Asp Burger
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Posts posted by Asp Burger
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Of course Sonny wouldn't want his wife or daughter breast-feeding in public. What an idiot.
Oh, God, can you even imagine? Picture he's out somewhere with his wife. He goes to make a phone call about the latest mob execution. The kid needs to be fed. She starts feeding the kid right out in the open. Sonny comes back and sees that. He'd probably run over and start beating up any guy whose eyes had even wandered in that direction. Then when he got the wife home, he'd be throwing shit at the wall and yelling, "You're my wife! Mine! Now you're gonna...you're gonna expose yourself in public? For everybody to see!" Then he'd grab her by the hand and hold her ring finger up and yell, "With this ring, I thee wed! WITH THIS RING, I THEE WED!"
Most viewers would be appalled, and a few weeks later there would be a half-assed onscreen apologia because it happened when Sonny went back to His Dark Place.
Tuesday show: Brandon Barash and Emme Rylan were wonderful, especially him. I loved their scene in spite of everything that led up to it. But I liked DZ too. I think he's been doing a great job in this story, playing someone who's kind of lost and unmoored. I like the character of Dante too. If I were writing the show and trying to sully the character to better facilitate an actor/character exit, these wouldn't be the choices I'd make.
MB works slightly better for me playing a parent of mostly grown kids. I found Sonny's family scenes unbearable in the "Shut that baby up!" era.
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And he also apparently REALLY disliked ALW herself--wasn't she let go because she and her mom (who I guess was involved with managing her career) were demanding too much/were acting like divas?
I remember hearing that the BFF vibe between ALW and Tamara Braun carried over offscreen as well, and that they (together and separately) had increasingly stormy relations with production. I suspect that the "failure to reach an agreement" when Braun's renewal came up, and the show's willingness to recast Carly, took Braun and ALW by surprise.
Without taking a side, and without denying that they had been given reason to think so, I believe TB and ALW thought by the mid-aughts that they were of considerable importance to the show and had clout, or should have it. Like some other heavily featured female performers before them, they found out that there was Benard/Burton/Geary and then there was everyone else.
I did like ALW and Courtney initially. It didn't last long. I still don't hate ALW or anything. If she turned up as a different character on other show I watched, I wouldn't carry a grudge over.
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"Many Rivers to Cross" is a song I dearly love. Linda Ronstadt did a good version years ago. Never heard Annie Lennox do it, but I respect her as a singer and i imagine it was good. BUT. It is a song that is so heavily identified with Jimmy Cliff and reggae and the struggles of black Caribbean people that if felt like an insult for her to say "by Annie Lennox."
Annie's Lennox's on IGB was very moving, but my favorite cover is Oleta Adams's. Not to be missed.
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Didn't Guza dislike having to keep Courtney. I think Guza resented deeply that he not only had to keep Courtney around, but had to pair her with "the coolest character ever"
I hadn't heard that. Interesting. I do vividly remember Guza and Pratt giving an interview not long after their 2002 takeover, in which they were laughing about the condition of the show they inherited (basically, bagging on Megan McTavish without naming her), and one of the things they found especially laughable was that suddenly "everyone had a sister." They implied that one of the first orders of business was to clear out all the new sisters. So, in short order, Liz's sister got sent out of town (for the second time; Sarah wasn't exactly new), Taggert's sister likewise, Alexis's sister got blown up, they eventually un-Q'd Skye...Courtney alone of that batch hung around for years as a major on-canvas character who didn't have her biological connection retconned away.
But then she got killed off too. Seemingly for real, since (I gather) Spencer was seeing her ghost when I wasn't watching.
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If true, I guess...happy for GV and his fans? It's getting harder and harder for soap actors to find steady gigs.
But I really didn't like his Lucky, and I wouldn't expect anything different. With GV in the role, no matter what they promise him going in, Lucky will be a B-list fall guy. If you're happy about this news, go watch the YouTube of him attempting to rescue Liz from Manny Ramirez or whatever his name was, and imagine years of similar stories.
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I only saw a little of the AJ-is-fat stuff, and it made me feel awful for Sean Kanan. The two lines I remember (and it's been a few years already, so take it for what's worth) were Tracy saying something about his obvious love for Burger King (or did she use a fictional Port Charles equivalent?) and Sonny calling him "that fat slob."
I do not understand why Val's brief affair with Dante is constantly equated with Lulu's illegal and criminal plotting with Johnny, a dangerous escaped felon. It was crass and shocking for Val to sleep with Dante in the Lante marital bed, but wasn't criminal like collusion in attempted murder by fire.I agree. And I wonder if they'd be writing Lulu with any layers if her plan with Johnny had worked. I'm not really getting from her remorse that she stooped so low and put someone in real danger...or even remorse for the lower level of the plan, the frame-up that would have implicated this woman in criminal matters. I'm seeing regret that it blew up in her face and she's been revealed as something other than the Big Strong Girl who nobly suffers through infidelity and marital estrangement.
That's why I said she was the Liz in the story. I don't think Liz is especially remorseful either. She told Robin quite calmly, "If I had it to do all over, I'd do the same thing." So if you're a fan of Liz (and I actually am), defending her as written is saying, look, I don't care about the prolonged grieving of Sonny, Carly, Sam, and Sam's rarely seen plot-point kid. I really don't. Sam from the very start has been a boring character played by an actress who has a lower energy level than some people with actual wasting diseases, and Sonny and Carly have been disgusting for 15 years. I'd enjoy GH more if all of those people boarded the next bus to anywhere. But I can't claim that Liz acted well in the story or that she's learned anything. In my best of all possible worlds, she would have. She'd be a bigger person.
Similarly, being Team Lulu means saying (as some have), do whatever to Valerie; she had it coming.
However, one thing I disagree with earlier in the thread is that I like Emme Rylan well enough as Lulu. I think she's about as good as JMB.
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It was petty, I know, but I loved the meta digs the writing got in at Burton via that self-important woman interviewing to be Dante and Lulu's surrogate. Did they actually identify her as "Stephanie" on the show, or was that just a board name for her? Either way, it was one memorable day-player scene. I don't know if her dialogue was word for word things Burton had said in negotiations shortly before, but it fit an image of him that was out there.
Also...I was all for AJ/Courtney and hated the direction that took with the strip club, the stalking, the skeleton, the flour, Jason as "protector" and all, but I'm not sure AJ was a sympathetic character all through that story. Right from the beginning, there was an agenda on his part, and I knew that Sonny and Carly were being positioned to be proved "right" in their warnings to Courtney. So it's not as though I went into that story thinking that finally something good was happening for AJ, and then it got ripped away from him. It was more like the other shoe dropping, predictably.
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P3pp3rb1rd, I agree with a lot of what you say on this Lulu/Dante/Valerie topic, but I don't need them to go as far as Valerie suing Lulu. Lulu is a spoiled princess; the best punishment by far for her is being bucked from her high horse, having everyone involved and even people not involved know how far she sank, and knowing it's all on her. She's like someone who was playing poker and had a royal flush in hand and said, "Now...how many of these cards can I give back?" and then ended up with a lousy hand. So she's forfeited a lot of sympathy in town, and with it the ass-kissing on which she thrives. Well done!
I mean, of course she's going to have people like Sonny speaking up on her behalf, telling Dante "Maybe you need to look at what you did to drive Lulu to act that way," just like Olivia a week or two ago was saying to Lulu she needed to take some of the responsibility for her marriage having problems in the first place. That's General Hospital's idea of balance.
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Also, Lulu's husband treated her like shit before it ever happened
Well, let's see. Responses to being treated like shit by your husband. Getting a divorce and moving on with your life OR...siccing a wanted criminal on the other woman, because the only way you're ever going to be able to have a chance with the guy who treats you like shit (and has been trying to get back with you as recently as Christmas) is if she's gone.
Which one of these does a non-vile person do, in real life or on soap operas?
Shrewlu is inexcusable.
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I sure hope Lulu shows a lot of personal growth after all of this trouble. Her beauty will either win Dante back or get other admirers--so I'm not worried about Lulu being abandoned.
Oh, but we MUST worry about her. She's the first woman on a soap opera whose husband ever slept with someone else, so we're in uncharted territory here. It's not as though we have a long history of examples of people handling that in various ways that don't involve mobsters. And now the show has established her as a brave heroine who rushes into a burning cabin, to limit the crimes for which she'll be on the hook. Also, she feels really bad...when a plot she set in motion and egged on for a period of weeks blows up in her face. Essentially, she's the Liz of that storyline, but with stalking, framing, kidnapping, and a near-death instead of the far more serious "made people grieve for additional months over someone they already thought was dead."
Sarcasm aside, I find her by far the least appealing of the three people in that triangle. I'll cop to never being much of a fan of the adult version of Lulu. Mind you, I'm loath to call what JMB was playing that.
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One of the very few good things about the hemorrhaging daytime audience in the years post-O.J. trial is that we've been spared a Young Sonny spinoff series showing us his hopes, dreams, heartaches, and hellish home life in detail. There would be an Adela, a Deke, an Olivia...blech.
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I'm okay with the hospital of the title being less focal than it was long ago; I just hated the period when the only purpose it served on the show was for people to be taken there after the latest mob-related shooting or bombing. It made something of a comeback in the mid-'00s once Liz became a nurse, Patrick and Robin were core characters, Steven returned, new characters such as Lisa and Britt had medical backgrounds, etc. At least now I once again see the purpose for there to be a hospital set. Remember the dark ages when the show might as well have been called The Penthouse?
Here's a massive unpopular opinion: I f---ing loathe Ric Lansing, and I never even liked Rick Hearst in the role. I couldn't stand either Ric/Liz or Ric/Alexis. I'll be nominally on the side of almost anyone brought on to destroy Sonny, but that whiny, ineffectual wuss? Please. It was about 75 percent the way they wrote him and 25 percent Hearst's needy portrayal and over-the-top dye job. Promising idea, terrible execution. But any character created as a Sonny antagonist in the Guza years was going to get kneecapped in the crib. You knew they would come out the loser more often than Cliff Barnes.
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Oh, and another thing, I don't know about SID, but SOD's sales are down to about 200,000 per year. 200,000 thousand!!
I haven't even looked at any of the soap magazines in so long, but I see them in the checkout line and it's so sad. SID still is broken up by network, and I think, "What does ABC Soaps in Depth have to cover? General Hospital and nostalgia pieces on all the canceled ones?"
My rhetorical question just made me go to Wikipedia, and I see that it's essentially a General Hospital magazine now, with some off-topic coverage of Days of our Lives, because NBC lost its magazine in the series years ago.
Freudian finger-slip: I first wrote Soaps in "Death."
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Thanks for the repost of Sarah Brown's last Carly scenes in 2001. That's what I remembered, because the SBr/Carly fans were just livid that afternoon. Of course everyone knew that that was Brown's last scheduled air day, and they thought it was such a slap in the face that her run on the show ended with Sonny screaming at Carly to go upstairs to her room, as if she were his disobedient daughter. Then when she refused, he threw something at the wall and told her he wasn't kidding, and she meekly trotted upstairs.
A classic Jill Farren Phelps episode-closing musical montage. "Classic" as in "characteristic," not meaning it was any good.
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Oh, poor little Lulu. "What did I do, Maxie?" It's a lot easier to hang out on the boat, smugly knocking back the drinks and playing spymaster, sending your thug out to terrorize someone, but when you get hauled out into the open for it, the big blue sad eyes and the quivering lip start.
"Stupid-ass bitch," indeed. No sympathy here.
Love Emme Rylan's portrayal, though. I've frequently found this character unbearable to listen to and watch over the years, but I never blamed either actress. I actually thought both ER and Brytni Sarpy did pretty well in the confrontation today.
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That was terrible. I almost threw up when she said Jason was a great man.
Yep...Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jason "Stone Cold" Morgan. That's the litany!
As yet, I would not read too much into the choice of "Rachel" for Hayden's allegedly real name, or one of her prior assumed names. I had completely forgotten the 2005 Rachel, but there are only so many common names and there is going to be repetition.
If they brought on a new character named, oh, "Zander" or "Venus," my ears might prick up, but not "Rachel."
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Dante: You're seeing Valerie now too?
How did lightning not strike his stumpy ass?
I laughed, personally. I love the idea of Dante thinking boring Dillon is this sexy dawg roaming around town and Hoovering up all the neglected Dante tail. I'm picturing it all happening in a recut version of RPW's Selena Gomez video.
Who the fuck was or is Rachel? I have no idea who Rachel is supposed to be.
The one in the Bible, I am predicting. There's a lot of dirt on her.
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I only started watching again toward the end of November, and I came onto the Previously TV board and read a lot of anger at Dante and Liz. But for me, the three characters I am most disappointed in, because I once liked all three, are Nikolas, Olivia, and Alexis.
Alexis has turned into some weird combination of "not even the same character" and "retaining only the worst." It's like the current writers don't get her at all and are going from some half-assed crib notes. For some reason, Liz repeating her own mistakes doesn't bother me as much as Alexis doing it (so boringly!). I think it's because Alexis was presented as a mature character 15 years ago. She even has a thirtysomething daughter. Liz's kids are all youngish; if they want to make Liz do such dumb things for a while longer and show slow growth, I can hang in there. With Alexis, by now it's just sad. After Sonny and Ric and Jerry Jacks, this is the guy she's with? And she's that blinkered about who he is, even when he talks openly about the shady shit he's pulling?
Nikolas is "going dark," I guess, but Tyler Christopher seems so checked out and lacking energy. I loved that character so much as played by TC the first time around, and he even had his moments when TC returned (like, I was reminded, supporting Lulu in the Abortion That Tore Apart Port Charles). Now he hasn't even become some interesting tragic villain. He's just kind of a sleazy slob.
And Olivia...okay, she was always a little annoying, but Lisa LoCiero had a nice presence in the role, and I don't remember Olivia ever being this much of a caricature. This psychopathically overbearing stuff she's doing with Alexis and Julian is painful. Sane people don't act this way. It also makes both of them look like idiots for indulging her as much as they do...especially him, because he appears to have no clue that this would bother the woman he's engaged to. If that's the best they can do as far as giving Olivia a storyline of her own, they should restrict her to being a talk-to character for people like Dante and Lulu. Basically, what Bobbie turned into after her last front-burner romantic story ended (it was the triangle with Roy DiLucca and Melissa Bedford, wasn't it?).
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It's worse than a baby voice. It's a drunk baby voice. Like, "formula and Jägermeister mix-up."
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I'm loving all the "Young and the Restless as choice of grandmothers nationwide" talk. Mine too. I have a childhood memory of one of my grandmothers being in the kitchen and not wanting to take an eye off the little B&W TV on the table when that show was on. One summer she was glued to a storyline involving this villainness named "Rosie" (who I think was played by Darlene Conley, later of The Bold and the Beautiful). She used to say, "Oh, that Rosie, she's so awful! I wish those girls would get away from her." The story was about something I shouldn't have even been near at that age. Forced prostitution, I think? It was just made clear to me that this Rosie was very, very bad.
Is the really hated GH opening discussed here the one where at the end, Tony Geary walks away from all the other guys in their tuxes? I didn't mind the musical rearrangement, but I thought that the visuals were really impractical. It got to the point where the opening ended with a shot of 12 guys and only about half of them were still on GH.
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Lulu abortion clip:
Dillon is an industrial-sized ASSHOLE here, not helped by the fact that his hair looks tragic as fuckI expect bad hair from Dillon, though. What the hell was going on with GV/Lucky's? I've never seen him look worse. I was watching when this was going on, but I had forgotten how right-wing/"Operation Rescue" Lucky sounded during this storyline. At least you could say Dillon had more standing.
That wasn't Liz's best look either. But Nikolas/Tyler looked better then than now.
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This already feels like unpopular-opinion territory, but I didn't mind the Johnny Zacchara howl and subsequent crazy-guy face today. Wasn't it kind of a callback? When the character was first introduced, he was portrayed as very on the edge, reckless, unhinged. In short order they dialed it way back, and he was playing his piano of pain while Sonny threatened to cut off his fingers. Then he developed a sense of humor and went full-on cuddly. I thought today he was putting on a "Johnny vintage 2007" act to make Valerie think she's in more danger than she really is in. I believed him when he assured Lulu he wasn't going to kill Valerie, and I don't think they would taint this character that much by having him even make a serious failed effort to kill or even physically hurt her. (I realize killing Valerie would make his popularity skyrocket in some quarters, but you know what I mean.)
I really don't know, as I'm not spoiled for this whole scheme of his, and all I see it doing is blowing up in Lulu's face. Not only is she going to look responsible for the things she sanctioned, she's going to look culpable for things he didn't even tell her he was going to do.
I just didn't think the howling was intended to be "authentic," and I thought BB did it pretty well. It was a reminder that Johnny can "do" crazy. He certainly had enough familial examples to study. (I'll take a minute to put some cyber "ROSES!" on Papa Zucchini's grave.)
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Also, in the preview, Sam saying: "Help me. You're my only hope." Is she Princess Leia?
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Lord...I'm sorry, but I hate Lulu. Still and always. I was reminded today how she got the nickname Shrewlu, years ago, with a different actress. She's one of those women who will turn on a dime and spit venom at you if you're anything other than completely in line with what she wants to hear, and start hysterically exaggerating, "Oh, so it's all my fault?" Blah blah blah. Her idea of "support" is nonstop, unmitigated ass-kissing, and Olivia fell down on the job today.
I have no complaints about the actress, though. I like her as much as I liked JMB. It's rare that recasts are consistent like that. She has great chemistry with Brandon Barash. I haven't seen enough non-hostile scenes with Dante/DZ since I've been watching again to comment on that.
S15.E06: Auditions #6
in American Idol
I was waiting for Harry to give Pageant Stephany his standard critique about how if you are going to do runs, make sure you can really nail them and keep them in tune, because besides her performance being a bunch of disjointed line-by-line vocal effects with no continuity, the pitch was all over the map. But he didn't! If ever anyone had that coming, it was her.
I think he and Keith were enthusiastic about her as a package artist, meaning they voted with their packages. J-Lo should have given her a "no" just for the record, IMO.