Privileged

I'm liking Privileged more and more as the weeks go by. The writing is surprisingly sophisticated and the acting pretty darn good. And I love the formula: the big, heart-felt emotions dipped in colorful fondant. You take a bite, expecting momentary delight — when you find yourself with a sustaining meal, it's a nice surprise. I hope they can keep it up.

CW seems to specialize in breezy concoctions that deliver more than you expect. It's the sort of thing Ugly Betty tries for but fails at, week after week after week. And yet who gets all the press? All the Emmys? I can't wait for Reaper, another CW show. That's starting the first week of March. Something to look forward to!

Dollhouse

When I first heard the premise for Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, I was really, really scared. After having watched the premiere, I'm still really, really scared. The uber-secret Dollhouse is a place where nubile young girls are taken to have their personalities stripped and their bodies super-toned. Why? So the girls can become Stepford Agents, of course. Let's say you're super rich and you want a hot girl who's really into bondage and likes to race motorcycles and dance in really, really short dresses and who'll fall in love with you just for your birthday — who you gonna call? Let's say your little girl's been kidnapped by really, really bad dudes — who you gonna call? Yeah, yeah.

Whedon has taken the River aspect from Firefly, added prostitution and, well, we're off. A bit too much Joe 90 for me, but then poor Joe didn't have sex forced on him. I have to give that to his dear ol' dad, child abuser that he was. Didn't the government ever give him a pamphlet on child work laws?

Anyway, the first episode was a real mess, too much being included at once in a too J.J. Abrams influenced fashion, strands thrown in here and there. I suspect the first episode was really three episodes all cut up and smashed together to satisfy Fox (Fox apparently demanded mucho changes). The main subject of the series is Echo (Eliza Dushku, Whedon's muse). She's the newest doll, escaping from a dubious past that the writers will or will not reveal to us in the future. And then there's Paul, Helo from Battlestar Galactica (Tahmoh Penikett), who's a government agent; he's off on his own strand trying to find Echo. In the middle of all this, Echo is doing a Mission Impossible stint trying to rescue a girl from her bad kidnappers who are also child molesters who also molested "Echo" only not "Echo" but one of the personalities downloaded to Echo — the personality has asthma as a result and blows the mission because she gets asthma because she recognizes a kidnapper ... which is a step up from Echo's last mission as a real inflatable sex doll. Thrown in is all the "what are we doing to these girls" angst, reinfoced by Helo trying to bring down Russian mobsters who import girls for the sex trade. See what I mean?

Of course the madam of the Dollhouse is an older woman, played by Olivia Williams, a Brit. God forbid that an American woman would ever become a madam. In the olden days it would have been a Caucasian playing a Chinese with chopsticks in her hair and really, really long red varnished nails. (Okay, I'm a sucker for Thoroughly Modern Millie.)

In the end, what I really found disheartening was the writing. It was bad. Anyone could have written the script. Not what you expect from Whedon at all. I'm hoping this is just stretch marks as Whedon expands and deepens his writing skills. After all, witty adolescent banter only gets you so far. Going deeper produces greater works, i.e. Persuasion from Pride and Prejudice. But if it's not ... :(

Some nice touches? Well, Whedon's brought back Amy Acker (Angel). She plays the in-house doctor — what's with all the bad scars on her face, we're supposed to ask. And Katya Kinski (Dichen Lachman) from Neighbours has morphed into a doll! She looks pretty hot with a semi automatic. Go, Katya. Only, don't get too excited and use the semi on Susan.

Nouvelle Vague

I'm talking about the French band. Their music is everywhere. In movies, ads, TV shows, runways, and yet, not too many people know who they are. Nouvelle Vague music is even featured in Korean dramas ("(This Is Not a) Love Song" is the anthem for Soulmate).

Maybe because Nouvelle Vague remakes old songs like "Dance With Me" and "Too Drunk to Fuck". Maybe because their music is so laid back that they merge seamlessly with whatever they're paired with. Maybe because their covers are more mood than music so it goes directly into the subconscious. I don't know. But I do love their covers: "I Melt With You", "Making Plans For Nigel", "Human Fly"...

nouvelle vague ....dance with me .... from bande a part

Can Korean Dramas Make an Impact in the US?

I was delighted to find out that the "Mom's Dead Upset" entry was recently mentioned in a book review at The Learned Fangirl blog. One of the books Fangirl reviewed was Mark James Russell's Pop Goes Korea and TV Kitty gets involved when Fangirl questions Russell's statement "Korean television also travels poorly to the West, coming across as histrionic soap operas. … But for people used to C.S.I. and The Sopranos, there are only so many stories of separated twins and dying lost loves that one can take."

Fangirl points out that more and more US audiences are being attracted to these "histrionic" shows. That got me thinking and I'd like to bring out some more points. Korean soaps and dramas do tend to strangle themselves with the same bag of tricks: orphans, incest issues (mainly the cultural ban on in-laws marrying in-laws), obsessive love, poor girls marrying rich boys, rich girls making poor girls miserable, the mother-in-law from hell, etc (did I mention orphans?). But US soaps and dramas have their own bag of tricks, so nothing new there. And, if you've been watching the latest wave of Korean shows, you'll see that even Koreans are getting sick of those cliches. One of the reasons I loved Mom's Dead Upset was precisely because it wasn't the usual Korean drama. And the same can be said of so many of the latest popular Korean dramas and comedies: Princess Diaries, a.k.a Goong (a wonderfully imaginative story that asks "what if the Korean royal family were still around?", adapted from a comic book), Women of the Sun, Couple or Trouble (a remake of the US movie Overboard, but so much better), Windy City, etc. There's even Worlds Within (a dramedy about the Korean TV drama factory) which basically pleads with all its heart for more innovative Korean dramas. The Korean TV industry is in the middle of a huge creative drive, probably inspired by the drive in the Korean film industry.

But going back to Mr. Russell's statement, I find there's something very basic that he's not getting. He mentions CSI and Sopranos and how that's changed the viewing tastes of Americans. I'd dispute that. I'm always surprised by how popular shows like Brothers and Sisters and Two and a Half Men are. Nothing innovative about these shows. Brothers and Sisters could have been made in the 70s — just replace the gay relationships with interfaith or something. And what about Privileged? Poor girl, abandoned when young by mom, gets job tutoring rich girls and falls in love with a rich guy. Gee, sounds like a Korean show. Her mom even defrauds the rich guy — a classic Korean plot device (what's a Korean show without someone running away with a chunk of cash). Also, aren't shows like CSI and Sopranos mostly watched by men? And as a man, isn't Russell completely dismissing the female demographic? Just like Hollywood has historically done to its detriment? Korean TV dramas and comedies attract women viewers. Winter Sonata was hugely popular with women all across Asia. And if you go into US message boards about Korean dramas, it'll be mostly women posting. Guns, blood, dead bodies and slick who-done-its are the kitsch of men. Long lost loves, torn families, Cinderella stories are the kitsch of women. Go figure.

And I'll tell you one thing I like about Korean shows versus American shows: there's this unabashed, uncynical love of sentimentality. These shows say there's nothing wrong with wearing your heart on your sleeve. And how wonderful is that?

The Guild

It's really hard to write about The Guild. There's this wonderful soft, gentle, rolling quality about it that I really like. But then there's also this tedious thing going on — sort of like what you feel when you're waiting in line at Bed Bath & Beyond, trying to return the Aerobed mattress that sprung a leak and realizing this is the second time this year you've had to do this and you're really hoping you'll one day soon be able to afford a real mattress and that it's a good thing the staff at BBB are so nice and don't make a fuss about returns and exchanges, at least at the BBBs in the Valley (the staff at the BBB at The Beverly Center aren't quite as upbeat).

So what is The Guild? It's a for-web-only series created by Felicia Day and it's about a gang of online gamers. I'm not going to describe the plot because that would do the series a disservice. Let's just say that during Series One there was an anti-love story and an embezzlement plot. Series Two just began and it looks pretty much like Series One.

I like Felicia Day, or at least her befuddled, too-nice-for-her-own-good character Codex. Day is a regular on TV and is probably best known as Vi, one of the would-be slayers on the last season of Buffy. She says she began writing The Guild during the writers' strike when there wasn't anything for actors to do except write. And so she did. The Guild has a good fan base and apparently even inspired Joss Whedon to produce his Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which, of course, stars Felicia Day. Series Two is even sponsored by Microsoft, so now you have to go to MSN to see the new shows instead of YouTube. But Series One is still available on YouTube and here's Episode One. The episodes are never more than six minutes long so you end up spending more time downloading them than actually watching them. Oh, well.

Cooking Japanese Like Morimoto

On the topic of TV ads, I thought I'd also comment on one of the funniest TV ads I've ever seen. It's for a TV show called Iron Chef and it's zany, clever, and soooo fun. The ad is basically a reduced essence of Iron Chef, a weird Japanese cooking competition, with bits and pieces of the show chopped up into a frenetic music video. The featured song is "Cooking Japanese", an adaptation of the Vapors's song "Turning Japanese". The show and song are satirized in the best way possible, and it also humorously captures the cultural confusion and bewilderment of anyone not Japanese. The song is so catchy, I find myself singing it at odd times of the day: "I'm cooking Japanese, I think I'm cooking Japanese like Morimoto..."

BTW, the original "Turning Japanese" is a love song, which I was astonished to find out. Ironically, it works better as a love song in "Cooking Japanese" because the narrator of the spoof is obviously besotted with the show. I like both songs, the original and the spoof. The lyrics of the original have a total post-modern disregard for coherence, which is great. Oh — the rumor that "turning Japanese" is an euphemism for masturbation is false. In case you wondered... ;)

Samsung/AT&T Thumbs Ad

This is one of the grossest TV ads I've ever seen. Ranking high on the Uncanny Valley, watching the heads on the moving thumbs makes me want to throw up. The ad is especially bad when seen on HDTV. I think it has something to do with the fact that the heads cannot move independent of the thumbs, yet the eyes are moving around and the mouths are yakking and all of a sudden it's like the unveiling of a terrible Eastern European science experiment and you're confronted with a dog's head on a cat's body and the dog head is talking to you. It just ain't right.