New Articles for the Week of March 4th: Colonel Sanders, in the TV Parlour, with the Stoker

KFC

You ever have that moment hit you, when you're walking down the street, loving and living life, and suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, it dawns on you that you haven't had KFC in, like, a year? Before you know it, you're back home, holding a plate of undercooked drumsticks, a cup of brown, motor oil gravy, and a greased through box of stringy potatoes that are to french fries what stubbing your toe on the cafe table is to a foot massage. As even your most base cravings flee the pleasure centres of your brain, you realize this is all too familiar. The stumbled upon stroke of gastro-genius, the thrill of putting thought into motion, the dreamy anticipation that follows on the way to the kitchen, and the cold, coagulated reality that greet you there are all part of a mistake you've made again, and again, year in, year out. You knew this was going to be the end result, because this is what happens every time you order KFC, and you've gone through these same motions more times than you can count. You should know better by now, you do know better by now. But you went through with it all anyway. You let the money change hands, and knowingly brought seven herbs and spices worth of sheer, southern-fried disappointment into your home. You see yourself as Memento's Leonard Shelby, having chosen to willfully ignore the truth of your own unchanging, self-destructive nature, and chase the glimmering mirage that's better left out of reach. Alone, you stare into the depths of the red cardboard bucket of chicken, and the chicken stare back.

afwjasdf;afiufqw1

Whoops, sorry bout that. Just cleaning fried chicken skin out of the keyboard. I wanted to start this week off with an extended metaphor for how finding stable, gainful employment after months of searching is like drifting onto an island moments before starvation...except then the very thing keeping you alive becomes a comforting deathtrap, and you wonder if it's worth sucking down coconut juice for the rest of your life. You know, the ol' "be careful what you wish for," type deal-y, except filtered through the universal disappoint that follows the five minutes each year you spend thinking, hey, I could really go for some KFC. Guess that sorta got lost in all the dramatics, my bad. And what the hell do I know about fried chicken anyway, I like Popeye's for God's sake.

Martin Freeman

Oh, right. Articles.

  • Like clockwork, a new Arrow review materializes. I may have been assigned covering the show, but that just means I appreciate its recent hot streak all the more.
  • And speaking of wooden objects that can be driven into the heart of a person, animal, or Dracula, the latter of which was created by late-Victorian-era author Bram Stoker (BOOM, SEGUE): here's my review for Stoker, the new movie from Old Boy director Park Chan-wook. I was lucky enough to catch it in limited release, and thoroughly appreciated its gothic style, and general fucked-up-idness. Plus, I think I've finally committed the proper ordering for Park Chan-wook's name to memory.   

I also had the very industrious goal of rattling off some thoughts on the shows I'm watching right now, but KFC-slamming slam poetry got in the way. Here's the five-second appraisal for a few of the things I'm keeping tabs on:

-Four episodes after reviewing the pilot, I'm still playing the Homeland game of "is this the week a tightly constructed spy drama goes to shit for being to plot-heavy?" So far, it hasn't happened, and the great character work, combined with the beautiful, insane setpieces, make this a challenger to Justified's Stetson crown as FX's best show.

  • Justified: One sawed off foot out of a pair of Walton Goggins bug-eyes.

-I might not have expressed this clearly enough when I reviewed the premiere for season 4 a few months back, but on the level of TV as entertainment, Justified is the best thing out there right now. Even the background music for the "Previously On" intros gives me more pure pleasure in 2 minutes than most shows manage in an hour. That it's a hoot every week, while also being consistently pretty great as a showcase for drama, acting, directing, writing, and all that, is just gravy.

-I don't know if I've fallen for an animated family sitcom like this since The Simpsons. Okay, so there haven't really been too many shows that fit the profile, and I didn't really fall in love with The Simpsons, so much as devote an entire childhood to it, but I stand by the inaccurate hyperbole. Bob's Burgers lands in a perfect sweet-spot between low-key, and zany, and the voice cast is really something else.

  • The Walking Dead: Thirty Walkers-appearing-from-literally-nowhere out of every furrowed brow Michonne gets to deliver instead of actual characterizing dialogue.

-I should more thoroughly hash out my near complete falling out with this show these last few weeks, especially after last Sunday's episode, which, while a significant step up from what the latest half season has brought, convinced me that The Walking Dead and I may soon be parting ways. And that's coming from a guy who enjoyed 50-odd issues of the comic, and reads The Ultimate Zombie Survival Guide at least once a year. "The Problem with Post-apocalyptic Programming" will wait for another time, but for now, I'll just say that between the two minutes of zombie action breaking up the tedium each week, and AMC's relentless efforts to Walking Dead-ify every waking moment of your life, I'm pretty strung out.

  • Enlightened: One epiphany-inducing sea turtle out of a dozen ironically self-involved existential voice overs.

-Again, I wish I had more time to write this one up properly. Then again, just about everything worth saying about how insanely precious this show is to TV as a whole, has come gushing out of the critical community these last two weeks like an African rainstorm, so I don't know how much I have to add. It's a show that's hard to really do justice in a paragraph, or even find an easy point of comparison, so let's settle for this: it's the opposite of Breaking Bad, and that's a compliment. Maybe everyone on Game of Thrones just wears sweat pants for a week, and HBO can spare the change to give one of the best things to happen to modern TV a third season.

  • Wordpress Shortcuts: 0 intuitive rulesets for font modification out of FUCK-YOU-I-JUST-WANT-THE-LAST-PART-ITALICIZED-WHY-IS-EVERYTHING-BOLD-NOW?!!?!

That's all for this week. To close up shop, please once again reflect on this picture of two-time Oscar-winner Ang Lee eating at In-N-Out Burger. I don't think we as a people have given the photo its proper due:

Ang Lee

New Articles for the Week of February 25th and a Little Oscars Post-Game

Happy post-Oscars Monday, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life with Argo as a Best Picture winner. Well, we could honestly say that the After Argo era started weeks ago, when the actual awards were just a formality needed to make it crystal clear that the Academy learned precisely nothing from last year. Apparently, Spielberg, and the war on terror, are out as sure-fire Oscar bait. What's in, are trifling, alphabetically convenient black & white love letters to Hollywood, The Artist being visually B&W, and Argo adopting the binary when dealing with themes, character, and writing. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself, and swear I'll be limiting my rambling on this subject, which has already been written about to death by much more perceptive commentators than I. So, let's just start with the old business: 

  • Two Arrow reviews for the price of one. Well, technically, it's two for the price of any integer, seeing as I'm not charging for these. How do people make money on the internet again?
  • And here's the piece where I got out most of my Oscar-oriented verbosity before the actual awards, in what was once titled "The Bullshitters Guide to the Oscars." I figured the addition of a number, and a subtraction of the word "bullshit" would help the SEO traffic. This was a lot of fun to write, which makes it easier to accept that I spent 7000 words writing an article with the shelf life of a baguette.

So, anyway, back to last night's big event. Look, I love the Oscars. It's maybe my favorite night of television all year, despite the fact that that as cultural commentary, a celebration of film, or just honest to god entertainment, they're usually pretty lousy. The major winners are almost always a given, and the broadcast itself is a familiarly blended cocktail of shameless pandering, and nervous flop-sweat. Worst of all, it's never quite as bad as your more sinister impulses might hope. But like I said, I love 'em, and the mix of that love that's ironic or earnest changes each year.

This time, with Argo rolling in as the prom king waiting to be crowned, and Seth MacFarlane hosting, the balance tipped far more towards the latter than the former. I don't actually mind how the winners shook out (beyond how some of the swing categories affected the results of my Oscar pool), and there's nothing really upsetting about Argo winning Best Picture, probably because there's nothing terribly upsetting about it to begin with. It was the default, the safety choice, the cheese-and-no-toppings pizza the Academy settled on after it was apparent that picking a film that played to the middle would be less of a headache than  supporting something that's even a slightly challenging. Why risk creating small pockets of dissent among the voters, when you can just make everyone shrug their shoulders in unison, mildly content with knowing that the one film that rubbed them the wrong way didn't win?

"At least it wasn't the worst thing," has become the de facto motto of the actual awards, leaving the show itself as the main attraction. This went about as well as you might imagine. The Academy hired Seth MacFarlane as a ratings bid to a younger, male-oriented audience, knowing full well that probably meant an evening of mean-spirited cracks about weight, sexual orientation, gender, and just general decency. There was a ten-second window in which it looked like MacFarlane's self-awareness would overpower his natural instincts, when his pre-recorded ditty, "We Saw Your Boobs," was cheekily pointing out the low expectations he was walking into the ceremony with. But then it kept going, and going, until you realized that the meta layer was present to let MacFarlane have his bad joke cake, and eat it too. The only thing in the opening act accomplished in a timely manner was how quickly it became apparent that William Shatner's "Ghost of Social Media Future" role wasn't an attempt at self-deprecation, so much as it was extended ass-covering (which is thematically consistent with the night, if you think about it).

The whole evening felt like it was written for the Crazy Old Racist archetype you find in a lot of TV and movies, where the jokes pretend to say "laugh at how inappropriate this person is," but really just provide backdoor entrances for the kinds of easy, racy groaners supposedly being satirized. Backhanded compliments, and other people's words, were MacFarlane's choice method of insulating himself when firing shots across the auditorium. Javier Bardem sure sounds weird huh, but it's okay, because he's pretty! I'm not making fun of Adele's weight, but remember when Rex Reed did? The thing is, there is a great Oscar host in MacFarlane, one brought out during the numerous song 'n dance skits that were the reason du jour for the overlong running time. As a comedian though, he played things as predictably as the Oscar voters, which is to say he stuck to his patented "mildly inflammatory joke, shit-eating grin" two-step. The snippy attitude infected some of the presenters, and a bit using the Jaws theme as playoff music, while amusing in concept, had the misfortune of being deployed during a heartfelt acceptance speech on behalf of recently bankrupt visual effects studio Rhythm & Hues.

Even The Onion got caught up in the general meanness, as an errant tweet about 9 year-old Best Actress nominee Quvenzhane Wallis was quickly taken down after posting, requiring a full-on apology letter this morning. The joke itself was actually a simple jab at how we accept that half the reason people watch these things is to see which couch-bound critic can unload the most vicious twitter insults. Wallis was the "target" for the sake of maximizing comedic juxtaposition between the harshness of the name-calling, and how innocuous the people being judged by millions really are. Buuuuuuuut there's just no way a majorly read publication, satirical or otherwise, comes out looking clever or insightful for calling a child a "rhymes-with-hunt," so whatever point there was to be made got buried in some very, very poor phrasing. It's a bummer of an evening when the only laugh everyone could enjoy without reservation was seeing Flight reenacted using sock puppets.

So, does that mean we're in for another soft-ball show next year, with the Academy pulling back on being "hip" by bringing back Billy Crystal, so long as he promises to leave the black shoe polish at home? Hard to say. Initial reports show that ratings did go up this year, and while critical response to the show has ranged from disappointed, to outright pissed off, the broader consensus from viewers at home seems to be that MacFarlane did a solid job ("Of course he was offensive, that's his job!"). Seeing as a bunch of old white dudes, a demographic safely outside MacFarlane's go-to material (unless a joke involving pedophile is needed), decided to gives this year's biggest prize to a work that's popular and inoffensive, then why not double down making the broadcast popular and offensive. At least when you do that, people might actually talk about the Oscars.

I realize I'm coming off as a downer, even though there have been far worse Oscars in the past, and the future will surely deliver many more. To end on a positive note, please enjoy this picture of two-time Best Director winner Ang Lee going all Richard Parker on some In-N-Out Burger.

New Articles for the Week of February 11th

Hey-hey, everybody! Happy belated February, one and all. It's been a hectic one over on my end, but for celebratory reasons. After months on the hunt, I've finally locked down a job, so the lights at my humble abode will remain on for the foreseeable future. Theoretically, anyway -the electricity bill is going to take a nosedive, as my new gig is mostly night work. It's got really good pay, with some really bad hours, but it'll free me up to write more extensive features during the daytime. Already cooking is my previously mentioned Oscars guide, as well as an opinion piece on Netflix's recent entrance into the heavyweight division of TV programming. Here's some stuff to tide you over until then:

-Old business first: Not one, but two Arrow reviews. Don't I just spoil you?

-New business: I reviewed the pilot for The Americans, a very promising new show on FX that can be best summed up as Cold War-era Homeland. As with Showtime's twisty conspiracy drama, I'm waiting for this one to go off a cliff at any moment, but through two episodes, it's been terrific. If nothing else, watch the first ten minutes of the pilot, which is fantastic, and might make a Fleetwood Mac song your new pump-up jam.

-Off my mind: I like having this blog because it lets me write pieces that don't really belong on other websites. For instance, I recently decided to take on The Shield as my next big TV drama, and wrote my thoughts on it through two seasons a couple weeks back. Ditto for my not-review-but-still-kinda-review-sounding think-piece for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which was supposed to only run a few hundred words, but quickly took on a life (and length) of its own. See, Peter Jackson: you're not the only one who can turn a small, simple project into a gigantic, shaggy monstrosity that runs waaaaaaay too long.

That's all for this update, but be sure to check back regularly, or subscribe to the site. As always, you can see an orderly list of my recent published work by checking out http://wegotthiscovered.com/author/sam-woolf/

New Articles for the Week of January 20th

Greetings and g'days everybody. Got plenty to log this week, so let's not waste time on pleasantries and get on with bulletpointing this bad boy:

  • First up, a movie review! For the new Schwarzenegger movie! That was released in January! And made $6 million on a three day weekend!  Yes, The Last Stand sounds depressing, but it's actually better than it has any right to be. You might have already part of my review actually, because one of the perks of writing for We Got This Covered is seeing your work selected by Rotten Tomatoes! That's right, I am one of the critics who said this "rotten" actioneer was "fresh". I AM THE 58%! 
  • Second, is another movie review! I did the honors of pulling double-feature duty last week, and the second review is for Broken City, which also has a blurb on Rotten Tomatoes from yours truly. Yup, I finally have work appearing on one of the biggest review aggregators in the world, and in both cases, they clash with the consensus (I'm coming for your troll crown, Armond White). This one split me pretty much down the middle, but I give it a gentle recommendation. Save it for an airplane, or a rental.
  • Last review of the week is for Arrow which can be found, along with all my other WGTC work, by following the link.
  • Next up, is my ranking order of the Best Picture nominees, which I teased in last week's update. This was a ton of fun to write, and is just a taste of something I've got cooking for when Oscar-hype proper starts to build next month. Check it out, see what you make of my list, and let me just how wrong I am about the order in the comments.
  • Last, but not least, a feature over at a new website, What Culture. I had never heard of this publication until they got into contact with me after I published my Skyfall analysis a few months back. It seems like a site with a very active readership, so it was a fun challenge to write an article like What Your Favourite Star Wars Movie Says About You. It was a bit like coming up with a roast for your boss at work...only you're the newest hire, and the boss isn't a person, it's a legion of fans that stretches across a 30 year history. Definitely a different kind of piece than I usually write, but one that was thoroughly enjoyable to generate. Expect more like it in the future.

That's all for this week, hope you all have a good one.

New Articles for the Week of January 13th

Happy belated New Year everybody. I hope your 2013 has gotten off to a great start, as mine has, at least in a pop culture-binging sort of way. Yes, awards season fervor is in full swing, as evidenced by my liveblog, and subsequent breakdown of the Oscar nominations. I also had the great pleasure of getting to review the fourth season premiere of Justified, one of my favorite TV shows that's as good as ever. It'll probably be my only writeup for the show until it inevitably makes my best of 2013 list, the way it did for my best of 2012 (plug!). And of course, there's my review for Zero Dark Thirty, which should be required viewing, if only to let you jump in on all the juicy debate raging online about whether it's pro-torture, anti-torture, or even any good. That's all for now, but expect my ranking of the Best Picture nominees just as soon as I get back from my Amour screening.

New Articles For Week of Rest of 2012

Happy New Year's Eve everybody, let tonight's celebrations be merry, and your holiday hangovers brief. Last update for the year, with final 2012 episodes from both Arrow and Parks and Recreation. But as a special year end send-off, I also threw together a Top 20 TV shows of 2012 article for Wegotthiscovered last week, part 1 of which can be found here. Part 2, which has the Top 10, as well as a video top 10 I cooked up, is right here. The video portion was a real learning experience, in that I learned when I do a Top 10 list, my writing patterns ape Alan Sepinwall, but my voice sounds like Dan Fineberg, two very fine TV critics I hope to learn more from in 2013. 2012's been another fruitful year of this little experiment, one that I assure you will only be getting weirder, more refined, and more refined in its weirdness, next year. Thanks for reading, and happy New Year!

New Articles: Week of November 26th

Happy end of Movember everyone. Seriously, i'm not even a guy who can grow much facial hair, but I've never felt more in need of a shave. A fair bit to add to the update this week, as in addition to recaps for Parks and Recreation and Arrow, two articles of mine got published over at wegothiscovered, and it was a blast writing both of them. The first was a fun little list about the worst storylines in the best shows. Okay, so including Dexter and The Walking Dead in that list might have been a stretch, but it was oddly fun reminiscing on plotlines that seemed either out of place, or major warning signs for my favorite shows.

On the movie end of things, I saw Skyfall twice and loved it. Rather than write a standard review, I decided to write a little piece about the themes (WHAT?) of the latest James Bond movie. And by "little", I mean, "5000 word thesis". No joke, I've had to turn in final papers in university shorter than this thing, but I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

So check my stuff out, rate, comment, link, all that good stuff.