SIC TRANSIT GLORIA CHUCK

When “Chuck” first came on, I wasn't too sure about it. I hadn't seen a really good spy comedy since “Get Smart,” and that was a loooong time ago.
But, I gave it my usual three episodes, and I decided that it was worth continuing.
I hated the Buy-More aspect; all too often, it felt as though the segments were just fillers for thin scripts. I didn't like Jeffster, and I really hated Morgan. I found him whiny and needy, and not very funny.
I know there were fans who love the Buy-More and its denizens. I wasn't one of them, and I think it was one thing that might have contributed to the low ratings because it distracted from the main event. Once the Buy-More became intergrated into the cover for Carmichael Industries, it worked a lot better.
But Chuck was great, and Sarah kept my attention. The storylines got better and the relationship progressed. It took too long to get there to suit me; I have said of many recent shows that the Long Slow Tease was cute back in the days of “Remington Steele” and “Moonlighting,” but has become very, very stale by now.
Loved Ellie and Awesome. McPartlin's transition from wide-eyed disbelief to solid backup was fun to watch. What was key to the overall success of the show was that all the main characters fit together and contributed something.
It was great seeing some of the guest stars, especially Timothy Dalton, neatly spoofing his James Bond turn.
What wasn't so neat was hearing everybody mispronounce his character's name. Any Russian speaker will tell you the name is pronounced 'Alek-say,' no 'Ah-lexy.' His close friends might call him 'Alyosha' as a diminutive, but not 'Lexy.' But if you've ever heard them mangle Russian on 'NCIS,' you won't be too shocked. Can't any of these shows afford a Russian coach?
Another general grotch about women in action shows popped up in the final episode: Sarah going on a mission in high-heeled boots. Come on, people! No trained female fighter is knowingly going into a dangerous situation in footgear that throws her off balance, misaligns her lower back, and creates an unnecessary risk of a sprained ankle. A case in point: in an early Cynthia Rothrock film, she's playing a vice cop on hooker detail, and she's shown walking down an alley in stilettos. If you watch closely in the ensuing fight, you can see that she's switched the heels for sneaks.
And it does happen that Sarah had to be in high heels for the ballroom sequence; that might happen to anyone, but the greater likelihood would be that she'd get the damned things off speedy quick and fight in her stockings, or maybe carry some kind of flat shoe that she could change into if there were time to do it. Rock climbing shoes would be a good bet; they would fit into a small bag and slip on quickly.
Anyway – Chuck went out with a near-bang (the bomb didn't go off, after all) and all the loose ends were neatly tied up. What was left at issue was whether Sarah would ever recover her memory, or whether Chuck would be able to make her fall in love with him all over again. I would like to believe so. It certainly seemed to be off to a good start in the last frame.
There are some interesting possibilities still dangling. There could be a spinoff about Chuck and Sarah trying to adjust to the new life, with surprises when a sudden situation throws Sarah into automatid defence mode. Or we could follow Ellie and Awesome's new life in the Midwest, adjusting to the new life, thje new job, the weather – and a string of Chuck's old enemies coming afer them. The baby growing up in a family that includes a gun-toting grandma, a kung-fu auntie, and Uncle John and Aunt Gertrude and their interesting toys....

MMcQuown Muses

TV OR NOT TV
(Thoughts on TV shows past, present, and passing)

“Chuck” is in its last season. At first, I didn't think I'd stick with it because I hated the intrusive nature of the Buy-More setup and felt it just dragged down the 'spy' aspect. It got better later and the inclusion of interesting guests helped. Now it's going out under its own steam and I'd rather see it do that than just disappear without a definitive ending.
CSI/NY/Miami is more fantasy than reality. Real CSIs don't make arrests or do a lot of things their TV counterparts do. I don't think real female CSIs totter around on six-inch heels during the workday, either. Why was Catherine never made head of the lab? Looks like a sure cause for a sex discrimination suit to me. And why did they dump Liz Vassey, then bring in a new girl? NY is my favorite, partially because I lived there, partly because they seem to have the best balance of work and personal life. To date, Horatio Caine has probably committed as many felonies as he's solved. Last week he let a perp fall to his death when he could have saved the man. The only lab type who ever committed more crimes was Jordan Cavanaugh, wno in her final espisodes had violated the gun laws of several states and the federal government and would be liable for anywhere between five and ten years.
Law & Order is probably on its last legs. I don't see it running another season without Benson and Stabler. Elliott's gone and Olivia's getting cut back. As worthy as the franchise may have been, I got tired of Dick Wolf's constant anti-gun polemic/propaganda. Non-police gun owners on the original series were never portrayed as responsible, rational people, and all gun dealers were shady. I know lots of people, including myself, who have owned guns all our adult lives and are law-abiding, responsible people who have never committed a crime. I have had a carry permit since 1995 and never had a problem.
Gilmore Girls is long since cancelled but still being shown. Aside from the mother and daughter and their wonderfully wacky dialogue, there wasn't much worth seeing. The townspeople should all have been wiped out: the mayor was a pompous ass, Lorelei's sidekick Suky was an idiot, the boyfriend was rude and surly, and the parents were awful. Kelly Bishop did a decent job of humanizing the mother, but...
NCIS is still good. Forget LA. I do think Dinozzo's character development has slipped backward somewhat, but the show still has legs. Now, if they could just get someone to teach Gibbs how to speak Russian....
Once Upon A Time/Grimm. Two interesting takes on the fairy tale. Grimm is the better of the two with a more interesting approach. Once suffers from some casting problems: Snow White is far from looking like a fairytale princess, while the Wicked Witch is smokin'. And Snow can't bring off the forest thief bit either.
Law & Order: UK consists largely of American episodes transposed to the UK justice system. That it has survived the ad campaign says something. It might be interesting to see what they could do with the Scottish system, which differs from England in that there are three possible verdicts: Guilty, Not Guilty, and Not Proven.
Burn Notice/Covert Affairs. Both are good fun, but writers keep ignoring the fact that the CIA's operating brief doesn't permit them to mount operations on US soil. Or at least didn't. Maybe 9/11 changed that. I'd love to see a crossover episode. Fiona's definitely my kind of girl.
Psych. I watched three episodes, thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen.
Criminal Minds. Love it. Glad they got smart and brought back JJ & Prentiss. I was rather hoping that the exit episodes might be a pilot for another series with Prentiss working for the State Department's spook shop with JJ as her handler.
Fringe: mind-blowing concept with really good actors. John Noble steals every scene he's in, but he's not working alone. Olivia is one of the more real women on TV.
Sanctuary: Another original concept. Much as I loved Colonel Carter, I'm just mad about Amanda Tapping 2.0 Brains, beauty and balls!
Eureka/Warehouse 13: Again, novel concepts populated by quirky characters in situations that are at once dramatic and funny. Good ensemble work in both.
Nikita: A different feel from the earlier version. Less claustrophobic and more action-oriented. I'd watch it more if Maggie Q gained about twenty pounds. The bikini shot in the first episode was really off-putting for me. Any woman who is thinner than the very hot Melinda Clarke is too thin!
The Closer: Love it. The LAPD as a dysfunctional family. The Christmas ep was an instant classic, as was Eureka's.
Bones, Rizzoli & Isles, Body of Proof. Smart, attractive women doing grisly work with great panache. Tamara Taylor as the 'den mother' for the Jeffersonian crew is a msitress of the throwaway like and the reaction take. All three shows do a great job of balancing humor and drama. I'd still like to see Brennan be more like her print medium character and be involved with the Canadian cop shop in Quebec. Never been sure why they changed the character so radically.
Leverage is a worthy successor to a long line of shows about con men doing good. The original was The Rogues, which starred David Niven, Charles Boyer, and Gig Young as members of a family of grifters who helped the little guy. White Collar also falls into this category with Nat Bomer as the new Al Mundy (It Takes A Thief with Robert Wagner).
I can't get into American Horror Story. There's nobody there to root for: they're all just awful people.

The Unseeing Eye

THE UNSEEING EYE


I freely admit it: I'm a TV junkie. I started mainlining when I was 10 and we got what was probably the fifth or sixth set in the neighbourhood. It had a round ten-inch screen, showed only black and white, and got only three channels.
What we got was a far cry from all the channels and all the content, but at the time it seemed wonderful. Some of the limitations were interesting. No movie could be shown on TV unless it was at least ten years old! Ironically, there was a fear in the industry that TV would kill the movie business.
Contrarily, movies now sponsor TV shows and TV has become a targeted market for less-than-big-budget movies and even more specific arenas like the Lifetime woman-centered movies. (I confess; a lot of days I find myself watching them because they are often excellent thrillers adapted from first-rate women writers.
Over time, I think that TV may have given women better representation than the movies. Of hand, how many movies can you think of that featured two strong women on the order of “Cagney & Lacey” and now “Rizzoli & Isles”? A few years ago, there was a pilot called “Nikki & Nora” which featured two lesbian detectives in New Orleans, but TV, or at least the Powers That Be in TV, weren't ready for it. There were other lighter-hearted but enjoyable offerings like “She-Spies” and 'Snoops.” and, of course, the ground-breaking “Charlie's Angels.” (From what I've seen. The remake of 'Angels' looks a lot more like 'She-Spies,” with the Angels being convicted felons. In the original, they were former cops who were being squashed under the glass ceiling.)
TV is a huge market and unfortunately, the market aspect often drags down the drama. The most annoying aspect of this for me isn't so much the commercials as the ads at the bottom of the screen, often for other shows on the same channel, which distract from and sometimes even conceal, the main action.
Now, however, TV has been given a new task: it is watching us. Finally, the grimmest prophecy of '1984' has come true. We are being watched everywhere we go. We are being sold this phenomenon on the grounds that it makes us all safer. And perhaps it does. But as has been pointed out, the illusions of safety often come at the price of freedom. To quote a line from a Lord of the Rings parody song, 'the Eye is seen each night on CBS,' referring to the Eye of Sauron, a device by which the evil wizard could keep track of his enemies. (For the 20-30 people out there who have never read the books or seen the movies.)
TV is certainly here to stay. It's everywhere: in our homes, public gathering places, our cars, our pockets, and even on our telephones. It has brought the world closer together and provided great learning opportunities for children from all over the world to meet. It's given us drama, comedy, art, music, dance, and ***INSERT COMMERCIAL HERE***history, the sciences, and a load of drivel. Like many another thing, one can get out of it what one wishes.

Trek Wars

TREK WARS

There's a brouhaha on YouTube over Star Trek vs Star Wars. Bill Shatner started it by calling 'Wars' “derivative.” Carrie Fisher responded with more heat than light, and others have waded in.
I don't usually get into these things, because A) nothing anyone says is likely to change anyone's mind, and B) they're just not all that interesting.
I was born at the beginning of WWII, and I grew up with science fiction. I saw all the TV shows, those great George Pal movies, and all the good and bad TV shows and movies that came along.
The great Ted Sturgeon once said, “90% of everything is crud,” which has come to be known in sci-fi circles as Sturgeon's Postulate. It was certainly true of the movies from the 50's. Some were scary, some were smart, but most were cheap and unmemorable to anyone over the age of 10.
So, here you have two actors both well beyond their glory days, sniping at each other over not much. I am sure both of them aren't happy about where their lives are now compared to Back Then. One is selling travel, one is selling a diet. But neither one of them is starving. So why does all this seem so desperate?
Who knows?
To get back to the argument, it's nearly pointless. Shatner saying 'Wars' is derivative is truly a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Look at everything that went before, especially shows like “Space Patrol” and “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.” Any sci-fi show, movie, even a lot of books, all stand on the shoulders if what has gone before. They all had the blasters, the rocket ships, etc. Even the miniskirts, which were prominent in 'Patrol” and turned up again in “Forbidden Planet.” Data is merely Tweeky 7.0 or Robbie 10.09. As movie technology and real science eveolved, so did these shows.
Fisher's contention that 'Trek' “isn't in the same league” as 'Wars' is partially truey because of the quantum leap in technology in the intervening years and the fact that the films had bigger budgets. Later 'Trek' movies are arguably equal, and I think the later 'Wars' trilogies are not as good as the first. 'Clone Wars' sucks, IMHO.
I have several gripes with both series.
1. The uniforms. They're better in 'Wars' because they look more like real military dress uniforms, and they did at least provide a decent head cover – the caps, not the helmets. In fact, a lot of sci-fi shows with military milieus have neglected any kind of field service or dress head covering, which flies in the face of all military traditions. And Bill Theiss never seemed to think it worthwhile to look at real combat clothing before giving the Enterprise crew pajamas with no pockets and tops that kept riding up. When I was in the Air Force, our winter blue uniform had two jackets, the waist-length Ike jacket and the full-length blouse (it's what they call it, god knows why). I spent a lot f time doing the 'Trekker tug' in that Ike jacket. (The Brits got around that problem by making their jackets attach to their trousers.)
2. The weapons. Not so much a problem in these two cases as in many others. Despite the fact that real-life weapons technology constantly moves toward smaller and lighter, I have seen a lot of movies where the longarm was about the size of a keyboard and had to be worn with a sling in order to be maneuvered at all, A far cry from those neat little sub-guns in 'Stargate.' Those, by the way, are very real.
That aside, both series have made major contributions to the genre. They are distinct in their character and intention. “Wars' is more of a mythic piece of Good vs Evil, putting it closer to “The Lord of the Rings” than to “Battlestar Galactica,'” which. Like 'Trek' has more to do with Man's relationship to technology.
My favourite sci-fi show, though, is “Blake's 7,” a British low-budget job that rode in on the coattails of 'Dr. Who.' It was the creation of Terry Nation, who had invented the Daleks. It showed a Federation further in the future which had become corrupt and ruthless. Although there was never any textual reference, the insignia on the black uniforms was the Star Trek device turned on its side.

“SPEAK THE SPEECH, I PRAY YOU...”

Why is it that most American actresses – and a lot of American actors – have such crappy voices? If you listen to their British and Australian counterparts, the difference is glaring.
How can they spend so much time on their talent and their appearances, and yet neglect the tool they use probably far more than any other to convey the emotion and inner life of their character?
I don't want to single anyone out, so I won't mention names, but here's a case in point: it's a B movie, direct-to-TV, but it's reasonably well done. The two big flaws were that one of the women was supposed to be Hungarian, and she couldn't produce even a bad imitation of Zsa Zsa. Every time she opened her mouth, you heard a contemporary Midwestern accent complete the whinig denasality and blurry diction. The other character was supposed to the be the ancient, ageless Queen of Vampires. As she came into the scene, she looked impressive: strong, powerful, beautiful – then she spoke, and the illusion was shattered.
Tonight's episode of “House” was a great lesson. Here was Hugh Laurie, an OxCam grad, and Jamie Bamber, fresh off “Law & Order: UK” both doing completely convincing American accents, but in pleasant-to-the-ear voices.
Listen to Hugh Jackman, Kenneth Branagh, Kate Beckinsale, Amanda Tapping, Lucy Lawless, Sam Neill. They can play anything they want: mutants, vampires, ageless scienttists, Greek warriors, master spies – kings, princes, and gods – because they have the vocal equipment to pull it off.
Part of the problem is the collapse of the studio system and the indiscriminate adoption of Stanislavsky without fully understanding what was involved. Stanislavsky taught only the master class. By the time students came to him, they already had learned the basics of speech and movement. They knew how to speak. What the American theatre ended up with was what became known as the 'Mumble and Scratch' school of 'naturalistic' actors who had great passion, but were sometimes hard to understand. When a group from the Moscow Arts Theatre came over here in the mid-1960s, they were shocked. One of them remaked to my director at CSC, “You have made Stanislavsky into a god!”
Another villain in the piece was the wireless microphone, which allowed people with untrained voices to make themselves heard without good vocal technique.
Contrariwise, the British can't seem to mike for sour owlshit. I don't know how many times I've found myself straining to hear a line in a British film because the mike isn't picking up the sound.
There are a lot of TV shows I watch these days in spite of this, because they have good writing and acting, but I would be happier if I thought they could make me believe they were anything other than 21st-century Americans.

                     PC  and the 'A' WORD

    I think the first time I heard the phrase 'political correctness' in its current context was during the Clinton Administration. I think whoever used it originally meant it to be ironic, but somebody somewhere chose to take it at face value, and there we were.
    First, the phrase itself originated in Stalinist Russia. One of the charges brought against the defendants (or should I say 'victims') was not being 'politically correct,' i.e, not being a good Stalinist.
    Secondly, it is a classic example of Orwellian 'thinkspeak,' or Skinnerian conditioning.  If you get into the habit of speaking a certain way, you also begin to think that way.
    Even before the term came into use, its application was already active. This emerged in the form of non-gender specific terminology.  As I remember it, the intention was not to deny the existence of two genders, but to avoid a presumption of gender where it was not known. So, 'chairperson,' rather than 'chairman' or 'chairwoman.' Once the identification was made, then then gender appropriate term should be used. This, of course, got completely out of hand and eventually bottomed out in such ridiculous identifications of someone as being the 'chair' of something or other. Down from a human being to a piece of furniture.
    The absolute nadir of this nonsense was the 'A Word,'  which resulted in the awards show where they prizes were given to the 'Best Female Actor...”
    Somehow, women in the Profession had got the notion that the term 'actress' was  somehow degraded and degrading.  So, many of them – mostly in this country – now refer to themselves as 'actors.'  Which, I suppose, is fine a good deal of the time, but as in the case of the awards, they have lost not only an identifying title, but had been reduced to mere adjuncts on their male counterparts.
    Women of the Profession: if you truly feel that your title has been degraded, then do something about it! Fight to take it back! You are Women. You are in the Profession of Acting. You are Actresses. Make it a proud word again. Don't let some obscure idiot with a warped sense of language and ideals trick you into thinking that way.