An Embarrassment of Riches

The Not So Grim Reaper - by Sarah Picture this: Death, a pudgy, half-naked bumpkin sporting only a single buck tooth and a leather codpiece, comes rolling into the small town of Shuckton on his motorized bicycle and delivers a beat down against the mayor via television remote control before snorting up his soul through a dustbuster - and that’s just in the first ten minutes.

Death Comes to Town is eight half-hour episodes of the silliest comedy hi-jinx that The Kids in the Hall have ever produced. Conceived by Bruce McCulloch after the Kids re-united in 2008 for a comedy tour, Death’s murder mystery plot is little more than a thin excuse for the troupe to breathe life into new and irrepressible characters. There’s Marnie, the terminally forgetful pizza delivery lady who calls her condition “the fuzzies”; Dusty Diamond, the town coroner who harbors an unconventional love for the dead mayor; “Crim” the local career criminal; and RAMPOP, the mayor’s adopted “special” son who speaks only in chirps and whirrs and sees all adults as large animated butterflies. My personal favorite? Inept defense attorney Sam Murray and his decrepit, perpetually dying 32 year-old cat, Buttonhole. If you don’t laugh until you weep at the scenes where Sam takes Buttonhole to the vet, you may need to upgrade your humor software.

Filled with plenty of the satire, sight gags and salacious humor that the Kids are famous for, this four hour mini-series can be knocked out in one glorious sitting and is best enjoyed with some gravel and grubs or eggs straight from the body (why yes, there is even a Chicken Lady cameo). Don’t you want to spend some time with Death tonight?

Back to the Future, Parisian Style - by Ross Mesdames et Messieurs, I bring you a tale of love and betrayal and revenge. It is the year 5053. Young friends from Paris’s most powerful families are set against one another after one of them meets a mysterious stranger during Carnival on Luna. The stranger calls himself the Count of Monte Cristo, and he has come to live in Paris after amassing a huge fortune in the far reaches of Eastern Space. No one knows the details of his past, but soon he begins to influence every aspect of Parisian society, and the dark secrets of those who are in power begin to be revealed.

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo is an animated Japanese television series, a retelling of Alexander Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. It had me captivated from its first moments and kept me that way for all 24 episodes with its suspenseful, sensuous plotting, beautiful artwork, and its brilliant 19th/51st century atmosphere.

Chock full 'o Chenoweth - by Steve Award-winning actress Kristen Chenoweth definitely deserves more recognition. She has a way of captivating an audience, and it's hard to imagine anyone else playing in the roles she's conquered over the years. As the lovelorn Olive Snook in the series Pushing Daisies, Kristen's performance earned her an Emmy! She hilariously and quite desperately tries to gain the affection of her boss at a pie shop. In addition to her acting career, Kristen is also a talented singer. Probably most well known the role of Glinda from the Wicked musical, she actually won a Tony award in 1999 for her stage performance in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Her musical theater chops were also showcased in Leonard Bernstein's farcical take on the Voltaire classic, Candide. Of course, Ms. Chenoweth's talents aren't all comedic in nature. Her stint as a fast-talking White House deputy press secretary in the sixth and seventh seasons of The West Wing was a thing of beauty. Keep up the fine work, Madam, and I'll keep watching.

The Alternative to Running Away - by Alison

When you're a kid you can entertain the thought of running away when the going gets rough - "and then they'll be sorry!" But what outlet do adults have?
Luckily for those of us past twenty a good TV series can still fill the need for escapism, without interfering with work the next day. All the better if the characters have little regard for the law and social convention.

Enter The Sons of Anarchy. Beneath the pleasant exterior of the fictional Charming, California lies a society tainted by corruption, murder and mayhem. The Sons of Anarchy or SAMCRO is a motorcycle gang with a stranglehold over the town. They have a thriving trade in gun-running and the protection racket. The police chief is in cahoots with the club, partly because of the threat of a nastier gang taking control of the town and also because the hush money is good. The morally reprehensible characters are compelling, and the series includes enough allusions to Hamlet to make you think that your liberal arts degree was really worth it.

For charming con-artists who clean up nicely, try The Riches. Wayne and Dahlia Malloy and their three children are part of a clan of Travelers. They make their living by moving from town to town pulling small-time cons. The story begins when a feud between the Malloys and another family in the clan results in the deaths of two innocent bystanders, Mr. and Mrs. Rich. Wayne Malloy, the charismatic father (deftly played by the comic Eddie Izzard) hatches a plan to impersonate the Riches by moving into their brand new house in an affluent, gated community in Baton Rouge. Wayne is quickly seduced by life as a 'buffer' or non-Traveler and thrives on the adrenaline of passing as a high-powered lawyer. Dahlia (played by Minnie Driver) is conflicted, believing that they will soon be caught in the lie. Watching the Malloys negotiate this alien world allows the viewer the vicarious experience of being both an insider and an outsider at the same time. A word of warning though - the series was canceled before it came to a satisfying conclusion. Still it's fun to watch the Malloy family as they struggle to reconcile their new-found wealth with loyalty to their roots.

Farewell Patricia Neal - by Rachael

The actress Patricia Neal died on August 8. She starred in one of my all-time favorite movies, A Face in the Crowd.

In any opportunity to wax on about A Face in the Crowd I tend to emphasize Neal’s co-star, Andy Griffith, who plays a lecherous, greedy, manipulative television star. Griffith’s charisma is incredible, and as we all know him so well as Sherriff Taylor it is mind-blowing to see him as Taylor’s evil twin, "Lonesome" Rhodes.

That topic exhausted, I will enthusiastically move on to the movie’s intelligent and hilarious take on television. 1957 seems awful early for such a biting and accurate indictment. Keep your eye on that rating!

But Neal’s character is the soul of the movie. She is the one who discovers and promotes "Lonesome" Rhodes, and who must destroy him. Because Rhodes is not simply crass. He is a fascist, and he plans to use his popularity to do real evil. Neal’s character is no raft borne by the tide; she is a moral creature and a true adult. And that makes A Face in the Crowd an all-too-rare treat: a movie in which a woman has world-changing power and responsibility.

Big Love Under Construction - by Jen

I sat down to dinner recently and noticed something amiss. My otherwise-perfect and untouched plate of food sported an ear of corn with a shaggy crop circle in the middle of the cob about the size of a preschooler's mouth. I looked to Child the Younger, sitting to my right, and asked him if he knew what had happened. He smiled jubilantly, his baby teeth clotted with yellow kernels.  

"Sowee, Mommy."

Sorry indeed.

I have learned from parenting that there is birthed, along with the child, a never-ending list of things-- both done and undone-- for which to be sorry on both sides. This parenting thing is a project without blueprints, continually under construction, using tools that are as frequently inadequate, shoddy, missing or downright dangerous as they are right for the job. If a day on the parenting jobsite is particularly heinous, I may think of the list I have posted at my desk just to remind myself to laugh:

The Six Phases of a Project:

1. Wild Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants

One project I managed to complete on my recent vacation was reading Brady Udall's magnificent novel The Lonely Polygamist. This is a Big Book, in both a physical and an existential sense; it is the American family writ large. Golden Richards is a big man (known to some as "Sasquatch") with three houses, four wives and twenty-eight children. He has problems. Big problems. While his lifestyle creates and magnifies difficulties, his internal struggles could belong to anyone. He attempts to keep his contracting business and his family finances afloat with a morally questionable project: his wives think the brothel he's building in Nevada is a senior center. His wives don't understand him and his children don't really know him. The story builds upon the alternating points of view of Golden, Trish (his fourth and newest wife), and Rusty (the eleven-year-old son of his third wife.) Trish is at a crossroads in her marriage while Rusty hatches a revenge plot for the bungling of his "special" birthday. At the center for each of these characters is a smoldering sun of grief blinding them in various ways to the complicated landscape. Golden grieves a lost daughter, Trish grieves a lost son, and Rusty is a ticking time bomb of grief waiting to happen. In all of this Udall manages to find the inherent humor in each situation, much of it laugh-out-loud funny. Within the mundane Udall raises Big questions, but the one that percolates through and ultimately lifts the book far above anything else I have read recently is this:

How big is love?

This is a question echoed by the deservedly popular HBO television series Big Love which I also highly recommend. Bill Henrickson is a modern-day polygamist living in suburban Salt Lake City with his three sister-wives, their numerous children and houses, and all of the complications and frustrations of his chosen lifestyle. His ties with a fundamentalist compound bring trouble, as do his business arrangements. Can one man find a way to keep it all together when forces both internal and external threaten constantly to tear it apart? Faith and love are big, but are they big enough?

In her memoir The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance Elna Baker discusses the issues that come with Big Faith. By turns utterly hilarious and painfully embarrassing, this described "Mormon Tina Fey" tells tales of what it's like to be an abstinent and religious single young woman in a city that's pretty much...not. Along the way she loses eighty pounds and takes a series of fascinating jobs ( I was entranced by her description of life as an "adoption specialist" for ridiculously expensive baby dolls at FAO Schwarz.) The heartbreak that ensues is predictable, but Baker finds the humor in each situation and manages introspection along with stories such as showing up to a Halloween dance dressed in a failed costume that makes her look, quite accidentally, like a giant part of the female anatomy.

The holds lists may be lengthy for some of these, but believe me: the love is Big. And worth the wait

Lawyers and Solicitors and Barristers, Oh My! - by Ruth All of my siblings are attorneys which means that the conversation at family gatherings can be a bit contentious and peppered with legalese. This talk, coupled with the law classes I took as an undergraduate in political science, has at least given me a decent grounding in the American legal system. Most everything I know about the English judicial system, however, has come from mystery novels and television.  A patron recently introduced me to a great but, alas, short mystery series starring some young London legal eagles and an Oxford professor. I am sometimes baffled by all of the lawyerly terminology, but that hasn't prevented me from enjoying the banter that goes on amongst the five principal players including Cantrip who has an "inferior" education (Cambridge rather than Oxford) and Julia, who gets her knickers in a twist on a fairly regular basis. The Shortest Way to Hades finds them investigating the death of a young woman who has turned greedy and demanded 100,000 pounds in exchange for her signature on a document that will allow an heiress to avoid massive taxes on a multiple million pound inheritance. Was the girl pushed over the balcony or was it suicide?  As Hilary Tamar (the Oxford professor) points out, if it was murder, then the wrong girl died. For more judicial antics, try the Rumpole of the Bailey series by John Mortimer. While not the first in the series, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders provides the back-story on Horace Rumpole's early years. For a wonderful television show about an English law firm and some courtroom drama, watch Kavanagh Q.C. starring the fabulous John Thaw. Any other great stuff out there to amuse me while also increasing my knowledge of law in Great Britain?

The Tudors, Season 2, Haiku too - by Steve

A son? No. A son?
Not quite yet, Your Majesty.
Get me a new wife!

Tudors: The Complete First Season

Tudors: The Complete Second Season

Tudors: The Complete Third Season

For the first season Haiku review, click here.

Better Living Through Chemistry - by Ruby I'm too cheap to get cable. My teeth start to clench at the prospect of seeing yet another set of wire ganglia wending their way through my home. As a result, I've come to depend on the kindness of my public library to fill in any TV culture deficits by borrowing from our collection's wide range of cable shows transferred to DVD. So far I've sat open-mouthed during Deadwood, sobbed uncontrollably through 5 seasons of The Wire, sweated with the outlaw unit on The Shield, and looked askance at every single episode of Rome and The Tudors. Recently I heard about another series just released on DVD called Breaking Bad - a term that refers to something going south.  Brutal, gory and heartbreaking, it's a darkly complicated tragi-comedy with tremendous performances by Malcolm's dad, Bryan Cranston and his meth lab partner, Jesse Pinkman. The series Creators definitely watched Weeds and read their James Thurber. Walter Mitty crosses way over the line - this time for real. Cranston's character is an internationally known chemist with a first-rate mind who finds himself teaching high school chemistry with a second job in a car wash.  Fate provides a chance to break out and get some serious cash. Why did I like season one so much?  Because somehow, regardless of all the blood, sweat and distillation paraphernalia, the story becomes highly plausible. But, see for yourself. 

Mankind and the Moon - by guest blogger Karen Brattain Our guest blogger is Karen Brattain, a freelance editor. She works for the scientific journal Astrobiology and has edited several books. She is a graduate of the Master's in Writing: Book Publishing program at Portland State University.

I tell everyone who will listen that I want to be the first copy editor in space. Two years of work for a journal that studies planets, moons, and stars has rubbed off on me and propelled my childhood interest in spaceflight to new heights.

Amazing spectacles fill the Cosmos. But I have come to feel that any story or study of the Universe is barren without us in it. The human element of space exploration—our ideas about what lies beyond, our attempts to discover it, and our thoughts about what we have discovered—is really the soul of space exploration. And the television series From the Earth to the Moon captures that soul.

Produced in part by Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, From the Earth to the Moon is a twelve-episode series that ran in the late 1990s. It brings to life the history of mankind’s journeys to, from, and on the Moon. I love that the series tells this story from a variety of perspectives. I am accustomed to seeing the Apollo astronauts as superstars; these episodes also stir me to admire the efforts of the ground crew, the spacecraft designers, the press, and the astronauts’ wives and families.

The first episode, “Can We Do This?” reveals the intense pressure of the space race. The plan to send Americans to the Moon began before we had even put an American in space; as a result, the Mercury and Gemini missions happen at breakneck speed. The consequences of this speed reach a climax in the next episode, “Apollo One,” which covers the devastating loss of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. This honest and deeply emotional episode hooked me on the series. It is an exceptional performance.

Since then, I have watched the Apollo 7 crew recover from tragedy to complete a successful mission, and I have celebrated as Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders orbited the Moon on Apollo 8. I am not finished with the series, so I am eager to see more. Indeed, it is taking an act of self-discipline for me to finish this review without popping in another episode.

If you want to test the water before diving into twelve episodes, I recommend the film Apollo 13. Directed by Ron Howard, Apollo 13 has an excellent cast, including Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise, and Kathleen Quinlan. Spaceflight was never so real and suspenseful to me as it was when I watched this film for the first time. Now, after several viewings, I still feel that intensity. And I have developed a soft spot for Mission Control. One of the achievements of the film is that the cast breathes passion into highly technical language and concepts. One actor exclaims, “I need to know if the IU’s correcting for the Number 5 shutdown!” I’m on the edge of my seat!

The Apollo missions show us what humanity can achieve. As Jim Lovell says in Apollo 13, “We live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It’s not a miracle. We just decided to go.” Working for the common good uplifts us all. Apollo also reminds us how much we have and how valuable it is. Earth, seen from space, is a fragile and fantastic thing. Watch From the Earth to the Moon and Apollo 13. Learn about Earth, the Moon, and humanity.

Bones - by guest blogger Chelsea Cain (watch)

 Our guest blogger is bestselling author Chelsea Cain (www.chelseacain.com/). She writes dark grisly thrillers set in Portland. Hear her speak at the Central Library on Saturday February 21st, 1-2:30 p.m. More details here.

I resisted Bones for a long time.  It goes back to my love-hate relationship with David Boreanaz. I loved Buffy and I loved Angel (though I only started watching it when Buffy ended and desperation kicked in – I mean, at that point I would have watched a spin-off about Dawn). 

Don't get me wrong.  I totally had a crush on him in Buffy. I mean, damaged, soulful vampire – what's not to like, right ladies?  But there was also something – how to say this? – a bit dim about him, like he was one incisor short of a full set of teeth.  Take away the black togs, the Byronic back-story, and he was mighty like your average high school jock.  

In Bones David Boreanaz plays an FBI agent named Seely Booth who wears snazzy belt buckles and shoots people a lot.  His partner, Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan is a forensic scientist.  She's played by Emily Deschanel who is the sister of Zooey Deschanel – the quirky indie actress with the fantastic bangs.  Dr. Brennan is serious and smart and a little nerdy.  Booth is cocky and funny and defensive. 

It's a familiar set-up.  Male/Female investigative team -- opposites in every way -- solve crimes while resisting the unexpected urge to do the horizontal mamba. 

But Bones is elevated by its cast and writing.  At least that's what I'd been hearing all that time I was resisting watching it.  And finally, since I write thrillers for a living – and do most of my research by watching cop shows on TV -- I gave Bones a shot. 

And you know what?  

(I love it.)

I don't care how much my husband makes fun of me. 

I don't even care that I'm so late jumping on the bandwagon.

You know that great feeling when you discover a show that you love and there are like thirty episodes on DVD?  It's like having a whole bag of M&Ms or a whole bottle of Vicodin. 

You can enjoy it all the more, because you know there's more. 

Chelsea Cain was born in 1972 and lived the first few years of her life on a hippie commune in Iowa.
Her first novel featuring Detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell, Heartsick, was a New York Times bestseller. The follow-up in the series – Sweetheart -- also a NYT bestseller, is available in stores now.  The third installment, Evil At Heart, hits bookstores in September 2009.
Chelsea is also the author of:
Dharma Girl: A Road Trip Across the American Generations
The Hippie Handbook
Confessions of a Teen Sleuth
Does This Cape Make Me Look Fat? Pop Psychology for Superheroes
She also edited the anthology Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture, was a former columnist for The Oregonian and The Portland Mercury, and has published work in British Elle, The New York Times Book Review, and Ms. Magazine.
Chelsea lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family.