Category Archives: television

Breaking Bad

Husband and I really like Vince Gilligan’s new show, Breaking Bad. It’s really hard to explain why it’s so entertaining. I don’t even know how you’d sell it to someone.

It stars Bryan Cranston (the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) as Walt, a middle-aged Chemistry teacher in Albuquerque. He’s got terminal cancer, a teenage son with a disability, and his wife is pregnant. He’s terrified he’s going to leave his family destitute, so he teams up with Jesse, a meth-dealing former student to make some quick cash. They get an RV and cook meth in the desert while trying not to raise the suspicion of Walt’s DEA-agent brother-in-law, blow themselves up, or get killed by the local competition. And it’s a comedy.

Yeah, that’s pretty hard to sell without sounding deranged. It was smart of them to open the pilot episode with Walt driving the RV like he’s being chased by the hounds of hell while wearing only a rubber lab apron and a gas mask. How could you not want to stay to find out what’s going on?

Well, apparently we’re the only ones we know who wanted to stay to find out what’s going on, but we thought it was intriguing…

In one episode Walt and Jesse try to dispose of a corpse by putting it in an acid bath and end up with intestines all over the house. It’s vile. Yet, it’s really funny.

We can’t pay our friends to watch it with us.

Sorry Ethan Hunt, You're no Jason Bourne

Mom and I usually save up the big, dumb, loud spy movies for weekend binges at her house. Consequently, when I tivo’d [tag]Mission Impossible III[/tag] and couldn’t remember if I’d ever bothered to see MI:II, she was my first phonecall.

She couldn’t remember either, although we were certain we’d watched MI:I sometime last fall before we made the transition to big, dumb, loud jewel heist movies. We might have had a Mission Impossible double feature, but it was a little hazy. We vaguely remembered the plot to MI:II. There was some sort of mission. It was impossible. Tom Cruise looked constipated. We may or may not have fallen asleep before the end. Some stuff blew up. The end set us up for a sequel.

Good enough. I decided to give MI:III a go. After all, J.J. Abrams has had more hits than misses and the movie does have lots of good character actors. Alas, it also has Tom Cruise in it, but you can’t win ’em all. Cruise looks like he’s always either constipated or about to try to tell everyone how great Scientology is. Maybe both. I think that’s called Method Acting.

After about 10 minutes it became apparent to me that even if the so-called villains were telling the truth and they’d put a bomb in Cruise’s head, I wasn’t going to get the gratification that would come from watching his head burst like a pumpkin that’s been tossed into the elephant house. I deleted it without bothering to finish it. It figured it would have been two hours of my life I wasn’t ever getting back.

Besides, I needed room on the Tivo for tonight’s [tag]SciFi[/tag] Channel Crap-o-rama Of the Week,* [tag]Ogre[/tag]. Starring [tag]John Schneider[/tag].

That’s just got quality written all over it, doesn’t it?

*that’s a COW in movie mogul lingo. Slip it into conversation the next time you’re at a bar trying to impress the ladies.

What???

I’m now well beyond being ready for the election season to be over. Last night we were watching [tag]Torchwood[/tag]. I have to paraphrase a bit, but this is close enough. Couple is in bed, the woman is a pilot. She says, “sex is better than flying.” I heard, “sex is better than voting.”