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rwilymz
Reviews
The Daily Show (1996)
extremely funny, extremely partisan
Indecision 2004 consisted of a show each day for, oh, weeks and weeks that used the following formula:
Token Kerry gag;
28 minutes -- less commercial breaks -- of Bush lambasting.
Granted, the Bush stuff was funny, but after a few days of that the laughs turned to chuckles turned to smiles turned to rolled eyes. "I've seen this show, Jon; get some new material."
For the same reason most people don't eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week 52 weeks a year, most people like a bit more variety in their political humor.
Many comedians have made a handsome living doing political comedy, and all of them will tell you that the easiest way to lose half your audience is to even hint that you're one-sided. Stewart shouts "one-sided". So far, it's worked. ...well enough for Comedy Central, at any rate.
Hilarious in small doses; amusing when taken in chunks. He could do much better by evening out the lampoon.
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)
wa-a-a-a-ay better when i was younger
I saw this "film" the first time when I was a teenager, late at night, on broadcast television. Wow, wow, wow!! Susan George was the ideal older woman to a 70s-era kid: sun-bleached blonde, jiggling halter top, and loose! Peter Fonda was uber-cool, and we all aspired to his élan. The ending was an object lesson on the upper limit of "too cool", so we tempered our stride.
But then a funny thing happened. I grew older. I learned to appreciate dialogue in movies. I learned that "cool" doesn't pay bills, and that there's a lot of women whose entire net worth is bottled up inside their jiggling halter top.
I saw this again a few weeks ago on a satellite movie station, on a Sunday afternoon.
Teenagers are idiots. I can say this unequivocally because I liked this movie when I was a teenager. The only reason I'm grading this 4/10 is because I'm taking the average of my two ratings. It got 10 stars a few decades ago. Do the math.
The John Larroquette Show (1993)
This was a perfect depiction of St Louis ...
... if St Louis was NYC.
Living across the river from St Lose and having grown up a few hours from NYC, I was interested in seeing how American Television, an industry concentrated on both coasts, would depict a city smack dab in between them.
I got the answer after a few shows: farcically.
St Lose is dominated by white and black which The JLq Show had, but Television Formula required the Obligatory Hispanic /Liz Torres, great actress/. There are no accented Hispanics around here. The nearest one is 300 miles away -- in Chicago. Casting Liz was my clue that something was seriously amiss in the show.
The closest thing to "ethnic" around here is: 1- "The Hill" -- actually a generally rising slope -- dotted with Italian restaurants; 2- Soulard Market, an old french quarter holdover where the frenchiness is reserved solely in the name; and 3- German towns in southwestern IL where everyone has a last name with no fewer than 18 letters, an uncommon allotment of which are 'e' and 'i'.
No Hispanics. Anywhere.
StL is brain sandwiches and toasted ravioli; downtown closes at 6PM. By law. Budweiser and mostaccioli -- pronounced "muskacholi" -- are the equivalents of champagne and pate at local weddings. These things are interesting, even if only from an Abnormal Psych perspective, and would have been worth seeing in a national television show centered on some region other than the boring, repetitive and cliché NYC and LA scenery and lifestyle.
But, oh well, you can't fight Television Formula. Don't bother sending the writers on a field trip to research the people they're going to depict. Remake the center of the country to be yet another in a long line of NYC replicants.
Good actors; tired plots; wasted opportunity.
Pornucopia: Going Down in the Valley (2004)
Fascinating look at The Biz
Watched the documentary series with my wife, who originally turned me on to its Real Sex original. What a wife! We get to see what porn stars are like when they aren't porning. Most of them are normal. They just like sex. A lot. They talk about the body parts involved and what they're doing as casually as others talk about an itch on their elbow.
The starlet we first meet, Katie Morgan, originally comes across as an airhead, but we see her in one of the later shows being interviewed and quizzed on a radio show, and she's not unintelligent. She still *sounds* like a ditz, but then we can't always help that.
The show tended to repeat some bits -- I was gonna say snatches but thought better of it -- quite often, and I think if I'd heard Ashlee or Bambi or whatever say "Finger lickin good" one more time it would have put me off porn forever, but mercifully they stopped in time.
Did you know that the female stars control who they will and will not, um, boink? Bet you didn't. Women veritably run the show. That's feminism! Did you know that Viagra® is the drug of choice in The Valley? We get to hear how porn stars balance love and relationships with porn acting: some embrace it; others go to female-only sex until they break up and marry someone else.
We get to see directors and crew commenting on the meal catering while in the background is obviously a money-shot being filmed. They musta been real hungry...
We get to see a few clips of Jenna Jameson, thankfully, and none of Ron Jeremy, also thankfully.
We get to see the movie camera change angles, and the actors stop and start their action. On cue. I could never accomplish that. Frankly, I'm in awe. Makes me appreciate what they do all the more. And wasn't that the point?
The Rundown (2003)
Fun mixture
As a cardboard "professional wrestler", The Rock {YOU call him Dwayne, I ain't gonna} is a remarkably good actor; as a professional actor, Christopher Walken turns in yet another cardboard performance. And I'm still waiting for Seann Scott to stop playing Stiffler. "American Pie" is a franchise and all, but geez, even Ashton Kutcher stopped playing Kelso in "Butterfly Effect".
That said, Stiffler worked here.
As you might imagine, the premise of the film is contrived, and the plot struggles to keep it plausible. Even so, neither me nor my wife, both very anti-action movie, wanted to change the channel. It has just enough self-aware comedy to keep it from being the typical boring "action film".
Rosario Dawson looks good sweaty, by the way, and should remain so in all her roles for years to come.
Screw My Wife Please: Collectors Edition 4 (2004)
Interesting concept ...
This was featured on the HBO documentary series "Pornucopia: Going Down in the Valley". The documentary led my wife and I to believe that it was a normal couple who wanted to star in a porn film with an established porn star. That is, true amateurs on a working vacation of sorts.
Apparently not true. The "normal couple", Yasmine and Vincent Vega, have been in porn films both before and after "Screw My Wife #4". Particularly Vincent, though I don't know why. Yasmine was far more alluring.
But that's only me. My wife might have a different opinion.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
The Ghost of Henry Higgins and the Widow Doolittle
As a kid I got to [had no choice] watch the Ghost and Mrs Muir television show. As a kid it was utterly fascinating; of course, as a kid, ghosts are possible. I vaguely knew that it was a weekly version of The Famous Old Classic Film®.
This last weekend I got to [my choice] watch the old classic.
I wish I'd stuck to my memories, vague though they are, of the television series.
I'd never seen anything, to my knowledge, with Gene Tierney in it before, and she was adorable. I was convinced that she could be a widow with no remarkable remunerative talents.
Rex Harrison, though, was entirely too busy acting like Rex Harrison, which is to say: proper, stuffy, eloquent and articulate. A sea cap'n, 'e warn't.
I actually snickered when the salty tar was chastised by the widow for being ungrammatical while reciting his memoirs. Harrison's version of a "grizzled owlde sea cap'n" was almost as embarrassing to watch as Gregory Peck's version of the appalachian dirt farmer in "The Yearling". Hint to you both: dialect is not the boarding-school elocution of slang words.
By George, Rex, you didn't get it. You needed Audrey's dialogue coach.
Surprise by Design (2002)
Surprise by chewing the scenery
This is one of a whole slew of home/room/personal redesign shows that populate and repopulate and endlessly re-re-re-re-repopulate cable and satellite channels way, way up the dial. The originals for many of these shows can be found on BBC-America.
Fortunately or not, I've become familiar with all of them at my wife's insistence, and after having seen them for well over a year now, I can actually tell the difference between some of them.
For example, Trading Spaces ginally Changing Rooms, on BBC] is an hour long and is hosted by Paige Page, though she goes by her maiden name: Davis. While You Were Out is guerilla redesign, is also an hour long, and has been hosted by three different people in its two-plus seasons. The highlight of this show was when the second host[ess], Theresa Strasser, was confronted by a combative surprisee, and she claimed to be Paige Davis. Inside humor for The Learning Channel.
Surprise By Design is also a guerilla make-over show, but it has the unique advantage of being only a half hour long. Unfortunately, the producers of this show have felt the need to compensate by doubling the hosts. So while While You Were Out is an hour long with one host, Surprise By Design is a half hour with two hosts. The host/hour density remains the same.
In While You Were Out, the host doesn't pretend to know what he or she is doing, and they bring in a designer from their stable, and the host becomes a gopher, a furniture mover and a painter; in Surprise By Design the hosts are the experts, and in order to get the guerilla redesign accomplished, they pull in a whole cadre of gophers, furniture movers, and painters from among the surprisee's family and friends.
Meanwhile, the hosts -- Robert Verdi and Rebecca Cole -- spend the first twenty-five minutes of every half-hour show trying to impress the gang of imported manual laborers by mugging for the cameras, making stupid jokes, giggling incessantly at each others' stupid jokes and basically annoying the snot out of the viewer with their vapidity. After the final commercial break, the surprisee comes home to find a room full of friends, strangers and television cameras, and Robert and Rebecca spend 45 seconds seriously describing how they did what they did.
The sparse denouement is not worth the oppressing "look at me giggle I host my own cable interior design show giggle giggle everything I say is witty and charming giggle giggle giggle".
For guerilla home makeovers, watch While You Were Out. You'll double your time commitment, but you won't be anywhere near as annoyed after you're done. giggle giggle.
giggle.
Trading Spaces (2000)
It ceases to be flattery when the imitation is better than the original
A direct rip-off of British TV [Changing Rooms], and it's far superior. Insert requisite blurb about the gimmick: redecorating a neighbor's room while ditto does ditto to yours.
This show is a hit; critics will have a hard time swallowing that. They will spend a great deal of time rationalizing why it shouldn't be. The music is boring, bad, lousy, tedious, whathaveyou, critics will wail. Jazz infusion is none of those, sorry. And it's better than the one-button Casio rhythm line from Changing Rooms. Just be honest and say "I don't like jazz infusion", and stop being impertinent.
A second impertinent yank on Trading Spaces is the shirts. I got one for my wife's Christmas gift this year; don't tell her. Yeah, they have a "Home Depot" logo on the sleeve, so what. You don't like Product Placement? Even The Simpson's does product placement, and that's a cartoon. If you have ever done a "project" around the house, you are well aware that you have a special shirt to catch all the gunk you spray yourself with. If you don't have such a shirt, you will by the time that first project is done, because whatever shirt you were wearing is all gunked up. The show simply provides the shirts.
Another popular criticism is that the show's too long. A half hour is not enough time to see a room, envision a redesign, see the results AND see how to do it. If you want to limit the show to a half hour, you're going to, of necessity, eliminate the How To Do It part.
If you live in an apartment, this may be fine. But if you have actually graduated from college and have a job that pays real money, then you probably have a house, and you are, by definition, a DIYer. Being a DIYer, you need to see How To Do It. Unless, of course, you are simply rolling in cash, and can afford to hire someone to do it for you. I'm sorry, Mr and/or Ms Vanderbilt, but maybe you should get your servants to watch TV for you as well, if this show is that annoying to you.
Changing Rooms -- the BBC original -- is only a half hour long, long enough to see the befores and afters, the bickering in between, but little or nothing of the How To Do It. Which may be just as well, since British rooms are usually no bigger than a walk-in closet anyway.
Another of the favorite criticisms is that the designs or the designers are simply bad. Welcome to real life, folks. How many times have we tried to redo our bathrooms only to find that we didn't like it when the paint dried? I used to have a family room that was functional, but aesthetically hideous, a Modern Troglodyte masterpiece. Watch Trading Spaces for a bit, see what sort of things work and, most importantly, How To Do It, and the family room looks habitable. Okay, so the wife insisted. But the point is, I would have kept resisting except that I saw How To Do It several times, by watching these shows over and over and over again. If John and Mary Guest-Star can do it when they can't use power tools, then I can also. And I *know* how to use power tools.
Trading Spaces appeals to those with home equity, because homeowners are always embarking on Another Big Project or other. This show, of all of them, is simply the most fun to watch.