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MrAristocrates posted:I've only seen the pilot of Twin Peaks, so I'm gonna commit to both seasons of that by September 22. I've never watched Twin Peaks, beyond the first ten minutes of the pilot. So, yep, I'm going to commit to it as well.
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Jun 29, 2014 23:50
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 10:36 |
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Super excited to finally get started on Twin Peaks tomorrow. Gathered a few friends together, and the plan is to marathon our way through at least the first season and a half. Let you goons know how it all goes.
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Jul 16, 2014 08:35
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Half an hour into Twin Peaks, and I'm not sure if I'm loving, but I know it's important an important show, so I'll soldier on. I think I've been taught to expect the incredibly weird from this show, and I doubt the show's going to live up to its latent image. I'm laughing/cringing/moved by the various character's reactions to Laura Palmer's death, though. Almost everyone seems to fall apart the instant they hear she's dead, into these ridiculous, totally un-tv, and yet completely real hiccup sobs from which they just can't be roused. It's utterly hysterical, but the various characters standing at the margins who are sort of tapping their feet and waiting for the plot to start are relatable figures. Can't decide if Bobby's hot or the Dork Who Walks, though that's probably part of the attraction. The teens in general are, umm, a strange sort of gangly group. Not sure what to make of them yet. I'll finish the pilot, and write up thoughts as I go in the Twin Peaks thread, but thought I'd check in here first.
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Jul 20, 2014 10:49
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I'm not enjoying Twin Peaks, which makes me really sad. Can I change my Toxx at this stage?
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Aug 13, 2014 14:43
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As part of my  , I said I'd watch all of Twin Peaks, but I couldn't, because it was Just Not My Thing. It was slow, (deliberately paced to be sure, but stultifying all the same), and the characters unravelled their motivations at snail's pace (and, at times, with worse acting). The weirdness was fun and wonderful about half the time, and then the other half the time it was just silly and pointless. Not sure if the incidents with the brothel were meant to grab my attention, but they didn't. The lead character, the FBI guy? I found him to mostly just be incompetent, and honestly pretty creepy, rather than wonderfully goofy and inspirational.The sad part is, and I think it is sad, is that I legitimately tried to love this show. No, no, don't roll your eyes, I know everyone says that when it's clear they can't stand a show and they're selfishly waiting for it to please them. But I really tried to meet this one in the middle. I tried saying the lines I felt like I was meant to say (Coop's the best! He's so funny! He and Audrey are precocious and electric, rather than strangely sexless!), and while the words were coming out of my mouth, I just wasn't believing them at all, and I had no motivation to even finish out the first season. So, instead I watched... Xena! Which I'd never seen before, other than the (very) odd episode[1] I remember from my childhood, when it was airing on Channel Nine over here. Glad to see that my swirly memories were at least slightly correct -- there is indeed a lot of strange wirework and jumping. And Ancient Gree-- I mean Rom-- I mean, like, The Ancient World, really, really loved adobo mud huts for some reason. I remember that really well. To whit, I've watched a season and a half of the show, thus finishing out my debt of with more than an equivalent amount of hours. Generally speaking, I really like the show. I think I'm not supposed to like Xena, since it's campy as gently caress (and what I've seen of Hercules, its parent show, is actually pretty boring). But Xena, the character, loving rules. She's so loving macho, which is startling refreshing for tv female characters, and Lucy Lawless is basically metal. Renee O'Connor pretty flip and light as Gabriel to be sure, so I'm not trying to put her down when I say that Xena is just so much better than the rest of the show entirely -- and it's really fantastic to see the rest of the show recognise this, and pick up its game accordingly. I mean, the show was never "bad" bad, but takes a noticeable uplift in the final few episodes of Season 1, and Season 2 is just something completely else. The stunts, the pacing, just the sheer volume and ambition of the action sequences is astounding. But the most astounding thing is that the show decided to loving Go There with its two leads, which is just so loving amazing. Speaking as a queer man, I can think of exactly one other science-fiction or fantasy show to expressly treat the lead as gay in a fairly incidental, but also essential way, and that other show just started last year. Xena's incredibly groundbreaking for what it is, and even when they have a slightly retrograde episode (the beauty pageant episode), its still amazingly groundbreaking. I mean Xena loving made out with a transwoman. Fucks sake. Amazing. Shame all the online reviews are basically transphobic about that episode, but what the gently caress. People who write reviews on the Internet are idiots, yeah? Speaking of: I've no space to cover a blow-by-blow of all the episodes, but I'll submit a list of the episodes that present the most significantly in my mind up until "A Day In The Life", which is the episode I'm currently partway through. * The Cradle Of Hope. The first episode of the show I conceptually enjoyed, mostly for its silly myth mash-up. Pandora's Box meets Oedipus Rex. Sure, why not? It's all Greek to me. * Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts. I love that Helen Of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, is an actor of colour. She's also a pretty great character in this, and Gabriel and her love interest have pretty good chemistry as the Cressidae and Troilus of this narrative (he's in far too few episodes though, to justify his upcoming death). But generally speaking, I'm not sure that the story of the Trojan Horse is good fodder for a story like this, it's just too famous to work as effective thriller material. Maybe if this episode was framed as more of a tragedy, but it's not. * Athens City Academy Of Performing Bards. A clip show, but also a surprisingly good use of Gabriel, who's not really had much of a showing beyond playing the damsel, or the little girl sidekick. Kinda loved that the clips weren't just from Xena, but from a bunch of Hollywood films too, like Kubrick's Spartacus. Also Euripedes was a great joke of a character. Incidentally, the dad in this episode has a hilariously terrible American accent, that just makes his Kiwi accent thicker, somehow. Generally the show's been fine with accents, but I'd rather the show just let some Greeks be from New Zealand, rather than forcing actors to lower the standard of their performance with unwieldy accents. One of the things that I really appreciated about the new BSG is that it let Lucy Lawless use her native accent part of the time, and I think that's less of a risk than most shows think it is. * Mortal Beloved. I love how casually badass Xena is at the start of this one. Crazy woman runs into a bar, is all "Help! Help! I've seen a ghost!" and then Xena, who's barely in shot, is halfway out the door and ready to deal with it. Getting poo poo done. Generally speaking, I like this episode a lot, even though I realise it's not that great. I've no great love for the two returning guest stars in this episode, they're just kind of there for continuity's sake. The episode also ends an act too early, with the death of the primary villain, and then just goes on for another ten minutes of sort of morbid crap. The final confrontation's really good though... I'm torn. The underwater photography is pretty good in this, and that shot of Gabriel looking over the lake, with the strange symmetrical vanishing point is sufficiently spooky to justify the inclusion of an otherwise completely pointless scene. The bright pink mists of the Underworld are kinda bad though, and I'm no special effects snob, but those Harpies were a mistake. Bit of a mixed bag, honestly. * The Prodigal. Not the most amazing of episodes, if I'm honest, but it's the first by Chris Manheim, who's basically kind of amazing. His writing strikes me as having the right balance of silly camp and seriousness to it, like a pre-fame Jane Espenson. I mean this episode has a joke about characters being crushed by a trolley full of spikes described as "death a la cart". That's loving amazing. (Also, like Jane Espenson, he's got a real talent for being able to write episodes really quickly to a high level of quality -- writing four out five episodes in a row, part way through Season 2). * Altared States. Worth a mention entirely for the opening scene, which features a naked Xena and Gabriel standing naked(?) and neck deep in water, pulling fish out from between their legs. Ostensibly Xena's teaching her to fish, but... * Callisto. She's just so loving cool, you know? I really loving love that they went to the effort of bringing her back so often in the second season. (I feel like that's really building to something, you know? I'm so loving psyched.) The fight sequence at the end of this episode is just amazing, with all that wire work over that giant wall set. Rewatching the scene, I'd forgotten just how loving great the director's compositions are. So, so cool, and so much _bigger_ than the stunts we tend to see on television these days. Massive shame. * Is There A Doctor In The House. This probably shouldn't take on the vaugely apocalyptic feel that it does, lent power by the fact that it's a season finale rather than some episode of the week. * Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Xena does Dracula -- or, more specifically, that very 90's type of vampire episode that inspired similar riffs in Buffy, or Alias, or whatever. This is batshit, but I love it. ORPHEUS IS A ROCK GOD! MYTHOLOGICAL NIGHTCLUB! Also the Harpies -- sorry, I mean, "Dryads" -- look so much better this time around. * Warrior... Princess... Tramp Fun, and funny. A French farce as a sequel to the previous French farce episode, but that was good and this was great, so I'm not complaining. Again, Lawless is able to sell the various characters with little effort, though I think her Meg is better than her Dianna. * The Xena Scrolls. A clip show episode, that's also a riff on Indianna Jones. Need I say more? Well, probably. For a clip show episode (when exactly did this genre die out? Sometime around Stargate?) there are a surprising number of cool stunts and action sequences. Honestly, this didn't look particularly cheap, not that I mind, since the lack of new incident and spectacle is usually the biggest criticism of this kind of genre these days. Still, I love the outfits and the look of the show. * Intimate Stranger Like I said, I really love Callisto, and this is by far the best of her episodes so far this season. The writers have shown an admirable creativity with the character, and managed to keep her scary and threatening in each appearance, despite her continually losing. Her attack on Argo's pretty brutal, but I do wish they'd just gone whole hog and have her actually murder someone. Lucy Lawless and Hudson Leik are pretty spectacular in this. * Here She Comes, Miss Amphipopolis Sweet, and wears its heart on its sleeve, and the most obviously feminist and queer positive episode of the show (so far, anyway). I like that the episode makes an effort to present a whole bunch of different perspectives and sides to its issues, and while I'm a little sad that the reveal of the saboteur isn't more thematically relevant (it should have been the female servant, surely!) it did, at least, surprise me. Even though I recognise the faults in this episode, it's episodes like this that make me want to talk about television. Not because it agrees with my take identity politics (and it doesn't), but because there's just so much thought and process put into the episode's structure. * Destiny. There's a really beautiful cut in this episode. Xena's dying in the present, dreaming of her history. In her memories she's just been crucified, her legs broken by an itinerant Julius Caesar. Suddenly we cut to timelapse images of ice and snow, never before seen on the show, and Gabriel is dragging Xena's body across the screen. This floored me. I love that the show can afford to be slightly experimental, like Farscape could, perhaps by virtue of being more than slightly away from the equalising fist of Hollywood Production Standards. Karl Urban is good value as Caesar (his third? role for this show? They really like their recurring cast of players), and this is a pretty good example of the more serious side of the show, for the chumps who'd prefer that to something like... * The Quest. The kiss is great, especially since it makes text what has until now mostly been subtext. And also since it cuts off just after Xena and Gabrielle have locked lips, instead of before. Bruce Campbell does some great body work when he's possessed, and Melinda Clarke puts in one of her best performances as Velasca (particularly in the second half, when she's completely off her chump). Also, nothing can beat an actual on-set explosion. Nothing. [1] Something about being turned into a mermaid and giving birth to a tentacle monster? Also, it's set at a country club. Because of course it was. A quick google tells me that it was this, which, What the ever-loving-gently caress? How's that not appointment television.
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Sep 22, 2014 16:52
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