How To Get Away With Turning Your Procedural TV Into Gay Porn.

I was going to quit How To Get Away With Murder with this fourth episode but I may have to keep watching from the sheer ridiculousness as well as the fascinating case study of Anything Goes in contemporary television. If you replace all the female characters on this show with gay men (as you could well do with only 1% of your imagination since all the characters are so broadly drawn) this would be the gayest show that ever existed. Sorry Queer as Folk, Sex & The City and Looking.

ABC had promised jaw-dropping with their promos for last night's episode once you heard 'Viola Davis's last nine words'. Those last nine words included the word "penis". Hey, they're the ones who said "jaw-dropping" not me! Naughty naughty. (For the record my jaw did not drop but it did open wide for a long chortle. It's either really terrible writing or A+ lurid paperback but either way it amounts to the same thing) Viola's quotable send-off turned out to be so gay and so trashy that it exemplifies the young series better than I could ever hope to.

The last nine-words were...

 

Why is your penis on a dead girl's phone?

The most important word in that sentence is penis because How To Get Away With Murder is obsessed with them. Let's recap their communal cock collection after the jump...

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HTGAWM: "Smile, Or Go To Jail"

We're three episodes in to How To Get Away With Murder and three episodes is where I draw the line if a show isn't working for me. Time is too precious: one season of a network series is time enough for ten or eleven movies, you know? You could basically catch up with the entire Best Picture lineup from 1939 in that time, something surely all of America is eager to do if someone would only suggest it to them as an alternative to watching another season of CSI: Wherever*. For love of Viola Davis I'm giving this series one more episode to win me over instead. Also because ABC has promised that my jaw will drop with "the last nine words" from Viola's mouth on episode 4. If their prophesy is true, we'll see. But I shall state it simply: after three episodes I can safely say that I think the show is bad. Trashy fun? Eh, Kind of. But more like Trash that thinks it Hot Shit.

On episode three we begin again with that hyper-caffeinated bonfire / murder coverup in the future so basically you never know which episode you're watching until like 5 minutes in. But even after that opening five, deja vu prevails since the show is so formulaic: 1. Annalise takes a case; 2. Her students help solve it with interstitials of them doing sneaky things; 3. The legalese is explained with cutaways to Viola's lectures in class; 4. We learn the client is guilty; 5. Viola wins, or, minor derivation in episode three: Viola doesn't lose; 6. Roll Promo for next episode!

Biggest Pet Peeve Runner Up: Professor Annalise Keating only ever calls on the 5 students who have series regular gigs despite hundreds of hands going up in her lecture hall. Come on showrunners, be good samaritans - give one of those extras their SAG card with a line, you know? This is highly unrealistic classroom behavior. I absolutely cannot buy that her classrooms arebig draws (we hear that she brings in the students for the university big time) when she doesn't remotely seem interested in teaching or involving her students unless they work for her for free when they leave the classroom like indentured servants and drop all their other coursework and abstain from social lives except when it comes to sex scenes which can be used to prevent people from grabbing remotes and switching channels.

Biggest Pet Peeve Winner (by which I mean we all lose)
For a show aiming to showcase Viola Davis she's often crowded out what with all the subplots and her students doing basically everything for her.

Gay Guy vs. Prom Queen shared a penis: pass it on.

This particular episode? If I must. Viola defends Ugly Betty's sister who went politically radical decades ago and bombed a building. Ugly Betty's sister skips bail so Viola's courtroom time abruptly ends. Meanwhile: Wes convinces Annalise to defend his neighbor across the hall instead of the quarterback that the university has asked her to defend in the murder mystery that the first season is built on. Who Killed Lila WhatsHerFace? Who cares! On the sex scene front, Viola is again rebuffed by her muscle stud cop boyfriend (who lies to her about her husband's alibi bur dor what reason? Surely to cause unmotivated hysterical drama later in the season) so Prom Queen gets this episode's big sex scene with her heretofore unseen fiancee who, as it turns out, once slept with Gay Guy Not Matt Not Wes when he was 16 at boarding school. Prom Queen absolutely freaks out because no straight guy in the history of the universe has ever fooled around with another student at an all male boarding school when he was a horny teenager. Say it with me: "SCANDAL!"

* Please do not tell me this is not true in the comments, he says weeping.

Box Office: Expect Gone Girl To Stick Around

Hey all, Nathaniel back at my own home blog. Sorry for my radio silence the past couple of days but on rare occasions the words just don't come. What did you see this weekend? Here's what the masses turned out for.

Gone Girl's strong opening weekend -- a best for David Fincher -- suggests that it's going to stick around for awhile given how many conversations it starts (and editorials it will continue to inspire). That must be what that blurb whore meant when he said "date movie of the decade"... that you'd want to talk about it after seeing it giving you conversation fodder at dinner. At least I hope that's what he meant because the story is so cynical about relationships and would probably be a horrible thing to see with someone you barely knew and didn't know if you could trust and didn't know how to read their reactions to entertainment yet (people want different things from it, after all).

TOP TEN WIDE (800 THEATERS PLUS)
01 GONE GIRL $38 NEW Review
02 ANNABELLE $37.2 NEW
03 THE EQUALIZER $19 (cum. $64.5) Why Denzel?
04 THE BOXTROLLS $12.4 (cum. $32.5) The Most Exciting Animation Studio
05 THE MAZE RUNNER $12 (cum. $73.9) Review
06 LEFT BEHIND $6.8 NEW 
07 THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU $4 (cum. $29) 
08 DOLPHIN TALE 2 $3.5 (cum. $.1)
09 GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY $3 (cum. $323.3) Review & Ten Best Trees
10 NO GOOD DEED $2.5 (cum. $50.1)  

Hrithik Roshan gets wet for action flick BANG BANGTOP TEN LIMITED (EXCLUDING WIDE RELEASES LOSING THEATERS)
01 BANG BANG $1.2 NEW 
02 THE GOOD LIE $.9 NEW
03 THE SKELETON TWINS $.7 (cum. $3.5)
04 MY OLD LADY $.4 (cum. $2.2)
05 BREAKUP BUDDIES $.2 NEW
06 HECTOR AND THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS $.2 (cum. $.5)
07 LOVE IS STRANGE $.1 (cum. $2) Review
08 THE TRIP TO ITALY $.1 (cum. $2.6) Review
09 PRIDE $.09 (cum. $.2) Review
10 JIMI: ALL IS BY MY SIDE $.09 (cum. $.2)  

The latest Bollywood action flick starring Hrithik Roshan, he of the very huge muscles and stunning eyes opened big. I don't see Bollywood movies unless there's a dance sequence so someone let me know if Hrithik shows his moves again in this one.

I can watch his dancing in Dhoom again forever...

The other newbie The Good Lie was just behind. I keep hearing that the advertising is not very accurate. Maggie Smith fans have come out for My Old Lady despite a total lack of publicity but weirdly it isn't doing nearly as well as Quartet did and that was a really bad movie. And now two great gay films:  Love is Strange didn't take off like I'd hoped but a $2 million theatrical gross for an indie without bankable stars these days isn't exactly bad news either. Meanwhile Pride, my fav cause of the moment, is only in three cities but will add more next Friday. As I've said before I think this would be a massive arthouse hit if this were still the 1990s when people went to charming limited release movies rather than waiting for them to go to Netflix.

Emmy Threats to the standard lineup don't you think? Jeffrey Tambor for Best Actor in a comedy and Viola Davis for Best Actress in a drama

In TV's version of box office, the ratings, Viola's How To Get Away With Murder is the best ranked new network show of the fall -- thus far, at least, since it's premature to say such things given that premieres are still happening. If you haven't yet checked out my liveblog of the first two episodes why not do it. I'm probably spendingnew week bingeing on Amazon's Transparent. Watched the first three episodes last night and wow it's good with fantastic performances, intriguing and tangled character-based plots, and a firm sense of taking it all very seriously while also being able to laugh at itself. Amazon had been waiting for a series to capture accolades / attention in a way that would put them on the map as a content creator and this could well be it. I haven't heard anything about whether any of their recent pilots (we reviewed Hand of God) will be making it to series. 

What did you see this weekend?

How To Get Away With Murder - Two Episodes

How to Procrastinate Film Blogging? Live-blog a tv show.

Since The Film Experience has been in Viola Davis's corner for a dozen years now -- I gave her one of her first film prizes even if she didn't know it: a gold medal for best cameo in Antwone Fisher (2002) -- I felt obligated to watch her new headlining gig for at least a couple of episodes. I'm not remotely a procedural kind of person or a Shondaland person. Grey's Anatomy, her career-maker, had too much whining and Scandal is too hysterical and (worse) wildly uneven in its acting. Nevertheless I thought I'd live blog the first two episodes and see if it's fun enough to stay with (?) and largely to see if you are watching, too.

How To Express Your Feelings? Comment on said blog.

1.1 Pilot
00.01 Opening sequence is like those 'we're changing scenes and denoting the passage of time!' interstitials on Scandal but for like a whole interminable two minutes. Average Shot Length of .0001 seconds is not my speed. Some college kids are shouting about what to do with a dead body. Is it mine? Having died from seizures from the editing.

01.48 Tall cute black guy (who has the longest neck I've ever seen on TV) says that "tossing a coin" is OUR ONLY CHOICE. Thank god for coins because decision making, man. Tall cute black guy looks super familiar but I can't figure out why*.

03.03 MATT MCGORRY! (love him on Orange is the New Black. And his sense of humor as a celebrity)

03.33 Giggling that Wes (that's the tall guy's name) is told there's a seating chart in his class. He looks at it for less than .002 seconds while simultaneously swivelling his head around with that crazy neck of his to talk to all the other main characters (everyone with a line will surely be important)...and yet he knows EXACTLY where to sit. Psychic. 

03.39 VIOLA ENTERS... 

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Viola Davis. 'Holy s***, that woman can act!'

Here's Matthew Eng on where we are in the career of one of the great screen actresses... 

“Holy shit, I love watching this woman act!” is what I immediately thought during Viola Davis’s doozy of a “big scene” in Get on Up, which nearly every review of Tate Taylor’s surprisingly strong James Brown biopic has been well-inclined to praise. As Brown’s aged, long-estranged mama, Davis—with the aid of terrific star Chadwick Boseman and some pretty expert makeup artists whose numbers Clint Eastwood should find immediately—manages to reinvigorate a set-up familiar from any number of tortured artist-biopics (i.e. absentee parent comes groveling years later to abandoned child-turned-superstar at the peak of his fame) with the same smart, electrifying clarity of character and tender yet tough-minded emotionalism that should be long-recognizable by now to anyone who has seen Doubt or Antwone Fisher or Solaris or Won’t Back Down, or else Fences, King Hedley II, or Seven Guitars on Broadway, or, more likely, witnessed Davis’ extraordinary, one-woman rescue job on Taylor’s The Help.

Holy shit, I love watching this woman act. It’s not the first time the thought’s run through my head.

Davis is, as usual, great in Get on Up, a superior musical drama that’s prone at times, like all entries in this genre, to some patchy plotting and tacky set-pieces, but which sports the affecting ensemble, sobering insights, and stellar, sweat-stained concert sequences that Eastwood and his animatronic Jersey Boys could only dream about. Davis’ role is also, as usual, brief but crucial to the movie at-hand. [More...]

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