Film and TV reviews

Incredibly fun French film about an intrepid female journalist at the turn of 20th century.  She gets into all sorts of adventures not to get or impress a man, instead she does it all to heal her sister who she injured in a tennis game.  It's wildly fun and super entertaining.

The first three series of this Irish import about criminals in Dublin is terrific.  The machinations behind all the drug running, the thefts, and cold blooded murders are incredibly interesting if you like this sort of thing, which I very much do.  This show features stand out performances by Tom Vaughn-Lawlor as the sociopath gangster Nidge, Charlie Murphy as the girlfriend of a gangster who suffers catastrophic collateral personal damage, and Susan Loughnane as the top gangster's girlfriend who becomes a junkie hooker.  This one is available through Netflix and HuluPLUS.

Very well done adaption of Douglas Adams creation.  The producers opted to use Adams novels as a template rather than to slavishly follow his original stories and it all works.  It's wildly funny and Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd are perfect foils.  This show is airing on Acorn TV.

Hilariously twisted 'retelling' of the controversy surrounding the Monty Python film 'The Life of Brian.'  This movie skewers everyone involved, the hysterical Christians who were so easily offended even though the film didn't mock their religion, the BBC, and most importantly of all the guys in Monty Python.  Once again Darren Boyd, as John Cleese, stands out.  This one is airing on Acorn TV.

Good but wildly over acted adaption of the Shakespeare play by the same name.  Feinnes makes the same mistake most British actor/directors make when adapting these type of films for modern audiences and that mistake is going so far over the top in his portrayal of his character that it detracts from the story.  He's all bluster and spit, which would have been fine if this had been a stage adaption, but on film, a much more intimate medium, he needed to tone down his performance.  All in all, this film isn't bad, it's just not that good, although, a usual Vanessa Redgrave is magnificent.

Pop Culture Friday

Welcome to Pop Culture Friday, a new recurring feature, actually it will recur as long as I remember to do it each week, here on Mnkey Muck. Every Friday the folks over at the Onion AV club do a feature where they answer questions about pop culture. So the idea Pop Culture Friday is if I like that week's question then I will chime in with my answer here on my blog.

This week's question is, "What are your pop culture sacred cows?"

Mine are the movie Heathers and three of the films from Monty Python.

Heathers is perhaps the finest, funniest black comedy ever made and if you have seen it and you don't agree with me on that then we're going to have a problem. I first saw it with a gal I was living with, this was before I met Sparky, and as I was watching it I was laughing like crazy because I got it. I understood the jokes and the references they were making and I laughed my ass off while she and I watched it. The gal I was with had no idea why I was laughing, she did not get it at all. In fact, she kept hitting me and telling me to shut up because it wasn't right that I was laughing at all the 'bad' stuff in the movie. She and I did not last but Heathers did.

Okay, I'll be magnanimous and give you a pass if you saw Heathers and didn't get it. But I swear if you saw any of the following movies:and you didn't like them or you thought they were not funny then you and I can never be friends. I can understand why some people don't like the old Monty Python TV shows, especially young people who never had to live in the comedy deprived world we who grew up in the 60's and 70's did, because some of the episodes are a bit dated now. But I draw the line at these three cinematic comedy Python classics. If you don't like them then you need to have your funny bone examined because it's broken. Or perhaps you might be a humorless right winger or tight assed Christian who hates it when people laugh and have fun. If that's the case then I don't want to be friends with you anyway.

Long live Heathers and Monty Python!

Here's one of the reasons why I'm glad I'm no longer a Roman Catholic

Conversation snippets

I just got off the phone with the "customer service" people at Charter Cable. One of the women I talked to was a woman who said that she understood how frustrated I was. I told her, "Miss, you have no idea how frustrated I am."

She shot back, "Yes I do."

I said, "These outages have been going on for months, so you have no idea how frustrated I am over all this mess."

"Yes I do sir," she said.

I said, "No, you don't know how I feel."

She insisted, "Yes, I do."

"Stop contradicting me," I told her.

"I'm not."

"Yes you are!"

"No, I'm not."

I asked, "Do you know what the word contradict means?"

"Yes."

"No, I don't think you do."

"Yes I do sir."

I felt like I was trapped in this Monty Python sketch:

After she hung up on me I took many deep breaths to try to cleanse my mind and body of her corporate idiocy. I don't think it worked too well yet.