thoughts on The Words (spoilers)

We open on a renowned writer named Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) giving a reading in a packed auditorium.  He narrates the story of aspiring writer Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), who, as the story begins, is told by his father (J.K. Simmons) that he needs to stop asking him for money all the time and get a real job.  Rory winds up working in publishing and marrying his girlfriend, Dora (Zoe Saldana).  The couple honeymoons in Paris, where Dora buys a beautiful leather satchel for Rory secondhand.  When they return to the United States and Rory opens the satchel, he finds an old manuscript.  He types it up on his computer, not changing a word or even correcting the spelling mistakes.  When Dora uses his computer, she finds it and reads it; she tells Rory that it's beautiful, and so different from his usual writing.  His "usual writing" keeps getting rejected by publishers, but they like this one, so he passes it off as his own, winning major awards and getting other, previously rejected, work published.  Everything is going along well until he meets the actual writer of the book (Jeremy Irons), who tells Rory his story.  And so we have a story...within a story...within a story, with Clay narrating first to his audience, then to a grad student/potential lover played by Olivia Wilde, and the writer narrating to Rory.  The main conflicts of the movie, then, are whether the writer or Rory himself will reveal Rory as a plagiarist; what the consequences will be if the truth is revealed; and whether Clay's story is, in fact, a fictionalized confession of the plagiarism.

Rory isn't a terribly likable character.  In one of his very first scenes, he yells at his dad for not believing in his writing career, then laughs in his face when his father offers him a job.  He also desperately, melodramatically yells at Dora at one point before he has made it big that this wasn't how his life was supposed to turn out; she asks how that's supposed to make her feel.  When he eventually tells her that he didn't write his career-making novel himself, he accuses her of knowing all along and just wanting it to have been written by him.  In other words, he blames everyone else for his own shortcomings and mistakes and lashes out at people who have, from what we see, been fairly supportive of him.  Because of this, it's hard to care about what happens to him.  The story that Jeremy Irons tells (which we see play out) also isn't terribly compelling, and it starts too late in the film for us to care about the characters in it, either.  Dennis Quaid and Olivia Wilde have pretty good chemistry, and Clay's narration adds a bit of suspense, but as a whole, the film is kind of a mess, with too many layers and not enough attention paid to any of the characters.

thoughts on Interstellar

In what appears to be the relatively near future, food is scarce, and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) works as a farmer, as, we're told, do most people, though he was educated as an engineer and once worked for NASA.  It's unclear whether corn is the only food available, but everything we see anyone eat is corn-based, and rampant dust storms are a way of life.  Technology appears to have stalled (at one point, Cooper complains that were MRIs still in use, his late wife's cancer might have been detected earlier), and in school, children are taught that the moon landing was faked to bankrupt the Soviets, and that, in fact, space travel of that kind is impossible.  The New York Yankees play in what looks more like a high school stadium, suggesting a lack of people to both participate in and attend games.  Coop's ten-year-old daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), thinks that there is a ghost in her room.  Coop doesn't pay much attention to this at first, but when binary code appears in the dust that blows in through an open window, he and Murph follow the coordinates it directs them to and wind up at NASA, which is still operating secretly. 

Soon Coop is recruited to go on a mission to investigate three potential planets that might be hospitable to life.  Plan A is that one of these planets might serve as a new home for those currently living on Earth; Professor Brand (Michael Caine) has been trying to figure out an equation that will apparently make this possible.  Plan B is to populate the new planet using fertilized embryos they are taking along.  Complicating everything is the fact that time will operate differently in space; on the first planet they are to explore, for example, one hour will equal seven years on Earth.

At the heart of the movie are a couple of key issues.  Coop's frustration with most of the people on Earth is that they are so focused on day-to-day survival that they're not looking ahead at all; for instance, we learn at a parent-teacher conference he attends that though universities still exist, only the very best and the brightest students get to attend.  Few people seem to see the point of many people going; they just need farmers.  Few people are interested in exploring new ideas or new technologies; they're just trying to keep people alive in the present, regardless of the quality of life they might have.  At the other extreme is Professor Brand, who eventually tells the adult Murph (Jessica Chastain), by then a NASA scientist, that he has known for years that the equation is unsolvable, and that there is no hope for the current population of Earth to live on one of the planets being explored even if one of them is hospitable.  What's the point, then? Why are Coop and the other astronauts putting their own lives on Earth aside for some theoretical potential future involving people who don't even exist yet?  Why is The Future of the Human Race more important than the actual, living and breathing people trying to survive right now?  Coop hasn't given up on the people of Earth, and neither has Murph, and we are given small hints that things might not be completely hopeless...but things look incredibly bleak for awhile.

A day after seeing the movie, I'm still thinking about and feeling incredibly unsettled by it.  In other words, it's quite thought-provoking.  McConaughey and Chastain give great performances, as well.  One issue that I had was that I wasn't exactly sure what the equation Brand, and later Murph, was trying to solve was going to exactly *do*, or why it was the key to humanity's survival.  It's certainly possible that I just missed or did not understand this.  It's also possible that the filmmakers figured that much of the audience wouldn't be scientists or mathematicians and would be willing to just roll with it.  This bothers me.  Because of this issue, it ultimately winds up being unclear *how* the main characters ultimately accomplish their main objective.  Again, it's possible that I just didn't get it.  It's also possible that it didn't make actual sense.  The film was well-done as a whole; there were just some unclear things that I found troubling.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One

When we last saw Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) at the end of Catching Fire, she, along with some of the other contestants, had been rescued from the Quarter Quell.  In Mockingjay: Part One, we catch up with her in District Thirteen, where she, along with some of the other Quarter Quell survivors and escapees from the districts, prepare for the revolution.  She has no idea whether fellow District Twelve tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) is alive or dead. Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), the president of District Thirteen, and former gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) want her to be the face of the revolution.  She just wanted to save her sister...but Mockingjay: Part One is, more so than the other Hunger Games movies, is about growing up and realizing that the world is bigger than you, your family, your friends, and your concerns, no matter how big or small those concerns might be.  Mockingjay: Part One follows Katniss as she moves from reluctant figurehead of the revolution to actually believing in and fighting for the cause.  Along the way, she gets bits of information about Peeta via interviews from the Capitol where he looks increasingly tortured and beaten.

It's an emotional rollercoaster, to be sure.  It is exciting to see Katniss grow angrier at the Capitol and move beyond concern for her own and her family's safety to seeing the bigger picture.  It's scary to watch Peeta's slow transformation at the hands of the Capitol.  It's interesting to watch both the Capitol and the rebels try to manipulate the media for their own purposes. For as emotional as parts of it are, though, it also felt a little long. It's less action-packed than either The Hunger Games or Catching Fire; a lot of it is preparation for the bigger stuff that we know is coming in Part Two...but there's not enough left to happen that seems to justify a second movie. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed aspects of it A LOT. I just think that if they had left it as one movie, they would have had to tighten it up a little bit.

It does include this song. The song was my favorite part:

thoughts on Laggies (spoilers)

Keira Knightley stars as Megan, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who is kind of stuck in a rut.  She has a graduate degree but spends her days spinning a sign out front of her dad's accounting office.  She's also still dating her high school boyfriend and hanging out with her high school friends, which wouldn't necessarily be bad things in and of themselves.  However, she's just sort of, as she herself eventually says, "floating"-- hanging out with the same people and doing the same things because that's what she's always done.  At one point she tells a story about how she and her boyfriend got together; everyone kept telling her that he liked her, and eventually he asked her out in front of everyone, so she said yes, not necessarily because she herself had developed a crush on him and decided that he was who she really wanted to be with, but because that's what everyone was telling her to do, and it was easy.  She realizes that this has become a pattern: just sort of going along with the things everyone else tells her to do rather than actively making her own decisions.

Her boyfriend (Anthony, played by Mark Webber) proposes to her at her friend Allison's (Ellie Kemper's) wedding.  Allison interrupts the proposal to ask Megan to go find Allison's mom.  Megan catches her dad (Jeff Garlin) making out with someone (possibly Allison's mom, but definitely not hers).  She freaks out and leaves the reception without saying goodbye to anyone.  She winds up at a grocery store, where some teenagers ask her to buy them beer.  She agrees, and winds up having a great time hanging out with them for a few hours.  When she gets home, her boyfriend is worried and upset that she disappeared from the reception; she makes up an excuse, and they start talking about his proposal.  She actually does want to marry him and is ready to run off to Vegas right away, but he reminds her that they have to go to Allison and her husband's wedding brunch the next day.  She tells him that the day after that, she is going to a weeklong seminar to help her find herself or some such.  Instead, she just sort of starts driving aimlessly, until one of the teens from the other night, Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz) calls and asks for her help with something.  Megan winds up spending the week with Annika and her single father, Craig (Sam Rockwell), telling them that the lease is up on her apartment and she can't move into her new one for a few days.

The movie is interesting in that, because you can pretty much tell where it's going to go even just from the preview (Megan is going to find what she's looking for with Craig and Annika and help them out with their problems, too), you wind up just focusing on and getting to know the characters, most of whom are interesting, and deciding how you feel about Megan's situation.  Example: Megan is, as previously noted, stuck in a rut as far as her career and romantic relationship goes, and you can kind of see why her mom and friends are exasperated with her.  However...not one person in her life is actually helpful.  Her friends and her mom just want her to move on, get a real job, and marry Anthony because that's what she's "supposed" to do.  Allison catches Megan getting coffee with Annika when she's supposed to be out of town at the seminar, and instead of asking if she's okay or why she would just disappear, she gives her a lecture, basically saying that if she doesn't marry Anthony, she's going to get left behind by the rest of them.  For Megan, the appeal of Craig and Annika is that they like her without really knowing anything about her; they're not pressuring her to do any one certain thing, yet she does seem to grow as a person around them, taking Annika to see her mother, who she is estranged from, and taking the rap for Annika's friend Patrick (Dylan Arnold) when he gets in an accident.  You get to see that she's a good person even if she doesn't exactly have everything figured out yet.  "You've got to let go of this imaginary future you have in your head and just go with your gut," she tells Annika at one point.  That's sort of the thesis of the movie; Megan hasn't moved forward with her life because she doesn't know what she wants, and with Craig and Annika, it's not like she suddenly finds the answers, but things feel right with them in a way that they just don't in her regular life.

I generally enjoyed the movie; I liked Megan, Craig, and Annika, and I thought that all of the actors gave pretty solid performances.  That said, there were a couple of things that bugged me about the story.  One of my least favorite movie tropes is, "Someone has a secret, and everyone's eventually going to find out, and they're going to be really mad for like five minutes, and then everything will be cool."  When Megan explains to Craig how she met Annika and why she wants to stay with them, there is not much of a reason for her to withhold the information that she is engaged and needs some space...but she does, and she makes out with and (presumably) has sex with Craig without telling him, and then Annika finds out by accident, and Megan has to tell Craig, and...yeah.  I guess she doesn't tell them about the engagement initially because she doesn't really feel that great about the whole thing, and I guess she just got swept up in things with Craig and decided to go for it, but the lies just make things so much more uncomfortable than necessary, and add an additional, unnecessary level of drama.  It would be challenging enough for her to try to figure out what she wants and deal with her feelings for Craig without also having to deal with the consequences of lying about the whole thing, and given how nice and understanding that Craig and Annika are, it seems cruel of her to mess with them like that. 

Also...she initially does what she says she was going to do, which is leave Craig and Annika at the end of the week and go off to marry her fiancé in Vegas.  The thing that makes her change her mind is that, though they had said they were going to go off and get married without telling their friends and families, Anthony takes a selfie of them at the airport and immediately sends it to their friends, wanting them to be involved.  This makes Megan feel like he's doing the whole wedding thing for the sake of the group, not for them, and tells him that she's "dropping out of the group." I mean, sure, don't marry him if you're doing it for the wrong reasons and also have feelings for someone else, and sure, distance yourself from your friends if you feel like they're not good for you anymore...but how about explaining what you're doing and what you want? It seems like her pattern has been to go along with whatever everyone else wants, never saying or even really thinking about what she wants, then running away when she realizes she wants something else; isn't "dropping out of the group" sort of the same thing? Why can't she try to explain herself to Allison and the others? I also have my misgivings about her jumping right into a relationship with Craig; presumably, her relationship with Anthony hasn't been good for a long time, but she's been with him for twelve years.  She must at least care about him, right? I think the point is that she didn't know what she wanted until she found it, and now that she's found it she's just going to go for it without a care about what anyone else thinks, which is great, but I think just abandoning her whole life seems a little drastic, as well.

So, bottom line: enjoyable movie, good performances. Misgivings about the story.

thoughts on A to Z, two episodes in

Ben Feldman and Cristin Milioti star as Andrew and Zelda, the A to Z of the title. (Isn't Zelda a cool name? You don't hear a lot of Z names for girls).  They begin dating in the first episode; we are told, via voiceover from Katey Sagal (I thought it was Allison Janney until I looked it up) that they will date for eight months, three weeks, five days, and one hour. I GUESS that means they break up at this point, but I am already freaking out about this possibility and hoping they get married at the end of this time instead.

Yes, two episodes in, I am emotionally involved.  After the end of the first episode, I thought the show had potential and a cute premise, but I found the two main secondary characters, Stu and Stephie (played by Henry Zebrowski and Lenora Chrichlow, respectively) fairly annoying.  I liked them better in the second episode; they both function as sort of sounding boards for Andrew and Zelda as they navigate those tricky first days of a new relationship.  I thought the show really did a good job of capturing the role friends play when you're trying to start a relationship: their advice isn't always perfect, but it's always well-intentioned, and you need friends to give you a push, sometimes, and to do ridiculous things that you couldn't or wouldn't do yourself.  In this episode, Stu spies on Zelda as she has dinner with another man, while Stephie digs up info on Andrew's date online and reports to Zelda.

I thought the second episode as a whole just did a really good job of capturing the beginning of a relationship.  Andrew and Zelda both like each other a lot, but in this episode, they're both trying not to let on too much, and, in Zelda's case, actually trying not to care too much.  Andrew's trying not to scare her off.  Zelda's trying to protect her heart.  It just rang really true to life.  It's also fun that it all takes place against the backdrop of Andrew's workplace, an online dating service that has just begun experimenting with a Tinder-like app.

I think it has potential.  I dig it.

thoughts on Gone Girl (contains some spoilers, but makes a reasonable attempt not to give away the best stuff)

Nick and Amy Dunne (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, respectively) met in New York City at a time when things were going well for both of them.  He, a good-looking "everyman" type from Missouri, was a writer for a men's magazine.  She, a beautiful heiress and the inspiration for a series of children's books called Amazing Amy, wrote quizzes for women's magazines.  As is common early in relationships, they both tried hard and perhaps put on a bit of a show to get and keep the other person.  He perhaps tried to seem smarter and more cultured than he was.  She eventually readily admits that she played the part of the "cool girl," the girl who eats pizza and drinks beer without ever gaining a pound, who watches sports and doesn't care if he blows her off to hang out with the guys once in awhile. 

Of course, they couldn't keep up the act forever, and once things got rough, the cracks in their relationship started to show.  The recession led both of them to lose their jobs and her parents, the authors of Amazing Amy, to have to dip into her trust fund.  His mom got sick, and they moved to Missouri, where she used the rest of her savings to help him open a bar with his sister.  She resented the move.  He resented the fact that he was beholden to her financially and that she was so unhappy in his hometown.  Their relationship dynamic changed; in New York, people respected her Harvard degree and thought it was cool that she was the inspiration for Amazing Amy.  In Missouri, people thought she was uppity and gravitated toward Nick, who they knew and loved.  He began having an affair with a much-younger woman.

All of this is revealed in the first third of the movie, which begins on the morning of Amy's disappearance.  The film alternates between the present, in which Amy's disappearance causes a media circus, Nick maybe doesn't seem quite upset enough that she's gone, and people begin to suspect him of murder, and the past, which is told to us through Amy's diary entries.  In the second third, we learn what has really happened to Amy, and things get twisty.  In the last third, a carefully laid-out plan goes awry, and things get off-the-rails insane.  This is not to say that things get unbelievable.  It is to say that it becomes very difficult to predict where things might go.

I'm glad that I read the book before seeing the movie, not because the movie was hard to follow or left out anything that I considered crucial, but because reading the book, I had a very emotional reaction.  Watching the movie knowing what was coming, I was able to get past that and appreciate the story, which is really very clever.  I felt almost betrayed while reading the book.  You learn in the second third that one of the narrators is unreliable, and I felt cheated by that; it wasn't fair, I thought, to lead the reader down one path only to pull the rug out from under them and say, "oh, ha ha; you're dealing with an entirely different kind of character than you were led to believe you were."  The thing is, though, while it might not be "fair," it's not just a thing that happens in fictional stories.  It happens in relationships, which is perhaps the thesis of the story: after you get to know someone and they've dropped whatever façade they had to put on in order to win you, after things happen that make it impossible for you to pretend that they are the person you hoped they were and wanted them to be, and after you have been through things together that cause the dynamics of the relationship to change, you are sometimes left with a very different person than you thought you started with.  At this point, you either learn to love the other person as they are, or you act out, or you break up.  Sometimes, the two of you have different ideas about what should happen at this point, and things get worse before they either get better or don't.  The second act of Gone Girl is the author dropping the façade and letting you see things how they really are, and once you can get past your emotional reaction to how you feel about having that "done to you," you can appreciate how brilliant it is.

I was able to enjoy watching the movie more than I enjoyed reading the book not only because I had the initial emotional reaction at the author's "betrayal" out of the way, but because the performances are completely amazing.  I've really turned a corner on Ben Affleck in the past five years.  I used to dislike him for a number of reasons, but he is absolutely perfect in this role, and-- I'm going to make a bold statement here-- I would not be at all upset if he won an Oscar for this.  Yes.  I just said that.  This is a character who has to come across as charming and handsome, but who you also have to believe is definitely an adulterer, possibly abusive, and possibly a murderer.  I can't think of anyone better for this role than Ben Affleck.  As Amy, Rosamund Pike has to come across as extremely multi-faceted, as well, and she's also great.  I know that Reese Witherspoon produced this movie and at one point wanted to star in it; Reese Witherspoon is my favorite, and I think she could have been good in this role, but I think it makes more sense for Amy to be played by a less well-known actor.  With Nick, you need someone who is instantly likeable who you could believe might be capable of sinister things in spite of the fact that you like him; having a well-known actor in that role speeds that process along.  With Amy, not having a preconceived persona to place on the character works much better: she could be anything or anyone, and she needs to be.  There are some supporting actors in the cast, too, and they're all well-cast, but when it comes down to it, this is the Nick and Amy show, and Affleck and Pike both knock it out of the park.

The ending is controversial.  It's the same in both the book and movie.  The odd thing is, while it made me want to throw the book across the room, and while I heard some people in the theater (including some of the people I was with) say they hated it, I really thought it worked in the film.  (For that matter, I think I would like it in the book upon rereading.)  Is it bleak?  Yes.  Is it the only outcome that could have befallen these two characters?  No, but it works, it's believable, and it's kind of wickedly awesome in it's way.  I can see how other endings might have been more satisfying, but I found this ending unsettling in a realistic way.

I really liked the film.  I'd strongly recommend.

thoughts on This is Where I Leave You

Jason Bateman stars as Judd Altman, who in the early moments of This is Where I Leave You catches his wife (Quinn, played by Abigail Spencer) in bed with his boss, shock jock radio host Wade Beaufort (Dax Shepard).  Not long after, his sister Wendy (Tina Fey) calls to tell him that their father has passed away.  Not only that, their father wants Judd, Wendy, their siblings (Paul and Phillip, played by Corey Stoll and Adam Driver, respectively), and their mother (Hilary, played by Jane Fonda) to sit shiva for seven days.

This provides the impetus for the four siblings to descend on the family home with assorted spouses, romantic partners, children, and personal dramas in tow.  Judd arrives alone and makes excuses for why Quinn didn't come along; Wendy knows the truth and presses him to tell everyone until, of course, he loses it and winds up spilling the beans in front of a houseful of mourners.  Wendy has a husband who won't get off his cell phone and a toddler who carries around his plastic potty everywhere and drops his pants whenever and wherever he feels like it.  Paul and his wife, Alice (Kathryn Hahn), have been trying unsuccessfully to conceive for two years; at one point, Alice, who dated Judd before she dated Paul, tries to get Judd to impregnate her.  Phillip, the baby of the family, roars up to the funeral late, in a Porsche, and later introduces them to his much-older fiancée (Tracy, played by Connie Britton).  This is all proceeded over by Hilary, a therapist who is none too shy about showing off her new boob job and made her name with a book on child rearing that revealed details of her children's early sex lives that they would rather she had kept private (Paul used to masturbate with an oven mitt, for instance).  Also popping up now and then are Penny (Rose Byrne), a local woman who apparently had a huge crush on Judd when they were young; Horry (Timothy Olyphant), their neighbor and Wendy's ex-boyfriend, who hasn't been quite the same since a car accident and brain injury twenty years ago; Horry's mother, Linda (Debra Monk), who has grown close with Hilary in the wake of Hilary's husband's illness and death; and Rabbi Charles Grodner (Ben Schwartz), a childhood friend of the family who can't stand that they all still call him Boner.

Got all that?  It's all a bit crazy and confusing, but only because that's how visits home under trying circumstances are.  Certain things are familiar, yet others are a bit off; with a houseful of guests, Judd is relegated to a sleeper sofa in the basement that won't even fold out all the way, and the electricity always fails at the exact moment Judd has a headful of shampoo in the shower.  Phillip is gleeful to get to go out to a bar with his older siblings (he was always too young when they were all living in the same house)...but not long after they've all done their first shot, Paul is getting called away by his ovulating wife, and Penny's there eager to flirt with Judd.  The brothers have fights that devolve into wrestling around on the front lawn and, at one point, accidentally set off the fire alarm sneaking a joint at Temple.  Judd catches Wendy doing the walk of shame home from Horry's house.  Judd actually gets away with spending the night with Penny...except then Quinn is showing up with big news.

As with many movies that are adapted from books, as this one is, there are a lot of things you find yourself wanting to know more about, yet it still feels a bit too long.  Yet it plays out better on the screen than I remember it playing out on the page; the actors' performances are grounded in reality, making it seem less self-consciously funny and outrageous than I remember the book being.  Bateman, Fey, Stoll, and Driver are believable as siblings; these characters don't spend a lot of time together on a day-to-day basis (Paul is the only one who still lives in their hometown) and aren't the kind of siblings that would refer to each other as best friends.  Yet there is an easy dynamic between them that feels comfortable and familiar; there are old resentments between these siblings, to be sure, yet you can tell that they all would be there for each other in a second if they needed to be.  I liked the way that so often the other people in the siblings' lives just faded into the background as the four of them gravitated to each other.  These are people that know each other's shortcomings (when asked, Judd tells Tracy that yes, there is a good chance that Phillip has cheated on her with his ex-girlfriend; Wendy tells Judd that if he had really loved Quinn, he would have noticed that she'd been cheating on him for a year) yet always have each other's backs (Phillip cheerfully calls Quinn a "heartless slut" to her face; Wendy punches Wade in the face when given the opportunity).  Their interactions feel real.

I enjoyed it a lot.  Funny, touching, great cast.  I'd recommend.

thoughts on The Mindy Project Seasons One and Two

It's interesting how shows find their stride in the first couple of seasons.  Throughout the first two (and thus far only; the third season debuts on September 16) seasons, The Mindy Project is about a single gynecologist (Mindy Lahiri, played by Mindy Kaling) in her early thirties who, in a nutshell, has dating misadventures while interacting with a wacky bunch of coworkers and eventually realizing her feelings for fellow doctor Danny Castellano (Chris Messina).  But the supporting cast shifts around a bit as the seasons progress, and this really makes a huge difference.  In the first season, she has a married friend who lives in the suburbs (Gwen, played by Anna Camp); we don't see her in the second season, and we don't miss her.  Receptionist Shauna (Amanda Setton), an attractive Jersey girl with a crush on Dr. Castellano, is unceremoniously replaced by Beverly (Beth Grant), a sixty-something woman who is fired as a nurse in the first episode for doing things like taking blood samples home.  There are other cast changes, too, but probably the best is the addition of Peter Prentice (Adam Pally), a doctor who, during his interview at the practice, tells a story about having sex with a Christmas tree at an office holiday party.  More on him later.

So, I like the show a lot, for a number of reasons.  For one, the dialogue is hilarious.  I could give plenty of examples of humorous exchanges and one-liners (and have on my Facebook page), but I'm constantly cracking up from little things, like how Mindy is constantly saying "How dare you!" and addressing people as "sir" (as in, "Excuse me, sir, but how dare you!").  For me, also, a lot of the humor also comes from the fact that, as a single woman in my thirties, I can relate to a lot of the situations she gets herself into (sometimes to a painful degree)...yet she is nothing like me.  For one thing, she is way more outspoken than I am; sometimes I'm appalled by the things she says, while other times I wish I was better at speaking up for myself and less guarded with my emotions like she is.  It's like watching how a completely different person would handle aspects of my life, basically.

Then there is the supporting cast.  There is Danny, who grew up in Staten Island, was hurt badly by his divorce from Christina (Chloe Sevigny), is Catholic, practically raised his younger brother after their father left, and, though in his thirties, is kind of a grumpy old man ("Get this guy a sandwich, and I don't mean a WRAP.  I mean a REAL SANDWICH, with bread").  There is Jeremy (Ed Weeks), a handsome British doctor who Mindy occasionally hooks up with at the beginning of the first season.  There is Nurse Morgan Tookers (Ike Barinholtz), an ex-con who I have a hard time even beginning to describe, except to say that he is a ridiculous person, and hilarious (Danny, at one point, describes him as having a "charming Huckleberry Finn illiterate vibe," which is fairly accurate).  And there is the aforementioned Peter, who joins the cast in the second season and really adds something to it.  He and Mindy don't get along at first (she invites him to lunch to try to make friends, but takes him to, as Danny describes it, "that doll restaurant where you tell the story about your period").  He goes with Mindy to her ex's wedding, is the life of the party, and then winds up having sex with the bride.  He and Mindy become close when she has a falling-out with Danny, and he gives her completely different advice than Danny would ever give her, but it's kind of great.  There is also a nurse named Tamra (Xosha Roquemore) who is constantly complaining about her boyfriend Ray Ron (Josh Peck), and a pair of midwife brothers (Brendan and Duncan, played by Mark and Jay Duplass) who serve as sometime rivals for the doctors.  And don't even get me started on the guest stars.  James Franco! Bill Hader! B.J. Novak! Ed Helms! Max Greenfield! The list goes on and on!

Basically, the employees of Schulman and Associates make up a group of coworkers and unlikely friends that rings true for a group of mostly single, mostly thirty-something coworkers and friends.  Some of them wind up dating and/or sleeping with each other, or developing crushes on each other that nothing really comes of.  They get into arguments over issues both big and small.  They interfere too much in each other's lives.  They all have their quirks, and they're not people who probably would have hung out with each other had they met in high school or college, yet they're incredibly loyal to each other when it counts.  They're all pretty great, and pretty fun to spend a half hour with once a week (or, you know.  Hours spread out over a couple of weeks on Netflix).  I'd definitely recommend.

thoughts on Boyhood

On the bookshelves in my apartment, I have more than thirty photo albums.  I got my first one and started filling it with photos when I got my first camera at age seven, and most recently added pictures in late June of this year.  On occasion, I have gone through them looking for a specific picture or pictures and been struck how, in some ways, it seems that I am living the same year over and over.  In multiple albums, there are pictures, for example, of me decorating Christmas cookies at my parents' house.  There are multiple pictures of groups of friends sitting around dinner tables on Thanksgiving, plates full of turkey and green bean casserole and mashed potatoes.  Often, it is difficult to tell when specific pictures were taken; you can tell, maybe, by hairstyles or glasses or the absence or presence of people who have drifted in and out of my life.  And yet...there are enough photos of things that only happened once, or only happened for awhile, or people that I'll probably never see again to let me know that while life is, in fact, organized by certain holidays and traditions that do happen over and over again, it's not the same year over and over.  Friendships start and end.  New hobbies are taken up.  Vacations are taken.  I move to different places and so do other people.  People are born and people die.  And some of the most important events aren't captured on film.

The experience of watching Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he ages from six to eighteen, was similar to the experience of flipping through those old photo albums.  This is not because most of the events selected from Mason's life are ones that would be caught on film, but because of the things that change and the things that stay the same as he ages.  His parents and sister are consistently part of his life, and a few other people pop up again and again, but others-- neighbors, friends, stepfathers, and eventually girlfriends-- come and go.  He moves with his mom and sister  from a two-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom apartment to a house that his first stepfather owns to a house that his mom buys herself to his first dorm room.  He plays video games on systems that change over the years and becomes more and more interested in, and more and more skilled at, photography.  His father (Mason Sr., played by Ethan Hawke) spends a lot of Mason's life pulling up in a GTO to pick him and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) up for weekend visits, then eventually gets remarried and trades the GTO in for a mini-van.  His mother (Olivia, played by Patricia Arquette) earns her Bachelor's and Master's degrees, eventually begins teaching at the college level, and, along the way, marries and divorces men who seem great at first but turn out not to be.  The audience is reminded that time is moving forward not only by the ages of the characters, but by changes in technology, by current events (Mason Sr. rails against President George W. Bush early in the film and later takes his kids with him to campaign for Obama), and by pop culture (Olivia reads to Mason and Samantha from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone early in the film; later, Mason and Samantha dress up in costume to go get their copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).

The film has a good heart.  There are some unpleasant and even terrifying moments in Mason's life (such as when Stepfather #1 drives him, Samantha, and his stepbrother and stepsister around drunk); he crosses paths with some bad people and even has experienced his first heartbreak by the end of the film.  Yet the core characters in the film-- Mason, Samantha, Mason Sr., and Olivia-- seem to be flawed but good people.  Olivia succeeds in her educational and professional goals but consistently falls for the wrong men.  Mason Sr. starts out roaring up in his GTO, taking the kids to do fun activities and forgetting not to swear around them, and then disappearing again, but eventually grows up, starts a second family, and becomes a more stable and consistent presence in the children's lives.  At one point, I was concerned that all of the men in Mason's life (which include his father, the two stepfathers he has over the years, a photography teacher, and a boss) seemed to be jerks, but then his father matures, and the teacher and boss wind up challenging him in ways that are good for him.  Again, Mason has some bad experiences and meets some bad people, but it's not a bad life, all in all. 

There are a few moments in the film that are just incredibly nice, moments when you are allowed to feel genuinely happy for the characters.  One of these is a section of the film in which Mason Sr., his wife, Annie (Jenni Tooley), and his infant son Cooper (Landon Collier) pick Samantha and Mason up and take them to visit Annie's parents.  The scene in which Mason Sr. and his new family pull up is the first in which the audience is introduced to Annie and Cooper, and we see immediately that Samantha and Mason are close with both of them.  It is Mason's fifteenth birthday, and Annie's parents proudly give Mason his first Bible and a shotgun that Annie's father tells him has been passed down in his family for generations.  The gifts aren't anything Mason would really want, but it's incredibly sweet how much Annie's parents want Mason Sr.'s kids to be included in their family.  Mason Sr.'s gifts are incredibly sweet and fatherly, too-- his first love is music (though he eventually gets a stable job in insurance), and he has painstakingly arranged all of the Beatles members' solo work into a "Black Album" for Mason, as well as bought him a shirt, tie, and jacket for things like school dances and job interviews.  It's just a really nice moment in the characters' lives-- Mason Sr. has clearly pulled himself together and is happy and surrounded by good people, and his kids are happy for him and accepting of the changes in his life. 

Olivia gets a nice moment, as well.  At one point, we see her tell a young man who is doing some work on her house that he is smart and should go to college.  A few years later, she runs into him again, and he greets her by telling her, "You probably don't remember me, but you changed my life."  He has finished community college and is working on his Bachelor's degree.  We see Olivia have a few "What am I doing?" or "Why does any of this matter?" moments over the course of the film, and even her own kids, who spend much more time with her than they do their father, are sometimes hard on her.  It's nice to see someone directly tell her that she's really done something right.

I really liked it.  The filming of the movie was spread out over twelve years, which gives it, for lack of a better word, a more genuine feel than the film might have if the same story was told with different actors playing the children over the years and the adults being made to look as if they were aging.  The pop culture, current events, and technology feel more authentic than they often do in movies set in the past, as well; some movies set in the past make such references in sort of a winky-winky way (again, for lack of a better term), like, "Oh, hey, remember when everyone was really into Harry Potter?  Remember when Facebook became a thing?  Remember when Obama was running for President?" Such references don't feel that way here; they seem like genuine reminders of what the world was like in 2002...and 2008...and so on.  I also like that we see some of the "big" moments in Mason's life (his graduation party, for example) but not all; we also see a fair number of days that are not necessarily ordinary, but that wouldn't necessarily appear in any photo album.  Because, after all, that's how most days are.

thoughts on Sex Tape (spoilers)

So...this was an awfully thin premise to base a movie around, and the only reason they're able to even get a whole movie out of this concept is that Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz's characters don't really understand how the Internet works, which doesn't make any sense, given that she is about to break a deal to become a professional blogger and he has some sort of DJ job that seems to involve uploading and sharing a crap ton of music.  Like, the events of this movie would have only been believable if we did not know that the two of them use the Internet all the time in their daily lives, and if perhaps the two were older and more out of touch.  Let's just get that out there right off the bat: the whole movie is based on a flawed and somewhat stupid premise, stretched out by having characters who seem relatively intelligent do stupid and unbelievable things.

Segel and Diaz star as Jay and Annie, a married couple with two elementary school-age children with cute old-timey names, Clive and Nell (played by Sebastian Hedges Thomas and Giselle Eisenberg, respectively).  They make a point early in the movie of letting us know that Clive is adept enough with technology that he has been put in charge of his fourth grade class's video yearbook, and also that he is, in Jay's words, kind of being a dick recently.  You would think that these two qualities-- his technology skills and his dickishness-- would allow him to eventually help his parents out, and that having a child help grown-ass adults out of a sex tape mess would be the kind of humor an R-rated comedy might go for. Spoiler alert: the movie doesn't go there.  The video yearbook eventually leads to some physical comedy when Jay jumps off a balcony to keep a child from accidentally playing the sex tape at a fourth grade graduation ceremony (I know; as one character points out, why the F if fourth grade graduation a thing?), but that's it. Missed opportunity, if you ask me, though it's hardly the movie's biggest problem.

Anyway, Jay and Annie met in college and used to have tons of sex all the time, but then once they had kids, they stopped having as much time and energy for it.  This doesn't actually come across as the World's Biggest Deal.  They seem to have a good relationship and probably just need some alone time.  Also, Annie's mom lives nearby and on two separate occasions in the film agrees to watch the kids on short notice, so you would think that getting said alone time also wouldn't be the World's Biggest Deal, but if it wasn't, there would be no movie, so...  Jay and Annie decide to spice up their marriage by making a sex tape of the two of them performing all of the positions from The Joy of Sex.  We don't get to actually see any of the sex tape until the end of the film (and what we do see is hilarious, for the record-- there are costumes, and Jason Segel singing for no real reason, and Cameron Diaz's stunt double (I would assume) doing flips off the couch), but apparently it lasts for three hours (which is implausible, but kudos to them, I guess), and they both seem to have a lot of fun making it.  The fun they have isn't actually from the recording of the sex, of course, but just from spending time together and trying new things, so they wouldn't have had to tape it to achieve the same result, but again, if they hadn't, no movie.

Jay promises to delete the movie after they're finished, but he doesn't, and it winds up getting uploaded to some sort of Cloud/Dropbox-like app that he has installed on the iPad they used to make the video.  We also learned earlier in the movie that Jay replaces his iPads pretty much any time a new model comes out and gives the older ones away as gifts, so Jay and Annie set out to find each individual iPad and delete the movies.  "Hey wait," you think to yourself even as you kind of enjoy the scenes where they go about getting the iPads back.  "This app he has installed is probably made up and I don't know exactly how it works, but if you delete the movie from the app itself, shouldn't it disappear on all of the iPads, unless people have already downloaded it to their hard drives?" The answer to this question is yes, but Jay and Annie don't find out you can do this until later.

Even so, it's clear that getting the iPads back should be simple, since they gave them all to people they know and see regularly in their daily lives, but the movie manages to stretch this out by having Jay and Annie do more stupid shit.  They find out Annie's boss's address and show up on his doorstep.  "Oh, hey," they do not say.  "You know that iPad we gave you?  Could we maybe see it for a minute to check something?"  This is literally all they would have to do.  Instead, they pretend to be there collecting money for charity, and Annie distracts her boss (Hank, played by Rob Lowe) while Jay searches for the iPad.  This leads to Annie and Hank (who seems super square but has weird tattoos and likes listening to rap and heavy metal and owns a lot of weird paintings with himself painted into scenes from Disney movies) snorting coke and Jay getting attacked by Hank's dog.  This is all kind of funny, but again, a lot of stupid, implausible stuff has to happen to make the scene possible.

And so the movie goes on in this manner.  Jay and Annie are blackmailed by a fifth-grader.  They take their kids with them to bust into the headquarters of the porn site that they learn the fifth-grader plans to upload the video to if they don't pay him $25,000. Jay, as previously mentioned, jumps off a balcony at one point.

Many of the individual scenes are pretty funny.  Like I mentioned, when we actually see the making of the sex tape, it's humorous.  The stuff with Annie's boss is funny in a bizarre sort of way.  Segel, Diaz, Lowe, Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper (who play friends that tag along for part of the iPad-retrieving journey), and Jack Black (who plays a porn site owner) all give good performances.  Unfortunately, all of the funny scenes and strong performances are taking place in a movie that doesn't make a lot of sense.

thoughts on Ruby Sparks (spoilers)

Paul Dano stars as Calvin Weir-Fields, a writer who is regarded a genius but can't get anywhere on the second novel he is supposed to be working on.  He seems to be in a bit of a slump, in general.  His girlfriend of five years has left him.  He doesn't really have any friends other than his brother, Harry (Chris Messina).  He got his dog, Scotty, because he thought that Scotty would help him get out and meet people; however, Scotty is scared of strangers and "pees like a girl."  One day, Calvin's therapist, Dr. Rosenthal (Elliott Gould), suggests that Calvin should write about someone who likes Scotty just as he is. 

He comes up with Ruby (Zoe Kazan), a painter from Dayton, Ohio, and finds himself really enjoying writing about her; at one point, he confesses that he thinks that he's falling in love with her, and that he looks forward to writing just so that he can spend time with her.  He lets Harry read what he has so far, and Harry tells him that the woman he has created is completely unrealistic.  Real women, Harry points out, have real flaws, not just quirks that make them endearing (Harry's wife, for example, is sometimes "mean as shit for no reason," Harry says).  Regardless, one morning when Calvin wakes up, Ruby has materialized as if out of thin air and is, for all intents and purposes, real.  Calvin is skeptical at first, but eventually he accepts that this has happened, and she becomes his girlfriend.  He only lets Harry in on the secret that he has created her; when Harry learns that Calvin can make Ruby do whatever he wants simply by writing it, he encourages Calvin to take advantage of this.  Calvin swears that he will never write about her again and will let her be, and he sticks to this for quite some time.  Eventually, though, he changes his mind, though every way he tries to change her backfires.  When she wants to spend more time apart, he writes that she is miserable without him...and she becomes so clingy that he can't even go to the bathroom or answer the phone.  He then writes that she is "effervescently happy"...but she remains so no matter what he does, whether he wants to leave her or wants to hole up in the house.

Calvin is a deeply flawed character.  This isn't to say that he's poorly written or unrealistic; however, I found him too off-putting to care about.  For example, Harry points out that he didn't give Ruby realistic flaws; I found it more disturbing that Calvin gave her no life outside of him.  She's supposedly a painter, but we never see her paint.  At one point, Calvin discourages her from going out and getting a job.  She is an orphan.  Now, he has no idea that she's going to come to life at the time he determines this detail, so it's not like he makes her an orphan so that he'll never have to meet her parents, or anything...but why, as a writer, did he not want/think to create people from her past?  Is this supposed to be a comment on how a lot of women in films aren't really well-developed or well-thought-out?  Perhaps, but Ruby isn't perfect enough or shallow enough to be a parody of the typical woman in, say, a romantic comedy (Jennifer Garner's character in The Invention of Lying comes closer to that); it just really seems like Calvin can't deal with a woman with a full life that doesn't revolve around him.  At one point, we meet his ex-girlfriend, Lila (Deborah Ann Woll), and she basically says as much-- that he had this idea of what she was supposed to be like and got upset when she didn't conform to it. 

He seems to impose this on everyone in his life, from Scotty to his mother (Annette Bening), who has apparently changed a lot since Calvin's father's death, but who seems happy, and whose new husband (Antonio Banderas) seems like a nice enough guy, if a bit new-agey.  It's a very unattractive character trait, though I wonder if it could have been made more understandable with a different actor or with more backstory.  It seems that this need to control everyone around him might have developed with his father's death, but since we're seeing everything from Calvin's perspective, we don't get any scenes where other characters discuss whether this is a recent change.  Or maybe Ruby could have asked him some questions about his past and pulled this out of him...but Calvin doesn't seem interested in having deep conversations with her or getting to know her, just in having her behave exactly as he wants her to.  It's frustrating.  Calvin does eventually set Ruby free, but it's unclear whether he really learns anything from the experience, or if the whole thing just gives him fodder to finish his novel.

I didn't particularly care for it.  It's kind of an interesting idea, and I always like Chris Messina; however, I just had too many problems with Calvin as a character.

thoughts on Party Down (spoilers)

First of all, the way I was introduced to this series (which originally ran on Starz from 2009-2010) is pretty funny.  I posted this article about why you should be watching the show Masters of Sex to Facebook; the article included a clip from Party Down that was funny and included some familiar faces.  I asked my Facebook friends what this show was and why I had never heard of it, and immediately received several responses about how great and funny it was.  Since I got the discs from Netflix and started watching the series, I've found myself bringing the show up in in-person conversations quite a bit, and inevitably someone will say, "Oh, I love Party Down!" The best is when someone specifically mentions the Steve Guttenberg episode, because that one's my favorite.  Anyway, I love that it's a show that apparently many people besides me have already heard of, yet I'm just finding out about it now thanks to the wonders that are Masters of Sex and Facebook.

Anyway, Adam Scott stars as Henry Pollard, a failed actor whose claim to fame is that he once starred in a beer commercial in which he uttered the line, "Are we having fun yet?!" People constantly recognize him from this; initially, they can't quite place where they know him from, and he always tries to say that he just has "one of those faces." Inevitably, they figure it out, and talk him into saying the line.  He worked at Party Down Catering years ago and finds himself back there after he decides to give up acting for good.  He is the most down-to-earth and likable person on the catering crew while also, in some ways, the saddest.  He's given up on his acting career even though there are hints that he is probably actually a very good actor.  He considers moving back in with his parents at one point.  At the end of the first season, he is promoted to Team Leader of the catering crew, but winds up giving it up several episodes into the second season because he doesn't want even the small amount of responsibility the job involves.  He winds up getting more heartbreak than joy from his "casual hook-up thing" with fellow caterer Casey (Lizzy Caplan), then falls into a relationship with rival caterer Uda Bengt (Kristen Bell).  He seems to have given up all hope and ambition...but there are hints, toward the end of the series, that maybe he's getting those things back.  He "rolls the dice" in a late episode by deciding to end things with Uda (though she breaks up with him before he gets the chance to actually do so) and turn down a corporate job with Party Down (though again, that opportunity disappears before he gets to actually reject it) in favor of trying again with Casey.  At the very end of the last episode, we see him going on an audition for a part he really wants.  We're meeting this character at a weird transitional time in his life, but it seems like things are going to be okay for him.

That's one thing that's fairly brilliant about this show. Many of the members of the Party Down crew are trying to break into show business, but because we mostly see them at their "day job," we don't often get to see a lot of the particulars of what they actually do; we see them catering, where they seem to spend a lot of their time goofing off, drinking, hooking up, and occasionally doing drugs.  There are moments, though, where we're allowed to see that some of these people probably actually have a shot at making it.  Casey gets a small part in a Judd Apatow movie; though the part is ultimately cut, we sense that it's probably not the end for her.  Kyle (Ryan Hansen) is good-looking, charming, and really sweet; we sense that he could have a future as an actor even though his "base jumping movie" goes straight to video and he spends most of his time at work hitting on women and feuding with fellow caterer Roman (Martin Starr).  Roman, a would-be sci-fi screenwriter ("I'm a writer! I write books! And screenplays! I have a blog!"), is a very particular combination of nerd and dick that can't get laid even when he's fully disguised as a famous rock star, and that just can't stop himself from explaining in detail to a woman why dragons are fantasy, not sci-fi, even though she might be into him if he could stop being a know-it-all for five seconds.  Yet there is a moment in the aforementioned Steve Guttenberg episode where we see that he might actually have a chance as a sci-fi screenwriter if he could find the right writing partner and/or mentor to rein him in.  These people haven't made it yet, and they're not as smooth and polished as the caterers from rival Valhalla Catering (nor do they care enough about their jobs to be), but they're not hopeless, either.  We also see genuine moments of camaraderie between them, such as when they square off in kickball against Valhalla at a company picnic, or when Henry and Casey try to stop Constance (Jane Lynch) from signing an outrageous pre-nup at her series finale wedding.

One of the most interesting characters is Ron (Ken Marino), the only Party Down crewmember to not even be tangentially involved in the entertainment industry, as well as the only one to really take his job seriously.  He is a recovering alcoholic and drug user; in a late Season One episode, he is thrilled when Party Down is hired to cater his own twenty-year high school reunion.  He can't wait to show everyone that he (who ruined his class's senior trip by chugging a bottle of whiskey and getting sent to the emergency room) is clean and sober and has a leadership position with the catering crew.  Once there, though, he winds up finding out that everyone is making fun of him for being so proud of his catering job, and he winds up pulling a repeat performance with the whiskey and emergency room.  His dream is to own a Soup or Crackers franchise, and he does for awhile...only the whole company goes bankrupt within a year.  The end of the series, though, finds him clean and sober again, and looking like he is heading towards running Party Down.  He has his own demons and failures to contend with...but still he's optimistic and hopeful and actually seems to have a chance at achieving his goals, small though those goals might seem to some.  It's pretty sweet.

I thought it was brilliant, really.  The catering premise meant that every episode found the crew in a new setting (an ill-attended Sweet Sixteen party...an NFL draft party for a closeted gay quarterback...an after party for porn industry awards) with plenty of fun guest stars (one of the producers is Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, which means that we wind up seeing a lot of Veronica Mars alum, including the aforementioned Bell, Hansen, and Marino, as well as Enrico Colantoni and Jason Dohring, among others; we also, at different times in the series, see the aforementioned Guttenberg, in addition to J.K. Simmons, Joey Lauren Adams, and Ken Jeong, just to name a few).  You also, along the way, got a fair amount of character development, as well as good chemistry among the cast.  It seems like it could have lasted awhile; Jane Lynch's exit at the end of the first season and subsequent replacement by Megan Mullally indicated that there was room for the cast to change if or when actors wanted to leave or it became realistic for the characters to move on from Party Down.  I wish that it would have lasted longer, but am glad I found what there was of it.  Thanks to all who recommended it.

thoughts on Obvious Child (spoilers)

Jenny Slate stars as Donna Stern, a comedian who, in the span of a few days, gets dumped (her boyfriend tells her that he has been sleeping with a friend of hers) and learns that the bookstore she has worked at for five years is closing down.  In the aftermath of this, she has drunken sex with a guy she meets following a particularly bad stand-up comedy performance.  They probably do not use a condom (we are shown some drunken fumbling with one; she later tells a friend that she remembers seeing a condom, but she isn't sure "what it did").  A few weeks later, she learns that she is pregnant.  She decides to get an abortion.  Though she had expected the drunken sex to be a one-night stand, she keeps running into the guy (Max, played by Jake Lacy), and he seems really sweet.  She struggles with whether to tell him about the pregnancy and upcoming abortion, then how to tell him.  Her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffman), and her mom (Polly Draper) provide emotional support.

This is not the type of movie where characters make epic speeches or have huge epiphanies or get into shouting matches, or where dramatic music plays on the soundtrack underscoring how we're supposed to feel.  We're just invited into Donna's life for a few weeks and shown how she deals with things.  I cringed when she left drunken messages on her ex's answering machine, as well as when she and Max fumbled with, but probably did not use, a condom.  I was touched by a scene in which Donna climbs into bed with her mom.  I appreciated that Max showed up with flowers on the morning of her abortion even though she wound up breaking the news to him onstage as part of her stand-up comedy routine; I liked that he was able to recognize that regardless of how she told him, the most important thing was that he be there for her.  I laughed at some of the dialogue, even though it included a few too many fart jokes for my taste.  I was glad that Donna seemed to have a lot of really kind and supportive people in her life. 

Because the film is missing the aforementioned epic speeches and huge epiphanies and dramatic music playing on the soundtrack, we are left to merely observe.  We may or may not always like or approve of what we are seeing in front of us.  The point is that we can have an opinion about what happens in Donna's life, but we don't get to have a say.

thoughts on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the predecessor to this film, most of the humans' troubles come from their own stupidity, arrogance, and general disrespect for and misunderstanding of animals.  Here, the humans are mostly good people, and the hyper-intelligent apes that populate the woods near San Francisco are generally peaceful and good-natured as well...but there are loose cannons in both groups that make it clear that any peace that currently exists between humans and apes is tenuous at best.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens with a montage of news clips that inform us that much of the human population has been wiped out by the "simian flu" that was introduced at the end of Rise.  A small group living in what remains of San Francisco wanders into the apes' territory near the beginning of the film hoping to use the dam on their land to get their power going so that they can try to establish contact with other survivors.  They get off on the wrong foot, though, when one moron (Carver, played by Kirk Acevedo) gets trigger-happy and shoots the apes' leader's son.  No one is actually killed in the skirmish, and fortunately, the apes' leader (Caesar, the ape raised by James Franco's character in Rise, played by Andy Serkis) is peaceful; however, Koba (Toby Kebbell) is definitely not, and he wants war with the humans.  A few of the humans (Malcolm, Ellie, and Alex, played by Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, respectively) manage to broker a tentative peace with Caesar and are allowed to do the work they need to do.  However, unrest between Caesar and Koba, as well as the fact that there are a number of humans who don't understand why they're negotiating with apes in the first place; who are scared of the apes; and/or who don't really give a crap how many apes they hurt while accomplishing their goals pretty much ensures that the humans and apes won't be living in harmony for long.

I enjoyed the previous film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, even though much of what happened in that film was completely ridiculous, with even the "good" characters doing things that were so stupid as to almost be unbelievable.  Here, though some people do bad things, their actions usually at least somewhat make sense, given the circumstances.  I will also give this film credit for taking longer than I expected before devolving into mad, human-on-ape battle, and at least keeping something of a real story going even after the film does go there.  Though Dawn makes more sense and is probably an objectively better film than Rise, though, I kind of felt like it was missing something.  Some reviews have pointed out that we pretty much know going in how the whole thing is going to end, so perhaps suspense is the missing element.  We are also missing any relationships with the depth of what we saw between Will (James Franco) and Caesar in the first film; Malcolm and Ellie make friends with Caesar in this movie, but the whole thing (with the exception of the backstory set up at the beginning) takes place over just a few days.  The first film took place over the course of literally years, so we got to see the relationships progress and change; here, we get that the humans have forged relationships and even makeshift families in the aftermath of the simian flu, but we didn't get to see those relationships form, and so much of the characters' interaction takes place in the midst of action that the relationships stay pretty shallow for us as an audience.

I thought it was just okay.  There were some good things about it, but overall, I felt like it was missing a lot of the emotional depth of Rise. 

thoughts on Begin Again

Spoiler alert: Adam Levine does not take his shirt off for even one second in this movie. For those of you who, like me, kind of assumed he would and are kind of disappointed by this news, here is the video for Maroon 5's "This Love."  In this video, he also frolics in some fake (or at least oddly shallow) sand and wears a bandana around his wrist for some reason.  Also, while I'm not a Maroon 5 fan per se, I do listen to a lot of pop music and can fairly confidently say that this is their best song. At any rate: you're welcome.



 

 

Anyway, so Keira Knightley stars as Greta, a songwriter who has followed her singer boyfriend Dave, played by the aforementioned Levine, from England to New York City.  He has recently had some songs placed on a movie soundtrack and has been flown to New York to record a whole album.  At first, he's super sweet and committed to including Greta in the process of making the album, but within a month, he has dumped her for a record label exec named Mim (Jennifer Li Jackson).  Greta goes to stay with Steve (James Corden), a friend from back home, and makes plans to head back to England the very next day.  First, though, Steve takes her out to an open mic night and convinces her to get onstage and sing one of her songs.  The crowd barely looks up from their drinks, but she catches the eye of Dan (Mark Ruffalo), an extremely down-on-his-luck, possibly alcoholic record exec who is separated from his wife, Miriam (Catherine Keener), and doesn't have much of a relationship with his teenage daughter, Violet (Hailee Steinfeld).  He has also just been fired from the record company that he helped build; he sees Greta as his way back in.  The record company wants her to make a demo, as is par for the course in the business, but Dan gets the idea that they will instead record an "outdoor album" all over New York.  He assembles a group of ragtag musicians that includes Steve, a couple of students, a guy who currently plays piano for children's dance classes, a few professionals who owe him favors, and eventually his daughter, and they get started.

That sounds like kind of a lot of set-up, right? It kind of is, but the film handles it well; the film starts with Greta singing her song onstage to a disinterested crowd, then gives us the backstories that show us how she and Dan got there.  It gives us these stories in a simple, non-cutesy way, meaning there are no subtitles labeling them as, "Dan: Down-on-his-Luck Music Exec," or "Greta: Recently Dumped Musician," which I could picture in a different kind of movie.  And these stories are important, because an album like the one they are making could only be made by people who have nothing left to lose. 

Literally all of my favorite movies (Walk the Line, Almost Famous, School of Rock, and That Thing You Do!) are about musicians or bands, and all of the movies on that list include both great soundtracks and iconic scenes centered around music and performance.  Remember when the Almost Famous gang sang along to "Tiny Dancer" on the tour bus?  Remember the sheer joy of Guy Patterson and the Wonders jumping and dancing around Guy's father's appliance store as they heard "That Thing You Do!" on the radio for the first time?  If you've seen those movies, of course you do.  They're scenes that illustrate what music can do: it can bring people together.  It can make everything okay when nothing is.  It can cause such pure, unadulterated joy that you just can't sit still.  I don't love the music in Begin Again as much as I love the music in the aforementioned movies, but that is more a reflection of my own taste-- as I said, I listen to lots of pop, both pop rock and pop country-- than of the film itself, because we get plenty of the types of scenes I've just alluded to.  Dan and Greta connect over a set of shared headphones as Greta shares her favorite "guilty pleasure" songs.  Steve leads everyone in a game where he plays a song and sees how long it takes before they all just can't help themselves from dancing.  Dan and Violet connect as he plays bass and Violet plays guitar on one of Greta's songs.  Greta gets closure on her relationship with Dave as she watches him sing one of her songs the way she wrote it, without all of the overproduction that has started to take over his music.

As is probably evident, my very favorite thing about this movie are the scenes that illustrate the joy and power of music...but these scenes aren't the only thing I loved.  The roles are all perfectly cast.  The relationships play out messily, yet just right: Dave isn't right for Greta anymore as either a musical or romantic partner, but the demise of their relationship led her to that stage, in that bar, in front of that record exec on open mic night.  There's a moment where you think there might maybe be something romantic or sexual between Dan and Greta, but they don't go there, and they shouldn't: they are making this album to get through or to something, and they need each other for that, but only that.

It's a great film.  Our lives are guided largely by chance and shaped by messy relationships. And for these people, music does more than just provide the soundtrack to all of it.

thoughts on Much Ado About Nothing (2012 Joss Whedon version)

I thought this was Just Delightful.  I'd never read or seen a staged version of this before, but I just loved the story, which involves two elaborate schemes; Don Pedro, Leonato, Claudio, and Hero (played by Reed Diamond, Clark Gregg, Fran Kranz, and Jillian Morgese, resepectively) scheme to trick Benedick (Alexis Denisof) and Beatrice (Amy Acker) into falling in love, while Don John, Conrade, and Borachio (Sean Maher, Riki Lindhome, and Spencer Treat Clark) plot to break up Claudio and Hero's impending wedding.  The setting is contemporary, but the dialogue is traditional Shakespeare; it's all shot in black and white.  I love any story involving an elaborate scheme, and Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof are FANTASTIC; I had previously only seen Amy Acker in the fifth season of Alias, but now I plan to watch Dollhouse, possibly even before I finish Breaking Bad.  Anyway, I thought it was great!

thoughts on 22 Jump Street

May I just say how impressed I've been with this summer's comedies so far? In the summer, all I want to do at the movies is laugh, and last year I remember being pretty disappointed with This is the End  and The Heat.  The To-Do List  was pretty good.  However, this summer I really, really enjoyed Neighbors, and 22 Jump Street was All That I Hoped it Would Be.


Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill are back as Jenko and Schmidt, the two mediocre cops who went undercover in a high school in 21 Jump Street to try to find and bust the dealer of a popular new drug.  In 22 Jump Street, they're in college to do the exact same thing; there are a lot of in-jokes about sequels, and how this time they're doing the same thing over again with a bigger budget.  In the previous movie, Tatum's Jenko surprisingly found himself as an outcast in a high school where dumb jocks weren't considered cool, while Hill's Schmidt fell in with the popular hipster kids.  This time, the tables are turned; Jenko fits right in with the football players and fraternity guys, while Schmidt meets a girl and hangs out with her and her artsy/poetry slam-loving friends.  Though the film is ostensibly about Jenko and Schmidt's undercover mission, it's also about college life and the two of them maybe drifting apart as partners and friends; their differences have always complemented each other, but now Jenko is having fun hanging out with new friends who are more like him, while Schmidt feels left out and gets clingy.  They manage to pull it together to finish up their mission over Spring Break.


It's all pretty fun and funny.  Tatum and Hill are both great.  The college setting is fun, and as a whole, it works as a send-up of both sequels and buddy cop movies.  I dug it.

thoughts on House of Cards, Season Two (spoilers)

So I finished the second season of House of Cards last night.  Though I enjoyed it to an extent and recognize that it is an objectively well-written and well-acted show, I didn't like it as much as Season One.  I looked back at my blog on Season One and saw that I apparently flew through that season in six days; this season probably took me about three weeks to a month.  This is partly because of timing; I watched the first season in the summer, when all of my regular shows had ended their regular seasons; I watched this while a number of shows I like were still broadcasting new episodes.  However, there are definitely other reasons why I found myself consuming Season Two less quickly.

For one thing, I missed the characters that left the show-- or rather, that FRANK KILLED-- in late Season One and early Season Two.  I liked Pete Russo (Corey Stoll) a lot, and while, as noted in my blog on Season One, my opinion on Kate Mara's Zoe Barnes changed throughout Season One, she was interesting, and it quite frankly pisses me off how things consistently end so horribly for the journalists on this show.  Zoe got pushed in front of a freaking train.  Lucas (Sebastian Arcelus) is in jail.  The journalists on this show are the only ones who are even trying to tell the American people the truth, and it's not even just that they are thwarted in their attempts to tell their stories; politicians actively work to destroy them.  Does this happen in real life?  If it does, it makes me feel bad for and about the world.

Additionally, when Zoe and Pete left, we lost a human element that was mostly missing from Season Two.  Was Zoe and Frank's relationship skeezy? Yes.  Was it compelling and, let's face it, a little bit fun to watch?  Also yes.  And though Zoe didn't always act ethically as a journalist, she was at least, in her own way, trying to do the right thing.  Same thing with Pete.  He was flawed, yes, but he was trying to be good; it's just pretty much impossible to do so when you have people like Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) actively planning your demise.  And so we're left with few characters who have anything interesting going on outside of their political lives and even fewer characters who are even trying to do the right thing.  And the ones who do try?  Beat down.  As I mentioned earlier, Lucas is in jail.  Megan Hennessy (Libby Woodbridge), the young woman who comes forward to reveal she was raped by a high-ranking military officer to try to help Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) get legislation passed to keep the same thing from happening to others is basically attacked on national television, abandoned by Claire, and then eventually pretty much suffers a nervous breakdown.  Can the good people win anything ever, please?  I'm not saying always; I know that wouldn't be realistic.  Just once in awhile.

I think they tried to insert the human element into two storylines: Remy Danton (Mahershala Ali) and and Jackie Sharp's (Molly Parker's) romantic relationship and whatever the hell was going on with Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly) and Rachel Posner (Rachel Brosnahan).  However, Remy and Jackie's relationship lasted about five minutes, and I never really connected with Jackie as a character; I feel like with her, they needed an actor who seemed more conflicted, or who you could see change more throughout the season.  Remy tells her at one point that she's gotten colder.  Her: "It makes things easier." Me: "Really? She has? She's never seemed particularly warm to me."  And...let's talk about the Doug and Rachel thing.  So...Rachel was the prostitute who contributed to Pete's demise, and she "knows things" about what went down with Pete.  I feel like there are ways to keep her from talking other than exiling her in an apartment in a town that doesn't even appear to be that far away, given how often Doug visits her, and forbidding her from having her any human interaction outside of work.  Doug's fixation with her was creepy.  I know that he himself recognized this and tried to stop.  This doesn't mean that it was anything but uncomfortable to watch him interfere with her romantic life and show up and make her read to him and stuff.  It also doesn't mean that I couldn't help but be all, "Good for you!" when she nailed him in the head with that rock at the end of the season.  RIP, Doug.  You won't be missed.

So, bottom line, I probably will still at least start Season Three, whenever it comes out.  But I just find it more and more difficult to find any connection to any of these characters as the series progresses.

thoughts on Million Dollar Arm

Jon Hamm stars as JB, a sports agent who, in the vein of Jerry Maguire, has recently struck out on his own with only a couple of loyal employees and isn't doing great so far.  He is close to landing a very promising client; however, when said client decides to go with a bigger sports management firm that can afford to pay him a $1,000,000 signing bonus, JB must come up with a big idea to keep his little firm afloat.  After flipping back and forth between a cricket match and Britan's Got Talent on TV one night, he's got it: he will travel to India and launch a "million dollar arm" contest to try to find Indian cricket players to bring back to the United States and train to be Major League baseball players.

Let me be clear about one thing: I love Disney sports films (Miracle, The Mighty Ducks, The Rookie, etc.), so I can handle-- and, in fact, was looking forward to-- a movie about underdogs overcoming obstacles to achieve a goal.  I certainly wouldn't give this film a hard time if its only problems were that it was formulaic or cheesy, which it is at times.  The issue is that after a few somewhat promising and interesting early scenes in India as JB and his employees go about the process of recruiting players, once JB gets back to the United States with two would-be ball players and a translator/would-be coach in tow (Rinku, Dinesh, and Amit, played by Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mattal, and Pitobash, respectively), the movie becomes less about the contest and more about how JB becomes a better person through acting as sort of a father figure to the young Indian men.  Before, JB was living a somewhat shallow bachelor life full of one-night stands with models but bereft of much real human interaction; the only people we see him check in with during his time in India are Aash (Aasif Mandvi), the employee who initially introduces him to cricket, and Brenda (Lake Bell), the medical student who rents his guest house.  After returning to the United States, JB makes a bunch of mistakes that can be chalked up to the fact that he's treating Rinku and Dinesh like commodities rather than people.  It initially doesn't occur to him that he should actually go and watch them practice and look after their general well-being, what with them being new to the United States, and all; instead, he drops them off at practice each day, orders them pizza each night, and for entertainment, takes them to a wild party and sets them loose while he tries to land a deal (spoiler alert: this doesn't end well).  He pushes them into their tryouts for the Majors before they are ready.

One frustrating thing about all of this is that JB has several people warning him every time he's about to make a mistake, and every time, he stubbornly pushes ahead and then acts angry and surprised when things turn out exactly as everyone told him they would, and exactly as any fool could see they would.  Because of this, this movie is, as previously noted, less about an interesting (if not selfishly motivated) idea for a contest and the people who participate in it and more about a jerk who learns to be less of a jerk.  Why not tell the story from Rinku and Dinesh's perspectives and actually develop their characters? JB would still necessarily play a large role in the whole thing.  Jon Hamm could still play him.  I just think that Rinku and Dinesh are probably more interesting people than JB, but we never really get to learn whether or not that's true.  I know that people made similar comments about The Blind Side-- that the movie was more about how Leigh Anne Tuohy saved Michael Oher than about Michael Oher-- but at least Leigh Anne Tuohy as played by Sandra Bullock was an interesting character.  JB really is not.

There are some moments of Disney sweetness, mainly involving JB's eventual (and perhaps inevitable) romance with Brenda.  Case in point: Brenda invites JB back to the guest house one night.  We see them kiss.  We gather, based on the fact that Rinku, Dinesh, and Amit catch JB leaving the guest house the next morning, that they slept together, but we don't actually see it, and JB has to gently tell the guys that just because he and Brenda spent the night together doesn't mean they're going to get married (though, spoiler alert, we learn before the closing credits that in real life, JB and Brenda actually do.  Did I mention that this is all based on a true story?).  Moments like this are nice, and Brenda is fine as a "cool girlfriend who helps the jerk guy change his ways" kind of character (other examples of this type of character include Jennifer Garner in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Jennifer Garner in Draft Day, which was the last movie I saw in a theater before this one, and which was so boring I didn't even bother to review it, in case you were curious). Jon Hamm is also fine as JB in that you always believe that Jon Hamm is good deep-down even when he's playing guys that often do bad things, which also works for him as Don Draper on Mad Men.  I just really feel like Disney made a mistake by having this film revolve so heavily around JB, though.

thoughts on Neighbors

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne star as Mac and Kelly Radner, a thirty-something married couple with a baby.  When a fraternity moves in next door, they are concerned about the potential noise, but want to try to be cool; they introduce themselves to the guys (led by fraternity president Teddy, played by Zac Efron, and vice-president Pete, played by Dave Franco) and offer them a joint, trying a little too hard to be casual when they tell them to “keep it down.”  After they get fed up with the noise and call the cops on a party, however, they find themselves in a war.  Mac and Kelly break a pipe and flood the guys’ basement.  The guys steal the airbags from Mac and Kelly’s car and strategically place them in chairs, so that Mac winds up shooting towards the ceiling more than once.  Kelly gets the idea to try to cause a rift between Pete and Teddy by getting Pete to hook up with Teddy’s girlfriend.

It’s all pretty fun and funny.  Part of the humor comes from the fact that with a few exceptions, the war is way more on Mac and Kelly’s end than the guys’.  Yes, the fraternity guys are being loud and annoying, but most of it isn’t specifically directed at Mac and Kelly; they’re just doing what they do.  Mac and Kelly actually scheme to try to get what they want.  Their friend Jimmy (Ike Barinholtz) correctly suggests that they’re just bored, getting used to being parents.  Likewise, Pete suggests to Teddy that perhaps he’s taking all of the fraternity stuff so seriously because he has no idea that he’s going to do when he graduates. 

The movie is also surprisingly sweet at times.  Mac and Kelly enlist a pledge to try to help them bust the fraternity for hazing; he initially goes along with it, but backs out when Teddy demonstrates legitimate concern for him and his sudden problems with the fraternity’s initiation rituals.  Teddy and Pete seem to have a genuine friendship.  Mac and Kelly have an argument at one point—he tells her that one of them has to be the adult in their relationship, and she’s supposed to be the one to rein him in; she points out that she’s never been like that—but make up quickly.  The film also largely avoids gross-out humor, save for one gag with the baby finding a condom on the lawn.

All in all, this was a funny and sweet comedy with largely likable characters.  I’d recommend.

thoughts during Scandal, 3/20/14

Jake killed JAMES?! I did NOT see that coming! I thought for sure it would be David!

Oh, my! Cyrus pushing James against the wall in that flashback! 
Cyrus: "That's my move."
James: "You're damn right, that's your move."
DAMN!

Jake: "James Novak died in a car jacking.  Accept that, and that world keeps spinning."
Olivia: "And if I don't?"
Jake: "Bad things happen to good people all the time."
Me: "HOLY SHIT!"

Olivia asks her dad what the point of anything is. If everyone is a monster, who is worth saving?  Olivia's dad's response? Everyone!: "In the face of darkness, you drag everyone back into the light! That is the point!  Or at least, that's what I like to think is the point of YOU!" I love Olivia's dad.

Oh, how I gasped when Mellie and the new vice-presidential candidate started getting it on!  And then I started repeating "Ohmygodohmygodohmygod" over and over again.  Go, Mellie!

Did Huck and Quinn really make out for a minute there? I swear, you turn away from this show for a split second... Anyway, those two creep me out, so whatever.

Aw, to the flashback of Cyrus taking his relationship with James public!  I was grinning from ear to ear, and happy to see that President Fitz was, too.

Aaand another episode of the emotional rollercoaster we all know and love comes to a close.

A long time ago, we used to be friends... (thoughts on the Veronica Mars movie) (spoilers)

Kristen Bell stars as Veronica Mars, who, since we saw her last at the end of the Veronica Mars TV show, has transferred from Hearst College to Stanford, completed law school at Columbia, and now is interviewing at a big New York City law firm.  She also is dating Piz (Chris Lowell), not still, but again.  Early in the movie, she learns that her ex-boyfriend Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) has been accused of murdering his pop star ex-girlfriend, who also was a high school classmate of Veronica and Logan's.  Though Veronica and Logan haven't spoken in nine years, he calls her for help, and she agrees to go back to Neptune.  Meanwhile, Wallace (Percy Daggs III) is trying to get Veronica to attend their ten-year class reunion, which she is less than thrilled about.

I wound up going to see this by myself, at the last minute.  This turned out to be for the best, since I was totally dorking out through the whole thing.  I was, like, clapping my hands in delight every time a familiar face showed up (Krysten Ritter as Gia Goodman!  Max Greenfield as Leo D'Amato, all adorable and pretending not to remember Veronica!).  There was also a moment where Logan was about to leave, and I full-on whispered, "Please stay," and then Veronica said, "Please stay," and they start making out, and I did the little "Yes!" thing with my arm.  OH!  And there was an A Few Good Men reference!:

Veronica: "You stand there in that f'itty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth show me some f'ing courtesy!"

Logan: "Way to keep it PG-13, Mars." HEE!

As is probably evident, much of the pleasure of this movie is seeing the whole gang back together, and for awhile, I was enjoying it in a simply, "Huh, this is like a better-than-average episode" kind of way.  HOWEVER, at the point where (SPOILER!!!) Veronica's dad (Enrico Colantoni) and Deputy Sacks (Brandon Hillock) got hit by a car, I was like, "Whoa, everything just got kicked up a notch!" Also...at it's heart, it's really a story about Veronica Mars learning to accept and embrace who she is rather than trying to escape it, which is pretty darn cool.  Watching her put her feet up on the desk at Mars Investigations at the end was just so badass.

Anyway...I'm not sure how it would be if you never watched the show, but I loved it a lot.

thoughts on Scandal, 3/6/14

1)  I love how Olivia's dad basically shows up once an episode to be all badass.

2)  Jake (and I'm not going to get this quote exactly right): "If I'm going to be your fake boyfriend, I want to come home at the end of the day and drink a real beer and eat real food.  Wine is not beer, and popcorn is definitely not food."  Hee.  I mean, popcorn IS food, but it's not a meal.

3)  Have we ever been given a good reason why Fitz hates Mellie so much?  I know that they're basically in an arranged political marriage.  I know she's a bitch.  I know he resents that he's basically stuck with her.  But he talks to her with such CONTEMPT in his voice.  He's the one who cheats on her constantly, and he's basically a hot mess.  I may just be forgetting something, or it may just be that I'm starting to really like Mellie now, but he just usually seems more hostile towards her than the situation warrants.

4)  "When I was given the chance to cheat, I kept my knees together and I said no.  We.  Are not.  The same."  Go, Mellie.

5) And tonight's first "Oh my god.  Oh my god" moment came when Mellie rushed forward and kissed Fitz's running mate in the room with the portraits of all the First Ladies.  When did she become my favorite?

6) Fitz: "Do you have feelings for Jake?"

Olivia: "That's none of your business."

Fitz: "I know."

Me: "Well, it kind of is."  I mean, Fitz is married, and all, and he's not in a position to tell her what to do or anything, but...they kind of still have a thing, and he's certainly not hiding how he feels about her or how he feels about Mellie.  He's a douche bag, is what I'm saying, but he's generally pretty honest and forthright about his feelings.

8) Jake using his security clearance to spy on Olivia talking to Fitz about him in the Oval Office?! EW! Already creepy.  Has the potential to get super creepy.  Scott Foley is well-cast in this role, though.  I never quite buy it when Foley plays a straight-up nice guy...but a "nice guy" who is kind of shady?  Absolutely, I'll buy that.

It's no secret that this show is my favorite these days, but the thing that still makes me uncomfortable about it is that sometimes it goes a little *too* dark for what it actually is, which is a well-written, well-acted soap opera.  It should be a straight-up "naughty fun" show, but then they have to throw in stuff like Mellie getting raped by her father-in-law years ago and all of the torture business they sometimes do with Quinn and Huck.  Things like that are not only unpleasant to watch, they're not in keeping with the tone of the show.

Regardless, it was a great episode.  Very concerned that 1) I'm going to miss next week and 2) abc.com doesn't put new episodes online for eight days.  I might have to temporarily get Hulu Plus, or something.