Television

The Killing: Pork Rinds Don’t Count

Last night The Killing delivered an episode that contained what I’ve been asking for since the beginning of the series: several nice long scenes of Holder and Linden talking to each other. In fact, the entire episode pretty much consisted of nothing but that. This is both great and horrible.

Great, because we finally get to see the two detectives sharing some real quality time, and we learn some new stuff about them both. After Linden’s stupid kid Jack goes missing, Holder and Linden take a break from the investigation to try to track him down. During the course of the day, Linden opens up considerably, and we learn that she’s more messed up than we knew: she’s a former foster kid, her fried Regi (the lady with the houseboat) is actually her social worker, and the case that haunts her so much involved a guy murdering his wife, going to jail, and leaving his kid to navigate the same damaged foster care system that Linden grew up in.

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Television

Lady Business: Dude!

I’m surrounded by dudes. If I carried around a bat, I could swing it and hit a guy at nearly every moment of every day. I might blame my current job in a mostly male dominated field, but I’ve been this way most of my life. At this point, I feel more comfortable being teased than I do having a real conversation. In short, I’ve been punched in the arm a lot.

So, it should come as no surprise that I love dude humor.

The League, FX – I had avoided this the first season because I really didn’t understand what it was about. They had these odd advertisements for the show that were like a beer commercial or something. Had they just shown actual clips from the show, I’m sure I would have watched much sooner. It’s basically a story of five guys in a fantasy football league who have known each other since high school. It’s a non-stop onslaught of insults and jackassery. In my favorite scene, Kevin gets up at a party to give a speech about how much his wife means to him. “Love is a journey, love is a committment…” then he gets all choked up, and his wife cries because she’s so touched. Later, they show a video from a few years before where he’s telling his friend how to give a romantic speech. Love is a blank, love is a blank and then on the third one, you just can’t get it out. Busted.

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Television

The Killing: It Ends Up Being Wrong

For weeks, The Killing, to my mind, has been steadily losing altitude, and while the latest episode wasn’t outstanding, at least the series seems to have leveled off and even powered the engines back up a bit. The detectives got to do some long-overdue investigating and interrogating, and their new suspect, though pretty obviously not guilty simply because he looked completely guilty, was at least discounted within a single episode instead of it being dragged out for several.

So, where are we, with only three episodes left?  Bennet is alive and in the hospital (boooo), and Stan has turned himself in for savagely beating an innocent man (and while he’s in jail, Mitch discovers that their bank accounts are empty). Belko is investigated, and while it turns out he’s a violent weirdo creep with mommy issues and pictures of Rosie above his bed (gross), and that he used to hang out in the Larsen’s home when no one was there (yuck), he at least didn’t kill Rosie.

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Television

The Killing: Punching A Rock

Okay. I’m going to have to admit that this show is not nearly as good as I’d hoped, and it has gotten clunkier by the week. Still, I’m invested at this point, and I’m going to see it through, and I’m going to pretend I’m still really enjoying it, when I’m only really sort of enjoying it.

This week we got some fairly unsurprising news: Bennet is not a terrorist. Like I had mostly figured out with my huge intelligent brain, what appeared to be some Muslim terror plot was actually a Muslim rescue plot: a little girl was being spirited away to protect her from an unwanted marriage and female circumcision. Bennet is clean, actually, more than clean: he was risking a lot to protect an innocent girl.

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Television

The Killing: Now With Motives!

Last Sunday’s The Killing didn’t do much to advance the murder investigation, focusing instead on the terrorism B-story, the Larsen family’s continuing downward spiral, and some long-overdue business between Linden and Holder.

First, Linden and Holder seem to have resolved their differences, their differences being that I thought Holder was awesome and Linden did not agree with me because she’s stupid. She didn’t trust Holder, because he was flashing wads of cash and having secretive meetings with some guy, and photos of Rosie’s body had been leaked to the press. She tailed him, and it turned out he was in a support group and his sponsor has been doling out his paycheck in chunks because Holder can’t be trusted with money because of whatever addiction he has (maybe gambling?).

Thankfully, Holder didn’t seem pissed that he had followed her. Why was he not pissed? Because, as I’ve said, he is awesome. Hopefully this will all mean they’ll start working together on the case and have some actual conversations instead of just being snippy with each other all the time.

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Television

The Killing: Everyone Killed Rosie Larsen

So, we’re still watching The Killing Sunday nights on AMC. It’s mostly still very good, though a half-season in, some of its flaws are starting to show.

First of all, the glacial pacing. At times, the show appears to be hanging around and checking its watch, waiting for the last five minutes to slap a revelation or cliff-hanger into our faces. It’s mostly forgivable, because it’s a full-season mystery, and if it was throwing suspects and clues at us every commercial break, it would be obvious that none of them would turn out to be legit. Still, it could use a little more content, more substance. Mood will get you only so far; some of the gaps could use a little filling.

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Netflix | Television

Stream Cuisine: Party Down

I discovered Party Down last week on Netflix Instant. I’d been aware of it for a while, actually, but I wasn’t a big fan of anyone in the cast until I’d come to really enjoy Adam Scott on Parks and Recreation this season. So, I finally decided to sit down and check it out, and wound up watching all twenty episodes in the span of a few days. It’s great, which sucks, because it got cancelled a while back.

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Lady Business | Television

Lady Business: Food Porn

When Chris and I first started dating, he had a TV with rabbit ears that only seemed to receive PBS. We watched a fair amount of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. My favorite was Cooking with Claudine, where Mr. Pepin would explain to his daughter what the heck eggs are and how to make food from them.

Many years later when funds were more plentiful and the rabbit ears were retired, I found the Food Network. If you are like my friend Jason, you watch the Food Network as a functional “how-to” in your life and learn to create delicious food. He once watched an episode of Alton Brown’s Good Eats called “My Big Fat Greek Sandwich”, and then proceeded to make the glorious thing. We ate like kings, I tell you! I, on the other hand, once watched the episode on Eggs Benedict and was completely lost after step 23 of 739.

Much like how MTV once showed music videos, the Food Network has evolved away from it’s original I’ll-cook-and-explain-what-I’m-doing-so-you-can-do-this-at-home format to it’s current format full of competition shows and fat guys eating. I can’t complain, because I love to watch people eat. Luckily, the Travel Channel has gotten into the game and expanded my choices. Here are some worth checking out.

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Movies | Netflix | Television

Stream Cuisine: Bond. Megashark Bond.

Some more of my favorite picks for your Netflix Instant viewing pleasure.

Easy A: The really nice thing about Netflix Instant is that it makes it easy to check out movies you’d probably never see otherwise, like this teen comedy based on The Scarlet Letter. I’d heard some good things about it but it’s probably something I’d never rent or see in a theater. We watched it this weekend, and it’s a fun film: Emma Stone is great as a high school girl who rides rumors of her promiscuity to new highs and then lows, and Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson steal every scene they’re in as her goofball hippie parents.

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e-Books | Movies | Television

Lady Business: Comedy is the New Whiskey

I’m in the middle of an office move and it’s no fun. I think I’ll have a little plaque made for the front my urn that says: “She solved 2,218,437 meaningless problems for other people and now she’s dead.” In order to remain sane, I’ve been loading up on the entertainment. Here are the things that have kept me from throwing a chair through the window or drinking heavily.

Anthony Jeselnik,  Shakespeare

I like my stand up comedy to be smart, dry, absurd and borderline cruel. I’ve seen him a few times on various specials, and his bit about the marshmallow dream had me in tears. If you are a sensitive sort, you’ll most likely hate this guy. However, if your idea of comedy involves allowing yourself to laugh at nearly everything that normally makes humans uncomfortable, then you’ll be just fine.

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