How I Met Your Mother – Again? Edition

I've put up a few posts about How I Met Your Mother in recent weeks. I could blog about other TV shows, but would you rather I talk about How I Met Your Mother or Charlie Sheen? Thought so.

How I Met Your Mother was in the news last week. They received a two-year renewal from CBS for their 7th and 8th seasons. When I saw that, I had two thoughts simultaneously. Yes, simultaneously. It's called in-brain multitasking. Or MPD. I can't tell which I have.

Firstly, in 2003, ABC was riding high with The Drew Carey Show. Just concluding its 7th season, Drew Carey was dominating its Wednesday time slot, delivering all the eyeballs ABC could want and still putting out a quality product. ABC decided to lock in their most valuable show and gave Drew Carey a two-year renewal.

Almost immediately after the 8th season premiere episode aired, the ratings dropped. Hard. I can't tell you if the quality of the show changed or not as I was one of the millions who stopped watching, although I don't remember any particular reason why. It was just time to move on, I guess.

The Drew Carey Show limped through its 8th season and was yanked by ABC. Remember that two-year renewal? Warner Bros held ABC to their end of the contract and forced them to pay for season nine. But in order to collect, Warner Bros actually had to produce the show. The entire show – cast, crew, writers, staff – made 26 episodes that they knew weren't going to air. ABC eventually burned off the episodes, airing them in the summer of 2004, a full year after production began.

CBS gave 2.5 Men a two-year renewal last year, after its 7th season, and look what happened. 2.5 Men is also produced by Warner Bros and co-stars Ryan Stiles, who was also in The Drew Carey Show. Funny coincidence. I get worried when shows I like get two-year renewals.

My other thought was for Ted's daughter on How I Met Your Mother. In most episodes, they show a few seconds of two teenagers on a couch listening to their Dad's stories about how he met their mother. It's kind of the point of the show. The two kids aren't aging, so the actors probably showed up for one day of work in 2005, did a whole bunch of reaction shots and have been collecting easy paychecks ever since.

Except that these actors still exist, grew up and are still working. The daughter is played by now 24-year-old Lyndsy Fonseca, who is creating a nice little career for herself, appearing in the movies Kick-Ass, Hot Tub Time Machine and co-starring in one of my favorite TV series, Nikita.

The troubling thought that I had was that Lyndsy is a hottie with well documented comedic chops. In two years, at the end of How I Met Your Mother's guaranteed run, she'll be about the right age to play Ted's wife (the right age in sitcom terms, that is – I personally think Ted should try to stay a bit more age appropriate). Wouldn't it be neat if Lyndsy Fonseca played both the daughter AND the mother? Neat, and a little creepy? The resemblance would be uncanny. And a little creepy.

This was just a passing thought when I heard the news of the two-year renewal.  I really hope that Lyndsy won't be available to appear on How I Met Your Mother as an adult because I want her to be playing Alex on Nikita for a few more years.

The Green Hornet

It's been five weeks since I saw The Green Hornet in the theater. My note at the time was “Barely Adequate.” Looking back, I think that may have been a Minnesota Nice way of saying it was bad.

Much like Jack Black, a little Seth Rogen goes a long way. As he was also the writer and producer, I guess his Hollywood success has reached that level where no one wants to tell him “No.” The story was thin and more than a little familiar. The rich man-boy suffers a tragedy and becomes a vigilante has been done – it was called Batman.

Christoph Waltz of Inglorious Basterds cashed a paycheck and chewed the scenery as the villain. I have no idea why Battlestar Galactica hero Edward James Olmos or aging uberhottie (but still uberhot) Cameron Diaz were in this movie. The gadgets, the sight gags, the CGI fight scenes all sound great until you put them together into The Green Hornet. All in all, a good movie to skip, even on home video.

1:51

83rd Annual Academy Awards

Of all the award shows out there, I only pay attention to the Academy Awards. The Oscars are most closely tied to the industry they represent and the voters are members of the industry, so they hold a little more sway with me. Yet, do the awards matter more than the work itself?I have a few gaps in my movie attendance this year, so I'm going to just concentrate on the big awards. And diving into the big awards brings us headlong into The Problem.

The Problem is this: What do you do when last year's winner outdoes himself? Jeff Bridges took home the trophy for Best Actor last year for Crazy Heart. This year, he gave us an even better performance in True Grit. Should he win automatically for doing a better job than a previous performance that won an Academy Award or should everyone be judged with a clean slate? Clean slate, obviously. The Problem occurs when voters (or observers who make a living hyping entertainment news) declare a winner due to a great body of work over a career. No one could argue that Jeff Bridges has a great resume and deserves career recognition, but, one year later, we can clearly see that Crazy Heart was Jeff's third best role, maybe. It's very important to cast our votes, non-binding or not, for the best performance of the year.

Having warned my readers about the dangers of acclamation, let's dive into the awards. Let's start with...

An asterisk * leading a nominee means I didn't see the movie.

Actress in a Leading Role
Annette Bening  The Kids Are All Right
*Nicole Kidman  Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence  Winter's Bone
Natalie Portman  Black Swan
*Michelle Williams  Blue Valentine

Acclamation has it going to Portman. Acclamation is correct this time, as her performance was head, shoulders and wings above the others I saw. She took some serious chances and it paid off big time. Some will say it's Bening's time and her performance was good, but, sorry, not this time. We could make a good argument for Jennifer Lawrence but Portman was feather better.

It would be a different story if Hailee Steinfeld had been nominated in this category for True Grit. She had more screen time than Jeff Bridges and completely inhabited her character. A competition between Natalie and Hailee would be be very interesting to contemplate.

Actor in a Leading Role
*Javier Bardem  Biutiful
Jeff Bridges  True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg  The Social Network
Colin Firth  The King's Speech
James Franco  127 Hours

Again, acclamation has this award already engraved with Colin Firth's name. I wouldn't have a problem with the Oscar going to any of the other three.

Actor in a Supporting Role
Christian Bale  The Fighter
John Hawkes  Winter's Bone
Jeremy Renner  The Town
Mark Ruffalo  The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush  The King's Speech

Acclamation has this award going to Bale. I'd be fine with Bale or Hawkes taking it although I generally don't care for Bale. Renner and Ruffalo, while doing fine jobs, weren't quite as good. Rush did a decent job but I felt like he hit the comic relief part just a little too hard.

Actress in a Supporting Role
Amy Adams  The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter  The King's Speech
Melissa Leo  The Fighter
Hailee Steinfeld  True Grit
*Jacki Weaver  Animal Kingdom

As I mentioned before, Hailee did a fantastic job in what was really a lead role, so I'm going with her here. Oddly, The King's Speech was so good that I forgot my general dislike of Helena Bonham Carter (going back to The Wings of the Dove in 1997). I wouldn't object if she won which says volumes about how good she was. The ladies from The Fighter were both decent but not quite award winning. And really, why wasn't Mila Kunis nominated for Black Swan?

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
The Social Network Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin

There is no need for discussion or even mentioning the other nominees. Sorkin.

Directing
Black Swan  Darren Aronofsky
The Fighter  David O. Russell
The King's Speech  Tom Hooper
The Social Network  David Fincher
True Grit  Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

I'm going to give it Fincher for The Social Network. The most important thing about this category is that Darren Aronofsky can never win an Oscar. We can say wonderful things about Black Swan and some of his other movies but the guy who directed The Fountain can simply never be allowed to win an Oscar for directing.

Best Picture
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone

Ten Best Picture nominees is simply too many to consider. I wouldn't object to any of them winning, except for:
Black Swan Both because it was hard to watch and to punish Aronofsky.
Inception It was 20 minutes too long. Maybe that's why it didn't get a nom for Film Editing.
127 Hours Not enough Kate Mara.

Oh, you want me to actually choose a winner? OK. Umm... The King's Speech. It's a close call this year, with The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit and Winter's Bone as exceptionally good runners up.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go find my tux so I can be suitably dressed when the show starts.

Unknown

Contains minor spoiler

Unknown is what we will henceforth describe as the basic Liam Neeson thriller. A grainy, dark film set in an exotic foreign locale with car chases up the wazoo and a mano a mano resolution featuring lots of quick-cut martial arts. Convenient for us that Liam Neeson is also the star of Unknown. It's very similar to Neeson's Taken of two years ago, where a former spy tracks down his kidnapped daughter in Paris, causing untold physical and personal carnage. Here, an amnesiac summons his inner spy when his life and wife are stolen in Berlin, with untold physical and personal carnage.

Although I'm describing Unknown as a formula movie, it doesn't feel like one, and the presence of Liam Neeson means you automatically know who the good guy is. It runs about ten minutes too long but is a very serviceable thriller.

Here comes a minor rant

I watched the movie this morning and watched a little TV this afternoon. Wouldn't you know it, I saw a commercial for Unknown. Part of the plot revolves around stopping a bomb from detonating. The commercial, run during a prime-time TV show last Thursday, showed the bomb going off. I had not seen any commercials for the movie before seeing it and saw the in-theater preview maybe three times, most recently two weeks ago. The sequence with the explosion - very tense - worked. If the commercial or preview had been fresh in my mind, I wouldn't have cared - I would have known what was coming. Consider this yet another example of the movie's marketing department ruining the hard work of the creative department - you know, everybody who made the dang movie.  Stop it.

1:48

How I Met Your Mother - Climbing Out of the Hole

Last month, I wrote about how an episode of How I Met Your Mother was ruined by an overly funny gag during a death-in-the-family story. Because I am holding them to a high standard and blogged about it when they screwed up, I feel obligated to report when they get something right. Tonight's episode (season 6, ep 15) was out-of-the-ordinary funny.

First, it featured the relatively new character of Zoey, played by the adorable Jennifer Morrison, previously Dr Cameron on House, MD - always good to see her. In this episode, Zoey's cousin was played by Katie Perry and her breasts. I'm not sure what Katie's claim to fame is, but she's also cute and her cleavage is a good sport. There was ample screen time for Suzie Plakson as Marshall's mother. I've liked her since she played a Klingon on Star Trek The Next Generation a generation ago.

Aside from the good writing on tonight's episode, there were the Minnesotisms, which put it over the top. The politeness in answering the phone and Robin's fake accent were good, but Mrs Erickson's comment about going to Byerly's was genius.

So, How I Met Your Mother producers, you've climbed out of the bottom of your hole a little. This was a very good episode, but you still us a great one.

Beverage Recycling

At the last two movies I've been to, they played a Coca-Cola commercial before the previews. It showed several flashy, bouncy sequences where one person would toss a can or bottle into a recycling bin and immediately someone else would get a full pop from a vending machine. The tag line was "If you've had a Coke in the past 85 years, you've been part of the biggest beverage recycling program in the world."

I really hope they meant to say "beverage container recycling" rather than "beverage recycling." If they're turning old containers into new ones, hey, count me in. If Coke is putting urine - filtered, treated, evaporated, condensed, sliced, diced, or otherwise - in my pop, I'm switching to something else.

The Little Fockers

A paycheck movie. Written by a sitcomputer.

1:32

Black Swan

It would be very difficult to provide a simple review of Black Swan. It's a good movie, but it's very complicated and a little disturbing. It's not a happy movie - movies don't need to be happy - and it may not be necessary for everyone to see it.

Natalie Portman deserves every accolade being thrown at her for playing the prima ballerina and Mila Kunis deserves more than a few for playing the understudy. Great performances from the entire cast, actually.

But something bothers me about Black Swan. And that thing is director Darren Aronofsky. Lets take a look at Aronofsky's resume:

Pi (1999) A math genius goes insane trying to find God in the non-repeating digits of pi.

The Fountain (2006) A guy with a spaceship goes insane and believes that his wife had been reincarnated as a tree.

The Wrestler (2009) A self-destructive guy does self-destructive things for 105 minutes.

Black Swan (2010) A driven ballerina goes insane when she gets her dream role and meets her polar opposite the same day.

Notice a trend? Crazy people (some certifiably, others hyperbolically) doing crazy things. Aronofsky's movies are dark and disturbing. Some are good (Pi), some are among the worst movies ever made (The Fountain). I'm not going to categorize Black Swan. It tells an amazing story but it's very difficult to watch. I assume that's what he was going for, so that's good, but it was difficult to watch. Not sure what else to say.

1:43

Country Strong

I went to see Country Strong last night. Based on the previews, I was expecting a formula movie - you know, a washed up singer hits rock bottom and wallows for 100 minutes, then has a mondo comeback concert. I make no apologies for liking formula movies - they're like comfort food and heaven knows I've put away enough comfort food over the years. Anyway, formula or not, it doesn't matter. Country Strong was nothing like the previews and I recommend that you skip it, even ten years from now when it's on cable and you've got nothing else to do. FIND something else to watch.

But here's the thing. I found myself chuckling over some of the country music cliches while I was watching the movie, then today, I realized that they used ALL of the country music cliches. I used Steve Goodman's song, You Never Even Called Me by My Name, as the guideline of what makes a country cliche.

Goodman said that the perfect country song would have to mention momma, trains, pick-up trucks, rain, prison and getting drunk. That's six elements. Country Strong features an alcoholic singer fresh out of rehab (1), who takes up with a saloon singer who drives a 1972 Ford F100 (2), who hops a ride on a freight train (3) and later finds our singer relapsing in a bar on a rainy night (4). There is also up & coming singer whose momma (and daddy) have been in prison (5 & 6). If I tried, I could probably put all of that into one sentence, but who cares? Skip the dang movie.

1:53

How I Met Your Mother - What the Hell?

I enjoy How I Met Your Mother. The premise of Ted annoying his kids by drawing out the story he tells them is pretty funny, the writing is great and the cast is pleasant. All good stuff.

Except for tonight's episode (season 6, ep 13). It was your basic episode, with hijinks and hilarity aplenty. I noticed right away that they had a countdown gag going on, with numbers prominently displayed, starting with 50. I had to rewind a couple of times to catch a few, more often that I lost count rather than they were hidden I'll admit. It was a legen - wait for it - dary gag - enjoy the show, have 50 bonus laughs with the numbers.

Except that they were counting down to a death in the family. When we got to 0001, the bad news was given. The show ends with two characters in tears. This was simply not the episode to have an extra thread of funny running through it.

So, to the How I Met Your Mother producers and writers, you guys owe us an extra-funny, APPROPRIATELY funny episode sometime soon. Above and beyond your normally funny standard. I will not forget this debt.

Firefly/Serenity on DVD

As I mentioned earlier, I am methodically going through my DVD collection, currently focusing on TV series sets. Firefly (2002) was not on my initial schedule, but Amazon.com had the Blu-Ray version on sale in November, so I upgraded. Once I had it in hand, I had to watch it soonishly.

After a week of watching two episodes a day, I finished the 14 network episodes yesterday evening and capped it off with a viewing of the movie Serenity last night. The Blu-Ray versions look fantastic. I could scarcely tell the difference between the TV episodes and the feature film.

The show holds up remarkably well, with stories about human nature, dignity, avarice, belief and greed, all strung together by the main theme of chosen family. Perhaps because it tries to be more than just a western set in space, Firefly is very entertaining and never drags. Every episode is thoroughly good, an opinion probably colored by the knowledge that there are only 14 of them. Serenity, with its mega-budget, is a balls-to-the-wall thriller with amazing action sequences. I am still able to say these nice things about the shows after watching the series start-to-finish at least six times in the past six years, and seeing Serenity at least 15 times since it opened in the theater on September 30, 2005.

If you want to be nagged into enjoying Firefly and Serenity, follow this link and this one into the onvoymovies archives.

Where are they now?
Nathan Fillion is fabulous on Castle.
Morena Baccarin is the villainous Anna on V. Her character on Firefly/Serenity is nothing like Anna.
Adam Baldwin plays Major Casey on Chuck.
Summer Glau will be on NBC's new series The Cape, which I had no interest in watching until a few moments ago.

[Update 1/18/2011: I watched the premiere of The Cape, and even though Summer Glau has a decent-sized role, wears mini-skirts frequently, is growing into her looks and has never looked hotter, I'm not watching it again.  On the plus side, The Cape will probably run 13 episodes and fade away, so Summer will be available for a new series this fall.

Another Where are they now?
Alan Tudyk will be in Transformers 3 this summer.  Hey, A guy has to eat.]

102

My final number for movies seen at a theater in 2010: 102.

Ten were movies that I went to see for the second time. There were another ten or so that I would have liked to see again but couldn't, mostly due to fast cycling-out of titles.

Twenty were part of Willow Creek Theater's retro program, where they show older titles on the weekends. At first, most of the retros could be considered classics or cool, but for the last few months, the titles have just been old (15-25 years) with little cachet. They just announced the titles for the next two months, none of which are must-sees for me. Retros are hereby caput unless they bring in something spectacular.

One of the reasons I won't miss the retro movies is that I noticed they cost me a few first-run viewings. It is the nature of the movie business these days to cycle titles really fast. And I mean fast - some movies that are promoted on TV and in previews for months have a big opening weekend and are gone in two or three weeks. The retro program took up 20 weekend slots that maybe would have been better spent going to a first-run movie instead.

My average ticket price for 2010 was $6.41. That's down almost a quarter from 2009, partly due to being comped by Willow Creek a few times and partly due to a new theater opening nearby with a matinee price of $5.00, which is nicely less than Willow Creek's $6.50. Maybe my New Year's resolution should be to see more movies at the less-expensive theater, but $1.50 isn't a bad premium for the convenience.

Most enjoyed movies in 2010 (in no particular order)
Secretariat
Hereafter
Easy A
Ramona and Beezus
She's Out of My League

Really good movies, even if they were downers
Never Let You Go
The Ghost Writer
Inception
The American

Worst movie of the year
Nine

Worst movie of the year, Dishonorable Mention
The Tourist

Picking a universally worst movie is problematic because you don't go to a movie you know you won't like. Most years, I would say I didn't see the truly worst movie of the year, because I skipped it. However, Nine was so bad, I think it may have been the worst movie of 2010 by any objective criteria. The Tourist deserves a mention not because it was bad, per se, but because it was such a disappointment. It had an A-List cast and fabulous Parisian & Venetian scenery, but the story sucked and some of the actors were sleepwalking. The Tourist should have been so much better.

How many movies will I see in 2011? Who knows? I'm not setting a quota, although I sure like round numbers and meaningless benchmarks. If we extrapolate from today - let's see, two days into the year and zero movies seen - I'll see NO movies this year. Well, the numbers don't lie but I think I'll buck the trend and see a few more than zero by December 31, 2011. Maybe a hundred more.

Holy Crap, I've Really Let This Blog Go to Seed!

If ever there is evidence that I am a slacker, it's the lack of posts on this blog recently (Hey, I just proved a negative! Cool). I could make up some excuse or rationalization, but the self-admitted slackerdom would tarnish the justification so I won't bother.

I will, however, tell you about what's been going on lately. I'm working my way through my DVD collection, focusing, for the moment, on TV season sets. I just did a quick count and found I have 75 seasons of TV on DVD. Seventy-five sounds like a lot but I have the complete series of a fair dozen, some of which went seven seasons, so it's not that many titles, yet it's a massive number of hours of programming.  It felt wrong to have spent hard-earned cash on these entertainment products but not watch them.  Something had to be done.

My strategic plan is to run through shows I haven't seen for a while, with an occasional fave thrown in. I finished Firefly/Serenity last night, a favorite. Over the next few days, slackerness notwithstanding, I'll tell you about my recent adventures.

Unstoppable

Whoa.  They don't make a lot of movies like this.  Set your adrenaline meters to 11 and hold on.  Tony Scott is a master director, and although I don't always like his movies, they are always well constructed.  With Unstoppable, Scott assembles a talented cast and tells a good story at high speed.

The plot is simple: due to a combination of bad judgment and bad luck, a long train with dangerous cargo heads toward a densely populated Pennsylvania city with no engineer on board.  Dashing engineer Denzel Washington and barely adequate Chris Pine (the new James T Kirk) try to catch up to the runaway on another train.  Thrills and spills happen, yada yada.

What I liked was that the movie didn't cheap out.  It explained the inner workings of railways enough so that the audience knew the stakes, and fleshed out the characters enough so that we enjoyed their company.  I was happy to overlook the implausibilities because it over-delivered everything else.  For example, in some of the scenes where the train is supposedly going 60-75 mph, it doesn't look like it's going anywhere near that fast, or, for the entire length of the train's run, a railway guy in a red pickup is keeping tabs on it.  They make it look like he's been driving along side the train most of the way rather than on the nearest parallel highway, which is more likely.  Whatever.

Think of Unstoppable as a worthy companion to 1994's Speed.  Unlike 1997's Speed II.

1:33

On a person note, that's number 90 for the year.  10 to go to hit 100.

Catfish

I didn't now anything about Catfish going in other than what I learned by looking at an insert in a NetFlix mailing. The insert had a bunch of rave blurbs (of course, even a bad movie can round up a passel of rave blurbs) and a warning "Don't let anyone tell you what it's about."

In the spirit of the distributor's wish, I will write no review, because to write a review would be to spoil the experience. However, I will say this: Catfish is a documentary. Not a dry, after-the-fact sit-down docu, but a let's turn on the cameras and see what happens documentary.

If the surprising and unexpected is what you like, Catfish is worth seeking out.

1:24