Jump to content

Type keyword(s) to search

wendyg

Member
  • Posts

    912
  • Joined

Posts posted by wendyg

  1. The credit card thing was less of a retcon than the same ploy in HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, but it was still jarring to me. If Gretchen really has 70 credit cards with overdue balances, the banks would be garnisheeing her salary. Yet last year she had paid six months or a year of rent in advance.

    It feels like this season they're throwing in a grab bag of things I've seen on other sitcoms. This show has always taken romcom tropes and twisted them to make Jimmy-and-Gretchen's style, but the wedding versions of it seem both less clever and more borrowed. Which is why I ask again: have we ever seen Gretchen's digestive system disturbed by overindulgence before? Because...on so many TV shows a puking woman is pregnant.

    • Love 1
  2. I think they picked both men for their chemistry with the women, not with each other. I just think Kimbrough could have made all the stuff Sheen did a *lot* funnier.

    He only did two episodes in the MB reboot.

    • Love 1
  3. I continue to feel that Martin Sheen was miscast in a very specific way: he was chosen to be the perfect husband for Jane Fonda, which he is. But he has no chemistry with Sam Waterston, and without that it's very hard to root for them as a couple. I think the idea behind the musical comedy is that now that the two have come out of the closet and are happy together both are breaking the bounds of their repressed characters - Sol by becoming more assertive and Robert by loosening up - among other things, by singing. Sheen is a fine actor, but I just think he wasn't right for this.

    I've been trying to think of 80-ish actors who might have had better luck, and one that springs to mind is Charles Kimbrough (Jim Dial on MURPHY BROWN).

    • Love 7
  4. willowk: Actually, in the 1980s when they were being built a lot of malls pulled shopping away from town centers, and they were opposed in numerous areas for that reason, as was Wal-Mart when those stores started being built. Quite often, malls were built just outside the town limits, and the result was a dying town center, loss of revenues for the town, and so on. Ecommerce is now killing the malls. It's a sort of cycle of shopping.

    • Love 2
  5. Yes, I remember at least one of the Smileys - Virginia, I think, who once performed what I later realized was Anna Russell's routine on "How to Write Your Own Gilbert & Sullivan". It was funny enough as "The Hat Things", as Smiley billed it - but much funnier when Anna Russell did it. (Look on YouTube!)

    It sounds like I would like it a lot less now.

  6. 2 hours ago, debraran said:

    at 80, you start to age quickly no matter how much you kept yourself up

    Just a reminder that in real life Lily Tomlin is 79 and Jane Fonda is 81...and Betty White is 97...and they're all still *working*. It really depends a lot on genetics, lifestyle, health, wealth...

    • Love 20
  7. Reminds me of the scene in MAD MEN where Shirley and Phyllis have a conversation where they call each other by the wrong name. But that was set in 1969; you'd hope we'd gotten beyond that! Nanjiani, Nayyar, and Penn look and sound nothing alike!

    The lesser ability to distinguish faces from other races is a real thing, though, and as has been noted, is an issue in police eyewitness testimony, lineup identification, and immigration. It applies as much to non-white people trying to identify white faces as the reverse.

    • Love 4
  8. Dani: the reason the Higgs Boson prize was awarded so quickly was that the winning scientist had predicted it long - I think decades - before, and the discovery confirmed the ground-breaking importance of his work. So I agree that the timing is ridiculous. Looks to me like the show is shaping up to give every character something to go home with at the end: Sheldon gets his recognition, and then we can end with Raj's Indian wedding.

    • Love 1
  9. 5 hours ago, debraran said:

    Midge's not as thick but as she travels, she will see a lot of cultural differences and people from all walks of life.

    Your contact with the people you meet on the road tends to be rather shallow, though - particularly as you rise through the ranks and start staying in hotels (my personal experience is on the folk scene, where you stay with people a lot and most of the people you know, also know each other, but even there the successful ones transition from clubs and personal hospitality to auditoriums and hotels). The more successful you become the more you become isolated from anyone who isn't in your immediate family or working for you (and sometimes even them), and the more you're in a different place every night. And when you do get time off to live a "normal life" for a bit, you're still largely isolated because your friends and family have jobs, and aren't free to hang out with you all day. Plus, for a comedian, there's also the factor that everything that happens in your life is grist for your act, so even when you're apparently just hanging out with friends you're watching them all the time - and that goes double if you do, as Midge says she does, "observational comedy". (Nora Ephron wrote about this in her much-better-anmd-much-funnier-than-the-movie-novel HEARTBURN; her main character was married to a daily columnist who is always asking himself whenever anyone says anything, "Is that a column?").

    • Love 2
  10. 19 hours ago, mojoween said:

    Wait when does Chuck write the vanity cards?  I’m assuming tonight’s was referencing his Golden Globes win but that was just four days ago.

    Pretty sure that was written in November, the day after the election. The vanity card before it was predicting he'd be enraged the following week.

  11. This episode felt to me like a PSA for rich people: news flash! Poor people struggle to pay their medical bills!

    Agree about the money, though. I had one friend who was perpetually broke, and when he did have a little money he'd go out and buy himself the latest TV-watching gadget (new TV/VCR/DVR/etc.). I thought it was a mistake, but at the same time I understood that at least that way he got some respite from the grind and then after all you can get a lot of use out of a TV if you watch as much as he did.

    There's also a lot of peer pressure involved. I won an award once, and everyone kept asking me what I was going to do with the cash. When I said I was going to put it in a tax-sheltered savings account they were really disappointed. Why didn't I spend it on something I really wanted? Because one thing I really want is the knowledge that I'll have some money 30 years from now...

    • Love 9
×
×
  • Create New...