“Justified” Episode 9/ Hatless

First of all, self would like to thank F/X for extending this series for another season.  The only thing that makes her sad is wondering how long it will be for Season 2 to get on the air.  But, once, again, self digresses.

Following, a list of self’s favorite things about Episode 9, “Hatless” :

• The opening scene in the bar. Raylan is so fetching when he is confronting drunken yokels and playing the gallant. The two yokels take Raylan out to the back and give him a good ass-whuppin’. This is also a very good thing — for the series, if not for Raylan’s face.  A series hero, even one so seemingly indestructible as Raylan Givens, must at some point provide a touching display of vulnerability, no matter how temporary.
• This is also good because it gives Raylan’s ex-wife a chance to “rescue” him, take him back to his crummy apartment, wipe his bloody face, remove his shirt, and

“Justified” Ep. 8/ Blowback

Where oh where was self when Timothy Olyphant was in “Deadwood”?

Oh, that’s right, self doesn’t get HBO.

Which is why, when “A Perfect Getaway” showed up in movie theatres last year, self had no idea who people were talking about when they said Timothy Olyphant. Timothy Olyphant.  Timothy Olyphant.

OK, self hated that movie, all right?  Hated it so much that she actually called it one of the worst movies of 2009.

Then, about eight weeks ago, she saw the pilot for “Justified.”

Hooooly @@##!!

Who was that smokin’ hot guy in the Stetson?

OMG, it’s Timothy Olyphant!  Who is 40 or 41, which means he’s been around a while!  And self, in spite of being such a movie-phile, had never heard of him!

But self was hooked, hooked, inexorably hooked.  And she hasn’t skipped a single episode this season (Ah, yes:  F/X finally announced there will be a Season 2 of “Justified.”  Jubilation!).

But TO is not the only reason she watches.  There also happen to be great actresses in this series:  namely, Joelle Carter (Self just loves her!) and Natalie Zea.  And every episode (while admittedly not as bracingly pungent as the pilot, which — “instant classic” is the only way self can think of to describe it!) has featured a whole rainbow of interesting/eccentric characters.  And there is Nick Searcy, who plays TO’s boss, who is another actor self had never heard of, but who charms her utterly.

And now self has got to turn her attention back to Episode 8.  Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Brain Cloud, 3rd Wednesday of April 2010: Katrina Halili, Our Lady of Manaoag, “Justified” Ep. 6, and Season Finale of “Damages”

Let’s see, what has self done so far today?

She made the trek to Daly City to see her fave hairdresser, Erly.  Erly was supposed to be in San Mateo, communing with other devotees for today’s festivities at St. Matthew’s for Our Lady of Manaoag, but she sent her Filipino staff on ahead and stayed behind just so she could do self’s hair!  OMG!  Self certainly owes Erly a big one!  To learn more about the fabulous Lady of Manaoag, click here.

In addition, self noticed that Erly appears to be branching out:  that is, there were new display stands by the reception desk, containing Filipino magazines and DVDs.  Self enjoyed perusing the magazines, and decided to purchase one:  Maxim Philippines, with Katrina Halili on the cover.  Only $2.50!  Perhaps because it was from September 2008.  See, Erly goes home only every other year and scoops up magazines which she then sells!  Talk about resourcefulness!  Self is sure hubby will enjoy looking at Maxim Philippines and Ms. Halili, when he arrives home this evening.

Then Erly pointed at the cover of another magazine, which had a picture of a man, somewhat chinito looking.  “And there’s Katrina’s boyfriend,” she said.

“What?  That’s the doctor?”  Self just couldn’t believe it.  He looked about 13.  But from all the stories, she knows he’s got to be at least in his 30s.

Anyhoo, the weather today is just atrocious.  Self doesn’t know if this is global warming or what.  But it is blustery and rainy and cooold!

Well, self again did not get much sleep last night.  She of course had to watch “Justified.”  Last night’s episode, # 6, offered plentiful views of Timothy Olyphant’s bare torso, as he is disturbed after a night of romping with Ava by his boss, played by Nick Searcey (Searcey is a very droll, understated actor.  Self thinks he is just great).  Then she watched the re-play of the same episode at 11.  Then, somehow, she found herself watching the season finale of “Damages” and it was brutal.  A man in a blue Oxford shirt and nice black leather shoes was tortured with a pen knife.  Then a lawyer came to his aid by shooting the man with the pen knife.  Then the man with the pen knife, who’d been shot but apparently not fatally, strangled the lawyer.  In the meantime, the man in the blue Oxford shirt crawled out of his apartment, screaming “Help!  Help!”  But the only one on the New York street who seemed to hear him was a long-haired homeless man.  To whom the blue-Oxford-shirt guy issued some instructions.  In the meantime, young lawyer played by Rose Byrne has a meeting with —  Timothy Olyphant!  Oh joy!  Three episodes with Timothy Olyphant in one night!

In “Damages,” Olyphant plays a hitman who then revealed to Rose Byrne (last night) that he was a cop.  All that fooling around they did?  He did that in the line of duty.  “So, it meant nothing?” asks very hurt Rose Byrne.  Timothy looks soulfully into her eyes and says it did mean something.  And then they’re left hanging, because we’re back to the man in the blue Oxford shirt, and he unluckily crawls into another New York apartment, which he at first thinks is empty but isn’t (and all the while self kept thinking:  WHY don’t you just call 9-1-1- from your cell phone instead of bleeding all over that nice carpet?).  Alas, the occupant of that apartment seemed to be really mad at the man in the blue Oxford shirt, for he pushed his head into a toilet, and the man this time truly expired.

Then we’re with Glenn Close, the star of the show.  She has just put her teen-age son’s older lover in jail.  While she is having flashbacks of the time when she was young and pregnant in some rural area that might be Kentucky for all self knows, she is hit–  SMACK! —  by another car, and she sees the driver of the other car running away, and horrors, the driver turns out to be her son.  Yes, apparently her own son has just tried to kill her, presumably payback for putting his (pregnant) older girlfriend in jail on the charge of statutory rape.

The final scene is Glenn Close and Rose Byrne on some beach that looks like it’s in the Hamptons, and they are both being very reflective, and self is so sad that Timothy Olyphant never re-surfaces, and that is the end.  No more “Damages,” FOREVER.

By this time it is 1:30 a.m.  In spite of self’s best efforts, she cannot stop answering hubby’s questions.  He suddenly becomes quite voluble about self packing him a lunch.  And it’s 1:30 a.m.  Self of course ignores this request, but it’s annoying enough to keep her awake until 3 a.m.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Coetzee, Shteyngart Bite Metaphorical Dust ?

Self feels like putting this book down. Oh God, she can’t stand it: 2 a.m. and she just can’t seem to pry her fingers from the pages of J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man. Why couldn’t she just float into Dreamland after watching “Justified” Episode 5 (Quite a title this episode had: “The Lord of War and Thunder”), the one where Raylan has a teaser of a sex scene with Ava in a motel room; the same episode where we see Raylan casually pushing a slime-ball into a room occupied by two other slime-balls, simply by prodding his back ever-so-gently with his Dad’s baseball bat, all the while engaging in (what’s quickly becoming his established) off-the-cuff repartee; also the one where he pretends to be an out-of-work day laborer who offers to fix up a woman’s yard for free, just so he can learn the whereabouts of the woman’s fugitive-from-the-law husband (You can come fix self’s yard anytime, Raylan!); the one where he . . .

Self, stop it! You are just too much! Not everyone in the blogosphere shares your love of “Justified” and Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens!

Okey-dokey, self will mosey back to more serious topics: which is books.

The other day, she prodded herself through one-fourth of erstwhile favorite author J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man. Even recommended it to her students at UCLA Extension, for heaven’s sake! Then she found out from reader reviews at Amazon.com that there will be a very interesting development: a woman will appear, a woman who goes by the name of Elizabeth Costello, who is actually J. M. Coetzee’s alter ego. Apparently, on a lecture circuit, Coetzee found he was unable to talk about himself except through the voice of a character, so he created Elizabeth Costello. Frankly, this makes self think Coetzee is freaking nuts. But she reads on, for she did so love his earlier novels, especially Life and Times of Michael K

Self actually does make it to the passage where Elizabeth Costello appears (at 3 a.m.), and Ms. Costello seems like a very ordinary woman. Finally, self decides she can’t swallow all this deconstruction or meta-fiction or whatever and decides to return the book to the library.

Next on her reading list is Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan. Oh, self had high hopes for this book. Top Ten on the New York Times Books of the Year, etc etc. Apparently, it is hilarious. Even Amazon readers find it hilarious. The hero is 325 lbs., farts, and is the sole progeny of the 1,238th richest man in Russia. He has his own bodyguard who is such an enabler he places plate after plate of Beluga caviar in front of our hero, and — well, why does this remind self so much of the fresh hell of Manila? Self does not need Gary Shteyngart to tell her that such creatures as 325-lb. spoiled only sons of rich crooks exist! She doesn’t need anyone to tell her that rich people are the same everywhere, whether they are from Moscow or Manila: they all still want their kids to get American educations! Preferably from Stanford or Harvard! (Self’s own Dear Departed Dad went to Georgetown Law School; hubby’s Dear Departed Dad got his PhD in Chemistry from MIT) Why is self not laughing in the bris removal scene (That’s circumcision, to those of you not in the know)? Or whenever she reads the name of corpulent hero’s American college: Accidental College, har har har — reminds her of Occidental College, where indeed some of son’s Sacred Heart Prep classmates did end up (Except, Occidental’s not in the midwest, like the one of Shteyngart’s hero. No, Occidental is in the flower-filled paradise of Pasadena. And also happens to be a very good school)

But wait, what’s this? Amazon reader says the book is about “the obssessive fascination with male sexual pleasure.”

Next!

“Justified” Episode 3

So far, the weakest of the three episodes.

But, self has decided that what makes this series so much fun to watch are the set pieces, such as the one that opened Episode 2, when the man who’d been shot in the chest —  miraculous survival! — in the previous episode, Boyd Crowder (turns out he was Raylan’s childhood friend), was talking about how he put off activating the morphine drip because he wanted his head clear for his talk with Raylan. Also, the scene where Raylan is escorting a convict to another prison, and Raylan and the convict get into a barbed conversation about “kin,” which (naturally) winds up leading to a scuffle, and Raylan cracks the man’s head into the steering wheel. Also, the scene where Raylan gets locked into a storage room by an escaped convict and they politely bid each other good night. (!@#!). Also, also —

Self, that’s enough! You’re posting about Episode 3, if you’ll remember?

Well, then, Episode 3 was rather slow, at least compared to the first two. Raylan again kills a man: that makes it 3 for 3.  One man killed per episode.  Self doesn’t really mind, though.  Perhaps Raylan Givens should keep killing one man per episode.  That would show that the producers aren’t afraid to be accused of following a formula!  Way to go, producers!

Self’s favorite scenes were these:

• Raylan meets a snitch at a restaurant, and the snitch gets Raylan to try some chocolate-y, frothy thing (looks like a Starbucks Frappucino) that supposedly has an egg in it.
• Raylan and Ava play pool:  Everything in this scene is double entendre, if you get self’s drift
• Raylan shows “black Mr. Clean” how a duel (with pistols) should go down.

Another

Anthony Lane on “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

This movie is currently showing in Menlo Park’s Guild:  hubby and self saw it a few weeks ago, but, alas, the post in which self gave her response to the movie vanished without garnering a single view.  Now, self reads with more than the usual interest a review of same movie by Anthony Lane in the 29 March 2010 issue of The New Yorker.  He seems to like it.  At least, more than self did.

This is how he summarizes the plot:

First, we get a prologue in which Blomkvist (played by a suitably dour Swede named Michael Nyqvist) is “found guilty of libel in an unconnected matter” (unconnected to the main mystery, that is, which is to find the missing grand-daughter of a wealthy industrialist) and is “sent to jail.  (The sentence is delayed for six months, which gives him time to solve the case of the disappearing girl).  Second, Lisbeth” (the heroine, the one with the dragon tattoo —  not to be confused with another girl with a dragon tattoo in movie “Hitman,” which they keep playing over and over on F/X, presumably so that fans of Timothy Olyphant can have him on demand, 24/7 if they so desire), who “has unspecified convictions in her past, has a new probation officer, who forces her to provide sexual services in return for a financial allowance” (This is the part that totally confused self:  She kept turning to hubby and asking, “So she’s an heiress???”  She didn’t get the fact that the man with access, apparently, to all of Lisbeth’s earthly wealth was her probation officer. But that’s because these days self is punch-drunk stupid from lack of sleep. But when did you ever hear of a probation officer doling out money as if he were administering a trust fund?)

Anyhoo, the probation officer keeps making disparaging remarks about Lisbeth’s sense of personal hygiene, yet seems to love running his porcine fingers through her (Amy Winehouse-type) black hair.  Not to worry, for Lisbeth “turns the tables, and basically rapes him back.  This frees her up to resume control of her own money, which buys her a new laptop, which allows her to hack into Blomkvist’s own computer  —  for no apparent reason other than sheer nosiness  —  all of which inspires him to take her on as his deputy.  Got it?”

Having never read the book on which this movie is based (The only Swedish mystery writer self has read is Henning Mankell), self has no way of judging Lane’s assertion that author Larsson “is concerned, to the brink of obssession, with cruelties of every stripe.”  But self didn’t like this movie for the same reason she didn’t like Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days,” which contained plenty of scenes of women’s sexual humiliation.  Really, self doesn’t need to sit through a movie to be reminded that women are being abused every day, all over the world!

Oh, oh, but what’s this?  Anthony Lane states that he, too, during “a single winter,” “feasted” on the collected works of Henning Mankell!  Which reminds self of the summer when she, too, feasted, though summertime is a much nicer time to feast on neurasthenic Swedish mystery writers, because then one can with greater facility distract oneself from the unrelenting mournfulness of the Swedish climate.

Then, Lane states that the pivotal moment in the movie (Spoilers ahead!) is when Blomkvist pins up a row of photographs on a cottage wall (Very cozy:  Blomkvist and Lisbeth share the cottage and of course the bed), and Lane knew, he just knew that “half of them would turn out to have been Nazis.”  Why?  Because they were all blonde???

Hubby professed to like the movie.  Sometimes he says things just to get self’s goat.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.