I got
up this morning and threw on my Hawaiian shirt to celebrate the
mid autumn
warm spell. Some people call it Indian summer. But the Princess
of Pain gets pissed
over the reference and insists on calling it Native People’s
Summer, despite how
dopey that actually sounds. The Wife and I watched The West Wing
tonight. I am
lamenting just how lame and ordinary that show has become with
the lack of Aaron
Sorkin at the helm and, yes, without the chatty Rob Lowe. It was
all about bringing
William Devane into the regular cast by nominating him for Vice
President and
grooming him for the big job, to take over at some point in the
future when Martin
Sheen’s term is up. Jeez, it’s only a TV show, and
I’m afraid it’s only about half the
show it used to be. Because William Devane is really kinda your
last resort. I’m sure
Aaron Sorkin will come up with something neat to watch. Hope he
goes to work for
Fox and they put his new show on right up against The West Wing.
Two can play at
this game.
THE RUNDOWN (2 SPUDS)
I’ve been f0llowing the career of The Rock with some interest,
and now that Arnie
has gone full tilt into politics, he seems to be the likely successor
to the action
adventure throne. The Rundown is The Rock’s 3rd movie, if
you don’t count the
gazillions of TV and closed circuit performances he gives for
the WWF (which I don’t)
In The Mummy Returns and the Scorpion King, he essentially plays
the same
character, so his role in The Rundown is kind of a breakout and
hopefully a sign of
things to come. Being a wrassler, the Rock comes to legit movies
with a lot of
training and screen presence. The fact of the matter is that he’s
actually a better
actor than Arnie as far a delivering lines and creating a character.
The Rundown is one of those hyperactive action adventure movies
that owes a lot to
Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone, but hey, there’s
nothing original in
Hollywood anymore. This movie is a hell of a lot of fun to watch,
because the director
Peter Berg is finally showing what he is made of. After his disastrous
directorial
debut (note the alliteration), with Very Bad Things (No Spud 4U),
I feared the worst,
that he would just fade into oblivion and go back to acting whence
he came. But The
Rundown is a real corker, with a cool story, wall-to-wall action
and fun performances
by everyone involved, especially Monsieur Rock and his nemesis,
Christopher
Walkin. In The Rundown, the Rock plays an intelligent mob enforcer
who is sent down to the Amazon somewhere to retrieve the son of
his mobster boss. The kid is hanging out in a mining town owned
by Christopher Walkin and managed by Walkin’s gang of bullwhip
totin’ Jungle Jims. Needless to say they are no match for
The Rock, cause, well he’s the Rock.
Having said all that, I have to point out that the real star of
this movie is the
direction. It’s some of the best and most inventive pure
action footage put on film
since Indiana Jones, and nobody really knows how pure that was
anyway. This is one
rollicking good time at the movies, cause it’s obvious at
Peter Berg’s intention here
is to entertain the hell out of us. And that’s exactly what
he does. The other thing he
does is prove the point that you don’t have to turn your
movie over lock stock and
barrel to Industrial Light and Magic to make it visually stunning
and exciting.
You just have to do what directors from Charlie Chalpin To Cecil
B Demille to Robert
Rodrigues to Peter Berg have been doing for almost a century.
Tell the story and
have a good time doing it.
THE NEW SHOWS
RATINGS SHIFTS
LAS VEGAS –TO ONE SPUD. I liked the second
ep better than the first. It’s still a little on the fluffy
side, but improving.
THREAT MATRIX – ONE POINT
5 SPUDS TO TWO SPUDS. This show is pretty amazing
and now has the early lead for Big Kahuna. The only thing that
could stop it is another major terrorist attack on US soil.
THE LYON’S DEN (ONE SPUD)
THE NUTSHELL: Rob Lowe plays the son of a senator or something
who is dragged,
via a combination of emotional blackmail and outright extortion,
from his brooding
life as a legal do-gooder to an even more intensely brooding life
as head of the
tyrannical law firm which supports the legal clinic where he works.
Now in addition
to being just brooding, he has to become brooding and ruthless,
a hard combo for a
prettyboy like Rob to pull off. FEARLESS FORECAST: After this
show starts to tank
because Rob is playing against his chatty in the hallways type
(thanks to The West
Wing) and it is essentially boring, Rob will start pining for
the hallowed halls of The
fake White House. By that time (next season), The West Wing’s
ratings will have
fallen (because of Aaron Sorkin’s departure and the subsequent
energy drain that
will ensue this season), that they will welcome Rob back with
open arms. And it will
all be good. Rob back in the White House where he belongs. The
Lyon’s Den will be
in a shallow grave where it belongs and Aaron Sorkin will have
some sort of new hit
series which I will watch faithfully no matter what it’s
about.
JOAN OF ARCADIA TWO SPUDS)
THE NUTSHELL: Young Joan (Amber Tamblyn) is a regular teenage
gal who one day
gets a visit from God. After a reasonable amount of bantering
and mystifying stuff,
Joan comes to believe this really is God talking to her and starts
doing what she’s
told. Joan is surrounded by an all star cast including Mary Steenbergen
(Mrs Ted
Danson) and Joe Mantagne (any David Mamet movie), so it’s
painfully obvious that
the powers that be in Hollywood want this show to succeed big
time and eventually
fill the gap left by the departure of Touched By An Angel. FEARLESS
FORECAST: Joan of Arcadia is 10 times the show that Touched By
An Angel was. So this objective will probably be achieved and
more. A lot of young people will be drawn into it because of the
teen focus. But overall, this show is pretty neat, not all pompous
and formulaic like TBAA. It reminds me a bit of Everwood, albeit
not quite as well written. But I’ll watch it. And a lot
of other people will too. I give it a three-season run, cause
it’s got lots of legs.
IT’S ALL RELATIVE (NO SPUD
4U)
THE NUTSHELL: A young Bostonian lad who’s parents own a
waterfront watering
hole in Southie hooks up with the daughter of two well to do and
sophisticated gay
men. Hilarity ensues as they are about to become one big happy
family or at least
that’s the idea. FEARLESS FORECAST: This show is a bright
and shining example of just how low the sitcom has fallen in an
attempt to cash in on the trend to shows
involving gays. The gay guys are great. They’re bright and
witty and well portrayed.
However, the same cannot be said for the low cast Irish Catholic
trashoids who are
the parents of the young Bostonian lad. They are boorish and ignorant
and completely disgusting. Anyway this show is crippled by a lot
of extremely obvious and tasteless anti-gay sentiment and will
die a quick and painful death, I hope. I’ve been wrong about
this kind of thing before. I despise TV like this. Give me Dogs
With Jobs anyday.
HOPE AND FAITH (NO SPUDS 4U)
THE NUTSHELL: Hope and Faith are sisters. They are played by Faith
Ford and Kelly Ripa (two TV manufactured blonde cuties and two
actresses who couldn’t carry a commercial let alone a whole
TV series.) Kelly is an out of work soap opera star and Faith
is her housewife sister. Kelly moves in with Faith because she
doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Hilarity ensues. FEARLESS
FORECAST: While we’re on the subject of how low comedies
have sunk, we must also talk about how shrewish these two women
feel they need to be to make their parts work. I was able to handle
the shrewishness for about 18 minutes. This is formula crap that
gives genuinely dumb blondes something to hope for. Six episodes,
fewer if there is a god.
KAREN SISCO (TWO SPUDS)
THE NUTSHELL: Elmore Leonard, who is one of the great writers
of crime fiction in
America was actually a copywriter in Detroit for a while, before
he got smart. He
worked on cars for D’Arcy. Anyway, Elmore created Karen
Sisco for a book called Out of Sight, which wasn’t so much
about her US Marshall character as it was about
George Clooney, who played the bad guy. That’s ‘cause
in Elmore Leonard books,
there is always a real shortage of good guys. Anyway, Jennifer
Lopez played Karen
in the movie and the series is basically a continuation of the
story and the character.
FEARLESS FORECAST: Because there are so many procedural and forensic
style cop shows on TV, this one kinda stands out because the writing
is OK and it’s more aboutpeople than gizmos and microbes.
Carla Gugino plays Karen and great character actor Robert Forster
plays her dad (true to the book), and they can easily carry this
show. Cop shows never need to worry about legs, so this one could
last quite a while. It’s not great but it’s kind of
a refreshing break from all the hyperactivity that the boob tube
seems to be generating this season. And it’s also trying
to stick to the quirky character formula that’s made Elmore
Leonard the best selling crime fiction
writer in the galaxy.
COLD CASE (NO SPUD FOR MILES AND MILES AND MILES AND MILES)
There’s been a lot of noise about how this show is a direct
rip-off of a Canadian show
that’s been on the air for a few seasons now called Cold
Squad. The similarities are
eerie and well, stranger things have happened. Since there are
no original ideas in
Hollywood anyway, I guess it’s conceivable. Myself, I think
they stole it to get even
with us for not going with them when they invaded Iraq. THE NUTSHELL:
Good
looking blonde detective starts working on a cold (read old) murder
case, does such
a damn fine job that she draws the assignment full time. FEARLESS
FORECAST: The trouble with both these shows is that they are about
old crusty cases and people
who have been concealing sins for years and years. I’ll
be honest with you…it’s just
plain dull as dishwater. It got a good ratings hit the first week
out. But so did It’s All
Relative and it was crap. But it’s a Bruckheimer and it
will at least last the season,
just not at Spud Central.
10-8 (TWO SPUDS)
THE NUTSHELL: This is a show about LA County Sheriffs, who are
different kinds of
cops than the LAPD. I’m not sure how they are different,
but there you go. This show
features one cop in particular, a trainee played by Danny Nucci
and his trainer played
by Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters). It’s also narrated by Nucci,
and like Karen Sisco it
comes down more on the people side of the cop show world. This
show is the Wife’s
favourite new show and I don’t mind it myself. FEARLESS
FORECAST: TV is trying like hell to establish a counterpoint to
the CSI style show. This could be a viable
contender. The only thing I worry about is that the show is getting
a lot of its fuel
from the trainee angle. I wonder if won’t just turn into
another ho hummer when
that’s played out. Catch it while you can.
That’s all she wrote for this week. See you in the funny
papers.
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