Mmm boy there’s a lot of fan service in this one, 3.5 readers.
Two hutts to replace Mighty Jabba. A defeated wookie who I’m going to guess will return. Speaking of returns, a new rancor is back.
Meanwhile, the speeder bike gang going to work for Boba is something new.
I’m enjoying this series. I do think Disney/Star Wars has lost its way a bit in charting a course and perhaps the overall lesson is that stories that veer too far away from the Empire timeline don’t work.
I’ve been on a month-long binge watch of Seinfeld, 3.5 readers. It’s funny the things you notice when a) you watch it all within the same time span and b) when time goes by and you notice actors/actresses who had bit parts on the show who later went on to hit it big.
Some observations:
#1 – Co-creator Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame is in it a lot, but you might not have noticed if you weren’t a super fan. He has bit walk on roles such as “Frank Costanza’s Cape Wearing Lawyer” (actual name of the character, the cashier who gives George back a twenty dollar bill with lipstick on the president, a mad scientist in a late-night B sci-fi movie that Jerry is watching. He also does a lot of voice over work, people yelling at the characters from off camera. Of course, his big claim to fame is that he did the voice of George’s boss, the gregariously boisterous NY Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
#2 – Speaking of LD, it’s eerie how much of a spot on accurate Larry David impression that Jason Alexander is doing in the character of George Costanza, who is based on the Curb star. Poor George/Larry. Their whole schtick is that they are unattractive bald men who screw up constantly who, despite their myriad of flaws, can only be happy with perfect women. They know in their hearts this is wrong and they might be happier if they could accept women with flaws the way they wish women would accept them for all their flaws but their dumb brains just won’t let them do it.
#3 – It’s a rare series that gets better the longer it goes on. You can tell the showrunners are trying to figure it all out in the first 2 seasons and then it finally hits its stride around season 3-4. Early seasons, they try to give more depth to everyone and then they eventually hit the formula where it becomes quick and snappy and everyone is a caricature every situation is a parody of some sort of social conundrum that everyone faces sooner or later. Understandably, Jerry wanted to go out on top by ending the show after season 9 rather than go on longer even though NBC offered him plenty of money to keep going. Some of the most memorable episodes with the quotable phrases that became part of the pop cultural language come between seasons 7-9.
#4 – Famous actors/actresses who were on Seinfeld and then went on to hit it big later. (Hard to make a complete list.)
Dayton Callie – You might know him as Charlie on HBO’s Deadwood but he played a cabbie in the Puerto Rican Day Parade Episode who has to put up with Elaine’s indecision over whether she wants to stay in the cab and wait for the traffic to clear up or to get out and walk.
Breaking Bad – Walter and Skyler were both on Seinfeld before Walt built his blue meth empire. Anna Gunn was on the long list of Jerry’s girlfriends dumped over comically trivial reasons (George loses his glasses but while squinting, is certain he spotted her smooching it up with Jerry’s despised Cousin Jeffrey). Meanwhile, Bryan Cranston had a recurring role as Jerry’s dentist Tim Whatley, who converts to Judaism just for the jokes and brands Jerry a rabid anti-dentite for making dentist jokes. (Sidenote a young Debra Messing of Will and Grace fame is in this episode too.)
Mariska Hargitay, Amanda Peet, Sarah Silverman, Courtney Cox, Janine Garafalo, Teri Hatcher, Megan Mullally, Lauren Graham and the list goes on and on. It seems like every up and coming 1990s actress took a turn as one of Jerry or George’s (sometimes Kramer’s) long suffering girlfriends. I say sometimes Kramer because oddly, any woman dumped by Kramer just seems to feel lucky to have had the unlikely stud in their lives.
Meanwhile, Jon Favreau (as a clown), Bob Odenkirk and a very young Patton Oswalt as a video store clerk stop by.
#5 – My last observation is how many of the premises wouldn’t exist today. So many of the episodes involve the quartet splitting up and not being able to find each other in the big city. Today, a lost friend is only a cell phone call away from being found.
It’s about time The Avengers’ arrow blasting badass got his own movie…except I guess they didn’t want to give him one so this TV show will have to do. That’s ok, Hawky. The Hulk could never carry a movie by himself either, even with those big green mitts. Hulk smash everything…except box office records.
Here, Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) is on a holiday vacay to NYC with his kids, the hawklets, in tow. After taking in an Avengers style broadway show (watch the entire thing after the end credits of the last episode), he has a run in with Kate Bishop (Hailey Steinfeld), an archery champ who was inspired to become a champion arrow slinger in her own right after witnessing Hawkeye take out some alien villains during Loki’s attack on New York back in the 2012 film when she was just a child. My, how time flies.
Kate has had her own run in with the aptly named Track Suit Mafia over a misunderstanding when she accidentally dons the Ronin costume, the same garb that Hawkeye wore during the blip phase of the last Avengers’ film, a time when he missed his deleted family and took vengeance out on the evildoers of the world with no remorse.
Assuming Kate is Ronin and wanting revenge, it’s a mad cat arrow infused romp as Clint and Kate shoot their way out of this mess, one flying pointy stick at a time.
At first, I felt there was a bit of a bait and switch here. Vile patriarchist that I am, I’m not a fan of this trend to replace longstanding male characters with females. In some cases, like when a character is more of an idea than a person and anyone can step in and be them, it works. In other cases, where the studio is just like, “OK this dude has a vag now” it makes little sense. It’s like the studios are saying that women can never be fully complete unless they grow ding dongs and become dudes, as if they were born deficient when they were born vaginized.
Moving on, my main complaint was that it looked like we were going to get very little Hawkeye and a lot of Kate Bishop, which seemed deceptive for a show called Hawkeye, but ultimately, we got a lot of the Hawkster. It’s basically like a mismatched buddy cop show about an old veteran arrow slinger taking a fresh, naive, lots to learn rookie arrow slinger under his wing.
I have to give this show kudos because it does show the dangerous side of super-heroing, particularly when the hero is just like, a person with no supernatural and/or scientifically assisted abilities. (Sidenote – isn’t it a gaping plot hole that Tony Stark never just outfitted the entire team with his Iron Man armor?)
Clint is deaf, having had a front row seat to plenty of gunfire and explosions in his day. Movies never tell the viewer this, but explosions and guns are loud. In the movies, people just stand around explosions like nothing’s wrong but in reality, if you’re lucky enough to not be vaporized in the blast radius, you’d still most likely be knocked on your butt and/or left with long-lasting, perhaps life-long hearing loss.
Kate and Clint get knocked around throughout the show and to the show’s credit, the pain shows. They’re constantly hurt, and they are never without band-aids and stitches on their face, so A plus to Disney for giving us a look at how hard it is to be a super-hero when you’re not a God, or haven’t been gifted with amazing strength and/or health regeneration, be it through magic or science. When you’re just Joe or Jane Average, getting your ass kicked hurts, a lot, and afterwards, you’re going to be limping and covered with bandages and you’re probably going to need a drink and a nap. Also, a dog. Bonus points to the show for adding a dog.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy, but SPOILER ALERT. Looks like Kate will take over the Hawkeye role, so where does that leave Clint? Where does that leave Jeremy Renner? Is he exiting the franchise? Will he come back as Ronin? Probably not since he burned the costume, then again, a new costume is only a call to the tailor shop away.
Meanwhile, Lady Thor is on the way and I guess, I don’t know, they’ll probably chop off the Hulk’s ding-a-ling eventually just to be fair to out of control green lady rage monsters.
Double bonus points because Vera Farmiga is in it. I have had a crush on her since she appeared scantily clad in The Departed.
Triple bonus points because the show is Christmas themed.
What’s the deal with puffy shirts, 3.5 readers? Why are they so puffy and why would anyone wear them as a shirt?
Kramer dates “a low talker” i.e. a woman who speaks so quietly that people can barely hear her. At dinner, Jerry politely nodes and says yes, yes to whatever she says, only to find out later that he has agreed to wear a puffy, pirate style shirt on the Today show (the low talker is a fashion designer and apparently, a bad one.)
This is one of the iconic episodes that everyone remembers and it portrays the great lengths we’ll go to in order to not appear rude and/or to fulfill an obligation, even if it is one we signed up for by accident.
Sideplote: George becomes a hand model and like Icarus, walks a bit too close to the sun.
Don’t you hate it when you think of the perfect comeback response to some idiot’s rude comment, only you think of it hours, days, weeks, even years later? I’ll tell you, to this day, I’ll have an epiphany of what I should said to some moron…twenty years ago.
Alas, we never think of what we should have said until it’s too late. Even then, our mind is a controlled environment. We think a response might be biting, but in reality, we might flub the execution, or the rude person might even bounce off your comeback with an even better comeback. As the old saying goes, sometimes it is best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Not George. Here, Costanza is feasting on shrimp at a Yankees executive meeting when a nemesis says, “Hey George, the ocean called. They’re running out of shrimp.”
On the car road, the G-Man thinks of…well, what he thinks is a witty retort. “Oh yeah? Well, the jerk store called. They’re running out of you.”
George then makes it his mission in life to deliver this comeback, going so far as to fly to Ohio to bate his nemesis into insulting him again so that he can use his jerk store line. Is it going to go as well as George thinks it will? Watch and find out.
Sideplots: Elaine becomes enamored with a video store clerk’s pick wall. Kramer wants to find someone who will pull his plug when the time comes. Jerry squares off against a tennis pro who isn’t a pro at all.
Seinfeld often poked fun at the futility of life, how we all try so hard only to eventually end up in the pine box sooner or later anyway.
Here, George’s fiance Susan dies. The cause? Toxic glue on cheap wedding invitations. George is to blame because he skimped on the invites, though isn’t the company to blame to? I mean, who sells invites with poisonous glue?
The perverse and creepily understated joke is that Susan’s death is a horrible tragedy, yet George is cool with it. For an entire season, George felt trapped. He didn’t want to marry Susan. He suffered from the delusion that if he just gave it more time, he might do better. (Briefly, he almost does as he meets a friend and mutual acquaintance of actress Marisa Tomei, who as we learn according to the show, has the hots for short, stocky, bald men.)
Susan is beautiful, charming and has a great head on his shoulders. George is a self-admitted loser. Not very bright, ambitious or successful and he knows in his heart he should be happy to have her but can’t help but feel stuck. Her death releases him from an unwanted marriage yet as the show goes on, he never does better. He’s doomed to be alone and unhappy.
There’s a secondary lesson here about how death is awful yet life has a strange way of going on. I’ve experienced it myself. I’ve lost people near and dear to me, losing them was like losing a limb and after the cries and sadness, you still keep living and it’s like, “Um, this is weird that I’m eating this sandwich while my loved one is dead. It’s weird that I’m watching a movie while my loved one is dead. It’s weird that…”
At any rate, George surely should have appreciated Susan more, though humor of the show came from George being an impression of Seinfeld writer Larry David, who has stated publicly often that his brand of comedy comes from the fact that he is aware he is a physically unattractive dum-dum and yet he longs for perfection in everyone else. He knows he can never provide it himself, but he suffers from the delusion that he can do better.
Bottomline – cherish your loved ones. If you meet a special someone, and you two love one another, do your best to make a go of it and stop worrying about what could be if you wait a little longer. Losers give up something good to wait for something that may or may not come. Winners realize they have someone great right in front of them and hold on.
A bird in the hand, 3.5 readers. A bird in the hand.
It’s funny how shows that were controversial years ago seem tame by today’s standards. Does that mean it’s good to break taboos or is it bad in that we, as a society, just keep sliding further and further into the abyss?
I don’t know.
At any rate, this episode is all about a contraceptive device called “The Today Sponge.” It’s Elaine’s favorite method for preventing an unwanted pregnancy, but it went off the market. After scouring New York, she finds a pharmacy with one case left and scoops it up.
This leads to her being very discriminating in her choice of men. Apparently before, when sponges were plentiful, she went wild, but today, she really has to be picky. She now interrogates potential boyfriends in the manner of a boss trying to weed out the riff raff in a job interview. A judgmental person might say Elaine should have been this picky all along because let’s face it, sex has consequences and before you invite a person into your bedroom, you might ask yourself is this really the kind of person you want to invite in your life. You never know what might happen that would cause an unwanted individual to stay.
Sideplots: Kramer volunteers to walk in an AIDS walk. He does so diligently, but he doesn’t want to wear the ribbon, which causes turmoil amongst his fellow walkers. The underlying message is that it’s not enough to say you support something, be it a cause or a movement or in this case, finding the cure to a deadly virus. Society literally requires you to wear your support on your sleeve. How sad we don’t trust each other to the point where we demand that people jump through hoops to prove their loyalty.
Meanwhile, George tells Susan a secret about Jerry, bringing up the old conundrum of how, when your BFF finds love, you have to be careful about what you say, because you have to realize if you tell one half of a couple, you are telling both halves.
I recall this episode being somewhat controversial at the time – a woman just flagrantly flouting society’s mores, so concerned about her ability to bang baby free that she hoards contraception and refuses to waste her sponges by banging “not spongeworthy” dudes, which if you take the sponges out of the equation, Elaine should be setting better standards for herself and not banging dudes that she doesn’t see a happy future with anyway. (Men shouldn’t be doing this with men either.) I hate to sound old fashioned, like I’m denouncing people who bang willy nilly, it’s just that I think TV tends to show us the fun side of indiscriminate banging while not showing the negative consequences.
I think my main complaint with the show (everyone’s complaint really) is you do have to suspend disbelief when it comes to the quartet’s dating numbers. They each have a new love interest every week when even the most beautiful and successful among us never rack up those numbers. Meanwhile, few ever rack up those numbers without catching an STD or having an unwanted pregnancy. Few also get out of such a robust dating life without making, well, for lack of a better word, enemies. To the show’s credit, the characters’ lack of concern for the people they are dating often comes back to bite them.
Jerry’s good deed inspires so much joy in a drycleaner’s heart that he grants our favorite 1990s stand-up 25-percent off all dry cleaning for life. Jerry’s girlfriend du jour this episode, Meryl (a young Courtney Cox) jumps at the chance to save money by falsely introducing herself to said drycleaner as Jerry’s wife.
And thus, the fake marriage begins. Jerry and Meryl experience all the joys of phony married life – the stability, the lack of loneliness, being there for each other, putting all the yucky years of dates that never go anywhere behind them. Alas, the also experience the pitfalls of fake married life, i.e. they take each other for granted, become cold and aloof and eventually Jerry has a fake affair with another woman, taking her clothes to the drycleaners’ behind Meryl’s back just to spread the savings.
My main criticism and…perhaps’ everyone’s criticism of the show is that Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer were not attractive or awesome enough to be able to court, catch and throw away so many love interests because, frankly, even the most attractive, successful and rich people in the world don’t rack up numbers like this. Thus, this episode is nice in that it shows a Jerry feeling happy in the throws of commitment, elated that he found someone to share his life with, even albeit on a fake basis.
Ironically, Jerry sends the majority of his babes packing over trivial, nearly non existent grievances but here, he really has no complaints about Meryl other than his desire to help other women save money on their dry cleaning causes him to stray from his fake wife.
Lesson? When you find the one, keep the one. Don’t get bogged down in thoughts of “Oh, the uber hot super hot hottie” is just around the corner. If only Jerry had turned this fake marriage into a real one.
Side plot: Elaine falls for an ass-face at her gym who acts like he can take or leave her, which counts for 100 percent of the attraction. This leads to a stand off when jerk squares off against George. George peed in a gym shower. Jerk sweated all over a machine and didn’t wipe it off. If Elaine doesn’t report one of them, they’ll report each other, so it’s up to her to choose who goes down first. Will she choose love or friendship?
What’s the deal with blogs that are only read by 3.5 readers? You’d think a blog would have 3 readers or 4 readers but how do you get .5 of a reader? It makes no sense!
BQB here with yet another Seinfeld review. I’m down the rabbit hole now and I’m going to watch them all, sadly.
I’d say this one is up there with The Chinese Restaurant episode as one of the series’ funniest/most memorable. While other sitcoms gave you special episodes and heartwarming lessons, one Mr. Jerome Seinfeld and his BFF Larry David dared to give us a comedy about nothing and yet, in the way it lampooned the ridiculous little absurdities of life, it gave us anything.
Sidenote – if you youngsters ever want to know what the world was like before everyone started carrying cellphones, this episode is your window.
The premise? Jerry and Friends take a Saturday afternoon drive to a mall in Jersey to help Kramer buy an air conditioner. Whilst there, Elaine picks out two goldfish to bring home in a plastic, watery bag. Alas, the crew can’t remember where they parked their car and go on an endless quest in search of it. Time is of the essence as Kramer can’t carry this big appliance forever, George is due to go out to dinner with his parents and if he’s a second late they’ll make his life a living hell, Elaine’s fish are going to be goners if they don’t get into a fresh water bowl STAT and damn it, Jerry has to pee!
Hard to believe we once lived in a world without instant communication. The group makes the mistake of splitting up in the hope of covering more ground. Today, you can do that and just keep in touch with your phones. Back then? Bad idea. Someone finds the car but now where the heck is everyone else? Do I leave and search for them? What if I can’t find the car again? Today you can just call everyone else and tell them where to go. Back then, not so much. Honestly, if you got separated from your group back then, the best thing you can do after searching for a while is just go home and hope they go home too and call you later.
I have also suffered the pain of getting lost in a parking garage, unable to remember where I parked. Today, I always take a photo of the level number, the space number, whatever identifying clues will help me get back there.
Another purgatory type episode that Seinfeld loved to do. Is it a metaphor for life? How long must we endure this misery before we can get where we need to be?
What’s the deal with bloggers reviewing old episodes of Seinfeld?
It’s been on Netflix for awhile now and I finally dove in. It was a rerun staple for years but it has been a long time since I watched them.
I think the funny/scary thing is it’s been so long since I watched them that Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer all seem so young to me now. Like I watch and say, “When will those young people ever get their act together?”
Anyway, this installment of the show about nothing is one of its most memorable. Jerry, George and Elaine go to a Chinese restaurant, only to end up in limbo as they wait and wait and wait only for their table to never come. Bribes, trickery, even begging are tried to no avail and like a wacky metaphor for life, the trio has to decide whether to continue investing time in the hopes waiting will pay off or if it’s better to give up and go somewhere else.
Jerry is hoisted on his own petard when an acquaintance of his uncle who he ditched to go out to eat and see Plan 9 From Outer Space spots him. Elaine debates whether to take a bet to swipe an eggroll from a customer’s table. George has a hot babe on the line but can’t get anyone off the pay phone to call her.
Almost like an early 90s version of Waiting for Godot, the three buddies are trapped in a veritable purgatory of their own design. Should they stay? Should they go? If they wait a little longer, they might get a reward. If they go now, they might find something better. And why the hell is everyone else getting a table before them? What did they do right? What are Jerry and Co. doing wrong?
Bookshelf Battle 