Bernard and Doris (2008)–**
TV Review

While watching Bernard and Doris I waited for the other shoe to drop. Hell, I was even waiting for a glass to be thrown. I was waiting for any hint of drama, but there was no drama to be had. Thus is the problem with Bob Balaban’s telefilm about the relationship between billionaire philanthropist Doris Duke and her butler and caregiver Bernard Lafferty; it is a bore.

Duke (played by Susan Sarandon) isn’t a diva here. She drinks a little too much occasionally. She likes things her way, and she doesn’t like waste. We first meet Duke when she fires her butler for informing her that he is going to throw out food she refused. He didn’t pay for that food, she reminds him and then gives him the boot.

Enter Lafferty (Ralph Fiennes), a mysterious, unassuming fellow who just happened to work for Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee. Without asking or without being offered the job, Lafferty begins to serve Duke, who quickly takes him on once she’s sober enough to make the decision. Lafferty, who is gay, isn’t susceptible to Duke’s usual fuck and fire antics. Instead a friendship develops that, though dubious in the eyes of most of her handlers, both she and Bernard understand.

The film flirts with the idea that Lafferty is scheming to cash in on Duke’s inevitable death (which he does). It nearly goes so far as to make Duke out to be a hardcore lush and a insatiable cougar. It sniffs around the idea that Duke had a wild outburst now and then, even if she is a solid, considerate figure. Then it bludgeons us with Lafferty’s alcoholism, which isn’t that interesting.

There’s no doubt that Duke is an incredibly intriguing figure, but the film plays out like a badly staged theatrical production without any theatrics. The single location (Duke’s estate) is cramped and claustrophobic, and we merely hear voice-over references to Duke’s exotic exploits.

There’s a moment where memos to the staff from Lafferty, who is out globe-trotting with Duke in southeast Asia, are narrated to the audience. Instead of getting to see the adventuring, we watch the staff at the estate put dust sheets over her antique furniture. There’s a sense that the relationship really blossomed during those months away, but we don’t get to see it. We remain disconnected, and even talented performers like Fiennes and Sarandon can’t draw us in.

Bernard and Doris airs Saturday, Feb. 9 at 8 p.m. on HBO.

Starz has a long way to go before it attains the quality of HBO or Showtime. The cable channel’s original shows just aren’t all that original. I guess that comment pertains more to the unfortunate airing of the home makeover parody Hollywood Residential than it does to Head Case. Both shows premiere on Wednesday, Jan. 23 on Starz, with Head Case celebrating it’s expansion from a 15-minute comedy to a full half-hour show.

I didn’t love Head Case when I first saw it, but at a quarter-hour, the show had a pace that made up for its often patronizing, Hollywood insider humor. Thankfully, the half-hour version keeps its momentum. With Alexandra Wentworth as Dr. Goode, therapist to the B-list stars, you still get the female equivalent of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, only with patients instead of subordinates.

It’s hard to believe a Starz program would actually decline in quality from Head Case. But with Hollywood Residential, an agonizing half-hour comedy about a celebrity home renovation show, you get a cheap knock-off of a Comedy Central original.

The episode I saw featured a kitchen remodeling for Chris Kattan, who gets the show’s host Tony (Adam Paul) an audition for a part in his movie. From there we learn, that Hollywood has its phonies and egomaniacs, much like we do in Head Case. Hollywood Residential is plagued by its paring with Head Case, if only because the celeb guest concept can only go so far in one night, and Head Case does it better.

Of the two shows, I can still see myself watching Head Case, if only for the fleeting moments of humor that occur when Dr. Goode is analyzing a patient. The sessions quickly become excessive ethnic jokes or sexual situations (just because you are on premium cable doesn’t mean you should mention cum-guzzling), which are often exposed as less than stellar attempts at edgy humor. Dr. Goode’s quirky personal life outside the office, which is thankfully a major focus of the half-hour version, adds some much needed punch.

Both shows have a similar gimmick, featuring celebrity guests as themselves with moments of self-parody. Yet, no one looks like they are having much fun. Here’s a suggestion. Instead of watching either show on Starz, rent Extras: The Complete Series and watch serious celebrities (David Bowie, Kate Winslet, Robert DeNiro, etc.) enjoy making fun of themselves.

Head Case’s second season premieres Jan. 23 at 10 p.m. followed by Hollywood Residential at 10:30 p.m.

Hollywood Residential

Head Case

I grew up in the same city as Justin Fatica, a Catholic youth minister who infuses his religious program with a touch of Scared Straight. It’s a small city with a predominantly Catholic citizenry. Fatica, a Catholic, attended the region’s most notable Catholic high school (one that is still boys only). The HBO documentary Hard as Nails follows Fatica as he builds his controversial Catholic ministry, Hard as Nails.

Fatica’s ministry is intense and extreme by any measure, but when he’s preaching to Catholic youth who are used to convention and not conviction, the experience is visibly jarring for those being evangelized. Though the ministry builds a team of youth ministers, all of whom share the same clarity of faith, none are nearly as powerful as Fatica, who may even have the audience converted by the end of the film.

He shouts and screams. He talks about loving sex (but not pre-marital sex) and calls one team member fat over and over again in front of an audience of at times hundreds of teens. He then asks why in the hell isn’t that audience helping the fat girl or the lonely boy or any others who feel excluded from the mainstream of any given group.

To go with his unconventional preaching style, Fatica has an unconventional look. He carries himself like a mob boss’s muscle. In his mind, he probably sees himself as God’s muscle. But while creating an almost mythic story about Fatica, the prophet, Hard as Nails doesn’t forget to tell at least part of the story of Fatica, the man. He’s noticeably uncomfortable around his father. The family house on Lake Erie where his parents live is a massive monument to materialism, something Fatica has more or less rejected. Though Fatica tries to explain his relationship with his father, we still see their mutual lack of understanding about each other’s lives.

I would have liked to know more about Fatica’s personal side. After all, there was a reason he found his faith. We don’t get much more than allusions to his past in the film. While the lack of personal background means Hard as Nails isn’t as well-rounded as any great documentary, it’s certainly another laudable effort from HBO.

Hard as Nails premieres Monday, Dec. 17 at 8 p.m. on HBO.

Late in the documentary I Am an Animal, PETA co-founder Alex Pacheco says that PETA founder and president Ingrid Newkirk believes there’s no such thing as bad publicity. If that’s the case, PETA could have used a scathing indictment and not this boring, balanced portrait.

I Am an Animal is at once a profile of Newkirk, an historical look a PETA, a contemporary tale of animal activism and a look at PETA’s controversial publicity machine. After catching the recent release Your Mommy Kills Animals, a documentary on the history of the animal rights movement which didn’t have anything kind to say about PETA and its fundraising over fur-saving, I fully expected this film to be a rebuttal. It’s not. It’s hardly anything. With fairness in its sights, I Am an Animal, in a mere 75 minutes, woefully attempts to cast a very wide net without knowing what it is trying to catch.

We are teased in the first moments of the film with a look at a PETA investigation into abuse at ConAgra’s turkey processing plant. This could have served as an emotional anchor for the film but is hardly revisited as the program proceeds. The film, with its facts and figures approach, never even captures the spirit of the activists.

Maybe that says more about PETA than it does the actual film. I Am an Animal is a corporatized version of the unfortunately titled Your Mommy Kills Animals (named, ironically, after a PETA flyer), much like PETA is a corporatized version of the animal rights movement. It’s at times dreary in its labored ambitions to find out who Newkirk and PETA are, and there’s never a sense that it breaks down the organization’s image control. The documentary proceeds like a cable news show’s profile of a seasoned politician who is making a run for the White House. There’s just no bark or bite.

Even when the film does address PETA’s less than perfect image in the eyes of non-PETA animal rights activists, it does so without the vigor we should expect from a documentary on HBO or otherwise. There are moments in the film when Newkirk and her employees discuss the apparent failure in their ConAgra investigation, maybe for dramatic effect or maybe as an subtle admission that the focus of the film, too, had disappeared. I hope for the sake of the filmmakers that the former is the case. If not, it may be time to return to film school. That or get a job at CNN covering the 2008 election.

I Am an Animal premieres Monday, Nov. 19 at 8 p.m. on HBO.

To Die in Jerusalem (2007)–***

To Die in Jerusalem, a documentary account of two mothers in mourning after an 18-year-old Palestinian girl’s martyrdom operation kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, leaves the viewer with two questions in the end: who will lay down their arms first and who should lay them down?

It’s not surprising, the questions we are asking, because they are the same questions we were asking before the documentary. To Die in Jerusalem doesn’t claim to answer either question, but rather shows the audience the ideological stalemate through the eyes of mothers who lost their daughters.

The daughters are Rachel and Ayat, the former being an Israeli teen who went to the supermarket for her mother and the latter being a suicide bomber. Both girls look eerily similar with long dark hair, dark eyes, and dark complexions. Their deaths were not lost on the world, so much so that the director even includes a sound byte from George W. Bush that is surprising in its eloquence. Bush mentions the dying of youths as the death of the future, and for the mothers, their ideas of what the future should be are representative of the broader conflict.

Though the film has about 40 minutes of poignant exposition, To Die in Jerusalem is mainly focused on getting to the last 30. In that half hour, the mother of the Israeli girl, Abigail, confronts the mother of the Palestinian girl, Um Samir, via satellite. The meeting comes four years after the bombing, and whatever answers Abigail was still looking for aren’t found.

The mothers tend to talk around each other, Abigail from the perspective of the free Israeli who has time to ponder the seemingly illogical attack and Um Samir from the perspective of the oppressed Palestinian who mourns her daughter but not the reasoning behind the attack. Um Samir, in fact, has one of the single most passionate moments when she argues that only through resistance have the shackles of oppression been historically removed.

Um Samir doesn’t have the ability to see the event from Abigail’s perspective. Likewise Abigail, who could barely stand to be in Palestinian Authority-controlled territory long enough to experience its horrors, cannot empathize with Um Samir’s life. Even the mutual prayer for peace and their hatred of the political systems that perpetuate the violence come from their differing points of view.

To Die in Jerusalem ends with the pictures of the girls juxtaposed once again on screen, a sobering reminder of the tragic consequences of the continuing struggle to find peace. There are no solutions proposed, but the delicacy of the subjects allows an audience well aware of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to consider it again in a way they haven’t before.

To Die in Jerusalem, directed by Hilla Medalia, airs Nov. 1 at 9 p.m. on HBO.

There are some books that you can’t put down. And then there are some DVD sets that you can’t stop watching. NBC’s 30 Rock is too hilarious and too lovable to merely casually watch one episode at a time. The half-hour comedy, set in the world of late-night TV, is a riotous laugher that tempts first time viewers with seven and a half hours of marathon-worthy episodes.

Starring Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock follows Liz Lemon (Fey), head writer and producer of The Girlie Show. Lemon’s show is a safe, secure hit until GE exec Jack Donaghy (Baldwin) takes over as Vice President of Television and Microwave Oven Programming. Donaghy, the author of Jack Attack: The Art of Aggression, sees a hit that can do boffo business outside of the show’s mostly female audience. Before Lemon can say no, Donaghy adds the unstable comedian Tracy Jordon (Tracy Morgan) to the cast and changes the name to TGS with Tracy Jordon. Hilarity ensues.

It’s not hard to nail down that hilarity. 30 Rock may be the smartest, cutest, funniest, most charming comedy on network TV, a package as rare as it is great. From the downright crazy, off-the-wall Tracy Jordon moments (as seen in such classics episodes “Tracy Does Conan” and the season finale featuring The Black Crusaders) to Tina Fey’s adorably neurotic, tragically lovelorn power female antics (see the episode titled “The ‘C’ Word”), 30 Rock has non-stop dialogue we expected from Sorkin’s canceled Studio 60 with ten times the laughs.

While the show’s best comedic moments are the random, unexpected laughs that audience off guard, the consistently funny Alec Baldwin playing Jack Donaghy is an unfaltering reminder of how good network TV can be. Baldwin’s acting chops bring a sense of legitimacy to his character, while his surprising ability to out-funny the show’s best comedians makes his stints on Saturday Night Live look like batting practice for the All-Star Game.

Baldwin’s Donaghy even bests Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott from The Office, making him the funniest boss on NBC. Baldwin leads an ensemble cast that complements The Office and allows NBC’s Thursday night line-up (featuring both shows) to regain the luster it lost when Seinfeld ended.

The Extras
If there is one disappointment on the 30 Rock DVD set, it’s the extras. The deleted scenes should have been deleted. The 10-second Internet sitcom isn’t funny out of context. The country bumpkin NBC page who, out of love for television, works the desk at TGS has uninspired moment after uninspired moment on his fake late-night talk show. He’s funnier than the extras let on. For longtime fans of the show, it’s better to simply indulge in rewatching the season than sitting through unfunny extras from one of the funniest shows on TV.

Weeds has always been on the periphery of a larger scale political debate. Sure, it’s a show about a white woman in a suburban California city who sells weed to the upper middle class locals, but it always appeared to be a dramedy first. It wasn’t until season two bridged into season three that I realized how much Weeds really reflected the culture at large.

To catch up, Weeds follows the widowed Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) as she sells marijuana here and there to make some cash to pay for the finer things in her suburban paradise. Stretched to the limit by the affluent lifestyle the now single mother wants to keep, Nancy ventures deeper into the world of dealing. Her African-American, working-class supplier, Heylia (Tonye Patano), pushes her around a little too much, forcing the assertive, ambitious Nancy to go out on her own. She, with her supplier’s equally bullied nephew Conrad (Romany Malco), decides to go into business growing and selling herself. At the end of season two, Nancy has a few automatic weapons pointed at her head and realizes that the big bad world of drug dealing is bigger and badder than she ever thought.

Maybe I’m late to the show on this one, but it wasn’t until watching the first three episodes of season three that I realized that Nancy represented the irrational, anti-social behavior that can follow a severe trauma. She is the tragic heroine of our post-9/11 America. After watching Weeds, you easily and begrudgingly realize how easy it was for America to go on a devastating, nonsensical warpath after the World Trade Center attacks (e.g. Iraq). Nancy too makes mistakes she wouldn’t have made had she had her head on straight.

Mostly, though, we see the collateral damage of Nancy’s mistakes. Her sons become just as unscrewed, one turning into a thief and vandal for the sake of his mother and the other becoming an outspoken, critical voice standing against the status quo. Nancy’s growing partner Conrad becomes a slave to the man who once held a gun to both his and Nancy’s heads. Her supplier Heylia can’t supply. Her DEA agent husband, who she married to protect her business, is dead. Her accountant and her lawyer both lose their marriages.

Yes, season three does have darker elements to it, but it also maintains the sharp, perceptive humor that made the show worth watching in the first place. Most notably is the addition of Matthew Modine (episode four) as the developer of spiritually-based communities who hires Nancy so he can openly and aggressively flirt with her. Elizabeth Perkins, playing Nancy’s bitchy, nosy neighbor, is as unlovable as ever, as well. The new combination humor and darker drama results in a show reminiscent of Six Feet Under.

Six Feet Under is an excellent, but imperfect comparison. That HBO show (still the greatest in the history of television) lost momentum after the first two seasons. Weeds, on the other hand, proves that it has the fuel to become something greater than I imagine even the show’s creator Jenji Kohan thought it could be. If you don’t have Showtime, yet, there’s no better reason to subscribe than to watch Weeds season three.

Weeds returns Monday, Aug. 13 at 1o p.m. followed by the new Showtime Original Califonication at 10:30 p.m.

Flight of the Conchords – Sally
TV Review

Flight of the Conchords is so naturally performed and so inexpensively produced it’s hard to see why it belongs on HBO at all. The show from the kiwi folk comedy duo Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement is an offbeat, but not irreverent single-camera sitcom that lacks the scale, substance and sensibility of most HBO series. That’s not an indictment, but a warning. Flight of the Conchords isn’t Entourage or Sex in the City or even Extras. It’s different. And sometimes different is just good.

Sometimes, different also means breaking into spontaneous song. Flight of the Conchords boasts three musical numbers, all fitting into the storyline of a New Zealand band trying to make it in New York. That’s not how we first meet Flight of the Conchords, though. We follow them to a party where Jemaine (you may recognize him from those Outback Steakhouse commercials) falls for a girl who could (now sing this part) “definitely be in the top three hottest girls on the street, depending on the street.”

Her name is Sally, and she once dated Jemaine’s buddy Bret. While Jemaine juggles his loyalty to Bret and his love for…oh, just stop. You know what? The story isn’t that important. The show is about two comedians making music. The songs are where the moments of brilliance lie.

The fun, quirky music videos that pop-up can make this long half-hour worth watching. The 10 or so minutes in between numbers aren’t groundbreaking comedy. Those interludes aren’t even Saturday Night Live funny. But the music makes the difference.

Still, a quick YouTube search for the duo, Flight of the Conchords, proves more rewarding than actually watching an entire episode of the TV show. Why listen to these guys pine on premium cable when you can listen to better songs, ones about racist dragons, via the Internet.

YouTube, Comedy Central or even PBS could have given Flight of the Conchords, a solid show when not compared to HBO’s usual fare, a suitable home. Sure, the duo has already appeared on HBO’s One Night Stand, but the oddly loveable comedians can’t pull off the half-hour storyline required of a sitcom. The fact is that with a CD coming out later this year, Flight of the Concords, the TV show, feels like a marketing gimmick for Flight of the Conchords, the band. I’m not saying they aren’t good, but with this show, they certainly are just passing through.

Flight of the Conchords premieres Sunday, June 17 at 10:30 p.m. You can see the entire first episode on HBO.com

Flight of the Conchords: Audio Download

Meadowlands: Pilot
TV Review

It’s refreshing to learn that Meadowlands, a series about witness protection program families living in the ultimate gated community, isn’t simply a show about the idyllic, mysterious suburban locale. In fact, we learn more about the town of Meadowlands in the pilot episode than we’ve learned about the island in all three seasons of Lost. No, Meadowlands doesn’t get caught up in forcing the audience to play guessing games about a bizarre community. Instead, we are thrust into the sublime weirdness of the residents.

There is a difference between Meadowlands and the usual TV series or movie about suburbia. It’s not darkly comical; it’s dark. The resident’s aren’t Picket Fencesodd; they’re Arkham Asylum odd. An undercurrent of madness makes the melodrama seem more dire and the residents more interesting.

Four of those residents just moved to town. The Brogan family, with patriarch Danny (David Morrissey), his wife Evelyn (Lucy Cohu), their daughter Zoe (Felicity Jones) and her twin Mark (Harry Treadaway), are led blindfolded to their new home. They leave behind their names, their lives and, hopefully, the people who tried to burn them alive for Danny’s criminal ways. Meadowlands is the safest place in the world. And they’re lucky to be there.

At least Danny tries to convince his family that their seclusion is worth it. While his 17-yea-old son, still silent from his traumatic fire experience, spends his time ogling a neighbor woman who is too happy to show off and his flirty daughter tries to snag the town’s hot, bad-boy handyman Jack (Tom Hardy), Danny’s focus turns to his wife who pines for a day outside the compound. That’s just day one. The true nature of the town is exposed when the aggressive sexuality of the handyman is countered by the aggressive discipline of the local head of law enforcement (Ralph Brown). Scared when the constable reveals that he knows his true identity, Danny runs to the folks in charge and gets a rundown on just how bizarre, and possibly dangerous, Meadowlands’s residents really are.

Compared to most shows that air on Showtime, a channel that masquerades soft-corn porn (The Tudors) and fetish TV (Dexter) as high-end drama, Meadowlands isn’t a likely candidate to fill a Sunday night line-up. It is a titillating drama for sure, but the Channel 4/Showtime co-production lacks the pretense of a show abut Henry the VIII or a serial killer who kills killers.

Within the first 15 minutes, Zoe has already made an indecent proposal to Jack (of all trades!) the handyman and Danny and Evelyn start to try out the kitchen counter. When the sunny neighbor Brenda (Melanie Hill) masturbates in front of Mark with one of the gloves he wears to hide his burns, the oddities are just beginning.

Yes, there is something askew about the entire show. Though we learn a lot about Meadowlands we hardly scrape the surface of how each resident got there. The show certainly has the makings of a quality soap, which makes criticism hard to dish out. The worst you can say about Meadowlands is that it isn’t groundbreaking; the best you can say is that it is it likely to be the most addictive hour Showtime has ever aired.

Meadowlands premieres Sunday, June 17 at 10 pm. on Showtime.

Head Case (2007)–**1/2

After his therapy session with Dr. Goode (Alexandra Wentworth) in the first episode of Head Case, Jason Priestly, dressed in women’s tank and wig, exits into the waiting room. There he runs into sportscaster Rick Eisen who asks Priestly if it’s his first time with Dr. Goode. It is, but Eisen ensures, “It gets better.”

The pushy, judgmental Dr. Goode has a slew of celebrity patients who go to her out of an apparent emotional masochism. The first three episodes feature appearances by Andy Dick, Ione Skye and Shelby Lyne, in addition to Priestly and Eisen. Later episodes feature Tom Sizemore, Jason Silverman and the karate kid himself Ralph Macchio.

It’s not the celebrity A-list the similarly-themed animated show Dr. Katz could claim, but it’s not bad for a therapist who can force an unwilling Priestly to think hard about his sexuality just because he’s pretty.

Yes, Head Case is a funny, if slightly conventional move by Starz! cable network into the world of original programming. Wentworth’s sketch comedy background shows, but the deadpan delivery and self-deprecating humor from her celebrity guests…err…patients are enjoyable.

In a world with The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, enjoyable alone doesn’t cut it. When you have to subscribe to Starz! to watch the show, it means it should be fresher. In the third episode, for example, Andy Dick’s standard temper tantrums aren’t as funny as they used to be. A few years ago the single-camera, no laugh track approach would have been equally novel, but today, even Comedy Central would have passed on Head Case.

Still, the 15-minute runtime is a nod to the success of YouTube, iFilm and the other user-generated content sites. Head Case isn’t long enough, even after three episodes, to let us fully appreciate the characters’ quirks (the gossiping receptionist and the patient-less Freudian psychologist), but it makes it so the funny moments come in quickly and the unfunny moments go away fast. I don’t plan on subscribing to Starz! for this one, but when it leaks onto the Internet, you can count me in.

Head Case airs as part of Starz! Comedy Hour every Wednesday at 11 p.m.