Don’t look at me for a caption. They got this covered.
In this corner, a onetime almost-movie star who has his own Food Network show! In that corner: a former SNL writer with some standup comedy experience! These two sitcoms have almost nothing in common, not even their ratings. I watched the pilots for both a while back and procrastinated doing anything with my notes…until now.
Moses (John Boyega) parts the sea of critters in Attack the Block.
In my ongoing quest to scribble things down before they vanish from memory and personal history, for a while now I’ve been trying to coming up with a system for jotting down notes about the movies I watch at home. I normally limit my movie writing to new theatrical releases, indies On Demand, and Best Picture nominees during Oscar season, but I’d like to engage in slightly more notetaking for the fun of it — tracking what I watch as I go and recording my impressions in brief, not in 2000-word list-bombs. Once I’ve forgotten the entire movie six months from now, I can return to my previous capsule and remind myself whether or not it was worth remembering.
Our Heroes prepped for their roles by attending a seminar on “Surviving an American Remake of a European Series” and then reading viewer complaints about The Killing.
This very special, pretty unwise MCC project continues!
I’m combining three entries in one for simple bookkeeping reasons. See, some MCC entries get Likes from fellow WordPress users. Some MCC entries see an uptick in site traffic. Some rare MCC specimens are blessed enough to garner both. Up to this point most of the MCC 2014 Pilot Binge entries have been earning neither. Even spammerbot accounts are looking at them and thinking, “This no good! We go spam other bloggers! You call when you go back to posting photos! THEN we link you to counterfeit Louboutins long time!”
I refuse to quit the project because that’s the kind of mule-headed fool I am, even if means more TV viewing discomfort. A few pilots may still merit individual entries in the future, but I’ve received the message loud and clear that not every impression I have is worth 700-1,000 words. It doesn’t help that my tastes are sometimes confounding and governed by peculiar guidelines. Regardless, we’ll see what we can do with this silent input and go from there.
And now, a few words on three pilots about MURDER.
“Time for karaoke! Where do we start? ‘Bad Reputation’? ‘I Am Woman’? ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves’? ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T’? Or something by the Fray?”
In case the title Bad Judge was a little too shorthand and didn’t prepare you, the pilot is quick to give you everything you need to know to form your own snap judgment and recuse your TV from the rest of the proceedings. I assume it owes some gratitude and royalties to either Bad Teacher or Bad Santa, but I really wouldn’t know and intend to stay ignorant of all such likenesses.
Before I continue, I suppose I could add a courtesy spoiler alert for anyone who’s saving this mistrial on their DVR for a rainy, thundering, frog-pouring kind of day. The element of surprise certainly didn’t help me out.
…
“So, while we’re trapped on this boat and there’s nowhere you can hide, and no other ABC show you can run to…wanna make out in front of the crew?”
It’s a common story a lot of us have watched unfold before. Dudebro meets flighty gal. Dudebro mocks flighty gal. Dudebro scares away flighty gal. Dudebro tries to make it up to flighty gal. Dudebro ticks off flighty gal. Dudebro kisses up to flighty gal with weak, music-free Say Anything nod. Flighty gal gives him yet another chance because the producers mandated a happy ending. According to the new ABC sitcom Manhattan Love Story, that’s modern true love at its finest!
I’d never seen a single episode of any previous NCIS products, but I was bound to encounter one sooner or later. In the fine tradition of Law & Order: Trial by Jury and CSI: New York and Here’s Lucy, NCIS: New Orleans is the third in the dynasty and presumably goes through the same motions as its predecessors, except with differently likeable actors and, I’m guessing based on location, a whole lot more local color, by which I mean the kind of Southern accents Hollywood flat-out dislikes. In most movies and TV shows, anyone with a Southern accent is evil, stupid, both, or Academy Award Winners Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey. Our NCIS:NO Heroes are appreciably none of the above, though I confess Louisiana is one of several states my wife and I haven’t road-tripped to yet, so I have no idea if there’s a single authentic Cajun, Creole, French-American, or Mardi Gras partygoer in the entire bunch.
The only new fantasy/sci-fi series of the Fall 2014 season that’s not based on a comic book, the hero of Forever, a Manhattan medical examiner who’s also a 200-year-old immortal, could’ve been adapted from the medium, using either DC Comics’ Immortal Man or Vandal Savage, or Marvel’s Mr. Immortal from the Great Lakes Avengers. Instead this mash-up derived from the crossed bones of the much more popular Sleepy Hollow and Sherlock will have to rise or fall on the strength of some added flourishes and the charms of star Ioan Gruffudd, who’s much more at ease here than he was as the uptight Reed Richards in the two Fantastic Four films.
Midlife Crisis Crossover calls Scorpion the Best New Series on TV!
That’s my honest assessment based purely on how its pilot stacked up against the nine others I’ve watched so far in my ongoing marathon. When I first read about the premise — the short version is, our government pays wacky hackers to save the world every week — my initial impression was a CSI: Big Bang Theory that would have depressing things in store for me. I feared the limited plot possibilities that would be solved every episode with some combination of “Let’s Enhance!” zooms and frenetic compute-offs in which Our Heroes must TYPE FASTER OR ELSE THINGS EXPLODE, all while we point and laugh at their personal defects. The first twenty minutes of the pilot saw my prophecy fulfilled for the benefit of CBS viewers who prefer that their shows look exactly like other CBS shows.
Then a strange thing happened during the back half of the premiere. This time, things got personal for me.
Sorry to join the party so late! Everyone else already watched the premiere of Gotham days ago on Fox and blogged, tweeted, Tumblr’d, or tin-can-on-a-stringed about it to all their circles, right? If everyone else is already over it, that means I can write whatever I want without fear of anyone reading it, right? Okay, cool. The way my week has gone, I’m considering using this space to update our grocery list and gauge its effect on site traffic.
For those who spent this week focusing on other things, or who don’t care about shows based on comics: Gotham tells the story of a young, stringy, ineffective toady named Oswald Cobblepot who spends his life groveling for a notorious crime lord and wishing people would stop bullying him. The ending has already been spoiled because fans of comics or old TV know Cobblepot will someday outgrow his ineptitude and mature into the formidable businessman known as the Penguin. Gotham, then, is his origin story, plus a half-dozen irrelevant subplots about far less interesting people.
Longtime MCC readers should know, putting it inadequately, that politics are not my thing. Tea Leoni is okay by me, but I knew ahead of time her new CBS political drama Madam Secretary might have a hard time holding my attention. I tried it nonetheless as part of the MCC 2014 Pilot Binge Project and found a fair number of upsides. For one, I enjoyed seeing the always-contrarian Zelkjo Ivanek rebound from the cancellation of NBC’s Revolution. Also: Keith Carradine is the President of the United States of America. It’s the sentence America wants and needs.
Serendipity meets (500) Days of Summer, with an added twist for people who like lists, in the new series A to Z, one of NBC’s additions to its ailing Thursday comedy lineup. The title holds a double meaning: the cute couple under scrutiny, played by Ben Feldman (whose Michael Ginsberg was last seen being carried off Mad Men in a stretcher) and Cristin Milioti (How I Met Your Mother), are named Andrew and Zelda. As described to the audience by narrator Katey Sagal, the series will detail their entire relationship “from A to Z”.
And when she says “entire”, she doesn’t just mean in-depth; it’s an implied time-bomb countdown to The End. Continue reading
The hard-knock life of an undercover officer.
Debra Messing is back on network TV! She’s po-lice! She’s Mom! Debra Messing is…POLICE MOM!
Have you been dying for a a return to the glorious absurdity of Sledge Hammer! and Police Squad, even if the absurdity is unintentional? Do you lie awake at night wondering why Lifetime never greenlit a series based on the Miss Congeniality movies? Are you tired of shows like The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street that think real-life, hard-knock police work is more important than magazine makeup or hair care? Then your new favorite show is ready and waiting to make you laugh and cry in all the wrong places.
I’ve not yet watched or read The Fault in Our Stars, so I’m unqualified to comment on whether or not Fox’s new terminal-teens drama Red Band Society owes it some debts. Of the twenty-six pilots I’ll be sampling over the next few months, it’s among the small number that I was not dreading. For me the major selling point is Academy Award Winner Octavia Spencer, who was great in The Help, lent Snowpiercer some of its heart, and tore me up inside as the tough-loving mother in Fruitvale Station. I was curious to see her handling a bona fide starring role.
Hey, that was my face while watching, too! We can totes share the same emoji!
Not a codeword for the new fall TV lineup.
And now for something completely regrettable:
I have a short list of TV shows I follow every year, but I don’t watch nearly as much TV as the average internet user my age. I don’t connect with what many of today’s sitcoms consider “humor”. The Wire ruined all ordinary police shows for me for all time. We don’t subscribe to any premium cable channels. I’m not remotely interested in any show that describes itself as “sexy”. My list of disqualifiers goes on and on.
This year I’ve decided against my better judgment to dare myself to do something different. I spent time this weekend reading the official annual “Fall TV Preview” cover features in the latest issues of Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide, and compiled a list of the new shows that merited full articles or capsule previews. I omitted a few premium-cable shows for the one reason mentioned above (the pirating option is off the table) and a few online-only streaming shows for assorted logistical reasons. That left me with a list of twenty-six TV shows in all.
Ready and waiting for its future home on a Starbucks spinner rack.
But I’ve never owned an Apple product, bearing in mind that digital downloads barely count as “ownership” in my mind, and my iTunes “library” so far is more like a Hot Wheels bookmobile. Apple’s ostentatious new-product announcements are usually outside my fields of interest. I’m not an early adopter in any tech-related areas. At all.
New iPhone? Pass. My phone is a Samsung S2 that accomplishes my simple daily needs as long as I remember to reboot once a week. (Longtime MCC readers may recall I was once staunchly anti-smartphone in general, until life gave me reasons not to be.) My phone isn’t broken, and once survived a ten-foot drop onto a metal catwalk with zero damage. I’m good for now.
New smartwatch with triple-digit price tag? Pass. I can’t function away from home without wearing a watch (see: “old”), but I rarely need to shop for a new one because any given fifteen-dollar waterproof department-store digital watch with a lithium battery will last me years. They’re arguably one of Walmart’s most durable products, and it’s faster for me to glance at my wrist than it is to pocket and unpocket any other time-telling gizmo, including my phone. And that lithium battery drains ten thousand times more slowly than any phone battery will.
But then Apple went in an unexpected direction with their third platform plank: a new U2 album. For free. Finally, a product in my price range and tangential to my personal interests. Sold!
Tyrion Lannister wishes you would go away.
I’m grateful every day to have a job that observes the largely superfluous privilege of Labor Day. I spent most of the weekend recovering from “con crud” and saving up energy and money for future chores and exploits. It was nice to have the time and excuse to make headway into my infinite viewing pile — with my wife’s blessing, no less. I’ll make a point of mowing the lawn some other week, just for her.
The weekend’s results, in no particular order:
* The Station Agent (Netflix): Before Game of Thrones, and slightly before his winning scene in Elf, Peter Dinklage starred in this 2003 indie, a low-key character piece about a railroad enthusiast who retreats to small-town New Jersey after his best friend dies and his model-train hobby shop is sold off. His attempts at hermitage are thwarted daily as life pushes other people into his path — a happy-go-lucky food-truck runner (Bobby Cannavale), a separated wife and grieving mother (Patricia Clarkson), a teen librarian with a secret (frequent Oscar nominee Michelle Williams), an unassuming young black girl, the backwater citizens who mock his stature, and Mad Men‘s John Slattery in a bit part as a disgruntled husband. Dinklage barely talks, letting his doleful gaze speak or deflect for him, but he slowly emerges from inner captivity as the tracks are laid for new connections to new friends, each overlooking the others’ outward differences and recognizing their inner wounds.
Spoiler photo of Bradley Cooper from The Expendables 7.
The raccoon! The tree! The wrestler! The funnyman! The female! Together they’re the hottest new super-team in the Marvel universe, and you probably saw their first movie before I did! If so, congratulations on doing your part to turn Guardians of the Galaxy into one of the summer’s biggest success stories with a boffo opening weekend despite an unproven leading man and not one single popular hero on their roster.
If you didn’t see GoTG before I did…well, that’s what entries like this are for.
Right this way for more about that new movie that is NOT called “Rise of the Guardians”…
A recently unveiled statue of Roger Ebert, seated outside the Virginia Theatre in his hometown of Champaign, IL. Photo by Anne Golden, from our 2014 road trip.
When film critic Roger Ebert passed away in April 2013, I wrote at length about the influence that he and his longtime TV debate partner Gene Siskel had upon my life. That entry is intro enough to explain why, when I heard there was a new documentary about Ebert, it was an obvious pick for my summer must-see list.
One contemporary peer labels Ebert “the definitive mainstream film critic”. Another, less charitable fellow in his field dismisses Ebert’s longtime TV career as doing their practice an injustice. (“Consumer advice is not the same as criticism.”) Several came together for the special occasion of Life Itself.
Toby Kebbell takes over for Claude Akins as the Koba of a new generation. So far I’ve seen no hardcore fans protesting the decision to change Koba from gorilla to ape.
Many of us here on the internet openly lament Hollywood’s fixation on sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots as their creative crutches of choice. Implicit in our grumbles is the broad assumption that all of those recycling methods are inherently bad by definition. We’re sometimes quick to forget within the space of 140 characters, for the sake of the snarky punchline, that such vehicles don’t have to be all bad. Their success rate is disappointing, but it’s far from 0%.
Last weekend, six of the top ten films on the box office chart were sequels. One was a sequel and a sort-of relaunch; one a sequel to a spinoff; one a sequel to a remake; and two were just plain sequels. And then there was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a loose do-over of 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes with the additions of one large MacGuffin and some expensive set pieces, any one of which probably cost five times Battle‘s miserly budget. Also, they smartly ditched the humans’ sci-fi B-movie costumes.
So Dawn is a sequel to a reboot and it’s a remake. Its pedigree is an anti-art hat trick. Somehow it’s also one of the best films of the summer.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 