So I’ve seen two episodes of the new CBS show “The Event” starring John Ritter’s son Jason Ritter, who by the way, in certain shots is a spitting image of his father, sometimes it’s downright distracting – and sad, because I was a huge fan of Ritter’s Jack Tripper when I was a kid.  It’s Jason Ritter’s first starring role, and he seems up for the challenge in the show, which isn’t too bad, but it’s also not exactly breaking any new barriers in television with some fairly mediocre dialogue at times.

That’s only at times though. In general, I found the first two episodes to be pretty entertaining. And that’s just what it is – entertaining. It’s not fantastic, and it’s not even close to the magnitude and originality of Lost, with the superb acting and fascinating dialogue and mythology, but it’s definitely entertaining.

One thing that’s a little annoying, which I also thought was annoying about Lost, is that there are two gorgeous women in somewhat unbelievable roles. One woman plays an assassin, or spy or something along those lines – a badass character, and she just doesn’t pull it off because she’s too “pretty”.  I do like that the show seems to have some guts. Ritter’s character Sean, has a girlfriend that he was going to ask to marry him on a romantic tropical getaway, when she gets kidnapped, and that is how he gets pulled into the whole “Event” storyline.

You see, her father is a pilot, and he is kidnapped and forced to say he will fly the plane into a building where the president will be, effectively assassinating him.  The kidnappers gun down her mother (I was surprised they went that hardcore, but had to give them props), and threaten to kill his daughter (whom they’ve kidnapped through an elaborate scheme in the tropics – enter pretty bad girl who’s not believable) if he does not comply.

This is where the story begins and starts to interweave with another story line, which is about some sort of aliens that landed here decades ago and have been living in captivity for years.  The president, before the assassination attempt, was just about to announce the prisoner’s release, and it appears that maybe someone wanted to stop him from making that announcement, only we don’t know why.

And we also don’t know why these aliens, who looks and act just like people, are here, and what their purpose is. We don’t know if they have good intentions or bad, but we know they they don’t age as rapidly as we do, and we know that they have scientific knowledge and capabilities that may far exceed ours. I’ve wondered so far though, why they haven’t freed themselves if that’s the case. Guess we’ll find out!  So far I like it, like I said it’s no “Lost” but it will do until something equally amazing comes along.

Danny McBride, the guy with the mullet and a foul mouth, now has carved out a name for himself as one of the funniest dudes I’ve seen on the screen in a while. My husband loves Eastbound and Down, McBride’s show about a down and out formerly famous baseball player named Kenny Powers (or Kenny F’ing Powers as he likes to call himself).  Not only is he broke and no longer famous, but he’s deluded and obnoxious, selfish, crude, and just generally a really screwed up guy who has delusions of grandeur – and then also some moments of self reflection peppered in that don’t last very long.

Just about everyone will identify with some aspect of this character, but the show is not for anyone who is easily offended. It’s as crass as crass can be, but it is roll on the floor funny at the same time because you can’t believe some of the things that come out of his mouth.  This second season has him in Mexico, doing anything to make a buck (he starts out doing cock fighting), then by the second episode he’s trying to be a part of a Mexican baseball team.

Kenny’s friend Stevie, who follows Kenny around like a little puppy and doesn’t possess much of a brain, adds to the constant hilarity with his totally inappropriate behavior while doing nothing more than trying to mimick his idol Kenny.  This second season really departs from the first in that so far it has pretty much abandoned the original cast except for Danny McBride and his buddy Stevie.

But it’s actually way funnier than the first season so far. I’m only two episodes in, but I’m laughing a lot more and digging the character of Kenny whereas before he just seemed obnoxious, not so much funny. This season, they’ve really upped the ante on the writing. The cast is very talented too, which always helps.  It looks like another hit for HBO, because I know a few other people who are watching it and think it’s hilarious, and it’s not exactly the type of show that you’d think has a wide range of viewers.

Now, if they could just put Curb Your Enthusiasm back on already, we’d have a few great comedies to watch!

So I watched the latest Samuel L Jackson movie (he plays the main role) and surprisingly, he was upstaged by an actor who hasn’t really done much except supporting roles, an actor named Michael Sheen, who plays the terrorist in this movie. The movie is about home grown terrorism, and at certain points it does hit a nerve that people probably have not felt since 9/11 happened.  The movie also stars Carrie Ann Moss, who hasn’t done much since she had great roles in Memento, a Christopher Nolan favorite, and of course, the whole Matrix trilogy.

Moss stars as an FBI agent who is very liberal in her beliefs and doesn’t believe in torture, even to get someone like Michael Sheen to confess to where he has hidden three nuclear bombs that he claims to have planted in three major US cities.  Samuel Jackson is a professional interrogator who does things to get answers out of him after he almost willingly gets “caught” that most people would consider unfathomable.

There are certain points in this movie where you have to look away because the torture seems so real, but that’s more due to Sheen’s superior acting than to Jackson’s somewhat mailed in performance on this one.  Sheen was definitely the high point of this movie, which had great potential but ultimately lacked in excellent dialogue and execution of the script.

Moss was good, but a little wooden as the character she played, who was supposed to be a childless, but compassionate career woman who wholeheartedly believes in the US constitution and the belief that we are the “good guys” who should uphold the tenets of the Geneva convention that put limits on torture to get answers out of prisoners or terrorists as international law.  The idea here is that we all know that these people are tortured behind closed doors, it’s just an unspoken rule.

And the question this movies asks is really, are we ok with that fact?  Is it justifiable to torture one human, even harm members of his family to get him to talk, in order to get answers out of him that may save the lives of millions of other people? In the end, the dialogue here lacks, and Jackson’s performance again, somewhat trivializes this important and touchy issue.

All in all, Unthinkable was entertaining, but it was just lacking the sort of emotional investment you’d expect in a movie of this magnitude, with such a serious and hotly contested subject matter.

So I’ve just finished the HBO series from 2003-2004 “Carnivale”, and I’ll give you a review here in a minute. Let me first preface this with the fact that this series was cancelled after two 12-episode seasons due to lack of viewership for the cost of making it. It’s a shame, because the series had promise, but I can sort of see why it never garnered a huge following. It was probably just a little too weird for some people.

The show is about a travelling carnival called “Carnivale” that is comprised of misfits that were somehow discarded after living normal lives.  There’s a contortionist, a bearded woman – the voluptuous and tempestuous Lila who is the fortune teller’s mistress (the fortune teller is Lodz), Sophie a card readers and her mother who has been in a comatose state since Sophie was born but has great future telling abilities.

Then there’s Samson, the guy who tells everyone what to do, brought straight down from “Management” whom we mysteriously don’t even get a glimpse of until several episodes into season 2, Jonesy, a crippled former baseball player, and the exotic dancers of the cooch tent, Libby, her sister and her mother (played by the awesome Cynthia Ettinger, and her daughter Libby played by an equally awesome actress named Carla Gallo, and her father Felix, nicknamed Stumpy.

All in all, there are several high class actors on the show, including the main character played by Nick Stahl who plays Ben Hawkins, a hick kid with healing powers who we come to find out is the “creature of light” that was born to this century, and the awesome Clancy Brown, who plays a preacher named Justin Crowe that seems righteous at first but then we discover, along with him, that he’s not what he appears to be.

Amy Madigan is another high class actress, who plays Iris, Brother Justin’s sister.  The brother/sister relationship is creepy in and of itself as their somewhat obsessive relationship unfolds and we learn the true nature of Brother Justin, and see what Iris is capable of to elevate his status.

This series had great promise, and indeed I watched each episode rapt with the characters, but at times the dialogue seemed a little odd.  That is probably my only complaint. I also have a small complaint about the hurried aspect of the story line at the end of season two, which actually ended somewhat anti clamactically and up in the air, as if they weren’t sure they were going to have another season or not and wanted to leave it open.

All in all, Carnivale has top notch acting, great sets, and a real, gritty feel like most HBO shows are known for.  I went through all 24 episodes in a matter of three weeks if that tells you anything!

We watched the latest cop ensemble cast movie, Brooklyn’s Finest this weekend, and I thought I’d give a review.  Let me just say up front, it didnt’ totally suck like I thought it would since a lot of people said that it wasn’t that great.  On the other hand, it wasn’t fantastic either.  This movie is a movie about cops. Good cops, bad cops, and cops that are in a definite grey area. 

The difference is that you don’t really feel like you totally like the cops that are in the grey area, like you do in other movies, like LA Confidential and other similar great cop movies where the cops blend the line between “good and bad”.  The guys that are in the grey area are pretty much all the cops in the movie, except Richard Gere who is just a burnt out cop who doesn’t really care about the job any more. He mails it in, and he’s got one week left to retirement when he gets assigned to have a bunch of young rookie ride alongs. 

Interestingly enough, his story is one of the more interesting parts of this movie, even though it’s the least dramatic. I also think Richard Gere’s acting is a highlight of this movie. 

It’s edgy, and sad at the same time.  Don Cheadle plays a deep undercover cop who feels torn between a lifelong friend who’s just been released from prison and his duties as a police officer. He’s blurred the lines between duty and friendship, and he’s admitted to his superiors that he’s lost his way and needs to be pulled out of undercover and put back into a job in the office, a nice cozy, easy and stress free desk job. 

His friend is played by Wesley Snipes, who is a former thug that’s been released from prison and is looking for a more legit way out, but still thinks that crime may be the only way to go.  Wesley does a decent job in this flick too as a former gangster, nice twist.

The story that doesn’t ring as sympathetically as you think it would is Ethan Hawke’s story. He’s a younger father with five kids and two on the way. And uh, well he just doesn’t look old enough to have a family this large, that’s A. B, he goes about things in such a stupid, ill conceived way to get money for a down payment on a new house for his growing family (illegally of course), that it’s hard to find a sympathetic aspect to his story.

It’s also a little forced that his family needs this new house because of a black mold problem, and there is a scene where a doctor tells him he really needs a new house that sort of pushes this over the edge of reality. 

All in all, Brooklyn’s Finest is not a BAD movie per se. It just lacks that groundedness and fast pace that pulls you in and makes you care for the characters.  It has it’s good points, it just needed better writing.

Carnivale is one of those shows that you’re not quite sure what to make of at first. You know the actors are extremely talented, the writing isn’t bad at all, and the scenery and the feel of the show is dead on for the depression era it is supposed to depict. And yet, you’re not quite sure if you like it or not or if it’s hitting all the right cords with your emotions to where you actually want to keep watching and see what happens to this cast of motley carnival performers.

Then, just as with other great shows, you suddenly are in for the long haul. That’s what happened to me with the immensely under watched and underrated, and in my opinion, too soon cancelled HBO show Carnivale.   Perhaps it was because of this sort of dragging story line that it didn’t garner enough viewers, or perhaps it was because like the other HBO show Rome, it was simply to expensive for them to keep filming.

I don’t know the exact reason, but I know that now that I’m on the first episode of the second season, I sure wish I had more than eleven more episodes to go.  We saw some interesting things culminate in the last two episodes of the first season, which whetted our appetite for more, and inevitably got us hungry to see what was going to happen after the cliffhangers of the first season with the death of Lodz, the fortune teller and seer of various truths.

We also got a sneak peak at the arm of “Management”, the mysterious force/person that never shows their face to anyone that comes in their trailer. And yet this “Management” seems omni present and powerful – but they live in a trailer. There are a lot of things that are really symbolic in this show that might go right over your head if you didn’t watch the extras or read about the show’s mythology, and I think that’s what I really love about it.

It sort of makes you think, like Battlestar Galactica did (incidentally Ronald Moore, who was a writer and producer on that show is the same on Carnivale), or “Lost” did, about the spirit world, good and evil, and civilization and humanity as we know it today.

The characters are rich and diverse, and although at first some of them seem almost too novel, we come to love them all, and dread their departure. It’s not too violent a show, so don’t be afraid to watch it if you didn’t like the Sopranos with it’s raw, gritty and upsetting violence at times.  All in all, I’m really glad I picked up the box set for Carnivale. It will probably go fast!