Community 1x04

Imagine having Señor Chang as your Spanish teacher! This man is utterly deranged. He received student evaluation cards and actually took the time to analyze the handwriting against past exams to find out who gave him such scathing feedback. Recognizing the little circles dotting the I’s from Annie’s handwriting, he slowly approaches her desk, shoving his face in hers, rubbing his nose against hers, and kissing her forehead. Poor girl! Hilarious, though, but totally insane and creepy. Anyway, this would be the episode in which we are introduced to shirtless, micro-nippled, hacky-sacking, surfer hippie Vaughn (is that his first or last name?) – the most annoying creature to breathe air on earth, but frightfully good looking. Obviously Britta has a crush on him, to Jeff’s great dismay. He tries not to show he’s jealous. Fortunately for him, Britta feels Vaughn is taking it to relationship status too fast and comes to Jeff for advice, which gives him an opportunity to sabotage the relation – but it won’t send Britta rushing into his arms, though. Meanwhile Annie’s taking a psychology lab with Prof. Duncan. The experiment involves making subjects wait unwittingly until they reach their breaking point. Naturally, Señor Chang breaks down the moment Annie walks in to tell the subjects they are running five minutes late! After three hours of waiting, only Troy and Abed are left. Prof. Duncan never counted on this! Troy crawls out, but Abed just keeps sitting in the waiting room, patiently waiting. Twenty-six full hours! It’s Duncan who breaks down in desperation. When Annie confronts Abed about not leaving, he admits he was livid, but stayed because she told him they were friends. Guilt trip! Laugh-out-loud funny!

Modern Family 1x24

This is by far the best episode this season. It made me laugh – and it even made me cry a little. Clair has planned a Modern Family portrait down to the tee in every perfectionist detail. She was able to get the best photographer in town and everyone is going to stand in a single line descending down the stairs dressed in white. Before the photo shoot, though, Phil’s off to a Lakers game. He was supposed to go with Luke, but he has a school project due, so Phil takes Alex instead. Jay was supposed to go with Manny, but Luke’s school project involves interviewing someone who lived through the 60s, so Gloria comes with. Uh-oh! Phil and Gloria alone ... that can’t be good! His first foul: when Haley calls her mom that Phil’s on TV, Clair calls, Haley jokes to tell him she’s pregnant, but Phil ignores the call. Worse: when the Kiss Cam zooms in on Phil and Gloria, he awkwardly refuses, but Gloria puckers him right on the smacker! He’s mortified Clair is going to hurt him!

For his part, Jay is telling tall tales about the 60s after Luke fell asleep listening to his boring stories. Meanwhile, Mitchell stays at home with Lily when Cam is hired to sing “Ave Maria” at a wedding. The scene that ensues is slapstick hilarious! Mitchell is terrified by a pigeon that somehow got inside, but after hiding out in Lily’s room, he mans up and ends up trashing half the place! When it’s finally time for the family portrait, all goes afoul as everyone ends up screaming and flinging mud at each other! Happy times. Well, your Cricket has now watched the complete first season and still doesn’t really enjoy the series... There have been a few nice episodes, like this one, but the rest just seemed mediocre to me. Should I continue with the second season? Will it get better or stay more of the same?

In Treatment 3x20

Paul drops off Max in Maryland, begging him not to worry about him. He briefly meets Steve, but declines to come in for coffee, as he has to get back to Brooklyn for his own session with Adele. He arrives late, with a great show of how bad he feels, taking aspirins in her office. He tells her he owes it to her that he finally spoke with Max, which made him realize that his son only came to live with him out of concern. Paul again makes a great show of this achievement, but it was only after the pancake incident (and the confrontation with Jesse) that he came to discuss his situation with Max. When Adele points out his demonstrative behavior, Paul angrily turns the conversation to his revelation in the last session. He may have dismissed it then, but he still needs to hear her response to his admission of his feelings for her. He genuinely feels they could make each other happy. It requires titanic tact and patience for Adele not to burst out – either in anger or laughter. Allowing his reverie to continue, Paul imagines they could discuss patients over wine, just as he now would like to hear her thoughts about Sunil. Adele indicates, that since he arrived late, their time is almost up, but Paul persists – explaining that he knows he is her last patient of the week – because he stayed in front of her building for an hour last time – and forcing her to extend their session (as if his situation is as critical as Jesse’s). When she hears about his stalk-like behavior, she has had it. He has asked her to be many things for him – his supervisor, his colleague, his life partner – anything, but his therapist. She bluntly confronts him with his paralysis to act in his life, with his son (waiting until a crisis occurs to talk to him), his patients (refraining from contacting authorities, even though he worries Sunil might harm someone), his girlfriend (not making up his mind whether to break up with Wendy or not), his health (persisting to believe he has Parkinson’s despite medical evidence to the contrary). Still, she offers to schedule two sessions a week to help him make progress – which he flatly refuses. What a wonderful show!

The Ghost Writer

The Cricket only just now caught The Ghost Writer (2010) by Roman Polanski. It’s an interesting movie – and when saying “interesting” you may detect a hint of reservations. The story has ambitions that unfortunately remain unrealized. The unnamed eponymous ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) is hired to rewrite the memoirs of the former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) – a barely disguised stand-in for Tony Blair. Lang’s previous ghost writer just died from drowning under suspicious circumstances. When the writer moves from London to the U.S., where Lang is staying for a lecture tour (the town is a fictional Old Haven, on an island off Massachusetts, thus Martha’s Vineyard), a conspiracy slowly starts to unfold. Not only was the ghost writer’s predecessor murdered, Lang is accused of illegally extraditing terrorist suspects to the U.S. and faces possible war crime charges in The Hague. The writer discovers a connection between Lang and the CIA, involving a Cambridge classmate, Paul Emmett (Tom Wilkinson), who is now a Harvard professor. Additionally, it becomes clear that Lang is having an affair with his personal assistant Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall), while his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) grows evermore impatient at her husband’s unwillingness to take her advice as he used to. The ghost writer gets chased around and eventually contacts Lang’s former Foreign Minister Richard Rycart (Robert Pugh), who is now the U.N. envoy who accuses Lang of the illegal seizure of terrorist suspects.

The film – and the novel by Robert Harris on which it is based – poses some appropriate questions about the post 9-11 political landscape. Unfortunately, it never really explores these questions in any depth. It certainly is baffling that a Labour PM could have been such an American lapdog – especially at the time of the Bush administration. Adam Lang, however, remains a rather flat character, more of a womanizer and heavy drinker. We get no indication what motives him, why he is such a staunch pro-American, or what his thoughts are on the war on terror. We are led to believe that he merely became politically active through his wife Ruth, who was his trusted advisor for years. We get no indication either what motivates her, why she is throwing temper tantrums, or why she approaches the ghost writer for solace and sleeps with him. In the end, we learn that she has been a CIA agent from the start, recruited by Emmett, and thus her emotional instability becomes only more puzzling and her motivations even more obscure. There’s a hint at a rightist intellectual think-tank, Arcadia, with ties to the CIA and a weapons dealer in whose private jet Lang is flying. It is all tossed in our direction, perhaps even vindictively, for us to make sense of. But the moral quandaries, the fascinating grey area between good and bad, are left unaddressed. It is, for one, a government’s responsibility to protect its citizens, whether from terrorism or other menaces. How to implement national security without breaching human rights, international laws, and personal privacy, those are important questions from which this film shies away.

Even on the level of a thriller the movie falters. Polanski employs some of the usual ploys to create suspense: it rains a lot, skies are broodingly dark, much of the actions takes place on an isolated island, the ghost writer stays at an empty hotel, until a crowd of journalists and protesters swarm all over the place, Lang’s modern minimalist villa is menacingly impersonal; then there are the eerie strings on the soundtrack, the car chase, suspicious people in the background. The tension between the characters, however, could have been emphasized to greater advantage, and should have been the main focus. Cattrall’s Bly just stands there as Williams’ Ruth throws fits of frustration, while Brosnan’s Lang sits and looks on. The best scene, in terms of suspense, is carried by Wilkinson’s Emmett, fiddling nervously with his fingers while sternly rebutting the ghost writer’s insinuations. The penultimate scene in which the ghost writer passes on a note at the book presentation to confront Ruth about his discovery is utterly senseless – it fails as the final act and remains implausible from the ghost writer’s perspective (or we have to acknowledge that he is just plain stupid). To bring home the conspiracy hypothesis, the ghost writer gets run over while trying to escape with Lang’s original (coded) manuscript.

On a personal level, we might speculate that Polanski was driven to produce and direct an anti-American film. While editing the movie, he was himself under siege, i.e., under house arrest in Switzerland facing possible extradition on account of pending charges of sexual abuse going back over thirty years. Such a personal motivation may, in part, explain the rather one-sided perspective and why the moral dilemmas facing the various characters is so little explored. In the end, Adam Lang is no more than a mindless pawn in American imperialism, manipulated by his wife, both hungry for a figment of power and the easy comfort that comes with it. That is not to say that I personally condone the extradition of terrorist suspects so that they can disappear in detention camps until they confess under torture – or die. I do believe, however, that Polanski’s personal experience of facing extradition (in his mind, at least) on trumped up charges plausibly suggests that he sympathizes with the victims of Guatánamo Bay. Yet, America is not the embodiment of everything that’s wrong in this world. These are times in the grip of terrorism, which – whatever its motives or leanings – is easily identifiable as criminally evil. This film never addresses this side of the story, other than in politicians’ hollow sound bites. To your Chirping Cricket, that’s a missed opportunity.

Californication 4x09

After a pep talk with Abby Rhodes, Hank returns to his hotel room, only to find he is locked out because his credit card declined his bill of a meager $25,000. Instead of knocking on someone’s door or finding a floozy to go home with, he sleeps in his Porsche in front of Karen’s house. In the morning, with bird poo on his shirt, Becca finds him and asks him in. They actually manage to get over the awkwardness and have a nice day together – almost like a family – teaching Becca to drive. Then it’s evening time, and handsome Ben is stopping by to drop off Pearl and pick up Karen. Hank gets bitter, fails to make a decent meal for the girls, and can’t connect with Pearl. He falls asleep, they nick his car keys and sneak out. When the girls crash the Porsche, without hurting anyone, Ben is livid, but both Becca and Karen stand up for Hank that the girls would have tried the same if it had been Karen who dozed off. Could this be the end of Ben? Let’s hope so.

Meanwhile, Runkle continues his freaky affair with the real estate agent Peggy, pretending to be siblings and acting rough between the sheets. Marcy still has not told Stu that she isn’t carrying his child, but Runkle’s. For his part, Stu asks Marcy to invite Runkle for dinner – plus one is okay – in an effort to behave as adults, while setting Marcy up to rub the joyous news. Marcy is stunned that Runkle is dating their real estate agent, but he points out the hypocrisy in that: she’s the one who has already moved in with one of the richest producers in town; he is just enjoying being single. At the dinner table Stu regales his guests with Hollywood stories, while Marcy keeps dodging his cues to tell Runkle about her pregnancy. She pours a glass of wine for courage and Stu yells, “the baby!” Runkle pretends to be unfazed and happy for Marcy, but can’t help notice it’s a little soon, since they only know each other for six weeks. Back in Runkle’s car, Peggy acts jealous of Runkle’s affection for Marcy, but ends up going down on him anyway. “Another Perfect Day,” as per the episode’s title.

Boardwalk Empire 1x08

The Cricket is pleased to say that all the patient waiting is starting to pay off. This was by far the best episode since the pilot, with just enough intrigue, action and drama to make watching the rest worth my while. Nucky Thompson heads to Chicago for the Republican Convention and even manages to tip the hotel manager enough to get the Presidential Suite, while presumed-Republican candidate General Leonard Wood gets shoved off to the Ambassador’s Suite! Nucky explains that Wood is “a war hero, a former chief-of-staff, and a practical shoehorn for the Republican presidential nomination,” while he on the other hand is a “magnificent tipper.” What a character! Then Nucky meets that backstabbing, double-dealing Senator Edge, who is hoping to win the vice-presidential nomination and asks him to attend a party in his stead hosted by Harry Daugherty, the campaign manager of Warren Harding. (If you know you’re U.S. history, you’ll know that Harding will be elected President.) When Nucky realizes Harding is having an affair with a woman who had his baby, he offers to help keep her out of the picture in Atlantic City until the elections are over. In return he demands that Senator Edge be blocked from the vice-presidential nomination. Nucky sits down with Torrio in the Four Deuces to talk business, speaks with some Ohio Judge who assures him to trust Daugherty, and meets Jimmy who’s looking mighty fine in his new suit. Nucky barely gives Jimmy a second glance, but merely chides him for not looking after his wife and kid.

Jimmy’s wife Angela has not been receiving any money from her estranged husband, but she refuses to find a job – despite Gillian’s reproach. She is hoping to find an art dealer in New York willing to sell her paintings in his gallery. We soon learn that Jimmy has been sending Angela money from Chicago, but that that self-righteous flagellant Agent Van Alden has been intercepting his letters hoping to find any evidence of Jimmy’s involvement in the death of five men. Van Alden’s wife Rose begs him for a surgery she believes would cure her infertility. He consoles her he will look into his finances, but in the end writes her she should trust in god’s plan – and turns Jimmy’s money over to Angela. Meanwhile in Atlantic City, Sheriff Eli Thompson takes over some of his brother’s responsibilities. Sitting in Nucky’s office, he’s waiting for all the people who usually show up asking favors, handing bribes, or bringing collection money. But no one appears, except Ward Boss O’Neill who excuses himself from the week’s collection at the casino. Eli decides to pick up the money himself – unwittingly walking into the D’Alessio brother’s hold up at the casino. Eli gets shot in the stomach and is taken to a hospital.

For her part, Margaret is enjoying some time with her new friend Annabel, when a drunk Lucy throws a scene for being replaced as Nucky’s mistress – and suddenly without money. After trying to calm her down, Margaret slaps Lucy in the face, tells her the next slap won’t be half as pleasant, and walks off. When Nucky is informed of the shooting, he calls Margaret, tells her to move into the Ritz with her children, and asks her to safeguard the ledger he keeps in his office desk. He will return on the next train from Chicago. At night he asks Jimmy to return to Atlantic City, realizing that he’s held under siege, though not yet knowing by whom. Jimmy reminds him that just a few hours ago he paid him barely half a glance. But Nucky cautions him that the Italian mobsters won’t let an Irishman get too far. He offers Jimmy a share in profits and assures him he will take care of Van Alden. Margaret resisted the urge to open the ledger all night, but the next morning she flips it open – finding full evidence of all Nucky’s illegal trades. See, things are seriously starting to heat up! Just a few more episodes, but I have enough faith to believe the show is going to get more interesting from here on.

Community 1x03

Jeff signs up for what he believes to be an easy A: no tests, no papers, just one assignment – to live in the moment. Should be a cakewalk for Jeff. He encourages his study group to all sign up for it, too, but Abed can’t. His father will only pay for courses that will help him run their falafel restaurant. He would rather take film classes. Sweet Britta immediately offers to pay for the course. Then Troy sneezes, and Jeff exclaims, “Hey, Troy sneezes like a girl.” He retorts, “How about I pound you like a boy? That didn’t come out right.” Shirley prays they all leave Troy alone. “You’re not my mother,” he replies. “She’s not?” Pierce asks. “Twenty-nine seconds,” Jeff remarks, referring to his bet Pierce would say something racist within one minute. With most of his friends in tow, Jeff gets picked out by the professor for being a cocky opportunist with no intention of seizing the day. Now Jeff has to prove somehow that he is genuinely living in the moment. That’s going to be tough. Ridiculous outfits and flying kites won’t cut it. Hilarious holy war ensues when Abed’s father comes to campus and gets in a confrontation with Britta while his son is filming everything for his first documentary. The father dashes off, leaving Britta and Jeff to look after Abed, who just keeps filming. When he’s done, he shows it to Britta, Jeff and his father. In the end, his father cries. His son is hard to understand, but if making films will make him understood, he will pay for the classes. The falafel business will be his fall back. That even made the cynical Cricket cry! Jeff and Britta walk off, she thanks him for being there for Abed, he jokes that must make her feel uncomfortable, she tells him to kiss her already. “A+ Winger!” the professors exclaims. “Where even,” Britta smiles. “I know a live changing kiss when I see one,” the professor explains. “Yea,” Jeff sighs, staring after Britta as she leaves. Aaah, what a show! Love it.