Trying to make up for being a slug: TV review capsules
Yes, instead of finishing my review of Mark of Zorro, I'm instead winging it through some capsule reviews of stuff I've watched on TV recently. Better than nothing, right? Get ready for "Burn Notice" and "Man Vs. Wild".
Burn Notice has been airing on USA Network for about a month now. It stars Jeffrey Donovan (no, you don't know who he is, but that's OK), Gabrielle Anwar, Bruce Campbell and Sharon Gless. Donovan is former spy Michael Westen, who's been cut off and blacklisted ("burned") and stranded in his old home town of Miami, Florida. He's got no money, no credit, no ability to get a real job or legal funds. He's being watched by the FBI; his ex-agent best friend (Campbell) is reporting on him to the Feds (he swears it's nothing really important!); his ex-girlfriend, the IRA bank robber (Anwar) is constantly breaking into his seedy apartment, and getting pally with his neurotic hypochondriac mother (Gless.) (Patrick MacGoohan had an easier time of it, really.) Westen needs to: try to find out who burned him and why; make a living by utilizing his talents in an "under the table" troubleshooter capacity; and try to keep his friends and family at an emotional arm's-length. (OK, that last is more of a neurotic compulsion than a need.) So far Westen has: helped a groundskeeper get clear of a bogus burglary charge; conned some con-men out of the money they stole from little old ladies; and saved a waitress and her teenaged daughter from the drug dealer the woman was a witness against.
The tone of the show is clever, amiable fun. The main characters rub each other the wrong way in an especially convivial manner (for the viewer, anyway.) Life in the world of espionage is not conducive to ease of mind, trust in others, or a tendency to share intimacy. Apparently, Westen's childhood did much to prepare him for this outlook. The end result of all this is wonderful character humor, clever crime plots, and a slowly percolating arc plot which might as well never get resolved, because it would spoil all the fun I'm having here.
Man Vs. Wild is a documentary series on the Discovery Channel (or as i call it, the "glad I'm not that guy channel'). In some ways, it's of a piece with other Discovery series like "Deadliest Catch," "Ice Road Truckers" and "Dirty Jobs." Rather than doin an unpleasnt and/or dangerous job, series presenter Bear Grylls instead deliberately strands himself in some godforsaken wilderness and tries to get out of it. Theoretically simulating a trapped tourist, and carrying very little equipment (the clothes on his back, a water bottle, and often, but not always, a knife and/or flint) ex-SAS man Grylls slogs his way through swamps, climbs sheer cliffs, scrounges for food, seeks out water, finds shelter and throws himself into quicksand to demonstrate how to get out of it.
Grylls has also climbed Everest (he's been climbing since childhood) so not everything he does here is safely repeatable by Joe Average, but surely I must be picking up some useful survival knowledge here, right? There's the trick of finding North using a watch (non-digital, of course). There's the fact that 80% of all mushrooms are poisonous, and that few of them have any nutritional value anyway. Also, you should really snap the trout's back with the first bite, so it dies quickly.
Which brings me to the major caveat. Grylls does some fairly nasty stuff in the name of survival (squeezing water out of fresh elephant dung in Kenya; drinking his own urine in the Australian desert) but the thing which will most trouble viewers is undoubtedly his consumption of live (or only just dead) animals. Fish are eaten raw... very raw. Spiders, scorpion, larvae and tree frogs are eaten live (scorpions get de-venomed first). Snakes are butchered on-camera. Rabbits are bopped on the head or snared, then skinned and cooked. He'd have eaten that young alligator in the Everglades if it wasn't a protected species (that's where he draws the line.) So viewer beware: if you don't like critters getting cacked on camera, approach this one with caution.
Queasiness aside, I find this show compelling. It's got some travelogue aspects. Each episode finds our pal Bear in a different location: Iceland, Utah, Switzerland, Mexico, an unknown tropical island... Hot, cold, wet, dry, barren, lush, he's done them all. Yet each place is distinct, unique in its circumstances and details. Mountains in Switzerland are not the same as mountains in the Sierra Nevada, and the Moab desert is vastly different from the Kimberly in Australia. Survival strategies vary widely: how to find human habitation, how to find food, how to find water. He also seems to keep finding different ways to start fires.
So slightly grisly, but only mildly repetetive, informative and fun. There's another, Canadian-produced show called Survivorman which also airs on Discovery. I may try it as well, see which one I like better.
That's all I can manage tonight. I may be back tomorrow with a few more quick capsules. And there's always the off-chance I'll finish with Zorro finally.
Burn Notice has been airing on USA Network for about a month now. It stars Jeffrey Donovan (no, you don't know who he is, but that's OK), Gabrielle Anwar, Bruce Campbell and Sharon Gless. Donovan is former spy Michael Westen, who's been cut off and blacklisted ("burned") and stranded in his old home town of Miami, Florida. He's got no money, no credit, no ability to get a real job or legal funds. He's being watched by the FBI; his ex-agent best friend (Campbell) is reporting on him to the Feds (he swears it's nothing really important!); his ex-girlfriend, the IRA bank robber (Anwar) is constantly breaking into his seedy apartment, and getting pally with his neurotic hypochondriac mother (Gless.) (Patrick MacGoohan had an easier time of it, really.) Westen needs to: try to find out who burned him and why; make a living by utilizing his talents in an "under the table" troubleshooter capacity; and try to keep his friends and family at an emotional arm's-length. (OK, that last is more of a neurotic compulsion than a need.) So far Westen has: helped a groundskeeper get clear of a bogus burglary charge; conned some con-men out of the money they stole from little old ladies; and saved a waitress and her teenaged daughter from the drug dealer the woman was a witness against.
The tone of the show is clever, amiable fun. The main characters rub each other the wrong way in an especially convivial manner (for the viewer, anyway.) Life in the world of espionage is not conducive to ease of mind, trust in others, or a tendency to share intimacy. Apparently, Westen's childhood did much to prepare him for this outlook. The end result of all this is wonderful character humor, clever crime plots, and a slowly percolating arc plot which might as well never get resolved, because it would spoil all the fun I'm having here.
Man Vs. Wild is a documentary series on the Discovery Channel (or as i call it, the "glad I'm not that guy channel'). In some ways, it's of a piece with other Discovery series like "Deadliest Catch," "Ice Road Truckers" and "Dirty Jobs." Rather than doin an unpleasnt and/or dangerous job, series presenter Bear Grylls instead deliberately strands himself in some godforsaken wilderness and tries to get out of it. Theoretically simulating a trapped tourist, and carrying very little equipment (the clothes on his back, a water bottle, and often, but not always, a knife and/or flint) ex-SAS man Grylls slogs his way through swamps, climbs sheer cliffs, scrounges for food, seeks out water, finds shelter and throws himself into quicksand to demonstrate how to get out of it.
Grylls has also climbed Everest (he's been climbing since childhood) so not everything he does here is safely repeatable by Joe Average, but surely I must be picking up some useful survival knowledge here, right? There's the trick of finding North using a watch (non-digital, of course). There's the fact that 80% of all mushrooms are poisonous, and that few of them have any nutritional value anyway. Also, you should really snap the trout's back with the first bite, so it dies quickly.
Which brings me to the major caveat. Grylls does some fairly nasty stuff in the name of survival (squeezing water out of fresh elephant dung in Kenya; drinking his own urine in the Australian desert) but the thing which will most trouble viewers is undoubtedly his consumption of live (or only just dead) animals. Fish are eaten raw... very raw. Spiders, scorpion, larvae and tree frogs are eaten live (scorpions get de-venomed first). Snakes are butchered on-camera. Rabbits are bopped on the head or snared, then skinned and cooked. He'd have eaten that young alligator in the Everglades if it wasn't a protected species (that's where he draws the line.) So viewer beware: if you don't like critters getting cacked on camera, approach this one with caution.
Queasiness aside, I find this show compelling. It's got some travelogue aspects. Each episode finds our pal Bear in a different location: Iceland, Utah, Switzerland, Mexico, an unknown tropical island... Hot, cold, wet, dry, barren, lush, he's done them all. Yet each place is distinct, unique in its circumstances and details. Mountains in Switzerland are not the same as mountains in the Sierra Nevada, and the Moab desert is vastly different from the Kimberly in Australia. Survival strategies vary widely: how to find human habitation, how to find food, how to find water. He also seems to keep finding different ways to start fires.
So slightly grisly, but only mildly repetetive, informative and fun. There's another, Canadian-produced show called Survivorman which also airs on Discovery. I may try it as well, see which one I like better.
That's all I can manage tonight. I may be back tomorrow with a few more quick capsules. And there's always the off-chance I'll finish with Zorro finally.