Prison Break and Xena
Jul. 10th, 2007 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficAs I've been packing, I've been playing DVDs as background noise. So…
I got season 1 of Prison Break from Netflix, and just finished it last night. Here was my very first thought on watching it: Dominic Purcell should never shave his head. Seriously. The guy's got a weirdly-shaped head and pokey-outy ears and just looks very strange with hair that short.
I have to say I'm not a fan of Dominic Purcell in general. He was the star of John Doe, which I used to catch the end of as it aired before something or other I was watching. And I have to say, the guy is one of the most wooden actors I've ever seen. Seeing him try to emote on John Doe was excruciating. He does occasionally do good stuff on Prison Break, but most of the time his delivery's flat and uninteresting. So I mostly ignore him.
I hate the conspiracy. For most of the season, the conspiracy looked like a bunch idiots because if this whole set-up was to make Lincoln a patsy, why all the bother? They go around killing people all the time. Why pay so much attention to Lincoln? Of course the late revelation that it's a vendetta is some justification, but even so, they run into the classical catch 22 of conspiracies. If they were that all-freaking-powerful, Lincoln's girlfriend would be a greasy smotch on their windshield by now. And since they haven't managed to do that, it's hard for me to buy them as menacing. I didn't like the conspiracy in X-Files, the conspiracy in SG-1 entertained me for an episode or two and then got boring, I stopped watching 24 cause I didn't like the conspiracy—so, yeah. I mostly ignore any scenes not at the prison.
I like Michael, but I'm not as crazy about him as some people. *hem! my sister-in-law! hem!* Mostly they lost me when they had a therapist come on and say he had a pathological need to help people. Oh, please. That's almost as bad as Peter having the power of heart.
I find that the character as it is outlined is far more interesting than what we get on screen. Here's a character who has decided to save his brother over all else, out of a sense of guilt and familial obligation. By the time the series starts, he's already resigned himself to sacrificing his body and his life to this project. But as the series goes on, he has to reconcile himself to the truly evil things he has to do to accomplish his goal. Cause there's no way that breaking Abruzzi and T-Bag out of prison is not evil. We got some of that on-screen, but not a lot. For the most part he's presented as your typical hero—always doing the right thing even if it's not in his own best interest. But he really is a twisted fucker with everything he's been doing. He's not a good guy, not anymore, and there's just not enough of that.
Sara Tancredi is far too emo and naïve to be a prison nurse. She's just too vulnerable for me to buy that she'd be able to do that job. I'd expect someone more like Bailey on Grey's Anatomy—real hard-ass with a lot of attitude. We mostly see Sara with Michael, where her vulnerable act makes sense, but I don't get how she'd manage with anybody else. And her od'ing at the end of the season. Emo. (For you!!!!)
So why do I watch? Abruzzi and T-Bag. Those two are fantastic. Unlike our hero, every time one of them is on screen, something unexpected happens. Just their acting choices—they're fascinating. Peter Stormare, who plays Abruzzi, I've liked for a while. He was fantastic as Lucifer in Constantine. And it wasn't until I imdb'd him that I remembered that he was in Dancer in the Dark, the most depressing film ever made. For those who have seen it, he's Bjork's clueless boyfriend who picks her up on the side of the road, covered in blood, and takes her to play practice.
In the DVD extras, Stormare talks about his character as Shakespearean—and I don't know where he's getting that out of these scripts, but whatever he's doing, he needs to keep on doing it. I mean, it takes a hell of an actor to make a character that chops off the hero's toes loveable.
T-Bag is just a fantastically evil, twisted little bastard, but at the same time strangely sympathetic. For the record, I don't buy for a second that the love of that woman we saw in the flashback episode had turned him straght—he was definitely going after those kids. But I kind of want him to win just cause he's more ruthless than Michael is.
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trinityvixen has gone into the plot holes at length, so I won't touch the stupidity of the guards. But here's a quick run-down of the most egregious plot holes:
-Michael had two of his toes cut off. Given the fact that the whole season takes place in a little over a month, he heals awfully fucking fast. And even if he had completely healed that quickly, losing those two toes would affect his balance. He would have a limp.
-That whole thing with projecting the devil's face onto the cement wall? Absurd. Ignoring the mechanics of it for a second, Michael had marked out the distance from the wall and the height of the lightbulb, but he had no way to indicate angle of the projection, and a small variation in angle would show a huge variation in where the image is on the wall. If you actually look at that scene, you can see that in some shots the tracing paper has curled up and in some shots the whole contraption is pointing at the floor.
-Even if the chemistry was right, "Cute Poison" is a completely useless acronym for remembering anything.
-Michael's schedule for his escape seems a little ludicrous. He has to get through that wall in the riot, but then they spend weeks on the hole in the break room? Why couldn't he do those simultaneously?
I also watched most of Xena season 5. Oh my god. This season is a travesty. There are a handful of episodes that are good enough to have been filler eps in earlier seasons, but that's it. Instead, there's the episode where Rob Tappert decided to save money by using the footage of the pilot for the failed series "Amazon High", resulting in a mish-mash mess of an episode that makes no sense; there's the episode where a very pregnant Lucy Lawless dances in a stripper outfit (I'm not kidding); there's the episode where for no reason at all, Gabrielle is a mermaid married to a merman Joxer and living under the sea in a weird psychedelic Flinstones set with three children: one with flippers, one with a sea urchin on his head and one that's just a puppet of an octopus. What the fuck. If I hadn't been half listening to it while packing, I would not have been able to sit through it at all.
I got season 1 of Prison Break from Netflix, and just finished it last night. Here was my very first thought on watching it: Dominic Purcell should never shave his head. Seriously. The guy's got a weirdly-shaped head and pokey-outy ears and just looks very strange with hair that short.
I have to say I'm not a fan of Dominic Purcell in general. He was the star of John Doe, which I used to catch the end of as it aired before something or other I was watching. And I have to say, the guy is one of the most wooden actors I've ever seen. Seeing him try to emote on John Doe was excruciating. He does occasionally do good stuff on Prison Break, but most of the time his delivery's flat and uninteresting. So I mostly ignore him.
I hate the conspiracy. For most of the season, the conspiracy looked like a bunch idiots because if this whole set-up was to make Lincoln a patsy, why all the bother? They go around killing people all the time. Why pay so much attention to Lincoln? Of course the late revelation that it's a vendetta is some justification, but even so, they run into the classical catch 22 of conspiracies. If they were that all-freaking-powerful, Lincoln's girlfriend would be a greasy smotch on their windshield by now. And since they haven't managed to do that, it's hard for me to buy them as menacing. I didn't like the conspiracy in X-Files, the conspiracy in SG-1 entertained me for an episode or two and then got boring, I stopped watching 24 cause I didn't like the conspiracy—so, yeah. I mostly ignore any scenes not at the prison.
I like Michael, but I'm not as crazy about him as some people. *hem! my sister-in-law! hem!* Mostly they lost me when they had a therapist come on and say he had a pathological need to help people. Oh, please. That's almost as bad as Peter having the power of heart.
I find that the character as it is outlined is far more interesting than what we get on screen. Here's a character who has decided to save his brother over all else, out of a sense of guilt and familial obligation. By the time the series starts, he's already resigned himself to sacrificing his body and his life to this project. But as the series goes on, he has to reconcile himself to the truly evil things he has to do to accomplish his goal. Cause there's no way that breaking Abruzzi and T-Bag out of prison is not evil. We got some of that on-screen, but not a lot. For the most part he's presented as your typical hero—always doing the right thing even if it's not in his own best interest. But he really is a twisted fucker with everything he's been doing. He's not a good guy, not anymore, and there's just not enough of that.
Sara Tancredi is far too emo and naïve to be a prison nurse. She's just too vulnerable for me to buy that she'd be able to do that job. I'd expect someone more like Bailey on Grey's Anatomy—real hard-ass with a lot of attitude. We mostly see Sara with Michael, where her vulnerable act makes sense, but I don't get how she'd manage with anybody else. And her od'ing at the end of the season. Emo. (For you!!!!)
So why do I watch? Abruzzi and T-Bag. Those two are fantastic. Unlike our hero, every time one of them is on screen, something unexpected happens. Just their acting choices—they're fascinating. Peter Stormare, who plays Abruzzi, I've liked for a while. He was fantastic as Lucifer in Constantine. And it wasn't until I imdb'd him that I remembered that he was in Dancer in the Dark, the most depressing film ever made. For those who have seen it, he's Bjork's clueless boyfriend who picks her up on the side of the road, covered in blood, and takes her to play practice.
In the DVD extras, Stormare talks about his character as Shakespearean—and I don't know where he's getting that out of these scripts, but whatever he's doing, he needs to keep on doing it. I mean, it takes a hell of an actor to make a character that chops off the hero's toes loveable.
T-Bag is just a fantastically evil, twisted little bastard, but at the same time strangely sympathetic. For the record, I don't buy for a second that the love of that woman we saw in the flashback episode had turned him straght—he was definitely going after those kids. But I kind of want him to win just cause he's more ruthless than Michael is.
trinityvixen has gone into the plot holes at length, so I won't touch the stupidity of the guards. But here's a quick run-down of the most egregious plot holes:-Michael had two of his toes cut off. Given the fact that the whole season takes place in a little over a month, he heals awfully fucking fast. And even if he had completely healed that quickly, losing those two toes would affect his balance. He would have a limp.
-That whole thing with projecting the devil's face onto the cement wall? Absurd. Ignoring the mechanics of it for a second, Michael had marked out the distance from the wall and the height of the lightbulb, but he had no way to indicate angle of the projection, and a small variation in angle would show a huge variation in where the image is on the wall. If you actually look at that scene, you can see that in some shots the tracing paper has curled up and in some shots the whole contraption is pointing at the floor.
-Even if the chemistry was right, "Cute Poison" is a completely useless acronym for remembering anything.
-Michael's schedule for his escape seems a little ludicrous. He has to get through that wall in the riot, but then they spend weeks on the hole in the break room? Why couldn't he do those simultaneously?
I also watched most of Xena season 5. Oh my god. This season is a travesty. There are a handful of episodes that are good enough to have been filler eps in earlier seasons, but that's it. Instead, there's the episode where Rob Tappert decided to save money by using the footage of the pilot for the failed series "Amazon High", resulting in a mish-mash mess of an episode that makes no sense; there's the episode where a very pregnant Lucy Lawless dances in a stripper outfit (I'm not kidding); there's the episode where for no reason at all, Gabrielle is a mermaid married to a merman Joxer and living under the sea in a weird psychedelic Flinstones set with three children: one with flippers, one with a sea urchin on his head and one that's just a puppet of an octopus. What the fuck. If I hadn't been half listening to it while packing, I would not have been able to sit through it at all.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-10 07:21 pm (UTC)I thought that was intentional on John Doe...
no subject
Date: 2007-07-10 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-11 01:10 am (UTC)*ahem*
Seriously, those characters are pretty much what made me tune in every week. Well, that and the utter hotness of Wentworth Miller. YUM.
T-Bag is pretty awesome at the beginning of S2, as well, although all in all I thought S2 was weaker.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-11 08:41 pm (UTC)I was thinking about how T-Bag ends up coming across as a lot less evil than he is since they never do more than imply that he rapes fellow inmates. Though we see Abruzzi lopping off body parts and shooting people, we never actually see T-Bag doing what he's known for. I think because of the lack of graphic, or even suggested, rape, he doesn't seem as evil. I think I'd find him a lot less enjoyable to watch if we'd ever seen him overpowering one of his pets and pushing them down on a bed. But, yes, I know--Fox, not HBO.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-11 04:20 am (UTC)Mostly they lost me when they had a therapist come on and say he had a pathological need to help people. Oh, please. That's almost as bad as Peter having the power of heart.
Okay, first: ::SNERK:: Nice :) Second, yeah, they really blew it when they did that because in that episode even (I think), he's like trying to get Tweener to do something for him and completely ignoring the fact that Tweener is like crying because he's been raped a billion times by his fat-ass cellie. Sensitivity my ass. I like Michael pathological, thanks. That's when he's actually scary and you're cheering for him--when he seems that much smarter than everyone else.
It's not hard to be smarter, though, is it? You've got Veronica "I put the 'Duh' in" Donovan running around trusting random strangers and the Conspiracy of Overly Complicated Plots to Take Over the Free World. And that's it. The people in and working at the prison are more competent, and these are the people who missed the fact that eight random guys suddenly got really tight and worked construction, like, all the time (36 hours from death, Lincoln is on a work detail? I think not).
I want to say more about some characters, but I'll avoid spoilage. Go on and watch season two! It's got like 50/50 love-hate going on. People who liked the first season for the setting are all pissed at them being free (uh, what did they think was gonna happen?), but I found it was almost too suspenseful to watch. I mean, it's an endless chase, and if the guys get caught, they're proper fucked. It was nail-biting for me--not always good, but definitely tense. And a lot of people die. I got spoiled by the TWoP reviews that listed in the summary titles "So and So--DEAD!" a few times, but many of the deaths managed to be surprises. Have fun!
no subject
Date: 2007-07-17 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-16 10:01 pm (UTC)I must shamefully admit that I did watch only the last 4 episodes (or 6, can't remember), even if a friend of mine was bragging about how cool it is and how addicted it is to the american realese dates...(of course she dl every ep when it comes out, like I do with SPN)and I must say that, probably because now my eyes have got used to Jensen Ackles, I didn't fall that much for Michael. He's pretty ok, but I don't think he's got these stunning actor skills to support the prettiness.
And Peter Stormare...I like that actor. He was in FARGO too, did you see that? He was the most horrible person I've ever seen in a movie, just chilling. He's that good...he even gave me goosebumps!
So, about Prison Break: is the one I'm watchin the 1th season or the 2th? I'm so out of the loop here...I can't decide if I want to get hold of all the parts I missed ^^'
no subject
Date: 2007-07-17 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-17 09:51 pm (UTC)Stormare is one of those classically understated actors...in dancer in the dark was so different than here, you gotta admire the versatility.
You should watch Fargo, it's a beautiful movie with a cold and strange atmosphere (I think it was setted in Alaska?), well beautiful for that genre anyway. It was creepy sometimes.