Friday, September 14, 2007 Rant Archive
I think I have a hard time writing passionate reviews of MAD MEN, because like the characters on the show, my feelings about it are buried beneath the surface. I can’t rail against it passionately like LOST, or taunt it mercilessly like FOOTBALLERS WIVES. All I can do, is let it wash over me and at the end examine what’s left, like so much gold at the bottom of a sandy pan. (Oh if only this were DEADWOOD!)
This week some interesting things happened, arcanely, as is the way with this show. People are always either surprisingly blunt, or politely mysterious. The parsing of motives is what makes the show some thing to chew over long after the episode is finished.
This week the writers do something very interesting. Don is being lured away from Sterling Cooper by two big firms; McCann Erickson, and BBDO. They both over him various enticements, but he’s not sure. His boss and pal, Roger Sterling, catches a set of golf clubs meant for Don, and tell him he takes it personally. Roger (John Slattery) and Don (Jon Hamm) have great chemistry; I always find myself hoping they’ll stay together, no matter what.
With only two eliminations left before the finally, the chef-testants are hitting the road. Culinary personality, Jimmy Canora, was tonight’s guests judge, and he had his hands full with this talented crew. It’s getting down to the wire, and the ultimate prize is so close everybody can taste it, so to speak. In the past few weeks, the only two women left have stepped up their game leaving former front-runner, Hung, to catch up. After Hung’s dismal performance, not to mention his cocky attitude, last week, he had a lot to prove to the judges this week. With Howie gone, you would think the stress level would have lessened, but this is a competition that all the contestants take seriously. That being said, you could cut the stress on that plane with a knife. But, that just makes better TV for us lucky viewers.
Anybody who’s ever been on a plane knows how god-awful the food usually is, which is what makes this competition so brilliant. I mean you really do have to use your ingenuity to make gourmet food that gets heated up in tiny ovens 3,000 feet in the air. For example, the oven temperature has to be in line with the air pressure, or you’ll end up with that yummy rubber chicken we all are so accustomed to. And if not rubbery chicken, you may end up with a steak that’s charred on the outside and raw on the inside. By the way, these are both examples of meals I’ve forced down my throat while flying the friendly skies. So anybody who can work around all these obstacles is a step ahead of the rest. Let’s take a look at food presentation, while we’re at it. Imagine how difficult it is to present an artistic looking plate of food on those ugly airline plates.
This was the defining Power of Veto competition for Zach and Jameka. Their nemeses were the Donatos who had faced similar circumstances and beat the odds and stayed in the game.
With four houseguests left, whoever held the veto decided who would cast the one eviction vote and ultimately would decide who was in the “Final Three.” “The Final Three” is an elite group; much like the “Final Four” and the “Final Five” only considerably better by one and two respectively. You can see how prized a position in that company would be.
To prepare for the big competition Zach and Jameka quizzed each other relentlessly on useless bits of navel-gazing trivia concerning this season. All it needed was a theme song by Survivor and Edward James Olmos whacking a blackboard and excitedly telling them to do it again to get the full throttle adrenalin rush of underdog victory. At the end they prayed together. Zach guaranteed victory with his brash use of metaphor, informing us his mind was “A samurai sword.”
And he wasn’t lying, either. When it came time for the veto competition his mind was exactly like a samurai sword…in a trivia contest: inanimate and useless.
Oh, sure, you’ll laugh out loud watching MR. WOODCOCK. You will snicker, you will smile, you will groan. But you won’t feel good about it. MR. WOODCOCK is a guilty pleasure, along the lines of that great intellectual series of AMERICAN PIE films. Need I say more?
Jasper Woodcock (Billy Bob Thornton) is every overweight kid’s nightmare of a gym teacher, a sadist who gets pleasure in humiliating his charges. How does he check whether the students are wearing cups? He hits them in the crotch with a bat. How does he stop a kid with asthma from wheezing. He orders him to do laps.
John Farley (Seann William Scott, appropriately Stifler from the aforementioned PIE series) was a fat, ungainly child who suffered Woodcock’s abuse. But Stifler uh, Farley became a successful adult anyway, author of a best-selling self-help book, Letting Go: Getting Past Your Past and a highly sought-after lecturer.
He’s out on a book tour when he hears his home town wants to honor him with its rarely-awarded Corn Cob Key at the annual Cornival. So he cancels his engagements to return home in some ways like a Thomas Wolfe hero. He wants to surprise his widowed mother, Beverly (Susan Sarandon), but the surprise is on him. You’ll never guess who she’s dating. If per chance you really can’t guess, then perhaps this film may be too much for you. But for the rest of us, of course it’s MR. WOODCOCK.
Digitally Enhanced Original STAR TREK episodes return to syndication the weekend of Sept. 15!
Depending on where you stand on the issue of a TV classic being altered, you will either be elated or horrified by this news. The plan is to release digitally remastered episodes for our viewing pleasure. The premiere episode will be “The Galileo Seven,” which was the one that had Spock in command of the shuttlecraft Galileo. But, you hardcore fans already know that. The question is, will the enhancement of these episodes improve the quality of the show, or go down in history as being as disastrous as colorizing old movie classics?
Near the end of the fourth season finale of RESCUE ME, Lou (John Scurti) gives a rather poignant monologue about how baseball is a metaphor for life – how you can’t be caught napping during the down time, because something important will inevitably happen -- as he and the guys watch a minor league game. Sean responds by promptly dozing off in the middle of it.
Poor Lou. It was probably the most elegant thing he ever said, and it gets wasted on deaf (or sleeping) ears. But I heard it. And it’s a great way to sum up a compelling end to an otherwise uneventful season.
You can find metaphors galore when exploring the events of the past few months. There’s the baby (Wyatt? Elvis? Somebody get this kid a real name!) as a metaphor for Tommy’s (Denis Leary) failed relationships. There’s Latrina, who represents Lou and his cousin’s guilt for hurting each other. There’s the dog (aka the ghost of Jimmy Keefe), who Sheila sees as a metaphor for her lost time with Jimmy. There’s the alcoholism, which serves as a metaphor for the entire Gavin family’s inability to be happy.