Fumarama

So I watched the series premiere of Ugly Betty last night, and I found the first show of the season that I am actually excited about. It was really really sweet and moving and funny. And it was so knowingly campy and over the top that it was totally awesome. It reminded me a little of my reaction to the first episode of the OC: "This show is so absurd but oh my god, I love it." This all leaves me a bit concerned about where it is going. It could continue down this road and be great, or it could go so over the top as to be annoying.

The show stars America Ferrera, who seems to be widely regarded as wonderful. She was in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. A movie that, as you can imagine, I enjoyed immensely. Anyway, I am hoping she is really cool. As in, I hope that she totally embraces this role and does not turn into one of those actors who has to constantly remind us that she is nothing like her character. I remember when i was kid every time i would read anything about Jaleel White, there would be something about how he is nothing like Urkel and how is actually really attractive and loves basketball. And then there is Bob Saget, who at every turn has to remind us that he is nothing like the good dad we saw on Full House. See The Aristocrats. I understand both characters fear of never being able to play another role in their life because they are so associated with this character, but honestly, if you reach the point where your character is so iconic that it is haunting you, the character has probably made you a shit load of money and you should stop whining. Either way, Ferrara seems like a much better actress than those two men and this won't happen to her at all.

So I really did not think I would like this show. Tom Shales hated it. The whole ode to New York aspect of it annoyed me. I am so over New York. I am never really jumped on the JJ Abrams bandwagon. I am not a Lost watcher, but I never could really get into either Felicity or Alias. Thursday at 10, I decided to watch Shark instead. But then I found that ABC allows you to watch full episodes online (briliant idea ABC) and I needed something to watch with my lunch and well, I liked it. Liked it enough that next week when I am done with Grey's Anatomy, I probably will not change the channel or turn off the tv. It has a great cast and they totally sell their characters. And well, it is a intricately woven soap opera, which I enjoy greatly. Some reviewers have derided Six Degrees by comparing it to Crash, but despite the fact that I did not think it should have won the oscar, I liked Crash, and Six Degrees is not as high handed, because, well, it is not about race. (it is about six people living in NYC, whose lives touch eachother is various ways).

And the ode to New York thing was in some ways awesome. I mean I love New York. And I love that the show is shot in places I know. The first scene of the show is a shot of fifth going South toward Washington Square Park, I love thoe couple of blocks. There is another shot of 6th ave and 10th street. And I know that block, I walk there all the time, but for the life of me I cannot remember what is distinctive about it. But what alternate universe do these characters live in that they meet a complete stranger and suddenly become best friends? I live in the New York where you eye strangers on the street with instant suspicion. Maybe if I lived in the New York City of this show I would not hate it so much.

Also, I am not a watcher of Lost. But obviously, as a person who reads about television, I know all about the show. Anyway, I think this whole just building mysteries and not telling you anyting would drive me crazy. So one character, Mae, played by the girl who played Michael Douglas daugher on Traffic, has a secret box and is on the run from some unknown men. If this Lost and I am never going to find out what is in that box, then i want to quit now. I just don't have the energy to keep watching forever just to find shit out. I like my mysteries if i know I will get a result. That is why Veronica Mars is good. Cause you know in 22 episodes, it will be over. I just don't think I could take multiple season secrets. Too tiring.

As I am doing this whole watch every new show and write about it project, I finding that a lot of these shows don't have any affect on my whatsoever, I leave them and just sort of shrug. I guess that whole sitting there for an hour and never thinking about it or anything related to that hour again is why people think of tv as this passive, mind-numbing experience. (although you can do the same thing with movies.) But my feeling about these shows is also well, they could be good, it depends on how they develop.

The Class
So this show is about a guy who on the 20th anniversary of starting 3rd grade, decides to bring members of his class today to surprise his girlfriend. She decides he is too sweet and too over the top and dumps him. But the show will follow the adventures of this group of friends. This actually sounds like a great idea except that the characters are a bit over the top and it also was not very funny. However, if they turn this into a soap opera or have some really compelling will they or won't they plot, I could get into it.

Smith
This is a show about a bunch of high powered thieves that steal like art work and stuff for lots of money a la Oceans 11. And Ray Liotta the star also has a nice, suburban life with a wife who does not know. The cast is very pretty, which i think is really key in shows like this. I just did not care. The theft was not so cool as to keep me on the edge of my seat and the interpersonal drama just was not that well-developed. But to reiterate what I said above, if they somehow turn the interpersonal drama into a soap (which here I am almost certain they won't), I'ld watch.

On a seperate note, Virginia Madsen plays the suburban clueless wife. I think that after her oscar nomination, television was actually the perfect move for her. She seemed destined to be one of those female oscar nominees who then you never hear from again after that one big role. (like Mira Sorvino and Elizabeth Shue). She particularly cause she was not young and she had not been an A list actress before this. Plus, she is old for a movie actress and even Meryl Streep has trouble finding really great roles. Anyway, with everyone saying that television is as good as the movies these days, (it is not just me, check out The New Republic Online), this was a good place for her to find an interesting role, and do steady work. And I thought she did a really great job last night. Just too bad I am likely never going to watch the show again.

I watched the first episode of this new sitcom on Thursday, and I waited until now to write something because...well, I have absolutely nothing to say. The show left very little of an impression. I remember the acting not being particularly good. Anyway, I imagine Fox will forget about it by the time baseball comes around anyway.

But starting tomorrow: Season Premiere Week!!!!

A couple of months ago I criticized Devil Wears Prada for featuring dialogue between the protagonist and her friends that was painful in how little it sounded like real people. So to offer a contrast... if you want to see a ridiculously accurate depiction of how 20-somethings in New York talk, go see this movie. (well, not how I talk, but still).

So I know I said I was not going to watch this show again, but it was on while I was making dinner....

I stand by my assessment of the show from last week. The topic of the show is heartbreaking, and not in a cathartic, or thought-provoking way, just very sad. So this week, we have the story of an air traffic controller who one day messes up and causes a plane to crash and the death of 150 passengers. The air traffic controller (who we will call John), however, does not think that he is the one who caused the accident but that it was actually pilot error. The next day he shows up to work, but he is suspended due to his error. At this point, he goes nuts and attacks his boss screaming that he wants to work and it was not his fault. The security guard goes after him, they scuffle, and next thing we know he has shot the security guard, and has taken the gun, and we are now in a hostage situation. In the course of the episode, as our heroes, the negotiators, are trying to to talk him down, we find out that his wife was cheating on him with a man on the plane. The negotiators think that maybe he is under "a pressure cooker" and needs to talk this out. So Ron Livingson and him have a phone talk where the air traffic controller admits that he is terrified that some part of him did on purpose but he really thinks he did not mean to. Then, we find out about how he believes the affair was his fault because he was a bad husband who was obsessed with his job. He loved the high of saving lives every day and just did not pay enough attention to his wife. (in case you think this show is not fully cliched, this part parallels the lives of the two negotiators and their attempts to date). Anyway, the negotiators finally realize that what John needs is to save 180 people's lives. So they create a fake almost plane crash and John is forced to save the day. This causes him to allow all the other planes to land (he was also forcing all the planes to fly around LAX) and calm down. The episode ends with Livingston taking the gun away from him and our heroes looking at eachother meaningfully. (which, by the way, is how the last episode ended too.)

So i guess for critics who call tv passive, and mind numbing the story ends here. But think about it for a couple of minutes. Our heroes did a wonderful thing for this guy. They gave him the chance to talk out his emotions and then feel redeemed when he saved 180 people. But now, as soon as they get the gun out of his hand, they stop giving a shit about him. (i mean they have to look at eachother meaningfully). It is just so unbelievably manipulative of them, getting him to trust them in this way. And where are we left with this guy? He is about to go to jail for a whole lot of years. I am not even going to attempt to look it up this time, I am busy, but trust me, essentially hijacking hundreds of planes will keep you there for a while. But the poor man. He never intended to hurt anyone. He did not even go to work planning to do anything but get his job back. He had dedicated his life to ensuring the safety of thousands of travelers a day. And he has a daughter. This is a good man. And now his and his family's life are completely destroyed. Basically, after two episodes, this is a show about mostly good people who fuck up. But these good people, they don't get a second chance. We just forget about them as they rot in jail. As I have said repeatedly now, very very sad.

So trying to keep up with all new tv is hard, so sometimes I cannot quite make it home for the first episode of a tv show, and I have yet to set up my vcr, it is all very stressful. The point is that i missed the first episode of Justice and had to watch the second instead.

Anyway, this show is about a law firm that defends very rich people accused of murder. It moves fast. The dialouge is snappy and the plot moves quickly and scenes are short and fast, and the camera keeps jumping from scene to scene and to different characters within a single scene. It is also very pretty. The interiors are pretty, the actors are pretty. (except for the district attorneys who are ugly, go figure). But I don't know, it was too much for me. The characters are supposed to be these very media savvy attorneys. They are all about focus grouping jury members and manipulating public opinion. And every 5 minutes the show has to explain in what way the lawyers are now manipulating the public and the jury. The show is basically about the games "smart" lawyers use to win cases. And i found all the explanations of the games, and all the manipulation itself, very tedious.

Postscript: this is from Allessandra Stanley's review of the show. I thought it was very funny.

Trott’s manner is so abrasive that he rarely speaks up in the courtroom; he defines his role as “spinning” on talk shows and news conferences on the courthouse steps. Juries are left to his handsome young partner Tom Nicholson (Kerr Smith, “Charmed”), a sincere Nebraskan who is described by Fulcrum as “the all-American face of ‘Not Guilty.’ ” Actually, Mr. Smith’s slick, sculptured features make him look more like the Eurotrash face of “Charge it to her room,” but her description is close enough.

So Standoff, Ron Livingston and a gal are hostage negotiators and also they have been sleeping together. That is the plot. To me, it actually sounds pretty promising. Sadly, the two leads have no chemistry and so it does not quite work. But who knows, maybe they will develop it in the next few episodes, and then this has the potential to be a reasonably good show. It is on the same time at Veronica Mars, so there is not a chance in hell that I will watch it, but next year if i am a clerk in Fargo, ND an I have tivo, it will totally make my list.

But here is my real problem with the show. The people who hold hostages are massively fucked up. ANd so our heroes job is to sweet talk them out of their situation by getting to whatever insecurities are driving them. So this episodes centers around the son of a senator, whose mother never loved him, so he decides to get revenge by becoming an Islamic terrorist and strapping a bomb to himself and threatening to blow up a coffee shop. The gal negotiator realizes that he is not really a murderer, he just wants to hurt his mother, so she agrees to go in unarmed to the coffee shop in return for all the hostages. She does and starts discussing his mother with him. Finally, the mother communicates that the reason she was heartless his whole life is that she never really wanted children. He breaks down in the negotiators arms and that is that. Oh, and the last scene is him being led off in hand-cuffs. But wow, this is all actually very depressing. It is the story of a 20 year old boy whose all messed up cause his mom was awful to him, and acted out in the worst possible way. He has finally found some peace, but he is going to be spending the next bunch of years in jail (I tried to use my Lexis skills to figure out how many, but the according to the Cali penal code the punishment for false imprisonment is a 1000 dollar fine and/or a year in a jail, I feel like this cannot possibly be right, and the prosecutor would figure out some way for any one in this situation to spend way more time in jail. I guess he can tack on assault, or even assualt with a deadly weapon. But what if the hostage taker took hostages but never intended to hurt them? Do he still have the intent necessary for assualt? and even so, the logest jail sentence for assault is 4 years, so that is at most only 5 years in jail, which still seems like too little. If anyone out there wants to tell me how to figure out the correct number of years this kid will likely spend in jail, I will be a better lawyer for it and my blog will be better too.) Anyway, the point is that we get to know this character, learn to feel sorry for him, our negotiator develops a "bond" with him, but at the end of the day, this person's life is completely ruined. It is actually very very depressing. And the tragedy of desperate people ruining their own lives by commiting crimes is not something I can handle thinking about week after week as a television viewer, especially not if the people helping these hostage takers then leave the hostage situation to go banter.

I won't spoil this movie for you. The plot is not all that great so it is not even worth spoiling.

But what makes this movie worth your $10.75, or if you are lucky enough to live elsewhere like 9 bucks, is Ed Norton. It is not that he is good looking, I mean he is, but it is that he is fucking mesmerizing. Every moment he was on screen I could not take my eyes off him. The last time i felt this way about a performance... may very well have been Ed Norton in American History X. (Paul Giammati was actually very very good as well. I think this movie might just be the perfect example of how acting skills can save a film from all its other major flaws).

Then there is the business with the accents. When I was 17 and had just seen Ever After I made the following observation. "I don't get it, they are supposed to be French, they would not be speaking French in British accents, they would not have accents at all so if anything the actors should just speak normally" paraphrasing 17 year old me. approx August 1998. Anyway, I guess this movie had a little more pretenstion, and their accents were just "vaugely foreign" and mostly they were just enunciating very very well. (Jessica Biel's accent was awful but picking on Biel when she was in the company of two of the best actors around just seems unfair). But what I found interesting last night was not the fact that they were speaking in a wierd accent, I am very used to that, but the fact that if they had not been speaking in this funny accent, I would have been very confused. If a European period piece did not have all its actors speak in these vaugely foreign or outright British accents, I would not know what to make of the movie. Sure, the costumes and plot seem to imply 18th century Vienna, but the accents make me think the movie is taking place in the midwest. And as I pointed out at age 17, this is completely illogical, the characters are not speaking English, and they are not speaking whatever language they are supposed to speaking with accents. But years of going to movies have trained me. My fictional european characters from 100 or more years ago must speak a certain way and nothing can be done about it.