Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I was expecting one of those "Gee, life was so cool when guys could be Frank and Dino and women/everyone else would take it and like it" era-worships. (The kind of head GQ, DETAILS, and MAXIM love to wallow in.) But MM is a lot smarter and more inclusive than that.
>you can't help marveling at the ruthlessness of the era. This show should be mandatory viewing for any aspiring Pussycat Doll who thinks she's not teetering on the shoulders of feminist giants in those skintight ass pants. "Gee, that unseemly, shrill feminist attitude sure came in handy back in the day, when we were all treated like lobotomized infants!"<
It should be also be required for the new crop of wifey/moos who swear up and down that marriage/kids makes them more complete and happier than when they were "selfish career women"--and who act as if their McMansion lives will stay perfect the more they act like uber wifey/moos.
I'd like them to to get rid of the obnoxious De Mornay/Cissy character. Maybe fire the Greenwood guy who plays Mitch Yost (he's kinda lame anyway) and replace him with Leonard Cohen. That might do it.
Cohen doesn't surf or act, but neither does anyone else in the show. And for some odd reason, the show features two of the worlds top surfers (Kenelly and Fletcher) in crucial leading roles, for which the have absolutely zero acting chops. It shows, and it's distracting to the product.
Anyway, someone needs to show the writers a thing or two about the art of using Christ imagery effectively. Their abilities IMO, are falling way short of their chosen subject matter and story line.The present ensemble look to be dealing with the Infinite as if they were teenagers doing a youtube spoof.
The dialogue is often tone deaf. And not in a deliberate Grindhouse, so-bad-it's-cool kind of way. Example; Tina to Linc in Ep06: "I never took a cock that big, and you handled it like a champ"
Who talks like this? And besides, Linc, we saw you full frontal in Oz. Sorry dude, suspension of disbelief can only go so far.
Maybe Rebecca De Mornay still has a couple of Cohen's CDs in her glove compartment she could lend to Milch.
Now that is off my chest, I need to say that I found "Mad Men" to be an extremely honest trip back to the late Fifties/early Sixties of my youth.
Yeah, kids, it really was like that back then, even into the Seventies.
I have tried so hard with JFC, but the past two episodes have just done me in, and the final blow was precisely at the point mentioned in this review, where John gives his monologue thingamajiggie - it was sooo Twin Peaks, but in a Fire Walk With Me kind of way. What was with that random dead guy that John carried out to listen in, anyway? I was waiting for some Lazarus reference or something, but he was just ... there ... and then he wasn't. Look, I'm all for mystical. I'm all for spiritual. I've a damn BA in Religious Studies for heaven's sake. But this stuff is just coming off flat to me. It seems like a gimmick so far, and the show relies on it way too much at this point.
There was one episode where I really felt something click together, and the odd dialogue started to work with the characters and the story and even the supernatural elements to create something akin to the sense of community tension that I felt in practically every episode of Deadwood (hell, in the opening credits of Deadwood). It was when they were rescuing Sean from the hospital, and the subsequent community camp-out in front of his house developed. There you had a supernatural intervention that left the entire community reeling and responding and interacting in a new way as a result. The characters started to seem more interesting because of it, rather than less. But then we have Mitch sitting at the beach with Cass, still believing his grandson is braindead, spouting about real surfing vs. competitive surfing. I'm a So Cal girl, I know plenty of surfers whose dedication borders on the obsessive, but please. Nothing else to talk about at that moment, Mitch? And he seemed genuinely enthralled with what he was saying there, too, not just spouting on in order to stave off sorrow. No no, this was serious surf talk he was engaging in. Sean seemed more like a pretext for his thoughts about surfing than the other way around.
And speaking of So Cal, I'm hard pressed to think of any way one could justify having such an almost exclusively white cast of characters in a community that is predominantly non white. I mean, other than the random "illegals" who were inexplicitly scurrying along the beach in the background of the opening episode, or the white-looking guy with the Mexican accent who accosted John. Other than the hotel manager, who has, what, one scene per episode, the whole show is lilly white as far as the eye can see. That's not the California I know, that's for damn sure.
And I was terrifically shocked to see the actress playing Trixie in that one scene, given that Cissy is clearly Trixie reincarnated and with a slightly better job.
I find myself only able to watch about ten minutes at a time of this show before I get so bored or so irritated that I have to stop and come back to it. At this point it's just a stop along the way to Flight of the Conchords on my Sunday night.
Y'know, if I were a TV columnist (again, I'm NOT asking for the job) and got to go to one of these group-grope fall premiere sessions, I would have made the best of it. After all, the next time I'd see these people would be on my teeny TV at home, and would only be able to guess at what aesthetic winds would make their shows soar or crash. And given the nature of celebrity, this would be the only chance.
It's also curious that there's a degree of experimentation going on in the summer, that offers a sliver more of hope than many of the shows on the fall schedule. Masters of Science Fiction is the first anthology show on network TV since the ill-fated Nightmare Cafe. How did that happen?
And what's with all the game shows that are apparently shot on the same circular set? Did ABC get pitched a bunch of game show pilots and decided to gang-bang them out?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
