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2014 RANDOM TV THOUGHTS


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Ray Donovan was ok. I like the show, I enjoy watching it but it's not like a top tier show. I'd put it right there with like Sons of Anarchy.

Jon Voight is clearly having the time of his life with this part. He had to have thought he'd never get a role this great again.

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Oh, STRAIN. What a piece of shit you are going to be.

I wish Guillermo had better taste in writing partners. Just anybody who could write decent dialogue would be a good start. For instance, someone who wouldn't write an air traffic controller to remark of airplanes, "They're like buildings...with wings!"

That line was awful and it's hard to see how that line was approved, and the show isn't great, but I am going to continue watching because the show doesn't have the feel of anything else that is on TV.  I don't know if that is a good enough reason, but I'll see how it progresses.

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The Strain was awful. I'll probably watch another episode or two, but only to see if it goes completely off the rails. Whomever wrote the dialogue has to be deaf, yeah? Literally no one in the history of conversation has said another persons name as often as Sean Astin did last night. Also, any time Corey Stohl would talk about being in the CDC, I couldn't help but laugh. Everything in the show was so seemingly self important, but in the exact wrong way.

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Oh, STRAIN. What a piece of shit you are going to be.

I wish Guillermo had better taste in writing partners. Just anybody who could write decent dialogue would be a good start. For instance, someone who wouldn't write an air traffic controller to remark of airplanes, "They're like buildings...with wings!"

 

The novels are also high concept / shitty dialogue and if the series is anything like the books, it is going to be a bumpy fucking ride that will get weirder with every episode.

 

I decided to read the trilogy right when the series was announced and when I was finished I said, "Yeah, I'd never watch this if it were a mini-series or something."

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I think you guys have talked me out of The Strain.

 

In an era of emo vampires that are just misundestood and not really evil we swear and you should feel sorry for us as we prattle on about how horrible immortality is blah blah blah, the vicious bloodsucking freaks from The Strain are a breath of fresh air.

You have to endure a lot of crappy dialoge to get to the good parts, though.

The second novel, The Fall, should make for an amazing season. The third novel, The Night Eternal, is so fucking weird its amazing..

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Masters of Sex was a little choppy. Too obvious in spots, like, they were reminding you of the character motivations in broad strokes instead if just continuing where they left off.

One of those broad strokes was Dr. Austin Langham hiding from his wife after she discovered he was sleeping with her sister. So that was awesome.

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I think you guys have talked me out of The Strain.

In an era of emo vampires that are just misundestood and not really evil we swear and you should feel sorry for us as we prattle on about how horrible immortality is blah blah blah, the vicious bloodsucking freaks from The Strain are a breath of fresh air.

You have to endure a lot of crappy dialoge to get to the good parts, though.

The second novel, The Fall, should make for an amazing season. The third novel, The Night Eternal, is so fucking weird its amazing.

Heels need to be heels.

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I think you guys have talked me out of The Strain.

In an era of emo vampires that are just misundestood and not really evil we swear and you should feel sorry for us as we prattle on about how horrible immortality is blah blah blah, the vicious bloodsucking freaks from The Strain are a breath of fresh air.

You have to endure a lot of crappy dialoge to get to the good parts, though.

The second novel, The Fall, should make for an amazing season. The third novel, The Night Eternal, is so fucking weird its amazing.

Heels need to be heels.

 

 

I agree.  You would not see Dracula asking Van Helsing for mercy.  Van Helsing is only human and Dracula preys on humans. 

 

We don't ask cows if we can turn them into steaks.  We just do it.

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Ray Donovan was ok. I like the show, I enjoy watching it but it's not like a top tier show. I'd put it right there with like Sons of Anarchy.

Jon Voight is clearly having the time of his life with this part. He had to have thought he'd never get a role this great again.

 

Most of the show is implausible, 80% of the first season was spent on a Samsung Galaxy (product placement, BITCH!), some of the characters are hokey, they are really trying to drive home the evil Jew in Hollywood stereotype, and all the women on the show are sluts. With that said, Jon Voight is fucking incredible on the show. It's something about a man well into his 70s watching twerk videos in a library. That's what sold me on the show. Marsan is also low key pretty good.

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Wait; Molly Shannon was featured in an episode of Hannibal? I mean I put it on the backburner for a spell but what the flying handshake?

 

She appeared in the episode that NBC pulled from the air after the Boston Marathon bombings.  You probably haven't seen it unless you have the season DVD set (though I assume it's online here and there).  In a nutshell, she played a psycho mother who kidnapped kids, raised them as their own, then sent them back to kill their original family (to bond more fully with her).  She was ok in the role.  It helped that she didn't have a lot of screen time.

 

 

Actually, I watched that episode on Netflix just last night.

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More thoughts on THE STRAIN:

-The thing that struck me the most was how...disinterested most of Del Toro's direction seemed. Like, 80% of that episode could've been directed by anybody. He only seemed to wake up whenever he was doing a scene that showed off his crazy creature effects and production design. And, as always, that stuff looked incredible*. But I don't know if I can get into a show that seems positively bored with, you know, people stuff.

*Except Corey Stoll's wig. We've got 9-foot tall ornately engraved caskets, still-beating disembodied hearts, and all manner of undead in various states of decay and dismemberment...but we can't get the leading man a plausible wig. I appreciated the audacity of Stoll to run his fingers through it a few times.

-Have GDT or Hogan ever actually watched a press conference for a mass casualty event? Unfortunately, I, and I presume all of us, have seen a great number of such press conferences over the past several years. They are typically quite orderly, calculated affairs. I can't imagine a tragedy involving 200 deaths where a press conference would be handled by one unprepared guy who was basically tricked into doing it.

-They really wasted no time diving right into Eph's wife being the classic disapproving spouse who wants her husband to stop doing the thing he's really good at. Embrace that trope, guys.

-I know it's only the pilot, so maybe there will be some development going forward, but damn, you'd expect GDT to do better than the cholo stereotypes that were all over this episode.

-"That force...is LOVE."

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-Have GDT or Hogan ever actually watched a press conference for a mass casualty event? Unfortunately, I, and I presume all of us, have seen a great number of such press conferences over the past several years. They are typically quite orderly, calculated affairs. I can't imagine a tragedy involving 200 deaths where a press conference would be handled by one unprepared guy who was basically tricked into doing it.

 

 

Jeremy Northam's character in Mimic did the same thing and it's one of the few exterior scenes in the movie. However, the movie is suppose to take place in NYC but whatever the fuck they were filming looks nothing like Manhattan. Plus, you would expect more than 20 people to show up after two scientists stopped a giant roach disease epidemic. But whatever, Guillermo.

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Finished up through the "Dead Like Me" episode of HANNIBAL.

The show continues to drift in unpredictable and poetic ways.  I never would have thought they would bring Wil on Hannibal and Abigail's lie.  And they really surprised me with Hannibal himself...first that he seemed to flash with something like genuine emotion when he talks of Wil as his friend, but then again when he decides to use Wil as a test subject instead of helping him.  Or does he fear healing him will cause him to lose his empathy with Hannibal?

The Georgina Lass character showing up as Georgina Madchen was amazing and more, I think, than just clever fanservice.  To take that character which was from a show that could be dark, but which mostly treated death as a subject of dark humor and even uplifting whimsy...and to reframe her as a brutally realistic image of violent mental illness...

It was not only clever but kind of surprising.  I know it's common for t.v. writers to pay homage to their own previous work as a kind of easy cleverness, but I don't remember anyone doing it by subjecting it to such violence...a violence that cancels it out or even mocks it.  When she finally appeared onscreen she looked like the Donatello "Mary Magdalene" a repellant diseased body and a maniacal face of delusion representing a person who had previously been depicted as a kind of beautiful and vibrant person.

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That main character dude in The Strain is some kind of terrible.  And the scenes where he was in counseling and then talking about the counseling where painful.  But I like the idea behind the show so I liked it overall.  I have a weird ability to still enjoy garbage movies and shows so long as I like the idea behind it.  The best part about the show was Harry Potters janitor.  He was so over the top it was comical. 

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Finished the fourth season of Law & Order.  So the Ben Stone era is now over.  Watching every single episode in a compressed format like that really made me appreciate the Stone character even more than I did before.  His quiet, cutting remarks and moral certainty are very appealing for me.  Definitely strengthened my preference for Stone over McCoy.  I also liked the way Stone went out, first getting upset at Schiff's refusal to prosecute a killer from a race riot and then feeling guilt at a witness being murdered after she testified under great pressure from Stone.  Well done.

 

Started the 5th season and it's obvious that the producers decided to make it really clear that McCoy was completely different than Stone and had him go all cowboy in the first episode with him in it (prosecuting a quack doctor selling metabolic treatments for cancer for murder).  Interesting that they peg him as having 24 years experience in the DA's office in that first episode, meaning he's up around 40 years when the show ends.  That's a reallllly long time to serve as a DA.

 

Anyway, good stuff.

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I wish they had put some back story behind all the departures. I don't recall there ever being any explanations on screen for Robinette, Kragen, Schiff, Branch or Fontana leaving.

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Robinette and Kragen definitely didn't get any explanations.  It was kind of implied that Robinette was a bit disillusioned with the DA's office but nothing ever really stated.  Years later, he came back as a fiery "black lawyer" (instead of "a lawyer who's black", to use the phrasing Ben Stone challenged him with) and so it can be inferred that he left to be an advocate.  Kragen just disappeared, which is too bad.  Really, really liked his character.  Van Buren was great but Kragen was awesome as well.

 

Also, as I binge watch, I'm getting to see/notice even more of the actors who appear as multiple characters.  Camryn Manheim, for instance, being a strong defense attorney in one episode and a worthless foster mother in a later one.  Spreading them out over several years originally, I wouldn't notice that stuff nearly as much.

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The final five minutes of the 2nd to last episode of HANNIBAL season 1 (the last scene with Abigail and Hannibal) was one of the most brilliant things I've seen on t.v.

It was the first time in the entire season that we are in the presence of the true Lecter, no masks, where we see him be honestly and horrifyingly "what he is."  They saved it so long that we almost forgot to be looking for it and was kind of caught off guard.  There have been so many watered-down "sociopath" characters onscreen lately (Sherlock, Dexter) who are not really sociopaths.  And in that scene after a season of letting Hannibal show little flecks of emotion, and of lulling us into seein him as a man of sensitivity (the music, the food, etc.) we are lulled into a kind of comfort around him.

And then we see it for real. Calmly and quietly.  the total emptiness toward this character he had pretended to care about as he explains to her that she was simply a curiosity.  It was the most chilling manifestation of a cruel God wearing a human shell revealing himself to a terrified supplicant that I've seen.

The closest performance I can think of offhand is Al Pacino in some scenes from THE GODFATHER PART 2 in which it becomes clear that Michael Corleone is also a kind of sociopath.  It has something to do with the largeness of their eyes taking in everything around them but letting nothing out in return.

I'm still not sure, then, how to take the tears he has in the season finale.  Perhaps he is not always the same person either.  His self is divided into a being with some odd sentimentality and another one that is purely empty.

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