What I Watched

Parenthood Season Finale

GENERAL SPOILER ALERT: They all live happily ever after.

Thinking about Parenthood, tonight, I thought about Little Women and Jo. In that book, Jo experienced some true disappointment. She worked for an impossible aunt with the promise that her efforts would eventually be rewarded with  a trip to Europe. But when the time came, the aunt told Jo that she didn't believe that Jo was of a suitable temperament to accompany her, that she would prefer to take Amy, Jo's sister, a sibling that Jo helped support by working for the impossible aunt, a pretty younger sister who had never had to take on the responsibilities of Jo. As a reader, this felt unfair, but it also felt real and imaginable.  The trip had further consequences. While in Europe, Amy fell in love with Laurie, the next door neighbor who Jo had turned down, much to this reader's initial disappointment, because she felt they were more suited to be friends. It was another hard decision, against sentimental reason, with consequences.

Parenthood seemed to in the end vote for sentimentality with both feet. A man is unfaithful to his fiancee. She will eventually forgive him and there will be a speedy wedding where true, undying love is declared, even though another promising life beckoned with a man who seemed mature, stable, and genuinely adored her and her son. Two brothers partner together on a start-up and are offered literally millions of dollars for their venture. One of the brother is a savvy businessman who has a daughter about to start attending an Ivy League school and a child recently diagnosed with special needs. His wife recently had another baby. They have financial issues. The other brother does not want to sell; the business is his dream. The brothers never seriously discuss the deal. The brother in need eventually announces that they will decline it, because he enjoys working with his brother so much. In another instance, one of the sisters is dating a younger man. She breaks up with him, because she realizes that she doesn't want to have more children, and that may be something that he really wants. At the end of the show, he comes back and say all of that doesn't matter, and they are now engaged.

Let me say that if the show continues, I will still watch it,  but I would have to always exercise or eat my lunch at the same time, and it would not get a place on the DVR hierarchy. I would be watching it on Demand.  If they would start making some hard choices. I could just sit and watch. I would fight for its right to be recorded.  But I would need some genuine complexity to enter the picture. If everything is eventually going to lead to Door #2 and behind that is sunshine and lollypops, where is the genuine drama of the story of a family? This show used to take some risks. Maybe it's just a case of low ratings, of wanting to tie everything up nicely after fighting for survival basically since its inception, that has caused this simplification and soapiness. I wish it didn't have to end the season and perhaps the series this way. The Bravermans used to be a much quirkier bunch.

Smash

I put off watching this show and then, once I started, I ran through both episodes in one sitting. It definitely is the type of show for people who grew up loving musicals. It has that larger than life glamour about it. It feels like those old-fashioned television shows where there were big budgets and production values and lots of stars. It is definitely one of those shows where I can't imagine that it will last, because it feels more like a movie. It seems like it would be both expensive and time-consuming to produce. Can this type of show still exist on network television as a weekly show?

On the Firewall and Iceberg podcast, Daniel Feinberg said the third episode (tonight's offering) was wretched. I have lowered my expectations, but I almost didn't even record this show and I waited two weeks before even giving it a try. It is something now that I plan to watch.

Love Crime

This year, for whatever reason, I am interested in resolutions. What small step can I take to do something that will be ultimately beneficial for me in some way?

One thing I decided to do was to watch a French film each month to try to regain a sense of the language that I've loved ever since I was a child in Michigan, where in public school, I had the thrill of learning all about Gaston le gourmand. I studied French throughout school. I majored in it, along with English, in college, only to seemingly shelve it once I graduated. Lately, I've realized how much I miss it. This is what brought me to Love Crime.

Love Crime is a drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier. It is the story of an unscrupulous employer (Thomas) and her equally ambitious assistant (Sagnier). The film itself, if you think about, falls apart midway through the story.  I thoroughly enjoyed the entire proceeding, but I couldn't allow myself to think about it much, because if I thought about it, I couldn't possibly believe that it would have occurred the way it did. But I still loved it. Part of the reason is I love what Kristin Scott Thomas has done with her career, finding a second professional life as an actor in French movies, where woman are seen as interesting and complex and sexual beings long after it is generally seen as possible in American cinema. As someone who wants to shake the rust off her understanding of the language, it was also fun to see a contemporary film and remember and learn how people talk in  everyday life. I had a good time watching this movie.

Inside the Actors Studio: George Clooney

To me, this show is so interesting. You have a defined structure. There are certain things that are a given. There are specific traditions, and then it's fascinating to see how the guest deviates from the norm.

So Clooney makes his entrance, and he immediately shakes things up. He talks. It is a seemingly small thing, but I have never seen another guest do this before. He does the sort of chatter that you would imagine from a neighbor, a "Hi, how are you doing?" to the massive collective that is this audience before he makes his way over to James Lipton and shakes his hand.

Other moments that are different: Often there are people special to the guest in the front row that are acknowledged. No one is mentioned. At one point, in discussion of O, Brother, Where Art Thou? Lipton indicated that he liked a dance that Clooney said he made up in the film. Usually that would lead to an invitation for the star to do a few steps on stage. That line of thought is not pursued.

As always, it is fun to revisit the actor's work to this point. In this two-hour program, they showed many different scenes from Clooney's movies, some that I would now like to see again. Clooney offered up some interesting insights. For example, he had wanted to play Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck., but he  said he could not have successfully conveyed the notion of a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. In addition, he talked about how he did commercials overseas in order to have the capital to make the independent movies where he would be paid scale. He also talked of wearing different hats—director, writer, actor—and how each one differed in the process.

In the final section, the Q and A with the students, he again did something I had never seen a guest do before. He set up a dynamic with the students. He used a few as examples and assigned them personalities that seemed to have very little to do with who they were as people. He created an interaction where they could be teased.

Whenever I think of Inside the Actors Studio, I always think of Robert Downey, Jr. When Robert Downey, Jr. came on this program, in my opinion, he blew the house down. He was funny and honest and spontaneous. He offered up information that went further than anything Lipton asked him. He seemed genuinely openhearted and had a real connection with James Lipton. I could watch that episode once a month and not tire of it.

Although I love Clooney's work, when I finished this episode, I had no need to ever see it again. I think it reflects an unfortunate trend of the show. It seems more and more that this show is about being a promotional platform, one that ties into the opening of a movie or, in this case, an Oscar campaign, than it is about coming on the show for the love of Lipton or just to talk about The Work in itself. Now that Clooney has been on, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill have apparently filmed their episode to air as part of their campaign for Oscar. While I will definitely watch it and I'm sure I will find it fascinating in some way, it seems like it's straying from the original heart of this show.