Television

10 February 2011

Box Watch: Suspect Behaviour

With a history of Law & Order and The Shield on my sheet*, one might have safely assumed that I transferred my cop show tastes to CSI, Without a Trace, Cold Case and/or Criminal Minds when the runs of L&O, et al finished. Nuh-uh. The flashwhizzbang-don’t-dare-change-channels style of most of them is not to my taste and even though they’re led by great actors like ~~William Peterson~~ Laurence Fishburne/David Caruso/Gary Sinise, Anthony Lapaglia, and ~~Mandy Patinkin~~ Joe Mantegna there are so many pretty people** in those shows that, well, call me shallow but I find it really annoying. That and they always get their man***.

Which brings me to three reasons why I’ll be trying Minds spin-off Suspect Behaviour:

1. Janeane Garofalo for whom I’ve carried a film and TV torch since The Truth About Cats and Dogs and The Larry Sanders Show;

2. Michael Kelly who first dirtied my eyeballs in The Shield as a nasty wee serial killer, and then showed smarts and compassion as one of the few sympathetic officers in Generation Kill;

3. and Forest Whitaker. Nuff said.

The title may be an awkward mouthful. It may be a spin-off of something I’m dubious about (with dubious reasons, yes). Don’t know who’s behind the camera, or who’s writing it.

But talent like that, in one show, is something I’m not passing up.

* The Wire has largely ruined my cop show enthusiasm – I can now only watch running, shouty, gun-drawing homicide cops with the same detachment that I enjoy Hellboy, The A-Team or Transformers.

** A rather scathing Vidiot review of Cold Case put me off sight unseen (can’t find the link, sorry).

*** L&O cops may have always got their offender, but sometimes they still got away with it in court.

3 February 2011

Say My Name

The Goddess and I sat down to watch some homegrown drama the other night and within two minutes my gut began to writhe, and it wasn’t from overindulging chocolate cake:

EXT. BEACH – DAY

CARL and DI, both in their forties, married twenty years now, walk hand in hand along the sand, as they admire the beautiful sunset.

Carl?

CARL

Yes, Di?

Do you love me, Carl?

CARL

Why do you ask, Di?

Riddle me this: when you talk with your partner/lover/friend – acquaintance, even – who you’ve known for a minimum of six months, do you say their name with every sentence directed at them?

Didn’t think so.

Then why do I keep seeing it in homegrown drama?

Why can’t exchanges just be:

EXT. BEACH – SUNSET

Carl?

CARL

Mm?

Do you love me?

CARL

What the hell kinda question is that?

5 January 2011

2010 in Film and Television

Television

Better Off Ted

Breaking Bad

Defying Gravity

Greys Anatomy

The Good Wife

Glee

Justified

Little Dorrit

The Big A

Modern Family

Nurse Jackie

The Unusuals

MC Ash

The Walking Dead

A toast to Better Off Ted, Defying Gravity and The Unusuals, all cancelled, and all sorely missed.

Breakout television for 2010? Zombies, natch.

Film

The American
Boy
District 9
Green Zone
I Love You Phillip Morris
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Kenny

Let the Right One In
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Once Upon a Time in the West
The Road
Sherlock Holmes

A Single Man
Star Trek

Film of the year? Boy. God damn your eyes, Waititi.

8 June 2010

Box Watch Update

With The Good Wife ending its first season just like it started (but OMG oh-so-different), the inhabitants of Fortress Mamea have been bracing themselves for the fact that this week is chocker with season finales of Nurse Jackie, Glee and (I’m on my own with this one) Justified. Winter 2010 threatens to be a bleak affair.

As if.

The second season of Fringe fell by the wayside ~~earlier in the~~ late last year but we can catch up with Dunham and co at our leisure now. Unless we’re already belatedly catching up with Dexter (about to start season three) and Burn Notice (couple of eps from the second season finale). Or (re)watching the first seasons of Scrubs and Green Wing.

It should only be for June and a bit of July: the fifth season of The Closer and the fourth season of Mad Men open next month.

Meantime The Goddess has Radar’s Patch to chuckle over while I have Treme all to myself.

We’ll get by.

6 June 2010

Potayto, Potahto

The Goddess likes Urbis and Beekeeper Journal while I like Empire and mourn the limited availability of Guns & Ammo. She listens to Greg Johnson and Jacqueline du Pre while I like to crank up some Wu or Nina Simone. She has a soft spot for Miss Marple while I’ll re-up with McNulty and friends any time.

There is some common ground. Queen, Maisey Rika and Phoenix Foundation. Better Off Ted, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife and Mad Men. (Yes, these last coupla years have been big box-watching years.)

She likes relationship stories while I like kill-my-dog-and-I-shall-lay-waste-upon-the-land-until-vengeance-is-mine stories. Her viewing threshold is a lot lower than mine – q.v. The Cult – but my excuse is that all viewing is a learning experience.

So we like different things. So what.

Were it not for Her, I would not have had the pleasure of Grand Designs, the River Cottage series, Pieces of April, and King of Kong. And were it not for me, She would not have had the pleasure of Mad Men, The Good Wife, Lars and the Real Girl, and In Bruges.

I suppose it evens out in the end. And because I do like to quote the good doctor,

It is important to always try new things.

17 May 2010

L & O: Oh No

After twenty seasons, Law & Order has been canned.

I readily confess to not having watched the last eight seasons as ~~fanatically~~ religiously as the preceding twelve, local broadcaster scheduling notwithstanding. It has been comforting to know that it continued to chug along as I took up with the likes of Miss Marple, Wallander, Orange Roughies, Dexter, The Closer, The Shield, and The Wire. A nice warm glow was almost always guaranteed when chancing on a L&O episode whilst channel-surfing.

Alas – until we start rerunning the show down here – no more.

Its been an institution. Its time has come.

Time for more of the same – but different.

11 May 2010

Why I Write 2010

I finished James Ellroy‘s The Big Nowhere a while back. I’ve read it a few times now. Don’t know if it’s my favourite of his “L.A. Quartet” but I do relish its quicksand plot, bastard cops, and Ellroy’s unremitting style. The end is so black that when I reach it, I immediately want to start over as maybe things will work out better for my favoured characters the next time around.

The same goes for whenever I rewatch films like The Constant Gardener or television shows like The Shield where the endings are not happy.

Why do I subject myself to this torture?

It’s the execution. It’s the characters. It’s being taken by the hand for a half-hour or hour or ninety-plus minutes or days and returning to the real world short of breath, my heart thundering in my chest and a lump in my throat.

This is not a new discovery. Romeo and Juliet will never grow old. Rick will always have Paris. Rachel and Deckard will never have certainty.

And I think to myself:

Someone wrote that shit.

I lapped that shit up and begged for more.

I want to write like that.

26 April 2010

Resonance

That word has been bouncing ’round my head lately. Part of it has been Steve Hickey‘s posts about sticky ideas. Another part has been discussions I’ve had recently about film, television and theatre that have left enduring memories regardless of the passage of time. And there’s been a smidgen of shop talk about making the familiar fresh.

There are doubtless innumerable posts in the ether about what makes a piece of art resonate.

For me, it’s a singular interpretation, execution and vision that transports the viewer.

I have no idea where David Simon and Eric Overmyer are going with Treme but I am so there, man, because I’m hooked. Same goes for the recently concluded 100 Bullets from Messieurs Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso – each trade paperback left me floundering as a reader but I’d still make enough connections between the many, many plotlines and goddamn if it wasn’t a hot little page-turner. And then there’s The West Wing and The Walking Dead. And The Good Wife and Ex Machina. And Mad Men. … I could go on.

With the exception of Treme, all of the above are easily categorized genre pieces.

Each title resonates not just because they’re so different from everything else out there that they’re essential reading/watching – they’re the creators talking directly to us the audience at an individual level. They’re connecting.

That’s resonating.

8 April 2010

Point & Click

Burble.

Screenwriter J D Shapiro apologises for Battlefield Earth.
(Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)

This. Is. SHATNER!
(Fedora-tip: Alex Epstein.)

Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire scribe and producer, David Mills died suddenly last week. I didn’t know – I should’ve, really, but I didn’t know – that he was the one who penned the Homicide “Bop Gun” ep (the one with Robin Williams and a teenage Jake Gyllenhaal). This forty-plus minutes of free-to-air television truly opened my eyes to just how much more you could put into a police procedural.
His and David Simon‘s latest television series Treme opens in a few days. I can’t wait to introduce The Goddess to teevee a la Simon et al.

Peace out.

31 March 2010

Box Watch – Paradox

This five-ep series about Brit plods trying to deal with space-time-continuum anomalies, fate v destiny, the possible existence of wormholes, and… oh god I can’t fake any more objectivity: it’s shows like this where cliches come to… make more cliches.

“[S]adly,… the show’s complete absence of internal logic (or, if you prefer, its overwhelming silliness) meant that it was beyond help.” – Daily Telegraph

“[Although the final ten minutes can be exciting,] the difficulty lay in the fifty minutes of scratchy dialogue, robotic acting and general misery that it took to get there.” – The Times

“[The show’s] Prometheus Innovation Satellite Downlink offers a perfect acronym for the state you’d have to be in to take this kind of thing seriously.” – The Independent

It’s largely negative critical reception in the UK may sum up the show best but will never explain why I persisted with these five hours of ‘entertainment’.