House of Cards - Episode 1.03 - "Chapter 3"

courtesy of Ken Thomas

     As House of Cards enters its third chapter, we finally get to travel outside of the wheelings and dealings of Washington politics to get some insight into Frank Underwood's roots in his home state of South Carolina.  In the process, we get to see what caused him to be elected to Congress 11 times, as he proudly declares in this episode.  More than anything else, Frank knows how to use his words to sucker people into doing anything he wants, even if that means delivering a eulogy he doesn't fully believe in.  Frank is called away to do some damage control after a 17-year-old girl gets into a fatal car accident after texting her boyfriend about the "Peachoid" (pictured above), which Frank paid an exorbitant amount of money to construct.  Though his colleagues try to persuade him to stay and work on the education reform bill, his image and worth as a Congressman are more important.  What I found interesting about this whole episode was the motivations behind Frank's behavior.  He doesn't go down to South Carolina to express grief over the loss of a young girl, he goes down after a local politician blames Frank's "Peachoid" for the girl's death.  Frank is primarily looking to make the problem go away with a settlement by offering a scholarship to be made in the girl's name.  Through meetings with locals, a eulogy at a church and a talk with the girl's parents, his rhetoric is almost mechanically sympathetic, designed to tap into the emotions of who Frank regards as easily persuaded, simple-minded folk.  He is a master at speechifying and Kevin Spacey probably delivers his most nuanced performance yet.  You almost want to believe there's a decent man underneath all the rhetorical bullshit and the selfish ambition, but his asides to the camera indicate a man whose been in this business for so long that he may have lost his capacity to connect to the common folk.

House of Cards - Episode 1.02 - "Chapter 2"

                                                                                          Patrick Harbron/Netflix

     Though I very much enjoyed the Pilot episode of Netflix's original series House of Cards, I wasn't initially sure if it could reach the HBO-level of high-quality drama it was so clearly striving for.  Unfortunately, this second "Chapter" was on such a similar plane as the first that I'm still up in the air about it.  I'm beginning to realize that these episodes aren't necessarily meant to be wholly satisfying as their own 50-minute stories; rather, they are genuinely intended for the ever-increasing trend of binge-viewing.  None of the thirteen episodes have unique names, they are simply assigned a "Chapter" number, which indicates that they are meant to be consumed like a novel.  And this is the beginning of the story.  Rarely do we find the first two chapters the most exciting ones; the author is busy setting up the rules of the world they've created.  Such is the case with these first two episodes, which find Frank Underwood masterfully manipulating his surroundings with remarkable ease.

The Americans - Episode 1.01 - "Pilot"

                                                                                   courtesy of fxnetworks.com

     Over the course of the second season of American Horror Story: Asylum, FX showed cryptic 10-second commercials that heavily featured the hammer and sickle that symbolizes the Communist movement.  These brief teasers, which used the hammer and sickle in place of the "c" in The Americans, were certainly enough to pique my interest.  I soon found out that the show would star Keri Russell of Felicity fame and Matthew Rhys, whose work on Brothers & Sisters was by far the most overlooked.  The FX network has developed a pedigree over the years for hard-hitting, grisly drama (The Shield, Justified, Sons of Anarchy) so my expectations for The Americans were high.  The resulting pilot episode is unquestionably a show of great merit despite the number of coincidences we're asked to forgive in its super-sized running time.

House of Cards - Episode 1.01 - "Chapter 1"

                                  courtesy of netflix.com

     Netflix's first big push into HBO territory comes in the form of House of Cards, an original series that will exclusively "air" on the video streaming site.  On February 1st, the company made the bold choice of releasing all 13 episodes of Season One at once.  Some critics slammed the decision as a poor business choice, while others hailed it as a bold new direction in consuming television.  I fall more on the side of the former, especially  because it limits the potential customer base of releasing one per week, while also causing viewers to be on different schedules from each other.  Anticipation is not allowed to be built and buzz becomes limited to no more than a week.  Regardless, House of Cards is a clear indication that Netflix wants to be in competition with the big boys of cable (HBO, Showtime, AMC).

1st Annual Filmiest Awards - Winners (Part 2)

Welcome back to the 1st Annual Filmiest Awards.  I now present the winners for the final eight categories for the year 2012:

The nominees for Best Sound are:

The Avengers

Les Miserables

Life of Pi

Skyfall

Zero Dark Thirty

And the award goes to...

ZERO DARK THIRTY

Sound Editing/Mixing by Paul N.J. Ottosson

The film begins with a black screen for a full minute while we hear the sadly familiar sounds of 9/11, and immediately we are transported back. This and the scene above are just two examples of the expert sound editing and mixing of Zero Dark Thirty.  Bombs explode naturally, the score is present but not overbearing, and silence is profoundly powerful.

1st Annual Filmiest Awards - Winners (Part 1)

1st ANNUAL FILMIEST AWARDS - WINNERS ANNOUNCEMENT

     Welcome, welcome. What a year it has been. Unlike most years, it was hard to choose a winner for each category.  Nevertheless, here we are to present the best in film in sixteen categories.  Let's get right to it.

The nominees for Best Original Song are:

“Big Machine” from Safety Not Guaranteed
“Freedom” from Django Unchained
“Safe and Sound” from The Hunger Games

“Skyfall” from Skyfall

“Who Did That To You?” from Django Unchained

And the award goes to...

American Horror Story: Asylum - Episode 2.13 - "Madness Ends"

     On its own, "Madness Ends" is a great episode of television, but as a conclusion to American Horror Story's second volume, I'm not sure it really gives a proper ending to anyone, aside from Lana.  The series' anthological structure allows it to kill off most of its primary characters 2 or 3 episodes before the season finale, which is exactly what both Murder House and Asylum have done.  Unfortunately, it is that very structure that seems to inhibit Ryan Murphy and company from creating full arcs for characters like Sister Mary Eunice, Dr. Arden, or Monsignor Howard.  The former two were killed off in episode 10 for unknown reasons other than to shock the audience, considering much of the conflict of the season had depended on them.  However, by (quite unfairly) cutting their stories short, it would ostensibly allow for a tighter focus on characters like Lana, Kit and Jude, each of whom had been put on the backburner.  This tighter focus is exactly what they did, but there were also characters such as the aforementioned Monsignor, Oliver Threadson, Alma, Grace, and Pepper to deal with.  For the most part, each of these characters was interesting, yet it seems like the writers didn't think so.  Over the last few episodes, Lana shoots Threadson rather unceremoniously, Pepper dies offscreen, Grace gets axed in the back by Alma, who quickly dies at Briarcliff, and Monsignor Howard commits suicide in a bathtub, despite the writers giving no indication that he would ever do such a thing. He was nailed to a cross for Christ's sake! (pun intended) These things feel significant on the page but the way each of these scenes is directed makes them feel so inconsequential that it becomes difficult to feel anything when they die.