Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 3

I can't pretend I have much to say about this or any season of Curb Your Enthusiasm- just three seasons in and already my posts are getting stale. It's a funny show that is of course similar to Seinfeld, mostly with Larry criticizing social norms and committing his own faux pas and getting everyone around him very angry with him. It's a very consistent show, with no episode really all that much better or worse than any other. There's more light serialization here as Larry tries to open a restaurant with a few friends over the course of the season, and of course that's loaded with hijinks. The final scene in the restaurant was probably the funniest thing in the show thus far. This is by no means must-watch, but compared with what else is out there in the sitcom wasteland it's definitely well above average. And there you have it, my hot take on season three of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Four Past Midnight

Four Past Midnight should be the last of King I read for a while, so I decided to switch things up a little bit and ditch the long novels for a short-story collection. Only thing is, Four Past Midnight is a collection of four novellas, not short stories, and they average nearly 200 pages each anyway so again I got a huge long book to read. None of the stories really have anything to do with eachother so I'll cover them all separately.

The Langoliers- Wow! This started off just awesome. It took something that's not particularly creepy or scary- red-eye flights, and made it creepy as all hell. I don't want to spoil exactly what goes down here, but I'll just state right off the bat that the intro to Langoliers was the best part of the whole collection. It didn't finish up with quite the intensity, but it was overall a very solid novella and my favorite of the bunch.

Secret Window, Secret Garden- I was slightly familiar with this one- it was turned into a movie, Secret Window a few years back with Johnny Depp. I didn't see it but I remember the ads and the setup- Johnny Depp is a talented writer (eyeroll) working on a new book in his secluded Maine home, who suddenly has to deal with a psychotic Southerner who's hellbent on proving that Johnny stole his story and passed it off as his own. I was aware of the big twist, and you might already be able to guess what it is, but there were a few interesting tricks up King's sleeve to make this not a waste of time.

The Library Policeman- Apparently this story came from that dumb fear that some children have about the library- what if I lose the book? Who's going to come after me? How will I deal with that? It seems nonsensical to me now, but I remember being VERY stressed out as a little kid over a book that I was convinced was long lost and overdue, only to find out I had returned it and simply forgotten. I wasn't sure how King was going to be able to make a decent story out of that kinda funny concept, but to his credit he does make the story more than just "scary people come after you when books are overdue!" There's one scene late in the novella when you find out the identity of the Library Policeman, and it's, well... very hard to read. What mostly plods along as a kinda cheesy, goofy story along the lines of Christine quickly turns into something very depressing and gruesome. Not fun!

The Sun Dog- We end with a book that sounds a little too much like it belongs in the Goosebumps series- The Sun Dog. A prequel to the novel Needful Things, which was released a few months later, we visit King's favorite non-Derry locale, Castle Rock, where a young boy has received a Polaroid camera as a gift. The thing is, none of the pictures come out properly and instead seem to constantly depict the movement of a weird dog somewhere. The story was alright, but that hasn't soured me on Needful Things. But that won't come soon; I've posted enough King books on the Blog for now, time to get back into some of the other authors I've been neglecting.

Dexter The Seventh Season

I admit it. By the time I got to this season, I just wanted to get to the series finale. I get a bit obsessive when it comes to shows and I can watch them at a pretty good clip. Just ask Danielle as I ignored her for a long time. Hannah McKay was introduced in this season and man is she a shitty character. The relationship between Dexter and Debra is explored and that thing takes a turn for the shitty as well. It wasn't a bad season and I loved the finale, but it really set up season 8 to suck. This season didn't really take advantage of the season 6 finale like I thought it would. At this point, I pretty much hate every character in the show. There are a lot of things that piss me off, but I do not feel like I should be spoiling anything for anyone except maybe Webber. Anyway, after finishing season 8, I can safely say that Dexter lived up to my admittedly tempered expectations, but that the series finale is about as unsatisfying as Lost's.

Dexter The Sixth Season

So here it is. The sixth season. A season that is universally panned. You know what. I didn't hate it. I didn't love it, but with the benefit of being able to fly through it in a few days I didn't have to deal with Colin Hanks for that much of my life. This was clearly a bad season, but not much worse than season 5. Colin Hanks was horrible, but I was able to get through his BS and continue on with the series. This seemed like a missed opportunity because the biblical themes should have meshed well with Dexter. Anyway, I don't think this season ruined the series like many others believe, but I also never saw Dexter as a really good show. Enjoyable, but that's about it.

Trance

Always like keeping up to date with Danny Boyle's films. Aside from The Beach, all of his movies have been extremely strong and I just love his energetic style behind the camera. I think Trance peeked it's head into theaters sometime in the spring and went relatively unnoticed. Wikipedia says it only pulled in $22 million from theaters - that's a meh. Needless-to-say, the low hype and limited release was probably good reason why I didn't find my way to see this movie until it came out to DVD. 

... and I can understand why 20th Century Fox was hesitant to drop all their money in publicizing this guy.

I'm not saying it's bad - in fact, far from it - but it is a difficult movie to follow. If you're completely clueless as what this movie is suppose to be all about, here's the lowdown: James McAvoy works as an high-scale art auctioneer. There's an emergency (heist threat) while auctioning off an expense piece of art. McAvoy goes to place the art in a drop shoot for safe keeping when he's intercepted by a thief. During the altercation, the thief hits him on the head and McAvoy goes unconscious. He awakes with a bit of amnesia and learns a lot of startling events. For one, he was in on the heist, and more importantly... the painting that the thieves thought they successfully stole is actually missing (stole an empty case). With the help of a hypnotist/therapist, the group of thieves attempt to help McAvoy go into the deep recesses of his mind to figure out what happened the missing piece of artwork. And there are plenty of surprising developments suppressed in his foggy mind. 

Sorry if that brief introduction to the plot was confusing, but that's what this film is. Confusing. It's one of those stories that just frustrates you more and more the deeper you get into it; however, it does redeem itself. By the climax, there's enough info clearly revealed to help the majority of the audience connect all the dots. It's a relief, but, unfortunately, the payoff isn't anything incredible. 

And that's my overall stance on the movie. It's fun and entertaining as you try to unravel this mystery, but - as with any good mystery - the ending has to be something worthwhile. This ending has some fun surprises, but really just didn't do it for me. 

Still a Boyle fan. Still pumped for his next film - a sequel to Trainspotting. As for anyone else somewhat interested in this work of his, I would give it a go if you have the time. Great cast and great performances all around. Just know that you're probably not alone if three quarters of the way through you find yourself completely lost. Just push on and it will hopefully all come together. 

In Bruges

This was an impulse buy. I used it to push an Amazon.com order up above the $25 minimum for free shipping, so in a certain light I got it nearly for free. Still, I'm not sure it was worth it. This was a fine movie and everything, but I can't shake the notion that it was a fairly boring movie. Like, there are plenty of movies that are far shittier than this one that I can readily acknowledge I'd rather have watched last night. This was dry and dark and British, and that's all well and good, but it just didn't grab me at all.

Two Irish hitmen have fled to the town of Bruges (in Belgium) after a hit gone wrong. And while plenty else happens along the way, the movie's climax involves their boss finding them and preparing to finish them off. There were some memorable moments and witty lines, but ultimately this just wasn't a thrilling, exciting, or entertaining movie. It wasn't bad. It just wasn't fun.

Election (1999)

I first heard about this one close to a year ago when the AV Club called it one of the thirty best movies of the 1990s. A lofty claim, for sure, and one the movie didn't quite live up to. There's really not a whole lot to this one. Reese Witherspoon plays an overly ambitious and manipulative high school overachiever. Matthew Broderick is a sad sack teacher opposed to her uncontested bid for student president. And Chris Klein is a lovable but utterly naive idiot who gets talked into running against Witherspoon's character. The movie has been called a "razor sharp" political satire, and I just can't give it that much praise. Clever, yes. Brilliant, no. Maybe 1999 had different standards? At any rate, this movie's worth watching if you find it on basic cable or something, but I really can't pretend it was a hidden gem of any sort.

House, M.D.: Season 1

Finally back into the swing of things after over a month of no posts. There's a lot to go over. Let's get to it.

Been a while since I've written on any TV shows. Now, House, M.D. is something I've half seen. I think I watched most of the first four season years ago while in college, but after re-watching the first season it's clear that I haven't retained much. I'm not saying the show is forgettable. I think I just treated it more as background noise whenever it came on TV, and - to be fair - never gave it attention it deserved. 

In short, the show's great. Not the best thing I've ever seen, but certainly suspenseful and entertaining enough to help pass the time and keep me happy. The character of House is also compelling as all hell. Something that I just don't get tired of. (Let's see if I still feel that way at the end of season 8.) However, the reason why House is such a great character to follow is because it's just an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes only placed in the medical world. Not saying this a bad or cheap move - far from it. It just makes sense as to why the  title character is so riveting to watch. 

Sadly, that's all I really think I can contribute regarding my thoughts on this guy. Why? Well, for one, I pretty sure most people here have already seen this show and understand where I'm coming from without elaborating too much. Another reason is just that self-contained, one-hour dramas like this don't really inspire too much in the vein of captivating stories that grow with every episode (something you see with Breaking Bad or Lost). With 22 - 24 episodes a season, maybe a quarter of them build upon some riveting story arc (e.g. House in jeopardy of losing his job when he butts heads with the new head of the hospital), but the rest are bottle episodes. Stories that are fun to take in, but rarely build on anything if at all. I think this is why I treated the show so much like background noise back when I first watched it. I could pop in on any season and on any episode, see the familiar faces battle their diagnostic problem in the same formula and be entertained, but never wow-ed. Sure, I know there are some major events that occur throughout the series (House getting a new team, House going into rehab, House going to prison), but, in general, the show always seems to find it's way back to its comfortable routine... and for that, there's little else to say other than, "It's fun to watch." 

Looper

Time travel is tough. It's one of mankind's most frequent fantasies, and yet we can't even come up with a general consensus over how it could even feasibly work. Do all possible timelines exist simultaneously? Can you change the past or the future? If you were to die in a previous time, would you just kind of pop out of existence in your present? The trope has been explored half to death, but it's still such an appealing and challenging concept.

Part of what made Looper so appealing - in addition to a great cast and a cool story - was the simplicity with which it handled the concept of time travel, a central element of its plot. Compared to Inception, another recent beloved sci-fi movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and plenty of mind-bending concepts, Looper is relatively straightforward. Sure, there's some narration, especially early on, explaining the gist of how this future world works with its time travel and telekinesis. But you don't spend the entire film getting hit over the head with new rules, exceptions to old rules, and unique situations for which all previously established rules do not apply.

(Side note. I loved Inception when I saw it in theaters, but within a few days of seeing it I had already begun to sour on it. By the time my future wife bought it on Blu-ray several months later I had no interest in even seeing it a second time; when I did watch it a second time, its numerous holes and flaws were glaring and obvious. Still, there are few movies I've ever walked away from feeling more impressed by than Inception. So, was it a great movie, a terrible movie, or some compromise of the two possibilities? I still don't know. Okay, enough about Inception. Side note over.)

I expect I'll end up souring on Looper a little bit, too, with time. Although it was far more straightforward than Inception and should hold up much better to repeated viewings, I'm already figuring out some contradictions and strange plot devices that I didn't really care about at first. Hey, no matter; Looper had something Inception didn't, which was a compelling narrative that superseded its gimmicky sci-fi set-up. And along with the narrative came some great subversion of my expectations. A good movie shouldn't telegraph its twists from half an hour of screen time away, but at the same time a good movie earns its own outcomes, if that makes sense. A deus ex machina climactic resolution is a cop-out, but a predictable vanilla conclusion is no treat either.

I guess what I'm trying to say - and here come some major spoilers, which I feel safe writing here since at least four other blog members have seen this movie - is that I love how Bruce Willis became the bad guy. It's not even that it happened gradually and you came to realize it suddenly; rather, he was a bad dude the entire time, and we were just rooting for him early on before coming to spend time on the farm with Emily Blunt and the kid. Early on, we root for Bruce Willis and think Joseph Gordon-Levitt is being a total asshole, dismissing all this advice and all these warnings form his future self so callously, and then worst of all just ready to shoot and kill his future self for some easy money and a carefree life. But by the end of the movie, it's like, wait a second - why do we give a shit if Bruce Willis dies? He made his bed long ago, and now it's time for him to sleep in it. Plus he's killing kids. It's misguided at best and horrifying in any case. For a movie to take the wisdom out of an "old man" character and replace it with a cold quest for vengeance was subtle, especially given Bruce Willis's charisma, and I'm sure I'm not alone when I say once I got to the end of the movie I realized I was no longer rooting for him, but couldn't remember when I had consciously stopped doing so.

At any rate, I thought this was a very solid movie. It wasn't perfect or anything, but few movies with this kind of ambition are.

Kick-Ass

I didn't know much about this one heading in, aside from that it was a movie about some regular kids who decide to dress up like superheroes and end up in way over their heads. I didn't even know Nic Cage was in it, let alone that he stole the show. (Though, that latter part is no surprise.) I figured this was just one more recent movie in an ongoing string of superhero comic book adaptations.

And it is, really. But it was also surprisingly entertaining and brutally violent. I guess I'm so used to the "PG-13" status quo on superhero movies that seeing blood spatters and limbs flying felt delightfully fresh for me. That so much of the carnage came at the hands of an eleven-year-old girl was a bonus toward the element of surprise I experienced while watching this movie. Ultimately I guess this is nothing special, but it was a hell of a lot of fun to watch, which is more than I can say about so many other cookie cutter comic book action movies these days. I'm interested enough in the sequel to check it out eventually.