TV and Streaming

No more House calls for a while

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On Monday, Swiss television showed the season 3 finales of both House, M.D. and Lost. We haven’t seen the latter yet, but it probably says it all that the best moment of House, at least for me, was the Chase/Cameron kiss. That scene was sweet, but the actual medical case was too vague and the character interaction not very interesting. The House vs. God angle had also been done previously. All in all it felt like the series could do with a couple of months off. Seeing as season 4, cut short by striking writers, is just about over in the States, we might get it fairly soon…

Gregory House, looking dark and depressed in between snarky quips

… but first, we’ve got the grand return of Grey’s Anatomy (at a point where I sometimes feel that if I have to watch McDreamy be a self-righteous, self-infatuated git for another minute, I’ll find the actor and put his face through a meat grinder), doubled up with Private Practice, the Grey spin-off that got started in an atrociously written and at best adequately acted two-parter on its mother series.

How’s a man to cope – especially when this man knows that there are only six more episodes of Deadwood? Like, ever? Come to think of it, I’d like to see a cross-over where some select characters from Grey’s Anatomy and perhaps Desperate Housewives stop by the picturesque little town of Deadwood. Derek Shepherd could open a practice with Dan Doherty as opthalmologist. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, click here, unless you’re still hoping to watch season 3 of Deadwood.)

Six Feet Under is also almost over – two more episodes. What next? We’ve got a fair choice of series: Rome, The Wire, Carnivàle, season 6 of The Sopranos. Then there’s more escapist or pulpy fare: Heroes, Veronica Mars, Joan of Arcadia, Dexter. I’ve heard very good things about the latter series, especially season 2 – which came as a bit of a surprise, as the second Dexter novel was quite a bit weaker than the first. I guess that sometimes film and TV can improve on books…

And to end this very meandering blog entry, here’s a YouTube clip – the very effective opening credits for Dexter, a show whose ‘hero’ is a serial killer… who is intent on only killing ‘bad guys’:

This is the one with pictures!

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And what pretty pictures they are! Oh! Oh!

Okay, enough of that… it’s getting silly. What is there to talk about? Blood Simple, perhaps, which we watched tonight. A fascinating film to watch if you like les frères Coen, because it combines the “Ohshitohshitohshit…” tension of a James M. Cain novel with traces of the subversive humour that would come to full bloom in later Coen movies. Then again, I don’t particularly feel like talking about that movie. Go and watch it yourself, if you can keep yourself from constantly muttering, “Oh. My. God. Frances McDormand is so young!”

What else then? Nate Fisher’s funeral perhaps. It’s strange – when I first watched this episode about 1 1/2 years ago, I mostly felt numb throughout it. The tears only started to come halfway through the penultimate episode “Static”. (When the car pickup guy kicks in the crashed hearse’s window, that does me in completely.) This time, though, the aptly names “All Alone” really got to me. The way all the remaining Fishers, as well as Brenda and Maggie, were locked into themselves by their grief, rage and frustration. The way putting shrouded Nate in that hole in the ground seemed so final – even though this is Six Feet Under, where the dead appear to the living to cajole, taunt and sometimes, very rarely, if you’re lucky, offer much needed sympathy. Even Claire’s flashback to the day Kurt Cobain died (“Too pure for this world”?! Whatever it is you’re smoking, buddy boy, gimme some of that!) didn’t just feel embarrassing. Perhaps I’m just getting soppy and old.

Ruth alone

Or should I write about Deadwood? I’ve already said a lot about the tension that’s been building up since George Hearst’s arrival and immediate claim. It definitely feels like more blood will be spilled before the end of the season – and quite some blood has already been spilled. Not to mention other body parts ending up where they don’t really belong.

So, just one brief note about Deadwood: in addition to the dialogues, the world that is evoked, the storylines, the series’ feel for what the Germans call Spannungsbogen (there’s really no exact English equivalent, which I consider a much greater inadequacy than the lack of Zeitgeist or Blitzkrieg), I simply love the faces. They all tell stories, and they feel so eminently right.

George Hearst, looking for a new captain (preferably with two eyes)

A death in the family

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Phew. He’s dead. And even though I knew it was going to happen – heck, I’d seen it before – it’s still amazing how much it got to me.

Rest in peace, Nathaniel Fisher Jr. You were often frightened, stupid, self-righteous, passive-aggressive (and lately just plain aggressive) and self-centred… but I’ll miss you.

Before Nate died, you did WHAT to him?!

We also watched another episode of Lost yesterday, namely “The Man Behind the Curtain”. It seems that the series makers have realised that you can’t just keep heaping mysteries onto the viewer without also revealing a thing or two, and the series definitely benefits from it. Also, I definitely like John Locke, Zealot more than the dithering Locke in the latter half of season 2. Hey, sometimes you just need to knock out a one-eyed Russian to make your point!

Also, note to all fathers reading this: Never, ever forget your son’s birthday every year – because otherwise he might just end up gassing you to death on some mysterious Hawaiian island. And some con-man from down South may just end up popping the skull off your dessicated remains to make the audience laugh.

Narm!

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I guess I now know better than to have an extramarital fling with a deeply kind Quaker while my wife’s pregnant with a child that may or may not be born with serious health problems.

For all those of you who just went “Huh?”or “What the…?”, I’m talking about Six Feet Under, and especially the episode we watched yesterday, called “Singing for our lives” (admittedly, a more evocative title than “The World According to Narm”, which would have been my suggestion).

It’s Narm out there, man…

I’ve always been puzzled with the people on the web who watched Six Feet Under until the final episode but hated Nate Fisher. There seem to be quite a few of them, the series’ reviewer for Television without Pity being a case in point. Yes, Nate is in many ways a self-pitying, egocentric loser – but for one thing, so are many of us a lot of the time… but even more, I always thought that one of the points of Six Feet Under was that it had sympathy and understanding for all its characters, whether they were self-important art school students, neurotics (and boy, were there many of those in the series!), biker dudes, gang leaders, sexually confused young men, druggie sisters, Russian flower shop keepers or dweeby hairdressers. Yes, the series has a strong, at times vicious satiric streak, but I felt that inherently it didn’t really distinguish between good guys and bad guys. It showed you were people were coming from. And it expected at least a willingness to empathise from you.

There are still four episodes for us to watch. And like the first time I watched the series, I will probably want to go back to the beginning and start again. After “Everybody’s Waiting” I felt… bereaved, for want of a better word. I missed the Fishers. In some ways, watching the series again has felt like going through old photo albums and reminding myself of the people who are no longer there.

So, on that happy note: Narm!

Coming attractions

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To be honest, I’m not completely up-to-date on what will be coming to cinemas near you (and me) in 2008. Right now, I can only think of a handful of films that I know of, and even fewer that I’m actively looking forward to. Two of these I’ve already mentioned, namely The Dark Knight and No Country for Old Men.

However, the film that I may just be looking forward to most is the latest movie by Paul Anderson. Nope, not the guy who did Event Horizon or Aliens vs. Predator. The man who directed Boogie Nights (the best Scorsese film by someone other than Scorsese),  Magnolia (the best Altman movie not by Altman) and Punch Drunk Love (the best- sorry, I have no idea what to compare this film to… the best Adam Sandler film, perhaps?).

People have called Magnolia especially a self-indulgent piece of something or other, but to them I say, “Bosh! Flimshaw!” If art isn’t inherently self-indulgent, I don’t know what is. Punch Drunk Love mainly left me non-plussed, but the cast and trailer of There Will Be Blood (as well as the title, which is reminiscent of the Deadwood season 3 premiere, “Tell Your God to Ready for Blood”) definitely have me intrigued and excited.

Marie Antoinette… She’s just zis girl, you know?

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Apparently, Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was booed in Cannes. Now that I’ve seen it, I am tempted to say that French film critics are pretentious shrinking violets with an utterly neurotic attitude to their own past. It’s not a great film, and I would rank it lower than both The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation (both of which I liked a lot), but it’s a well made film with some good performances, and it’s definitely beautifully shot and edited. Frankly, I don’t know what les critiques Françaises are on about.

However, Marie Antoinette has one big problem: the beginning is by far the strongest, most subtle illustration of the film’s main motif – a young woman taken into a world that is foreign to her and that regards her as an alien intrusion into their rules and conventions – and almost everything that comes after is much more obvious, much less elegant. Coppola’s use of anachronisms, especially in her choice of music (but also in one semi-witty image of a Converse sneaker among the hundreds of Baroque shoes the young queen tries on), works well enough, but once you’ve seen one scene indicating that “she’s really just a lost, rich, poor teenager… and in the end, aren’t we all?”, you’ve seen them all.

In addition, the film does suffer from being under-plotted. This may be strange coming from someone who loves Lost in Translation, hardly the most plotty of movies, but because Marie Antoinette sticks pretty much to history, there’s little of the smooth flow that a well-told story has. There’s a sense that you could walk out for five minutes, to get yourself a drink or have a bathroom break, and come back without having missed much. I don’t think that films have to be plotted tightly, and in fact many of my favourite movies aren’t, but if you know from the beginning where the story will end – off with her head, and all that jazz – then the film can’t really afford to meander.

On related news, I’m going to keep myself short on Deadwood and Six Feet Under. Just know that there are things more frightening in Deadwood than Al Swearengen on a good or bad day, Francis Wolcott, or even E.B. Farnum talking dirty to a leather bag…

This man couldn’t be scary… could he? Could he?

P.S.: Brian Cox should be a fun addition to the citizenry of Deadwood… I wonder whether he’ll ever get that theatre built – I’d love to see auditions for amateur night!

Confessions of a sneaksy, thiefsy crash test dummy

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Well, for once I won’t write about last night’s episode of Lost (titled “Catch-22”). Why? Because it wasn’t very interesting – but neither was it so horrible that I have to share my eye-gouging terror with the world (and the Keira Knightley fans who may want to eviscerate me after yesterday’s entry… Just kidding!).

So, instead let me regale you with my current PC gaming choices: Colin McRae DIRT (which I’ve mentioned here before) and Thief: Deadly Shadows. The latter is a game that I originally played when it came out, but now, two computers and three videocards later, it runs much, much smoother than it ever did. However, the game bears sad witness to who I really am: someone who gets a kick out of skulking in the shadows, waiting for people to pass, and then hit them over the head with a blackjack and rob them blind.

Yup, that’s me. I prefer crouching in the darkness and waiting, and then knocking out my enemies. With almost any shooter game, if I have the option to put my opponents to sleep, that’s what I’ll do. There are few things as satisfying in a game as a totally non-lethal headshot with a tranquiliser dart and then dragging the motionless body behind a wall or some rocks… and then waiting for the guy’s buddy to turn up, looking for his mate – and do it all over again.

Now, as far as DIRT is concerned… I’m not bad at it. Not totally bad, at least. But sometimes… well, sometimes my driving looks pretty much like this – and (moving) pictures say a lot more than words in this case:

Those cheating so-and-sos at the Sci-Fi Channel

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I’m back from my Christmas break, with lots of new DVDs to watch and not enough time… Sad, sad, sad.

In any case, we continued with Battlestar Galactica season 3 yesterday, watching “Exodus”, a double episode that ends life under Cylon occupation for the poor denizens of New Caprica. (Who’d have thunk, with a title like that?) The episode was exciting, with some fairly tough scenes in between – but the way they continued from “Precipice” was a disappointing cop-out.

 Last thing we’d seen was Callie, running away after Jammer cut her restraints and told her to get out of there, and then we heard the sound of gunfire… Of course it was unlikely that the guns firing were actually the Cylon executioners cutting down, among others, Tom Zarek and Laura Roslin. It was unlikely that they’d kill both of them off in one fell swoop lifted more or less directly from The Great Escape. But they completely cheated with continuity and editing – when “Exodus” part 1 finally arrives at the scene, it’s plain to see that a) Callie isn’t running next to bushes or trees and b) by the time the guns start firing, she’s already been thrown to the ground by Chief Tyrol. There’s only one thing to say to such blatant cheating:

Your dirty, dirty birdy!

“HE DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCKADOODIE CAR!”

Anyway… While the episode fumbled on that one, it was very strong on characterisation. Especially Starbuck and Tigh get fantastic scenes. I never really liked Ellen Tigh as a character, finding her annoying more than anything else, but her last scene with Saul was quite heartbreaking; as was the expression on Kara’s face when she arrives on the Galactica with kiddo Kacey, whom she’s been made to believe is her daughter – and then Kacey’s real mother turns up, sees her child and takes it from Starbuck, crying and thanking her. You can almost see something inside Starbuck breaking.

It’ll be very interesting to see how (or indeed whether) the people who’ve escaped from New Caprica will re-integrate into life aboard the starship. Chances are there are fairly deep psychological scars, and it’s doubtful they’ll heal from one episode to the next.

P.S.: You gotta love Gaeta’s bitter quip to the quivering Baltar: “He believed in the dream of Gaius Baltar. The good life. Booze, pills, hot and cold running interns…”

HBO doesn’t believe in happy marriages

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Okay, I haven’t seen Rome yet, or The Wire (which is next on my list of “DVD sets I should bloody well get”), but in the HBO series I’ve been watching marriage pretty much seems to be a recipe for unhappiness of one sort or another. Nate and Brenda (although they did get along better than last week, and for a change Nate had a point under all his aggression), George and Ruth Fisher, Rico and Vanessa… The marriages in Deadwood are somewhat less unhappy and antagonistic, but the happiest couples are the ones that aren’t married: Trixie and Sol (and golly, aren’t they a lovely couple – the whore and the banker?), David and Keith (well, it took them long enough to get their act together!), Dan Dority and Johnny… Okay, that last one doesn’t really count – because we all know that Dan only has eyes for Al.

New career move for Calamity Jane - primary school teacher?

Today’s episode of Deadwood, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For”, made it clear that the town has been changed by the arrival of Hearst. People seem to be talking in more hushed tones and walking around on tiptoes. Even the sex and violence is no longer as carefree as in the good old days, when the guy shot dead in the saloon wasn’t part of an elaborate power game but just a symptom of Dan Dority having a headache. However, the episode had more humour in it than the season premiere, although some of it was of the “Did E.B. really just say that?!” kind. It’s amazing that the guy’s small intestine hasn’t jumped up his neck yet to choke his brain’s blood supply, to the service of all mankind.

Sometimes I wonder whether Rico doesn’t need a stool to stand on in order to reach the corpses…

We’re steadily getting closer to the end of Six Feet Under, and while I’m already sad about where the season will take us, I’m quite looking forward to getting started on a new series. We’ve got a couple to choose from: Rome season 1, Heroes, Carnivale (I’ve got both seasons), The West Wing, Dexter (you’ve seen him be neurotic and gay for five seasons – now see Michael C. Hall as a cop and a serial killer!). So many series, so little time…

One of us… one of us…

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Lost has this habit of introducing characters that I care little about (in some cases, I actively dislike them). Then, within one or two episodes, the series builds them up… and suddenly they’re fascinating!

That’s when I know they’re doomed, and in the next episode they’ll be blown up or eviscerated or shot.

If there is something to my theory, chances are that Juliet is for the chop. We recently watched “One of Us”, the episode where Jack introduces her to the rest of the beach bunnies and says, “Play nicely, kids!” Never mind that the Others abducted Claire, tried to shoot Sawyer, almost killed Charlie. (Okay, that last one may be understandable enough. Ahem.) Is it just me, or is Jack one of the most consistently naive people on that, or indeed any, island? Or is it just when it comes to women smiling at him?

“Either you’ll treat her nicely… or I’ll pout. I do a good pout, me.”

Especially in this episode, Juliet’s really grown on me. She’s almost as fascinating as Benjamin “Henry Gale (hope you haven’t read Wizard of Oz!)” Linus was in season 2. Her backstory’s intriguing, and her motivations murky in a good, wanna-know-more way. Elizabeth Mitchell’s acting, especially in the scenes with Ben (see the YouTube video below, if you’re interested), has also become considerably more complex and interesting.

However, I think what I enjoyed most about this episode was how it started to tie up plot strands from the previous two seasons. While there are still dozens of big, red, blinking question marks when it comes to what watchers of Lost laughingly refer to as “the plot”, there are hints now that the writers do know what they’re doing. If the rest of season 3 can manage to do that while keeping things interesting for the last two seasons, then bring it on, I say. (Just don’t kill Juliet next episode, please!)