Monday, June 11, 2007 Rant Archive
What is there to say about the last episode of THE SOPRANOS? There are no big shoot-ups, no dramatic, violent deaths, no obviously life-changing moments. There is life, and it goes on.
Despite losing his top two guys last week, things with New York appear to have calmed, and Tony’s major worries are what to do about A.J. and his desire to join the army. Paulie develops a hatred of a cat, and we learn that Meadow can’t parallel park. The minutia of everyday life has returned, and due to the fireworks of the past few episodes, we hang on every syllable and action, looking for meaning. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And as always, David Chase has his way with us. He knows how invested we, the audience, have become in his characters, and he uses this episode to bring us right back to the beginning. Tony almost immediately begins recounting his tales of childhood woe when confronted with a therapist — though this time the shrink is treating A.J., not him (not that he cares). Carmela worries, and Meadow whines. The only difference is the feeling of loss. No Christopher, no Silvio, No Bobby — heck, no Big Pussy.
When HOSTEL and WOLF CREEK both arrived during the 2005 holiday season, they garnered a lot of attention for their gory scenes of torture and for heralding the arrival of torture horror to the U.S. I saw both films in theaters and found Eli Roth’s HOSTEL to be the better of the two. What made Roth’s film so enjoyable was not the protracted sequence of sadistic violence, but the manic third act. The tempo increased dramatically and the audience was rewarded for its perseverance with one of the most madcap, violent chases ever captured on film. The second film picks up right on the heels of the first, but where it doesn’t lack the creativity of its predecessor, HOSTEL: PART II is ultimately a letdown.
Where the first HOSTEL featured male protagonists, its sequel follows two female students studying in Rome. The two decide to unwind with a backpacking trip to Prague, and invite a mousy classmate to go along. On the way, an exotic friend encourages the coeds to join her at the titular lodge to enjoy the fabled hot springs of a nearby Slovakian town for the weekend.
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I didn’t hate SURF’S UP. It’s far too innocuous to be the subject of derision. I’m sure it’s a godsend to those among us looking to entertain the little ones during the long summer months. Still, Sony Pictures Animation’s latest is about as mind-numbingly safe a bet as you can cook up in the shadows of a constant barrage of high-profile summer blockbusters. As such, a collective groan swept the country when parents realized there was going to be another penguin movie out in June.
Did anyone really anticipate that penguins were going to become a legitimate subgenre of children’s entertainment? Is there any creature on the planet that can emote as poorly as this Antarctic bird? When the fad began with 2005’s MARCH OF THE PENGUINS, I was not as surly as I am today. I really enjoyed the Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary. There was a charm to the stoic emperor penguins in their dumb tenacity. But the follow-ups to this sweet movie have squandered my good humor. Six months ago, HAPPY FEET confirmed that penguins were in fact bankable, and so we’re treated with this predictable retread.
JOHN FROM CINCINNATI shows possibilities — a great cast and a great creative team. But so far, nobody dies.
When a critic says a television show or film is quirky, it means that the show is odd, difficult to describe and he or she likes it. If s/he didn’t like it, the performance wouldn’t be called quirky; it would be called stupid.
JOHN FROM CINCINNATI (Sundays, 9 p.m., HBO) definitely is quirky. It is the brainchild of David Milch, and for those of you who follow these things, he was the guiding light behind NYPD BLUE and, more recently, DEADWOOD. He created this show with Kem Nunn, slacker/surfer-turned-author who is considered a kind of Raymond Chandler of the boogie set; Nunn made his reputation writing noir novels about people who ride the waves. For the record, if you saw it, the film POINT BREAK was based on one of his books, but so loosely as to be unrecognizable.
What they’ve come up with here is something totally different and unexpected. It’s not a wet DEADWOOD or a dramatization of the Beach Boys gone HBO. It is fascinating, thought-provoking and, well, quirky.
What fruit loop okayed this series? He or she must be real loopy. Okay, I’m out of loop jokes — but so is THE LOOP.
There was a rumor flying around the television business a year or so ago that a consortium of network executives had contacted the federal government about buying the Grand Canyon. Apparently, the Lords of Television were looking for a safe place to dump their failed shows.
Of course the deal never went through. Someone in accounting did the math. The Grand Canyon wasn’t big enough.
So, a decision was made to burn the old sitcoms. By burn, of course, we mean in a politically correct and environmentally-friendly way. How? Put the episodes that were paid for by the network, but unaired — the very episodes deemed so terrible that they warranted the cancellation of the show — yes, put those remaining episodes on the air. However, TV execs by law subscribe to the Hypocrite’s Oath: First, do no harm. So the shows are aired when no one is watching and likely to be hurt.
This of course brings us to the burning of THE LOOP — a series that lasted a few episodes last fall before it was, I believe, the term is “put on hiatus.” (That sounds so much better than axed, doesn’t it?)