This week my pop-culture explorations mostly kept me glued to the tube, but between the various cliff-hanger resolutions and clunky character introductions of the Fall TV season, I was able to stumble on a few items of interest:
This short film/prequel to the upcoming The Darjeeling Limited is teeming with writer/director Wes Anderson’s unique visual style, musical tastes, and humor. Giving us a brief peek into the life of Jason Schwartzman’s Darjeeling character as he is paid a surprise visit in the title hotel by his estranged girlfriend (Natalie Portman), this twelve-minute appendix has got me more excited for TDL than any of the trailers or pre-release press has been able to do. Hotel Chevalier is available as a free download on iTunes.
The follow-up film from Donnie Darko writer/director Richard Kelley looks like such a train wreck, it will be impossible for me to not go see it if it, in fact, gets any form of wide release. If not, it’s a definite Netflix rental. From the look of this trailer, this post-apocalyptic musical starring The Rock, Justin Timberlake, Bai Ling, and Seann William Scott could be the next Tank Girl. OK, that’s not really a good thing---but sometimes the promise of a flat-out fiasco can be more interesting than a mild success.
Director David Cronenberg must have been aware that the advertising for his last film, the excellent A History of Violence, gave away all of that film’s surprises. The trailer and ads for his follow-up offered up little of the plot and for this I am very grateful. Promises offers many surprises in it’s tale of the Russian mafia in modern day
TV Series Premieres
Below are the series I decided to check out in order of my preference/eagerness to check out a second episode:
Watching this pilot, I was thinking to myself “Damn. I’ve been telling everyone for weeks to watch Chuck and now this show is twice as good and I’m going to be the only one watching it.” Sharing a somewhat similar premise (working class young slacker is imbued with new abilities), Reaper is the funnier and therefore more entertaining of the two shows. A young man discovers that his parents sold his soul to the devil (Ray Wise) and now has to send rogue demons back to Hell (“That’s cool, huh?”) CW currently does not have the Kevin Smith directed pilot for view online, but if that changes—I will post an update. I seriously recommend it. 9/10
Journeyman
I was totally won over by this time-travel series starring Dylan McKidd as a man forced to relive parts of his own life and also solve other people’s problems. Everybody is comparing the series to Quantum Leap and yeah, he travels in time without a machine, but the personal ramifications of this man being unstuck in time are going to be what makes this show ultimately unique. My only hope is that they keep doling out the hints as to the cause of his condition. 8/10
The last few television seasons have featured shows (The Nine, Kidnapped) that felt like they were better suited to a mini-series format than an ongoing television program. Thankfully, this season’s premieres more-or-less feel like they have the gas to go on for multiple seasons right out of the gate. Chuck’s slacker-with-a-computer-brain spy-comedy hybrid has the potential to entertain for years. Given that they stop trying so hard---watching the pilot for a second time the jokes felt more strained than I had remembered. Still, I’ll be checking this out for a few weeks at least. 7/10
This re-imagining of the 1970s series from Battlestar Galactica producer David Eick shows a lot of promise, even with if the pilot moved too fast-- trying to introduce too much in the first hour. Lead Michelle Ryan seems capable of filling Lindsay Wagner’s shoes and the more Katee Sachoff (as prototype bionic woman Sara Corvis) the series can provide, the better. 7/10
Well-produced and filled with a great cast, this rich drama about a family-owned rum empire and their long-lasting feud with a rival sugar business will keep me tuned in to see if the show can keep forward story momentum. In
This soapy dramedy is not really my cup of tea—the cast is great and the premise (a sort of more-seriousish Arrested Development with Peter Krause’s family lawyer playing the Michael Bluth role) holds promise and lives up to the title—but ABCs brand of nighttime tongue-and-cheek soap operas seem to fail to hold my interest for more than a couple of episodes. I might tune in again and test that theory. 6/10
This vampire drama felt like any other CBS mystery show, just that the protagonist has fangs. It reminded me of SciFi’s recently canceled The Dresden Files in that it had a lot of elements that should have held my interest, but a palpable lack of urgency left me wanting. On the plus side, Alex O’Laughlin is a fine leading man while Jason Dohring (Veronica Mars) and Sophia Myles (Doctor Who’s Girl in the Fireplace) are a fine supporting cast. If the series decides to take some chances, it could be worth watching---but if it continues to be a by-the-book private eye drama (with vampire powers to help solve the mysteries—an element that actually makes the detective work less interesting) it’ll be just another show on the Tiffany Network that I don’t watch. 5/10
Big Shots
Dear God, this show sucked. I decided to watch the pilot, despite bad buzz, because of affection I have toward Alias’ Micheal Vartan and Sport Night’s Joshua Malina and the knowledge that Veronica Mars creator/show runner Rob Thomas was coming on board in a few episodes time. The show’s basic premise is ‘aren’t men cads?’ The characters are unlikable chauvinists (as opposed to the Entourage likeable kind, I guess) and instead of ‘aren’t these guys pathetic?’ we get the feeling that the show is glorifying them, a form or writer’s dream-fulfillment. Maybe it got better after the first ten minutes, but I doubt it.
Grey’s Anatomy (Season 4 Premiere)
Cloying narration. Whine Whine Whine. Speech. Whine. Medical cases that coincidentally mirror the life-struggles of our whiny doctors. Whine. Cloying narration.
I’m bored now and done with the show (though I said that after the season 3 finale).
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