Game of Thrones - "And Now His Watch Is Ended" - Review

When Game of Thrones is excelling, it’s mesmerizing. The series is addictive and when it’s firing on all cylinders, the show propels forward with such intensity that it becomes incredibly thrilling. And I wish I had more insightful or thoughtful words to give you, but all I can say is hot damn that was awesome! There are arguably better shows than Game of Thrones but there are few that have such a huge momentum to them where every story picks up at exactly the same time and the holy shit moments are pulled out in such large numbers that all you can do is stare in awe at how exciting, intense, and fun it all is.

It helps that this episode actually has some thematic unity. “I resolved to live,” Varys tells Tyrion early in the episode, and it’s something that we find to be true of almost every character’s story. Now this is a theme that’s arguably inherent in every episode, but it’s particularly true in “And Now His Watch Is Ended”. 

The first character we see is Jaimie, a character who has lost all the will to live. With his swordfighting hand cut off he knows that the one valuable asset he had is gone. Besides his wealth, he’s pretty useless now. Jaimie has become a hot mess; Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is fantastic in these scenes. He’s so completely dour that it’s easy to almost instantly forget that this character a short while ago was tossing a ten year old out of a tower. He’s come a long way, and he’s lost his center entirely. If it weren’t for how he has unintentionally sparked a new resolve for life in his companion, who recognizes how much she currently owes him for saving her own life (she likely would have fought to the death for her chastity if Jaimie hadn’t lied about her family’s supposed wealth) Jaimie would remain wallowing in self-pity and resigning himself to die. 

Resolving to live means staying alive, and when someone’s desperate enough to live, they’ll do just about anything. Take our beleaguered Night’s Watch members for example. “If we’re going to live, we’re going to have to look out for ourselves,” one crow says. Crastor continues to strive for the award of Worst Person in Westeros, and eventually it leads to a breaking point. The members of the Watch are underfed, freezing, and scared for their lives. Commander Mormont can only do so much to hold back their thinly veiled rage.  “All Hell breaks loose,” I wrote in my notes and it’s an apt description of the scene (and yet oddly enough this isn’t even the most explosive moment of the episode – more on that later). Everyone starts killing left and right and Mormont is stabbed in the back. Sam recognizes that shit is going down and resolves that he’s not going to die. More importantly he’s going to save his beloved Gilly and her son. 

However, resolving to live often means much more than just merely choosing to live. Tyrion barely survived the Battle of the Blackwater and yet he can’t be content with this fact. He has to immediately try to discover proof that Cersei is behind the gruesome assassination attempt on him. He wants revenge but has no power to achieve this. Tyrion has little reason to live if he finds himself useless (he was given a taste of power after being looked down upon his whole life and seeing his whole life as a joke). However, as Varys explains to Tyrion, gaining “influence” takes time and Varys only managed to accumulate power after years and years of hard work. Most people in the world of Game of Thrones don’t desire to live solely for the sake of living; they always have some angle. Usually it’s to vie for power or position. 

Cersei tries to convince her father to take her seriously. In Cersei’s eyes she’s Tywin’s perfect child. But Tywin doesn’t lack respect for her due to her sex but because Cersei isn’t as smart as she thinks she is. Tywin, on the other hands, has power; his reason for living is to rule the kingdom and keep power in the hands of his family (a task undermined by his children who keep screwing up constantly at every turn). 

Margaery is almost a cracked mirror image of Cersei. She’s a beautiful girl with an eye for the political maneuvering in King’s Landing. But she’s also an astute manipulator; she has Joffrey wrapped around her finger, and she puts on the visage of a giggly teeny bopper for the sake of Sansa. Cersei lets her emotions get in the way; she’s too maternal towards Joffrey and too jealous of Margaery to effectively make any power plays at the moment. 

Which leads us to that conclusion; Dany starts the series as a meek, subordinate individual. She had loss all will to take action for herself. And now, she’s sacking cities like it’s no big deal. Did anyone really think Dany would give up one of her dragons? Of course not! Dany is already playing the “game of thrones” despite being a continent away from King’s Landing. The whole scene where she gives over Drogon, we can see the gears shifting in her mind; she’s calculating whether the risk she’s taken is working. And HOLY SHIT did it ever! Dany resolved to live back in the Khalasar; she decided she wasn’t going to live for her brother. She resolved to live in the Red Desert. She has strived to keep going through constant setbacks (and less than great storylines). When you resolve to live and then you resolve how you’re going to live, and you succeed at both: well, you can walk away with an 8,000 man army and three dragons.

"Storm of Swords" (the book being adapted) when it hits it stride is a book that is near impossible to put down, and the show, similarly, when it's doing what it does best feels like something you can't stop watching. This episode captures that feeling. It's like being a junkie needing the next fix. And when we get such well-earned, wonderful moments as Dany's sack of Astapor or the breakdown of order at Craster's, nothing else really matters. The show pulls off these moments better than almost any other series and they're so cool, intense, and engrossing that little else matters. Next Sunday can not come soon enough.   

Stray Observations:

-Some excellent Varys scenes in this episode. Conleth Hill has been underutilized prior to this episode, but he gets a number of wonderful moments. The best of these is possibly the monologue where Varys describes just how he became the eunuch he is and how the incident led him to the particular life he’s chosen. It’s a powerful scene that fills in so much information about this character. Just as telling is Varys talk with Lady Olenna. When he describes Littlefinger as the “Most dangerous man” in all of Westeros; Varys reminds us just how aware he is of the political machinations taking place and where he stands in the midst of it.   

-Jaimie is forced to wear his rotting hand around his neck (as if his circumstances weren’t bad enough). This opening scene is deeply painful. Watching Jaimie sink down in the mud and flail with his nonfighting hand is  sad and pathetic. If you’re not sympathetic about Jaimie by this point (I am), than Brienne’s opinion is certainly changing. This pairing = too good for words.

-Bran has another effectively creepy dream vision in which Catelynn (in her only appearance in the episode – Robb makes no appearance) pushes him off the top of a tree while yelling “No climbing!” in a call back to the very first episode. Bran's story is one of the less interesting stories, but it's been better handled this season than in the past.

-Ros continues to get much more screen time and it’s intriguing how the character is being used. She’s playing off both Varys and Littlefinger and it’s hard to say where she stands in all of this. However, she picks up Littlefinger’s eye towards Sansa where Varys doesn’t.

-Joffrey’s small talk: dragon’s killing people.

-“Sometimes severity is the price we pay for greatness” – Margaery, your way with words is awesome! Natalie Dormer gets some other choice lines but this one resonated with me (especially for how it works on multiple levels).

-Theon’s supposed helper returns him back to the torture chamber he left in the first place and claims that Theon killed the men that he was responsible for murdering. Theon's story is probably taking up more story time than it needs to.

-Alfie Allen is given a great monologue where he acknowledges his failures and how he screwed over his actual kin, the Starks. I know we should hate Theon, but in that moment, Theon is so vulnerable and Allen plays it so well, that it’s hard not to be slightly sympathetic (especially after what comes next).

-“Porridge Plague”? Sansa, you really are clueless. 

-Margaery suggests that Sansa be betrothed to Loras (at the behest of Olenna who is scheming with Varys)

-Arya’s story is left on a cliffhanger: The Hound is sentenced to trial by combat by Beric Dondarrion (Eric Dormer).  Because apparently there were just too many awesome moments for one episode as is.

-Maisie Williams’ delivery of “You murdered Micah” was just all kinds of awesome.
-I set aside the power rankings model from last week but I may return to it in the future. 

Grade: A

"Death Race 2000" - Film Review

Death Race 2000 (if it wasn’t clear from the title) is not a film that is meant to be taken seriously. Its premise is absurd and the film doesn’t try to take itself seriously.

It’s a campy, absurd romp with all the best elements of an exploitative low budget film. There are explosions, bloody violence, and nudity. 

The film never tries to be anything more than it is and that’s one of the joys of watching it. It’s not trying to be something that plays off your intellect but just revels in how cool and outlandish its premise is. Leather clad individuals in super powered cars driving at top speeds in a race with the goal to kill people for points. It’s a delightfully fun premise and the film takes a lot of pleasure in playing up its absurdity. News crews analyze every aspect of the race in detail, groupies obsessed with the "sport" try to sleep with the racers, and rebel forces attempt to dismantle this world’s dystopic dictatorship by tossing roadblocks in the paths of the racers.

The racers themselves are all so cartoonishly bizarre. The most amusing of these are a pair of neo-Nazis who bear swastikas and mock fellow racers whose shtick is being old timey cow boys. The protagonist is the mysterious Frankenstein (David Carradine), a racer who’s been in so many racing accidents that most of his body parts are less than original. He appears to love racing but he’s also oddly altruistic, doing things for the greater good based on his dark self-serving moral code. One of the more interesting parts of the film is the fact that a young Sylvester Stalone plays the villainous "Machine-Gun" Joe Viterbo, a bratty, selfish dude who will win at any and all costs. 

The race is at the heart of the new world order, numbing the viewers at home with endless violence so they forget about the fact they’re being ruled by a corrupt government with a secret police force. The commentary on society really is never taken far enough for it to matter and largely seems tacked on. The film doesn’t really get into the specifics of the functioning of the world or the race. Instead it leaps right into the race and gets in as many propulsive action sequences in as it can. The action is sometimes incredibly over the top but that’s ultimately part of its charm. The film as a whole, in deed, is over the top.

One of the most entertaining things about the film is how funny it is. The film plays up the blood and explosions to a point of dark, absurd comedic effect. There’s also some satire that though mostly mild and middling is occasionally really funny.

There's even a romantic plot thrown in because, of course, this film isn't trying to rise above its cliches. Frankenstein and his "navigator" (essentially a co-pilot) Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth), who as it turns out is working for the resistance, slowly fall for eachother despite constantly being at eachother's throats. Those crazy kids better figure it out in time to stop the dictator Mr. President! 

There's a fair amount that's clumsily handled. Dialogue is at times awfully written and even more poorly delivered. But it's not exactly the type of film that's concerned with having a precise ear for the way people speak or even having an actual basis in reality.

The cult classic hasn’t exactly aged well but its low budget thrills remain surprisingly fun.

Grade: B-

The Vampire Diaries - "Pictures of You" - Review

“Pictures of You” is a busy episode. That’s not to say it’s a bad episode but there’s quite a lot going on, and in the end it's simply too much for the episode to deal with. The show seems poised for the final stretch of episodes where shit looks like it's going to blow up in a fashion that only The Vampire Diaries is capable, but until we see the way this play out, much of what we see in "Pictures of You" will remain a messy set of exposition. Now a good portion of it this delectably fun in that Vampire Diaries kind of way, but the excessive number of stories (a few of which aren't very good) does make for an episode that comes off as if it’s trying to get in every idea it has with no room for a nice logical order.

The messiest of  stretch of the episode takes place in the middle. The episode gets away with most of this by having it mostly go down at the senior prom (dances and parties have always been a nice central location for this series, but the lack of scheming and lack of sense of dread do retract from some of the enjoyment of these scenes). There are a number of isolated little plots occurring simultaneously and each of them largely in their own right gets in a wonderful little slice. But taken together, it’s just way too much for a single episode to be trying to tackle.

If there’s a throughline to all this though, it’s emotionless Elena (who needs a better name because it doesn't do justice to describing her) and the episode does a really fabulous job of mapping out this new version of Elena’s relationship with all of the characters at this point in time. The episode obviously reaffirms her standing with characters like Damon, Steffen, and Rebekah that we already knew about, and these are well done (Rebekah and Elena are a surprisingly good pairing and they have a sort of odd couple banter). But what’s far more interesting is seeing how this new Elena acts around characters we’ve yet to see her with such as Matt and Bonnie. Yea, on the face she’s simply a total bitch to all of them (but in a wonderfully fun way), but all the interactions are specific to the characters she’s with. 

While this is all entertaining, there’s a fair amount else to keep up with. Elijah makes Rebekah spend one day acting like a human (i.e. not using her vampire powers) in order to get the cure from him. Bonnie has weird visions of Jeremy courtesy of Silas. Damon and Steffen try to pry some emotions out of Elena (although it's hard to care when they're going to be stopping the most fun to watch part of the show right now), while simultaneously contending with Silas. Caroline continues to be moody about Tyler’s absence (then he shows up because, hey, prom!). Rebekah spends most of the episode trying to win over Matt who is still being cold towards her. And because the episode didn’t have enough going on as is: April makes an appearance to remind us that she exists.  

Emotionless Elena as always is a total delight and I could watch Nina Dobrev do this all day. A number of her actions push the character forward into darker territory that it’s really nice to see the show broach; she takes the initiative to try to kill Bonnie, all smartly to stop Silas and Damon and Steffen simultaenously, although she fails because that would be too many dead main characters of late. But it’s what the show has been hinting is possible with this character’s new direction, and it’s the most exciting thing to happen in the episode. 

Or there’s the other contender for most exciting moment: the twist where Silas steals the cure from Elijah. Now this twist could have been dealt with better. There could have been stronger suggestions as to Silas’s scheming, but it’s still a cool moment.

The twist doesn't entirely work though because of everything the episode does with Rebekah. We can tell something is up because Rebekah has just had the lovely scene where Matt finally gives her the compliment she’s been seeking that she would make a good human. And the crosscutting with Klaus and Caroline also undermines and confuses the moment. But the twist is still an exciting moment that could have proven better if the show figured out what it wants to do with silas and brought him to the forefront of the story.

But otherwise, the Rebekkah storyline is really affecting. Claire Holt provides shades of bittersweet sadness to this character. The Rebekah-Matt scenes are really sweet and sad, and this pairing works really well. The choice between not using her vampire powers and saving April is also an excellent moment. The murkier the show makes the moral lines, the better it typically tends to be. In the moment, we almost can understand the decision not to save April and yet by choosing it despite it being the “right choice”, Rebekah will be forced to give up everything she wants. 

Not everyone is making the "right choice" though. Steffen is falling for Elena again even though he knows it’s just not worth it anymore. Damon, more smartly, has largely fallen out of loving her. The whole task to get her emotions back is almost out of a paternalistic sense of duty (which is sort of problematic even if it’s easy to understand where it’s coming from). 

Bonnie is also just making horrible life decisions in a way Bonnie seems to almost always weirdly do on this show. She meets the “real” Silas, who looks like some deformed old man (okay, then?), but she also appears to have joined his cause. Because … reasons … I’m not quite sure actually. I had always assumed Silas was lying about the magic getting out of hand, but that doesn’t look to be the case. 

We don’t know much about Silas beyond the fact that he’s hugely powerful and has this grand plan to unleash dead supernatural forces. The balance between concerns for emotionless Elena, the cure, and Silas are a fair amount of story to balance and while this is a mostly fun; it’s a slightly all over the place, hopscotching from story to story with a lack of direction. It doesn’t help that the show is continuing to push the exit of Klaus from the show for the new series The Originals (Katherine sends him a letter mentioning some witch who has it out for him in New Orleans). Not a standout episode but not a bad episode; just a middling effort. 

Stray Observations:

-Candice Accola has proven herself a great actress, but this funk they’ve got her in over Tyler just isn’t a pleasant note to keep her repeating. It's not interesting and the show always stops in its tracks when we find Caroline complaining about Tyler. This is a stronger character than what we've seen of her lately. 

-“Nice dress” “I stole it”

-“Princess Grace of Monaco hot” – The scale by which pretty much all hotness should be measured.

-As a Cure fan, I can dig the shows continuing references even if they seem kind of arbitrary and surface level.

-“Hindsight is an even bigger bitch than you”

-Silas as Steffen was a great twist and played well by Paul Wesley.

-Damon and Steffen plan to use fear to coax emotions out of Elena. The writers almost come off as if their scared to allow particular story threads to reach their inevitable conclusion. Elena becomes a vampire but they never take that development to its logical conclusion, but in stead mull around in stories about sire-bonding and finding a cure that undermine anything interesting about this change in Elena. And now they're immediately trying to get her back to status quo even though that totally defeats the point of ridding Elena of her emotions.

Grade: B-

"Rebel Without A Cause" - Film Review

James Dean is Rebel Without A Cause. Most people can’t remember many of the specifics about the film but if you mention the title, odds are that they’re going to have at least cursory knowledge that Dean starred in it.

That’s probably not a coincidence; Dean is the best and most memorable part of the film. There are some clichéd and questionable things going on in the film and yet it mostly doesn’t matter because Dean is so good. Dean’s character troubled teen Jim Stark is described as “sincere” by a number of characters throughout the film and it’s an apt way to describe Dean’s performance. He’s not a traditional actor; sometimes he appears to be ad-libbing and he nervously mumbles a number of lines. But there’s an utterly intense, raw power to Dean’s performance that it makes up for weaker elements in the film.

The moments everyone remembers still pack the punch. When Dean yells, “You’re tearing me apart,” he sells the hell out of the moment and the ending has a kinetic fervor that makes it deeply affecting.

The acting is largely very good. Natalie Wood is given some amorphous material but she finds the sadness underneath her character Judy. Sal Mineo’s Plato is one of best tragic figures in all of film; he’s a kid whose hero-worshipping of Jim borders on infatuation and when he feels abandon he overreacts and brings about his own demise.   

However, much of the narrative is forced and stretches at the seams. Characters act in illogical and contradictory ways depending on what the story is asking of them. The first half of the film and the second half of the film feel like they’re two separate entities, and the tragic midway break is largely overlooked despite a character dying (pretty gruesomely in fact – even more troubling is Judy quickly getting over the guy’s death since they were technically dating). 

The film is also thematically inconsistent; oh sure there’s something in there about teen angst but the film seems so uncertain as to what it wants to say about the subject. 

There’s some intriguing subtext underneath it all if you look carefully. Plato is clearly gay and in love with Jim which makes his interactions and death all the more complicated. Judy’s father has either sexually assaulted her or come very close to it, and she’s not entirely adverse to the idea. The film doesn’t play up these aspects but they tinge everything we’re watching, making the youthful malaise something even more inexplicably painful and dark. 

This was the last film Dean starred in before his death in a car crash in 1955. Dean had only starred in three films, but he reached an iconic status after the release of Rebel, and it’s not difficult to see why. Dean has a quality about him that makes you stop and take notice; there’s a gravitation to his screen presence. 

Rebel Without A Cause is a problematic film, but parts of it taken by themselves have an energy that carries them and makes them still rather intriguing, sad and occasionally powerful.   

Grade: B

Mad Men - "Collaborators" - Review

Back in season five, Jon Hamm directed his first episode of television, “Tea Leaves”. Whether it was Hamm’s direction, the writing for the episode, or both, “Tea Leaves” was a weaker episode in the fifth season, which on the whole was one of the strongest seasons of Mad Men. “Collaborators” is the second episode Hamm has directed, and, once again, perhaps its Hamm’s direction or perhaps it’s the content of this episode, but “Collaborators” is a real step down from last week’s premiere “The Doorway”.

It’s not all bad because this is Mad Men, and it’s the top prestige drama on television so invariably there are moments that are strikingly lyrical and bitingly funny. But on the whole, the episode suffers from gluttony. There is simply too much going on in this episode. “The Doorway” could get away with its wealth of stories because it had an extra hour to tell those stories, but with the standard episodic length here again, the episode has trouble telling all of its stories (which I hope I'm not overstating; it could be more overstuffed, but the stories are balanced a little awkwardly). 

Initially the episode looks like it’s going to be an episode where we learn some more information about Don’s past, which I wouldn’t protest against because episodes featuring flashbacks have been this series strength since season one’s “The Hobo Code”. But the flashbacks are almost an afterthought, acting solely as bookends. It adds in a tinsy bit more backstory relating to the mysterious figure Uncle Mac and Don's time growing up in a brothel, but we probably could have guessed what the deal was with that portion of Don’s life was. It might have been justified if there were a few more flashbacks, but otherwise it’s one more element of story that strains the episode's storytelling abilities. The episode is trying to reach this poeticness utilizing the bookends but it just doesn’t reach it (the flashbacks just aren’t as interesting as the writers seem to believe). 

What the episode really is about is paralleling Don and Pete. Pete has been slowly falling into bad habits that are turning him into a sort of young Don Draper (though with much, much less charm). He hits on a neighbor’s wife Brenda (Collette Wolfe) (like Don is) and invites her to the city to “give her tickets”. They sleep together, but it all turns disastrously quickly. She tells her husband who beats her horrifically. Rather than letting Pete get away with his adultery, the show doesn’t let him keep his success like Don has been with neighbor Sylvia. This provides the episode with its best moment when the superb Alison Brie as Trudy scolds Pete. She’s not upset with his indiscretions (heck that was why she let him have the apartment) but his idioticness in choosing the neighbor’s wife. She tells Pete not to come home until she tells him to. 

Where Pete is failing to be successful with his affairs, Don is, as always, too good at his infidelity. He hates it and Sylvia is still doubtful of it. She particularly begins to doubt the whole affair after Meghan confides in her about a miscarriage. It shakes her whole worldview, and when fate conspires so that she and Don end up alone at dinner, she’s quickly won over by Don’s commanding (but honestly pretty awful) argument that “You want to feel shitty right up to the moment where I take your dress off” (that was disgusting. I was uncomfortable throughout that scene).

Another thing the episode does well, in a way Mad Men has always been good, is taking a character (in this case Sylvia) that is essentially a plot device and giving them enough of their own story time that they become humanized. Sylvia likes sleeping with Don (because: holy shit, have you see Jon Hamm’s body!), but she also doesn’t want to be a home wrecker and she sympathizes with Meghan and hates herself for wedging Don’s relationship with her.  

If this were all the story this episode featured, it would be pretty compelling because much of this is very good. But we get more story time with other characters as well. The creepy Jaguar guy, Herb, hits on Joan, who denies his advances. Hey, I love Christina Hendricks as much as the next guy but it’s one scene we could do without and we only get it to establish the presence of this character again (although: Hendricks knocks it out of the park). Then Herb demands the ad agency sell his partners on the idea of more local ad space (as opposed to a national campaign). Pete, “yes man” that he is, acquiesces to this, but Don realizes it’s an awful idea. Don kills the idea in the pitch meeting; he “sells” it to the other Jaguar clients but he purposely does a terrible job (he's enthusastic about it to a fault). It’s a really funny scene and it brings together Pete and Don’ts stories in a nice way. Pete’s no good at being Don, and Don hates that he’s good at being this persona he keeps adopting. 

Meanwhile Peggy gets more story time that is awkwardly fitted into the episode. Elisabeth Moss is a fantastic actress and I like this new more confident version of Peggy, but the story mostly comes off as an excuse to check in with this character. Stan (in another of his late night phone calls) lets it slip that the head of Heinz Beans, Raymond, is feuding with the head of Heinz Ketchup, Tim, a much younger guy who’s had everything handed to him (sound like Don and Pete, huh?). Peggy tells her boss, also named Tim, offhand about this and regrets it because Tim wants to go ahead to and steal the displeased client away from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. This plot appears to be more about setting up future story than about actually going anywhere. Peggy and Don may soon be in conflict over an account and that’s a story that could potentially be fascinating.   

Don sits outside the door of his apartment at episode’s end, unable to enter. Inside is his wife, a woman he doesn’t want to see because she reminds him of all his failures. Don never had a mother and his mother figures (such as his aunt seen in flashbacks) were pretty lousy. Don has projected his motherly needs onto the woman he’s in relationships with. Meghan tells Don about the miscarriage and he’s suddenly like a child again. All he wants to do is please her (especially considering he's feeling bad for sleeping with Sylvia). He tells her he’d do whatever she wanted to do. “Don’t you have your own room?” the prostitute tells Don in the flashback. No. Don doesn’t. Pete does though, but it’s off alone in the city. He had everything and he fucked it up and lost it. Don should have everything he wants … and yet he doesn’t.   

It’s a slightly overcrowded episode and some of this feels forced (the appearance of Herb and the Heinz people each feel awkwardly placed and don't completely rub up with the affair plots entirely well) but it’s not without its moments. May be this is just the curse of Jon Hamm directing (although: this is much better than "Tea Leaves"). 

Stray Observations:

 -The title of this episode (like most Med Men episode titles) is rife for deconstruction. Of course it refers to the appeasement of Hitler by France and England which is paralleled to what Pete was trying to do with Herb. But it also speaks to the "collaboration" between Trudy and Pete in pretending their marriage was still the happy little enterprise it looked to be on the surface. There's also Don's "collaboration" with Sylvia in their affair. 

-"I thought there was no smoking" "I found out the maid does"

-Peggy is awful at pep talks. But then again her heart was totally not in that. If she were Don (and a man), she wouldn't feel the need to do that and she definitely wouldn't be given advice like that by her secretary. 

-Pete was so awkward at making sexual advances on Brenda in the apartment.
-Don essentially pays off Sylvia at one point, which is deeply unsettling.
-If it hadn't been a miscarriage, Meghan says she'd have gotten an abortion. Although he upbringing would have her raising kids at some point in the future.
-Once again: Alison Brie was excellent. I got chills. 

Grade: B

How I Became a Better Film Watcher by Watching More Television

I had always loved films but starting in college I had far less time to watch them. Not only that but there was much less easily accessible film content in the college setting. Television became an alternative to films largely out of convenience.

However, I was watching television shows at a great time to be watching television. In the wake of The Sopranos, television had the creative ambitions to match and occasionally outsize its prestigious film cousin. This coupled with easier ways to watch this content through online streaming services, and I suddenly found myself much less interested in films and watching a lot more television shows. 

I caught up on Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I was left wanting more. 

But eventually I felt like I was neglecting watching movies and so I decided to jump back in began watching films. But my experiences with television watching had actually proven really useful. Watching and analyzing television, you’re constantly assessing a show’s aims and whether they’re succeeding at them. 

Movies and television are different mediums with different goals, but they’re both playing around with similar structural concerns on the whole. You’re constantly much more aware of whether an episode of television does its job well or not. If its structure is out of whack, it’s much more noticeable because it stands out from well-crafted episodes. But in turn that made me stop and wonder what makes a well-structured episode and why do certain episodes prove good at achieving what they set out to do.  

It might seem odd to say so, but watching television made me a better movie watcher.  Once I got back into viewing films, my paucity of film viewing made me lap up every film I had been neglecting to get around to. I became re-obsessed with the medium that had made me such a pop culture devotee. But I was also much more hypercritical of it and that made me get more out of my experience.  

Oddly enough, now film watching is pulling a similar awareness on my writing and my viewing of television. Writing television reviews can get repetitive and sometimes it’s like grasping at straws to find some new angle to take on a show. But writing about films reminded me that the most important thing is to tackle what does or doesn’t work in the simplest and most direct terms. Just tackle what’s there. 

Our understanding and awareness towards other mediums can help make us better viewers of content, and we don’t have to treat films and television as mutually exclusive. They both are good at different things and though films are typically seen as the better of the two; films just can’t match tv shows for their ability to form a bond, develop characters, and build up its story. Television has the time to do that. Film doesn’t, but films also can usually get away with a spectacle that television simply can’t and certain stories just don’t warrant the large amounts of screentime television requires.  

Neither is better. They’re just different. And until I understood that and the things they’re trying to accomplish I couldn’t truly appreciate or properly analyze either. Granted, I’m a long way from being really good at this whole reviewing thing, but I’m working on it and using television to understand film and vice versa, and is a good place to start.

How I Met Your Mother - "Romeward Bound" - Review

Ted asks Barney something towards the end of “Romeward Bound” that I’ve been asking for weeks now. Why is he still acting like the womanizer he’s been for ages when he’s soon to be married? Yea, Robin might be cool with it, but it’s still bothersome.

The show has had Barney continue to ogle at women even as his bachelor days are supposed to be essentially over. It’s frustrating to see him continue this way. At first just because it didn’t add up with where his character was at anymore, but now it looks as if the writers want to use this detail to form a conflict between Ted and Barney... which is ... strange (to say the least).

Ted’s lingering affection for Robin isn’t the most interesting longstanding plot element; it’s been played out until that beaten up horse resembled little of its original self or charm. It keeps being utilized to diminishing returns. It remains to be seen just how exactly Robin fits into the whole picture of Ted meeting the mother, and after eight seasons playing the same note over and over of Ted’s weirdly obsessive feelings towards his ex just isn’t all that enjoyable to watch. 

The rest of the content for the Ted-Barney story is very filler-y. Ted’s fawning for a woman he describes as “redonkulous” who turns out (in a meh twist that’s crafted to bring Robin into the picture) to be Barney and Robin’s wedding planner. It’s all rather lightweight and there’s a lot of questionable objectifying going on that the show keeps just on the side of not offensive (though we still could have done without it; there are far, far better ways to do stories without having to objectify women). (Although I have to admit that Robin’s enthusiasm for discovering what’s underneath the coat is played wonderfully by Colbie Smulders)  

Marshall and Lily’s story is more original but it features a lot of rehashed jokes (Marshall using lawyer speak to misdirect, cuts to imagined futures) and twists that pile up to the point where their devoid of value. However, I’m intrigued by the decision to uproot two of the five main characters to Italy. It’s not a decision that exactly works within the medium of television but it’s a bold one (perhaps the boldest the show has done in about three seasons depending on where they go with it). 

This was an ultra-lite episode; it was mildly amusing but not all that funny, which is a nice way to describe this season as a whole. It’s usually doing things that are oh that’s pleasant I suppose but you usually forget most of what happened soon after you’ve finished the episode.  

Grade: C+