24 Makes Me Feel Like Pavlov’s Dog

Every season it’s the same damn thing. I get all excited about 24, thinking o boy, Jack Bauer’s back, kicking ass and takin’ names, and then I get about 6 episodes in and all of a sudden, I just lose it.

Most of the time, I don’t intellectualize it, I just turn it off and watch whatever else is on. But this time I started to wonder why and after slapping myself in the forehead and doing my best Homer Simpson d’oh! I realized exactly why.

The simple fact is that this show actually fits into my theory about how almost anything that goes on too long in front of too many people inevitably becomes a caricature of itself. And that’s what has happened here with 24.

On top of that, #1 there isn’t really a single character in the show that isn’t a grouch, a bitch and authoritative asshole, a sad victim, a political manipulator, dumbass criminal, international wannabe terrorist or a dickhead, so there’s nobody to really care about. #2, the characters are all made out of cardboard, spouting cliches and trying like hell to act their way out of what is #3, a terrible overbaked story that just seems to go absolutely nowhere and not even all that fast these days.

I didn’t just become apathetic about this show. I found myself actually starting to despise it in that strange way that you can despise things on TV, like Access Hollywood or Star TV or The Jerry Springer Show.

In my opinion 24 has gotten worse and worse every year, since Keifer Sutherland’s character no longer had anything to lose. So that would make it after the second season. Yet year after year, I get all excited about its return. I feel like Pavlov’s dog. And maybe that’s the price you pay for being an avid watcher of TV shows. Sometimes it seems like that price is way too high

Woof woof. From one dog to another.

This Is The End

Dear Spuds

Over the Christmas holidays I spent a lot of time going over the 10 years worth of columns I had written since I started The Couch Potato Chronicles late in 1998. One of the most significant things I have noticed is that over the past several months, I have had less and less to say from an editorial point of view than I had in the 9 years plus prior.

Slowly it has occurred to me that this column has well and truly run its course, and that it’s time for me to find a new hobby. All I am really doing now are reviews. And quite frankly, I am just as happy to do those on Twitter.

So as of today, January 5, 2010, I’m hanging up my guns and shutting the column down. One of the things I would like to do is edit the couple thousand pages of columns I already have into a book. It might make an interesting (he said modestly), chronicle of the first decade of the 21st century.

Anyway, I would like to thank all the loyal spuds out there for their support over the years. I love you all and hope you will continue to follow my mini-reviews on twitter. http://twitter.com/TheCouchSpud

I will also keep up the movie tip sheet blog at Movie Tips Blog: http://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/

Adios Spud Amigos

Mur

Volume 375

2009..What A Pantload

Well, here it is New Years Day. If you write a column like this I guess it’s expected that you kinda look back over the year and try to identify the significant events.

The difficulty of this task is compounded by the fact that 2009 sucked. Getting work was difficult. Getting paid for the work you were doing was also difficult. The greedy bastards on Wall Street almost bankrupted the free world. The new Network TV season was pretty much a bust. Other than Star Trek & Wolverine, and a handful of indie flicks, my movie watching was pretty lame. My local pro sports teams did squat to give me anything to cheer about. The best baseball team money can buy finally won a World Series, thus proving that money talks just about everywhere. And my dad died. How’s that for sucking big time?

Having said all that, however, there were a few positives. Barack Obama puts an end to the decade of greed and corruption in the US. Tiger Woods finally proves that he is human, after all. The Green Movement, of which I am a part, is getting stronger and stronger. And along with my partner Terry Lewis, I think we have found a marketing concept that will actually help us succeed in business. My son’s business , which I help him market is booming. We had a nice quiet Christmas, which we will be completing tomorrow in Fort Dreary. And, in spite of the fact that I may be extremely hard to live with, I am still happily married.

TV HIGHLIGHTS

DEXTER: Everybody favourite serial killer took out a most formidable foe this season in the person of John (Name). But he gave up quite a bit in return. This show contains the most exquisite suspense in the TV business.

LIE TO ME: This is a highly entertaining thriller series starring Tim Roth as a guy who reads facial expressions to find out the truth about what’s going on. Some real interesting stories and Tim Roth is a time ball of hate. I love this show.

FRINGE: Back for a second season of weirdness and thrills. This is one of the best shows ever.

DOLLHOUSE: Now defunct, this Joss Wheden sci fi series started off a little slow but then grew into a monster.

KINGS: Ian McShane is positively Shakespearian in this elaborate and expensive soap opera.

THE UNUSUALS: Dennis Leary’s new cop show is quirky fun and full of wisdom and good humour.

RESCUE ME: This is one of the all time great drama series on TV, because it’s actually about something.

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE: TV entertainment doesn’t get any more entertaining than this. Both the Canadian and American versions are amazing.

ENTOURAGE: This show is proving to be one of my all time favourites. I love these guys.

THE GOOD WIFE: Julianna Margueles has finally found a vehicle for her unsmiling face. This is a great legal series.

DAMAGES: Glen Close is freak good in this complex legal melodrama. This show is top notch.

THE BORDER: Home grown action series about immigration agents. Who knew that this could be such great TV.

SPOOKS: Powerful Brit series about keeping the country from being pummeled to death by terrorists from without and within. Really, really exciting stuff.

BETTER OFF TED: Great new corporation based comedy that makes The Office look like a bad joke played on an unsuspecting TV audience. This show is very clever and actually has a pulse.

WHITE COLLAR: Light new thriller about a big time art thief recruited by the FBI to solve complex white collar crimes in the Big Apple. Lots of fun and complex plotting.

BIG BANG THEORY: Best comedy on TV. Just watch it. You’ll see.

TV LOWLIGHTS

I guess that would be everything that I didn’t mention in the highlights.

MOVIE HIGHLIGHTS

This is me, breathing a heavy sigh of frustration. I can’t remember a year when I have wasted so much money on movie rentals or have gone to see fewer movies on the big screen.

BIG SCREEN
This list is short.

X-Men Wolverine Origins
Watchmen
Sherlock Holmes
Star Trek

Yep, that’s it.

DVD
This list is a little longer

The Secret Life Of Bees
Bottle Shock
Slumdog Millionaire
Body of Lies
In The Electric Mist
Inkheart
Outlander
Last Chance Harvey
District 9
Charley Bartlett
Management
Weather Girl
Julie & Julia
The Answer Man
Law Abiding Citizen

Now if you know anything about my movie consumption habits, this is actually a very small percentage of the movies I tried, mostly in vain, to watch this past year. I don’t really know what’s going on in the move business. But I do my best to try and keep up, but it seems like there’s simple less and less to keep up with.

Anyway that’s pretty much it for a crappy year. I don’t make many New Year’s resolutions but this year I’m resolving to do a bit more research before I run out and rent a movie or head off to the theatre. That might be a good one for all of us.

Happy New Year. Anything could be better than ‘09.

Volume 374

Since it’s New Year’s Eve. Just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone out there is Spudland a happy New Year. If you drink don’t drive because the fines are hefty and the stupidity factor overall is just way too high for your self-esteem to take.

The Wife and I are going to do an early dinner at Feathers, where the ribs are great and then head off to see Sherlock Holmes, which I have been looking forward to. Then it’s back home to flip around and watch the world bring in the new year. I never really got the significance of New Year’s. I guess people look at it as a chance to start fresh and undo a lot of the junk that has been slowing them down in the present year. But most people just plod along business as usual, and not much really changes. Hence, my mystification.

But I do wish you all the best nonetheless.

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out

Gerard Butler, who is quickly becoming the North American Clive Owen, plays this dude who is seeking revenge on the legal system after his family is brutally raped and murdered by a couple of lowlife creeps. Jamie Foxx is the DA who cuts a deal to get one guy to testify against the other and pisses Gerard off even more. But what nobody knows about Gerard’s character is a) something I can’t tell you, because I’m not a dick reviewer, and because its b), where the movie gets all its fun and excitement.

Now you will have to suspend some disbelief to enjoy this movie. But hey, it’s worth it. This as an exquisite revenge film and in the capable hands of writer Kurt Wimmer and action director F Gary Grey, they create a fast paced thriller that really looks like it was made by people who actually have a clue.

Now this movie is a bit graphic in parts and not for the squeamish. But the satisfaction level is so high that all pussies are advised to just close their eyes and hum to themselves when the gory bits are on.

This movie is several notches above the average thriller. And the kind of movie I love to watch.

PUBLIC ENEMIES
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton

This is a bastardized bio-pic directed by Michael Mann and starring

Johnny Depp as John Dillinger. Now the simple fact of filmmaking is that you can’t go wrong with Johnny Depp. The dude is so precise in whatever he does that he really kinda take you away.

Michael Mann, who is one of the best directors working today does an okay job of bringging the period to life. But there’s something about his directing style in this film that left me kind of cold. The film itself, really looked like a bit of a slice of life of the last month or so of Dillinger’s life, after he started getting pursued by Christian Bale, who plays the G-Man, Melvin Pervis who really starts getting everybody seriously behind the cause of ridding thew works of bad guys like Pretty Boy Floyd, Babay Face Nelson and John Dillinger. There is also a great performance by Marian Cotillard, who played Dillinger’s girlfriend.

Michael Mann movies tend to have a lot of people in them and sometimes they just aren’t properly introduced, so the movie tends to get a little confusing in terms of who are the bad guys and who are the good guys and who are the bad guys who are ratting out the other bad guys. Stuff like that.

In spite of the really decent cast, I found the movie a bit flat and one dimensional. I like it a lot better when Michael Mann sticks to fiction, I guess. Sorry Mike.

THE ANSWER MAN
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out

This is actually quite a brilliant little movie written and directed by some guy name John Hindman, who has literally come out of nowhere.

This movie tells the story of a terribly screwed up individual named Arlen Faber who, 20 years earlier wrote a book which he based on conversations he had with God. It became a best seller and then a whole industry unto itself, which the author remained completely reclusive, living in a ritzy area of Philadelphia and basically hiding out  from the world.

Arlen Faber, which incidentally was the original name of the film, is played perfectly by Jeff Daniels. His eventual love interest, in the person of a chiropractor who helps him with his bad back is played by TV vet Lauren Graham. The third lead character is a young bookstore owner just out of rehab, played by Lou Taylor Pucci.

This film could be classed as a romantic comedy, because there are some very funny bits in it, mostly performed by Mr Daniels. But this is really more a film about dealing with loss., as all three main characters are confronting loss of various kinds in completely different ways.

This film is extremely well written, almost poetic in certain parts, and the actors are all on board with it. And in a character drama, well you really can’t ask for much more than that. Except maybe Nora Dunn as Arlen’s publisher, and she’s great too.

This is a movie that will make you feel very good.

VOLUME 373

CHRISTMAS…WHAT A BLUR

Well here it is the day after Boxing Day, and except for taking out the trash, the Wife and I managed to stay in the house for the entire day and night. I finally got to watch the season finale of Spooks, (an uber cliffhanger). I also started to watch Canada’s first match in the Junior Hockey Tournament against Latvia, but I kinda got bored when the score climbed to 8-0. I tried doing a little work too, but my heart wasn’t in it at all. Besides, I was pretty sure it was Saturday and thought, hey, it’s the weekend, already.

Anyway, I hope you all had a great Christmas. I scored a green frying pan and a barbecue pan to cook veggies in, as well as a cool new mouse that runs off my Bluetooth, thus saving me a USB port and some other cool stuff. Not a bad haul for the man who has everything. We also got a Cobra Walkie Talkie with a 35 km range, so that I can make sure I’m bringing home milk and bread etc. It’s sorta like a cell phone for 2 people who only need to talk to each other.

And of course there was the big Turkey dinner. The Boy got us a great hormone free turkey this year, and I have to tell you, it really makes a difference. (2 XL Spuds for the turkey)

THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out

This films is one of the reasons I am happy that I have Turner Classic Movies. It was made in 1942 and stars Bette Davis, Monty Wooley, Ann Sheridan Richard Travis and Billie Burke among others. In it Monty plays this egomaniacal critic and writer named Sheridan Whiteside, who hurts his back on a speaking tour, in some small Ohio town and ends up moving into and virtually taking over the home of one of the town’s richest businessmen.

This movie is a borderline screwball comedy that pretty much takes place in the main rooms of the businessman’s house, and it is as well written and beautifully acted comedy as there ever was. I call them Motormouth Comedies, because everybody in them talks real fast, but always seems to be saying something witty. In a way, you could classify it as a Christmas movie, because, well it ends at Christmas.

I love watching movies from the late thirties and forties, like this one. I know it isn’t true, but everyone looked like they were having a real good time. And because the individual scenes were so long, it felt more like a stage play than a movie, and you could really get an appreciation for how good these characters were as actors and not just movie stars. Also, because this was mostly shot on a sound stage where they had great control of the lighting, you could really appreciate how beautiful women like Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan and the younger June Stanley, really were.

This movie will undoubtedly show up again on TCM. It’s really worth a peek. And if you see it on TCM, you’ll have the added bonus of no commercials.

WEATHER GIRL
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out

This is a little movie, sort of a romantic comedy about a girl who does the weather on a Seattle morning TV show, and finds out that the show’s anchor, with whom she had been having an affair is now schtupping the co-host. So she melts down on the air, quits and ends up living with her brother. Yadda Yadda. And so it goes in true romantic comedy form. You can almost write the thing yourself, plot wise. But character wise this movie is very refreshing. Written and directed by a TV actor named Blayne Weaver, and starring pretty much a bunch of TV actors, he brings his characters to life with smart, snappy realistic dialogue and genuine feelings.

I thought about movies like Chasing Amy when I was watching this. Kevin Smith has this same sort of talent as a writer director, that is keeping his characters interesting while making them feel very real.

So this movie, overall and except for its predictability, was pretty decent to watch. The protagonist characters were endearing, the antagonist characters like Mark Harmon as the talking head show host and Jon Cryer as one of the Weather Girl’s rebound dates, were total dicks.

I like little indie type films like this. They don’t cost much to make and always tell neat stories. It’s a lot better than linking up for half an hour to be let down by some Committee produced big budget dog’s breakfast. This movie had one guy’s stamp on it, and this guy was pretty talented.

Volume 372 — Holiday Memories & Wishes

It’s Christmas Eve. There is a very thin blanket of snow on the ground. The presents are all wrapped up in their re-usable cloth bags under the pencil thin Christmas tree in the basement of Spud Central. It’s late afternoon. In a while we will be heading over to Van Fleet’s for some of his famous Christmas Clam Chowder and other goodies. We’ll hang around there for a while and then come home and watch a movie. Maybe Miracle on 34th Street. There really isn’t that much to do on Christmas Eve, except conserve your strength for the big turkey dinner preparation that happens tomorrow.

I have always liked this time of year. Not for all the crazy running around you have to do to make sure you’ve got something great for everyone. Or all the extra food shopping you have to do. (It’s really hard to find turkey cooking trays and good green beans on Christmas Eve). No, what I like is the feeling that Christmas gives you. It a warm cozy feeling, a feeling like, no matter what happened up to this point, the whole world stops and takes a breath and maybe just for one day, forgets all the crap and just exercises the sacred human right to eat drink and be merry every now and them.

I often think back to the Christmases we used to have when the kids were small and there really wasn’t a ton of money. I also think back to the Christmases when I was a kid and Christmas meant huge family gatherings. I was going through some of my old columns and found this piece, which is an excerpt from Column #68 from 2001. It sums up my feelings about Christmas just as well as anything I could write today.

AND A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE YADDA, YADDA.

We’re having the worst snow storm of the season so far as I sit here and write these words. I’ve shoveled twice and will doubtless be shoveling more. According to The Weather Channel, this storm is called a Colorado Low. Not very creative but I have always liked the word Colorado. It forms in the lee of the Rockies and blows straight from there to Newfoundland. It’s after eleven and the sky outside my window is an iridescent greyish orange. When you look up into the trees, away from the neighbouring houses and pretty lights, there’s a timelessness to the way the barren branches blow around in a seemingly aimless pattern. The cold feels even colder when you look into that grey-orange sky. There’s a great deal of solace in knowing you’re fortunate enough not to have to be out in weather like this. Its more than enough to make you count your blessings.

Because Christmas comes on a Monday this year, this is my official Christmas column. I usually don’t write this column until Thursday or Friday. Maybe it’s the Colorado Low that’s put me in the mood. Or maybe it’s just the fact that the later I stay up and shovel snow, the easier it will be to dig myself out in the morning, when I have to go to a meeting at some hotel up in the north part of the city.

This past Saturday the Wife and I listened to The Vinyl Cafe on CBC radio and it filled us both with a real sense of Christmas.

It also gave me something of an insight into the nature of Christmas itself. Stuart McLean, the host of The Vinyl Cafe is a brilliant Canadian writer, and during the show he read a couple of his stories. One about his first Christmas away from home and the other about this family he invented who live somewhere in the suburbs of Oshawa, Ontario. These stories were both quite moving in the simplicity of their prose and the honest delivery of the reader. They made you conjure up in your own mind, memories of Christmases past, and the potent combination of well written pieces of Canadiana and the images that came dancing though my head, brought tears of nostalgic joy to my eyes. The Wife sat on a wooden stool and I leaned on the kitchen counter, eating one of those little Maroc oranges that are so plentiful at this time of year. And though we were there together, we were both adrift in our own private memories of Christmas past.

Mine happened to take me back to the time when I was about eleven or twelve and our rather gigantic family would gather at our house in Fort Dreary for the holidays. They would travel from as far away as New Jersey, California and Vancouver just to sit around and drink egg nog and Coca Cola laced with Canadian Club and remind you how big you were getting. In my memories, it wasn’t about the opening of presents on Christmas day although one year, my Uncle Harold, who was the building superintendent of the Empire State Building, brought me a burgundy coloured Schwinn roadster with balloon tires and hand brakes. I loved that bike with a passion that would be considered kinky in most civilized countries.

No, Christmas back then was really all about having people around you whom you knew and loved and felt really safe with. It was about shooting the breeze over nothing at all and singing along with Bing Crosby’s ultra mellow version of White Christmas and watching your dad carve the big turkey while your uncles all told off colour jokes and your aunts would give them a whack for their trouble. It was about sitting around with your cousin Tony, who was a sailor in the merchant marine, and hearing stories of all the great ports of call he visited. It was about learning to play poker with your cousin Pete and losing the ten dollars your Aunt Frannie gave you in the process. It was about going to Ineson’s store and picking up eggs for the home-made eggnog your aunts took turn whipping up. Mrs. Ineson would give you a mug of hot chocolate to drink and a cookie to munch on . Everybody who came into the store took a few minutes out of their busy Christmas Eve day to have a pleasant chat and exchange seasons greetings. It was about your cousin Lynn, the grade 6 teacher, who would gather all the young kids around on the living room floor and read ‘The Night Before Christmas’ in that enchanted voice that really good teachers all seem to have.

If you close your eyes for a moment, at any time around Christmas, these memories can flood back into your own consciousness, with no more stimulation than the smell of a Scottish pine tree or sound of Christmas carol in some store. And it will probably occur to you as it did to me listening to Stuart McLean, that Christmas in the present is mostly about Christmas in the past.

As I grow older, my memories move along in time. But they are always there. And besides being with my loved ones, they are the very best part of Christmas for me. The tiny perfect part that remains undisturbed by all the commotion and distraction which typically surrounds the holiday season.

I wish you all the happiest of holidays and all the joy the season has to offer. Get a little rest and relaxation. You’ve earned it.

Volume 371 – Scary Movies for The Holidays

HORSEMEN (1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton)

This is one of those bleak serial killer movies that they do a lot of in countries like Denmark and Sweden, only this one is American and stars Dennis Quaid. In it he played the clichéd widowed copy with kids he barely knows, a job that’s too demanding and a case that’s really hard to crack.

The story line of this film is really solid and interesting because Dennis has to go digging around in the bible and stuff for clues to help him put it all together. I’m always amazed at just how much weird shit actually went on in the Bible. Maybe it was written by Stephen King or Clive Barker.

But this movie is kind of hard to watch because it’s really gritting looking and the landscapes are all kind of bleak and David Fincher like. The crimes are kind of gross to look at and the real villain in the film is…well that would be telling, for the few of you who might be interested in seeing this flick.

These kinds of movies interest me because I like the way that a good cop’s minds work. And Dennis is a great cop. He is one of those guys who can look like something that the cat dragged in when he has to, or he can look exactly the opposite.

This would normally be a two spud movie. But I’m shaving half a spud for the bleakness, which I thought made the flick a little too depressing.

THE HAPPENING (TWO SPUDS—Definitely Worth Checking Out)

M. Night Shyamalan is pretty much the reincarnation of Alfred Hitchcock. His movies are filled with exquisite tension that derives from the warping of everyday things. He leans a little more toward the supernatural than Hitchcock, but he knows how to build suspense as good as anybody in the business, always seems to work with top flight people and appears to have complete creative control of his projects, as they all look very pure and un-screwed-around-with-by-the-suits.

In The Happening, something weird blows in on the wind and causes people to start reacting in extremely self-destructive ways. The story centers around a couple of teachers, in Philadelphia, who are trying to escape whatever it is before it catches up with them.

So in a way, it’s a kind of chase movie, the chasees being this ever dwindling group of people led by Mark Whalberg. I can’t tell you much more about this film other than that it is just as interesting as each and every one of Mr. Shyamalan’s films, extremely exciting and watchable, without having to resort
to all kinds of CGi effects. I would imagine he’s a Hollywood dream director as his effects are mostly in camera and probably even more effective than the big glossy ones, because they look scary real.

I guess the most frightening thing about The Happening, is that in our toxic world, it could be possible for any one of a number of anomalies to form in the atmosphere and become poisonous to humans in one form or another.

Something to think about for sure.

Volume 370 BRUCE WILLIS, OLD DUDE

SURROGATES (1 Spud – Not Worth It Except for the Hard Core Fan)

Bruce Wills has been around making great action pictures for quite a while now. He’s probably most famous for the Die Hard series in which he plays a regular cop who gets involved in some pretty hairy shit.

Bruce also specializes in the ‘strong silent villain’ type and the middle aged ‘romantic lead’ type too. He’s actually pretty versatile and usually good box office.

In this so so sci fi action adventure, where everybody has robots that do all their stuff out in the world so that they can stay home and experience life second hand, he plays an FBI cop investigating the murder of the son of the dude who invented the concept of surrogates.

This movie is a little hard to get your head around, not because you don’t get the concept and see all kinds of military and industrial complex uses for robot soldiers and high risk workers, but because it’s never really made clear just why everyday people are using them as opposed to getting out there and being in the world.

There are also a number of subplots involving Bruce’s marriage and other stuff. But mainly it’s a pretty straight ahead high concept flick that doesn’t really make a strong enough point about robots to be memorable. And it also doesn’t have enough Bruce type action to be all that exciting.

This could explain why it didn’t really last very long in theatres and why I feel I kind of wasted 5 bucks renting it. It was OK, but these days, OK hardly cuts it.

MY TWITTER LINK

http://twitter.com/TheCouchSpud

Volume 369 A Pair Of Season Fare Thee Wells

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE SEASON 6  (2 XL SPUDS—Absolute Must See)

It’s actually hard to believe that the 6^th season of this incredible show has wrapped up. It’s obviously one of the most highly rated in the Fox prime time lineup, because  it reaches out solidly into several extremely valuable demographic segments. Namely young people who know nothing about dance and treat this show like a kind of  Operation Runway with choreography, and older, more cultured people who see this as an amazing opportunity to see some extremely good dancing and highly innovative choreography and really appreciate dance for the true and ubiquitous art form that it really is.

With every new season this show just gets better and better. The contestants have to be much more skilled and talented to get into the top 20 and compete. The choreography gets more and more brilliant. And the voting numbers increase exponentially. I know I am talking about this show like a marketer. But, in addition to the art, which I appreciate tremendously, this show really is a masterpiece of the promotion of dance. It has pretty much singlehandedly created a high level of interest  in dance for a whole new generation of people, thus assuring the survival of this amazing and multifaceted art form for years to come. That’s quite an achievement and one of the things that people like me have always believed that institutions like television should be doing more of.

The last four shows of the season were so good that I have made copies of them and are giving them to people close to me who I know have not see this show before and have some idea of what they were missing.

DEXTER SEASON 4 (2 XL SPUDS—Absolute Must See)

For those of you who have been hermetically sealed in a barrel in your basement for the past four years or so, Dexter is one of the very best series on televisions. It stars Michael C Hall as Dexter Morgan, blood splatter analyst for the Miami PD by day, cold blooded serial killer, specializing in killing people who have escaped prosecuton on a technicality or via a smart lawyer, who he scientifically (forensically) proves to be guilty. In a way, he’s really just taking out the trash.

My brother-in law Dr Bob Twidle thinks Dexter is too evil for television. And I sort of agree. But in spite of that I am drawn to this show like a moth to the flame. It’s not that Dexter is particularly violent. In fact, there are a lot more violent shows out there. It’s that Dexter’s struggle to compartmentalize his serial killer life and his family life are so intriguing that I am just fascinated by the juggling act that goes on every week. Each show is a tour de force for the writing crew, who always manage to figure out interesting and plausable ways for poor Dexter to dodge the bullets coming at him from many directions, often at the same time.

This show has just completed its forth season, with a nasty and jarring twist right at the end that knocked me for a loop. But that’s what great TV is supposed to do to you. It’s supposed to exhaust you with its brilliance. And Dexter certainly does that.

I can hardly wait for next season.

You should be able to catch the 4^th season on Showcase at some point in the near future.

MY TWITTER LINK

http://twitter.com/TheCouchSpud

VOL 368-JULIE & JULIA (DVD)

THIS MOVIE IS RATED 2 SPUDS Definitely Worth Checking Out

This is a new DVD release starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in the title roles of celebrity cook Julia Childs and writer Julie Powell who undertook to cook all the dishes in Julia Child’s first cookbook in a one year period.

This flick is evidently based on two true stories. One which takes place in  the late 1940s and early 50s as Julia Child, the wife of an American diplomat stationed in Paris, starts to become…well Julia Child. The other story takes place in 2002, where Julie Powell, starts her cooking project and creates a blog to chronicle it. This flick was written and directed by Norah Ephron and is one of the best things she has done since Michael, back in 1996.

The story jumps back and forth in time and you don’t get the impression at all that this is rigged to end in a meeting of the two main characters. Both stories are equally charming but Meryl Streep steals this film with a bang on portrayal of the larger than life Mrs Child. I used to love to watch Julia Child on TV. I always thought she was extremely funny and a genuine caricature of herself. So you can imagine how far Merly Streep was sticking her butt out there, taking on a role that could have very easily turned into disaster of epic proportions.

This was easily one of the most accomplished pieces of acting I have ever seen in modern day cinema. And the weird thing is, she didn’t seem to be working hard at all to pull it off. She will, without a doubt, be nominated for every acting award going.

One of the things I did learn from this movie was that Julia Child’s road to becoming the legend that she became was a long and arduous one. One which required great huge gobs of patience and perseverance. Not to downplay Amy Adams’ role in this film. But hers was a bit easier, since hardly anybody really knows who Julie Powell is. I sure didn’t before watching this film.

The other important thing I got out of this film was a reminder of just how talented Nora Ephron is. She has written and or directed some of my favourite movies, including the aforementioned Michael, (with John Travolta as a horndog archangel, Silkwood (another Meryl Streep masterpiece), Heartburn, and When Harry Met Sally.

Julie & Julia is a lighthearted, intelligent drama, that one might argue is a chick flick. But I don’t care because this spud is totally in touch with his inner spud.

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