Writing by Diane Garrett
I was SO ready to like “How to Get Away With Murder,” the latest project from Shonda Rhimes, but the premiere left me wanting. Viola Davis was riveting, but the plotting was disjointed and the student characters callow.
Maybe that will improve with time. But I’m not ready to devote a season pass to it yet.
Here’s my review for TheWrap.
Jill Soloway’s new serio-comedy is so good I plowed through all the episodes I could get my hands on yesterday, then quickly re-watched to see what I had missed the first time around.
The Amazon show revolves around a father coming out to his adult children with his secret female identity. It’s melancholy, intimate and wholly unconventional, the perfect antidote to broad sitcoms trafficking in tired cliches.
You will never think of Jeffrey Tambor the same. Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass and Gaby Hoffman are pretty terrific, too, as adult kids with their own issues.
Read my review at TheWrap here. And then go stream the show via Amazon Prime.
Very strong season opener for “The Good Wife” tonight: Alicia and Co. got back to business with nary a mention of Will, the partner killed late last season, though the fallout from his demise continues to reverberate.
My review for TheWrap:
‘The Good Wife’ Review: Legal Drama Ditches the Grief for Dynamic Storytelling
A few months ago, this house was a mess: Water was dripping through a big hole in the roof to a trashcan with a kiddie pool underneath it. There were heaps of outdated clothes thrown on dirty yellow shag carpet in the master bedroom, and duct-taped carpet squares concealed holes in the linoleum.
The wallpaper alternated between burlap and garish mid-century patterns.
But there also some interesting period details.
The kitchen combined two popular colors from my youth: burnt orange and avocado green.
And giant lamps that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1967 Debbie Reynolds vehicle, “Divorce American Style.”
But it wasn’t clear what would survive the renovation. The property, located in a Lodi subdivision near the Mokelumne River, needed a major overhaul before it could go back on the market.
A few months later, most of the interesting period details have been stripped out.
The walls are white and the carpet in the bedrooms is beige. New hardwood floors have been installed, and the roof completely redone.
The counter tops have also been replaced with the marble-looking finish you see everywhere.
Hints of mid-century design remain.
The swoop of the dining room wall — my favorite feature — is still there. It’s just not as noticeable in white.
The gold cushions in the breakfast nook also survived the process. But the walls didn’t match any longer.
The brown tile in the master bathroom is still there.
But the distinctive, if cheap looking, front entrance seen in this pre-rehab Google shot, was completely knocked out.
Instead of screaming mid-60s, the house now whispers it. It’s a shame, but truth be told many of the old materials weren’t that high in quality. The property will surely sell more readily this way than it would have with refurbished period details.
Caught up with “Parade’s End” and I’ll say this about HBO’s “Downton”-like miniseries:
1. It looks gorgeous.
2. Benedict Cumberbatch’s muddy elocution got in the way of the story. For long patches of the five-part series, it was impossible to figure out what his character was saying. I get that Christopher Tietjens was supposed to have a stiff upper lip — and be restrained to a fault — but director Susanna White did the audience no favors by allowing him to mumble his words so.
I wanted to shake his shoulders like Gen. Campion and say: Enunciate, good man!
This tortured diction was evidently intentional, given that Christopher’s father in the series, portrayed by Alan Howard, spoke in the same incomprehensible fashion. Spoiled and vivacious Sylvia (Rebecca Hall) was a welcome antidote to these two marble mouthed men.
I liked the complexity of the characters — especially Sylvia — and swooned over her outfits and the gorgeous scenery away from the front lines in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s World War I novels. But I really wish Cumberbatch had spoken more clearly.
My favorite moment in last night’s “Girls” came towards the end of the episode, when Lena Dunham’s Hannah quizzed her therapist on his literary accomplishments.
“Have you written a book?” she asks.
Ever droll Bob Balaban as the therapist: “Yes.”
“Was it a therapeutic text?” she parries with a slight edge in her voice.
“No.”
Edge increasing: “Was it a memoir?”
Shredding the last of her defenses, the therapist informs Hannah it was a book about a boy and his dog that sold 2.5 million copies.
There are many things I love about that exchange: the way it gently punctures Hannah’s grand ambitions and creative snobbery. The unexpected reveal of the therapist’s success as an author.
But more than anything, I love how it gives voice to a distinctive type: the smart and critical lit gal. This is not earnest Anne Hathaway in “Devil Wears Prada” or preternaturally perky Meg Ryan in countless Nora Ephron movies, but rather Chloe Sevigny’s aspiring book editor in “The Last Days of Disco.” Or even Hope Lange in “The Best of Everything.”
These women are ambitious, bookish and discerning.
I know these women. So does Dunham, a wildly talented writer-director who inked a lucrative deal to write a book of essays for Random House last fall.
Seriously, I don’t know how he does it: Quincy Jones is about to turn 80, and he’s still a very active producer who makes plenty of time for philanthropic endeavors.
What’s his secret? One long-time associate, who runs his music consortium, told me “love drips from his fingertips,” while another head of a charity talked about how he sprinkles Quincy dust everywhere. Whenever they need him, the heads of these organizations told me, he is there.
Here’s my Variety story about it.
Sadly, it looks to be my last in Daily Variety, which is ceasing publication later this month. But the good news is that new owner Jay Penske has overhauled the pub’s website and promises to do the same for weekly Variety, which I worked on as writer-editor for seven years and have freelanced since.
This week, I was fortunate enough to see the Who perform “Quadrophenia” at the Staples Center. I fell in love with the album in high school, when my friend Leslie and I saw the movie inspired by it with her older sister.
But I hadn’t listened to the album in decades, and wasn’t sure how it would hold up. Especially with Pete and Roger approaching 70.
That wasn’t a problem: They were really good, hitting most of the notes and rocking harder than I ever could hope to at that age. I thrilled to the music just like I did all those years ago.
One irritation: the guy two rows ahead of us kept standing when everyone else around him was seated. Trust me, you don’t want to be that guy.
He sat down for a while, and then, just as the rock opera was reaching its emotional crescendo with “Love, Reign O’er Me,” popped up again. He finally parked it after a lady within reach asked him to do so. And we once again got a clear shot of the stage and the woman exuberantly signing for the hearing impaired in front of him.
As a short woman, I dread getting stuck behind the vertically endowed. I beg you: Do not be that guy.
Here are some unobstructed views of Roger strutting the stage while he belts out the album’s signature song: this video and this one.
They don’t want to believe that major cities can’t sustain daily newspapers anymore. And they cry foul when a beloved character prostitutes herself for a partnership in a fictional ’60s ad firm. Why? Because they can’t — or simply won’t — believe it.
But in fact the move toward diminished print publication has been underway for a while now. Why should we expect the New Orleans Times-Picayune to be immune? Just because you love a city and its traditions doesn’t mean they can or will continue forever.
I live near the water so I’m used to occasional foam on the beach.
The anchors at the Fox D.C. affiliate? Apparently not so much.
Over the weekend, at the height of Hurricane Irene, they kept marveling at the foam covering poor Tucker Barnes in Ocean City, Md., asking him question after question about its composition.
Barnes answered the best he could, but he clearly did not know that much more than they did. Later, a TV website asserted that the foam was “probably the remnants of raw sewage.” Which, ew, but maybe it wasn’t. (The report wasn’t all that conclusive.)
My bigger question: Why did they make him keep giving reports while foam of uncertain composition was spewing all over him? I do my best to avoid the stuff while I’m running barefoot on the sand.
You don’t have to read water quality reports to know that there are plenty of toxins in our waters under the best of circumstances, let alone raging hurricanes. (And trust me, if you have read those reports, you’ll really be squeamish about wading in during a storm, when runoff makes water quality especially dubious.)
My Wrap story on hurricane coverage, complete with video of Tucker and a streaker in Virginia Beach, is here.