Tag: Teevee

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Behold the Ritual Clearing of the Tabs

Yup, it’s that time again: When I look at Chrome and realize, “Wow, I have a lot of tabs open to stuff.”

::  On the oldest book in the world printed with movable type, and it’s not the Gutenberg Bible:

The oldest extant text ever printed with movable type predates Gutenberg himself (born in 1400) by 23 years, and predates the printing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, printed in Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.

Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier.

::  Why does everyone want to buy candy on Tiktok right now?

Causey’s most successful TikTok videos follow her as she packs old-school candies, like wax bottles filled with sugary juice and vintage candy buttons, into boxes for customers. Her videos also show off new offerings that she eats on camera: Think gummy Nerds clusters and chamoy-drenched dulces enchilados, or Gushers coated in chamoy syrup and rolled in Tajin seasoning. Her account features imported chewy Puchao candies and Pocky sticks from Japan, along with a slew of other Asian candies. There’s also weird stuff — sour candy that you spray in your mouth, candy shaped like unicorn poop, and gigantic gummies, along with nostalgic favorites like fizzy Zots and lemon drops. But Causey’s taste of viral success really began when the jelly fruits trend emerged on TikTok.

In countless videos on the platform, users would eat the jellies — a type of candy sold in fruit-shaped plastic capsules — by popping the capsule with their teeth, causing the jelly to burst in their mouth, often to comedic effect. The hashtag #jellyfruitcandy has racked up more than 27 million views, and for a while Candy Me Up was one of the few places that sold it.

The article goes on to describe “freeze-dried candy”, which is something I saw in a store in Toronto recently. I thought about trying it, but that stuff was expensive, at least in the store where I saw it, and I’d already dropped a chunk of money in an anime-and-comics store that very morning. Alas!

I find Tiktok kind of fascinating, and I hope it, or at least something very much like it, survives the current challenges. (I have to be honest here: I don’t get terribly worked up about the Chinese maybe “spying” on what I’m doing. If they think they can learn something insightful from the odd doings of a guy in overalls who lives near Buffalo, well, have at it, Hoss. Something needs to be done about the car-theft thing, though.)

::  V: The Original Series first aired 40 years ago. Wow.

I actually didn’t watch V the first time it aired. I don’t remember any buzz about it in school, and right around then all our geeky energy was laser-focused on the impending arrival of Return of the Jedi. I think I remember one kid talking about the V show that he’d watched the night before. Plus, V aired on NBC, which was at that point languishing in third place on the networks, and it’s biggest hits of the 80s had either just launched and had yet to gain traction (The A-Team) or hadn’t even come along yet (The Cosby Show), and in those days (wow, there’s a phrase I’m not keen on using to describe the 19-freakin’-80s), buzz was based pretty much on if you saw the commercials on the network you were watching at the moment. So, for me, V came and went very quickly, and I missed it entirely.

A year later, though, the sequel dropped, and that one, I saw. By then we were watching NBC a little (thanks, A-Team!), and I might have watched a movie that I wanted to watch on NBC’s weekly movie telecast, back when the networks actually televised movies. In fact, I think it was a movie, because I remember a long preview at the movie’s end–maybe five minutes long, maybe more–for the upcoming Big! Teevee! Miniseries! Event!, called V: The Final Battle. Now that I was properly briefed, I watched V: The Final Battle faithfully, and I was a big fan right from there. The original miniseries from the year before was re-broadcast soon after, and I was now fully briefed.

V: The Final Battle was produced by a different team than the original series from just a year earlier, which led to some differences in tone and story; the second series is much more action-oriented than the original and it doesn’t focus nearly as much on the allegory of fascism that the original did. Also, the second series features one of the most gobsmackingly bad endings I’ve ever seen, even for a thirteen-year-old kid. But the preceding five hours and fifty-five minutes of the six-hour miniseries was great, so if the ending sucked, I was willing to forgive.

V was a big enough hit that the two miniseries led to a weekly series later that fall (1984, I think), which started off strongly but then bogged down a bit. There’s some handwavey-stuff in the series opener explaining how the humans’ victory from The Final Battle actually wasn’t, and then a favorite character from the miniseries was killed immediately, and the show just wound up bogging down. There was a reboot many years later (ten years ago, maybe?) on ABC, but I didn’t watch any of it.

Oh, and The Final Battle boasted a wonderful 80s-synth score:

::  Ten Essential Songs by Gordon Lightfoot.

SO MANY BRILLIANT songwriters came out of Canada in the Sixties — legends like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Robbie Robertson — that the talents of Gordon Lightfoot are sometimes overlooked by those who don’t know better. He never even appeared on a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot before his death at 84. That’s a raging injustice when you listen back to gems like “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Carefree Highway,” and “Early Morning Rain.” These songs earned him a sterling reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter, which you can see when you check the list of people who covered them: Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and countless others. Or you can take it from Dylan himself, who famously remarked, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Here’s a guide to ten of Lightfoot’s best songs.

::  Color Him Busy: A profile of heavily-tattooed actor Robert LaSardo.

In person, LaSardo comes across as a sensitive soul with a sense of humor. In an interview in his agent’s office he lifted his right forearm as if to prove it, and there, amid a roiling sea, is winsome Betty Boop in her flirty pose. “That’s my comic relief,” he said. He’s reluctant to make too much of the other tattoos — or as he prefers, “illustrations” — that cover both arms, his abdomen, neck, hands, fingers, back and legs. He’s even a bit self-conscious about discussing their significance.

LaSardo admitted the ink has helped him establish a 20-year career portraying thugs, drug dealers and gritty undercover cops. But he said landing roles through his tattoos was never his intention. “It’s my life story,” he said. “It’s the trip through my world.”

A bit of background here: a while back I found a YouTube channel that posts clips from the classic show NYPDBlue, and just this morning there was a clip that features a guest stint by Robert LaSardo. Now, La Sardo has been one of my favorite “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors for years–the proper term is “character actor”, obviously, but “Hey, it’s that guy!” or “Hey, it’s her!” works to convey the same idea. His work as a particularly nasty bad guy in CSI: Miami is a standout in my mind, but he’s always good when he turns up. A quick glance at his filmography reveals five different appearances on NYPDBlue, each time as someone different!

Actors like LaSardo tend to get lots of reliable work by being, well, not only good, but also professional and reliable. The linked article above, which I found on a simple Google search, is almost twenty years old, but LaSardo’s career does not seem to have slackened one bit since then.

(image credit)

::  Chicago Symphony Orchestra librarians know the score:

Shortly before each Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert is set to begin, someone discreetly walks onstage to place a score on the conductor’s music stand, then returns to retrieve it when that first piece is over — a process repeated for each selection on the program.

Those brief, easy-to-ignore trips across the stage are the only times that audiences get a glimpse at the three staff members who work in one of the CSO’s most important if little-known behind-the-scenes departments — its library.

Located one floor below the Orchestra Hall stage, this windowless space serves as a repository for the music the orchestra owns and a work space for three librarians.

Here’s a fascinating article about a little-known facet of professional orchestra operations: the library and its librarians. The music they’re playing–the actual physical music, consisting of the conductor’s score and the orchestral parts for all the musicians–comes from somewhere, after all!

::  30 fun facts about The Voyage of the Mimi.

In 1984, The Voyage of the Mimi debuted on PBS. The groundbreaking educational science series, part of the curriculum of many elementary and high school students (including this writer!), captivated kids throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, spawned a sequel, and kicked off Ben Affleck’s career.

If you’re my age, you may remember watching The Voyage of the Mimi, either in school or on PBS at some point. I’m honestly not sure when I first saw it, but it’s been on my radar for years, so I’m assuming it was in the 80s at some point. It’s a 13-episode series about a research expedition into the North Atlantic to study whales, aboard a ship called the Mimi. There’s a crusty sea captain, two research scientists, their graduate assistant (who is deaf), two teenagers, and the sea captain’s grandson, who was played by a young Ben Affleck, if you can believe that. The whole show is available to watch on YouTube, and it actually holds up pretty well, as period educational shows go. Each episode consists of fifteen minutes of story followed by a fifteen-minute mini-documentary that applies to that particular episode’s topic. I wish it was viewable in better resolution than YouTube’s max from eleven years ago.

Sadly, the Mimi herself fell on funding and ownership difficulties that led to her eventual scrapping (though she was a long-lived ship, originally built in the 1930s!), but I did get to see her once! We were on our honeymoon in May 1997 in Boston and New England, and we went one day on a whale-watching expedition that set out from Plymouth. On the way back in, the boat’s tour guide pointed out two ships anchored nearby: one was a replica of the Mayflower, and the other was none other than the Mimi. I wish I’d taken a picture, but this was in the days (there I go again) of film cameras and I don’t even think I took my camera with me on that trip. Alas!

There was a sequel series to Voyage of the Mimi that I don’t think I ever watched, and sadly, a proposed third series never managed to get funding. Anyway, I like to think that the characters from the show got together again for more adventurey science voyages in the future!

::  Finally, speaking of Tiktok, this particular creator has found an incredible pair of overalls. I’m actually envious of these! The Big Smith brand made a lot of funky-patterned overalls years ago, I’m assuming in the 1970s, and they do turn up on eBay and vintage shops now and again.

@mckailahanna I dont think youre ready for these bibs ✨ #cincodemayooutfit #cincodemayocelebration #cincodemayo2023 #cincodemayo2023 #vintageoveralls #bigsmithoveralls #bigsmith #bagguoftheday #conversehigh #summeroutfits2023 #size12summerfashion #bagguoutfit #vintagefinds #vintageetsy #midsizeoveralls #overallsoutfits @imogene + willie @Converse @BAGGU @Etsy ♬ original sound – McKaila Hanna

Wow!

That’s all for now. Keep on truckin’, folks! (Hoping to have a much-delayed Substack ready this weekend, too! I’m not nearly done with Rachmaninoff….)

 

 

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March on Teevee!

So, what did we watch in March?

::  We went to see Casablanca on the big screen, which makes it by definition the best thing we saw or watched in March. As Casablanca is my second-favorite movie of all time, the only way it could be bested for a month’s viewing is if we watched Star Wars in the same month, which we did not. I wrote about it on my Substack. (And I have got to stop letting so much time pass between viewings of this movie. It was about a year-and-a-half between viewings. Too long, man. Too long!)

::  Your Place Or Mine is a rom-com. Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon play best friends of twenty years who hooked up one time in college…and then settled into platonic bestie-status. They live on opposite sides of the country, and for the purposes of this plot, they agree to switch houses for a week. Then the movie has each become involved in the other’s life, and as the movie goes on, even though they spend the entire film apart, in the end they have to admit that they’re not platonic besties at all. It’s a diverting enough piece of fluff, but if you want the rom-com between two “lovers” who don’t actually show up in the same place until the very last scene, you’re better off with Sleepless in Seattle.

::  Then there’s R.I.P.D., which stands for “Rest In Peace Division”. I cannot lie: we watched this because it has Ryan Reynolds in it, and nothing with Reynolds is ever unwatchable, even if he has made the occasional not-so-great movie…like this one. Oh well, it happens. This movie coulda-woulda-shoulda been better! It’s not bad, but it has some cool ideas that sadly fall flat in the execution. Reynolds is a cop who is killed in the line of duty, but rather than go to the afterlife, he ends up with the Rest In Peace Division — R.I.P.D., get it?–where he teams up with Jeff Bridges, doing his best growly-angry version of The Dude, to track down dead souls who have gone on the run rather than report to their date with, well, the Bad Place. This is a riff of sorts on the Men In Black idea, with dead people instead of aliens, and with the talent on screen I kept thinking that it should be as good as M.I.B., and yet…it’s not. It’s not bad, exactly…but it’s not great, either. Frustrating, really.

::  I remember when Cameron Crowe’s movie Aloha came out, and it got roasted for being bad and uninteresting and also for whitewashing Hawaiian culture by casting white actress Emma Stone as a character who is “one-quarter Hawaiian”. Still, I wanted to see it anyway, because honestly, I’ve loved just about everything I’ve seen by Crowe. I mean, he’s given us Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous, all of which are terrific. I am even a fan of Elizabethtown, which is not a highly-regarded movie, and We Bought a Zoo, which isn’t exactly poorly-regarded but isn’t considered in the class of his earlier work, either. So, what about Aloha? Well…I didn’t hate it, but it never really clicks, either, and no, Stone is not terribly convincing as someone keyed in by blood to the concerns of the native Hawaiian population. I didn’t hate it, but it’s not a Crowe movie that I’ll be revisiting any time soon. It doesn’t even offer much by way of Hawaiian travelogue goodness. After the movie, it hit me that the most interesting couple in aren’t the leads (Stone and Bradley Cooper), but the secondary couple, the military couple fallen on marital struggle, played by John Krasinki and Rachel McAdams. It’s never a good sign when the writer-director doesn’t realize who the most interesting people in the movie are, is it?

::  Last Seen Alive is…well, let’s just say that it was the perfect movie to watch while armed with a pitcher of Rum Punch. (Have I posted about the Rum Punch yet? No? Huh….) Gerard Butler and Jaimie Alexander are a married couple who are about to “take a break”, after they visit her parents, when they stop at a truck-stop/convenience store for gas. She disappears, and he proceeds to set out to track her down. If you ever want to watch a movie where the hero makes exactly the wrong decision at nearly every juncture along the way, this is it. Also, if you want to watch a guy sweat, watch Butler in this movie, because he sweats a lot. As Carla from Cheers once quipped when Norm said that he’s been known to sweat a bit, “We could grow rice!” It’s a taut thriller, sure–so taut that the movie doesn’t really take time to make me, you know, care about the characters. Three glasses of Rum Punch really helped this goofy movie go down.

Teevee thoughts:

Actually, not a whole lot! We’re still watching the same shows, really. Next Level Chef is still grinding along, and it’s a fun watch, even with its somewhat strange concept. (Why, I continue to wonder, are all the contestants made to dress the same? I don’t get this.) We also started a cooking show on Netflix called Snack Versus Chef, in which chef contestants are tasked with recreating junk-food snack items like Oreos, Lays Chips, and so on. Kind of fun, though it usually leaves me with the munchies.

We also started watching Wednesday, of which I will only say for now that we’re really enjoying. We watched the first episode as a family, and then The Wife and I continued watching, all the way up to the finale…when The Daughter saw us getting ready to watch that very finale and said, “Awwww, I wanted to watch that show with you!” We’re like, “Sheesh, it’s not like we binged it!” We took two to three weeks to get to the finale, and there are only like 8 or 9 episodes…but as of now, we’re rewatching it with her. And honestly? Watching stuff as a family on occasion is still a delight.

What are you all watching these days?

 

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“We’re using time-honored skills to preserve history.”

So, what is noted master furniture restorer and upholsterer Sonnaz Nooranvary so cheerful about? Clearly, it’s the latest issue of my newsletter, in which I write about one of my favorite teevee shows ever (and one that features Ms. Nooranvary), The Repair Shop. Check it out and subscribe! Tell your friends and your neighbors and your coworkers and that sleep-deprived barista who nevertheless gets your coffee order right more often than not!

(No, Ms. Nooranvary isn’t cheering anything I did, that’s just a screencap from an episode of The Repair Shop. But I’ll bet she would cheer it, if she had any idea who I was!)

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Viewing Diary: February

Here are some random notes and thoughts on things we watched in February:

Teevee:

If you’re not watching Abbott Elementary, I really don’t know what you’re doing with your life. I was getting kind of tired of the whole “workplace documentary” sitcom subgenre that The Office blew up, spawning a dozen imitators, but the characters in Abbott Elementary are just so fun and compelling that all the usual “workplace documentary” stuff–the knowing glances at the camera, the “stealth shots” of characters’ hidden reactions to things other people are saying or doing–don’t feel at all forced. If you’re unfamiliar, Abbott Elementary takes place in an inner city elementary school in Philadelphia, where talented and well-meaning teachers work with too little resources and too little money to teach their overstuffed classrooms. Yes, there is a slow-burn romance subplot a la Jim-and-Pam from The Office, and yes, the boss figure, Principal Ava Coleman, is portrayed in the grand Michael Scott tradition as an often-inept obstacle that the teachers have to overcome. But where The Office would occasionally try to portray Michael as a guy who was actually a much better boss than he was usually depicted (and as many funny moments as there were with Michael Scott, this was not an angle the show was terribly successful), Principal Coleman actually does have more than a few moments where you see that she’s good at her job–or really would be if she was actually invested in it.

::  Our other sitcom candy of the moment is Home Economics, a show about three siblings and their families. The original notion is that the three siblings are all at different levels of financial success: the millionaire techbro, the middle-class brother who is a writer, and the social-worker sister who is in a constant financial struggle. Now in its third season all of those lines have been blurred a bit and the show is mainly about the quirky goings-on of this family with all their extended things going on, but it’s a fun and mostly positive show where nobody is unlikeable. Honestly, that goes a long way. (I think the show may have ended for the season! Apparently it had a 13-episode order, which does not leave me terribly optimistic for a fourth season.)

::  Then there’s American Auto, another mockumentary workplace sitcom that somehow works despite everybody being fairly unlikeable. This show is a strange case. It focuses on the upper management team of a car maker company. I suppose the pleasure here is mostly on watching upper management look like a bunch of rubes on a regular basis. The second season is unfolding now, and it’s full of a lot of madcap antics that don’t portray American management in too flattering of a light. The show does have a kind-of slow-burn romance subplot going on, but so far it’s really a slow burn, and I do find the show entertaining in its skewering way. It was created by the guy who previously created Superstore, which was also a terrific workplace comedy, so all of this tracks. Plus, alumni of Superstore show up on American Auto regularly.

::  The latest season of Hell’s Kitchen wrapped up recently, and wow, has that show become a robotic paint-by-numbers exercise. We’re watching more out of habit now than anything else. Gordon Ramsay is always fun to watch, but the challenges are almost always the same, and the punishments are just goofy (“All of our peppercorns are being delivered today, but they screwed up and mixed them all together, so you have to manually separate the black peppercorns from the white peppercorns!”), and honestly, at this point I’m not sure how much shelf life Hell’s Kitchen still has, if it doesn’t do something to mix itself up a bit. Twenty-one seasons in, watching new cooks screw up the scallops and the Beef Wellington isn’t nearly as interesting as it used to be…and with every individual cooking challenge being a 45-minute cook, watching every dish served be a “protein on top of a root vegetable puree” isn’t all that exciting, either. (But yes, we’ll watch Season 22. It’s a show that can be on in the background while I read.)

::  Then there was Pressure Cooker, a cooking competition show that actually added a Survivor/Big Brother wrinkle. A bunch of chefs are brought to live in a house that’s outfitted with a killer kitchen, and they are submitted to cooking challenges that result in elimination challenges. So in addition to cooking, this show adds the subterfuge and “alliance forming” that informs the Survivor genres. One particular chef, a young woman named Jeana, was depicted as one of the bigger “villains” in the show, as she did a lot of scheming and at one point her strategizing and, well, outright lying managed to get one of the strongest competitors eliminated. Now, I know that this woman is the villain and we’re not supposed to like her, but I don’t know…there was just something about her….

I dunno, it’s a mystery.

::  Next Level Chef has started a second season. It’s a strange concept: the set is three kitchens, stacked on top of one another, with the top level being a state-of-the-art kitchen with the very best stuff, the middle being a standard commercial kitchen that’s decent but not as good as the top level, and the basement being where old equipment, pans with loose handles, uncalibrated gas burners, and the like reside. There are three teams of cooks, and based on the results each week the teams are slotted into one of the kitchens, and each week someone is eliminated. It’s a fun concept, though the “basement level” is still good enough that we don’t really see those cooks struggle all that much. I was thinking in terms of the sabotages from Cutthroat Kitchen here, but no dice. I like the show mainly because it has a relatively fresh concept, unlike Hell’s Kitchen which is honestly just pure formula at this point.

Finally: Andor is the latest Star Wars show on DisneyPlus. I was looking forward to it after a whole bunch of people opined that it’s the best Star Wars show yet and it might even be one of the best pieces of Star Wars filmed entertainment of all, including all of the movies. So imagine my shock when I found myself bored and unengaged with the characters, to the point that my enthusiasm petered out completely and we stopped watching it after the 8th episode. (There are 12.) Andor tells the backstory of Rebel spy Cassian Andor, who was one of the leads in Rogue One. In so doing, we also get a lot of background on the earliest days of the Rebel Alliance and some citizen’s-eye-view of life under the Galactic Empire. The show is crafted as a political thriller with some heist action along the way, but the pacing was incredibly slow for me to the point of tedium, and the characters were nearly impossible for me to connect with. Andor didn’t work for me at all, being too disjointed and having too many concurrent subplots for me to invest fully in any of them. (After giving up, I learned that there’s a post-credits scene on the last episode, so I tracked it down and watched it…and it turns out that when Andor is sent to an Imperial prison-labor planet, the electronic parts he and others are forced to make are components for the super-laser for the still-under-construction Death Star. My eyes rolled at this revelation, if I’m being honest; at this point I am so tired of everything in Star Wars being tied back to the same story.)

Movies:

::  The Age of Adaline is a deeply affecting fantasy about a woman who was born in 1908 and who, when she is 29 years old, is in an accident that arrests her body’s natural aging process, basically making her forever 29. The events of the the film unfold in the present day, when Adaline’s daughter–born before Adaline’s husband’s death in 1937, just ten months before the accident–is an old woman herself, and Adaline is getting ready to push the “reset” button on her life yet again, something that became necessary when she realized people were starting to ask questions about the woman who never seems to get older. Over the course of the movie Adaline meets a man who somehow manages to slip through the defense mechanisms she’s set up for herself over the years, and then more complications develop when the new guy’s past intersects Adaline’s past in ways she couldn’t have seen coming. The story is like a kind-of Back to the Future in reverse, and it’s a beautifully made film, wonderfully shot and acted with Blake Lively in the lead as Adaline and a frankly amazing supporting role played by Harrison Ford.

::  Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t a movie that interested me in the slightest when I learned they were making it. I was never a fan of the original movie, which I found to be really predictable and kind of boring, as great as the fighter-pilot flying sequences were in that picture. I never really cared about the characters in that movie, so I wasn’t going to watch this new one…except that the buzz on it has been exceptionally strong, and curiosity got the better of me. Wouldn’t you know it: the new one is a terrific movie, that somehow makes Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” character somebody I can actually relate to, and he’s surrounded by interesting characters of their own, as well. The movie’s story is every bit as predictable as the first film, but a story’s strength does not always lie in its surprises and its twists and turns. I enjoyed this movie immensely. (For The Wife, Tom Cruise’s perfectly brown hair without a hint of salt-and-pepper was a point of contention. I’m not sure why that particular item was what tripped off her Plausibility Meter, but there it is.)

::  Like Father is an insightful story about a young woman and her troubled reconnection with her estranged father…trapped inside a dumb sitcom. The bad parts are a shame, because they drag down the good parts; but the good parts are good enough to lift the bad parts, so much so that I’m not sure where I even come down on this movie. Kristen Bell plays a young professional who is so work-obsessed that she is late to walk down the aisle at her own wedding because she took a work call as she was waiting outside the venue. This enrages her fiance, who leaves her on the altar when her phone falls out of her bouquet (because, in the movie’s first sitcom moment, she realizes she has no place to put her phone so she stuffs it down in the bouquet). As she stands on the altar not even sure what’s just happened, she recognizes her estranged father (Kelsey Grammer), whom she has not seen in years, ducking out the back. Tracking him down, they go out and get ripping drunk to the point that they don’t even remember getting on the cruise ship that was already booked for her honeymoon; thus, trapped together for the length of the cruise, they start to wear each other down and figure out where they stand, where they went wrong, and where they can go from here.

Like I said, there’s a lot of good stuff in here, mostly when the two of them put aside all the shenanigans that the movie forces upon them and just talk. When the conversation finally comes as to just why it is that now, of all times, Dad has re-emerged into the picture, it’s a welcome scene indeed and Bell and Grammer do it justice. In fact, they both sell the idea of their relationship very well, even through obnoxious stuff like their participation in the cruise ship’s lip-sync contest or other episodes that are pure sitcom. We’re talking Three’s Company-level stuff here, folks. It’s a maddening movie, honestly, because there’s enough of a really good relationship study here to make me wonder throughout, “Then why are we watching all this other goofy shit for?”

::  Finally, I randomly found Foul Play on YouTube (right here, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see it gone for copyright violation at some point). This is a movie I saw as a kid when it came out, featuring Goldie Hawn as the adorkable librarian who finds herself in the middle of some kind of criminal conspiracy that keeps ending up with dead bodies in her presence…but when she goes to notify someone about the dead bodies, the bad guys have whisked them away. It’s the classic “Normal person caught in a conspiracy but nobody believes her” story, until a cop played by Chevy Chase comes along and starts to think that maybe she has stumbled on to something. Which she has: a plot to assassinate the Pope. It’s kind of a love letter to the kind of Hitchcockian screwball mystery flick, and it still holds up pretty well. Chase is especially noteworthy here because he actually gives a performance; aside from exactly two pratfalls, none of his SNL antics are on display here, and he’s nowhere near the full-on gonzo work he’d later do for the Vacation movies and whatever else he did. Chase has had a long and productive career, even with his reputation for being enormously difficult to work with, so I guess he’s done fine, but it’s interesting to look at Foul Play and wonder what he might have done if he’d followed this line of work instead of creating Clark Griswold.

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Recent Watching….

I’ve drifted away from tracking things we’ve watched in recent years here, so I’m going to start getting back to it.

Teevee:

Kaleidoscope (Netflix): This is a heist show that tells a pretty standard heist story: a guy wants to rob another guy, but stealing his stuff is going to be very difficult, so he puts together a crew to help him. The crew consists of career criminals each with a different skill set, and they all have trust issues. All that, and there’s backstory between the main thief and the planned victim. It’s all pretty standard, as heist stories go, but the twist here is that the show is designed for the episodes to be literally watched in any order. This works kinda OK. The show is slick and well-made, with terrific acting, but once you get past the “shuffle it up!” nature of the story, you see that when taken from point A to point B, it’s a completely standard heist story.

Andor (Disney+): As I write this we’re only up to the 7th episode, and there are 12 overall. Many folks have told me how incredibly well-written this show is, and there’s some of that, but so far I’m finding the pacing really off. The first few episodes are basically a three-hour slow burn and it’s hard to get terribly interested in the characters. Things do improve by around the fourth or fifth episode, but “best Star Wars writing yet”? I’m not seeing it yet. Maybe the last five episodes get there, though.

Hell’s Kitchen (FOX): As of this writing, the show is down to probably the last three or four episodes of the season. At this point it’s pretty much something to put on the teevee. I’m glad that it airs Thursdays, which makes it a perfect brainless watch on Hulu on Friday night. After this many seasons the show is just paint-by-numbers with a new group of chefs each year; there has been no significant change to the show’s formula in years, and not even dumping nasty stuff on the chef’s heads makes the “Blind Taste Test” interesting at this point.

Blown Away (Netflix): This was Season Three of Netflix’s competition show about glass blowing. And yes, it’s a delight to watch, because it’s shot beautifully in a giant glass hot-shop in Hamilton, ON; there’s none of that personality-clash, alliance-building crap that is so often the rule in “One goes home each week” competition shows; and the episodes are only about half an hour long. There’s a lot to learn here about glass-blowing, and it’s joyous to watch artists doing art. (Watching the first two seasons partially informed our visit last year to the Corning Museum of Glass, a residency at which is part of this show’s prize for the final winner.)

Movies:

Glass Onion: This sequel to Knives Out isn’t actually a sequel at all; it’s simply another mystery story featuring the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc as he unknots a crime that’s been committed by one from a number of narcissistic rich people. Glass Onion doesn’t follow the Knives Out formula much at all, and it looks very different from the first film, which is encouraging; writer-director Rian Johnson isn’t just ticking off the boxes as he makes these. Lots of fun.

The Gentlemen: Adventures in the London underworld, told by unreliable narrators and involving people none of whom seems to have the slightest expectation of longevity. Marijuana cultivation and smuggling, blackmail, and double-crossing give way to violence and murder, much of it committed by criminals who aren’t always the most competent batch out there. It’s an entertaining movie, and it actually gets really good about halfway through, when the viewer realizes that the story is too complicated and is being told to us by people who may be lying, so it’s best to sit back and enjoy the blood-soaked ride.

The Pale Blue Eye: I really enjoyed this and it’s an utterly beautiful film, a murder mystery set at West Point and the Hudson Rivel Valley in the early 1800s; one of our heroes is a young West Point cadet named Edgar Allan Poe, who assists a detective (Christian Bale) in tracking down whoever is brutally murdering cadets. The movie gets its atmosphere completely right, including tavern scenes wherein a movie finally manages to convey how dark a place really gets when it’s lit by candlelight alone. The film suffers in its last act; there aren’t enough characters to make the mystery’s solution a satisfying surprise, and then there’s the fact that the mystery is apparently resolved while 25 minutes of runtime remains, so…well, if you’re an experienced viewer of these kinds of stories, you know what that means.

Hugo: This filmed adaptation of Brian Selznick’s wonderful book The Invention of Hugo Cabret–which I have only recently read, after having owned it for years–is one of the most delightful things I’ve ever seen. The book is a delightful blend of novel and graphic novel, and the story blends an almost steampunk-ish initial story in which a young boy is living in the secret tunnels of Paris’s biggest train station in 1918 or so, secretly tending to the station’s many clocks and trying to complete the repairs he and his father began on an “automaton”, a steel clockwork figure in the shape of a man with a pen, before the story eventually shifts to being a love letter to early cinema. Martin Scorsese directed this film, and every second of it is a delight, between the main story, the wonderful characters in the periphery, and the entire world the film inhabits–and that’s before you even get to the “love letter to early cinema” part, which is where Scorsese really shines. Though the film was nominated for many awards, it was apparently a flop in 2011 when it came out; why word-of-mouth didn’t propel this movie to being a hit, I’ll never know. I’m very happy we watched this.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: One of the things I’ve always admired about Love Actually is that a few of its characters are assholes, and the movie doesn’t shy away from looking at what happens when assholes get involved in a love story. This Woody Allen movie takes that concept all the way: it’s basically Love Actually but entirely about assholes. It’s oddly amusing and even entertaining, but everybody in it is a huge asshole.

Stay the Night: Oooooh, I loved this movie. Sheila O’Malley recommended it last year, and as her recommendations are almost always good enough for me, I watched in on that basis alone. It’s similar to Before Sunrise in that it unites a young man and a young woman for one single night in one city, and it lets us follow their emotional gamut for just that one single night. In this case the young woman is a professional who has just been passed over for promotion, and the young man is a hockey player who is being sent down to the minors. They’re both reeling and wounded when they meet each other in downtown Toronto, and they roam about the city (I always love how movies in this mini-genre make cities look so magical) sharing more and more about their lives, before the morning brings them to their required parting. Do they ever get back together? Who knows? That’s not the point.

What have you been watching of late?

 

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Friday Night: Three hours to DALLAS!

For no real reason other than I need a blog post (and I’m waiting for The Wife to get ready so we can go out to dinner), here’s a memorable clip from the finale of the sixth season of Dallas.

When I was a kid, I loved Dallas. That show was golden–at least for several seasons; later on it started getting a bit cornier and even slapsticky (there was even an episode where JR got hit with a pie!). Early on, though, it was a blast, even if I think the delightful portrayal of someone as awful as JR on a huge hit show helped pave the way for where we are today.

Anyway, in this clip, JR’s plan to get even with Cliff Barnes has almost come to fruition. What happened was this: Cliff was blackmailing JR’s secretary for inside info that allowed him to beat JR to the punch on several deals. JR found out and rather than firing the secretary, used her to feed him information that he wanted. JR manipulated Cliff into overextending his company to purchase offshore drilling leases, and then JR continued to manipulate things so Cliff’s company, Barnes-Wentworth, was nearly beankrupt*. Cliff went to a shady banker for last-minute capital, a guy named Vaughn Leland, but guess what! JR was behind that, too! Adding to injury, JR paid off Cliff’s drilling crew in the Gulf of Mexico to pretend to drill but never actually strike oil, so now Cliff’s time is running out.

That’s where this scene happens, and it’s really a well-done scene, with Larry Hagman delivering some of his best work as the sociopathic oil millionaire. Hagman and Ken Kercheval, who played Cliff, always bounced off each other so very well! Anyway, this scene is a perfect illustration of 80s soap-opera villainy.

Oh, what happened after this? Well, in this episode a whole lot of people are established as having reason to hate hate HATE JR, and in the end an unseen person with a gun goes to Ewing Oil and fires three bullets into JR’s chair…but it’s Bobby who falls to the floor, fate unknown. Oh NO! (It would turn out to be Bobby’s spurned would-be lover, Katherine Wentworth, who shot Bobby, and she meant to kill him all along; JR was never her target. As for Cliff’s company, a scene a few minutes after this one has Vaughn Leland returning to Barnes-Wentworth to foreclose, but not before the new foreman Cliff hired, in a Hail-Mary attempt to strike oil in the Gulf earlier in the episode, calls with the news that he has indeed struck oil. When the next season started, Cliff was rolling in money.

* Obviously a typo that should be “bankrupt”, but I’m leaving it in because “beankrupt” amuses me. It’s like a fictional German word.

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The algorithms are scaring me now

By now I’m sure we’ve all had the weirdly unsettling experience that goes something like this:

I was talking to a friend about how to best slice tomatoes, and nobody else was in the room, and then the next day my Facebook feed kept showing me ads for mandolin slicers and tomato-slicing gadgets and kitchen cutlery! It’s SCARY, man!

I’ve kind of gotten used to this, to be honest. I find advertising an irritant and nothing more; I generally pay no attention to it. What’s a little frustrating is how often I’ll see a whole bunch of ads for a thing or a category of things–after I’ve already bought the one example of such a thing that I needed! Buy a new vacuum cleaner? Why then, here are a bunch of ads for vacuum cleaners! But…I don’t need another one, so why am I seeing all these ads?

But then these algorithms can get a bit too granular in their serving up content to satisfy very particular tastes. My mother has been out of town, so I’ve been hanging out at night with my father, and I’ve already noted that there’s been a lot of prime-time The Price is Right on lately, so I’ve seen more TPIR in the last couple weeks than I had probably in the last ten years.

Yesterday I visited YouTube just to kill time by checking out some videos, and YouTube suggested several TPIR clips, probably because I searched for a couple on the post from a few days ago. Leading the pack was this clip, likely from the early 80s, in which a young woman who looks a lot like actress Elisabeth Shue from The Karate Kid (if you were a straight dude in the 80s you crushed on her in that movie, it’s just a thing you did, like playing Pac-Man) plays for a car. And she’s wearing purple overalls.

Yeah, sometimes these algorithms get it right to an eerie degree.

I wonder if Konnie is still out there somewhere…she’d probably be in her early 60s by now, if I’ve timed this right.

(BTW, I noted that I spent a bit of Friday morning taking The Wife to a local hospital for an in-and-out procedure. When I picked her up I had to wait in the surgical waiting room for fifteen minutes or so. I walked in and plunked myself down in the nearest seat that wasn’t clustered by other people, and then I noticed that everyone else was looking in my direction. Weird…until I realized that they weren’t looking at me at all, they were watching the teevee that was hanging above my head. And on the teevee at that point? You guessed it. The Price is Right.)

 

 

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50 years of coming on down….

Apparently The Price is Right is 50 years old, which kind of blows my mind. I don’t know why, since it was my favorite game show as a kid* and I’m 50 years old. I’ve seen a few episodes of the show recently, thanks to the prime-time incarnation of the venerable game show, and…well, the show is what it’s always been, with a few updates here and there. TPIR has this really interesting blend of retro and modern going on these days. The set has dialed up the garish colors, but the 70s-era snowflake logo things still abounds. Anyway, some random observations:

::  Drew Carey is a pretty good host. He’s no Bob Barker, but then, who is? Carey has at some point eschewed his old short-haired look for a longer mane and a beard that makes him kind of look like a more cheerful version of Jeff Bridges from The Big Lebowski.

::  There’s a male model now! That’s pretty cool.

::  Who pays for this stuff? The prizes are WAY better now than they used to be! Everybody gets to play for something cool. I remember contestants winning their way onto the stage and then having to pretend to be excited for a new waterbed and a set of golf clubs. Even the items up for bids are nicer than some main prizes used to be.

::  I know it’s beloved, but Plinko sucks. There, I said it.

::  I love that the Rangefinder game is not only still around but apparently has never once been upgraded.

::  They still play “Cliffhanger”! That’s the one with the climber who yodels his way up the mountain in accordance with your ability to price the box of corn flakes or whatever. I always liked that one.

::  Some guy won a trip to Hawaii. Eff that guy.

::  The Family Guy really nailed what continues to be my reaction to contestants who up-bid the last bidder by a dollar:

::  I haven’t seen it yet in any of the episodes I’ve seen, but the “Clock Game” was always some really intense shit.

::  What’s the worst game? I’m already on record as disliking Plinko, but I just watched some dude “win” $6 playing “Any Number”. That sucked. I’d forgotten that game until I saw that happen. (You’re playing for a car, something way less nice than a car, and then the “piggy bank”. All the digits from 0 to 9 appear in the prices once; you just call out numbers and whichever item you fill in first is what you win.)

Finally–and yes, this post is just some stuff I’m writing to keep my “Days Posted” streak alive–here’s one of my favorite TPIR games of all time. The contestant in this clip has zero idea what she’s doing, she’s doomed, there’s no way she’s going to win…and then….

*If my mother ever tells you I used to use the turkey baster as a microphone and pretend I was Bob Barker, don’t believe her. That never happened. Well, maybe one time. Or two. You know, I don’t get why that pissed her off so much, it’s not like we were regularly roasting turkeys that needed basting!

 

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Figure out a new funny.

 For years, Ken Levine has done a “summation” post of the annual Oscar telecast, full of pithy humor. I don’t normally do much more than skim these over, because I don’t watch the Oscars and therefore I never have the full context for what Levine is making fun of, and in all honesty, I occasionally find Levine’s sense of humor a bit mean-spirited.

Well, yesterday he wrote a surprisingly whiny post announcing that he’s not doing the Oscar posts anymore, and not for the obvious reason (this year’s telecast is likely to be a colossally unentertaining train wreck), but because of…sigh…he doesn’t want to run afoul of “cancel culture” or “the woke crowd”.

But the major reason is the current woke culture.  God forbid I offend anybody.  What good is being snarky if you’re not allowed to criticize?  And it goes beyond possibly being insensitive.  Now you’re branded as a racist.

In the privacy of our homes, part of the attraction of watching the Oscars (and especially at Oscar parties) is taking shots at the horrible gowns and stupid tuxedos and ridiculous hairdos.  What makes them so funny is how those offenders thought they were looking so glamorous and elegant.  Bringing down people who take themselves too seriously is a comedy staple.   And you may not be proud of yourself for making fun of these entitled people, but you do. 


However, if I say one despairing thing about Viola Davis’ dress I’m loudly pegged a racist.  If Penelope Cruz mangles her turn announcing the nominees and I point it out, I’m a racist.   If I’m happy for a deserving winner who happens to be white I’m a racist.

I find this incredibly disappointing, and it’s really tiresome hearing from comedians who are upset that they apparently have no avenue to being funny other than by offending somebody. Maybe a Black actor is wearing a dress inspired by traditional African tribal wear; maybe Cruz has a speech impediment. I don’t know, and maybe it’s occasionally unfair if someone takes your funmaking moment that’s directed at someone and interprets as not being motivated simply by a desire to be funny. But then, maybe your little joke actually is rooted in a preconceived notion, a prejudice, and maybe we should be a bit more intellectually curious about that. In short, I have become very weary of white people who whine about “the race card” getting played.

And to be honest, elevating “Hahaha, look at what someone decided to wear!” isn’t punching up. It’s just making fun of someone’s looks, whether they’re rich or poor or whatever, and I suppose it’s up to the person laughing to decide if it’s even “comedy”. It frankly isn’t to me. It’s why the least appealing part of Joan Rivers’s career was her “make fun of the people on the Oscar carpet” phase.

Levine wraps up thusly, though, which just made my jaw drop:

It’s a shame because comedy suffers.  And as a society we need comedy.  Now more than ever.  But if those who provide it have to walk on eggshells, then what’s the point?  

Yet another comedy writer or comedian complaining that comedy is all hard, now! It’s so hard! But we need comedy! I’m providing a desperately needed service in dark and gloomy times, but you’re all being mean to me for it!

Well, look. I grant the premise that we need to laugh and we need comedy. Absolutely. But…do we really need this particular kind of mean-spirited comedy that’s not so much motivated by finding the funny things in life but by primarily making fun of specific people? Levine sounds like everybody else who I ever hear complaining about “Everybody’s offended now!” When I hear people talking about this, I like to ask: “Just what specifically do you feel you can’t get away with saying now?” The hemming and hawing starts immediately, because no matter how hard I press, they’re never going to admit that they really want to be able to tell mean and sadistic jokes about n*gg*rs or k*kes or sp*cs or f*gg*ts or whatever. But that’s what it almost always boils down to, in my experience.

Maybe not for Levine specifically, but as I look around at a world where certain things are not really seen as viable sources for comedy, I’m not seeing comedy itself suffer as a whole. There’s funny stuff out there a-plenty. The last ten years have seen shows like Brooklyn Nine Nine and The Unicorn and Kim’s Convenience, all of which are funny without resorting (much) to potentially offensive minefields. (B99 has come in for some criticism for its treatment of asexual/aromatic people). Christopher Moore and other humorists are still writing books. Daily comic strips still generate humor; the venerable Nancy has been rejuvenated of late by a new writer/artist, and no “offensive” content is needed.

What’s more–and this is what’s really bugging me about Levine’s rant–is that comedy has not always needed to rely heavily on the kind of material that’s now seen as unfunny or outright offensive, and Levine of all people should know this. He’s been writing comedy for years! He wrote episodes of M*A*S*H, for God’s sake, and that show was on almost fifty years ago. The idea that comedy is somehow being hobbled today by “the woke crowd” simply doesn’t hold up when one considers just how much older comedy is still funny and didn’t need to do any of the eggshell-walking stuff to be funny.

Recently The Wife was on bed rest following a medical procedure (she’s fine!), and one thing she did to pass the time, during which I joined her a bit, is watch a lot of old episodes of Bewitched. That show holds up as being pretty damned funny, even if its sense of humor is dated by being a sixty-year-old show. Some jokes fall flat because we’ve moved on in a lot of ways, but the show really does hold up. A lot of M*A*S*H still holds up. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was airing fifty years ago and a ton of that material is still hysterical, and not much of it at all needed to lean on anything that might get ‘canceled’ now to get laughs. The “Reverend Jim takes his driving test” scene from Taxi? Forty years old, and funny. The “Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton figure out golf” scene from The Honeymooners? Still funny, and nothing to be canceled here (unless it’s Ralph’s absurd pseudo-Scottish outfit). We also watched an older George Carlin HBO special, one from the late 1980s (Carlin wore a light blue shirt, which tells you something since he spent his last several decades only wearing black), and it was still hysterical, despite a few jokes that didn’t age well.

Of course there’s a lot of comedy that has not withstood the test of time; I never see Sam Kinison or Andrew Dice Clay mentioned much these days when the subject of older comedy that’s still funny comes up. I never found either of those two amusing, even when they were popular and using their shock value to generate nervous laughter. My point isn’t that everything stays funny, but that shifting mores and evolving societal choices don’t neuter all old comedy, which would have to be the case if we really were making comedy so much more difficult now.

There’s plenty of stuff that’s making me laugh, so what am I to make of the idea that comedy is somehow in handcuffs now, that it’s so hard to be funny without offending? Frankly, not much, because I’m too busy laughing. And sure, maybe I’m not a great test subject–I’m one who is still amused by a pie in the face, after all–but the material that makes me laugh exists, so I can’t be the only one. It’s not comedy that’s suffering, it seems to me; it’s people who want to make people laugh a certain way and are discovering that people don’t want to be made to laugh that way anymore. And how surprising is that, really? An awful lot of people probably never found that stuff funny, and if amplifying their voices means some jokes don’t get told, well, that’s a trade I’m willing to make.

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“Can you tell me how to get to Mandalore?” “This is the way.”

 A couple weeks ago, we finished watching Season Two of The Mandalorian, so here are my thoughts on the show, including thoughts on Season One. None of this is in any particular order. In fact, it’s pretty damned random, because that’s how I blog. This is the way.

(Note: I know that his name is actually “Din Djarin”, but I’m going to refer to him as either “The Mandalorian” or “Mando”, as he is dubbed by the Carl Weathers character.)

ITEM the ZEROTH: OK, before I begin talking specifically about The Mandalorian, I have to once again complain about how lax the Internet is with spoilers. Many are careful, but it seems to me that most are not, and even if the ones who are not do not actually constitute a majority, there are enough of them out there that it really doesn’t matter. We did not watch The Mandalorian as it unfolded; we waited until the seasons were complete to enjoy them. This, of course, meant that nearly every major development was spoiled for us.

When the era of streaming shows began, the original Netflix-led model was to make the entire show and then put all the episodes online at once, so you could watch the entire series in a weekend if you wanted to. Now, the streaming services seem to be leaning more toward an adaptation of the original broadcast model, in which one episode is dropped a week for however many weeks it takes to get the entire thing out there. That’s how The Mandalorian worked, with the result that within a day or two of each episode appearing online, the major events would be spoiled. And brazenly so! I’m not talking about people posting “WHOA!!! Did you SEE what happened on MANDALORIAN tonite!!!” and then discussing in the threads. No, they would post the spoiler right in the text so you had no chance to avoid it…or they’d post “SPOILERS!” but then also attach a screenshot from the show that had the spoiler right in it.

Disney very clearly structured the marketing of The Mandalorian, before Season One, to keep the appearance of Grogu (then dubbed by fandom “Baby Yoda”) a surprise at the end of Episode One. That surprise lasted, I think, mere hours. I knew about “Baby Yoda” before noon of the very next day, and this went on for every major development in the show, over both seasons, right up to the appearance of Luke Skywalker.

I don’t know that there’s a solution to this, but it is most definitely an irritating aspect of 21st century fandom and geek culture. I’m not super-militant about maintaining my spoiler-virginity on everything I watch, but I would like the choice there to be mine.

On to actual stuff from the show:

ITEM THE FIRST: It’s cool how this show has easily added its catchphrase, “This is the way”, to the Star Wars lexicon. A lot of Star Wars teminology eventually does so, starting with “May the Force be with you!” being on everybody’s lips way back in 1977, and leading up to Prequel terms like padawan and youngling showing up in general conversation. Now we have “This is the way”. I also liked [character]’s habit of finishing his thoughts with “I have spoken!”. This one hasn’t caught on as well, but I like it and I try to use it from time to time.

This is a good thing for writers of sci-fi and fantasy to do, I think. People have things that they say repeatedly, out of ritual or habit, and I like it when writers of such material create such–is there a word for what I’m talking about?–slogans. George RR Martin is really good at this in A Song of Ice and Fire, as an example.

Having Mandalorians salute each other with “This is the way” is a really cool way of establishing their insular, internal culture.

ITEM THE SECOND: It’s something of an article of faith that Star Wars, at least at first in A New Hope, was essentially a Western translated into a space opera. I’ve never quite bought into this notion. It seems to me less that Star Wars was a space Western than Star Wars used older tropes that many Westerns use as well. Star Wars‘s influences do include Westerns, but they also include the films of Akira Kurasawa, many of which also share tropes with Westerns without actually being Westerns. This show, more than any other of the Star Wars projects of the post-George Lucas era, put those tropes on display. You have the lone hero who lives his lonely life going from place to place, you have the dusty frontier outposts, you have the minor chieftains or warlords or outlaws who are ruling their little regions.

But again, I wouldn’t say that The Mandalorian is a Western. I’d say that it shares a similar feel, with all those tropes. The closest analogue is the great Japanese manga Lone Wolf and Cub, which has a lone Samurai warrior traveling throughout old Japan, as he cares for his infant companion.

ITEM THE THIRD: In all honesty, I was never a big Boba Fett fan (more on him below). That said, it’s interesting to finally get some of the backstory about the Mandalorian warriors. Our hero’s commitment to his order’s rules and laws gives him plenty of opportunity for internal conflict as he negotiates a deeply dangerous universe.

ITEM THE FOURTH: This story is set in the years after Return of the Jedi, when the Empire has fallen but the New Republic is still trying to gather its strength. This is a largely unexplored part of Star Wars lore. I liked seeing pockets of remaining Imperial strength, as surely much of the old infrastructure will keep on functioning, even in the absence of the Emperor. Factions will be jockeying for power, which is definitely something we see in this show. The show’s structure dealt with this better in Season One, I think, as it showed our hero and baby Grogu moving into and out of these stories that are still going on.

But in Season Two, we start off with thrilling episodic adventures that take us from one world to another as Mando and baby Grogu have interesting adventures. This part of the series felt like the old Marvel Star Wars comics, the ones that were the first-ever tales told in the Star Wars universe beyond the scope of any movie. At that time, there was only one movie and just the barest beginnings of all the mythology that would unfold over the next four-and-a-half decades of Star Wars storytelling, so you had tales that had Han and Chewie going to a dusty backwater world for a Magnificent Seven type of adventure (and that was way more of a “space Western” than A New Hope ever was!), and then Luke and company had an adventure in a little local war on a planet that was nothing but oceans, and then there was some intrigue on a space casino…well, you get the point. Back then, the only Star Wars storytelling in town was a sequence of fun space adventures. In its best episodes, for me, The Mandalorian hearkened back to that feel.

Toward the end of Season One, our hero and his young charge run afoul of an Imperial official and his still-loyal soldiers who are looking for young Grogu (who hasn’t been named yet, by this point), and the first season ended with a bit of a cliffhanger that made clear that our Imperial official, Moff Gideon, was going to be a continued problem. And that was pretty cool, as it’s still interesting that all the Big! Grand! Events! that have redefined Galactic history elsewhere (Vader killing Palpatine, the Rebels defeating the Empire) really haven’t had that great an effect in the Outer Rim. Still, my hope was that all the Empire-versus-New Republic stuff would be kept firmly in the background.

Sadly, about halfway through Season Two, the tone shifts completely, away from the cool adventures and into Bigger Mythology, which is when I started to lose a bit of my enthusiasm. Mando learns that Grogu is clearly a powerful being, and that he can only be safe with a member of a race of wizards called “Jedi”, who were apparently a major enemy of the Mandalorians at one point. This quest, for Mando to deliver Grogu to “his people” (not necessarily his species, which has still never been named!), forms the backbone of the second season: Moff Gideon is still searching for Grogu for his own purposes, while Mando is trying to get him to the Jedi. As this story takes over, we’re squarely back in Empire-versus-Jedi again, albeit looking in from the outside.

Structurally, this quest takes on a repetitive note: someone tells Mando that they’ve heard of a Jedi or something Jedi-like on some planet; he goes to that planet and finds what he can find, but it’s not the right place, so he’s told…”Go to this planet instead.” There’s a kind of lather-rinse-repeat feel in the middle episodes of Season Two because of this.

Then there’s an episode which a lot of fans were really looking forward to: Mando goes to a planet where he’s heard there’s a Jedi, but it’s actually Ahsoka Tano, a character from the Clone Wars animated series (which I haven’t watched). Ahsoka was a Jedi padawan way back when, but since the fall of the Jedi and the rise of the Empire she’s been on her own (and my understanding is that she’s actually left the Jedi order, for whatever reason). There’s an adventure here, and then at the end of the episode, Ahsoka says that no, she can’t take Grogu and train him, but if Mando goes to [insert planet], he’ll find someone! So off we go again. Meanwhile, Ahsoka captures the episode’s Villain-of-the-Week and demands, before the episode ends, “Where is Grand Admiral Thrawn?”

Nothing ever comes of that. It’s just there.

And that’s my main problem with the back half of Season Two: just about all of it feels like set-up for stuff to come later, or fan service, or an odd tying together of seemingly every story and every character who is already out there.

This has actually been a long-time problem with Star Wars, and it can infect other large franchises, too: for worlds that are supposedly incredibly vast, it sure is odd how everyone ends up knowing everyone else. When Boba Fett showed up in Season Two, I had to go look up the character’s history post-Return of the Jedi, because I just haven’t kept up with a lot of it. (Remember, if all you watch is the movies, the last word on Boba Fett was that he got eaten by the Sarlacc, so to find him quite alive and well is a bit of a shock…but then, in every post-ROTJ story ever, starting with Marvel’s own comics back in 1983, he’s gotten himself spit out by the Sarlacc, because writers just can’t quit the guy.) In The Mandalorian, it’s never mentioned how Fett got out of the Sarlacc, so I figured I’d check it out. It turns out that in all the comics and books (and maybe shows too, which I haven’t watched), Boba Fett has had a long history in which he has interacted at one point or another with everybody in the Star Wars universe.

Surely not all of Star Wars needs to boil down to “Ain’t nothin’ but a family thing.”

But to go back to Ahsoka Tano’s mention of Grand Admiral Thrawn…that’s nothing but set-up for something to come. Ditto all the mentions of retaking the Mandalorian home planet, or whatever. For the entire back half of Season Two, I felt like I wasn’t watching a story but rather a long sequence of set-up events, like the end-credits scenes from MCU movies, each expanded to episode length.

ITEM the FIFTH: There’s a lot more fan service in Season Two than there is in Season One, but for the most part I was cool with it…until the very end. It was nice seeing Boba Fett’s ship again, and yes, I’ll admit an internal squeal when I realized he was going to deploy the seismic charges (the most underrated weaponry in all of Star Wars: how can you not love a bomb that detonates with a colossal electric-guitar TWANGGGGG!) But this show really went way too far with the idea that Imperial Stormtroopers are terrible shots. In scene after scene after scene after scene, we see Mando and his allies picking off the Stormtroopers one by one, while the Stormtroopers flail and fire randomly and seemingly can only win by virtue of sending hundreds of themselves into battle against two people.

But the worst fan service comes at the very end of the last episode.

Judging by the reactions I saw online after this episode aired, I am in a very small minority here…but I did not like Luke Skywalker’s appearance.

First, from a pure storytelling stance, it was pure Deus ex machina. Our heroes are backed into the corner, there seems to be no way out…and along comes, at just the right moment, the Greatest (and, currently, Only) Jedi in the Galaxy to bail them out, carving his way effortlessly through the legion of battle droids (who, having been disposed of earlier in episode, manage to turn around and show back up again, in a kind of Diabolis ex machina to make the Deus necessary). This whole scene seems visually designed to echo the Darth Vader scene at the end of Rogue One, which is another scene that I, contrary to just about everyone else, greatly dislike.

Now, by the time I got around to watching this I had been long-spoiled (thanks, Internet!), but even so…while everyone else was cheering at this, I found it just…well, sigh. And not just because it was Deus ex machina, but it put me in mind of the Sequel Trilogy of movies, whose events lie a decade or two in the future of these characters. Luke takes Grogu off to properly train him in the ways of the Force…but here’s the thing. We know from those movies (about which I need to write some final thoughts, I guess) that Luke’s efforts to establish a new Jedi order come to spectacular ruin. It’s entirely possible that Kathleen Kennedy, Jon Favreau, and Dave Filoni (the current High Poobahs of the Star Wars enterprise) have ideas to the contrary, but since we know that eventually Luke Skywalker ends up depressed and dejected on Ahch To as the Empire’s remnants rise again as the First Order and come very close to retaking the Galaxy, and since in none of those events does an older and fully-trained Grogu show up to do useful stuff, I have to assume for now that Grogu is simply one of Luke’s students who is later murdered by Ben Solo/Kylo Ren.

I know, there’s a lot of story that can unfold between now and then, and maybe we do get a story later on someday of Grogu’s Last Stand…or maybe the Star Wars writers can actually come up with a satisfying way of sparing Grogu the fate of falling before the Knights of Ren and also not playing a part in the whole First Order War. (Or maybe they end up just retconning those movies out of existence, which would in all honesty not bother me at all, as much as I love The Last Jedi.)

ITEM the SIXTH: To bring this back to a positive note, since I really did enjoy both seasons on balance even with my reservations and my genuine distaste for Season Two’s ending, I love this show as a production. It just looks fantastic, with a lot of imagination in its visuals and yet still firmly tied to familiar Star Wars aesthetic. The end credits are even worth watching, as they scroll over illustrations of scenes from each episode that stylistically hearken back to the great Ralph McQuarrie paintings that helped George Lucas establish his visual vocabulary for Star Wars in the first place. The music is neat, adding a whole new sound world to the Star Wars universe and moving well beyond the general John Williams sound. And despite my misgivings noted above, the writing is often excellent! Individual episodes move quickly and the dialogue is surprisingly crisp and witty.

What really makes The Mandalorian work as well as it does is the acting, though. There’s not a bad performance to be had here, and each actor in this show creates a unique character. I would single out Pedro Pascal for special mention here, since except for a couple of scenes, he has to convey everything through body language and his voice work…and it works completely. Mando is as vivid a character as any in the Star Wars universe.

As for the other main lead? Grogu is terribly well-done, isn’t he? I haven’t looked it up at all, but I assume that he is a blend of CGI and puppetry. He’s cute, but not nauseatingly so; he has real facial expressions and at times his behavior is not cute at all. I have to admit that I hope Season Three somehow manages to reunite our Lone Wolf with his cub.

ITEM the SEVENTH: I also want to note the nifty spaceship design in The Mandalorian. The aesthetic here is much more Original Trilogy Star Wars than Prequel Trilogy Star Wars; everything here is old and used and lived-in and beaten up. Living spaces are tight and cockpits are cramped and ships look and sound like what they are: machines that have been put through their paces and asked to do things that they were never built to do in the first place. Mando’s ship, in particular, is great, and it’s quickly become one of the iconic ships in all of Star Wars. It’s sad that it got destroyed at the end of Season Two. (I do note that its outboard thrusters, which rotate on their axes depending on where the thrust is directed to go, owe a conceptual debt to the Serenity of Firefly fame.)

ITEM the EIGHTH: I loved the music for this show! It’s Star Wars meets the spaghetti westerns, indebted both to John Williams and to Ennio Morricone.

IN CONCLUSION, YOUR HONOR: I really did enjoy both seasons of The Mandalorian and I’m looking forward to what is to come. I do hope, however, that the show steers back toward being its own mostly-self-contained thing, and not a vehicle for backdoor-piloting other Star Wars stories. I also hope that it doesn’t delve too much into larger stories about Galactic politics and ancient wars. I have absolutely nothing against those things! But…I’d like to think that Star Wars can still be more than that. There’s nothing wrong with smaller stories where the stakes aren’t galactically high. In fact, sometimes the most compelling stakes are the small ones, and I prefer The Mandalorian when it’s concerned with a few people trying to hold on to what they have.

Like a Western. In space.

I have spoken.

(art credit)

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