How I Met Your Monday Night Line-Up

Remember how I said a lot of my blogs will probably be written in a hungover haze? This is going to be one of those.

For the last few years, Monday nights have been the biggest TV night of the week for me, with as many as six shows I was watching at one point. Last night was no exception, with four different shows on my schedule making their season premieres (with two more scheduled to start in the next month or so, so I'm back up to six). The first was returning fave How I Met Your Mother, which is both my favorite comedy on right now and the burr in the saddle of my life all at the same time. One the one hand, just tell me who the friggin' mother is already! And on the other hand, once we know who the mother is... good-bye, favorite comedy, in all likelihood.

Frustration, thy name is Mosby.

 

My new favoritest picture ever.

(For a great article on HIMYM and just how awesome the storytelling on that show is, go here: The Next "Lost" Has Been Here All Along because, let's face it, it probably does a better job of praising the show than I could right now.)

After HIMYM, I checked out the new show, 2 Broke Girls. Full disclosure? I was only watching it because I think Kat Dennings is both gorgeous and talented (and if you've seen the pictures of her that popped up a year ago, you've seen quite a bit of her talents), so imagine my surprise when it actually had me full-on belly-laughing at a few points. Sure, her character got all the good lines and the rest of the show needs some work, but it was enough to get me to come back next week.

The next new show I checked out, The Playboy Club, did not fair nearly as well. I made it through about twenty minutes before the fight between plot, dialogue, and acting over which was the more abysmally awful made it too painful to watch anymore. Not even the amazingly sexy and lesbianic Amber Heard could save this show.

I'm really hoping The Playboy Club makes like Lonestar did last year and becomes the first show of the season to get cancelled after like three episodes. It joins The Secret Circle in getting removed off my list.

Lastly, Castle's fourth season premiered last night. Back when this show started as a mid-season replacement back in March of 2009, as much as I liked it, I figured it wasn't going to last. Boy, am I glad I was wrong. I honestly think it's become one of the best shows on television, and the finale last season was honestly my favorite season finale of the year. Aside from just how awesome Nathan Fillion is, the rest of the cast is fantastic. Also, and I can't stress this enough, one of the show's greatest strength is that they learned a lesson from Moonlighting: keep the romance between the leads unconsummated at all costs! As much as we want them to get together while we watch, once they do, the show fundamentally changes, and probably not for the better. Just look at how bad House got when House and Cuddy finally got together. Ugh.

Also, I caught the Charlie Sheen Roast... all I really have to say is that WIlliam Shatner, Patrice O'Neal, and whoever wrote Mike Tyson's material were pretty funny; the rest of the show was definitely not #winning.

(Additional note: After trying to watch the second episode of Ringer tonight, that got cut as well, making 2 Broke Girls the only new show out of four so far this season to actually survive so far.)

The Schedule... Blame it on the OCD!

Just for your amusement, I'll admit to the fact that my personal brand of OCD forces me to make an Excel spreadsheet of the Fall season so I know what I'm watching, and when.

Click to enlarge!

Yeah, laugh at me all you want. FYI, The Secret Circle has already been dropped off the list. Maybe I'll wait until everything has premiered and then I'll repost what it looks like after I've made some cuts.

God, I need a life.

The To-Do List

It's not exactly a big secret that my life is in a bit of a shambles right now. Unemployment, debt, sick grandparents, etc. So, with that in mind, I've put together a list of the things I need to do to right the ship before I make like the Titanic and die in a spectacularly long and bad movie.

1.) Get a job with decent pay and benefits, because I'm closer to thirty-one than thirty now and benefits are becoming more and more important... it's only a matter of time til my liver needs some attention! And I really need a phone that doesn't suck. Plus, I've got exactly four weeks of unemployment benefits left before I join the Fully Financially Fucked Foundation.

2.) Get laid. Yes, we'll see some things on this list that seem like a bigger priority, but intimacy is a basic human need and, well, let's face it, I'm in a dry spell so long it makes the Jews who wandered the desert for forty years look positively dewy.

3.) Pay off the student loans and hospital bills I am slowly drowning under, especially now that there are letters from lawyers arriving. Of course, without making #1 happen, this is impossible.

4.) Move the hell out of this house that is rapidly becoming a hospice. Aside from keeping me from slowly going crazy, this will help with #2, but is also impossible without #1.

5.) Find a diet I can stick to that doesn't make me absolutely miserable because I'm not allowed to eat anything that actually tastes like anything. There's only so much cereal, grilled chicken, tuna, and fat-free everything a man can take. Again, this will help with #2 but is sort of dependent on #1 for more choices... plus, let's be honest, the expensive crap that tastes like dry ass is more expensive than any of the stuff that tastes good.

6.) Write more. Hello, blog! And hey, this is free, so screw you, #1!!! Of course, unless someone out there is really turned on by semi-witty blogs, this ain't getting me anywhere with that pesky #2...

7.) Get this ordination taken care of so I can be the officiant at my friends' wedding like they asked me to. It's a nice thing to do and I'm looking forward to it. And who knows, maybe it'll make me a little extra cash here and there. Also, I get to pick my title, like "Magus" or even "Archangel." Thoughts?

So that's the list. There are probably some other things that would come to me if I really thought about it, but those are definitely the pressing needs in front of me at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to cross some of these off soon. Either way, I'm sure updates will be appearing here as needed... so y'all come back now, ya hear?

Breaking the Circle

Okay, so, full disclosure? I've been hungover as hell all day, which is weird, because I don't think I actually drank that much last night... anyway, because of the happy combination of a hangover and exhaustion and me starting this at four minutes after midnight, if this blog lacks that certain je ne sais quoi, well, tough.

Plus, I'm totally being distracted by this on TV right now:

Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger, can I take your order?

 

Anyway, it's a well-known fact that I watch a lot of television, and people often ask me what I think of different shows. With that in mind, and with the new season starting up, I've decided to blog my opinions about the new TV shows I start watching, like I did with Ringer the other day. And sometimes I'll talk about the returning favorites too. Such as The Vampire Diaries, which I've always been a big fan of. Ridiculous name aside, this show just started it's third season and hasn't had a bad episode yet. It's easily my favorite part of the vampire wave around; of course it's better than Twilight because, even though some of the vampires are able to walk in the sun, they don't friggin' sparkle. While True Blood might get the edge in shock value, sex, and gore, it's been a mess in terms of story and characters for the last two years while TVD has believeable characters and a tight storyline that just keeps growing and growing.

 

So, because of my fondness for TVD, when I learned the creators of the show had another new show starting this season, I ignored the way the commercials triggered my spider-sense and watched the premier of The Secret Circle anyway. I'll let this clip describe how I felt about my decision after I watched the show. 

 

Just awful. Every single cliche you can think of... dead parents, parents with secrets, the bitchy high school girl, the list goes on... was pretty much just thrown into a big bowl of awful and served cold. And don't get me started on the acting. Even the star, Britt Robertson, was terrible, and I've loved her in everything else I've seen her in (seriously, the CW cancelled Life Unexpected and put her in this instead? That's a move so stupid I'd almost think someone from Fox made the decision...).

 

Next time I want to see witches, I'll just watch The Craft, which this show is pretty clearly ripping off in, like, every conceivable way. The Secret Circle gets the dubious honor of being the first show cut from my viewing schedule. And I'm pretty sure it won't be the last; I'm looking at you, Playboy Club.

Ringing in the Fall Season

Anybody else remember this show?

I do. Swan's Crossing aired for like four months way back in 1992... Christ, I feel old. Anyway, it was a pretty terrible show, an attempt at a daily soap opera for teenagers that featured, among other things, Russian spies in a submarine. As a show, it's beyond forgettable; so forgettable, in fact, that I can't even find a way to download it off the internet, and I was able to find the full series of Are You Afraid of the Dark? online. The only reason I bring this show up is that it was the first show to star Sarah Michelle Gellar, and, as such, it was the first time I saw her and where she became the first crush eleven-year-old Jimmy ever had.

From Swan's Crossing, she went on to a roll on All My Children for a handful of years, which I caught bits and pieces of here and there because my grandmother followed that show closer than Jews follow the dollar. Then, of course, there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which most people know is my favorite show of all time. Granted, not because of her but because of the total package, although she definitely helped.

I go through this roundabout spiel to point out that I've seen every TV show SMG has ever starred in, so it was only fitting that her return to television was the first show of the Fall TV season to premiere for me.

So how was it? Convoluted as hell. You might have heard the plot; she plays twins who haven't seen each other in years because one is a junkie and the other is rich. Long story short, when they do finally meet again the rich one disappears mysteriously and the junkie assumes her life because she's running from both the FBI and Native American gangsters.

There's a sentence I never thought I'd type.

Anyway, she finds out her rich sister's life isn't all it was cracked up to be, and let's face it, nobody's is. There are plenty of twists and turns in the first episode... too many, honestly, but I imagine that was necessitated to set things up and won't be the norm. The acting is fairly solid; aside from SMG the cast features Ioan Griffud (a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic) and a bunch of people you've never heard of. Well, and Mr. Eyeliner himself:

It's like his eyelashes are looking into my soul, man!

The only real gripe I have with the show so far is how many damn mirror shots there are. The first one is genius; in it the sisters are face-to-face in a mirrored closet, giving the impression there are, like, forty of them... and, let me tell you, forty SMGs would have been just too much for eleven-year-old Jimmy's brain to handle. But from there, there's a mirror shot in just about every scene, and it goes from a clever technique to a cute affectation to flat-out annoying real quick. That one complaint aside, the show was definitely interesting enough to at least get me to want to watch the second episode. Only time will tell, though, if this is another Buffy... or just another swan crossing in the night.

Episode VI: Return of the... Blogger.

That's right, I'm back. At least, I hope I'm back. I intend to blog much more often now. Partly, it's because I'm just really bored. Partly, it's because people have suggested that I should start again because they enjoy reading what I write. And partly, it's because I just really feel like I need to write something, anything, before I lose what little is left of my mind.

So I'll be writing about the same things I always used to: some fiction if I ever write any; my life; comic books, of course; novels; and movies (I'll probably steal some ideas from good ol' Heckling from the Balcony. Yes, I know it's currently defunct, but there were some good ideas there, and I'm linking it because there were plenty of fun blogs to read and you should go do that sometime). There might even be a guest blogger or two along the way, if some of the ideas I have pan out.

Next season, I might even blog about the Mets again. You know, if they aren't still making me want to slit my wrists.

As I tried to hold to last time around, I'll be funny, maybe thought-provoking, and always honest... and anyone who really knows me knows that that last part might get me into trouble, which, hey, will doubtlessly be damn fun to watch. It all starts tomorrow with a real blog, get in the car and come along for the ride. Who wants shotgun?

83rd Academy Awards Preview

Damn, I haven't posted anything in a long-ass time. So, what better time for someone like me, who has an endless supply of opinions when it comes to movies and sees just about everything to return to blogging than right before Oscars? I'll be talking about the important categories... sorry, Costume Design, maybe next year... and doing so in two ways: who I think should win, based on my opinion, and who I think will win, based on what usually happens at the Oscars. Here we go.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay) Yeah, I know, but I'm a writer, so I think these first two count!
“127 Hours” Screenplay by Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy
“The Social Network” Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
“Toy Story 3” Screenplay by Michael Arndt; Story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich
“True Grit” Written for the screen by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
“Winter's Bone” Adapted for the screen by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini

Should Win: Sorkin's screenplay was absolutely brilliant, like most of his writing, and is definitely the best of the bunch.

Will Win: I think they'll go with Sorkin here. Not only have they never nominated any of his screenplays before, but he's cleaned up at all the other awards shows in this category, so I think its pretty much a lock.

Writing (Original Screenplay)
“Another Year” Written by Mike Leigh
“The Fighter” Screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson;Story by Keith Dorrington & Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
“Inception” Written by Christopher Nolan
“The Kids Are All Right” Written by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg
“The King's Speech” Screenplay by David Seidler

Should Win: Nolan, hands down. As good as the other flicks here are, everything about Inception was brilliant, and since they absolutely stiffed him in the director category...

Will Win: Not Nolan, since there seems to be one hell of a grudge against him somewhere. This is a tough one to call, but I think it'll go to The King's Speech.

Animated Feature Film
“How to Train Your Dragon” Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois
“The Illusionist” Sylvain Chomet
“Toy Story 3” Lee Unkrich

Should Win: Toy Story 3. Shit made me cry.

Will Win: Toy Story 3. I don't think there's really much doubt here.

And now that the preliminaries are out of the way...

Actor in a Supporting Role
Christian Bale in “The Fighter”
John Hawkes in “Winter's Bone”
Jeremy Renner in “The Town”
Mark Ruffalo in “The Kids Are All Right”
Geoffrey Rush in “The King's Speech”

Should Win: Tough call for me because I enjoyed all of these performances, and in a lot of ways they were the best things about their respective movies (or, in Ruffalo's case, the only good thing about the movie...), but I have to give it to Bale.

Will Win: I think the only threat to Bale is Rush, but I think it is a very slim threat, and Bale walks out with this one.

Actress in a Supporting Role
Amy Adams in “The Fighter”
Helena Bonham Carter in “The King's Speech”
Melissa Leo in “The Fighter”
Hailee Steinfeld in “True Grit”
Jacki Weaver in “Animal Kingdom”

Should Win: I'm turn between the two amazing performances in The Fighter on this one, if I'm being honest, but I'm leaning towards Adams as the stronger performance of the two.

Will Win: Honestly, I'm kind of thinking Adams and Leo might cancel each other out, leaving this award to go to either Steinfeld or Bonham Carter, in which case the latter probably wins.

Actor in a Leading Role
Javier Bardem in “Biutiful”
Jeff Bridges in “True Grit”
Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network”
Colin Firth in “The King's Speech”
James Franco in “127 Hours”

Should Win: Firth. He was fantastic, sympathetic, and uplifting.

Will Win: Probably Firth, but remember, the Academy loves the Dude, Franco is hosting, and The Social Network is a powerhouse. This is probably the most interesting award this year.

Actress in a Leading Role
Annette Bening in “The Kids Are All Right”
Nicole Kidman in “Rabbit Hole”
Jennifer Lawrence in “Winter's Bone”
Natalie Portman in “Black Swan”
Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine”

Should Win: Admittedly, I'm biased, but Portman's performance was easily the best out of this group, with, in my opinion, Jennifer Lawrence as a close second.

Will Win: Even with my bias, there's no way this award should go to anyone other than Portman.

Directing
“Black Swan” Darren Aronofsky
“The Fighter” David O. Russell
“The King's Speech” Tom Hooper
“The Social Network” David Fincher
“True Grit” Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Should Win: Christopher Nolan. What's that you say, he isn't nominated? Yeah, I think that's as absolutely ridiculous as you do. Can't argue with the others, but the direction had absolutely nothing to do with The Fighter's success. Mini-rant aside, I think I'd have to take Aronofsky as my personal pick here.

Will Win: Fincher. Like I said, The Social Network is a powerhouse, and a rare film where absolutely everything in it works, from the music to the cast to the script.

Best Picture
“Black Swan” Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin, Producers
“The Fighter” David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman and Mark Wahlberg, Producers
“Inception” Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan, Producers
“The Kids Are All Right” Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Celine Rattray, Producers
“The King's Speech” Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin, Producers
“127 Hours” Christian Colson, Danny Boyle and John Smithson, Producers
“The Social Network” Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Ceán Chaffin, Producers
“Toy Story 3” Darla K. Anderson, Producer
“True Grit” Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, Producers
“Winter's Bone" Anne Rosellini and Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Producers

Should Win: The Social Network. Like I said above, its pretty much a perfect film...

Will Win: ...and I'm totally expecting the Academy to recognize that. I'd be beyond surprised if The Social Network doesn't win the grand prize here.

So there you have it, my thoughts. I'd love to hear what you guys think. Agree? Disagree? Let me know!