Archive for the ‘TV Review’ Category
Weeds Sucks; (500) Days of Summer Does Not
Posted by: chilly17 in Movie Review, TV Review on July 29th, 2009
Weeds was once a pretty interesting, if far-fetched, Showtime dramedy about a suburban widow keeping her family afloat by dealing marijuana. The cast and performances were strong – Mary-Louise Parker, Elizabeth Perkins, Romany Malco, Kevin Nealon, Justin Kirk each brought something unique to the table, be it comedic perspective, empathetic longing or whatnot. The storylines were interesting and there were some pretty staggering plot twists to keep things lively in the first two seasons. The third and fourth seasons starting veering out of control to unrestrained silliness.
Now it’s the fifth season, and essentially none of the above plaudits still hold true. Call it The Curse of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Ghost – Weeds is now as fucking stupid as Grey’s Anatomy, maybe (shudder) even worse. Parker’s “eyes wandering to the far left or right of the screen as she silently slurps the last of her Diet Coke/iced coffee” scenes were heralded as a nuanced take on a widow’s disociation in the first couple of seasons. Now it just seems like she’s got undiagnosed Asperger’s. Kevin Nealon’s character is beyond cartoonish and 100% unfunny – you are better off fastforwarding once you see his face, only pressing play when there is no trace off him left. Perkins’ Celia, initially the meddling bitch that made dicey situation dicier, is now a zero dimensional character that is just a hair beyond Nealon’s in prompting suicidal/homicidal urges. All that He Said, She Said potential sadly wasted…wait, what? Wasted potential? Elizabeth, perhaps you’ve found a home. Call us.
The writers seem far more interested in having an interesting opening credit sequence. Hey, Jenji Kohan, we fucking get it – you created Weeds! Ha – you carved that in a bar of soap! You are clever, great. Now make the show stop sucking. Bring back Conrad, Heylia, and Sanjay. Kill off Doug, Celia and all Mexican gangsters (except maybe Ignacio). Thanks, much appreciated.
(500) Days of Summer
Hey, what do you know, two good movies in a row! What a streak, particularly in this barren summer. Most of you probably assume I will love any movie with parentheses in the title, but that isn’t true. (Although parentheses are awesome, allowing you to “break the fourth wall” even though you are already speaking directly to your audience) Is (500) Days as good as The Hurt Locker? No, too precious in spots and also featuring a couple of (unneccessary) standard romantic comedy staples – the bumbling friends with no advice to offer and the wise (and profane) beyond-their-years sibling with way too much (good) advice to offer. Other than those quibbles, though, (500) Days was pretty fresh – I loved the fact that they tell you up front (and in the trailers) that it isn’t a love story and doesn’t really work out for the couple.
It’s a pretty typical story: straight-laced boy Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets quirky, not-that-conventionally-beautiful-yet-uniformly-desired girl Summer (Zooey Deschanel). The story is not told in chronological order, so you don’t get the straightforward “does she like me? she likes me! she doesn’t like me…” routine. I think every guy has probably encountered some loopy chick like Summer (and does Zooey Deschanel play any other type role? And is she the same exact person as Maggie Gyllenhaal or what?) at some point, leading to much consternation. Gordon-Levitt is a great actor, although this is the first time I’ve seen him in something this light since his seminal work in Third Rock From the Sun. He works just fine here, maybe a tad too earnest at times, but he was able to bridge the gap from breezy to (literally) cartoonish well. As a bonus, there’s a big dose of Hall & Oates in here, too. If you are going to go to a romantic comedy, I highly recommend this over that garbage with Katherine Heigl and that 300 dude. (Side note: Doesn’t that Gerard Butler look a bit too Quagmirey to be starring in romantic comedies?)
Giggety?
One other thing, Geoffrey Arend, who I saw in the liquor store the other day, is one of the goofy friends in this movie. As you may recall, he is engaged to Christina Hendricks of Mad Men fame. Geoffrey may be a great guy, but we still couldn’t figure out how this all adds up.
Maybe they just hope "Arendricks" will catch on?
About to go on safari, yall,
Chilly17
Terrible TV Tuesday
Posted by: chilly17 in Pop Culture, TV Review on March 24th, 2009
I Watch Shitty Shows So You Don’t Have To
I have more free time. And, apparently the policy in our apartment is that anything that somehow gets onto the DVR must be watched. And the frickin DVR has a mind of its own – I turned off Tool Academy after 5 minutes and took it off record. But there it was, every week. It would not go away. And so we watched. And I’m certain that it shaved a good 15-20 points off of my already regressing IQ.
I’m here to save everyone else from such a fate. I will take a look at some retarded shows and save you some gray matter. Since tomorrow is Wednesday it probably makes sense to start with…
Real World: Brooklyn (MTV, Wednesdays at 10:00 PM EST)
This is the most action that this show has seen
Two-word Cast Description: Black girl. Token gay. Tat girl. Gender reassigner. Bodybuilder/model. Dancer/dancing disliker. Really-seems-ghey mormon. Ex-army guy.
Summary: By now, everyone is pretty much familiar with the Real World formula: mix together combustible (yet attractive) people from all walks of life, and watch them fight and fornicate. Sometimes at the same time. Each cast member will have some lame story line: “I always wanted to live in Omaha because I have longed to pursue a career in agriculture, and there aren’t many ag opportunities in Compton.” There’s always some contrived “work” that the cast members have to do, but it’s all essentialy staged for the inevitable fighting and fornicating.
What’s New This Year: Since being gay doesn’t pack much shock value anymore, this season MTV has raised the bar with Katelynn, a post-op dude-turned-chick. There’s also a regular gay dude who seems to be straight given his anger issues and a virgin mormon widely assumed to be gay. I’m pretty sure that he’s just ultra naive (think Will Ferrell in Elf) but some of his quotes strain credulity. The others are basically the same cookie cutter types you see every season, with the exception of Ryan, the Army vet. Thankfully, he is by far the most normal person on this show and comes across as a likable regular guy who’s looking forward to starting over after getting back from Iraq. (Spoiler alert: Never look forward to anything when the military is prominently involved in any possible disappointment)
What Interesting Things Happen on the Show: Nothing. This season is hurting. There’s zero chance of anyone hooking up on this show. The producers have been reduced to having the guys play silly pranks on the girls. Not pranks with the panache of Jim Halpert, either – more Dwight’s style. The bodybuilder dude and dancer girl were barely on the first 5-6 episodes. No one really gets drunk (except sometimes the token gay guy, which seems odd), no one has sex (although Devyn is certainly juggling a lot of guys) and the fights are always of the “please-do-the-dishes” variety. (Although there was potential for the extremely rare do-not-steal-my-artificial-vagina-growing-tools-as-a-prank argument. Unfortunately tensions eased before they got to this point)
Having Katelynn traipse around in panties was bothersome on many levels. Not so much for the whole transgender thing, but more for “everyone else here is pretty modest; i guess to make a great impression I should walk around in my panties constantly” reasons. From the get go those savvy guys knew something was amiss with her and they correctly guessed that it was a dong. When the big secret came out, there were dribs and drabs of humor as the guys asked questions about the process (although Chet (might-be-gay-mormon) predictably asked some creepy ones). But even this supposedly inflammatory cast addition is really just kind of boring (as well as really messy).
Conclusion: Don’t waste your time. JD’s (token gay guy) meltdown was the only mildly interesting thing that’s happened so far, and they all pretended it didn’t happen the next day. So read a book or something, but don’t waste your time on this. But for heaven’s sake if you are hurting for TV to watch on Wednesday, don’t even consider directing your dial to…
High School Reunion (TVLand, Wednesdays at 10:00 PM EST)
Small photo used to prevent retinal damage (plus was all I could find)
Two-word Cast Description: Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick. Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick. Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick. Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick. Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick. Non-ugly Chick. Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick. Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick. Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick. Ugly Chick.
Summary: I didn’t see the first season of HSR (a relief that this no longer has anything to do with Hart, Scott or the other guy) but the setup seemed enticing: take a handful of people from a random high school class set to have its twentieth reunion and have them cohabitate in a resort house in Hawaii. This is right in my wheelhouse since I graduated at roughly the same time (from high school; college took me seven total years as, uh, the NCAA granted me three redshirt seasons). They try to populate the “reunion” with key stock characters: the Jock, the Class Clown, the Snob, the Beauty Queen, the Dickwad, the Stalker – all your favorites are here.
Plotlines: The producers attempt to make it interesting with various subplots: a woman has held a 20 year grudge against another woman because of a slumber party snub (gasp!); two of the reunionites were formerly married (and the wife is inexplicably in high demand) leading to some awkwardness; two frat boy types from a different graduating class at the same school are air-dropped in to stir things up.
The mechanisms for personal interactions are Hall Passes (you get to pick someone to go do an activity with) and Detention (the producers pick someone for you to be stuck with on some random activity). This being TVLand, there won’t be much adult-oriented action. Although one of the girls was allegedly in Playboy (must have been the “Insecure Girls of Botched Plastic Surgery” issue).
What Interesting Things Happen on the Show: Nothing. It’s super-duper boring. The staged fights/rivalries generally fizzle out.
One of the interlopers (the two guy from a different graduating class) got pretty drunk the first night and made some inflammatory comments. The rest of the cast spent approximately four consecutive episodes deciding whether to kick him out, culminating in a Jedi council meeting where they nearly-unanimously decided to do so. He walked in on this meeting and apologized. Instant forgiveness was granted (except for one tool who could not abide this forgiveness and sent his own message by leaving Hawaii). In his defense Shalonda’s high school picture does bear more than a passing resemblence to that of Buckwheat. There’s nothing wrong with that – most of the children of the 80′s have at least one regrettable look in their past. If I could go back in time, along with preventing myself from watching Real World: Brooklyn and HSR, I would skip over my “parachute pants and sleeveless white tee shirts” phase.
The “wannabe” girl who was snubbed by the other girl (who herself carried some (literal/fun) baggage – she had apparently suffered brutal teasing for having large breasts) used this hatred to fuel a Keyser Söze-esque quest for revenge. It was all resolved as a silly childhood misunderstanding after ten minutes. They spent like eighty hours of screen buildup for this quick and easy resolution. Sweet. Glad I invested some time in this. Awesome how they repeat stuff 7-9 times to make sure you get how major the issue is and then it just disappears.
Another radically unattractive guy was dropped in a few episodes later as the long-time “crush” of the one girl on the show who is not hideously ugly. This gentleman had had a rough go of it lately – his roommate had stolen all of his shit (or something like that, too lazy to track down the details). So the producers hooked him up with multiple Hall Passes with his crush. It was excruciating to watch his fumbling advances (even though the two interlopers tried to give him some ladykilling advice). She was at least nice about it, belying her “snob” past. Ultimately, her rejection led this sad fellow to nude up and jump in the pool, probably one of the least-desired images in television history.
Conclusion: Again, don’t bother. But one question for the producers: where the fuck did you get this homely menagerie?? They are from Arizona, for Christ’s sake – couldn’t you at least have found a graduating class with 1-2 average looking people? The “hot” guy in this group has skin that would have Tommy Lee Jones seeking out the nearest laser skin resurfacing center. Even if you hypothetically wanted to watch this program, you would have to spend much of your time averting your eyes (one of the girls either has Type 10 skin cancer, 7th degree sun burn or leprosy). Spare yourself.
