4 posts tagged “comedy”

Okay, so last night I found myself in the same position I find myself in a lot of Saturday nights -- nothing really to do, not enough money to really go out randomly to a bar or whatnot, with a bunch of boring crap on my "Getting Things Done" lists that I could be doing if I wanted, and so therefore with a need to find something semi-interesting on TV to keep me half-entertained as I spend my Saturday doing these boring things (like website maintenance, photo uploading, etc). And I saw that one of the broadcast networks here in Chicago, one that features a lot of family-oriented miniseries (channel 38, "Ion," for those who live here themselves), was going to be showing the classic Western miniseries Lonesome Dove last night; four hours of it in a row, in fact, from 6 pm to 10 pm straight. And this I figured would be a good thing to keep me semi-entertained on a Saturday night, but which wouldn't require complete concentration from me, so that I could also get my stupid computer chore stuff done too; not to mention that I've been coincidentally enough thinking about Lonesome Dove recently as well, in that I recently learned that the original novel by Larry McMurtry that the miniseries is based on actually won the Pulitzer in 1986, which came as a big surprise to me.

And I've been thinking in fact about how Lonesome Dove might actually be the last Pulitzer winner (or one of the last, anyway) where you don't need to automatically be a radical liberal in order to even have a chance of really liking it; and yes, I've been thinking of this specifically because of reading Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke recently, this year's winner of the National Book Award so of course automatically on the short list for the Pulitzer as well, which very well might be the first Pultizer contender since Lonesome Dove where you don't necessarily have to be a far-left liberal in order to have a chance of loving it. And of course thinking about how it's no coincidence that Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer in the middle of the Reagan years; and how in many ways it was Lonesome Dove in particular that Clint Eastwood had in mind when making Unforgiven just three years later, a gritty answer to all those romanticized Westerns like Lonesome Dove that came out at the tail end of the genre's popularity.

Anyway, my point is that I thought it'd probably be pretty interesting to watch Lonesome Dove, on top of it simply being something to keep me semi-entertained on a boring Saturday night; so I ended up watching all four hours, and indeed it kept me pretty entertained (and especially the whole subplot about the town whore who every single male in the area has fallen in love with, because of she being literally the only person any of these guys have fucked in years). But then we start getting into the last half-hour of the evening, and I start realizing that we're not nearly at a point in the story we should be at for a project about to end in a half-hour; for example, the plotline in general is about a group of guys who organize a cattle drive in the 1880s from Texas to Montana, but as of 9:30 the cows had only gotten to Oklahoma. And that's when you start thinking, "No, wait a minute, it's taken them three and a half hours just to travel one state -- there's no freaking way they're going to make it across another four states in the last half-hour! What's going on here? Is this ending at 10 o'clock or what?"

And that's when it dawns on me; that the four hours I just watched were not the entirety of Lonesome Dove at all, but rather the first half, that there is yet another four damn hours to go tonight (Sunday) as well. Ugh! Sneaky fuckers! I would've never committed myself to this stupid happy revisionist Western crap if I had known exactly what I was signing on for! Sigh. So anyway, yes, now I'm roped in to watching another four hours of Lonesome Endless Fucking Dove, the opening credits of which are running right as I'm finishing up this entry. So, off to it I go; and I'm drinking beer as well, because that's what you do when you watch stupid eight-hour revisionist family miniseries on television while bored; so in case I have any more drunken bitter thoughts about what's happening, I might just jump on here again and add them below. You go, Gus! You go and win the heart of that got-dang lovely whore!

6:30: Sheeeee-it! Dey done hung Jake! Daaay-em!



6:49: By the way, it's true what fans of this miniseries say -- that this is one of the best-looking Westerns in the history of the genre, and one of the best-filmed. Lonesome Dove in fact paints a much better picture than most Westerns of what the entire area of the US west of the Mississippi used to look like back then, not just the vast deserts of Texas and the Southwest where most traditional Westerns are set; I was thinking of all this, for example, because of just getting done with the scenes shot at Angelica Houston's house, which is this giant Queen Anne three-story in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska, that has this weirdo picket fence around it in the middle of nowhere and with a finely manicured lawn inside of this fenced area in the middle of nowhere. Growing up in the deep Midwest like I did, even in the '70s and '80s most rural areas looked exactly like this; it's a nice touch to see in a miniseries like this, instead of the endless mesas and cactii of most traditional Westerns.

7:44: You did it, Gus! You got that got-dang whore to love you! You did it, you finally did it! And then you promptly dump her in the lap of your former lover in Nebraska, fucking coward! YOU FUCKING CHICKEN-GIZZARD COWARD, GUS! Ah, but it's probably for the best; we're just now entering the last two hours of the eight-hour saga, the push from Nebraska (basically the last settled area of the West in the 1880s) to Montana (where the men are going with their herd of cows, since there are no cows up there right now and people can get rich bringing them up for the first time), where they will need to battle pissed-off Indians and starvation and half-finished maps in order to finish their quest. I'm predicting, in fact, that the last two hours are going to be more action-packed than the first six (which are awfully slow-moving and character-oriented, two obvious details behind why it won the Pulitzer in the first place); it's probably for the best to get rid of all the women-folk before this part of the story, so that the final two hours can be all scalping and stampedes and "Hi-ya!" and shit.

7:59: Dude, Indian spear through Danny Glover's fuckin' abdomen! Dude!!! Oops, I guess I should've mentioned that's a spoiler; Danny Glover gets an Indian spear through the abdomen, while holding a baby no less.

8:16: Dude, I was right! Wicked awesome surprise Indian attack, hi-ya hi-ya! Gus takes two fuckin' arrows to the knee, then has his friend just yank them right out with no anesthesia! Gus is a fucking BADASS!



8:52: GUS!!!! GUUUUUUSSSSSSS!!!!!!!! Goddamn you, dead stubborn son of a bitch!!! Oops, sorry, I've been spending way too much time in Larry McMurtry's universe this weekend, a place where everyone talks like a leftover extra from a Zane Grey novel and has a poetic stoicism that borders on the ridiculous. "So you say the Apocalypse is upon us, Call?" "Ah yep, I reckon." "And this don't bother you done none, Call?" "Ah nope, I don't reckon." Call, you emotionally steady white-bearded summa bitch!

9:19: "I...I...I LOVES YA, NEWT! But I CAN'T SAYS IT, NEWT! But I loves ya, Newt, I loves ya like the son I can't admit in public I have!" Sheesh, if there's ever been a project more typical of the '80s noble "tough male/sensitive male" paradox, it'd have to be Lonesome Fucking Dove, I'm tellin' ya. "Newt! Newt! I...I...I gottsa go now, Newt!" Dah-DAH-de-dah...dah-DAHH-de-daaah...

9:31: Okay, we finally come to something I legitimately love instead of ironically love -- the relationship between basically the only two female characters of the entire miniseries, Diane Lane's character and Angelica Huston's one, who both deeply loved the same guy (Gus, dude who died back about 45 minutes ago, played here by Robert Duvall), who were both deeply loved back by Gus at two very different times in his life, and after having losing the first woman to another man long ago so thinking there wasn't any chance left with her. It's really fascinating, character-wise, to watch these two women awkwardly bond over the fact that they both deeply loved this man, and wished that they could've had him to themselves, but simply can't because it's the 1880s when guys were allowed to run around swearing allegiance to two women at once. And so these two women have to make due as best they can, at least be happy that this great guy loved them in the first place, even if they have to deal with the reality of this other woman being around and having been loved by him that way too. And that in the 1880s in nowhere Nebraska, these two women would end up being drawn together because of this very fact, end up living under the same roof and doing chores together and running a farm together with Huston's two adolescent daughters. I do like all that, I have to admit.

9:43: Ooh, Mexican butcherer and old Ranger-days nemesis Blue Duck faces his fate in an unknown podunk little town! In the last 15 minutes of the eight-hour miniseries too! A great second-to-last coda for the entire thing, I have to admit -- a nice little formal (er, metaphorical) end to the lawless 1800s days of the American West, a start to the "civilized" age of the 20th century. Now that I'm almost finished with the miniseries, in fact, I can see a lot more clues as to why the original novel it's based on won the Pulitzer back in the 1980s; although I'm still highly skeptical, I admit that the miniseries makes me more curious now about reading the original book.

Die, Blue Duck, die die fucking die you psycho!

9:47: Wait...so...Tommy Lee Jones has just been living with Robert Duvall's dead, decomposing body for the last six months? Is that right?! Because I swear I would've thought they would've cremated him the preceding fall, and then just taken the ashes down to Texas to bury in that fruity little garden he and Angelica Huston used to hang out in back when they were young and horny. You know, given that there was a six-fucking-month difference between the two dates. Or am I just getting that wrong?

9:58: "I'm from a paper down at San Antonio. I was hoping to maybe talk with you a few minutes?"

"No. No I can't. And it's because you pronounced it 'San Antonio,' not the proper way, 'San Antony.'"

Walk off into red sunset! Ah, cripes! ALL HAIL LONESOME FREAKING DOVE! Best bloated high-production Western television miniseries in freakin' history! Okay, that's probably the beer talking. Bye!

I likes to rock the party!!!

www.hbo.com/conchords/ <-- COPY AND PASTE, sorry, links not working at VOX today for some reason.
Best! Cable! Sitcom! Ever!

Good news for fans of smart comedy -- the best show currently on television, British nerd sitcom The IT Crowd (produced by the UK's Channel 4) just started its second season last week. I ended up downloading the season premiere this morning off BitTorrent, in fact, and just got done watching it; and I can happily say that so far, it looks like the second season might just turn out to be even funnier than the first.

For those who don't know, the show is about the three-person "Information Technology" staff at a boring stuffy corporation in England, and is absurdist in nature; in one infamous episode last year, for example, the staff discovers that a moody goth has actually been living in one of their back server rooms for years now, ala "Phantom of the Opera." The show is CONSTANTLY referencing geek subjects and working actual tech talk into the dialogue; the show has also gotten famous for displaying famous geek projects and causes (Boing Boing, the EFF, etc) via t-shirts and posters in the show's backgrounds. And by the way, it's fucking hilarious, and the American remake coming to NBC next year is going to be just as much a disaster as any other attempt over the years by American television networks to adapt a funny, smart British sitcom. (Do you remember, for example, CBS's disastrous attempt a number of years ago to do an American version of Absolutely Fabulous, called High Society and starring Jean Smart and Mary McDonnell? No, I didn't think you did!)

Anyway, just thought I'd let Americans know about the new season, for all you geeks who have been waiting patiently for it. Fire up them BitTorrent clients, ladies and gentlemen! Oh, and here are my favorite two lines from the season opener, by the way, which I can't stop saying out loud today and giggling:

"A gay musical called Gay. Well, that's a bit...gay."

And...

"You're Irish? Oh, I adore the Irish! They're all mad! They're all so mad!"

"Yes, yes, we're all insane."