Innocent Bystander

Happy Halloween from Spooky Spooky Wolf-Boy...

Last time for this  "Halloween tradition," I promise...

 

Friday Foto #199...

New York state of mind...Rockefeller Center's 30 Rock.

Friday Foto #198...

New York state of mind...Top of the Rock at sunset...lights on!

The new fall TV season: is it "meh" or "blah"...I can't decide.

We're close to a month into the new fall TV season and I have to say, it's pretty sucky. Yes, I know that's a highly technical term, and I apologize to anyone reading this for using such advanced terminology, but I call them as I sees them.

There were a number of new--and returning--shows I decided to watch or was looking forward to seeing again. At this point--I'm either happy or sad to say--I've pretty much dropped all the new ones I decided to try. That speaks volumes either to the quality of those shows or my dwindling attention span.

Of all the new shows, the one I was most looking forward to was Person of Interest, the JJ Abrams/Jonathan Nolan collaboration featuring actors Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson teaming up to fight crime in New York City with the aid of Emmerson's post-9/11 super computer. The good news is it's filmed in NYC, and it neatly captures the post-9/11  surveillance, closed circuit TV, and other assorted changes in city life since that horrible day. The bad news: It's kind of boring. Caviezel is about as exciting as burnt toast, Emerson does this very actorly limp that is supposed to give his character some kind of damaged depth, and co-star Taraji P. Henson is the most unconvincing police detective EVER. No one seems to get that this is a "new millennium" version of the classic The Equalizer, and as such, should neatly sum up the paranoia of everyday city life. It fails miserably at that, with a "person in distress" weekly plotline and a much too slow unveiling of  the two main characters' backstories. I gave up on this show halfway through the last episode, when it was revealed the "damsel in distress" was really the person doing the bad stuff, a plotline they recycled from an earlier show. Yes, four shows in and they're recycling already. Yeesh (there I go using highly technical terms again).

I was also looking forward to New Girl, starring the lovely Zooey Deschannel. Three shows into that, I gave up. Deschannel is lovely and quirky and different, but I got to the point where I wanted to slap her for all those things. The guys she lives with are all blatant stereotypes, including the em0/sensitive guy (who you just know will end up being in love with Zooey and they will live happily ever after) and the douchebag guy. New becomes old really fast in this day and age.

Whitney Cummings was the "It Girl" there for a short period of time. With two new shows on the networks this year--2 Broke Girls and Whitney, her own "sitcom"--Cummings breezed in out of nowhere (for me, at least) to suddenly dominate prime-time. The good news: 2 Broke Girls is cute and funny, if a little too much a female version of Two and A Half Men, especially when it comes to how far can you go to be dirty on network TV, at least dialogue wise. It coasts along with the very appealing Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs and is refreshingly Whitney-free. I wish I could say the same for Whitney, which is about as funny as pay toilet in a diarrhea ward (I doubt they've ever had diarrhea wards in hospitals, but that joke from a 10-year-old perfectly illustrates the kind of "sophisticated" humor present on Whitney). My advice to NBC: Change the name of the show to Skanky. It fits better.

American Horror Story is Glee creator Ryan Murphy's new FX show. It's gotten a lot of press (Entertainment Weekly seems to LOOOOOOVE it, for some reason) and I'm at a loss for why. I watched the first episode and gave up. The creators and the netlet owe Stephen King a royalty payment: The show is nothing but a rip-off of The Shining, with an evil-infected house in Los Angeles subbing for the evil-infected hotel in Colorado, and a bit more sex added in. I totally forgot to watch episode 2 and by the time episode 3 aired last night, I was over it.

As for returning shows, I'm sad to say that The Office without Steve Carrel is like AfterMASH without Alan Alda: uninspired, unfunny, and just kind of sad. It's time to close down Dunder-Mifflin, I'm afraid. The Walking Dead grew from six episodes last season to 13 this one, and if the first extended (90 minutes) episode is any indication, that was a major mistake. The cast spent just about the entire show looking for a missing kid in the woods. It was a long and boring search, and a metaphor for what I was experiencing while watching. Both the actors and me where asking the same question: When the F is something going to happen? Turns out zombie killing gets real old real fast, and I actually think the show jumped the shark when Rick and Daryl cut open a dead zombie to find out if the missing girl was in its stomach. It was a long, gross sequence done solely for the gross-out factor, with much head-turning, eye-rolling, and disgusted looks from the actors involved. Don't worry...I'm pretty sure all the viewers felt that way, too.

And finally there's the new--improved?--Two and A Half Men with Ashton Kutcher. I've never been a fan of Ashton and find him pretty much as bewildering, appeal-wise, as Jennifer Lopez. As software billionaire Walden Schmidt, Kutcher is a bit like the dead Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen) and a bit not so much. He's a naive chick magnet on his own for the first time, having been booted out by his wife (the wonderful and horribly underused Judy Greer). He's taken over the Malibu house with Alan (Jon Cryer) and Jake (Angus T. Jones) still in residence. Each subsequent show seems to offer diminishing returns, both for the viewer and in the ratings. Supposedly in real life, Demi Moore has kicked Ashton out of the house. I think I'm about to do the same. This show would have been so much better if Hugh Grant had signed on. I will admit though that Cryer is one of the funniest and most talented actors on TV today. Give him his own show!

Be still my Tweeting heart...

In the interest of still having something--occasionally--to say, I have decided to test this "Twitter" thing. Since I'm sure I will miss blogging if and when it goes away (I'm still saying "if," so don't send me any threatening comments about "DON'T PISS ME OFF"), I have decided to embrace another form of technology and still have a means of expressing myself, even if it's only in a pithy--or pissy, as the case may be--140 characters.

Twitter somehow reminds me of a monk's form of blogging, as if we're all locked away in a monestary and have taken a vow of silence and are allowed to only say so much each day. And while I'm sure the monks--in between their self-flagellation, wine-making, and illuminated manuscripts--did not count characters, I'm equally sure they would appreciate the brevity of the Tweet (which I think is a new sequel to Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs).

For those of you interested in "following" me (see?... it still sounds semi-religious), you can do so at gg92101T. We'll see how long this lasts. I may embrace it, I may scorn it, I may just forget it exists. So sign up at your own risk. Suffice it to say, if I have anything longer to say, this will still be the place I use to say it.

Friday Foto #197...

New York state of mind...traditional New York dinner (this one's for you, Lianna.)

Okay, HBO...I give in...

After a lifetime of resistance, I finally gave in this weekend and ordered HBO. And when I say lifetime, I MEAN lifetime. I was still living in Tamaqua, PA when HBO was first broadcast in eastern Pennsylvania (Wilkes Barre, to be exact, on Nov. 8, 1972). For years my standard joke was "I can only watch Sharky's Machine so many times," a reference to a ubiquitous Burt Reynold's movie that seemed to be on the pay-channel every night back in the 1980s, the last time I had HBO for any length of time.

I grew up in a time when drive-in theaters regularly ran "public service announcements" (as seen here) against pay TV. We had cable TV in my household as early as 1962, and when HBO started, my parents actually sprung for it, at least for a little while. I resisted it pretty much ever since, even when the channel started to offer new programming such as The Sopranos. I resisted it through the True Blood years (I'd rather watch toast turn cold than Anna Paquin in anything...have you seen Blue State?). But a couple of weekends ago, they had a (largely unadvertised) free weekend, which coincided with the second season premiere of Boardwalk Empire. During that weekend they reran all the episodes of season one of BE, and I was smart enough to record them all.

Let's backtrack a year, to the last time I caught a free weekend of HBO. It was when Boardwalk Empire premiered, and I watched the first episode. Despite the fact that it took place in the almost-mythical land of Atlantic City--where many a summer vacation was enjoyed by yours truly--I wasn't sold on it. I couldn't buy Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson, the Atlantic County treasurer (actual name: Nucky Johnson), who ruled the City in the 1920s through the 1940s, with an iron fist. Buscemi is a fine actor, but he's someone who is always Steve Buscemi. Only the clothes and situation changes on and around him. I also didn't like Michael Pitt, who plays World War I hero Jimmy Darmody, Nucky's surrogate son. And when you have problems with the two main leads, you have a problem with the show.

But something clicked this time, and after watching the first 3 or 4 episodes of season one, I was hooked. The meager set--which is quite well done, but limits the boardwalk action as much as Tim Burton's Gotham City set in Batman limited the action there--has grown on me, supplemented by a lot of green screen work to add to the less than a block of actually built boardwalk. The set ia an amalgamation of long-gone AC landmarks (including the Marlborough-Blenheim hotel), and some of the green screen work includes the Traymore and other hotels and piers.

The real star of the show--for me, at least--is the luminous Kelly Macdonald, who plays Nucky's far from usual type squeeze, Margaret Schroeder. I first fell for Macdonald in the BBC miniseries, State of Grace, then loved her in the movie The Girl in the Cafe. She's done some American movie work--including No Country for Old Men, as Josh Brolin's wife--but here she's allowed to utilize her lilting Irish accent to full effect (for the record, she was born in Scotland). And she's wonderful in it, playing a woman far ahead of her time who is equally adept at providing for her family while trying to be on as equal ground as possible with her male counterparts. Mrs. Schroeder is a plain-speaking, honest, immigrant woman who has seen a lifetime of tragedy already, and who now lives with the man--Nucky Thompson--who ordered her husband's death.

Boardwalk Empire touches on a lot of things that are all but lost in American history: Prohibition (catch Ken Burns's excellent recent PBS miniseries on that, too), the parade of lost souls who came back from WWI damaged beyond repair (Jack Huston's spooky portrayal of Richard Harrow, the vet with half a face), even the incubator babies that were an "attraction" on AC's boardwalk for many years. It mixes fact with fiction: Thompson and Dermody hob-knob with Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein, to name a few prominent 1920s-era gangsters, while some AC politicos (including Nucky) have their names changed to protect the innocent (there's a Mayor Bader, who is the namesake of the AC airport, for example).

So here's to Boardwalk Empire and Steve Buscemi for getting me to spring for the extra 14 bucks a month to watch their most excellent show for the coming 10 weeks or so. Not even bare breasts, Burt Reynolds, and the opportunity to watch the same movie 30 times in one month, were able to accomplish that in the past.

Friday Foto #196...

New York state of mind...free movie night at Bryant Park.

Where I've been and why...

I have been absent from this blog for too long. Save for a weekly "Friday Foto" post, I haven't posted anything in a good two weeks, and--I'm somewhat saddened to say--I haven't really missed it. I have been tied up with work-related stuff and a trip to San Francisco for APE, the Alternative Press Expo. Now I'm back and on vacation, but sick, also...I caught something up there or in the plane or whatever.

But mostly I've been extremely tired and bored of the Internet. I think the web has actually ruined the world in some strange way. It fosters immediate gratification and gives a voice to everyone. The latter sounds like a good thing, but it's really not. The majority of the people who comment on the Internet only have something negative to add. I have been lucky on this blog with nice comments, to be honest, but all you have to do is read the comments on sites like Entertainment Weekly or any of the comics sites. In fact, if you want a true cross-section of the idiots of the world, read the comments sections on any major comics site. Everyone is an expert on everything, including how to run a comics convention. Even people who have NEVER been to a show have the cure for whatever perceived ailment exists at any given show. A prominent comics industry figure once told me that he believes that there are only 37 people responsible for all the comments on all comics websites. If that's true, all 37 are absolute assholes.

I am sick to death of this. I am--for the most part--sick to death of the Internet. I have always had a love/hate relationship with it, and now it's mainly hate. I am tired beyond tired with Facebook, the ubiquitous "friends" site. Three-quarters of my friends are people I could care less about. Half of those are people I've never even met. I'm not a networker, I'm not a joiner, by nature. I don't like parties or crowds, so why I ever joined Facebook is beyond me. But all of this is habit now, hard to break and hard to get away from.

I hate to be the blogger who cried wolf, but the future of this blog is really up in the air right now. For those of you who care--the three or so who read it on a regular basis--I am seriously thinking of ending it at the end of the year. The archive of it will stay up online, but ongoing material--even Friday Foto--will cease. I'm still a little on the fence on this, but I'm pretty much all the way over it...just the pocket of my jeans is caught on a splinter, and I'm having a bit of a hard time extracating myself from an almost 7-year habit.