Destinyland – everything and anything

The way a blog oughta be…and beer! Old movies, old TV, Devo, comics…all the good stuff.

Actually what drew us to the site was the post about writing 300 reviews for $3 each. As Kojak would say, that’s volume, baby.

Answer 1: What’s the Connection? Dawn Wells and Jack Bruce

On September 4, 1967 Cream played a gig at the Whisky A Go Go in LA,  the same night of Gilligan’s Island’s last first run broadcast.

So it may just be possible that someone out there watched the first-run rerun of the last episode  of that show and later popped in for a set of Cream live. If’ you’re that person drop us a line.

New Amsterdam 2

[Spoilers ahead. Also, look for our reviews on blogcritics.com. Coming soon.]

Third episode is tonight (Monday, 10 MAR 08) at its regular time so we better get on the stick, get this posted maybe before episode three starts. We won’t be “live blogging” the whole series but up until Amsterdam meets the potential contemporary The One you might consider all a single episode. We’ll see how it goes.

The second episode of Fox’s new immortality crime show New Amsterdam tightened up in some areas. With two apparently equally balanced plots it’s difficult to assign one as main and one as sub, but it’s a crime show so priority must be assigned to the crime.

A ripped-from-the-headlines murder provides it, in which the killer employs a quite topical, and sometimes fatal, method of self-gratification, somehow in vogue, we’re told, among the young these days, to mask the murder. Although not glorified – lingering on the dying victim may not make the activity attractive to potential self-victims - the smothering was prurient enough for sick types out there to get inspiration from it, especially since it looked like it could have been a young girl.

Second plot-wise, the 400-years-long life-style of our hero, John Amsterdam, crystallizes significantly, when we see that his elderly bartender sidekick is actually a close relation, his son. And this strange relationship is nailed down hard when a flashback also reveals that his elderly secretary back in the Forties had a good reason to keep his secret, since she was his daughter. Both the sidekick and assistant situations may be emphasized or not in future episodes, but now the viewer has this unusual, possibly unique, character trait permanently planted.

This is also the thin thread that ties the one plot to the other, via one line by the distraught father of the victim: “He’s my boy.”

Other than that the whodunit aspects of the crime plot did not jell so well. The murderer had a clear, but somewhat preposterous motive, and the resolution was a deux ex machine provided by a cell phone camera. But the husband of the murderer muddies up the waters some. There was not enough time in the hour to throw in this red herring without deflecting the spine of the story. The whole affair, so to speak, is salvaged by a powerful scene where the girlfriend of the victim speaks at the memorial service and unloads royally on the hypocrites at the school they attended, and fingers, graphically, via images on a large screen, one of the the teachers as the dead boy’s seductress.

Incredibly even this bit was eclipsed by the dramatic tension in the flashback, with the inter-racial love affair between our hero and the past-future mother of the ethnically mixed elderly bartender.

And then from this we were wrenched forcibly into the long-term series arc. Ratcheted up a step here in episode two was John’s search for The One, the woman who the Indian Shaman had predicted would allow him to age, and then die. John is convinced that it’s the doctor who got off the subway and tried to help him when he collapsed, but as both the sidekick and the secretary remind him, John also thought their mothers were The One.

Only reference to any party substances was in the John is shown twice really putting away some scotch . When he’s pouring from a bottle in his office it can be identified as some species of Johnny Walker by the shape of the bottle, but whether black or red label could not be determined. In episode one we saw John at an AA meeting. Looks like the drink will get the better of him at some point.

All in all an interesting and impressively underplayed acting on all parts. Hopefully they have enough episodes in the can to keep it going for a while. According to Media Life Magazine the show’s first episode didn’t do do so well. It won its time slot in a few demographic slices but didn’t reach expectations considering it follows American Idol. And it did even worse on Wednesday. So John Amsterdam may get the death he wishes for. We can only hope he finds The One before the show is cancelled.

New Amsterdam

It’s quite rare that Mrs Shears and I will make a point of watching the first episode of some new TV show, seeing as all series’, without exception these days, are insipid and braindead affairs. The last shows we watched in first run were: every season of  Seinfeld, a few seasons of Malcolm in the Middle, and about one-point-three seasons of Monk, until we realized that show was bound and determined to remain a one-note song.

We thought this New Amsterdam might be interesting and, by and large, it was more interesting than not.

Stop here to avoid spoilers.  

Start with the bad: Clichés are hard to avoid, especially, apparently, on TV crime dramas. You had your three glaring cliché characters dragging the whole thing down: The Belligerent Colleague, the Unwelcome Woman Police Partner and the Corrupt Rich Guy. You’ve seen them many times before – that’s why they’re clichéd – so no need to belabor it. It’s almost like the creators (and this would include show runners, writers, directors and meddling network suits) feel they need to add these sorts of signposts or their audience will get disoriented, forget they’re watching TV and wander aimlessly out of the room.

Our hero, John Amsterdam, is given the gift of immortality by an Indian shaman woman for saving her life…400 years ago. He’s a Dutch soldier trying to keep his fellow blood thirsty Europeans from slaughtering the Indian women. (Kill the men, no problem.) Ostensibly this is all happening in or around Manhattan Island before the trinkets-for-skyscrapers deal was inked. Amsterdam is repaid with a sharp sword through the gullet.

Overall the show found interesting ways to dab history and made-up history into the script, some of it purely throwaway and some worked into the plot. And the episode ended with a cool time-lapse animation of Times Square morphing from the old days to present.

The treatment of tobacco was surprisingly equitable. It’s unusual enough to have tobacco present at all, but here it appears to have magical restorative powers; the shaman woman grants John his curse/blessing by blowing smoke from a pipe into his mouth, and by waving what can only be a bouquet of smoldering tobacco leaves over his body.

Later though, Unwelcome Woman Police Partner slams him with the obligatory “You have a death wish.” while he’s drawing nicely on a hookah. A hookah! The creators here obviously went out of their way to moderate any knee-jerk smoking stigma and found an exotic and unfamilar nicotine delivery system for their hero. To have John Amsterdam smoke a cigarette or a cigar might not only get them in trouble with the the network tobacco censors, but narrative short-hand conventions over the last decade or two have evolved so that smoking is as much a signal of the Bad Guy as black hats might have been in the old Westerns. A Bad Guy – and it usually is a guy, a white guy - can easily be identified in modern movies and TV shows because he smokes. (Remember that guy who smoked in the movie Deep Blue Sea? You knew that brainy shark was going to eat that guy.) Then again how often do you see a hookah on a network TV show?

The tone of the show was tolerably tongue-in-cheek, with Amsterdam occasionally referring to his presence at some long-ago historical event or other, and his companions looking at him like he’s just a little off, rather than completely nuts.  Hopefully they’ll refine this, keep it low-key, instead of dropping it.

But we don’t hold out too much hope that the Indian shaman’s magical medicinal plant will stick around for too many more episodes. Complaints from the life-style commissars have probably already begun to flow in.

Second episode tomorrow night. It was good enough to have us leaning toward watching that one too.