Reviews and stuff - TV and movies

And now onto the reviews:

Deadwood, Season 1 – 8.0

The first few episodes are a bit slow but I started to really get into it towards the end of the season as the story arcs came into focus. Al Swearengen is a great anti-hero - he really makes the whole show work. Everyone else plays off of him, Cy’s introduction as another relatively bad guy was effective, as was Trixie’s evolving role as Al’s beaten down but essential companion (I don’t know what’s a good word for her relationship with Swearengen…). Seth and the doc are both likeable ‘good guys’ and E.B. is the opposite – easily hateable. Even, the arc with the little one (for some reason it delights me every time someone calls the little girl ‘the little one’), which I was highly skeptical about, turned out to be solid. Hell, Alan Matthews from Boy Meets World even showed up.

With all that said, the highlight of the show for me is pretty much every scene Calamity Jane is in. She’s fucking hilarious (gotta let the f-bombs fly when talking about Calamity Jane). Omar from The Wire is still the best character on TV, especially now since the fucking smoke monster took Mr. Eko out of the running, but Calamity Jane is up there with some of my other favorite current TV characters like Desmond, Dwight Schrute, and Hiro Nakamura.

Heroes, Season 1 – 8.0

Speaking of Hiro Nakamura, I also watched the whole first season of Heroes. It has a lot of similar elements that make LOST so effective – an interesting and fresh idea behind the show (though not that that fresh since it is pretty damn similar to X-Men), good ongoing storylines and cliffhangers that make it hard to stop watching, intriguing mysteries, and several good characters. Hiro is easily my favorite, but I also like Claire, Mohinder, Mr. Bennet, Isaac, D.L., and Agent Weiss … I mean Parkman, to name a few. However, unlike LOST, a few of the main characters kind of suck (suck might be too strong a word – let’s just say I don’t like them that much). The Niki and Micah and Peter and Nathan Petrelli storylines never grabbed me. And Sylar’s a good villain, but him getting away is getting a little old – they should’ve let him die in the finale and moved on to something else, in my opinion. My other main qualm is that the acting, at times, has been pretty bad. The main culprit is the dude playing Peter Petrelli – he’s gotten better (or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it) as Peter has become more and more badass, but he was terrible at the beginning of the season. The actress playing Niki isn’t so great either. I’m sure everyone is tired of me professing my love for LOST but this aspect of Heroes makes me appreciate it even more – for a cast that big to have excellent acting throughout is amazing.

Sicko – 6.0

The overall point of this movie is right on – there are a lot of fucked up aspects of our healthcare system that need to be fixed and we could probably learn something by looking at some other countries like Canada and *gasp* even France. Michael Moore took a much more understated approach in attempting to prove this point than he has in his previous films. This might be an effective way to gain more widespread support for his ideas, except most of the people who disagree with the point of the movie would never see it because it is after all still directed by Michael Moore. However, despite its merits, this more understated approach also made a more boring movie than anything else Moore has done. It especially dragged in the last half hour, though the ending in Cuba was quite good. If I didn’t agree with the message wholeheartedly, I’d probably drop a point or four off my rating.

Toy Story 1 and 2 – 7.0

So I never saw these, mainly because when the first one came out in 1995, I was in that backlash against animated movies phase of my boyhood, and never saw a reason to watch them anytime since. Well the updated AFI top 100 movies of all-time list, in which Toy Story comes in at #99, gave me all the reason I needed – if I can watch The Gold Rush or An American in Paris Toy Story wouldn’t be so bad (and you can expect a post coming up in the next day or two on the AFI list – I meant to do it when the list came out right before I left but never got around to it). then I figured I didn’t expect I would like Toy Story a whole lot, mainly because I don’t like animated/pixar/dreamworks movies all that much, but I watch as AFI commands. Well, I was pleasantly surprised. These were clever and entertaining, perfectly paced (keeping them at 90 minutes or less was very smart), and not quite touching, but at least not cringe-worthy. Best of the bunch when it comes to the new generation of animated films, except for maybe The Incredibles or Shrek 1.