Culture Round-Up
Oct. 1st, 2017 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. This is kinda of cool, did not know it existed, I may try it -- Inktober - Drawing a Different Drawing in Ink every day, and posting to Twitter with Hashtag, Inktober.
I need to get back in the habit of drawing, I'm rusty. Been working on writing instead.
2. Amazon is justifying my subscription by opting a lot of sci-fi books for adaptation>
3. Television Series Round Up
* Will and Grace -- I tried this. It's a reboot or rather a continuation of the 1998 series, with just a few political updates. The cast looks the same, making me wonder if they made bargains with the Devil or just have great plastic surgeons. So is the humor. Considering I didn't like the 1990s series all that much, this didn't work for me either. Yes, I know, what was I expecting...something different? If the 1990s series did not work for you, this won't.
* Great News -- made me miss Broadcast News, Newsradio, Murphy Brown, and WKRP. It's a bit over the top and I don't like the cast. Considering I was among the few people that did not fall in love with 30 Rock, it's not surprising. I find Tina Fey's humor a bit heavy handed and over the top. I prefer a more subtle approach.
* The Good Place -- Best situation comedy currently on. As a friend on FB put it --"it's an epistemological nightmare. Don't feel bad, I had to look it up to..mainly just to spell it. If you are into philosophy at all, you should be watching this series -- it makes fun of philosophy and organizations, religious thought, and well our society in general.
Also by far the least predictable comedy that I've seen, and the most innovative. There's nothing else like it. This year is so much better than last year.
This week's episode was reminiscent of Ground Hog day, but from the perspective of the Management creating Ground Hog Day and getting frustrated when no matter what they did they got the same result.
Chibi, upon realizing they are repeating themselves over and over and can never learn from their mistake, because when they are rebooted they have no memory of what occurred before...calls it a Nietzchian reoccurrence ---or an epitsmological nightmare. I could write reams of meta on that episode alone. It's a philosophy/organizational sociologist, psychologist dream episode. Academics must be having fun with this series.
* Big Bang Theory Still funny. But impossible to get into if you have not been watching it all along. Very serialized.
* This is Us -- first episode of the season was a bit weak, and somewhat over-sentimental, not to mention heavy-handed and preachy. I rolled my eyes a couple of times. Yes, yes, we know, "it's better to have loved and lost than never to loved at all...and better still to have never lost the love to begin with.." But it's not like people have control over these things. Honestly. Save the platitudes and tell the frigging story.
* Grey's Anatomy -- best season opener that I've seen in a while. Riggs Wife is played by the same actress that stars in Timeless (so I knew she wasn't going to stick around). She survives.
Just doesn't stay. Exactly. And if she does? It won't be for long. Hello, on another television series.
But I enjoyed the show and cast interactions quite a bit. Considering this is it's 14th season and it's managing to stay fresh and compelling...that's saying something.
* The Good Doctor -- this is an adaptation of a Korean Series, and produced by Korean actors, directors, etc. But written by the guy who did House. I wish they had cast more Koreans in the roles, and had more Koreans writing for it...it might have been better. It stars Toby from the West Wing, aka Richard Schriff, and he's just as preachy and sanctimonious as he was as Toby. Also the kid from Bates Motel as the lead. He's good in it. Everyone else...eh..jury's still out. There's two very attractive male doctors who report to each other, that look alike and I'm having troubles telling apart. Usually it's female doctors...so progress. Not sure I'll stick with it, it's heavy handed and somewhat cliche.
The story is about an autistic surgeon who gets selected for a competitive surgical program by his former mentor.
The board doesn't want him, nor does the chief of surgery, because hello, autistic.
The former mentor/president of the hospital board pushes him through anyhow. He succeeds because Dr. Murphy, the autistic young surgeon, manages to save a kid in the airport doing an impossible procedure. (I wondered about this...because he uses whiskey to do it. Kids don't try this at home.)
And -- comes up with the means of saving the kids life at the hospital, with a bit of help from an eager and rather attractive female surgeon. The male surgeons, including his new boss are skeptical and don't think he can help. And the security guard keeps him from entering the hospital, forcing him to sit out in the rain.
At the end, it's his ideas that save the day and they give him a chance to explain why he wants to be a surgeon. Throughout we get flashes of his backstory as a poor kid in Wyoming with white trash parents, and an abusive father who smacked him around and killed his pet bunny in front of him -- until his brother rescues him and they run away to live in a bus. He becomes a surgeon because the brother dies and he wants to save people, also make enough money to buy a television set.
It looks earnest, but I sort of wish it had a bit more humor and less earnest...also so far a bit on the cliche side.
About a C-
* The Brave - the first of four different military covert ops action series debuting this fall. This one stars Anne Hech as the Department of Defense Secretary who sends the team on tough assignments, as she monitors them via drones and satellite feeds from Washington with her Washington team. The team is a diverse unit of four men and one woman. The actors are rather good.
The production professional. The writing....boilerplate. If you feel you've seen something like this before, you most likely have. It's your paint by numbers covert ops thriller. Hostage crisis, off they go to solve it, and kill the bad guys. Of course the bad guys try to retaliate. Will state that terrorists make much better bad guys than Russians/Communists, which were the bad guys in these shows in the 1970s and early 80s. Then it became the drug cartels and organized criminals involved in human trafficking, now it's the terrorists. And they are rather demonized. You, the viewer, will hate them and want them dead.
It's graphically violent and doesn't appear to have much to say -- so violent entertainment, with bias.
But well-produced and directed. Also the plot was rather tight. And we have the typical back story character conflicts, one guy died, the team is struggling to get past his off-screen death and accepting the replacement, who is proving himself. There's a woman on the team who is struggling with the new guy. A sympathetic CO.
The pilot focuses on the rescue of a female surgeon, who they think is just a hostage, only to realize she's been captured to save the life of a head of a terrorist operation. So, they have two tasks, save her and take out the head of the terrorist operation, who they thought was dead.
Meanwhile there's the team struggling to trust each other and work as a unit.
Like I said, it's nothing you haven't seen before and all rather predictable.
Overall rating? B-
4. Bright Lights Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Renyolds - this is the HBO documentary that Carrie's brother Todd Fisher produced and worked on about two years before his sister and mother's death, featuring his family.
It's an odd documentary. Not at all what I expected. The film crew basically follows the family around in their day to day lives, and interviews them and their associates. Featuring news footage, film footage, and highlights from past performances, mainly Debbie Reynolds. (I'm guessing they couldn't get the rights to Carrie's films?)
It reminded me a lot of the Princess Diarist, and some of the things mentioned and referenced in The Princess Diarist are here as well -- such as Carrie's attendance at the Comic Cons signing a billion autographs. She calls it the lap-dance. Or celebrity prostitution. It sort is in a way. People will wait around all night, line up around 9AM in the morning until 9PM at night...just to spend five minute with a celebrity and get their autograph. Can you imagine signing a million pictures? Or taking hundreds of photos with total strangers? This would be my definition of hell. She's exhausted at the end of it. And states, people think she's Leia, when she's more the custodian, and possibly the closest they'll get to the fictional character.
The relationship between mother and daughter, I found touching and relateable. Debbie lived just up the hill from Fisher. They could walk between their houses, they are next door. And visit each other constantly. Fisher states that she always went to her mother..."I always come to her." Until the end that is...and Debbie followed her daughter into the grave. The documentary is bittersweet and ironic in places, because as the viewer watches it, they know something Fisher and Reynolds don't, which is how they died and when. We know...Debbie died while making the arrangements for her daughter's funeral. We know it didn't matter what she left her daughter in her will. We know that Fisher got more tributes at her death than her mother did, it was the one time she outshone her...in the public eye.
Fisher talks about the difficulty in letting her mother go, and fear of her mother's death. But Fisher goes first...leaving them behind.
The other bits worth mentioning?
*Both Carrie and her brother inherited their parents voices, but chose after witnessing what happened with their parents to never pursue a singing career or career in music. Carrie, who Debbie states has a better voice than her own, refused to sing or do the nightclub act that Debbie had groomed her for.
Instead, she chose to write and act in films.
*Eddie who at one time had more hits than the Beatles or Elvis combined, destroyed his career with drugs. A doctor got him hooked early on.
*Catherine Hicklind, Todd Fisher's wife, and 70s/80s television star and movie actress, is huge. She really gained weight. It's weirdly reassuring. You pass 40 and the pounds come on.
*Todd, Carrie, and Debbie compulsively collect pop culture and movie memorabila. They had to auction off Debbie's collection to pay off debt, and the fact that they could not build or create the museum she had dreamed of. Couldn't find an investor. Debbie had Marilyn Monroe's dress from the 7 Year Itch, the Rat Pack Suites down to their underwear, and Dorthy's red slippers from OZ, among other things. Also their houses are covered with photos of famous people.
*Todd at one point states that you have to marry into the fame or celebrity race or it will overwhelm you. And his family really overwhelms people, more than most. True, they've always been in the spotlight.
*Hickland, who had been in the television series Knight Rider, owns a replica of the car.
Like I said, it's an odd documentary, but compelling. (Carrie smoked like a fiend throughout it, and drank a ton of coca cola, which her personal trainer kept trying to get rid of. He'd pour it out. She'd buy more.)
The documentary is worth a look. If you can get if for free, which I sort of did. I had a 30 day trial to HBO Now, so saw Big Little Lies, Game of Thrones and Bright Lights for free, more or less.
I need to get back in the habit of drawing, I'm rusty. Been working on writing instead.
2. Amazon is justifying my subscription by opting a lot of sci-fi books for adaptation>
Amazon is betting on science fiction in their upcoming slate of series. In addition to adaptations of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Larry Niven’s Ringworld series, they’ve ordered an adaptation of Greg Rucka, Michael Lark, and Santiago Arcas’s comic, Lazarus. Rucka, who wrote the original comic, will help write the TV series, and both Rucka and Lark will executive produce.
3. Television Series Round Up
* Will and Grace -- I tried this. It's a reboot or rather a continuation of the 1998 series, with just a few political updates. The cast looks the same, making me wonder if they made bargains with the Devil or just have great plastic surgeons. So is the humor. Considering I didn't like the 1990s series all that much, this didn't work for me either. Yes, I know, what was I expecting...something different? If the 1990s series did not work for you, this won't.
* Great News -- made me miss Broadcast News, Newsradio, Murphy Brown, and WKRP. It's a bit over the top and I don't like the cast. Considering I was among the few people that did not fall in love with 30 Rock, it's not surprising. I find Tina Fey's humor a bit heavy handed and over the top. I prefer a more subtle approach.
* The Good Place -- Best situation comedy currently on. As a friend on FB put it --"it's an epistemological nightmare. Don't feel bad, I had to look it up to..mainly just to spell it. If you are into philosophy at all, you should be watching this series -- it makes fun of philosophy and organizations, religious thought, and well our society in general.
Also by far the least predictable comedy that I've seen, and the most innovative. There's nothing else like it. This year is so much better than last year.
This week's episode was reminiscent of Ground Hog day, but from the perspective of the Management creating Ground Hog Day and getting frustrated when no matter what they did they got the same result.
Chibi, upon realizing they are repeating themselves over and over and can never learn from their mistake, because when they are rebooted they have no memory of what occurred before...calls it a Nietzchian reoccurrence ---or an epitsmological nightmare. I could write reams of meta on that episode alone. It's a philosophy/organizational sociologist, psychologist dream episode. Academics must be having fun with this series.
* Big Bang Theory Still funny. But impossible to get into if you have not been watching it all along. Very serialized.
* This is Us -- first episode of the season was a bit weak, and somewhat over-sentimental, not to mention heavy-handed and preachy. I rolled my eyes a couple of times. Yes, yes, we know, "it's better to have loved and lost than never to loved at all...and better still to have never lost the love to begin with.." But it's not like people have control over these things. Honestly. Save the platitudes and tell the frigging story.
* Grey's Anatomy -- best season opener that I've seen in a while. Riggs Wife is played by the same actress that stars in Timeless (so I knew she wasn't going to stick around). She survives.
Just doesn't stay. Exactly. And if she does? It won't be for long. Hello, on another television series.
But I enjoyed the show and cast interactions quite a bit. Considering this is it's 14th season and it's managing to stay fresh and compelling...that's saying something.
* The Good Doctor -- this is an adaptation of a Korean Series, and produced by Korean actors, directors, etc. But written by the guy who did House. I wish they had cast more Koreans in the roles, and had more Koreans writing for it...it might have been better. It stars Toby from the West Wing, aka Richard Schriff, and he's just as preachy and sanctimonious as he was as Toby. Also the kid from Bates Motel as the lead. He's good in it. Everyone else...eh..jury's still out. There's two very attractive male doctors who report to each other, that look alike and I'm having troubles telling apart. Usually it's female doctors...so progress. Not sure I'll stick with it, it's heavy handed and somewhat cliche.
The story is about an autistic surgeon who gets selected for a competitive surgical program by his former mentor.
The board doesn't want him, nor does the chief of surgery, because hello, autistic.
The former mentor/president of the hospital board pushes him through anyhow. He succeeds because Dr. Murphy, the autistic young surgeon, manages to save a kid in the airport doing an impossible procedure. (I wondered about this...because he uses whiskey to do it. Kids don't try this at home.)
And -- comes up with the means of saving the kids life at the hospital, with a bit of help from an eager and rather attractive female surgeon. The male surgeons, including his new boss are skeptical and don't think he can help. And the security guard keeps him from entering the hospital, forcing him to sit out in the rain.
At the end, it's his ideas that save the day and they give him a chance to explain why he wants to be a surgeon. Throughout we get flashes of his backstory as a poor kid in Wyoming with white trash parents, and an abusive father who smacked him around and killed his pet bunny in front of him -- until his brother rescues him and they run away to live in a bus. He becomes a surgeon because the brother dies and he wants to save people, also make enough money to buy a television set.
It looks earnest, but I sort of wish it had a bit more humor and less earnest...also so far a bit on the cliche side.
About a C-
* The Brave - the first of four different military covert ops action series debuting this fall. This one stars Anne Hech as the Department of Defense Secretary who sends the team on tough assignments, as she monitors them via drones and satellite feeds from Washington with her Washington team. The team is a diverse unit of four men and one woman. The actors are rather good.
The production professional. The writing....boilerplate. If you feel you've seen something like this before, you most likely have. It's your paint by numbers covert ops thriller. Hostage crisis, off they go to solve it, and kill the bad guys. Of course the bad guys try to retaliate. Will state that terrorists make much better bad guys than Russians/Communists, which were the bad guys in these shows in the 1970s and early 80s. Then it became the drug cartels and organized criminals involved in human trafficking, now it's the terrorists. And they are rather demonized. You, the viewer, will hate them and want them dead.
It's graphically violent and doesn't appear to have much to say -- so violent entertainment, with bias.
But well-produced and directed. Also the plot was rather tight. And we have the typical back story character conflicts, one guy died, the team is struggling to get past his off-screen death and accepting the replacement, who is proving himself. There's a woman on the team who is struggling with the new guy. A sympathetic CO.
The pilot focuses on the rescue of a female surgeon, who they think is just a hostage, only to realize she's been captured to save the life of a head of a terrorist operation. So, they have two tasks, save her and take out the head of the terrorist operation, who they thought was dead.
Meanwhile there's the team struggling to trust each other and work as a unit.
Like I said, it's nothing you haven't seen before and all rather predictable.
Overall rating? B-
4. Bright Lights Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Renyolds - this is the HBO documentary that Carrie's brother Todd Fisher produced and worked on about two years before his sister and mother's death, featuring his family.
It's an odd documentary. Not at all what I expected. The film crew basically follows the family around in their day to day lives, and interviews them and their associates. Featuring news footage, film footage, and highlights from past performances, mainly Debbie Reynolds. (I'm guessing they couldn't get the rights to Carrie's films?)
It reminded me a lot of the Princess Diarist, and some of the things mentioned and referenced in The Princess Diarist are here as well -- such as Carrie's attendance at the Comic Cons signing a billion autographs. She calls it the lap-dance. Or celebrity prostitution. It sort is in a way. People will wait around all night, line up around 9AM in the morning until 9PM at night...just to spend five minute with a celebrity and get their autograph. Can you imagine signing a million pictures? Or taking hundreds of photos with total strangers? This would be my definition of hell. She's exhausted at the end of it. And states, people think she's Leia, when she's more the custodian, and possibly the closest they'll get to the fictional character.
The relationship between mother and daughter, I found touching and relateable. Debbie lived just up the hill from Fisher. They could walk between their houses, they are next door. And visit each other constantly. Fisher states that she always went to her mother..."I always come to her." Until the end that is...and Debbie followed her daughter into the grave. The documentary is bittersweet and ironic in places, because as the viewer watches it, they know something Fisher and Reynolds don't, which is how they died and when. We know...Debbie died while making the arrangements for her daughter's funeral. We know it didn't matter what she left her daughter in her will. We know that Fisher got more tributes at her death than her mother did, it was the one time she outshone her...in the public eye.
Fisher talks about the difficulty in letting her mother go, and fear of her mother's death. But Fisher goes first...leaving them behind.
The other bits worth mentioning?
*Both Carrie and her brother inherited their parents voices, but chose after witnessing what happened with their parents to never pursue a singing career or career in music. Carrie, who Debbie states has a better voice than her own, refused to sing or do the nightclub act that Debbie had groomed her for.
Instead, she chose to write and act in films.
*Eddie who at one time had more hits than the Beatles or Elvis combined, destroyed his career with drugs. A doctor got him hooked early on.
*Catherine Hicklind, Todd Fisher's wife, and 70s/80s television star and movie actress, is huge. She really gained weight. It's weirdly reassuring. You pass 40 and the pounds come on.
*Todd, Carrie, and Debbie compulsively collect pop culture and movie memorabila. They had to auction off Debbie's collection to pay off debt, and the fact that they could not build or create the museum she had dreamed of. Couldn't find an investor. Debbie had Marilyn Monroe's dress from the 7 Year Itch, the Rat Pack Suites down to their underwear, and Dorthy's red slippers from OZ, among other things. Also their houses are covered with photos of famous people.
*Todd at one point states that you have to marry into the fame or celebrity race or it will overwhelm you. And his family really overwhelms people, more than most. True, they've always been in the spotlight.
*Hickland, who had been in the television series Knight Rider, owns a replica of the car.
Like I said, it's an odd documentary, but compelling. (Carrie smoked like a fiend throughout it, and drank a ton of coca cola, which her personal trainer kept trying to get rid of. He'd pour it out. She'd buy more.)
The documentary is worth a look. If you can get if for free, which I sort of did. I had a 30 day trial to HBO Now, so saw Big Little Lies, Game of Thrones and Bright Lights for free, more or less.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-02 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-02 12:36 pm (UTC)Hee, I'm sort of glad I skipped the Tom Cruise film.
The concept is far from new...almost every fantasy tv show during the 1990s was doing the die reset button. And a few movies did it as well...Edge of Tomorrow is hardly the first. It's an old and popular gimmick. I think there was a horror movie done a few years back about it, and now there's another one entitled "Happy Death Day", also Cabin in the Woods played with it.
What I found innovative and interesting about The Good Place's take on it ...is we're seeing it from the point of view of the guy torturing the characters with it, albeit not deliberately (which is amusing in of itself). Here's this demonic manager/architect in hell who has devised a new means of torture, yet he fails to see that by rebooting it constantly, after everyone's memories of it, he's managed to find a torture device that literally tortures EVERYONE involved and in a far better manner than his original idea. Mainly because he's obsessed with making the original idea work as he saw it, with no variations.
So the theme and humor is completely different than any of the prior takes on the gimmick. And not only has The Good Place looked at the gimmick from a different angle, it's also made fun of it, and commented on it. Brilliant.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-02 10:24 pm (UTC)It was actually quite good, and rather funny if you like watching his smug and cowardly character repeatedly get his just deserts in the early parts of the film.
Mainly because he's obsessed with making the original idea work as he saw it, with no variations.
Which is why one of the jokes in the episode "Make Michael think he's in the bad place" might not be far off. For most of the demons, this is a dumb, lame job. But for Michael it's torture.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-03 01:37 pm (UTC)It was actually quite good, and rather funny if you like watching his smug and cowardly character repeatedly get his just deserts in the early parts of the film.
I'd read it was worth watching for Emily Blunt's character...so may try it on Netflix or Amazon yet. If I can find it. Sounds sort of fun ...in a way.
Cruise's latest looks interesting -- "Made in America" -- but I'll wait until it hits the on-demand, Netflix circuit.
Which is why one of the jokes in the episode "Make Michael think he's in the bad place" might not be far off. For most of the demons, this is a dumb, lame job. But for Michael it's torture.
Thought this as well...it's a very good satire of workplace dynamics and organizational/management issues. OR, how theorists come up with this great idea for making an organization better...and well, works better in theory than practice.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-02 03:40 am (UTC)The Good Doctor: It seems like such a gimmick, that even if it is a great show now, it can't last much more than a season.
Bright Lights sounds interesting. The bit about the "celebrity lap dance" is telling. You hear about the same thing from many lesser lights, who react just the opposite. Some love doing signings, if for no other reason than to remind themselves that somebody remembers them from a small part whenever.
I guess every would-be author has considered what it wold be like to do book signings. For me it would be kind of creepy to write "Best Wishes to what'd-you-say-your-name-was-again" forty times in an evening, very like writing "I will not pull the girls' pigtails" a hundred times in third grade. But I understand why such things are important.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-02 12:44 pm (UTC)Will and Grace: It seems like those folks never quite went away like most TV casts, so I knew what they looked like now.
Good point. I've seen everyone in that cast pop up in one failed series after another. Also Scean Hayes and the other gay keep doing B'way shows.
Agreed on the Good Doctor. It's a show with a gimmick. And the gimmick doesn't quite work.
For me it would be kind of creepy to write "Best Wishes to what'd-you-say-your-name-was-again" forty times in an evening, very like writing "I will not pull the girls' pigtails" a hundred times in third grade. But I understand why such things are important.
That's my take as well. Hillary Clinton was doing a book signing recently at a Brooklyn Book Store. The line was around the block -- talk about block-busters. I thought wouldn't her hand cramp after a hundred signatures? Also there's no way I'd stand in that line...because autograph signings make me cringe.
Fisher states at one point in the documentary...how she finds nothing sadder and more cringe-worthy than the has-been celebrity. Possibly because she saw it up close and personal. Her childhood friend is Griffin Dunn, whose disappeared from cinema. And well, look at her parents...
I found it to be a fascinating take on the pitfalls of fame and celebrity on people who reach that status.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-02 04:17 pm (UTC)So true. I think it was back in the 1980s, so only 20 or 25 years after her last big movie, I happened to see Debbie Reynolds on an afternoon talk show. People my age knew exactly who she was and what a talent she was. But she turned to the studio audience practically as soon as she sat down, and said, "For those of you who don't know who I am, I'm Pricess Leia's mother." Sic transit gloria mundi.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-02 05:50 pm (UTC)Yep, there's this great scene with her driving her wheel chair through a Vegas hotel lobby and no one has a clue who she is.
And later Fisher tells an older woman, who is a dress tailor, that she's Debbie Reynold's daughter (the woman looks blank), Eddie Fisher's daughter (woman looks blank), was Princess Leia in Star Wars (the woman suddenly grins and gets really excited, wanting a picture, stating her son will go nuts over this.)
I know who they are -- mainly because my mother did. But a lot of people have no clue. Gene Kelly is still associated with Singing in the Rain, not Debbie Reynolds...unfortunately.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-03 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-03 01:33 pm (UTC)I've learned the advantages of free trails with these services. Managed to see Big Little Lies, GOT and Bright Lights under that trial. Quit the service, because nothing else really appeals. And next GOT season probably won't be until 2019 anyhow.