The Pacific

A disclaimer I have not seen Band of Brothers, everyone I know has suggested I see it, but I haven't got around to it. I was planning on watching Band of Brothers before I started The Pacific, but I was at a friends as he started watching The Pacific so I decided to watch it, I was underwhelmed. Another disclaimer I generally do not like war movies, I am not a history buff so I don't care for or appreciate the verisimilitude of even the most accurate war films. My blood will boil when Dillon High runs the ball from the 10 with 10 seconds left, but even if I could tell the difference I would be indifferent if British Solider was using a Smith and Wesson.

The Pacific opens showing us soldiers preparing to ship out to war and to me the scenes felt like how people who didn't live through the 40s remember the 40s. I don't think they did this to juxtapose the inevitable war scenes, it just felt like a way to introduce some characters and develop a tone, which I didn't really care for.

Most of the dialogue in the Pacific feels like it should be in Kelly's Heroes and while I realize that 19 year old country boys getting sent off to war wouldn't be discussing Proust on the front line, it seemed like the writers were trying too hard to capture the banality of the conversations. I didn't expect to hear bawdy WC Fields jokes followed by musical theatresque fake-laughing.

Though it has cliche dialogue The Pacific has some very ambitious action sequences. Most movies want the audience to see everything so they can follow the action. The Pacific tries to truthfully recreate the battles by having many fights at night in the dark. The goal is too make the audience feel as uneasy as the soldiers, who don't know where the enemy is, however there is a fine line between making the audience feel uncertain and making the scenes impossible to follow. I wasn't watching on a great TV and my mind may change when I watch this weeks episode in HD, but I struggled following a lot the action in the pilot and often found myself incredibly disinterested during what should have been great action sequences.

A major reason why I am not a huge war movie fan is because they tend to have have the same moral: "War is Hell". Several soldiers are sociopaths and war justifies racism, sadism and other awful elements of human nature or even worse turns ordinary people into cold callous killing machines. I do not want to discuss the accuracy of the message, but the sentiment is trite. I am not particularly interested in seeing The Pacific illustrate the dehumanizing nature of war after I have seen movies like Full Metal Jacket that have done a much better job of it. I maybe holding The Pacific to an impossibly high standard, but given that they aren't trying anything particularly original, there would need to be near flawless execution for me to really love the show. Ultimately The Pacific's moralizing is not particularly compelling, but it is so overt that it can't be ignored. In the pilot the Pacific oscillated between being an ambitious, but flawed popcorn war-movie and an unoriginal guilt trip about war's role in society. I will probably end up watching the whole series as it is only 10 episodes, but thus far it isn't something I would recommend.

The Marriage Ref Larry David/Madonna/Ricky Gervais

After the first episode of The Marriage Ref was eviscerated by almost every single critic, I decided I would never watch the show ... that is until I discovered both Larry David and Ricky Gervais would be panelists. David and Gervais are two of the best comic minds in the world and I was curious to see if they could turn The Marriage Ref into an entertaining hour of TV. A disclaimer I am not a fan of reality TV, however unlike most of the internet I didn't think the concept for The Marriage Ref was particularly bad idea for a reality show. I certainly found it more intriguing than a retread of a competition or dating show, so from the outset I figured it could be decent.

Overall I thought this weeks episode was a very funny hour of TV, but it was only funny because of Larry David's misanthropy and the postmodernity of David and Gervais recognizing how absurd this show is. Larry David's unfiltered stream of consciousness was hilarious and while I am sure he only went on the show as a favour to Seinfeld his laissez-faire attitude towards the show is what made him endearing and funny. Gervais tried a little harder to actually make jokes, but he is such a great comic talent it never really seemed like he was trying any harder than I would when making a joke while watching a bad movie with friends. I find meta-commentary in fiction is often smugly clever, however I loved Gervais and David''s meta-commentary because it came from a real place. This wasn't a carefully crafted deconstruction it was two guys shooting the shit as they slowly came to terms with how odd this show is.

The oddly pleasant surprise of the episode was Madonna who acted like a normal person all things considered. As a 21 year old I am more aware of Madonna the infamous crazy person who believes in Kaballah than Madonna one of the biggest pop stars of all time and I have created a false dichotomy where she can only be one or the other. It was disarming, but intriguing to see Madonna doing anything sincerely and while her feminist rants became a grating it would be something i'd expect out of a lot of female guests in this environment.

A major criticism of the first episode was that the conflicts were too surreal and they all had clear winners. I think this episode has surreal conflicts, but they were all based in reality of classic relationship arguments; controlling mothers, relationship's with exes, a sloppy spouse. That gave the disputes a universality, having said that (sorry LD) I don't think the show would be entertaining without an all-star cast like tonight, there is still some really sloppy editing* and Bob Papa has a typical annoying upbeat host attitude, that makes me think he would be better served fake laughing on an NFL pregame show.

*Madonna had at least two jokes that clearly bombed and the producers tried editing it so the home audience couldn't tell it bombed. Instead we got a couple really bad choppy edit jobs. This may also be why Madonna appeared relatively un-insane.

Stray Thoughts

- Outside of being gorgeous I am not sure what the point of having Maria Menounos act as the celebrity fact checker was.

-How hard would it be to synch up the satellite feeds with the couples after the fact, given that the show is pre-recorded.

- This really should not be an hour long.

Saturday Night Live Zach Galifanakis/Vampire Weekend

Since SNL is usually at its strongest during election years I expected a drop off for this season, but didn't imagine it would be this severe. However there have been occasional bright spots and they had a lot of hosts like Blake Lively or Taylor Lautner who seemed predestined for a mediocre to bad episode, so when I discovered Zach Galifanakis was hosting I was excited. I am not the biggest Galifanakis fan in the world, but having a comedian host a comedy show instead of a movie star seemed like a novel development. Despite a very weak opening sketch (get it health care reform is unpopular! and if you don't get it we will repeat it half a dozen times) I was excited after seeing a very good monologue even if it was basically Zach's standup act, that is much funnier than most of what SNL has done this season.

Unfortunately my high hopes after the monologued were quickly abandoned and they proceeded to perform the same tripe they have performed throughout this season. One would think that with a team of writers and a cast of a dozen comedic actors they would be able to create more than one or two original sketches a week, but they haven't been up to the challenge. This week they had 6 sketches 3 0f them were more or less exact copies of sketches they have already done unsuccessfully. I am pretty sure they have covered every possible joke about over-affectionate families, Kathy Lee Gifford and What's Up With That.

The other sketches were a mixed bag. The bidet sketch seems like a funny riff that you would have at 3am while sleep deprived with friends. The idea that people would be so have a bidet fetish is a funny one-liner, it isn't funny as 4-5 minute sketch where you repeat that joke ad nauseam. The Situation Room sketch was a less funny, muddled version of this excellent Daily Show piece from a couple days ago. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-4-2010/tech-talch---chatroulette.

The pageant sketch was relatively strong, but it should be a type of sketch they are regularly pumping out and not the highlight of the show. It allowed Zach Galifanakis, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig to showcase their talent in some funny moments, even though they cracked near the end of the sketch. This ended very abruptly and it got me thinking that SNL does a lot of fake talk shows and game shows because they don't need a to write a good ending since they can just end the show or go to commercial break.

After this episode I am convinced SNL maybe the most creatively bankrupt show on TV, in the old days of SNL the cast was constantly doing drugs, which would be a reasonable excuse for recycling a bunch of bad sketches, but this cast just seems lazy, uncreative and insular. It amazes me that they get hosts like Joseph Gordon Levitt or Zach G who in another world could have been stars on SNL, but they just force them into their formulaic sketches instead of using their talent productively. If DVR didn't allow me to fast forward through a bunch of sketches and crank through an episode like 30 minutes I would stop watching SNL on a regular basis.

Stray Thoughts

- Kenan as Mo'Nique, gee what a surprise Kenan is in drag playing, I can't wait to see that happen next week.

- Wolf Blitzer at Burning Man

- At least Vampire Weekend was a solid musical act.

Community and Parks and Recreation

Community "Physical Education"

After the Olympics I was craving for NBC Thursday and Physical Education gave me what I was missing for two weeks. Physical Education could be my favorite episode of the series thus far, two really strong plots, tons of funny one liners and some good character work. Earlier I blogged about how I liked Community's subtle twists on formulaic sitcom plots so long as they aren't winking too much at the camera. Physical Education successfully achieved that in both of their stories. The Abed plot sets itself for the cliche, "just be yourself" plot and veers towards the obvious cynical twist. You can be yourself in the world of family sitcoms where mean things happens solely so everyone can learn a lesson, but in the real world conformity is necessary. As I watched this unfold I felt the plot uninspired, but succeeded because of all the jokes along the way, however I didn't anticipate the final wrinkle. Abed was never acting like himself and he was doing it to appease his friends who are so sure there is something wrong with him. It's easy to view Abed as pop culture references machine, but episodes like this show that he has some elements of a real person and isn't just a quirky funny sitcom character.

The other plot was an outrageous, but hilarious parody on cliche sports movies. Though Community has shown it has a heart, it is at its funniest when it is as its most absurd. Dan Harmon has created such a crazy environment at Greendale that it seems like any character can reasonably inhabit it; even a senior citizen pool teacher who insists all of his class wears tight gym shorts for increased mobility. However in spite of it's insanity Greendale is still endearing. It makes sense that Jeff would start embracing this Community instead of just making cynical comments at everyone's expense. While I wouldn't want to be there forever Greendale does look like it would be a lot of fun and we can see that Jeff really enjoys the spectacle of the pool game. Similar to the debate episode, I thought it was a really strong choice to attach the ludicrous views of the coach to the game of pool. Pool is always portrayed as a tense, cerebral game and it was delightful to see Community's manic version of strip pool, that led to several hilarious sight gags and crowd reaction shots.

Stray Thoughts

-The original joke and all the callback from Shirley wondering if white people got offended that they remade black movies specifically for white audiences was executed perfectly. Starting with Jeff calling Fat Albert the black after school special and continuing with Brown Joey and White Abed.

- Abed as Don Draper hitting on Annie/Trudy Campbell was fantastic.

Parks and Recreation "Lady of the Year"

Despite The Office having an hour long baby episode tonight, I wasn't that enthused to watch it and after Lady of the Year I have a hypothesis for why that might be the case. The Office has frequently used outsiders as an audience surrogate, they are the minority who realizes how wacky and zany all these characters are so hilarity ensues. The peripheral characters on Parks and Rec are often equally if not more insane than the cast members allowing us to empathize with Leslie Knope for having to deal with militant soccer coaches or feminists who sell out for transient publicity. In bad episodes of The Office I find myself pitying the cast members and empathize with the periphery, over time this has caused me to become resentful of a lot of the characters.

Ron Swanson has a strong sense of humanity and decency that allows us to like him and not just laugh at him. He showed this compassion in the pre-olympic Valentines Day episode and continued to show it in this episode. He has a lot of fun playing with Leslie, but never does anything especially mean spirited just a bunch of harmless pranks that rile Leslie up. While elaborate pranks are often funny, sometimes simple ones are much more effective and I enjoyed watching Ron getting under Leslie's skin so much when the most elaborate thing he did was hiring a photo crew.

Stray Thoughts

- I would go to a club called clubadubdub

-"Andy why are you digging that hole in the backyard?"

Skins Season 4

About a year ago a friend of mine recommended the British high school drama Skins to me. He told me it got rid of all the typical high school cliches in film and television and was a compelling groundbreaking show. He mentioned that they didn't present drug use and sex as taboo, but as facts of life without moralizing; I was intrigued. I pictured a version of Freaks and Geeks where they focused on the cool kids with a little less humour and a little more drama. That is not what I got. I got The OC with british actors who actually looked 17-18 instead of being 25 year olds playing high schoolers.

The above description isn't all that bad it wasn't the magnum opus I was expecting, but it could be a fun compelling diversion and considering I have watched 7 seasons of 24 and am still watching new episodes of Entourage Skins was at times a pleasant addition to my TV cycle. Skins is a mercurial show that managed to occasionally create nice moments between characters that captured high school in a real way only to ruin them with soap opera cliches. Characters sleeping with teachers, 14 year olds performing sexual espionage, characters dying or getting terminally every month. In the second season one of the characters father a archetypal middle-aged blue collar man who wishes his life worked out differently, finally confronts his more successful family members and gets the redemption he wanted his whole life. It is a nice real albeit slightly melodramatic character driven moment that lets the audience empathize with the characters. However Skins the writers aren't content with just slight melodrama so either due to sadism or an addiction to melodrama the newly redeemed father dies from a severe case of Deus Ex Machinas. I was literally angry when watching this, because they just ruined a nice relatively grounded moment so they could create a cliffhanger that didn't really lead anywhere.

A common theme in a lot of high school shows is that adults are not infallible, they are real flawed people, which makes solving the existential crisis that is high school even harder for our protagonists. Skins does this, but it takes out it to such an extreme that we the only people that can sympathize with the characters are popular teenage girls. I doubt any audience member thinks boy it must suck to be a precocious teenager in a world full of adults who you are much more talented then. You aren't supposed to sympathize with the characters, you are supposed to envy them, which really enforces the oldest high school stereotype ever, you want to be one of the cool kids. Frankly I think the creators of the show, wish they were the cool kids in high school and are now trying live vicariously through these characters and become cool dads. In reality they are helping create a generation of people who are envy self-absorbed egotists.

Despite all of this I still watched the first three seasons of the show. Some of this was because I had a couple of long train rides and both seasons on my computers and because I like finishing everything I start. However on some level I did like the show, it was good enough to make me want to watch the next episodes out of general curiosity while my critical rage merely simmered and it has enough attractive high school girls that I didn't feel like it was a complete waste of time (though it did make me feel a little creepy), until I started season 4.

Skins has a young writing staff, an average age of 21, which explains a lot of the awful plotting and the reductive attitudes toward all adults. However they also have different directors for a lot of episodes and it seems as if each director is trying to show off as many tricks as possible. Season 4 opens with a longshot of an unknown girl walking through a club before she kills herself by jumping off the balcony into the middle of a dance floor, which seemed like an idea some director had so he could show off his limited technical process. After this tragedy the characters finally come to the conclusion that there maybe consequences to using drugs, but of course the characters aren't responsible for their actions (with one possible exception), it's all the fault of the sketchy clubowner for letting 15 year olds into his clubs. One of the show's strength has been it's lack of moralism, however when you decide to do it you need to implicate the characters, when you have validated their actions throughout the series. It is at this point in the episode there is a sex scene with a baptist choir chanting "I believe in your lord" ad nauseam, because there is no better way to juxtapose characters actions with religion then having ironic song lyrics literally screaming at the viewer so they have to understand this trite message. It is at this point of the episode I turned it off and stopped watching the show, likely forever. I just wrote 1000 words about a show I dislike and I don't feel like letting it waste any more of my life, so I am going to end this post as abruptly as I quit the show.

Friday Night Lights "Thanksgiving"

If Vegas allowed you to bet on what would happen in this season of Friday Night Lights "East Dillon beats the Panthers to knock them out of the playoffs" would have opened at 10:1. The challenge for Jason Katims et. al. Was to make that compelling and believable for the audience, while they sort of accomplished the latter they definitely accomplished the former. I literally stood up and fist pumped when Landry's FG went through, eventhough my brain knew it was going in. There has been a lot of misery and despair in East Dillon, but the writers are not sadists. Landry losing his girlfriend, best friend* and the big game in such a short span would be too cruel for the audience and the characters. So as soon as the score was 22-24 I knew Landry would be the hero, but I still cared about the characters and East Dillon so it didn't matter that I knew it was coming.

* Yes him and Saracen patched things up, but as lots of friends do I expect them to lose touch as life gets in the way.

As usual Coach and Mrs. Coach are the backbone of the show and while it wasn't necessarily the pragmatic thing to do it was nice to see Mrs. Coach go off book, because she knows she's right. Kyle Chandlers look of pride and worry at her press conference perfectly showed how I believe most of the audience reacted to her stand. I thought it was a little contrived for Tami to get the guidance counselor job at East Dillon so easily, but it will make next season less chaotic allowing them to fully develop all the arcs, so I don't mind it.

The finale also gave a happy and tragic ending to two of the shows staple characters Matt Saracen and Tim Riggins. Saracen finally gets the finale he deserved after seeing him sparingly since he left for Chicago. In possibly his last episode* Zach Gilford gives another wonderful performance; his banter with Julie really brings out the best in Aimee Teegarden, who has been hit or miss throughout the series. Little things like Saracen talking about Greektown or joking about Matt "deflowering" Julie created a bunch of little real moments that makes this show so good.

*He won't be a regular but it wouldn't surprise me if the last season ended in a big West Dillon vs. East Dillon game where everyone came back to watch the game.

Finally I would be remiss without touching on the tragedy of Tim Riggins, the season premiere seems so far away, but in season 4 Tim Riggins went from being a scholarship athlete to a felon. I knew they would be writing Riggins off the show as he is trying to pursue acting in films, but it still hurts to see him go. He has an incredible screen presence and charisma, in addition to being incredibly good looking. I started tearing up a bit when Tim saw Mindy and Billy playing with the baby and I knew he was going to fall on the sword. I started tearing up again as he walked into the police station alone, very few actors could elicit that emotional response from me from so little. I was expecting the Riggins brothers to turn on Mo, solving Vince and Riggins' problems, but like real life not everyone in Friday Night Lights gets a happy ending. I realize I have complimented almost everyone's acting in this blog post, but I need to mention Derek Phillips as Billy Riggins. He was always good as the goofball older brother of Tim, but he has showed off some good dramatic chops this season. His rambling apology to Tim and rambling toast at Thanksgiving dinner, were two great heartbreaking speeches that were compelling, but also difficult to watch because they were so sad.

Stray Thoughts

- Friday Night Lights does a really good job executing or putting a spin on typical sports movie cliches. The two best examples this week were Coach Taylors speech over a montage of practices at the beginning of the episode that literally gave me goosebumps and Coach Taylor''s Thanksgiving practice where the other coaches wanted to leave.

- Of course Buddy Garrity would deep fry a turkey.

- All of the new cast members have been very good this season and while the finale left a lot of open ends for Vince, Jess, Becky and Luke I expect them to all be addressed in the fifth and final season.

-I initially planned on writing this blog right after the episode, but felt so sad afterwards that I decided to do something else.

LOST "What Kate Does"

It's been awhile since I posted a blog. I don't like writing posts for TV shows a week after they aired and I have been relatively busy which isn't a great combination for whoever wants to read my thoughts on TV.

Last nights LOST was a mediocre episode, that I don't feel like commenting that much on. Evangeline Lilly is not a good actress and Kate episodes generally require a performance that Lilly isn't capable of giving. They also require the audience to empathize with Kate despite the fact that she still is a murderer* . Most of the characters in LOST have cliche redemption stories, but they are well executed and you feel happy when that character can correct their past mistakes. Despite being one of the leads the leads Kate hasn't changed at all. She is the same selfish, non-committal person and the audience is supposed to root for her. The title, "What Kate Does" acknowledges this, but I don't need a full episode to show me this is What Kate Does when I already have 5 seasons that do.

*Whose actions are less reprehensible then most murderers.

Before writing this post I read a lot of other peoples thoughts about this episode and it made me notice how many LOST fans are petulant children. There were problems with this episode, but a lack of answers wasn't one of them. It seems like people would rather have a textbook with all of the answers than a great television series and this attitude has been prevalent since season 2. Two of the consensus worst episodes of LOST are Expose and Tricia Takanawa is Dead. Both of these episodes are light on answers, but are entertaining hours of television that lets us see some nice moments between characters. They aren't my favorite episodes of the show, but they are episodes I enjoyed at the time and on the rewatch. In an era of DVRs LOST is one of the few shows that is appointment television, which has caused viewers to demand an unrealistically high standard every week. They want the answers right now so they can prove that they didn't waste 50 hours on TV's wild goose chase.

After seeing the reaction to this weeks episode one of my first thoughts was "Do these people learn?" Since the 2nd season most LOST seasons have had huge developments in the premiere followed by a letdown 2nd episode, yet everyone was completely blindsided this time. Cuse/Lindellof will wait until Episode 8 or 9 to do a Richard or Jacob or Esau flashback and everyone will instantly put that episode in the top 5 of all time. After watching this show for 5 years, waiting another week won't kill you, but treating the show like a crack addict who needs his next fix could.