Mood Music LII

There's something so great about the way Debbie Harry delivers that "oh" after "I should have known/you'd look at me, then look away." Like, who hasn't felt that way sometime or another?

Week in TV: January 16-22

Big Love

I don't think there's been another television protagonist I've wanted to punch in the face as much as Bill Henrickson. Not Don Draper. Not Sookie Stackhouse. There's something about Bill's smug obliviousness in the face of the sheer misery he inflicts on others nearly everywhere he goes that makes me wish I could physically reach into the television and smack him. And like many of the episodes in the fourth season, this premiere didn't offer enough of a balance of other characters and plots to make him slightly tolerable. I'm trying to be optimistic about the writers bringing it all to a good close this year, but that idiot is testing my patience.

Skins

- I don't think I realized quite how many times I'd watched the original Skins pilot from the UK until I watched MTV's take. Because the mirroring of shots and dialogue was seriously jarring and the lived-in quality that the young British actors brought to their characters was largely absent. I'll keep watching, mainly because I'm interested to see whether the show can forge an identity that's unique, but right now I'm mostly doubtful.

- So, if you're going to completely reshoot your first episode with an entirely new cast, why on earth would you keep what is easily its worst subplot? Not only were the scenes with the drug dealer still tonally inconsistent with the rest of the material, but they completely botched the play on words with his name. Of all the slang they elected to keep in that's distinctly and obviously British, they change that?

Parks and Recreation

I don't really have much specifically to say about this particular episode, just that having Parks and Rec back is like a soothing balm for the soul. And I wish I could have the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness in poster form. Get on it, NBC store!

Also Watched: How I Met Your Mother, Chuck, Greek, Lights Out, The Good Wife, Modern Family, Cougar Town, Off the Map, Top Chef, Community, 30 Rock

Mood Music LI: One Week

From the past week, when I did daily posts on Facebook. Because I'm a nerd.

Sweet Tuesday Morning by Badfinger

Mood Music L

How have I lived for so long without Loaded in my life?

Week in TV: January 2-8

How I Met Your Mother

There were a lot of things to like about this episode - after watching a lot of Angel this past summer, I was thrilled to see Alexis Denisof return as Sandy Rivers - but I ultimately can't get behind the countdown. Using such a distracting gimmick to lead up to such a grave moment felt callous, and made me wonder if the show's writers are no longer sure of how best to utilize the tools at their disposal. Hopefully, the coming weeks will show that they still know how to maintain the balance between broad comedy and emotional authenticity that served the show so well in its early seasons.

Greek

As the series-concluding half-season continues, I imagine that I'll decide whether I think the show is pushing it narratively or not. The premiere made the almost-everyone-stays-at-CRU premise seem a little plausibility-stretching, but they've managed to do a lot within a relatively formulaic structure before, so we'll see.

Grey's Anatomy

- It was not at all surprising, and felt like it might have been ripped from an old ER, but I have to admit that I teared up a bit when they had the big reveal of Christina in the back of the ambulance. The Grey's writers haven't squandered any of the emotional potential of the fallout from last season's finale, and Sandra Oh continues to do some of her best work in the entire series.

- Today in Shallow Observations: It's been like a decade since Felicity, but Scott Foley is still totally cute.

Rewatched

Skins, Third Series

- Both the upcoming fourth series DVD release and the premiere of MTV's American version prompted me to rewatch the third series of Skins for the first time since it aired on BBC America in 2009. I was pleasantly surprised by how much more I liked it this time around - maybe it's the pacing, or that my first viewings of the first two series were fresher. While I still have some narrative quibbles, I was better able to appreciate the work of the young actors and the episodes as individual showcases, and I find now that I'm genuinely curious about the fourth series.

- What narrative quibbles, you say? Namely, this: I can appreciate any show that's willing to do something as dramatic as a season-to-season full cast change. However, the ties that remained between the first and second generations of Skins characters at times served to undercut the narrative arc of the third series. I understand that Nicholas Hoult was off becoming Tom Ford's new favorite person, but to me it seemed completely implausible that the dissolution of the Stonem's marriage and Effy's subsequent down-spiral would all occur with no intervention whatsoever from Tony.

- It seems to me that it's a major failing of American English that we have no pejorative equivalent to "wanker."

- One of the things that's been interesting about the press regarding the MTV remake and what distinguishes Skins from American teen shows is the tendency to classify the characters' actions as consequence-free. And while Skins tends to eschew the kind of immediate cause-and-effect framing of actions and consequences that one sees in a show like, say, 90210, watching any stretch of the show reminds me that a lot of really terrible things happen to any number of the characters. They may party like there's no tomorrow, but one of the great things about the show is that the writers don't harbor any illusions about the characters' actions not being unbelievably self-destructive. The greatest crime in the show's universe is avoiding confrontation with deeper emotional truths about oneself, and that, much more than any tawdriness, is what truly distinguishes Skins from its contemporaries.

Also Watched: Detroit 1-8-7, Modern Family, Cougar Town, Top Chef, Private Practice

Mood Music XLIX

Trailer Thoughts

1) The first time I saw this, I was really excited because I thought that Mindy Kaling was the lead. And then, disappointment. Doesn't it seem like, given the opportunity, she could totally rock a romcom lead?

2) Joining Michael Ealy, Natalie Portman wins the 2010 "Best Performance that was So Unnerving that I Feel Uneasy About Watching the Actor in Other Roles" award. Truly, after seeing Black Swan, my initial gut reaction to this trailer was, "Look out, Ashton! She's crazy!"

Mood Music XLVIII

On Writing and the New Year

Since it's resolution-setting time, I thought I'd lay down some thoughts about what I'd like to do here in the coming year. I'm not big on the New Year's resolution as hard-and-fast goalpost, but more like a guideline for where I'd like to go. So, with all attendant wiggle room and heaps of forgiveness, goals for Accounting for Everything for 2011:

1) More posting: I never want to feel like I'm forcing myself to write posts, but I would like to make more frequent use of this outlet as a place where I can channel all my various pop-culture musings. Looking back over the past couple of years, I'd like to have a more even distribution of posts throughout the year and take advantage of the time I have available to write to fill the gaps of the time I don't. The conservative goal is to have 120 posts on the year, ambitious is to have 150.

2) Completing and continuing series: Nothing sticks in my craw more than the assorted series of posts that I've left unfinished in the past couple of years. It may be far past timely, but I really want to finish up the Best of the 00s, and the set of posts on my favorite book-to-movie adaptations, and I'd like to return to talking about movie musicals. I'm looking forward to continuing the monthly posts on movies, and the Week in TV should pick back up in the next couple of weeks - I expect I'll have a lot to say about the final season of Big Love, if nothing else.

3) More academic discussion: When I started writing the Books Read posts a couple of years ago, I decided to focus it predominantly on my recreational reading; the life of a graduate student in the humanities is one of endless discussion of one's reading, but I do still love to read all manner of things when I have the time to do so. But now I'm done with classes, and while I still like to keep this space somewhat separate from my other work, I think it will probably be helpful to see this as another place where I can think "aloud." Plus, being interested in popular culture and media means that a fair amount of my reading falls into somewhat of a liminal space of being germane to my interests but not strictly academic, which deserves at least a modicum of attention and time.

Mood Music XLVII

I was going to try to finish up enough pending posts this evening to try to match the overall number of 2010 posts with that of 2009, but if Black Swan taught me anything, it's that sometimes you just have to let go of goals that necessitate one's behaving like a crazy person in order to accomplish them. So I thought instead I'd wrap up with some party tracks for New Years Eve - a few of my favorites from my party playlist compiled earlier this month:

And my favorite segment from All Day:

See you in 2011!

Happy December 26th

Screened: November 2010

November 7: For Colored Girls

Screened: In the theater

What a two-headed monster of a movie. The performances were pretty uniformly great, especially Thandie Newton and Kimberley Elise, but the monologues from the original stage work never gelled with Tyler Perry's dialogue or his script's tendency toward over-the-top melodrama. (Michael Ealy's character dropping his children out of the apartment window? Good grief.) Add to that the fact that various of the actresses had pretty clearly performed the work in some prior theater experience, giving the cadences of their readings of most of the monologues a disconcertingly stagy quality. I admire Perry for even trying to adapt the work for the screen, but this was kind of a glorious mess.

November 13: Oklahoma!; The Young Victoria

Screened: At home, DVR from TCM and Netflix Instant Watch

I spent the better part of this day having an epic neurotic meltdown, so this was my movie night. A soothing inoffensive-film-romance balm to my weary soul. Oklahoma! holds up pretty well for material that's nearly seventy years old, even if the dream ballet is really boring if you've seen it more than twice. And The Young Victoria is exactly the kind of British period romance that's useful to have around for woe-is-me weekends. (Although I always sort of wish the epilogue added some sort of title card about how Victoria and Albert's descendants messed Africa up. But I digress.)

November 22: Dead Presidents

Screened: At home, on HBO

I probably wouldn't have checked this movie out if my TV hadn't already been tuned to HBO. I always thought it was predominantly a heist movie that was emblematic of some of the issues of the post-Do the Right Thing/Boyz n the Hood "Will there be a Black film revolution? No? Okay, then!" moment in the mid-nineties. But I was pleasantly surprised to find a film that mostly mused on urban discontent in the Vietnam years, then in the last twenty minutes devolved into a heist movie that felt like it got edited in from somewhere entirely different. It's really interesting to read the comments on the movie's Netflix page - half say something like, "I thought this was a heist movie, what an interesting surprise!" and the other half are like, "I thought this was a heist movie, WTF?"

November 24: Burlesque

Screened: In the theater

Sometimes it's really nice to go to the movies and see a film that is exactly what it was advertised to be. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a cheesy-bordering-on-trashy "country girl dreams of stardom" movie. The movie benefitted from having as good a cast as they could've hoped for - where a lower-budget endeavor might have looked for a "Cher type" or a "Stanley Tucci type" or an "Alan Cumming type," here they actually had those actors, which made it as classy as possible within the constraints of the central premise of the film. A delightful trifle of a film - I envision errant cable viewings for years to come.

November 25: Babies

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

A totally perfect movie to watch while lying around like a beached whale after Thanksgiving dinner and dessert.

November 27: The Family That Preys

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

November 29: I Can Do Bad All By Myself; Madea Goes to Jail

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

I always sort of knew that being interested in race and cinema meant that I would have to familiarize myself with the Perry oeuvre sooner or later. To some extent, I land a bit on the Spike Lee side of the argument - like, "Some people like minstrel shows!" is not a valid response to criticism, Spike Lee knows some people like minstrel shows, it's central to the core premise of Bamboozled - but I respect the extent to which he's employed a lot of black actors who aren't getting a huge amount of work or attention in Hollywood, even if that employment is situated within some of the heaviest melodrama I've ever seen (and I own three seasons of Dynasty on DVD).

Mood Music XLVI

Enjoy the Portuguese subtitles. Without classes, I'm going to have to really plan my days so I don't turn into a moody hermit. That is, so I don't spend any more time being a moody hermit than is absolutely necessary. There has to be a difference between occasion-appropriate moody hermitness and pointless, self-indulgent moody hermitness, right? Hermitness? Hermitude? Hermitosity?

Week(s) in TV: Catching Up

I'm supposed to be working on a paper, but I figured that this was not entirely useless as a stalling tactic as it gets me writing something, which is better than writing nothing even if it's not germane to the task at hand. I keep starting weekly posts and then having them sort of fade into the ether as I get farther and farther into each successive week without posting, so this is sort of a multi-week commentary compendium including the various cable shows that have concluded their seasons in the past few weeks.

Boardwalk Empire

- When I do the Dream Emmy Ballot in the summer, the supporting drama categories are always the ones where I end up with about twenty performances that I love, and BE added some great actors there. Michael Kenneth Williams never seemed to get enough to do, besides that unbelievably excellent scene with Chalky and the guy from the Klan, but still used every second he appeared on screen to radiate a kind of simmering menace that made Chalky seem like the greatest badass of all time. Similarly, Jack Huston made a lot out of relatively little screen time, particularly in selling Richard's war wounds as more than a gimmicky period flourish.

- Try as I might, I just cannot bring myself to care about Angela and her problems. The whole "drifting along ineffectually, letting oneself be swayed by whomever happens to be physically closest" thing is likely very true to the way a fair number of people go through life, but it's terribly boring to watch. And unlike, say, Mad Men, where I think the writers made a decent case for Betty's continued presence by emphasizing the degree to which Don places importance on his children, the same can't really be said here for Angela in relation to Jimmy. The writers made me care more about Pearl in two episodes than they did about Angela through the whole entire season.

- I honestly wasn't sure for much of this season whether I would be excited for the next when it wrapped, but the finale sold me - I'm genuinely interested to see where the alliance between Jimmy, Eli and the Commodore goes. It seems like BE has all the tools necessary to pull out a superlative second season, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether they stick the landing.

The Walking Dead

Conversely, I don't know if I'm just that into The Walking Dead. It wasn't bad, but the first six episodes didn't feature the kind of character development or plot advancement that makes a show feel like vital viewing. (This post from io9 delves really well into the differences between the show and the comic - which I started reading over the summer, then tapered off - and how those differences tended to make the show a bit shallower.) Depending on how many shows I'm watching next fall, I may pick it back up again when the second season starts, but at present I'm not burning to see more.

Gossip Girl

Last week's episode concluded what is easily the best-executed narrative arc the show's ever done. (Considering the entire Schwartz/Savage oeuvre, it may be the best-executed narrative arc on GG or The O.C.) Eleven episodes must be some kind of record for them as far as sustaining a storyline, and the writers managed to make Juliet's motivation logical (as logical as Gossip Girl ever gets, anyway) and to resolve the story with a decent payoff. The only disappointment is that Juliet and Serena ended on good terms - Katie Cassidy could've made a stellar recurring villain for the show.

Glee

While watching both "Special Education" and "A Very Glee Christmas," I was struck by how little I cared about the seeming dissolution of the relationships between Rachel and Finn and Will and Emma. For all of the show's emphasis on the pairings of characters, there isn't a huge degree of chemistry among any of them. Some work well plot-wise, but there's no real, say, Matt Saracen/Julie Taylor or Chuck Bass/Blair Waldorf in this group. That said, I will observe that Artie and Brittany seem to be shaping up to be a great example of the Dream Relationship - that being when one finds someone who takes in the various things about them that are maybe a little nutty, crazy, flaky, whatever, and finds those things charming.

Sons of Anarchy

- I'll be interested to see how this season plays back on DVD. I watched both prior seasons within the span of about two weeks, so this season was going to feel like slow going no matter what happened, and I suspect that the trip to Ireland will play better within a shorter span of time and that the way it eventually circled around to bring John Teller's history in will fit better with the show's mythology as it's been laid out so far. Regardless, it's difficult to quibble with the story's denouement in the finale. If you're going to dispatch with a pair of villains who've outlived their narrative usefulness, best to do so with extreme badassery as the culmination of an epic triple-cross. The potential for a degree of narrative resetting with Jax, Clay and company coming out of jail (presumably) at the beginning of next season seems really promising - why is next fall so far away?

- I so hope that this season's finale, like the prior two, appears on the DVDs with a cast commentary. Kurt Sutter gathers together a giant group of cast members, then they proceed to basically ignore whatever gravity the plot would seem to dictate and replace it with a lot of catcalling, insults of each other's stage fighting and motorcycle riding abilities and general raucousness. I really, really want to rewatch the moment when Chibs slices Jimmy up with a cast commentary soundtrack.

- I found him kind of one-note in his early appearances, but I have to say that Chucky is growing on me. Once they minimized the masturbation jokes and focused on his potential as an odd-but-game friend of the club he became a great figurehead for the community built around SAMCRO.

Terriers

Between the time when I initially planned to write about this and now, Terriers was officially cancelled by FX. As was frequently true throughout the season, I find myself at a loss for words to encapsulate what was so good about Terriers. There were the perfect marriages of character and actor with Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James. The ensemble of smart female characters like Katie, Maggie and Steph, truly unlike any other on TV. The marvelous frayed-edges and lived-in-ness of the universe of Ocean Beach. The push and pull between laid back amiability and tangible danger that somehow never seemed to tip the balance too far any one way. I wasn't surprised that the show got cancelled - all I could really do was shrug and sign up for an Amazon update when the DVDs are available - but man, will I miss it.

I suppose the other side of the coin as far as The Walking Dead is that in the past six months alone we've had both Rubicon and Terriers come and go, and while I feel like I'll miss the characters and their universes and chase down other work by the actors from the latter two, right now I feel like I could quite contentedly never watch TWD again.

Mood Music XLV

How frequently does one have to have an evening of drunkenness devolve into hysterical tears to qualify as a weepy drunk? I figure I'm at about 25%.