thoughts on Nashville 10/31/12

1)You know how during my first review of this show, I could neither remember Rayna's husband's name nor pick him out of a character list? I've had the same trouble with a lot of characters on this show, finding myself thinking things like, "Okay, there's Juliette. There's the other blonde girl. There's the other blonde girl's boyfriend. There's the other blonde girl's singing partner." At first, I thought this was because of the whole divided-attention-span thing I mentioned in my first review. However, tonight I realized why it is so hard to keep people straight: everyone has a name that either sounds completely made-up; is the name of a famous fictional character; or sounds like a nickname, only you suspect in this context it is the person's actual name. Rayna. Juliette. Scarlett. Deacon. Gunner. Teddy. Scarlett's boyfriend's name is Avery, which is a real, not-made-up name, yet it still manages to be confusing because it can be either a man or a woman's name. I realize that many real country music singers' names also fit the criteria I've just given: Dolly, Reba, Waylon, Garth, and Martina are not names you hear excessively often in daily life. Still. It is only now, a few episodes in, that I feel like I've gotten everyone straight.

2)I spent a lot of this episode puzzled by Juliette's entire storyline. Is it really that big of a deal, I wondered, that this girl shoplifted a bottle of nail polish? Then I thought of country singers that I think Juliette is supposed to be similar to-- Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood, namely-- and I realized that if one of them did that, yes, it would be a big deal. What it comes down to is this, though: I still just don't really care that much about Juliette. I thought about this last week, too. For one thing, I don't think that Hayden Panetierre is nearly as strong of an actor as Connie Britton. Connie Britton is the type of actor who you root for even when her character is doing bad things; do you all remember second season Friday Night Lights, when Tami Taylor actually slapped Julie at one point? In theory, that could have made you hate her, because that is a pretty terrible thing for a mother to do to a daughter. But you didn't hate her, partly because Julie Taylor was Just Awful, but also because Connie Britton made you see how Tami had reached her breaking point: Coach had taken that college coaching job in another town and wasn't around much, and she had a new baby, and she didn't have anyone to talk to except for stupid Glenn, and she just snapped. I never really had a strong opinion on Hayden Panetierre one way or another before I watched this show, but I just don't think she can hold her own with Connie Britton. I also don't think she has the star quality of someone like Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood: again, you just don't get why anyone would care if she stole a bottle of nail polish. I wonder if this is going to be a problem for this show.

3) They do a great job with the musical scenes on this show, huh? I mentioned how magical I found Rayna's daughters' talent show performance last week, and Deacon and Rayna's country club performance tonight? Wow. The way they were looking at each other. The way Deacon was looking at Teddy. The way Teddy and Kimberly Williams-Paisley were looking at each other (and-- whoa! Teddy had an affair with Kimberly Williams-Paisley's character?! Whaaaat?!). These are characters who have spent years loving each other, hurting each other, and/or hating each other, and all of that comes through when they sing or even watch each other sing. It's amazing.

4) Also, okay, wow. That opening scene where Rayna and Deacon were in bed together? My inner monologue went something like this: "Ohmigod. When did this happen? Did I miss something at the end of the last episode? Is someone dreaming? OH. Yes. Rayna is dreaming." I was a little disappointed...but I like that Rayna is morally ambiguous enough that you wouldn't be shocked if she cheated on her husband.

5) One thing that's sort of frustrating is that basically everyone is romantically involved with the wrong person-- Rayna and Teddy, Deacon and Juliette, Scarlett and Avery, etc.-- and you know where it's all going, and you wish they would just get there already.

6) Unrelated side comment: I had never seen more than a couple of minutes of Suburgatory before I started watching this show. Now, however, it comes on between Modern Family and this, so I've wound up catching the last two episodes. It's oddly compelling. Like, I was putting away laundry while it was on tonight, and I kept reaching out my hand to turn off the TV when I walked by, then pulling my hand back. Hmm.

The End.

thoughts on Nashville 10/24/12

I don't have a ton to say about this, except that the scene where Rayna's daughters sang at the talent show was frickin' magical. The older one with her glasses and guitar, and the younger one with her little boots, all stomping her feet...magical. Other than that-- oh, Juliette. I feel like I should feel bad for her by this point, yet watching that last scene I'm just all, "Oh, there goes poor, sad Juliette, buying her chips and dip. There she goes, buying her nail polish-- oh, no wait! She's just putting it in her purse! Those girls are going to put that video on the Internet! Stupid Juliette."

Teddy doesn't want to apply for a loan. Hmm.

Rayna's mom had a ten-year affair with a musician. Double hmm.

That's all!

thoughts on The Perks of Being a Wallflower

In honor of Kate Walsh playing a minor role in this movie, please enjoy my two favorite clips from her days on Grey's Anatomy. They are awesome, though I incorrectly remembered her calling Meredith a "tramp" in the first one, and I also incorrectly remembered Derek telling her, "I'll see you in Hell, Addie," in the second one. They would be better my way, but again: still awesome.





Okay. Now that that's out of the way...The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Logan Lerman plays Charlie, who has psychological issues stemming from a repressed childhood trauma (that he doesn't remember until late in the movie, and which I won't reveal the details of here) and from his best friend's recent suicide (which he tells his then-new friend Sam (Emma Watson) about while stoned at a party, promptly freaking her out). He starts high school with no friends, eating alone in the cafeteria (his older sister goes to his school and seems nice enough, but is, through much of the movie, constantly hanging out with her boyfriend, "Ponytail Derek"). However, he is fairly quickly taken in by two seniors-- the aforementioned Sam and her stepbrother Patrick-- and their group of friends, who Sam refers to as "the island of misfit toys." Indeed, they are not the "cool kids"; they include Mary Elizabeth, who has "somehow gotten angrier since becoming a Buddhist," and Alice, who "is constantly stealing jeans from the mall, which doesn't make any sense, since her parents are rich." I'm not sure if this is the type of movie I can say I enjoyed, exactly, as it dealt with some pretty heavy stuff, but there are definitely things that I appreciated, including...

1) ...lunch on that first day of school, when Charlie nervously looks around for someone to sit with. I've been the new kid before, and yeah, they capture this accurately. You can practically hear his heart beating in this scene. One of my problems with a lot of TV and movie teens (and I may have complained about this before) is that they seem way too confident; Rory Gilmore on Gilmore Girls, for example, was always just casually eating lunch by herself, wearing her headphones and reading a book, and I really had a hard time believing that she cared so little about fitting in. Like, there is one episode where she goes off to a room by herself during a party and opens a book that she's brought along with her, and I remember screaming at the TV, "WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL?" Charlie, though dealing with a host of serious problems, is ASTOUNDINGLY normal, which I also really appreciated. A lot of movies with mentally ill characters make that illness the single defining aspect of their lives, and that isn't the case here. It is an important aspect of his life, and sometimes plays a bigger role in his life than in others, but there is a lot more to him than that.

2) ...the sheer joy Charlie feels at just having friends. Now, as I've mentioned before, Patrick, Sam, Mary Elizabeth, and Alice aren't the "cool kids," and, since they are all going off to college at the end of the movie, they won't be the only good friends Charlie ever makes, and I doubt he'll even keep in touch over the years with Mary Elizabeth and Alice (though I think Sam and Patrick, especially Sam, will always be special to him). That's how it works, when you're in a new situation: you fall in with the first people to be nice to you, and maybe you stay friends with them, maybe you don't, but just that feeling of belonging is HUGE. The movie captures that really well, also.

3) ...the fact that Charlie knows all of the answers in his English class but won't raise his hand for fear of singling himself out as "different." Again: he isn't overly confident like a lot of TV and movie teens. (Though I could relate to Charlie in a lot of ways, though, that isn't really one of them; sure, there have been individual classroom situations where I haven't really talked a lot, but in high school, I totally would have been obliviously constantly raising my hand and then been genuinely confused when people found me annoying.)

Basically, you're getting the idea here: this movie gets a lot of the little things right that a lot of movies get wrong. During the movie, I wondered when, exactly, this movie was taking place; I guessed the late eighties or early nineties, and yep, looking it up just now, I learned it was during the 1991-92 school year. The kids are constantly making each other mixed tapes; I was making mixed tapes right up until the day I got my first car with a CD player, which I'm going to go ahead and admit was in 2004. But, yeah-- I miss the mixed tape, and how sometimes it would run out of room mid-song, as Charlie experiences (see? Again with the little details). Oh, and Kate Walsh (who plays Charlie's mom) is always wearing these flowered dresses like EVERYONE wore back then. Oh! And there's this moment where Charlie just puts down the cordless phone when his girlfriend-at-the-time won't stop talking, and his dad gets exasperated because he needs the phone. Remember cordless phones that the whole family shared? Remember when not everyone had their own cell phone? Man.

Another thing that is nice about this movie is that, though some of the high school characters in this movie do your average, jerky high school things (such as calling Patrick "Nothing" FOR THE ENTIRE SCHOOL YEAR because of ONE incident in shop class), and though some truly awful things have happened to Charlie over the course of his life, he is basically surrounded by good people. His friends abandon him for awhile as a result of something that happens at a party but like him again when he sticks his neck out for one of them-- again, the type of thing that happens ALL the TIME, especially when you're young, but even sometimes when you're an adult. His parents seem to give him a pretty decent amount of freedom considering his past issues and even his age, and they don't seem to freak out about too much, even though over the course of the movie he 1) brings home an older girl with a white streak in her hair 2) is found passed out on the snow after taking acid and 3) gets into a pretty major fight at school at one point. His brother is a college football player and doesn't seem to have much in common with him, yet he seems to take a genuine interest him. His sister, as noted before, isn't above ignoring him at school, but knows to tell a friend to call 911 when Charlie calls her freaking out. Again, basically good people, even if they don't always do everything right.

Here are a couple of bits of randomness (yes, in addition to the Grey's Anatomy clips): 1) Paul Rudd plays Charlie's English teacher. I don't really have much to say about that. I just thought it was cool.

2) Sam, Patrick, Mary Elizabeth, and Alice are all members of the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which seems to play year-round in their town. My thoughts on this are a) that movie is SO inappropriate for high school students to even be watching, let alone to be so involved in and b) GOD. I haven't ever been to a "real" showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I've just seen it on VH1 a couple of times, yet SOMEHOW, something happens to get "Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me" stuck in my head for days on end like once every two years. Before this, it was when the Glee kids tried to put on The Rocky Horror Show in their school (only it wasn't allowed, because again-- SO INAPPROPRIATE). Now-- this movie. It's just a weird thing to find yourself singing to yourself on your normal Thursday morning run, is all I'm saying.

And on that note, I will leave you with this somewhat disturbing clip of Miss Pillsbury from Glee singing "Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me" to Mr. Schue while Britney and Santana look on. You're welcome.

thoughts on the Nashville series premiere

I'm going to preface this review by explaining something: when I am watching TV, I am usually also doing something else, at least during the commercials. Example: there were two episodes of Modern Family on last night. When the first one started, I hadn't quite finished cleaning my bathroom yet, so I kept jumping up during commercials to do that. After I had finished, my apartment was clean, except that the two pumpkins that I bought on Monday were still sitting around unpainted, so I sat them on some old magazines, got out my painting supplies, and got to work, looking up when I could tell the characters were responding to something visual (Phil got dorky t-shirts made to wear while moving Haley into the dorms at college! Gloria was insisting on wearing her pre-pregnancy clothes LONG after appropriate and busting out of them all over the place! Claire accidentally cut off a chunk of Alex's friend Skyler's hair!). By the time I finished that, Nashville was starting, and I fully intended to give it my full attention; I love country music, I love Nashville, and I loved Connie Britton on Friday Night Lights, so I was really looking forward to it. But then I wanted to take pictures of my pumpkins and post them on Facebook, and of course then there were other things I wanted to check out on Facebook, and then I needed to clean up my paining supplies, and then I freaked out a little bit because I had managed to get paint on both my pants and my couch (even though I sat on the floor to paint the pumpkins), and so on, and so on, and so on.

Somewhere in the midst of this, I managed to catch the gist of the pilot episode of Nashville, a lot of which was given away in the previews, and in articles I'd read about it: Connie Britton plays Rayna James, a country singer who is beloved by fans and by the Nashville community, but who hasn't had a hit in some time, and whose current album is tanking. Ticket sales for her upcoming tour aren't good, either, and the record company says that they will lose a lot of money if they try to send her out on an arena tour with those types of sales. They propose a solution: she will "co-headline with" (which Rayna figures out pretty quickly means "open for") Juliette Barnes, an up-and-coming singer played by Hayden Panettiere. Juliette is kind of supposed to be like Taylor Swift, I think-- if Taylor Swift was THE PERSONIFICATION OF PURE EVIL, that is. No, really, Juliette will probably turn out to be okay-- she seems to have more talent than Rayna gives her credit for, and her bitchiness appears to primarily be caused by Mommy issues. But in this episode, at least, she turned me off by flirting with/fawning over every guy she met while being openly bitchy to Rayna for no apparent reason, other than that she is apparently the type of woman who has no use for other women because they see them as 1) competition and 2) unable to do anything for them, financially, emotionally, or otherwise. I HATE that.

Anyway, Rayna is given a few days to think about the offer. The record company clearly expects that she will accept it once she thinks it over and decides to swallow her pride, and quite frankly, I expected her to, too. I expected that the first season of the show would primarily follow Rayna and Juliette on tour, and that they would have a dynamic similar to Gwyneth Paltrow and Leighton Meester's in Country Strong-- competitive with and suspicious of each other at first, but then slowly growing to like each other, with Rayna serving as a mentor of sorts to Juliette.

I was wrong.

Oh, I can't say how Rayna and Juliette's relationship will develop over the course of the series. What I do know is that Rayna walks into that record company executive's office, outlines all of the things that she has done for the record company over the years, and then tells them to "kiss their offer as it's walking out the door." And-- impressed by this point, but still seeing Connie Britton in her Friday Night Lights role-- I shout, "You ROCK, Tami Taylor!" And then they cut to commercial, and I do what I tend to do, which is pick up my laptop and check Facebook.

Meanwhile, a subplot is developing where Rayna's father, who apparently is one of the richest, most powerful men in Nashville, is trying to find a mayoral candidate who he can "keep in his back pocket." And because he is evil as hell, he plays on the insecurities that Rayna's husband-- whose name I can't remember, and whose character was so nondescript that I can't even pick him out of the cast list on IMDB, even with the helpful pictures that web site provides-- feels about always being in Rayna's shadow and encourages him to do it. Rayna doesn't like this one bit, but her husband takes her father's bait and accuses her of being unsupportive and unwilling/unable to ever take the backseat in their relationship.

Then there is a scene that is so good I can barely even talk about it, and I'm not sure if I even caught everything that was going on in it-- it was just packed with SO MUCH. Rayna is arguing with her father, and over the course of this argument, we get hints that 1) maybe Rayna's father has played more of a role in her success than she wants to believe and 2) there is more tension than we realized between Rayna and her husband, and that he "stuck by her" through something-- maybe she cheated on him? Maybe with her attractive songwriter? And the whole thing culminates with Rayna shouting, "We canNOT be bought!" and storming out of the room.

I put down my laptop. I started paying attention. And I stopped calling her Tami Taylor.

I feel like this show is going to be FASCINATING, everyone. There seems to be so much interesting backstory between Rayna, her father, her husband, and the other people in her life, and Rayna seems like such a great character: strong and outspoken like Tami Taylor, but also rich, powerful, and probably not completely squeaky clean and morally upright. I'm not sure what to do with Juliette yet, and I dig that one ad for the show features Rayna basically stepping on her with her spike heel. All I know is, this show looks like a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to it.

thoughts on Pitch Perfect

The premise: Barden College has an all-female a cappella group called the Bellas. They are not as good as the all-male group the Treble Makers, but they have made it to Nationals, and we later learn that they are a pretty tough group to get into...until Aubrey (Anna Camp) projectile vomits all over the stage during their Nationals performance. Now, they're the laughingstock of their school, and they have to take who they can get for their group, including a girl who refers to herself as "Fat Amy" (Rebel Wilson, a.k.a. Kristen Wiig's weird roommate from Bridesmaids); a girl who touches herself inappropriately regardless of what song the group is singing; a girl who speaks so softly you can barely understand her (though when you can, you hear that she is saying things like, "I start fires for fun" and "I've done time in the joint"); and our main character, Beca (Anna Kendrick), who really wants to be a D.J. (the kind that produces music, not the Rick Dees kind, as she has to explain to her Comparative Literature professor father), but whose father is making her go to college, at least for a year. Along the way, Beca falls for a member of the Treble Makers (though the Bellas are forbidden from letting said Treble Makers "penetrate" them, and though Beca has had trouble getting close to people since her parents' divorce); there are many musical numbers; and, at one point, there is more projectile vomiting, which one girl literally does snow angels (vomit angels?) in.

Sound goofy? Sure, it is. It's also a lot of fun. Here are the things I liked about it:

1) the musical numbers, duh. There are performance numbers, but there is also this bizarre sing-off between the four a cappella groups on campus that culminates in the Bellas harmonizing on "No Diggity," as well as a truly joyful bus ride sing-along to "Party in the U.S.A." Aubrey wants the girls to stick with what they've always done (bland numbers like Ace of Base's "The Sign" and the Bangles' "Eternal Flame"), but the thing is, they're not the Bellas they once were, in looks or personality, and she eventually accepts that they're at their best when they're all being themselves. I know, that's a pretty cheery little message, but...

2)...it's not NEARLY as preachy as Glee, which I appreciated. As many of you know, I liked Glee a lot when it first came out, but eventually came to find it frustrating and offensive for a bunch of reasons. I won't enumerate those reasons here (many of you have heard it all before), but what was refreshing about Pitch Perfect is this: the only person in this movie who thinks a cappella singing is dorky is Beca, and she comes around. The Glee kids were dealing with hatred from the other students and even teachers and administrators LONG after they should have earned everyone's respect, and all of the "everyone hates us/we're such outsiders/the school's going to shut our club down and give all our funding to the Cheerios" business took away from what the show was at its best, and what Pitch Perfect is: a story about a group of kids who want to sing some fun songs and maybe win some awards while dealing with growing up, forming friendships, falling in love, and all that jazz. I dug that. I also dug...

3)...the fact that Pitch Perfect (mostly) avoids cliches. Yes, Fat Amy's weight and another character's lesbianism are sometimes played for laughs in ways that I sometimes felt a bit uncomfortable with. However. Here are some things that I assumed would happen, but did not: Beca and her love interest, Jesse, both have internships at a radio station. They have a boss who is attractive and slightly older than them. At one point, he offers Beca a D.J. shift that she has to turn down because of an a cappella competition. Now, I assumed from the moment that we met this boss that Beca would go for him even though Jesse clearly liked her from the beginning; that the boss would be a jerk about her being in an a capella group; that she would eventually have to choose between him and Jesse, as well as her D.J. dreams and her newfound love for a cappella singing; and that the movie would play it like she was being all morally superior for choosing Jesse and the a cappella group. None of this happens. Her boss appreciates her music producing skills without ever making a pass at her, and he still gives her future D.J. shifts even though she has to turn down the initial offer because of the competition. Isn't that surprising, reasonable, nice, and oh, I don't know...REALISTIC? Good job, Movie. You pleasantly surprised me.

4) On top of all of this good stuff, the movie all comes together with a musical number at Nationals that is so good, you almost don't even care whether the Bellas win or not, and the movie doesn't put a lot of emphasis on that, either, because...when you give a performance that is so good that you have all of Lincoln Center, including your competition, on its feet, it almost doesn't matter.

It's a fun movie, everyone. I'd definitely recommend.