spicedogs | Entries tagged with review

( This episode was difficult to watch )

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: Dreaming of Hawaii
Current Music: I'm your vehicle

I finally finished watching Tuesday's episode of Boston Legal. I don't know what to say. I guess, I am questioning myself as to why I even bother watching this show. The show is just one big excuse for sex. I can't believe that lawyers spend so much of their time having sex in their office. I am not a prude, but I think that this show jumped the shark in its first episode of Season 2.

I started thinking on why I started watching the show in the first place. The only answer I could come up with is that I started to watch because of William Shatner. I loved the way he made fun of himself: Denny Crane.

The beginning of Season 2, however, was mostly about how many women James Spader can screw. The end was about how many lawyers can screw each other and where. The trials were bizarre and unbelievable. So why do I continue watching? Is it the same reason that many of us when seeing a horrible accident on the road can’t keep our eyes off of the carnage? I stopped watching Prison Break because it was so gruesome. I couldn't stand the violence. I think I will do the same with this show. I am giving it one more week, and if I still feel the way I felt tonight, I will remove it from my TIVO lineup.

I'm beginning to believe that both Boston Legal and Prison Break belong on the cable channels and not on the main TV channels. Of course, because of HBO, Boston Legal and Prison Break are pushing the buttons to see how far they can go. Give me LOST anytime. Now there's a show that is innovative and not offensive.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Location: In front of the TV, dismayed
Current Music: Boston Legal

I can't believe that I became a real TV fanatic. But before LOST came on the small screen, I found that there was no real good shows to watch. This season, however, I can say that it isn't so anymore.

My Name Is Earl

This show was as funny and silly as usual.

The Office

First of all, the third season opener of The Office came on like a bang. What a funny episode. I was not disappointed. I think that they handled the Pam–Jim relationship really well. I am glad that she did not marry that bozo she was engaged to, and I am glad that the show was not ruined by placing Jim and Pam in a love relationship. In my opinion, the show would have gone downhill with the romance aspect.

I loved Michael's shenanigans. What a dolt he was. But then again, that was the Michael we've grown to love: Insensitive, brash, and clueless, and all the while he thinks he is being sensitive, friendly, and knowledgeable. He tried so hard to show how sensitive he was to gay people and all the time putting his foot in his mouth twenty times over.

It was sad to see both Pam and Jim looking so lost without their soul mates. However, it was a great idea to have Jim transfer to Connecticut and leave Pam in Scranton. I loved that she is now on her own. She tried to get Ryan play the inside jokes she and Jim so well played. Ryan was just clueless.

Dwight, like Michael, was the usual fool, and it was great to see that even as far as Connecticut, Jim was still able to get the best of Dwight.

I loved the idea of seeing both offices: the competents vs. the fools. Loved it. What can I say, the show did not disappoint me.

Grey’s Anatomy

We started the season where we left off. Izzy was mourning Denny’s death; Meredith was regretting her lack of constraint with Derek. It was a good show. I learned a lot of new things, there were some obligatory medical trauma, and the characters were true to life. I still wish the show was on Sunday nights.

All in all, I enjoyed my Thursday night. I still need to watch the episode of Boston Legal that I recorded on Tuesday. I have mixed feeling a bout that show. I hope that it doesn’t disappointment me as it did last year.

Current Mood: content
Current Location: AT home.
Current Music: Cosy in the Rocket (Psapp)

Wow, I have not been able to post lately. My task of making the Cliff Notes for Lost is a monumentuous task. I am still doing it, but it will be slow in coming. Writing the synopsis takes time and capturing the pictures to match each episode is even more challenging. My long commute to work and my long hours at work do not give me much time during the weekend. The training classes for the dogs that I attend during the weekend does not help either. Luckily Zack graduated his class and Carrie is soon finishing hers. I finally will be able to breathe.

Well any way, I will give my opinions about the shows that I just saw and then slowly add my Cliff Notes. This summer, with the help of Cliff's Generally Speaking podcast and forum, I will be rewatching LOST from Season 1, so I will be adding those to my blog as well.

( Read on only if you have seen Dave, SOS, Two for the road, ?, and Three Minutes or don't mind reading a spoiler. )

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: At home
Current Music: La Mer

Episode 2.18
Dave

This episode was not as exciting as the previous one: Lockdown. Nonetheless, it had a lot redeeming value. It was not islandcentric as Lockdown was, but you cannot have all episodes be islandcentric. That would make LOST so unexciting. Awaiting for that cliffhanger islandcentric episode is just a great experience, in my humble opinion. However, I think that the relationship stories (which Dave is) are vitally important for the building block of the storyline. They are fun to watch, your heart is a bit settled, and you learn a bit about the characters and, at times, a little bit about the island itself.

Anyway, enough rambling. As I did for Lockdown, I will make a synopsis of this story and add screen captures. ~~As I don't have time to make my own screencaptures,so I will be using this site for my pictures:~~

~~http://lost-media.com/modules.php?name=coppermine&file=thumbnails&album=1033~~

~~I may eventually change them, but then again, I may not.~~

I went ahead and made my own screen captures.

( Read only if you have seen DAVE, or if you don't mind a spoiler... )

Current Mood: artistic
Current Location: LOST
Current Music: Hurley's Theme

Lockdown

What a show this one turned out to be. One of my favorites is 23 Psalm, and I can say that Lockdown came very close. We learned something new about the hatches, food on the island, and how Jack will obtain the items Sawyer appropriated for himself. Next, I will give you a synopsis of the entire show (with screencaps for illustrations). Read it if you have seen the show or if you don't mind a spoiler.

( Read more... )

I hope that you enjoyed this episode as much as I did.

Current Mood: tired

Recently I was asked about giving out my one LOST favorite episode. After pondering about it, I couldn't come up with just one. They were all my favorite, or at best, they all had some merit. Not one episode left me without my wanting to watch more, wanting more, learning more. However, last night, while on the commuter train I take to go home, I put on my iPod. I really wanted to listen to one the other podcasts that I listen to. But as fate would have it, I accidentally touched the wrong list and put on a LOST episode.

Rats, I said to myself, of all the episodes, this one is the one I really don’t want to watch right now. But being somewhat lazy at 6:30 pm, I decided to watch it. The episode ended just as my station was called out; hence, I got to watch the whole show. And I was glad that I did watch it all, because I knew then and there that John Locke would be pleased with me: Fate spoke, and I listened.

So here’s my favorite:

COLLISION

( Read more... )

Current Mood: bouncy

Auditions for Next Leipzig Idol (Pedal Power a Must)

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Published: November 15, 2005

"Leipzig, June 1722." That dateline, proclaimed repeatedly in the opening stretches of Itamar Moses' windy play "Bach at Leipzig," may well lodge permanently in the minds of audience members, becoming one of those useless pieces of pseudo-information that plague the idling psyche forever, settling alongside the lyrics of songs you never liked and plot points from episodes of "The Brady Bunch."


Carol Rosegg Michael Emerson, left, and Richard Easton as organists hoping for the big time in "Bach at Leipzig."

Little else about this ardent but hollow literary homage is likely to make a similarly durable impression, or for that matter a happy one. Sitting through Mr. Moses' reverent attempt to mimic the brainy irreverence of Tom Stoppard is like being forced to consume glass after glass of flat Champagne, with no hope of giddy inebriation in the offing. Inundated with arcana about religious and musical squabbles in 18th-century Germany, besieged by sophomoric jokes, you leave stuffed and queasy but sadly sober.

The play, which opened last night at New York Theater Workshop in a handsome, superbly cast production directed by Pam MacKinnon, bears many of the hallmarks of Mr. Stoppard's erudition-enhanced comedies like "Travesties" or "The Invention of Love," in which stuffy historical or literary figures spring to life and do the hokey-pokey in between shapely little exegeses of big ideas. What's missing is the necessary yeast of true artistic inspiration. The 28-year-old Mr. Moses, clearly a writer of nimble verbal gifts and high ambition, expends much time, energy and vocabulary to say nothing of consequence.

The play is essentially a fictional footnote to an actual footnote in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. In Leipzig in 1722, Johann Kuhnau, the organist at the city's leading church, played his last fugue. The town council charged with replacing him considered several candidates before settling on the first of classical music's celebrated three B's. As the ill-fated nobodies in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" inspired Mr. Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," so do the bit players in this tale hog center stage in Mr. Moses' early-instruments version of "American Idol" - Bach himself playing the role of a deus ex machina who never arrives.

One by one, in a structure aping the musical form of the fugue, the competitors introduce themselves by reading long letters to various wives, lovers and associates. The innovator Fasch (Boyd Gaines) is a former student of Kuhnau who broke with his mentor over their differing ideas of how to serve God through music. Lenck (Reg Rogers) is a scamp with a spotty past who hopes to restore his reputation and finances by gaining the prestigious post. Steindorff (Jeffrey Carlson) is a sexually voracious young aristocrat from a town at daggers drawn with the neighboring burg, whence hails the dotty older Kaufmann (Richard Easton), yet another candidate. Guarding the door of the church from all comers is the downtrodden Schott (Michael Emerson), the organist at one of Leipzig's lesser churches, who hopes that his chance at the big time has arrived at last.

Plots are hatched, conspiracies are fomented, "Survivor"-style alliances are formed as the candidates try to outmaneuver one another to win the big prize. But for all the fancy machinery of its plotting, the play never works up the farcical energy to sweep us past the dialogue's draggy digressions into learned discourse on the conflicts between the Pietists and the Lutherans, or the intricacy of the fugue form, or the symbiotic relationship between structure and content in drama.

Mr. Moses is particularly ill advised to be lecturing us on that last subject, since the play's needlessly complicated architecture fails to conceal the void of real ideas at its core. These bewigged figures give many pretty-sounding speeches on the aforementioned subjects, but unlike the talkative types in Mr. Stoppard's best plays, they do not espouse or embody philosophies of universal interest or enduring resonance, but remain self-infatuated party guests gabbling on about subjects in which few will have an avid interest.

And while Mr. Stoppard's work can sometimes be top-heavy with book-learnin' - not everyone emerged from the recent Broadway revival of "Jumpers" agog with excitement at his or her new knowledge of metaphysics - he is a great entertainer who orchestrates his tomfoolery with genuine wit. Mr. Moses may someday develop a fine ear for comedy, but "Bach at Leipzig" suggests a serious pitch problem. Considering how frequently the same jokes recur, it's alarming that no one involved in the production seems to have noticed how few are actually funny.

That said, the cast assembled by Ms. MacKinnon includes some seriously skilled comic actors, and each manages to earn a robust laugh or two by tethering the hot-air balloons of their roles to earthy shtick. As the dimwitted Kaufmann, Mr. Easton, resplendent in the most mountainous of wigs (the costumes by Mathew J. LeFebvre are terrific), wanders the stage in a happy daze, oblivious at all times to the plots and counterplots he keeps stumbling upon. Mr. Rogers proves yet again that he is a master at playing craven snivelers. And Mr. Emerson, his blue eyes permanently radiating a deer-in-the-headlights gaze, displays a wonderful gift for graceful physical comedy.

Mr. Moses' affection for his aesthetic mentor is certainly sincere, and Mr. Stoppard has generously reciprocated, giving "Bach at Leipzig" a seal of approval by writing an introduction to the published version. But what's in it for us? For most of the audience, watching "Bach at Leipzig" will be about as rewarding as reading a long, gushy love letter addressed to someone else.

Bach at Leipzig

Text by Itamar Moses; directed by Pam MacKinnon; sets by David Zinn; costumes by Mathew J. LeFebvre; lighting by David Lander; sound by John Gromada; fight choreography by Felix Ivanov; production stage management, C. A. Clark; assistant stage management, Jonathan Donahue. Presented by the New York Theater Workshop, James C. Nicola, artistic director; Lynn Moffat, managing director. At 79 East Fourth Street, East Village; (212) 239-6200. Through Dec. 18. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Boyd Gaines (Johann Friedrich Fasch), Michael Emerson (Georg Balthasar Schott), Reg Rogers (Georg Lenck), Richard Easton (Georg Friedrich Kaufmann), Jeffrey Carlson (Johann Martin Steindorff), Andrew Weems (Johann Christoph Graupner) and Jonathan Donahue (the Greatest Organist in Germany).