts and features are always sly, witty and extremely funny—the product of a collective imagination that’s full to the point of overflow. Even the shortest Aardman productions are stuffed with visual detail, subtle comic references, and neat little subplots to layer the foundation story.

That applies especially to both Pirates! and Were-Rabbit. Every scene, every setting, every character is so packed with detail and color it’s hard to appreciate it all in one viewing. This is compounded by the two films’ respective stories, which are breezy and fun while at the same time loaded with many plot turns and twists. Sometimes you’re too busy laughing at the comedy or tracing the story to appreciate the craft of the sets, characters and the animation.

Since both films are crafted with the same very high level of quality, in terms of art and story, it’s as difficult as winning a Pirate of the Year award to choose the better one. If we really, really, had to—and one of the occupational hazards of being a Smackdown ref is that we do—we’d go with the one that has the slightly less complicated story. After all, one of the great pleasures of an Aardman feature or short is the artistry of the design and the details to be found in the sets.

The Decision

Pirates! is still Aardman-like in the many turns of its plot, but its path is a bit more clear and focused than Were-Rabbit. The latter film packs much more into its contents, what with Wallace’s invention of a brainwashing machine, a human-to-beast transformation, a love triangle centered by a gardening enthusiast, and a scientifically modified rabbit, among many other elements. Whew! It’s almost exhausting to write about. Both films are real treats but Pirates! Band of Misfits gives audiences comparatively more brain room to enjoy the details of the clay world it inhabits. The pirate captain may never get his coveted Pirate of the Year Prize, but he and his film are worthy of booty we consider to be nearly as valuable—a victory in this Smackdown.