Went on a stroll down memory lane this weekend, way back to the early 2000s, when I was a huge fan of the Shield. FX was new back then, and this was one of the shows that built that network. Tough, gritty, all about the anti-hero who you partially rooted for and partially wanted to fail.
In the first episode, the clock is ticking when a young girl has been kidnapped and every second counts when it comes to her safe return because God only knows where she’s being kept or what condition she’s in.
When a pervert suspect demands a lawyer, all the by the book cops are stymied by procedure, but fear this scumbag will walk while the girl dies in whatever secret dungeon she’s being held in.
Enter Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) who turns the camera off, lays out his torture tools, and proceeds to beat a full confession out of the pervert. The girl’s location is revealed within minutes and she’s returned home safely.
Good Vic.
However, by the end of the episode, Vic suspects a new member of his strike team detective unit is working undercover for his captain, trying to dig up dirt, and so during a raid of a drug dealer’s hideout, Vic shoots said dealer, then shoots said informant in cold blood, then plants the gun on the dealer. Doing so allows Vic and the boys to continue with their long running scam of stealing drugs from crime scenes and selling them to a drug dealer on their take.
Bad Vic.
And thus is the conundrum of Vic Mackey that lasts for nearly a decade of great TV. Vic has a super power in that he’ll bend, break and completely ignore laws that most cops won’t. Many times he does this for good – to save lives, particularly innocent lives – we cheer when he brutalizes psychos and scumbags, murderers and killers and saves innocents but then we are aghast when he commits crimes and murders witnesses in the name of being able to line his pockets with illegal drug money for another day.
There is a lot going on in this show, so I’ll begin with the premise. Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto” (Jeremy Allen White) has spent years working as a high-level chef at some of the best restaurants in the world, but when his older, alcoholic brother Michael (Jon Bernthal) commits suicide, Carmy trades glamor for grease when he returns home to Chicago to run the family business Michael left behind – a dirty old dive of a sandwich shop called the Original Beef.
OK, BUT WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Your guess is as good as mine. In many ways, it’s like your own personal Rorshach test and what you see isn’t necessarily wrong. My initial thought is it’s about the dark side of the American dream. For many, business ownership is seen as the pinnacle of success, true freedom, the ability to know that money will come in yet if you want a day off, you can have it. While you’ll never have to worry about answering to a sucky boss, you’ll damn near answer to everything else. If something breaks, you’ll fix it. If a bill is overdue, you’ll pay it. If a government inspector wants a word, you’re the one getting an earful. When profits run short, you’ll go without pay to keep your staff in the black. And when disaster strikes, you’re the one up all night, picking up the pieces.
Carmy exemplifies this lifestyle as the living embodiment of a walking, talking human panic attack. The poor kid says very little or does very little outside of work and constantly looks like his head is about to explode. If owning your own business is supposed to be fun, someone needs to remind him.
Maybe it’s about family, or how the people we love drive us nuts, and that insanity can be magnified times a million when money is involved. Petty rivalries, jealousies and infighting abound as Carmy deals with Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss Bachrach) and sister Sugar (Abby Elliott.) (An SNL alum, Elliott really shines here.)
At the start of season 1, Richie is miffed that Michael didn’t leave the joint to him and undermines Carmy at every turn, while Sugar sees the shop as an insufferable money pit/giant ball of stress that should be sold and forgotten posthaste. Carmy knows he’s better than this greasy spoon, but he just can’t bring himself to let this place, wrapped up with so many family memories, go.
Maybe it’s a show about perfection, about being the best at something and all the time and stress that goes into being the best at a trade. You may not know it but the chefs behind the scenes at your favorite restaurant really do toil away to bring you exquisite dishes in a timely manner and make it look so easy you probably never thought about all the skill that goes into it. Here, we get a constant look at this labor of love, kitchen workers hustling about putting the finishing touches on their masterpieces.
At the start of the show, Carmy wants to turn the Beef into something better. He’s well versed in French kitchen style – the ranks and customs and so on – militaristic rituals that turn cuisine into a science and get food ingredients out of the fridge, into the fryer, onto your plate and into your mouth in record time without you ever knowing about any of the fuss that went into it. Speed. Timing. Precision. Respect. Calling each other Chef. And dang it, keeping the kitchen clean.
But the Beef crew are more or less fast food minimum wage schmucks at the start of the show. With the help of his right hand woman/sous chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri), a fellow culinary school grad, Carmy whips the crew into shape in an arc similar to any down on their luck sports team movie. You know the movies I’m talking about. First they’re idiots who think trying is for chumps but when they try, they start to win and they start to like it so they try harder and win more?
Chaos is the name of the game. Episodes are loud, obnoxious, fast paced, and crazy, all meant to mimic the frenzied pace of a busy kitchen. It’s hard to keep track of what’s happening when the characters are screaming at each other while having secondary and tertiary side arguments with others. Richie is the loudest and most obnoxious of them all and one wonders when someone will just knock him the eff out but he eventually redeems himself and grows on you.
Season 2 changes things up a bit as Carmy closes the Beef and goes on a quest to reopen it as the Bear – a fine dining restaurant “bearing” his family nickname. Apparently, the show became very popular between last year and this year because it’s a star studded cameo fest this year- Jamie Lee Curtis, John Mulaney, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Olivia Colman, just to name a few.
Yes, to be the best, you really have to put in the time. Morning. Noon. Night. No time for a life. No time for love. No time for hobbies. No time for fun. No time for anything. Our intrepid food slingers often wonder whether or not it is worth it but then again, they love food so much they can’t imagine doing anything else. Further complicating matters, they love each other, but drive each other insane.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. With so many cooking shows like Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen gaining popularity, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out away to dramatize food production, raise the stakes, and make us realize that behind every cheeseburger we scarf, there’s some poor bastard of a restauranteur sweating it out over whether he’ll be able to keep the lights on for another month. It’s almost enough to make you want to go on a diet, and you should, because let’s face it, we’re all fat.
Grab your hats and whips, 3.5 readers. It’s time for a review of Indy 5. SPOILERS ABOUND!
Hype is weird, noble readers. This movie got a lot of it. Bad hype. Hate hype. All the social media comments and online reviews, youtube videos etc – it all gave me the impression that this flick had taken a big huge steamy corn infested dump all over the legacy of America’s favorite fictional archaeologist.
Indy turned into a pathetic old man! Indy bossed around by a mouthy dame the whole picture! Four decades of a beloved franchise flushed down the toilet in the name of radical feminism.
I only bought a ticket with the intention of hate watching it and writing a scathing review for all 7 of your eyes, but to my surprise, I ended up liking it. It wasn’t that bad a movie at all.
Now don’t get me wrong. The original trilogy was fabulous with a perfect ending that wrapped it all up nicely, so other than the profit motive, I’m not sure Hollywood wants to keep tinkering with it. Well, the answer is because Disney bought the Indy franchise when it bought Star Wars and the rest of Lucasfilm’s IP, and I can’t blame them for wanting a return on investment.
The story begins at the end of World War 2 with a CGI de-aged Indiana Jones infiltrating a train full of Nazis making a run for it before the Allies arrive. They’ve packed the train with a buttload of stolen artifacts, all the relics and artwork they need to sell and fund their post war exile abroad.
With colleague Basil Shaw in tow, the duo is on the hunt for the famed Spear of Destiny, the spear said to have pierced Christ’s flesh when he was crucified. Truth be told, the legend of this spear and how it was passed about through various European rulers and how their downfall often coincided with when they lost control of the spear would, in and of itself, make for a great flick, but its only a premise for our heroes to discover an entirely new MacGuffin, namely that the train is carrying Archimedes’ Dial, an Ancient Greek device that Shaw has been obsessed with for years, due to claims that it can be used to travel through time.
Preposterous, surmises Young Indy, and dutiful suspenders of disbelief that we are, we’re totally supposed to forget that Indy has seen the Ark of the Covenant melt people who looked at it, went mano y mano with a voo doo priest who rips the hearts from people’s chests and turns them into mindless zombies and oh yeah, there was that time he met a still-alive ancient knight who was guarding the holy grail, which he used to cure his father’s bullet wound.
SIDENOTE: I gotta say, this beginning scene felt like it could have been from a lost cut of an old Indy movie. The effects are modern, but the CGI is brilliant, such that it looks and sounds like a young Harrison Ford. One wonders if we aren’t only a few years away from new Indy movies where Ford lends his voice and likeness and lets Disney techs work their magic to bring us new tales set in Indy’s golden age of the 1930s and 40s.
But I suppose that involves a debate of whether or not CGI actors are a good thing. That’s a whole other kettle of fish.
Flash forward to 1969 and Indiana Jones is very old, sad and lonely. It’s his retirement day as a college professor. He’s bummed for without his job he has little to look forward to. Marion, who he married in his 60s according to the Crystal Skull, truly the shittiest of the Indy movies with the exception that at least it left Indy in the happy situation of having a wife and newly discovered son, has left him, because of course she has. I get the online criticism here to an extent. I mean, they don’t ALWAYS have to leave our heroes sad and lonely but other than suffering the woes of old age, Indy proves he still has some piss and vinegar left, as does Harrison Ford.
Indy’s sidekick in this film is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a woman so excessively British that she probably had relatives who spit shined King Arthur’s codpiece and her blood type is fish and chips. She speaks English throughout the film, but you know, Englishy English. I’m trying to say I have no idea what she’s saying half the time because she’s absurdly British.
Her character, Helena Shaw, to put it simply, is a total asshole. She is Indy’s goddaughter as her father and Indy were once BFFS. She approaches Indy under the guise of being a grad student researching Archimedes’ Dial, but this is just a pretense to steal it and sell it to the highest bidder. Throughout the film she insults and betrays our fearless hero, and I think that online critics didn’t quite get the point that the intention was that her character was written specifically so that she’d come across as a dick. Indy, however, isn’t that pathetic, and goes tit for tat with her throughout the flick.
My complaint is the writers never offer an explanation as to why Helena is such an unscrupulous d-bag. We see her father was a very nice, moral man. We see she was nice as a child. If there was an event, a tragedy, a something or other than turned her into a money hungry scumbag willing to screw over a close family friend in the name of cold hard cash, we weren’t told about it.
But Indy and Helena become frenemies as their larger goal is to keep the dial out of the hands of the villainous Jurgen Voller, a Nazi scientist who dreams of using the dial to rewrite history and turn the Nazi’s defeat in 1945 into a permanent, never-ending world tour.
There’s some great car chases. Incorporation of history. Thrills and chills. Twists and turns. Fun cameos. All in all, a decent flick. Does it outshine the trilogy? No. As good as the trilogy? No. Does it make up for the doody fest that was the Crystal Skull? IMO, yes. It’s a good movie, a fun time, and its far from the crapfest the internet tongue waggers are making it out to be.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Worth a trip to the big screen.
My thoughts on the future of the Indy Franchise:
#1 – Key Huy Quan, who played Short Round in Temple of Doom, just had a major career comeback, winning an Oscar at 50. Maybe it’s time to see what Shorty’s doing as an adult.
#2 – If done right, I wouldn’t be against a Disney Plus animated series where Ford lends his voice and likeness to Indy cartoons of Indy’s younger days.
#3 – CGI actors are getting better and better so before you know it, we might actually see Young Indy movies where he looks as spry as he did in the trilogy.
#4 – There’s talk of Indy passing the torch. Maybe, but the thing is, the franchise is called “Indiana Jones.” If another character becomes an adventurer, they might be inspired by Indy but they aren’t Indy. They might make movies where a younger actor plays Indy in his prime, but the role is so much all about Ford.
#5 – But ultimately, this IP is worth big bucks. Disney bought it, so they’ll want to make bank off it. Let’s hope Harrison eats his wheaties.
BQB here with a review of the raunchy R rated girls trip comedy Joy Ride.
So, this film actually doesn’t come out until July 6 but there was a sneak preview showing at my local theater and since I have no life, I decided why not check it out. I’ll say at the outset I took the bullet on this one so you don’t have to. It is worth a rental or a stream, and sure, it had heart and some laughs but all and all, you won’t miss much if you miss it on the big screen.
Adele Lim, screenwriter of Crazy Rich Asians in her directorial debut with producer Cherry Chevraparatdumarong (I’m not sure I spelled that right), she of Family Guy producer fame, join forces to give you a comedy best described as what would happen if you took a Hangover style movie but replaced the dudes with naughty Asian ladies who can’t stop talking about sex, penises, buttholes, vaginas, cocaine but occasionally they find friendship and meaning. Some of the jokes will make you laugh and some will make you groan. Some I’m not sure you’ll get unless you’re Asian as they’re somewhat Asian insidery but are fun anyway. Some you can tell are definitely coming from a disciple of Seth MacFarlane.
In the late 90s, little Audrey and Lolo (Ashley Park and Sherry Cola) become BFFS for life as the only two Asian kids in the town of White Falls, which in modern movie logic, is a terrible, horrible place because there are so many damn white people living there.
Flash forward to present times and Audrey the perfectionist has become a high-powered lawyer while Lolo waits tables at her parents’ restaurant to fund her true passion of crafting sexual art, which the viewer is treated to in excruciating detail.
With a big promotion waiting in the wings if she closes a deal in China, Audrey invites Lolo on the trip to be her translator. Tagging along on the trip are Lolo’s socially awkward yet lovable Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and Audrey’s college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), now a famous actress in China.
Upon learning that her new business associate is a family man and would be way more keen on the deal if he knew that Audrey was as into family as he is (because business deals totally rest on such things!), Audrey and friends set out on a trip across China in search of Audrey’s biological mother who gave her up for adoption years ago.
Hijinx ensue and various opportunities for hanky panky arise. TBH, from the trailer, I thought the movie was going to focus more on a fish out of water tale as American Asian women visit China and aren’t sure if they feel more out of place in America or Asia. That does come up often but the plot more or less serves as excuse for dirty jokes and naughty humor. At times, their travel plans are derailed, leaving them to hitchhike and depend on the kindness of strangers, which for a minute I thought it was going to be like Planes, Trains and Automobiles but in China but the stakes never get too high as the girls are never put into too much danger, at least nothing they can’t talk their way out of with a dirty joke.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Its fun and funny, with insight into the ups and downs experienced by American Asians, not to mention the struggles friends go through to keep their friendships going as they grow up.
One complaint. There’s a scene where a little kid drops an F bomb and while the other kid’s character deserved it, I’m not a fan of this Hollywood trend the past decade where people think it’s funny to have kids say bad things. IMO, the joke is never funny enough to warrant asking a kid to say that, but that’s just me.
Bookshelf Battle 