State of the American Television: Tuesday – Wednesday

Here is the continuation of the topic started in the previous post. The new shows on American TV and what I think about them.

Tuesday

Cavemen – one of the two shows on this list where I could not finish watching even the first episode. This one is so lame it is unbelievable. And if anyone really thinks that this is a sitcom… well… I had more fun when Arsenal lost the Champions League final.

Carpoolers – so far so generic. A sitcom (and not a particularly funny or even witty at that) about 4 guys that have a connection via carpooling and their problems. 5 laughs an episode at best. And that is being generous. Can it improve? Possibly… but don’t ask me how.

Cane – I lied when I said that I have sampled all of the new shows. I still have the first 3 episodes and I still haven’t seen any of them. Just cannot make myself. Sorry.

Reaper – I am a big fan of Kevin Smith and I can watch Clerks with a surprising regularity. This show (with the pilot directed by Smith, who then becomes a consultant) is a PG-13 version of Clerks. It is kinda similar to Chuck (airing on Mondays) as the main character works in a Wal-Mart rip-off as well and has a secret job (in this case instead of spying he catches souls for the Devil) but whereas I really like Chuck’s supporting character, Reaper’s are quite annoying. Also there is not much going on in terms of plot progression and the special effects are quite lame (it is on CW after all).
Wednesday

Pushing Daisies – as my friend put it, this one own a lot to Amelie. At first I wasn’t sure but now with each episode it is becoming clearer and clearer that he is right. Nevertheless, even though I hated living in Paris I do enjoy French cinema and Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain is not the worst example of the modern Gallic film. It is a charming story about a guy who brings the dead back to life but at a cost. This show is a good way to relax and just enjoy a fairytale but then again it can be a bit too sweet. And when that happens for too long you start loosing your appetite.

Back to You – is what happens when you take two very famous sitcom actors, give them basically the same characters (with different names and professions) and then let them go at each other. I have nothing but love for Kelsey Grammer, but I have seen all the season of Frasier and Cheers that are out there and I could use a change of pace. It is still funny but it just feels stale.

Gossip Girl – I was a fan of The O.C. (the two shows share a creator) and what I realised in the middle of the first episode of this show is that this is just another attempt at that. Only this time the kids a richer and even more obnoxious. And then I realised that “I am too old for this shit”. I simply cannot relate to this anymore. You need to be at most in your early twenties or to be a gay TV Guide reporter to enjoy this. Since I am neither, this show leaves me completely apathetic.

Dirty Sexy Money – I may be too old for rich teenagers but I am just the right age for rich (in this case filthy rich) adults. And in this show I really want to know what is going to happen next. And I do enjoy the cast here: from the immortal Donald Sutherland to the O.C. alumna Samaire Armstrong. Anyway, no show that is willing to use a real shemale to play a shemale can be all that bad. Can it?

Bionic Woman – I have to admit that in the earlier days when I had no broadband I used to watch my TV on an actual TV set. In those days if I was bored enough I could be seen watching the 70′s classics re-runs that tend to be shown in the middle of the night. The original The Bionic Woman was one of them. That one was a load of fluff and camp that was pure entertainment. The more I watch the new show the darker and gloomier it becomes. I have nothing against cast a former Eastender as the main character, but why does everyone have to apply the modern comic-movie formula to any re-imagining? “It has to be darker… it has to be more sinister…” How about “It has to be entertaining and not suicide-inducing”? How on Earth has the main character not killed herself yet is the biggest mystery of this show. It has a future and with the recent change in producers there might be some hope for this show, but so far it can be described in one word – “depressing”.  (And that is after they dropped the first pilot plot of the deaf sister.) Watch this in a brightly lit room with a bowl of popcorn and you might enjoy it.

Life – there is only one reason to watch this one – Damian Lewis. If you are a fan of his work, you will enjoy this. If not, then this is just another police procedural with a twist (a wrongly convinced cop comes back to work after 12 years in jail). I am a fan and I am watching.

Private Practice is a spin-off of Grey’s Anatomy, and since I stopped watching the original some time last season the new version does not entice me at all.

In the next post I will have a look at the Thursday and Friday line-ups.

State of the American Television: Sunday-Monday

For over a month now I have been watching all the new shows shown on the American television. I am now ready to rant about them, but be advised that this time there my be some raving involved as well.

Before I begin I want to make sure that whoever reads this understands my tastes: my favourite American shows are House, Bones and Numb3rs. Those are the shows that I cannot wait to watch each week. My other favourites are How I Met Your Mother, Scrubs, My Name is Earl, Las Vegas and Boston Legal (I am not a trekkie but I am a fan of The Shat).

To make it easier to place the shows I will go weekday by weekday:

Sunday

Actually, I do not believe that there are any new shows on Sundays (but you can always watch Top Gear, the British programme, which is not new, but brilliant nevertheless)

Monday

Chuck – one of the hits of this season as far as I am concerned. It combines comedy and spy action with a little bit of family melodrama to a most satisfying effect. The pace has slowed down a bit since the first 2 episodes but this is one show that I will keep watching. There are two aspects of this show that are particularly attention-worthy: Yvonne Strahovski is quite hot (while looking a bit fragile to do all those action scenes) and the other is Adam Baldwin playing a good/bad guy. This part is a rant: are those the only roles he can get? Firefly, Day Break even his guest spots on Angel and Bones – he is always a bad guy that is either partially good or pretends to be good. Talk about type-casting!

The Big Bang Theory – this is a half hour sitcom about genius nerds (not dorks or geeks, nerds!). It is well acted and apparently (from what I have read) the science mentioned is supposed to be true. The addition of Kaley Cuoco as the sexy neighbour is a cliché but so far it seems to work as her affection for the nerds (at least the one she is neighbours with) seems genuine. Basically this is one of those sitcoms that makes you laugh with the characters not at them. And sometimes it makes you go “ooooh”… For me- it makes me feel good afterwards.

K-Ville -  it’s your regular two new partners cop show. It has two ‘distinctions’ both of them have plenty of secrets and it is set in the still ravaged New Orleans. The New Orleans factor could be the only reason that this show stays on after the winter holidays. Anthony Anderson is about unconvincing as a tough cop as a fat black man can be. When he runs (as cops always do in these shows) you think he might have a coronary in 20 meters. This is not me being racist, far from it, it is me being realistic: I can see that he is trying but it is simply not working. And when your main character is not a believable one… It doesn’t work for me.

Samantha Who? – is the new Christina Applegate sitcom (no canned laughter), which has only been on for two weeks so this is one case where the opinion is not as final as it should be. After seven years of non-sitcom roles Applegate is back with a different persona (different in comparison to her previous roles on Jesse and Married with Children) – an amnesiac who does not remember being a bitch. So far the main laughs come from the supporting cast and having seen the US rating for this show, it is sure to stay, but I am still not convinced. There is only so long one can laugh (or chuckle in my case) about amnesia.

Journeyman – a time travelling drama with twists and turns and plenty of family tensions (for one the main character is married to his brother’s ex and has a child with her). I am unemployed at the moment and that is the only reason I am watching this show. The reasons for time travelling have become tedious in comparison to the first couple of episodes and the family stuff is just piling on and on. If this show goes… I will forget about it in a day. I hate using the same words but it is just too tedious! (Why can’t Moon Bloodgood choose a show that might have a future?)

That’s it for Sunday and Monday… More to come later.

P.S. Here’s another show that has become tedious – Heroes! There could not be any less plot development in each episode if it were a game-show!

Porn in different cultures

As a completely uninhibited person I decided to use this particular post to compare ways in which Western creators and their Eastern (more specifically Japanese) counterparts approach the subject of explicit sexual situations. But please remember that these opinions are my own and that they come from my own experiences. You are free to doubt and question me.

Let’s start in Japan, where the both manga (that is the word used to describe Japanese comics) and anime (Japanese animation) are used as the main outputs for any kind of desires and/or perversions people might have. When people talk about hentai (which is the word used in the West to describe the non-live Japanese porn, but which in Japanese itself basically means “pervert”), the first thing that most think of are “tentacles”. The origins of the “tentacle porn” come from so really old Japanese stories about squids and women being kidnapped by them and this has long been considered by the Western audiences to be the main topic in hentai. I cannot really provide you with actual statistical data, but from my personal experience with hentai in either animated or print form seems to suggest something completely different. First of all there is a slight difference between manga and anime: anime is still more conservative and does not cover as many topics as manga. From what I have seen the main topic in hentai anime is BDSM that sometimes borders on rape (from time to time it crosses that line) with deviations into cosplay with most scenarios taking place in high schools or in an office (thus creating the background of an institution which is supposed to have strict rules). There are additional topics that are popular in hentai animes: artificial lifeforms (basically sexbots), fantasy settings (which allow for tentacled and non-tentacled monsters) as well as hentai version of harem animes. Over 50 percent of hentai manga is about incest (the usual pairings are brother-sister or mother-son) and in general much more time and page space is devoted to hard fetishes such as futanari or lactation or gangbanging (with rape being much more used than in anime). In both anime and manga the women depicted can almost never be seen as being of Asian descent as their physiology (most of the female characters have breasts starting at size D at least) is extremely uncommon in a Japanese woman.There is one aspect of hentai that bugs (remember this blog is mainly about ranting and venting) me and my Westernised view of the world to the extreme – women enjoy being raped! What the fuck? I have a friend in South East Asia that told me that in Japan the pacifism has killed the “male” in a Japanese man, so this is how he re-establishes himself as the dominant sex… by raping a woman… but since simple rape is too much the woman starts to enjoy it at some point and then becomes a sex slave to the man (typical hentai plot). Mind you, if a woman does something similar she tends to end up a sex slave herself or simply dead (another common hentai rule). The whole rape thing is just bugging me too much! No wonder otakus cannot get laid! They probably think that this is the way regular people behave! But there is one thing that is generally common to the Japanese porn (even live ones where they pixelised genitalia) there tends to be some sort of a story.

Which is less and less the case with the Western media. I cannot truly compare the Western comics to the Japanese manga, since the printed porn comes mainly from France and tends to be more erotic than pornographic, while American pornography is almost non-existent in the comic form (compared to Japan). So instead I will look at the DVDs of live porn (no animated porn of notice is produced in the West) as well as the semi-amateur porn writing. The current porn DVD production can be divided into high-scale (Andrew Blake or most of the stuff produced by Private) or semi amateur. While Private tends to make movies with some resemblance of a plot others have abandoned that idea. In fact, most DVDs feature separate sex scenes with a common denominator (it could be anal or transsexual or bust size or some other specific aspect of sexual behaviour). I find that to be boring. If there is no plot it doesn’t matter how many you watch, in the end the only thing that changes is colour/size of the ‘actors’. I know they cannot act as such, but would it really be that bad to have some semblance of a storyline? My problem with the written stuff is slightly different. First of all, why are 99% of the characters absolute sluts? I am not sure about gay porn, having never read any (and that is not me being homophobic, it just doesn’t do anything for me), but in most straight/bisexual/lesbian stories everyone is willing to do anything with anyone at any given time… I know this is fiction and it is probably written by men, but still… I have met a lot of women in my life and only one or two could be in that category (barely). It is just unbelievable. And don’t get me started on the seduction process (the thing that is gone from live porn)! It lasts about one paragraph in which one character touches the other one a couple of times and that is it! I am no woman, but I pretty sure that they tend to want more than an ass-grab and compliment on their tits to get them to spread their legs!

I am getting tired now, so before the end I will bring up something that bugs me in any type of porn. Call me a fuckin’ romantic, but what the fuck happened to emotional attachments?!!! In Japanese media consensual sex between loving partners is incredibly rare (unless it’s incest or a harem) while in the West love is all but a forgotten idea. I am of the opinion that you need to at least like a person to stick your dick into them (unless the other person is incredibly hot… but seriously how often does that happen?). I could understand why it is hard to portray on the screen (acting is tough, remember!) but how come people cannot write about it?!

Anyway… if you wish to ask me for any specific materials, you can do that.

P.S. By the way, how come in Western porn shemales mostly tend to have sex with men, but in the East they are attracted to women? Just something I thought of…

Fresh Meat

How come it is so hard to find good meat in Israel?

At the moment I live in Israel and I am seriously annoyed that I cannot buy a nice rump steak to make at home. None of the big supermarkets (such as MEGA or SHUPERSAL) sell good beef. And even the smaller non-kosher chains (TIV TAAM or MANIA) do not compare well to the steaks I used to buy in London in TESCO. Why is that? I know that to keep things kosher the cows must be killed a certain way, but why would the non-kosher shops still sell tasteless beef? There are a few restaurants (non-kosher)in Israel where I can get a really good medium-rare steak, but how come I cannot buy one to be cooked at home? This is fuckin’ retarded!

I WANT A GOOD STEAK!!!

First post

And so it begins…

This blog’s main purpose is to provide me with a place to rant and vent my frustrations regarding whatever bugs me at the moment.

Usually it will be related to one of the passions in my life:

Arsenal Football Club (kind of self-explanatory)

Women (I am quite straight and can be quite baffled by the opposite sex.)

Films / Television Shows (Your typical Hollywood fare. Although I do enjoy European cinema as well as Asian cinema, most of the stuff that I watch is in English.)

Food (I love good food, and if I see/taste/manage to cook something out of the ordinary I am more than likely to share my opinion on that.)

Anime/Manga (I am also a big fan of the Japanese non-live entertainment, and I do have plenty to say on this topic as well.)

Whatever else might come to mind (Anything from politics in the Middle East to behavioural science regarding chow chows.)

But this is a work in progress, so anything can change (starting with the layout)

Now let’s see how this goes