Rob Bricken wasn’t sure why the trailer for “The Expendables” excited him more than this new trailer for the A-Team movie. I’ve got two words for him: obvious, unlovely CGI. Also, the jokes aren’t funny.
Still, even though I never watched the original series, this still has my moderate interest. Maybe.
And it’s official: this will be the last season of Premium Hollywood’s “24” blog.
Did you like how I made Fox’s decision to kill the show all about me?
Truth be told, I’m relieved. Ask anyone who blogs about a show and they will tell you that the single-best way to ruin a show for someone is to write about it. Even really good shows like “Lost” get exhausting after a while (biggest, mythology, ever), but “24,” frankly, has been spinning its wheels for years now, and I know that my frustration with the show reflected in my writing. I really did try to make this as entertaining as possible, but that can be difficult when all you want to do is say “Fuck this show,” and hit Publish.
Now that I know it’s over (ooh, another potential blog title), though, I plan to have as much fun watching this show as possible, even if Starbuck is the sorriest excuse for a mole in TV history. And fingers crossed that I get another interview with Annie “Crazy Jackie” Wersching before they call it a day.
Insert your own gun joke here.
I am always amused at how cavalier TV politicians are about committing high treason. (There’s a Karl Rove joke in there somewhere, but…nah.) We always knew Weiss was a weasel, but not even I thought that he would sell out Madame President like that, especially after that rousing speech she gave when the cabinet members actually entertained the idea of giving up Slumdog in order to stop the bomb. That was worthy of the piece on Presidential speeches that our own Will Harris assembled earlier this year. Say this for the lack of screen time Cherry Jones has suffered this year – when she is on screen, at least they give her good stuff…
…though in return for that good stuff, they have her assign the nation’s best field agent with the menial task of escorting Slumdog President and family out of the blast range. Of course, it turned out to be a very good thing that he was there, or they’d all be dead. Two firestorms in two weeks! Wheeeeee! Actually, I liked seeing Jack go all Call of Duty on General Brucker’s goons, picking them off in the smoke screen like fish in a barrel. (That general has a great agent though, as he has made memorable appearances in “Fringe” and “Damages” before appearing here.) I was sure that Jackie was going to get picked off though, but it’s too soon for a dramatic death scene like that. That one comes in Hour 23. Book it, Dan-O.
Now that we know that Starbuck is a terrorist, isn’t it curious how Samir is suddenly ringing her phone like it’s Booty Call Hour? Was she really not communicating with him up to this point? You have to think that he needed a thing or two from her before she killed Jimmy James, and either way, how conspicuous is she that they’re in a crisis and she’s constantly on her cell? Especially when – this just occurred to me – her phone was blasted in the EMP? She must have sent Samir a text message with the new number of the replacement phone NSA handed her. Or not; maybe they thought we wouldn’t notice. Silly, silly show runners.
Starbuck did say something interesting during one of the calls, though. It’s clear that there is no real relationship between Samir and Starbuck, and that this is a reluctant business arrangement on her part to help him. So who is it that she answers to? Who would be interested in recruiting a young, attractive female with a criminal past for a position of vast interest to national security? If they’re American, that would explain how “Dana” has been able to escape detection up to this point. God, this couldn’t be the makings of a perfect storm of sleaze, could it? Remember who’s making a late appearance before the final clock tick? Three words: Buck buck brawwwwwwwwk!
But nah, that’s too easy. There is no way an ex-President could get involved with something like that…right? Tony Almeida’s behind bars, so he couldn’t be the phantom menace, as it were…but Alan Wilson could be. His story is still unresolved; all we know is that Jackie nearly tortured him to death at the end of Day 7. Maybe his lawyers secured some kind of pardon for his troubles, and now he’s trying to secure more work for his defense contractors by executing another attack on US soil. It makes sense on paper, but that is usually the best indication that the show has other plans.
Lastly, let’s discuss poor, poor Tarin, who was forced to assume the role of the delivery driver for the bomb. This is surely a test on Samir’s part, since he has unofficially questioned Tarin’s commitment to the cause from the moment he expressed regret for getting Princess Jasmine involved. Tarin activates the ticking clock within the ticking clock, with a pained expression that said, “I am far too handsome to die like this.” Doesn’t he have 42 virgins waiting for him in the afterlife? Hey, no one wants to die, but dude, you’re a terrorist. You had to know that this moment was coming.
Which brings us to our song of the week, by my beloved Muse. Time is indeed running out for both Madame President and the show as a whole. The show’s producers seem to be excited about flipping the franchise into a feature film property, but I don’t know how that’s possible without massive commercial breaks. I remember when Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken tried that in the ’90s with “Nick of Time.” Didn’t work out too well. But on the plus side, maybe they’ll cut out all that useless stuff like Mare Winningham and her closeted terrorist son. That can only be a good thing, right?
He had his biggest success on television with Bill Cosby on “I Spy,” historic in its way as the first inter-racial buddy adventure program on TV or, for that matter, in any medium and the tongue-in-cheek superhero comedy, “The Greatest American Hero.” Nevertheless, Mr. Culp, who died unexpectedly today from a fall at age 79, also made a notable mark on films.
Costarring with his colleague and friend Cosby, he directed an attempt to translate their TV fame into movies with 1972’s “Hickey and Boggs.” The film, which was written by a young Walter Hill, tried to go in vastly different, far grittier and grimmer direction than the TV show and failed at the box office. Recently, however, it’s been rediscovered by some cinephiles and crime film fans.
Still, a few year before that Culp appeared in one of the real cultural break-out movies of the 1960s, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” For better or worse, it helped popularized, or perhaps merely capitalized, on the idea of “swinging” and “free love” among the older, married set. I haven’t seen this one either and I have no excuse other than somewhat mixed-feelings about most of writer-director Paul Mazursky’s other movies. However, in her heartfelt farewell to Culp, Cinematical’s Monika Bartyzel was kind enough to provide the lengthy, terrific clip below. This scene with Natalie Wood really shows Culp’s way with both serious and light material as he experiences a pretty broad swath of emotions in a scene that starts out as something close to straight drama and gradually eases into some pretty delightful comedy. Now, I want to see this.
Well, how about that: I get to use this title after all.
Some of you may recall that I wanted to use this title for an episode, any episode, and after Buffy iced Kevin and his psycho dirtbag friend in Hour 9, I figured that was my last chance, and Starbuck would go back to being the sniveling sissypants we’ve grown to loathe.
Fool.
I have to say, I did not see this coming. Of course, I feel like I should have, since her story line was beginning to run out of juice, but I never suspected that our small-time juvee felon would go so far over to the dark side. Let’s flash back to the moment where she’s tailed Kevin and dirtbag back to the lake. We thought she was unsure about what she wanted to do next. In retrospect, dirtbag is probably lucky that Buffy pulled the trigger.
What would be a neat touch is if we now caught a “Usual Suspects”-style glimpse of all of the strings she was pulling up to the moment where she strangled Jimmy James to death and stuffed him behind the paneling in Holding Room #2. (The stink will give her away eventually, yes?) Maybe there is security preventing people from entering the CTU tunnel, and Starbuck was the one that cleared Princess Jasmine’s entrance. Heck, maybe she remotely activated the EMP’s timer once the car came into range, since we’re still not sure of the weight-sensitive detonation theory espoused in last week’s comment section. Maybe she taught the snipers at the river how to jam the cell phone frequencies. But we’ll never see any of that, because of the show’s real-time format. Pity. We might learn all of those things – or none of them – but it won’t have that same punch as the ‘Verbal straightens out his foot’ shot. Damn it. (*takes drink, per “24” drinking game rules*)
I was about to say that CTU’s facial recognition software was going to play a part in identifying Starbuck as a terrorist sympathizer (if you can call them sympathetic), but something just hit me: ten bucks says she’s in that file of anti-IRK rebels that President Slumdog was supposed to hand over in the previous hour. We were led to believe CTU scanned through them all on the big screen, but perhaps not. We may not get our “Usual Suspects” moment, but there’s a good chance we’ll get our “No Way Out” moment, and soon. One thing’s for sure, and it is in stark contrast to my prediction of a noble death for poor Jenny: her story ends with Buffy pulling the trigger…but does she take out one of Bullz-Eye’s TV girlfriends (Chloe or Crazy Jackie) before she takes her last breath? You know my thoughts on Jackie’s life expectancy, so she’s the odds-on favorite. But there are times when I hate being right, and this is one of them.
“I’m sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. When I said, ‘I’m really busy right now,’ I meant, ‘Bitch, I will cut you.'”
Lastly, I think we all owe Katee Sackhoff a formal apology for questioning her decision to take the role of Dana Walsh. She clearly knew something that we didn’t, and we should have given her the benefit of the doubt for making this her next role after “BSG.” In our defense, Ms. Sackhoff, you didn’t make it easy for us at first. Still, we said some things, and for that, we’re sorry.
Chloe, meanwhile, grows a pair so big she’ll need a wheelbarrow to carry them in, pulling a gun on an NSA engineer and telling him to step tha fuck off as she throws a Hail Mary in order to get coms up and save Jack. (Of course, Starbuck thought Chloe’s idea was a bad one, because she needed those servers down for as long as possible.) Bubba is now forever in her debt – her reply of “I’m not good with praise” would have produced a spit take, had I been drinking anything when she said it – which makes me wonder if Chloe is next in line to run CTU. She may still have that personality disorder, as Big Balls Bill Buchanan (RIP) once said, but she also has a good sense of right and wrong, and she knows that Jack is impervious to bullets…
…unless Fox cancels the show, a story that has been making the rounds lately due to the show’s increased budget and decreased ratings. Another rumor has the show relocating to NBC, and while they could use a show like “24,” I just don’t see a fit there. Maybe it’s a grudge fuck for Fox supposedly in talks to land Conan O’Brien. Either way, “24” will forever be a Fox show to me.
Speaking of Jack’s imperviousness, he and Buffy were in a shootout at the East River with a couple of red shirts that pulled a trick from Scott Smith’s book “The Ruins.” A character is on death’s door, but the vines leave him there to suffer, in order to force his girlfriend put him out of his misery. (Forget the movie – the book’s awesome. Brutal, but awesome.) Here, when one of the characters pulls what I call a Hudson (“Aliens” fans just nodded knowingly) and lies in the open, the snipers pull the brutally effective stunt of shooting Hudson repeatedly in order to flush their enemies out in an emotional rage. Both were exercises in mental torture, and both worked. Good thing that Jack and Buffy had a silent partner, one they didn’t even know about: Crazy Jackie, who comes out guns a-blazing in both the literal and euphemistic sense. Man, how did I not notice how, um, talented Jackie was last season? Damn things are just screaming at me now. And knowing that she will surely die before season’s end, I’m reminded of Cary Elwes’ great line in “The Princess Bride”: “‘Tis a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It’d be a pity to damage yours.”
Can’t think of a better ‘out’ line than that. See you next week! Once again, I give you the song “Starbucked” by the UK band Bond. You want to know how forgotten this band is? Not even the last.fm page that’s hosting this track has the album title right. It’s Bang Out of Order, not Band Out of Order. And there are over 90 copies available for a mere penny on Amazon. Click here to buy!
The first image that really catches our eye is that of some poor bastard hauling his dirty, grimy self across the ground. He looks, in a word, pitiful…and as we’ve just seen a truck driving along the dusty road and another man wandering about with seeming calm, we have to presume that the aforementioned gentleman on the ground has but a short amount of time left on this earth.
But, then, we start to get mixed signals when a second man is seen crawling in the dirt, then a third.
By the time the shot cuts to reveal a veritable legion of dirt crawlers, with the ominous score only serving to underline the palpable nervousness of the bystanders in the village (i.e. the ones sitting or standing rather than crawling), we have to ask: “What the hell’s going on here?”
A car pulls up. A man with silver skulls on the toes of his boots steps out. Make that two men. Are they twins?
Oh, but it’s too late to consider the genetic origins of these guys, because now they’ve started crawling. This is getting downright creepy…and that’s even before the group begins to rise to their feet and enter a highly disturbing candle-lit shrine, to which they add a sheet of paper.
It’s a Santa Muerte shrine. On the paper is a pencil sketch of Heisenberg. In short, these guys are praying that Walter White will be dead soon.
Season 3 is officially off to an awesome start. Welcome back, “Breaking Bad.”
Given the end of Season 2, it’s no surprise that the first thing tackled post-credits is the inevitable repercussions of the airplane crash. You probably spotted the guest appearance by Ashleigh Banfield, but the other newscasters are actually from Albuquerque’s NBC affiliate, KOB. It’s an easy segue back into where we left off last season, offering a look into how it’s affected the residents of the city…including, of course, one W. White, who’s busy burning money on his barbecue grill. If there’s any sight more horrifying than watching cash go up in smoke, it’s got to be Walt having second thoughts and, in the process, setting his robe on fire. It was a must-do, though: right about now, the money is really the only thing in Walt’s life that he can stop from going up smoke.
Certainly, his marriage is shot to hell, a fact underlined by Skyler’s inaugural appearance in Season 3, which takes place as she’s attempting to kickstart the divorce proceedings between herself and Walt. It’s a meeting borne of emotion rather than intellect, however, with Skyler desperately trying to ignore the attorney’s comments and suggestions until the cumulative effect of her protestations finally begin the process of collapsing her resolve. The tension between her and Walt, Jr., doesn’t help the situation any, and once her sister starts to get on her case, Skyler can’t deny it any more: she’s got to ask Walt outright what the hell he’s got going on in his world that he’s been too afraid to reveal to her.
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