2011年11月30日星期三
Ryan Seacrest gets 3-year restraining order against fan
PICS Derek Hough treats Cheryl Cole to a Subway 6 inch
Will Ferrell I want to play Simon Cowell in a movie
2011年11月28日星期一
Dannii Minogue I'm not upset or angry about being forced to leave The X Factor
Peter Andre I never wished Katie Price any harm
The Apprentice Leon Doyle is fired after losing French sales task to record-breaking Team Venture
2011年11月21日星期一
Jack Tweed Chanelle Hayes is a great kisser
SAD NEWS Jade Goody's mum Jackiey Budden, 55, loses baby at 10 weeks pregnant
2011年11月19日星期六
Barack Obama left off guest list for Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding
2011年11月8日星期二
Review of Mad Men, The Grown-Ups Entertainment TIME.com
Mad Men Watch: Where Were You When?By James Poniewozik | @poniewozik | November 2, 2009 | +Tweet
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SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, slow the playback to one-quarter speed and watch last night’s Mad Men.
As a period drama set in the ’60s, Mad Men had a choice to make: it could depict its characters against the big historical events of the day–which have been treated over and over in movies and TV–or it could skirt around them. Since the first season, Mad Men has committed, more than I would have guessed, to the head-on approach–ending the first two seasons around the 1960 election and the Cuban Missile Crisis–but focusing on how the events affect or reflect the personal lives of the characters, as opposed to “How we all lost our innocence,” &c.
Last night, Mad Men faced the Big One, the Kennedy Assassination, which has loomed over this season since it jumped to the year 1963 and showed us the invites for Margaret’s wedding–on Nov. 23, 1963. The episode brought the news in as if it were the Cloverfield monster, weaving in and out of scenes in which it came this close to pouncing on the characters: CBS News breaks in with a special bulletin just after Harry turns down the volume to talk to Pete, the scene cuts to Don arguing with Lane Pryce Sale ugg boots, Duck unplugs the TV after first news of the shooting.
And then, suddenly, it’s everywhere: on every screen, in every head, every phone ringing at the Sterling Cooper offices. And, as happens in times like this, the TV stays on, through the workday, through the wedding Ugg boots, into the night and the weekend and through Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. Which, as Betty’s horrified reaction starkly showed, was maybe the moment when it seemed that more than a tragedy had happened: everything, everywhere, had just gone crazy, all the sublimated violence bottled up in America was now right out there on the surface and on live TV, and maybe it was just never going to stop, ever.
Then Ugg sale, as they say, everything changes–in the lives of a few of the characters Ugg boots, at least.
A personal digression, for just a minute. My first, knee-jerk reaction to Mad Men using the assassination this way (as the moment when Betty decides things are over with Don and when Pete and Trudy decide things are over with Sterling Cooper), was that life doesn’t really work that way. History is history and life is life and connecting big events in one with big events in the other is artificial.
But then I thought about the closest thing I’ve experienced in my adult life, 9/11, which I was in New York for. And I had to admit that it does work that way, at least sometimes. I won’t bore you with the details, but I made decisions afterward–nothing as momentous as here, but still–that were directly prompted by the fact that, one morning, 3 ugg boots,000 people were killed out of the blue because they took a ride on an airplane or showed up to work at their desks.
Now, would I have done anything differently if the hijackers were caught and 9/11 never happened? I don’t know. I can’t know. Certainly there were other personal factors in my own decisions: I’d just become a father, for instance. It may be that 9/11 changed me; it may be that it crystallized things that were in the back of my mind; or it may be that it simply gave me permission to do things that UGG tall, in the back of my mind, I already wanted to do. And before long, other people I know told me they’d done the same.
Bottom line, though, it made people make personal changes–not everybody, of course–even though, had you written it into a script before, it would have seemed forced.
Digression over. Last week, there was that scene of marvelous ambiguity after Don’s forced confession, when Betty saw him the next morning, handed him his sandwich and seemed stronger and more at peace than we’d seen her in a long time. Were things over, or was their marriage actually on the mend for Don’s having come clean?
Well, three weeks passed and Don and Betty are still together. Then comes The Big One. And then Betty sees Henry at the wedding. Is it the assassination–or that world-gone-crazy Jack Ruby shooting–that forces Betty to decide that she doesn’t love Don anymore? Is it that Henry asks her to marry him, and she sees a practical future after Don? Is it her loveless kiss with Don? Or is it simply something she already knew, but that the holiday of the national trauma–normalcy is suspended, the routine is broken–gives her permission to say out loud?
Last season, the Cuban Missile Crisis arguably saved the Drapers’ marriage, pushing them closer together at the possible end of the world. Last night, it may just be, the country’s next crisis ended their marriage: “There’s no point. There’s no point, Don.”
“The Grown Ups” did a nice job of showing how various characters reacted to the news in their own way. Don’s response coming home was spot-on: his first instinct is to shield the children from the news and get them away from the TV–though he relents and talks to them about the assassination instead, in terms that you might use to talk to kids about Ugg classic tall, oh, say a divorce. We’ll be sad for a while, but we’ll be OK. Peggy, meanwhile, sits bolt upright in bed at the news, shocked, but later–like Don and yet unlike him–goes into the office to immerse herself in her work.
Everything does not change for everyone; Margaret’s wedding still goes on, though her meltdown early in the episode suggests she might have welcomed an excuse to call it off. (Before the assassination, she gives up when Roger calls her bluff on that.) The wedding is, on the one hand, awkward and uncomfortable–especially since, as Pete notes, the room is full of people who never liked JFK to begin with.
And yet there are no good answers here either way. In his eyes, forging on with the wedding is his grown-up responsibility to his daughter. It’s horrible, as Roger later admits to Joan–he’s not stupid, and he’s not unaware of the inappropriateness. Roger has been contemptible in a lot of ways, leaving his wife and sousing his way through his work. But ironically, in this most uncomfortable moment, he’s strangely sympathetic, even as he throws a party while the country is burying a President. He’s slogging through an ugly situation that he knows is ugly, and, as Joan perceptively points out, he’s doing it without his chief weapon: “My God, you’re really upset.” “What’s that about?” “Because there’s nothing funny about this.”
Meanwhile, Peter has been taken down by the slow-motion train that Lane Pryce set on the track toward him in the first episode of the season. There’s no deus ex machina or family connection to save him. He loses the Accounts job, and he loses it to Cosgrove in exactly the same way and for the same reason you would have predicted. Because Cosgrove is blessed. Pete can up his game Pink ugg boots, he can buckle down, he can have insights like the opportunity to market to African-Americans. None of it matters because Cosgrove can do the job better without even trying–just as when he published his short story in the Atlantic.
It’s strange that Pete should become a figure of sympathy for this; after all, he was born on third base. The only reason he has his job is because of his old-money background and his old-school contacts. But he’s run up against the one thing that he can’t beat, which is Ken’s effortless ability to have diamonds fall from the sky into his lap.
And this crushing blow comes after we’ve seen, over three seasons, that for all his unfair advantages, Pete actually does have talents and abilities. Most important, he has a vision that the rest of hidebound Sterling Cooper is unable to appreciate or even notice. He–this kicked-around scion of a blueblood family–somehow became the one person at Sterling Cooper with a sense of where America is heading. (Not always an idealistic sense, either, if you’ll recall how eagerly he picked up on the chilling nukes-and-rockets aerospace presentation last season.) He’s the one who saw Admiral TV’s situation clearly, and got reprimanded for it. He’s the one who saw that the future belonged to young people who didn’t wear hats, like Elvis.
And–bringing it around to the terrible news–like JFK. After the assassination, he sees the situation in a way that sounds like he’s talking about his own career: “It felt for a second like everything was going to change.” But this is not just solipsism talking: it turns out Pete really is a Kennedy man. And while LBJ’s taking over the Presidency may reflect his view of Sterling Cooper–the old guard is reaffirmed, the older generation is back in charge–it also cuts to something deeper and more idealistic. He realizes that he’s just not like them. And more important, Trudy does: in another excellent performance by Alison Brie, who I just praised for her much-different work in Community, she comes around to the idea that Pete can’t simply stay on at work as if nothing is different.
Again, who knows what’s the chicken and the egg here? Does the assassination make Pete see that it’s time for him to make a move? Is he even characterizing his coworkers fairly, or does his petulance over losing his job color the way he sees the assassination? (We never actually see or hear, you’ll note, the horrible comments that he tells Trudy people made about the shooting, and the one specific he offers when asked–”He made a lot of enemies”–is kind of weak sauce.)
In the end, it’s a philosophical question. In the end, for whatever reason, and whether it’s a clich��?or not, everything changes.
And now for the–I don’t mean to be inappropriate, but this blog has traditions too–hail of bullets:
* The entire scene between Pete and Lane is well-played by both Vincent Kartheiser and Jared Harris (Pete contains his emotions but you can see his feelings in the way he sinks back on the couch), but the beauty moment came when Lane removed his glove to shake Pete’s hand. Nice touch.
* So Peggy and Duck are a still thing! We had a big discussion when they hooked up over my (and others’) “ewwww” reaction to Duck as Lothario; sorry, but–besides the ickiness of his coming on to her in the context of a job interview–I couldn’t help remembering him as the weaselly, alcoholic sad sack we met him as. (Which, I don’t know, may be why I react to him differently from fellow drinker and age-inappropriate dater Roger; Sterling can be contemptible, even loathsome, but he’s not pathetic in the same way that Duck was.) But maybe Duck’s changed; in any event, I hope we’ll see more of what draws Peggy to the relationship (if it is a relationship beyond sex). I just want our Peggy to be happy.
* Walter Cronkite’s announcement of JFK’s death is probably the definitive anchor moment of the assassination, so it was good to see Mad Men not go only to that footage but also mix in NBC’s coverage.
* I’m almost surprised that Pete isn’t more resentful of Harry, who–as he himself pretty much acknowledges–had one good idea in his career and is living on the result. (Though he also notes that he’s plateaued; he’s going to die at his desk unnoticed, which may mitigate any jealousy of Pete’s.) It’s only fitting, then, that Harry, whose only job it seems is to watch TV–not that that’s a bad thing!–is five feet from a television when he misses the most important program interruption of his lifetime.
* One last ambiguity to think about. Roger carries his drunk child bride into the bedroom and calls Joan. Maybe it’s true that, at long last, Joan is The One for him–but you have to question his credibility on that judgment. Is he really finding out now what he really wants, or is Joan only The One when she’s unavailable to him?
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Review of Rubicon, Wayward Sons Entertainment TIME.com
Rubicon Watch: Let Me Take You on a Sea CruiseBy James Poniewozik | @poniewozik | October 11, 2010 | +Tweet
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SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, check into a motel and watch last night’s Rubicon.
After ten deliberate genuine ugg boots, talk-heavy episodes, last week Rubicon gave us a taste of the kind of action and violence we expect from other terrorism-and-espionage shows. Now, in the penultimate episode of its season, Rubicon showed that it could deliver tension and suspense and big shocker moments—in ways that still distinguished it from its TV predecessors.
That Will and API failed—barely—to stave off the terror attack was not unique. In season 3 of 24, terrorists partially successfully pulled off a bio-terror attack, killing hundreds, in season 4, the bad guys melt down a nuclear reactor and in season 6, Jack Bauer failed to stop a suitcase nuke from going off in California. But after weeks of hints about Kateb’s intentions, Rubicon elects not to play the top-the-bodycount game ugg women boots, instead having him pull off an economic attack, exploding an oil tanker in Galveston Bay to cripple the energy supply and thus the economy.
As devastating as the attack itself is the punch-in-the-gut way the show delivers the news, having the attack hit the news seconds after Will, thanks to David’s paper on the “Houston problem,” pinpoints the type and location of the attack. The closing moment—Will, falling just short after all his effort, hanging his head in silent despondency—was perfect.
The question now being: what now? Does he, and can he ugg bailey button, try to expose the men he now sees are behind the attack? It’s interesting that, 12 episodes into the season, only now does a character literally bring the show’s title into the story, as Kale explains to Katherine the story of Caesar crossing the Rubicon and effectively ending the Roman Republic. (At which point Cato, like her husband, committed suicide so that his heirs could live in peace under the new order.) While the conspiracy has been at work seemingly for decades, this move—effecting or permitting an attack in American waters—is, like Caesar’s bold move, an act of hostility at home. Does it ugg classic boots, like the crossing of the Rubicon, mean that the action is already too far along to stop?
Caesar, of course, wanted an empire. It’s interesting now to wonder what Truxton Spangler wants. The members of his consortium seem to be after money, but that has never really seemed like his motivation. Failing to stop the attack would seem to be a blow to API, but is it? Having nearly stopped Kateb—whom the government seemingly would not even have been close to without them—could API’s power, and the homeland security state, become only more essential and powerful? Is that his goal?
We’ll have to wait and see. What was in Kateb’s mind, on the other hand, we’ll never truly know, and the glimpses the final manhunt gave us of him were chilling while allowing him to ultimately remain a question mark. (It’s possible the writers kept him an enigma deliberately, to avoid seeming to push a particular political agenda. Having him be a Muslim terrorist on the one hand, but a white American convert a la John Walker Lindh, offers different interpretations for different worldviews. Was he a coldly rational true believer? An insane man and wayward son looking for “something he was good at” and a rationale to act out? Both? Neither?)
In any case, the truly significant thing for Rubicon going forward—and I’m praying it gets a second season—is that it’s all come together now: the terrorist hunt with the conspiracy chase ugg short, Katherine’s investigations with Will’s. One more episode to go from here this season: let’s hope it isn’t the last forever.
Now the hail of bullets:
* As I wrote a few weeks ago, the interesting thing about Rubicon’s terror-hunt story is that its principals have all existed almost entirely on paper and in photographs. So finally seeing Kateb in person was both bathetic and chilling at once, particularly the opening scene of him giggling at a cartoon (was it Heckle & Jeckle?) of a bird causing an explosion. Another nice touch: the way we followed him on his itinerary without seeing where exactly he was (unless, as is wholly possible, I missed some big contextual clues) and thus what his target was.
* No sooner did word of the attack come than characters raised the same question that must have gone through your mind: after the BP spill, what’s one tanker explosion? I visited the set during the shooting of the episode in July—a couple of out-of-context scenes that didn’t spoil anything about the attack—but for all I know the attack may have been imagined as a plot point before the April BP disaster, necessitating that the later explanation be written in.
* How plausible is the idea that the attack itself, as a means of choking off America’s oil supply? You’re asking me? I’m no national-security expert, but a quick Google search did turn up a number of reports and papers about the possibility of an attack on a tanker to create a major chokepoint—if not necessarily Galveston Bay.
* Like Spangler’s conversation with Will (for, he believed, the last time) last week, his talk with Kale was an adroit combination of sentiment and veiled menace; in particular, loved Arliss Howard’s delivery of the line, “I can’t imagine either one of us leaving until they carry us out.” Still one more week for that to happen.
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The Morning After: Fox Shows Teeth in DebateBy James Poniewozik | @poniewozik | August 12 wholesale ugg boots, 2011 | +Tweet
Eight Republican presidential candidates debated on Fox News from Ames, Iowa, in advance of its straw poll this weekend. My colleague Michael Scherer liveblogged it at Swampland, and I’ll let you pick the winner: was it Mitt Romney ugg bailey button, for not doing anything to jeopardize his frontrunner status? Michele Bachmann ugg classic boots, for slapping down an attack on her credentials by Tim Pawlenty? Rick Perry, for looming over the festivities without even showing up?
But the horse race aside, I’ll call the round for Fox. If anyone suspected that the conservative-friendly network would spend the evening lobbing up softballs to the home team, they were mistaken; the panel of Bret Baier, Chris Wallace and guest Byron York spent two hours asking pointed questions, keeping a tight watch on the clock and occasionally getting under the candidates’ skin.
Like many debate moderators ugg women boots, the panel sought to strike sparks off the candidates and get them to spar with each other, but the GOP eight��beginning to come in sight of the actual voting process��were already happy to oblige and try to distinguish themselves. But to their credit, the Fox moderators generally avoided stunt questions or goading, instead sticking sharply to specific issue-based questions and trying to get the candidates on record on difficult issues.
The panel was asked, for instance, to raise their hands if they would refuse a budget deal that traded 10 dollars in budget cuts for every one dollar in revenue increases (every candidate’s hand went up). York asked Bachmann about her statement that she had made a career decision on her husband’s request because the Bible says wives should be “submissive” (the crowd booed York for using Bachmann’s own words). And at one point we saw the awkward spectacle of former Fox contributor Newt Gingrich going on the attack against… Fox, or at least against the “gotcha” questions of Wallace, fixing the moderator with a peeved stare.
Gotcha’s in the eye of the beholder, but at a minimum the debate far outclassed the previous CNN-hosted debate, with its inane “This or That” round asking the candidates to choose between Coke and Pepsi or whatnot. (I very much look forward to the “Boff ugg boots online, Marry, Kill” round in CNN’s next presidential debate.) Fox assumed, rightly genuine ugg boots, that its audience tuned in to watch a 2012 Presidential debate in August 2011, and thus was interested enough not to need things jazzed up for them.
That said, I wouldn’t have objected to Sarah Palin’s driving her tour bus on stage for a surprise appearance at the end. For that, it seems, we’ll have to wait a day or two. How would you rate the debate?
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