thoughts on New Girl Season Two

This show, you guys.

As many of you know, I liked the first season a lot.  The second season is much better.  The first season introduced us to likeable, interesting, flawed characters and put those characters into funny situations.  It was very well-written.  However, in the second season, we got to know those characters, and their stories started to move forward.  For example...

...Nick and Jess.  In the first season, it was clear that something would happen between them eventually.  In the second season, something did happen, and it was, at different times, hot, touching, messy, and frustrating.  Always believable.

The two have their first kiss in episode fifteen, "Cooler." The plot of the episode is as follows: Schmidt (Max Greenfield), Winston (Lamorne Morris), and Nick (Jake Johnson) plan to go out with the intention of getting laid.  Jess (Zooey Deschanel) wants to go, too, as her hot doctor boyfriend, Sam (David Walton), is working late; however, Nick tells her that she can't because she's his "cooler": he never gets laid when she's around.  At the same time, a neighbor's trench coat has been delivered to their apartment by accident, and Nick loves it and begins wearing it everywhere even though it is a woman's trench coat.

The guys go out, and Jess is initially just bored at home alone, but then she begins hearing scratching noises at the door and gets scared.  She tries calling Sam, who initially doesn't answer because he's busy at work; her best friend Cece (Hannah Simone), who is out on a date with Shivrang (Satya Bhabha), a man she is in the courtship stage of an arranged marriage with; and finally Nick.  Nick answers, of course, because he loves her.  Anyway, the guys wind up leaving the bar with a couple of girls and coming back to the apartment; they are eventually joined by Cece, Shivrang, and Sam.  They play a "sexy" version of the drinking game True American, and at one point the "rules," such as they are, require Nick and Jess to go behind a door and kiss.  Nick drags his feet about kissing her, to the point where Jess begins to feel a little insulted and wonders why he doesn't want to kiss her.  "I just don't want to kiss you like this," he blurts out.  She is flabbergasted-- what does he mean, like this?

Later that night, the game is over.  Jess and Sam go to bed in her room.  Nick goes to bed in his.  However, eventually the scratching starts up again, and Nick and Jess both go to investigate.  It turns out to be a large dog being chased by a woman.  The woman is apologetic until she realizes that not only has Nick not returned the trench coat that has been delivered to him by mistake, but he has apparently been sleeping in it ("It gives me confidence," he tries to explain).  She leaves, and Nick and Jess start to head back to their rooms.  But then Nick takes her hand and pulls her to him, and they share what I daresay is one of the best TV kisses I have ever seen.  Jess agrees; in the next episode she will tell Cece, "He just...took me!  He was firm, yet gentle!  He was a man, and I was a woman, and for just a minute, I saw through time and space!" 

Regardless, the two don't instantly become a couple.  She's still dating Sam.  Then she and Sam break up, but by then, Nick is dating his new boss at the bar.  Then Nick's dad dies; it brings Nick and Jess closer, but when they try to go out on an actual date, it's kind of a mess.  Finally, Nick remembers something his dad told him: the best things in life are the things you don't think about.  Jess is about to leave to meet up with the guy she lost her virginity to years ago, who is in town and has contacted her.  She gets on the elevator, but just before the door is about to close, Nick holds the door and gets in with her.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Not thinking," he says.  They go back to the apartment and make love.

Here's what I love about all of this: the two are a great couple in a lot of ways.  They have great chemistry.  They're always there for each other.  However, the show doesn't try to ignore the characters' flaws or the actual problems they would realistically have.  It's been established that Nick is kind of a mess; he dropped out of law school and now works as a bartender, which isn't horrible, or anything, but he doesn't really have any idea what he wants to do next, drinks too much, and has kind of a Grumpy Old Man personality.  He has a lot of good qualities, too, and it seems like he will try harder at life for Jess, but it's not like he just automatically becomes the perfect guy or like the show tries to sweep his issues under the rug.  I also like that while, sure, it's pretty normal for TV to delay the couple getting together, all of the things that get in Nick and Jess's way are pretty believable.  Finally, I like that through all this, the show still stays its wacky self.  Games of True American.  Silly storylines like the whole trench coat thing.  Schmidt and Winston eventually trying to sabotage Cece's wedding.  It stays the show we knew and loved in the first season, but explores the characters with more depth.

This brings me to Schmidt.  He was my favorite part of the first season.  I liked him in the second season, too, but I feel like as we got to know the other characters more, they all started to be more of a balanced ensemble, with no one standout.  I consider this a good thing.  Also, he stopped being just the womanizing, clean freak, formerly overweight funny guy with commitment issues to a fully rounded character.  Near the end of the second season, we meet Elizabeth (Merritt Wever), who he dated for years when he was overweight.  She still is overweight (though she is not now, nor was she ever, as heavy as Schmidt once was).  They initially fell in love because she didn't care what anyone thought, which he appreciated and loved about her when he was heavy; however, as he began to lose weight, *he* started to care more about appearances, and, as she puts it, "got mean."  They start to date again at the end of the second season, though it's not like he still doesn't care about appearances or isn't generally his funny but slightly douchey self, and it's not like he's not still hung up on Cece, who he dated off and on through much of the first season.  Again, the show doesn't skate over any of this or try to pretend he's suddenly this perfect, stand-up guy.  I liked this a lot.

Oh.  And the second season also manages to work in the song "22" by Taylor Swift and to give Swift a cameo in the season finale.  That's also pretty awesome.

Bottom line, I fell in love with this show even more during the second season.  I can't wait to catch up on the third.





thoughts on The Spectacular Now

Miles Teller (who you may remember from the relatively recent Footloose remake) stars as Sutter, a high school senior who has recently broken up with (been dumped by?) his girlfriend, Cassidy (Brie Larson, from The United States of Tara and 21 Jump Street).  In voiceover early in the film, he says something like, "I don't want to say that we were the life of every party...but we were pretty much the life of every party."  He meets Aimee (Shailene Woodley) when he literally passes out on her lawn one night after a party; she finds him the next morning when she heads out to leave on her (technically her mom's) paper route.  He offers to help her out, and the two of them begin a friendship that fairly quickly develops into a romance.

I thought the film's performances were pretty solid across the board.  Teller is charming as Sutter, a basically nice guy who isn't doing great in Math, who sneaks drinks from a flask pretty much constantly, and who believes his mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kicked his father (Kyle Chandler) out years ago.  Woodley is insecure and nice as Aimee.  However, in terms of plot, I really had no idea where the movie was going, or where I was supposed to want it to go.  Sutter and Aimee make an okay couple, I suppose.  On the one hand, he drinks too much, and she starts drinking quite a bit when she's around him.  On the other hand, through dating him, she gains the confidence to stand up to her mom (who we never meet), who Aimee thinks won't let her leave to go to college. 

There is also the issue that since the movie is told from Sutter's perspective, we don't really know that much about Aimee.  She reveals at one point that her father, an addict, is dead.  She seems smart and like kind of a loner, though we see one friend that she occasionally talks to.  She gets along fine when Sutter takes her to a party, though, so it seems mainly that she lacks confidence, not like everyone sees her as some huge dork or anything.  When it comes down to it, we don't know enough about Sutter, either; he's supposedly popular, and he seems to get invited to more stuff than Aimee, but it seems to be mostly because he's a partier and somewhat charming.  He doesn't seem to be popular for any particular reason; the popular kids at my high school were good at things and really involved in the school, and that doesn't seem to be the case with him.  So...it's a love story between two kind of blah characters who don't really do much except hang out together and drink, and you're not really sure whether you want them to stay together or not.  In other words...it's hard to care that much about this movie.

random blog on Alias Season Three/Lauren Reed/Melissa George

Today I'd like to talk about Melissa George as Lauren Reed, a.k.a. Vaughn's wife in Season Three of Alias.  Here's a Season Three promotional picture of her in case you are unfamiliar:

You will notice that she is sitting on some boxes that say "Fireworks."

Anyway, so after the Sydney/Vaughn YouTube binge I told you all about recently, I went back and watched some full episodes-- not in any particular order, just the ones I felt like watching.  The thing I keep puzzling over is whether or not the producers always intended for Lauren to be evil, or whether they either a) decided to make her evil because she was so hated by fans, or b) perhaps *did* intend for her to *eventually* reveal herself as evil, but rushed to this a bit more quickly than they might have because, again, fans just wanted Sydney and Vaughn back together.  Don't get me wrong; I was one of those fans.  But here's the thing:

Vaughn is DESTROYED when he learns the truth about Lauren.  He basically goes completely insane in the last two episodes of Season Three.  He freaking pours acid on someone at one point during an interrogation.  He leaves Sydney with no back-up to run after Lauren on one mission.  Let me repeat: He puts Sydney at risk for a shot at revenge on Lauren.  He actively plots Lauren's murder (with Jack's help and encouragement).  When he eventually does kill her, it's more of a self-defense type scenario, but he shoots her a ridiculous number of times.  He fully wants to do it, which haunts him well into Season Four.  There is one Season Four episode where he has to exhume her corpse and where Sydney has to pretend to be Lauren for the purposes of a mission (I don't remember the exact details surrounding this, but trust me: it happened), and this is unbearably painful for him.  In another Season Four episode, he confesses to Jack that he can't sleep and that he sees her everywhere.  He eventually forgives himself for what he's done (in an episode where he goes undercover as a hot priest, by the way).  However, we are led to believe that what happened with Lauren may very well have ruined his life had Sydney not been there to pull him back from the dark side.  In order for us to buy any of this, we have to believe that Vaughn was completely and totally in love with Lauren.

Vaughn and Lauren in a Season Three promo pic.

This was always going to be a hard sell.  For one thing, we are positioned to identify with Sydney in this narrative, meaning that when Sydney lost two years at the end of Season Two, we lost them with her.  We didn't see Vaughn and Lauren meet and fall in love.  For us, like for Sydney, it was like Vaughn had been with Sydney just earlier that day, planning a romantic vacation for the two of them, and...what now?  He's married to someone else?  He tells Sydney that he's moved on with his life, and in the first couple of episodes of Season Three, he seems like he has; he seems primarily concerned with making sure that Lauren doesn't feel threatened by Sydney's reappearance in his life, meaning that 1) Sydney doesn't have him, even as a friend, to help her through her transition back to a life where everyone has moved on without her and 2) he sometimes appears a bit insensitive to Sydney, being openly affectionate with Lauren right in front of her.  He's not intentionally being mean; he just honestly doesn't seem to care that much about Sydney anymore.  Again: hard sell for the audience, who saw Vaughn in love with Sydney at the end of the very last season.

Vaughn and Lauren getting annoyed with Sydney during a meeting.

Add to that the fact that his indifference to Sydney doesn't last terribly long.  Within maybe three or four episodes, we see him having a post-stabbing dream where he wakes in the hospital to find Sydney sitting next to him crying about how much she misses him.  He confesses that he misses her, too, and they kiss.  We figure out that it's a dream when she stabs him (again) and asks, "How could you do this to me?"  He wakes up and seems a bit shaken, if not a little disappointed, to see Lauren sitting by his bedside.  It's not much longer before he is actively lying to/hiding things from Lauren to protect Sydney.  It takes him awhile to realize that he still has feelings for Sydney and to make any sort of move to leave his marriage, but...the feelings for Sydney are clearly there, early on.  In other words: he was in love enough with Lauren for her betrayal to destroy him?  Really?

Also: not even two full years had passed since Sydney's "death," which means that Vaughn either married Lauren roughly five minutes after Sydney disappeared, which doesn't seem overly plausible, or that he had only been married to Lauren for roughly five minutes at the time of Sydney's return, in which case...who cares about Lauren?  It doesn't really help that the show doesn't really give us a clear timeline for all of this.  I have this Alias companion book that states that Vaughn and Lauren met and began dating nine months after Sydney's "death."  At one point, Lauren mentions something about not hearing from her handlers for more than two years after she was assigned to marry Vaughn.  At another point, Vaughn makes a comment about how they've been talking about taking a vacation for over a year.  When the heck did all of this happen?  How long have these people even known each other?  When did they have time to fall in love, plan a wedding, and get married?  The whole thing makes not one goddamn bit of sense, is what I'm saying.

And yet.  The producers of the show did seem to put a fair amount of effort into both casting Lauren and (at least initially) creating a character that Vaughn might realistically marry.  Melissa George is very pretty, and in a more va-va-voom type way than Jennifer Garner:

Her role on Friends back in the day was the "hot nanny." On Grey's Anatomy, she played Meredith's wild college friend who allows the other interns to freaking take out her appendix *for practice.*  In other words: I haven't seen her in a ton of things (though her IMDB page indicates that she gets fairly regular work, particularly on TV, and I'm kind of excited about the fact that she will apparently be "tempting" Peter Florrick on the upcoming season of The Good Wife), but in the stuff I *have* seen her in, she seems to get brought out when they need someone hot and/or wild and/or shady.  Okay, I guess I've just answered my own question.  Maybe they totally planned for her to be evil all along.

Melissa George on Grey's Anatomy, possibly trying to convince the other interns to remove her appendix.

But beyond her appearance, they gave her character a backstory and independent storylines the likes of which characters other than Sydney rarely got on Alias.  In  a nutshell, she was a NSC agent/liaison to Sydney and Vaughn's task force at the CIA.  Her father, a United States senator, had managed to keep her from being trained as a field agent.  That's the thing: we met her parents.  They factored into a couple of fairly major storylines.  There were a handful of scenes shot at her parents' house.  We did not even see Jack's apartment until Season Four.  We never saw Vaughn's house until he married Lauren.  I'm just saying: why go to all of this trouble with her if they were just going to reveal her to be evil in like half a season, and kill her off by the end of that same season?  I feel like when we were originally introduced to her, we were supposed to view her as a legitimate professional and personal rival for Sydney.  I also feel like, given the fact that they later added Mia Maestro to the cast in late Season Three, then Rachel Nichols in Season Five, the producers/network were planning for the possibility that the show might last for a long time, that Jennifer Garner might want to leave someday, and that they should have some sort of back-up female character ready in that event.  None of them really stuck, and the show ended after five seasons.

The interesting thing was, as unpleasant as it was for me personally to watch Sydney and Vaughn be apart in Season Three, I came away from all of this with mildly positive feelings toward Melissa George.  Like, when she shows up on something I'm watching, my reaction is usually, "Oh!  I'll bet this is going to be fun!" I actually just watched a couple of her Grey's Anatomy episodes last night; she was pretty fun and entertaining.  I feel like maybe Season Three Alias could have been more okay if they'd taken more time to play out the whole Vaughn/Lauren storyline...but even I, at the time it was actually on, pretty much just wanted it to be over with.  So, they wrapped it up, they moved on, and, what, eight years after Lauren's last appearance on the show, I found myself puzzling over it.  I guess the show wins, then =).

thoughts on Butter

Huh.

I'm not entirely sure I completely got this movie, or that it really accomplished what it was trying to do.  It seems like it might have been trying to be a few different things, didn't go for any of them quite enough, and thus didn't really succeed at any of them.  However, there were enough funny one-liners and enough genuinely bizarre moments that a day after watching it, I find myself chuckling about parts of it in a "What the f*ck was that?" kind of way.

Ty Burrell plays Bob Pickler, who has won the Iowa State Fair butter carving contest fifteen years in a row.  He is asked to step down and give someone else a chance to win, and perhaps be a judge.  His wife, Laura (Jennifer Garner), whose life seems to revolve around this contest and who seems to fancy herself some sort of First Lady even though...you know...it's a butter carving contest that happens once a year, is initially FURIOUS about this ("Those mother f*ckers don't know who they're dealing with!).  She grows even more furious when she catches Bob having sex with a stripper (Olivia Wilde) in their van.  She decides to enter the contest herself.  Her competition at the county level consists of Carol Ann (Laura Schaal), a butter carving contest "groupie" (is there such a thing?) who carves a laughably bad sculpture of kittens in a basket (in her speech explaining her sculpture, she says something along the lines of, "I really love kittens when they're all tangled up in a blanket, but I didn't know how to carve that, so I just put them in a basket instead"); the stripper, Brooke, who basically enters just to mess with Laura; and Destiny (Yara Shahidi), a ten-year-old foster child who has recently been taken in by Jill (Alicia Silverstone) and Ethan (Rob Corddry), a couple with a fridge full of soy products who think that butter carving competitions are "kind of redneck-y."  There is a subplot where Brooke hooks up with Bob's daughter (Ashley Greene) to try to get the $600 (she later raises the price) she says Bob owes her for sex.  There is another subplot where Laura has sex with her high school boyfriend, Boyd Bolton (Hugh Jackman), so that she can get him to help her get a rematch after she loses the initial competition to Destiny.  It all comes to a head at the Iowa State Fair contest.

So...I've read some stuff that said this was supposed to be a political satire, and as Laura, Jennifer Garner dresses and speaks in a sort of Sarah Palin-esque way.  But no one besides her seems to be taking the butter carving contest overly seriously, and she's definitely the only one getting cutthroat and playing dirty about it, so she just comes across as kind of insane, and since her main competition is a ten-year-old girl, it's just kind of like, "Why is she being so mean to that little kid?"  I also read some reviews that suggested that the movie was going for a Christopher Guest Best in Show type thing, but in that movie, the dog show was such a huge part of it; here, the butter carving stuff seems almost arbitrary-- it seems like it's more about how insane competition in general can make some people, but again, Laura is the only one who seems particularly insane about it.  So it's kind of like, "Here's a movie about some crazy lady who's really into this butter carving competition for some reason, and also there's this crazy stripper running around, and also, hey, there's Hugh Jackman as a dumb local car dealer."

That's not to say that this isn't all sometimes kind of fun and funny.  For one thing...this movie is rated R basically just for language, and some of the stuff that comes out of Jennifer Garner's mouth made me laugh just in a "Oh my god, I don't think I've ever heard Jennifer Garner swear before" kind of way (I looked her up on IMDB, and no, it's likely that I haven't.  Besides Alias, she's been in Juno, a few short-lived TV series from the '90s, and some romantic comedies.  A handful of other stuff, too, but nothing that I would imagine would involve a lot of swearing.).  I've also read some stuff about how Olivia Wilde pretty much steals every scene she's in, and that's pretty true; there is one scene where she's riding her bike-- which appears to be a child's dirt bike-- across a football field where a marching band is practicing, and she could easily just ride around the marching band.  Instead, she rides right through them shouting, "Out of my way, bitches!" Why? I don't know, but I laughed.  Also...what is Hugh Jackman doing in this movie? He's seriously in like four scenes, one of which involves staring at Jennifer Garner's boobs and another in which he prays to God to thank him for bringing her to him.  This prayer quickly grows dirty enough that I had another moment of shocked oh-my-god type laughter.

So, bottom line: it was kind of a hot mess of a movie, but it had its moments.  It didn't make a lot of sense, but it was pretty funny.

Scandal Season Two

Finished the second season of Scandal today.  Not at all sure if I'm going to keep watching it.  Yes, Tony Goldwyn and Kerry Washington have some insane chemistry.  Yes, it makes me gasp at times.  There was one heck of an end-of-season cliffhanger that might make it hard not to tune in.  However...

...This show takes place in an ugly, ugly world.  This really hit me in a second season episode where we learn Huck's (Guillermo Diaz's) backstory, which is this: as a young Marine, Huck is told that he can avoid a second tour of duty by accepting an assignment from the CIA.  He is told that he is uniquely qualified for this assignment because he has no attachments; he was raised in foster care, is not married, and does not have children.  He accepts the assignment, which involves torturing people in extremely nasty ways.  Along the way, his girlfriend gets pregnant and he proposes.  Following his marriage and the birth of his child, co-CIA worker Charlie (George Newbern) shows up at his house and threatens him: he was told no attachments.  He needs to take care of this.  Huck makes a plan to run away with his wife and son; however, before he has a chance to, he is captured by the CIA, thrown in a hole, and tortured for months and months until he no longer remembers that he has a wife and son.  When he is finally let out, he is given the opportunity to go back to work, only he can't bring himself to complete his next assignment.  Charlie is supposed to kill him, but instead just points a gun at him and says, "Bang.  You're dead.  Don't contact anyone you know ever again."  He is left with no identity and no money to live as a homeless person.

Ugly story, right?  Do I believe that the U.S. government would do this to their own agents?  I would like to think not, and I have a hard time believing they would do it under these particular circumstances.  While I can deal with some unbelievable shit on TV shows, though (my favorite show of all time is Alias, for God's sake), the question is whether I want to routinely visit a world where *this particular* unbelievable shit can happen.  I'm not sure that I do. 

Add to this the fact that the only character I particularly like is Olivia Pope.  Fitz is okay, sometimes.  Joshua Malina's character, David Rosen, is okay.  The President's wife, Mellie (Bellamy Young) is so over-the-top evil that she's practically a cartoon. (Side note: you know who would have been good for the role of Mellie? Kate Walsh.  I'm pretty sure she was still busy with Private Practice until recently, but I think she could have played that character in such a way that we would have at least loved to hate her instead of just flat-out hated her.)  And for all of the times that the show has made me gasp out loud...I went like two weeks without watching an episode just recently.  It has cliffhanger-y storylines, but you don't necessarily care about the resolution of those storylines because you don't care about many of the characters.

So, bottom line, I was pretty disappointed.  I may or may not tune in for Season Three.