Asp Burger
-
Posts
2.2k -
Joined
Content Type
Blogs
Gallery
Downloads
Discussion
Posts posted by Asp Burger
-
-
2 hours ago, WendyCR72 said:
From the whole pyramid juice scam to this current...whatever it is...backstage GH would probably garner huge ratings versus the actual show. ABC should put cameras in the hallways.
I was just thinking the same thing. Juicegate...friction between cast members who play good friends or even love interests...the former cast member who was aggressively trying to recruit all the younger actresses into her controversial religion...the actress who was balking at masking up when they first got back to shooting...the soap behind the soap is juicier.
-
6
-
-
6 hours ago, CeChase said:
I don't understand why Miller would never come back? What the heck happened BTS there?
Whatever we think of Jason Morgan, he's at least the second-most-favored male character on GH, and that has been the case through multiple writing regimes.
Miller had played Jason for about three years. Some fans loved his take on Jason; some did not. When Show had the opportunity to get Burton back, they elbowed Miller out of the way, broke up his pairing with Sam, and gave him a twin brother make-work assignment to burn off his contract. Admittedly, this is more than Greg Vaughan got when they were able to lure Jonathan Jackson back as Lucky, but I don't remember even the Drew fans here being riveted by the material with Kim and Oscar Nero that was most of his last year and a half on the show.
I think Drew could be an interesting character -- anyone potentially could be -- but he wasn't in 2018-19. If Miller perceives that he was given scraps once Burton was back, I'd agree with him. So I'd understand negative feelings.
-
1
-
12
-
-
On 2/11/2021 at 11:53 PM, Asp Burger said:
I saw "Anthony Zacchara" (Bruce Weitz) as the Senate Majority Leader on an old West Wing. He acted kind of like a gangster in that role too, but it was fitting.
West Wing is on HBO Max now, and it's a GH bonanza. Megan Ward (original Kate) plays a congressional staffer in one episode. Vernee Watson-Johnson (Aunt Stella) plays a maternity nurse who takes Toby in to see his twins, and then she comments on the distastefulness of the TV news showing home movies of Bartlet with Zoey when she was a little girl. And Joyce Guy (Phyllis) has a recurring role in the later seasons as an aggressive White House reporter.
Vernee and Joyce barely look any older today! I'd never guess that 15+ years have gone by. MW looked good too in her brief appearance as Ghost Kate/Connie not long ago.
-
1
-
-
4 hours ago, Katy M said:
It's funny. I was on another board discussign a show and I said that we didn't have burials in the winter, we have a memorial service and then wait until spring to bury. Even though I have personally experienced this, I was told I was wrong by quite a few people from Connecticut and New Jersey saying they use heavy equipment and do indeed buy during the winter. Again, I have never experienced that happening, but others say it does happen.
The movie Manchester by the Sea (set in Massachusetts) gets into this issue in a well-informed way and makes it a big part of the plot. Essentially, it depends on the cemetery. A steam shovel can penetrate the hard ground, but many cemeteries, especially those of an historic nature (like the cemetery used in the film), do not permit them. The just-deceased character's son, who seems at first pretty stoic about the loss, starts coming unraveled over the idea of his dad being in a freezer for months.
-
The Tuesday show is a step up from the Monday one, even though it's still too Sonny-focused.
Scroll past the rest of this if you care about being spoiled.
I didn't know in advance that there was going to be such a big development: Nina overhearing the full extent of what Carly and Jax have been hiding about Nelle's fall to her apparent death, Carly's role in same, and Jax covering for her. Of course, the two of them loudly and explicitly talked about it with her on the other side of a door. Good stuff. I'm thinking Cynthia Watros might get to bring out her inner Annie Dutton. Amazingly, Nina is confronting Jax within the same episode about what she knows.
Alexis and daughters have pretty good scenes, although I don't like any of the daughters much.
Laura and Cyrus are okay too, but it's getting to that point where they're obviously having a version of the same conversation every time we see them, so it's wearing thin.
Still too much "emotion" going into the fake funeral, including an enormous color head shot of MB up front, and a long scene of everyone walking up to the casket and taking an emotional moment with it before placing a flower on it. I'm thinking the writers know they won't ever get to write a real Sonny funeral, so they want to have a crack at it.
In the race for most sickening remembrance of Sonny, I give it to Spinelli: Sonny was touched by greatness, and his passing will leave a void in the universe. I was on a break when Jason got kicked into the harbor, but was Spin even that hyperbolic over Jason being dead? And does Spinelli really need to qualify Sonny's crimes as "alleged" when talking to Jason and Diane? He's helped in some of them.
Part of my nightmare scenario came true. Flannel-shirted amnesiac Sonny is having visions of Laura Wright, but always either from behind or backlit so that he can't see her face. Still, as he puts it to Lenny, he's remembrin' sumthin'! This whole story really continues to suffer from MB's seniority.
-
3
-
3
-
-
I don't want Cameron killing Franco either. That would just be too heavy a deed to put on such a nice kid, even if it were justifiable homicide. Franco and Cameron have developed a nice relationship, so even if Franco went tumor-mad and were coming after Liz with knife in hand at the time, you know Cameron would have terrible guilt for having to go that far.
I would not miss Franco, and I'd want him gone with RoHo and not recast with someone else. There would still be plenty of story directions for Liz if they deign to write for her.
-
7
-
-
16 hours ago, Hiyo said:
I kind of liked both Jacob Young as Lucky and Coltin Scott as Nikolas
*uses Sonny and Carly as human shields*I didn't like them, but one thing that can be said for them is that they certainly had chemistry. They lit up in their scenes together far more than they did with their various love interests. It was an unusually intense and loving relationship in both the writing and the acting, for male siblings.
Coltin's (Stephen Martines's) Wikipedia page has been engulfed in one of those back-and-forth edit wars, for those who like rubbernecking at such things. You can probably guess what's in dispute.
-
1
-
-
I hate Sam, but if I think about her history of the past decade -- even for a soap character -- I have to admit that she shouldn't need a roll in the cat feces to be a mental/emotional mess. Imagine thinking you were raped, then thinking you were widowed, then thinking your husband was back with a different face, then having the rug pulled out from under you. "Whoops! No, that guy wasn't really your husband. This is the real one."
I didn't want to see Kelly Monaco digging deep and wrestling with complicated emotional material, because she was never that good and she phones everything in now. But I feel that the story they opted to tell didn't have enough POV on Sam's part. She shared a bed with this man for years. He had all the marital privileges and blithely crossed all the boundaries of an intimate relationship. She had another kid by him. All of this was predicated on assurances that he was Jason...and he wasn't who she thought he was at all. For a woman with her history, who already had suffered over matters of consent, it should have been a bigger deal than it was. What we actually got onscreen was her stubbornly believing that the Jason she had been with since 2015 was the one and only Jason, then going with the other one when his bona fides were demonstrated to her satisfaction, but with no turmoil over how she'd spent the previous two-plus years.
That's the unpopular part of the opinion. I know it's a soap, but I think she should have been much more squicked out by Drew than she was -- like, having a hard time even being in the same space -- and more rattled over how she'd spent the last two years.
-
2
-
-
I hate starting sentences with "In fairness to Carly," but I was skimming recaps of that year, and I had forgotten how she went to bat for him when he'd worn out his welcome with Sonny. Pratt/Guza had Zander acting childish and jealous over Jason's being back and reclaiming the position of Sonny's top stooge in town. He tried falsely claiming that Jason was making the moves on Carly, which was the last straw that got him fired, and then he started threatening to get revenge by selling information to Sonny's enemies. Carly did try to be a voice of moderation with Sonny in this period: Zander was just upset, give him time to cool off, etc. And she went looking for him and tried to talk him down.
I don't think Carly was done with him until he started throwing in his lot with any Sonny foe who would have him: Roy DiLucca, Luis Alcazar, Faith Rosco.
-
3
-
-
There was Zander discussion in the "News" thread about the character's romantic history.
I'm sure mileage varies, but the only one of Chad Brannon's romantic pairings in 2000-04 that really worked for me -- and it really was one of my favorite GH "young love" stories -- was Amber Tamblyn's Emily.
I never saw whatever people were seeing with him and Tams's Carly. I might have bought puppy love on Zander's part, but it was hard for me to see Carly ever reciprocating. Jax was the guy I wanted Carly to have a Sonny-enraging affair with at that time. This would have been early 2002, when she and Jax were business partners in Club 101. So I was a Carly recast or two premature on the CarJax.
The Robyn Richards Maxie...ew, I just wanted that shipping to stop, given that she was about 15 and he was an adult. And the other Maxie, the busty one who said "exspecially" all the time, was terrible.
He and Gia #2 (Andrea Pearson) had nice friendship chemistry, but I wasn't rooting for more between them. A site with Zander's character history says they did eventually become lovers after their respective breakups with Nikolas and Emily. I don't even remember their making it to bed.
Becky Herbst has chemistry with almost everyone, but I didn't see it with Chad. However, she may just have been following the red arrows of the writing marking him as the undesirable choice. Same with Natalia's Emily.
I can't remember what I thought with anyone else he might have been chem-tested with, e.g., Big Kristina, Faith, or Courtney. Courtney actually shared her first scene with him. He tried to help her when he found her stranded by the side of the road, and she threatened him with a tire iron.
-
1
-
-
I'm taking some Zander history to the history thread.
-
I saw "Anthony Zacchara" (Bruce Weitz) as the Senate Majority Leader on an old West Wing. He acted kind of like a gangster in that role too, but it was fitting.
-
1
-
-
I highly doubt they'd be bringing Chad Brannon back as Morgan. Brannon is 41. He looks great but he looks that age -- eight years older than Other Chad (Duell), who plays Morgan's older brother.
If he's playing some other not-dead character besides Zander, it would be easier for me to believe he's coming back as a recast Drew Cain, now revealed not really to have died in the plane crash that Peter engineered.
My first thought was a Ghost Dad scene for a dream of Cameron's, but as @FilmTVGeek80 says, the wording of "begins filming" on a certain date makes it sound like more than a day's work. So does Brannon's own social-media commentary about heading back to Port Charles.
-
1
-
3
-
-
Alexis was better to Zander than vice versa, in my opinion. He was so nasty when he ripped into Alexis for sleeping with Sonny, causing the great Carly such anguish that she drove off a cliff or whatever. Alexis did more for him, but he had more loyalty to Carly. GH gonna GH.
Still, for the most part I really liked Brannon, and I liked Zander until Pruza's writing of him started to make it impossible, so I'm happily surprised with this news. I tend to suspect it's something along the lines of the ghostly appearances of Stone and Courtney, maybe a Cameron dream, but I'll take whatever there is.
In an unrelated spoiler, an episode that was supposed to air this week was rumored to feature some of the loudest shouting ever heard on the GH set. I'm tempted to make a guessing game of the actor, but I'll just spill it: Lisa LoCicero. Since Alexis was getting into the vodka again after hearing Sam/Kristina/Molly talking about her, I'm assuming Alexis shows up drunk at the Sonny funeral and Olivia goes off on her, not only for past acts but for "YOU DRUNKEN SLUT! ON THIS DAY! OF ALL DAYS! TO LAY THE FATHER OF YOUR CHILD TO REST!" On the Tuesday show, she made it clear to Dante that even though he survived the injection incident with no lingering effects, she's still gunning for Alexis.
-
For the benefit of anyone who will not get to see it for a while, Tuesday's episode was a total Carly/Sonny/Josslyn prop-fest. If you aren't in the Corinthos fan base and Jason's occasional "suit days" don't do anything for you, there's not much to see.
A lot of "I can't believe Sonny/Dad/Uncle Sonny/my best friend is gone."
We got Jason telling Carly he knew she was a survivor the first time he laid eyes on her, and her most salient quality (he didn't use those words) is that she "never fail(s) people."
We got Olivia ruing that she spent years keeping Dante from knowing such a great father, and Dante telling her it all worked out the way it was supposed to, even with Sonny shooting him in the chest. No, the last part isn't true; they didn't even allude to that.
Dante and Michael hugged it out, but the scene fell flat, because it was awkward and abrupt. It might have been good if they'd really talked leading up to it and gotten into their messy early history.
Willow inserted herself in things and kissed a lot of ass.
When Alexis left the room to change into funeral-wear, her three daughters started shit-talking about what a mess she's been, and she overheard it. Soap characters are so bad about recognizing the possibility of being overheard.
We got yet another scene in which a character (Jax this time) explains Josslyn's personality to her/us and tells her why she's so amazing. She's so much like her mother, but Jax thinks she has a lot of him in her too. Other characters always have so much to say about Josslyn's remarkable qualities.
More stuff at Lenny's with the suspicious local cop, who thinks Sonny is responsible for robberies and also seems to think lithium is the kind of thing someone can take and go crazy on.
For me, it was the worst day in a while. The only part of the episode I was very interested in was Nina/Phyllis. CW and Joyce Guy are good together, and I enjoyed Nina taking her through the whole Nelle story.
-
8
-
-
It's cracking me up how much they're just hammering every character's surprise/suspicion over Dante jumping in front of Franco when Alexis came at him with the syringe. "Why would he save Franco? He has no use for Franco!" is the new "Nelle's body was found on the Pennsylvania side of the river." We got three iterations of it in Thursday's episode alone.
I think the writers are being so relentless about it because the plot has to turn on it, with the brainwashing and the Heinrich/Peter mystery, and they know it's weak, so it's supposed to get stronger with sheer repetition and a variety of voices. Even if there weren't brainwashing and a Heinrich/Peter plot, I wouldn't be all that surprised at Dante getting in the way of an unhinged-looking woman lunging at someone with a syringe. I wouldn't even be surprised if Jason were written to do that (and he hates Franco more than Dante does). It's the kind of thing soap writers would have a character do when they want the audience to think well of that character, and someone unhinged is on the attack with a sharp object.
And occasionally someone has voiced a plausible rationale regarding Dante's "cop instincts," but it never shuts it down. The response is like, well, maybe, but there's still something strange going on. And there is more to it, but...you know. The destination point of the story doesn't make that beat convincing. Characters who are less than deductive geniuses even when they have good clues are on the right trail over a bad one.
25 minutes ago, dubbel zout said:Elizabeth has been checked on that point, more than once. She, like Maxie, doesn't want to accept that people have legit reasons to dislike/be afraid of the man she's chosen to live with.
Of course, the parallel falls down in this sense: Peter really is doing all this shady shit his naysayers think he is, and more. Maxie isn't defending him over things he did in the early 2010s. A real parallel for Franco/Elizabeth and Peter/Maxie would be if Franco were shown skulking around committing new serial killings behind Elizabeth and the boys' backs and then being all "Who, me? I'm a changed man!" when anyone voiced a suspicion.
I'm years over Maxie (and, frankly, Kirsten Storms is a big part of it), but I enjoyed her with Britt and Nina in spite of myself.
-
7
-
-
2 minutes ago, paisley said:
MB is stuck in the Sonny groove. I thought this amnesia S/L was the writers giving him an opportunity to show his diverse acting skills and get an Emmy, but no, all we get Is the same obnoxious character he's been doing for decades. Except now he wipes tables and sweeps. Soon he'll throw some glassware and be back on track. Maybe if he'd been taken in by a tiny, kindly brunette we'd have a different, more interesting outcome.
Phyllis actually could be described as a kindly brunette, but she doesn't fit his profile.
Sometimes I wish they would bring back Angel Ellis and do her right. Not played by the same actress. Since we're stuck with the mob scene, I could get behind an IDGAF middle-aged lady mobster. That kind of describes Ava, but she's out of the scene now.
The only usefulness of Sonny's current story to me is in demonstrating that he's deep-programmed to be an asshole even when he doesn't know who he is. So it isn't memories of his traumatic childhood or anything like that. He's a blank slate, and Phyllis and Lenny have been nothing but nice to him, and he's fought them every step of the way. His manic behavior isn't a nice, trying-too-hard type; it's a pushy, overbearing, "I know better than you" type.
-
12
-
-
I was thinking about how this Sonny "death"/amnesia story would have been played during the Guza/Tamara Braun years, It would have been different, if not necessarily better.
For starters, Guza would have leaned more heavily into the "power vacuum" side of the story. We'd be seeing more gatherings of mobsters, rather than just desultory talk about the offscreen Five Families. There would be more negotiation and action scenes for Jason (and possibly Brick and other subordinates) opposite swarthy day players.
Amnesiac Sonny would be having dream visions of Carly and talking about them to whatever characters he had to interact with.
However, the biggest difference would be in Carly's response. Even I'm a little surprised at how easily this Carly knuckled under. I can just see the scenes of the Tamara Braun Carly insisting Sonny isn't dead, refusing any kind of memorial for him, because she could still "feel" him out there. Everyone around her would be worrying that she was in denial or even losing it. They'd be pussy-footing around her about needing to break the news to the younger kids, and she wouldn't hear of it. Her brave-little-thrush steadfastness in the face of all these people who had "given up" would set up her ultimate vindication when Sonny came limping back in. Then we'd get extra helpings in dialogue about how "strong" she had been, and once she got reacclimated to having him back, she'd be super-smug about how she never lost faith.
-
2
-
-
1 hour ago, ciarra said:
How did Carly manage to mix up the necklaces when one clearly looked like brass?
Because "there's so much going on right now!" (You have to shriek that in the LW voice, either out loud or in your mind.)
-
9
-
2
-
-
Every once in a while I see the non-NLG Alexis (Susan Diol) in a rerun of something. She was such a Hey It's That Gal of series television for so long. One example is that Seinfeld episode in which she's a George girlfriend, and Kramer blurts out to her what George has been saying behind her back: that she'd be pretty if she got a nose job.
I wasn't a fan of her take on Alexis when she had a couple of stints in the early 21st century, when NLG had a family bereavement issue. NLG could play the character's neurosis and keep her grounded and intelligent; Diol's version just seemed like a comedic ditz. I remember the Sonny/Alexis fan contingent being annoyed because one of her runs coincided with big developments for them, and they would have preferred to see NLG play the scenes. A trip to the island, maybe.
-
1
-
-
7 hours ago, perkie1968 said:
My only complaint, why would Nikolas propose to Ava, at the gym, all sweaty and gross. Geez show, could you not afford a more romantic setting than that.
They like that gym set a lot more than I do. We see too much of it. What is it now, three times a week a scene opening with a guy pummeling the bag, and someone walking up and starting a conversation with him? I'm glad there's an alternative to the same three bars/restaurants over and over, but maybe they need another one. Whatever happened to Perks, where Kristina was a barista with the guy she was involved with?
Phelps and McTavish tried to make a gym set happen as a meeting place way back. It got weirdly overused too for a few months, and then was never seen again. Anyone else remember Liz and Sarah's passive-aggressive treadmill battle, where they glared at each other and tried to outdo each other?
In general, the scene-setting could improve. Seeing the flashbacks yesterday to Millow's "love among the drop cloths" reminded me how silly it looked the first time.
-
Would random tests at the hospital on some guy found in the woods have shown that Sonny had lithium in his system? I think a lithium level is a pretty specialized thing they order when someone's known to be taking it. I don't think it shows on standard tox screens (THC and cocaine and such would).
I'm by no means sure, but they might have a bit of cover on that. There are more illogical things about this story to me, like the disappearance/death of a famous mobster not being all over the news and in everyone's "MyFace" feed.
I've only seen original Jackie Templeton in clips, but I wonder if Kim Delaney watched some of the Demi Moore version. She really convinces me as the same woman in middle age. She's a good recast.
20 hours ago, statsgirl said:I think that Carly was deliberately over acting to have an excuse to look for the necklace herself since Bobbie is apparently blind and couldn't see it.
It's the ravages of the diabetes on her retinas.
-
2
-
2
-
-
I don't think Benard looks bad for 57, although the black hair dye is too much. That isn't fooling anyone that it's still the '90s.
But yes, the biggest problem is that the character is apparently going to be front burner until they turn out the lights, and not just front burner, but always involved in the action. It's hard to buy that a pushing-60 mob boss would be loading up his gun and going in person on dangerous missions such as the attempt to bring back Julian. That's why he has an "enforcer" and a bunch of subsidiary thugs! Goodfellas was a great movie; it wouldn't have been better if Paul Sorvino had been shown doing everything himself. (And Sorvino was younger then than Benard is now.)
Then they have him taking down an armed robber and pummeling him, and we've been getting scenes like that one for 30 years. I had to suspend disbelief when he beat up Hannah's FBI boss, and when was that, 1999?
-
1
-
4
-
-
For that matter, after so much was made of Liz's shifts at the hospital being drastically reduced under the Cyrus/Britt regime, she seems to be working as much as she ever did. I don't remember any scene in which she was told, "Never mind; we're not doing that after all." Was that solely about giving her a motivation to participate in the fleecing of Ava and Nikolas?
I laughed earlier this week when Ava was talking about Nina/Jax and said, "Wow! A drama-free relationship!" The show has a few of those, Ava, and not in a good way!
-
2
-
Episode Discussion II: The TFGH
in General Hospital
I wasn't even a Miller fan, and even I felt sorry for him when they made a whole meta thing out of how Jason wasn't "the same" anymore, in the run-up to Burton's return. The sentiments of original-Jason hardliners were being put in the mouths of characters on the show who hadn't shown a hint of feeling this way until then. That was the sound of the bus revving up.
About all that can be said is that they didn't fire him outright. They kept him around for a "mystery" (which wasn't much of a mystery; probably 2% of the viewers thought there was any chance Burton would have returned to play the non-Jason character) and then kept him around as a character of little importance for a while afterward.