October 12, 2009
Now that Monk’s almost over I have to say that I enjoyed the show like everyone else. I guess it’s not a surprise since I like a lot of stuff but I always had this little suspicion that there was something wrong with the show – some reason why I shouldn’t LOVE it. But I don’t think it matters if it is too safe and scripted – Monk and his anti-social brother are such excellent characters that everything else is just mean-ness. Plus I think it’s always a winner when there’s a Sherlock-ian character see. Law & Order – Criminal Intent.
October 12, 2009
I used to LOVE this lady and she’s still pretty awesome but, and it’s totally my own fault, I signed up for her online health plan thing and she bugs you EVERY DAY!!! ALL the TIME!!! Way too much pressure. I’ve made a lot of really good things thanks to her recipes, though. Delicious and healthy which is why she hasn’t been totally overwhelmed by my love for Giada De Laurentiis – Giada specializes in italian and that means pasta and pancetta and lots of cheese and is basically the devil in the guise of a totally adorable, masterful, inspiring cook. Devilish. Ellie is the devil as well but she doesn’t try to kill you with ricotta cheese. She trys to kill you with being disarmingly relaxed.
October 11, 2009
Oh man. So this show is totally awesome with some weirdness that just comes with it being a British production. And I love the actor who plays the main character, Tony. He’s rad blah blah blah. But the super weird thing about this show is that somehow it’s sucked my PARENTS in TOO! All my parents do is knit/play online poker during the day and then watch dvd’s before they go to bed at 8pm. They like their CSI Miami and Cagney and Lacey and lots of weird things that totally belie their high IQs. My mother sets the rules and so they never watch anything that’s going to upset her – violence, preachiness, reality. So I was totally surpised to find Wire in the Blood as their current NetFlix! Apparently they love it! (Yay! Common ground!) When we had the CSI conversation where she said that she doesn’t like the original show because the main guy, Grissom, is too “paternal” and she found the relationships “creepy” a little part of me died on the inside (How can they ever understand me if they can’t stand CSI!) but now I feel better – we can bond over Tony and homicidal sadistic drag queens. It’s the little things.
October 11, 2009
It is super sad but all I’ve wanted to watch for the last, oh, several months has been Criminal Minds. I’ve watched so much Criminal Minds that I now have that icky feeling that you get when you spend all of your day off surfing the internet in your pajamas. That being said I have to say I feel pretty ambivalent about the newest season. Ordinarilly I’ll wait for the DVD so I can watch the whole season in a marathon format. I’m so addicted, though, that I couldn’t stop myself from watching AT LEAST the first episode of the season. Not great and the blonde is wearing more and more make-up with each season – maybe she’s trying to change her image? “I’m a sophisticated woman, now, and deserve to wear the red lipstick!” No! Everyone has their job as a different archetype and she’s the blonde girl next door! Not the dark one! Anyway, other than lipsticks I can’t be objective about that show – I’ve totally drunk the Kool Aid and there’s no logical argument that can convince me that it’s a waste of my time – totally love it. Totally.
October 6, 2009
but I swear I love this blog! Life just gets in the way of quality time with the computer I guess. On the plus side my husband now lives with me versus hundreds of miles away, we may be getting a house soon (before November 30th, please!!!), we’re planning on having a baby despite the obvious drawbacks and the dogs will be ok with the proper medication. Maybe soon I’ll have some time to devote to quality programming. That would be super.
February 26, 2009
More Mark Valley!! Of course everyone is awesome on Boston Legal – it’s definitely tailored for a specific audience but for people who really appreciate this particular brand of humor it’s AWESOME! I can’t help it. I love William Shatner AND James Spader AND Candice Bergen and I love how Valley really embraced being the butt of Spaders “Ken doll” jokes – I can appreciate an attractive actor who’s totally willing to look like an ass (David Boreanaz in Bones). Naturally I was unable to convince my parents of the obvious wonderfulness of this show – my mother has a really low tolerance for perky people. Luckily, I’m an adult and don’t need their approval anymore. I think I left off somewhere in season 4…
February 26, 2009
Totally adorable. There’s a large part of me, by the way, that can’t understand why anyone cares about Sienna Miller but it doesn’t matter – she’s totally charming in this and is the perfect foil to Mark Valley. There’s lots of too cute stuff – they bicker like they’re married, the dog destroys something, Mark Valley ends up in his boxers at inappropriate times – it all comes together in a nice way. Of course I was desperately sick when I watched the series so that needs to be taken into account but I swear it wasn’t the DayQuil.
February 26, 2009
I used to think that I really like musicals. Then I watched a lot of them and realized that a lot of them are really annoying. This isn’t saying that they’re all bad – everyone should watch Cabaret if a quality version comes to town and I grew up on Rogers and Hammerstein. I think my issue is with the structure. If you’re going to have people waltzing around, singing in public and overacting the story must be really compelling; Nazi’s always provide an excellent foil to the musical format (Cabaret, The Sound of Music, The Producers), poverty’s generally good (The Wizard of Oz, Les Miserables), crime’s pretty good (Chicago, Guys and Dolls), issue’s with culture are winners (Fiddler on the Roof, The Flower Drum Song) – there must be some element of reality that the viewer can really understand and latch on to since the rest of the show is SO ridiculous. And a crazy killer could have been just the excellent dash of reality that this movie needed. The problem is that the songs seem to be from another musical – the music is nauseatingly lighthearted and the lyrics are often beyond dumb. I guess this would have been less annoying if the story wasn’t so annoying on its own. I have no patience for musicals that exist for the sake of people who like participating in musical theater productions. I also have no patience for prose which is nauseatingly purple. Toward the end of the movie I was hoping that everyone would die in a fire or something. No such luck.
February 16, 2009
I don’t know if I can be completely objective about this movie. It was totally adorable and I loved it but there are so many things about it that remind me of trips I’ve taken to Kentucky with my husband that I was bound to love it. Eric felt similarly – I think he was a little more thrown by the familiarity of certain things (the church, the people, the architecture, the relationships). The only thing he didn’t buy was the art that Embeth Davidtz sells – he couldn’t believe anyone would really buy it. But from art classes I know that ridiculous stuff like Civil War scenes of naked soldiers with giant penises would sell like hotcakes. And, though I can never appreciate how good the re-creation of Southern life is to the level that Eric can, I can still remember my trips to Kentucky and see those experiences reflected to a large degree on the screen. I’ve decided to take this recognition as an indication of a job well done. And, on top of all of this accuracy, the movie was really enjoyable (I don’t really go in for painful accuracy). Amy Adams is rad as usual, Embeth Davidtz is terrifyingly thin but perfectly citified, Benjamin McKenzie blew away my low expectations and Alessandro Nivola is just a sex-pot. Celia Weston gives such a subtle performance and Scott Wilson is so hen pecked by her – it makes their relationship so good and complicated. All the relationships were good and complicated. And I think it was a really even-handed version of Southern life. I think it showed that it’s easy for non-Southerners to be snarky and bigoted about the south and people who’re from there but their complicated relationships between the characters, miscommunications and clashes between mores should be much needed common ground between disparate groups of people – Southerners are people too.
January 8, 2009
I bypassed this show SO many times for no good reason. Then people started recommending it to me and that never does any good. I don’t know why I finally picked it up but I’m totally glad I did. I mean besides the fact that it’s incredibly well made and the acting is totally on and it’s got just the right amounts of style and grittiness there’s also the Irish thing. I don’t know anyone like these people, really, but I did grow up in an Irish family and every once in a while I see something familiar. The clannishness, the crazy family responsibility thing, the food. I don’t know. There have been shows like this before (The Sopranos) but there’s something about it that I really like. It probably glamorizes Irish-Americans and everyone likes to be flattered. Whatever.
