![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
my paragraphs have too many parentheses
In other news I'm now mainlining Flashpoint; I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that I really need to be around comforting people before I can give Durham County a real go, but then I started having, um, Hugh withdrawal. (Oh my god, didn't I say I knew it was a bad, bad idea to watch Hard Core Logo? I want my fucking life back, Mr. Dillon. And also my ability to refrain from swearing every other word; it hasn't been this bad since that time I RP'd an angry British man who liked to blow shit up. Good times.)
In any case, Flashpoint! I am really easy for shows About The Team anyway, and probably nothing in the 'verse can erase my Enrico Colantoni love after the sheer awesome of Keith Mars, so it's all good. On the other hand, I so actively don't care about Sam that every time he's on screen having manpain I want him to go away yesterday, possibly to make room for Ed's angst instead. And to my massive bewilderment, the fact that Hugh Dillon has no hair is not actually making me find him any less attractive. I don't know quite what to do about this, but on the other hand maybe when Hugh has normal people hair he breaks the laws of physics or something. (And I would link to fic to prove my point, but then I would actually be admitting that I was reading fic about Hugh Dillon's attractiveness breaking the laws of physics.)
And look, I have a new goddamn fandom tag and everything.
In any case, Flashpoint! I am really easy for shows About The Team anyway, and probably nothing in the 'verse can erase my Enrico Colantoni love after the sheer awesome of Keith Mars, so it's all good. On the other hand, I so actively don't care about Sam that every time he's on screen having manpain I want him to go away yesterday, possibly to make room for Ed's angst instead. And to my massive bewilderment, the fact that Hugh Dillon has no hair is not actually making me find him any less attractive. I don't know quite what to do about this, but on the other hand maybe when Hugh has normal people hair he breaks the laws of physics or something. (And I would link to fic to prove my point, but then I would actually be admitting that I was reading fic about Hugh Dillon's attractiveness breaking the laws of physics.)
And look, I have a new goddamn fandom tag and everything.
no subject
I too am perplexed by finding bald!Hugh attractive, though I still miss the hair.
no subject
I miss his hair too! Which is completely ridiculous considering that I as never around when he wasn't rocking the buzz cut. But I see pictures of him with hair and I make stupid little squeaking noises.
CHINA HE REALLY IS A DISEASE HOW CAN I MAKE IT STOP.
no subject
CHINA HE REALLY IS A DISEASE HOW CAN I MAKE IT STOP.
Have you seen the Hugh DVD of Awesome (four hours of interviews, music videos, live performance, etc.)? [Blatant lie] That might cure you. [/Blatant lie] *beams angelically*
no subject
dsdslfdsk. I. dslfdd. UH NO I HAVEN'T. WHAT. WHERE. fsdksd.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I'm just looking forward to the inevitable posts of starry-heart-eyed GLEE! ♥♥♥
no subject
99% of FP viewership agrees Sam is a toolface. I mean, a lot of people know exactly who you mean as soon as you say Toolface in an entry.
Re: Hugh's hair: this apparently happened right before he decided to do away with the hair. It's... probably for our own good? *stares a bit*
no subject
Luckily Sam is still a toolface and has kept my brain from total meltdown. See? Sam is good for something!
no subject
And Sam is just so... MEH. I'd trade him in SO FAST for more Spike time, or a goddamn character ep for Lew, and certainly for Donna (whom you probably haven't met yet, or for Keira the dispatch desk jockey. Because jeez, what a tool.
no subject
I feel the exact same way about Durham County.. I want to watch it, and people seem to be into it, but I saw like 2 mins of the first ep and shut it off pretty quickly. Eep.
no subject
Yes! Ewwwwwwww! *hides*
no subject
no subject
And I think I can watch Durham County as long as I am around people; I'm moving house at the beginning of next month to be around loads of people, and I can probably do it then! Because I did make it all the way through the first episode, and it was quite good, but also way, way too much when I didn't have something to diffuse it afterward.
no subject
Yeah, DC is waiting for my husband to be home full time to watch. Thanks for spreading that MLaaD disease, btw. :-p I'm now craving fic about eric's mom... Backstory, needs more!
no subject
no subject
no subject
The actual point of this reply is to say that you still owe me musings about how you would write Alden differently, given the opportunity; you said you had them written down somewhere. If you can't find it, just ramble at me a bit the next time we talk, before we get down to other things. (When will you be around next?)
no subject
Let me see if I can go dig up my Alden musings! And, um, I am out tomorrow night, so I think Thursday evening I will next be around. I should probably brush up a bit on my grad school research before I leave Carolina and reliable internets, but I should be around briefly. And right now, good god, I should sleep.
no subject
no subject
no subject
1. FNL is one of the best TV shows I have ever seen in my life and I recommend it without reservation to everyone. (The second season's plots almost all suck, but the sheer quantities of love for each and every character should pull you through.) The dialogue is beautiful and natural. The cast is magnificent. It makes your heart grow.
2. One-line summary: FNL is about high school football in a poor little town in West Texas.
3. BUT. But but but but but. It's not JUST about football. As best as I can quickly summarize it, FNL is about little people who were born into circumstances that mean they will probably never be great making unspeakably hard choices to be and do good-- to care for each other; to try to go to college; to leave Dillon; to stay in Dillon. If you give them a chance, they will win you over. I suggest that you focus on Matt Saracen and Tammy Taylor if you're having a hard time getting into the series.
Here are some professional explanations and opinions:
NYTIMES:
Lord, is “Friday Night Lights” good. In fact, if the season is anything like the pilot, this new drama about high school football could be great — and not just television great, but great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art with a single obsessive creator who doesn’t have to consult with a committee and has months or years to go back and agonize over line breaks and the color red; it could belong in a league with art that doesn’t have to pause for commercials, or casually recap the post-commercial action, or sell viewers on the plot and characters in the first five minutes, or hew to a line-item budget, or answer to unions and studios, or avoid four-letter words and nudity.
And the fact that Peter Berg wrote and directed the premiere of “Friday Night Lights” within the confines of television production — network television production, at that — means that it’s certainly great.
Consider a single moment in the audio: a sharp, mean, purposeful whir that tells almost the whole story.
This sound surfaces in the mix toward the end of tonight’s episode, which chronicles a Texas town’s run-up to the first football game of the season. It’s the whir of a surgeon’s saw splitting open a football helmet. The sound is at once terrible to the ear — like a nose breaking or a girlfriend sobbing — and clean and competent: at this hospital in Dillon, Tex., the E.M.T.’s evidently know how to steady a bone saw to split open a helmet, carefully but unsentimentally, so as not to exacerbate a skull fracture or a spine injury. All of that you can tell from the sound: the circular-saw teeth cutting through the helmet’s polycarbonate alloy shell and the dual density stabilizer system, through the whole optimistically designed headgear, which is both an invitation to fight and a symbol of the wish to protect fighters.
But what the whir sound also tells us is that fighters cannot ever be protected. “We will all fall,” as the vaguely biblical voice-over puts it. So now, in the emergency room, the helmet is less than useless: it is opened easily and as a matter of course, because brain and spine injuries in this town of big football are obviously nothing new.
If this sounds grandiose, so is “Friday Night Lights.” But its capacity to turn a single sound into not just evidence of football’s mortal stakes, but exposition, scene-setting and anthropology (this is West Texas, where football players and E.R. workers work closely together), is proof that this is a fiercely controlled and inventive work of art.
(source)
WASHINGTON POST:
"Friday Night Lights," based on the 2004 film, is the "Platoon" of high school football -- the story of the embattled infantry as well as of the officers in the field, reverberant with metaphorical and microcosmic echoes. Thus, viewers can come off a weekend of football satiated with the sport and still find fascination in producer-creator Peter Berg's realistic saga of how The Game affects life in this town -- not just affects it, but also overwhelms it.
The Texan local color is shrewdly observed, but most of what happens in "Friday Night Lights" could be happening in the Midwest or in California or in suburban Washington -- could be, and probably is.
In tonight's episode, the coach and the team prepare for one of the biggest games of the season against an absolute and ruthless arch-rival, so arch that there's a nastily upheld tradition of staging raids and attacks on the other team's territory. The enemy begins by trashing the Panthers' training facility; warfare escalates with a brick thrown through Coach Taylor's window. The note attached: "Die, Panther Pigs."
Taylor cautions against retaliation, but he knows the plea is futile, and soon a squad of Panthers is laying waste to an " '02 red Mustang" that belongs to the other team's captain. Of all people, the innocent Saracen is the only one caught at the scene of the crime, but good soldier that he is -- and although he will suffer for his nobility -- he refuses to name names. These towns are like medieval villages sending out war parties to pillage and plunder.
Berg came up with the haunting war cry "Clear eyes, full hearts."
"Friday Night Lights" has plenty of realism -- as well as passion, soul and heart at levels rare in episodic TV.
The show raises innumerable troubling questions and refrains from supplying the usual easy answers. Even as the earnest and upright Saracen, for instance, tries desperately to fill the fallen quarterback's cleats -- and to watch over the borderline-senile granny with whom he lives -- cold-blooded plans are afoot to replace him with a brassier, sassier quarterback who has just transferred to Dillon. Arrogant and self-obsessed, the new player -- who became available because Hurricane Katrina washed away his house and school -- has the kind of intimidating confidence that Saracen lacks.
All eyes are not on either quarterback, however; they're on Coach Taylor, whom blowhard boosters expect to deliver victories at almost any cost. Even the coach's wife, well-played by Connie Britton, is beginning to lose faith in him. At a party she's obliged to give for the team and its followers, she and the coach argue under a table, then emerge smiling so no one will know.
(source)
no subject