This Is The Universe Singing To Itself

At the end of a job interview once, I was asked to choose between Star Wars and Star Trek. I made a favourable impression when, instead, I replied, "Dune".

Because the Dune Universe is as emotional as it is scheming and so deep in human accomplishments and  shortcomings as it is rich in mythos. 

The lyrics of this song are written in Chakobsa, the language of the Fremen, the desert people moulded upon the Arab nations and their control over the Spice that allows the world to function. 

Do yourself a favour and pick all six of the original Dune books. Try to steer clear of the latest fun-exploitation novels churned out every year in the name of Frank Herbert. They do little more than soil Frank's vision. 

And even thought the 1984 David Lynch's Dune film is considered canon, do not overlook the Dune (2000) and Children of Dune (2003) Mini Series. This where this magical music comes from.  

Bears. Beets. BattleStar Galactica

I have been a huge fan of the Office ever since its first season. And, up to and including the very last episode, I am glad I did. The Series was original in its premise and execution, the pseudo-documentary format opening up numerous previously little explored avenues of storytelling. And it was great fun to watch.

The setting (the office of a small branch of paper-selling company) and the stories (everyday life of the people found working in such a low-prospects jobs) seem mundane at first. And there lies the magic of the creators. For (if the endless strings of CSIs are any indication) it not hard to create good TV with car chases, gadgets and explosions. It is extremely hard to make excellent TV with only the everyday grind to work with. It seems effortless only because they made it look easy.

The brief one-way interviews each character had with the camera functioned as either prefatory summaries of stories about to unfold (building up the anticipation) or as instances of pushing back, yet never breaking, the forth wall, and, thus, making the viewing experience more personal and involving. All without the show ever loosing its step.

Producing, directing and writing will only get you so far without the right cast. And the Office enjoyed such stellar cast. Steve Carell may have risked getting typecast by creating the unforgettable character of Michael Scott but it was worth it. Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer) served first as the precarious love interest and then as the familiar friends you care about and the rest of the cast was one successful pick after another. From hypochondriac and hypercritical (not to mention hypocritical) Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey) to perky Kelly Erin Hannon (Ellie Kemper), I could not imagine anyone else portraying these memorable characters. However, the show stealer has always been obsessive nerd Dwight Schrute, portrayed to perfection by Rainn Wilson.

Purists and snobs will try to argue that the precursor British BBC Series was better. Strangely for someone who usually finds Hollywood remakes watered down and bland, in this case I strongly disagree. The US version was much better. It had the perfect mix of familiar workday desperation and sweet quirkiness to make it a weekly craved addiction. In contrast, I found the BBC version too mean for my taste. Maybe one should have grown up in a cruel class system, carved out by accent hues and prep-school rankings to appreciate it; however, during the handful of episodes I managed to watch I found myself laughing at the characters, not with them, and then felt bad about it. Anyway, in all honesty, how could Gareth ever compare to Dwight!

The series is unique in another aspect as well: it respected its viewers. Every producer, director and writer wants to make his or hers memorable splash so we often end up with unnecessary cliffhangers, ambiguous endings or unsatisfying closures. Not so with the Office.  No spoilers but I will just state that the show does not disappoint to the very end.

Now, how many reams of Dunder Mifflin Premium acid-free paper should I you down for? 

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Season One: Tickets to the Gun Show

Season Two: That's What She Said

Season Three: Mergers & Initiations

Season Four: Dunder Mifflin Infinity

Season Five: Dream Team Heartbreak

Season Six: Sabres Under Niagara

Season Seven: Threat Level: Midnight

Season Eight: The Weak Link Went to Cornell

Season Nine: King Dwight - And That's All She Said

Deliciously Weird

Everyone has his or hers favorite TV shows, and  our preferences may shift with seasonal moods, age and personal experiences. However, Twin Peaks is television at its best! The frivolity of the 80's gave way to the seriousness of the 90's - all painted in 50's Americana nostalgia of innocence lost.

Atmospheric, mysterious, quirky, intriguing, intelligent, naive, bold and nostalgic for an American way of life gone - if it ever really existed - yet coveted in all our visions of Utopia. Then again, there is a serpent in every Eden. And David Lynch knows how to, masterfully, give us brief terrifying glimpses of it!

Words are just not capable to describe this prematurely terminated series! Every time I watch it I discover another moment, another gem I treasure. Casting three of the most beautiful women of the 90's did not hurt either. Too bad the network executives decided to, first, meddle with the plot and, when this backfired, then treat this masterpiece as filler material, moving it around to different weekdays and different time-slots. No wonder ratings floundered resulting in the series eventual cancellation.

True, the 25 years are not up yet. However, I think that real Agent Cooper has remained trapped in the Waiting Area long enough. Let's all petition David Lynch for a long-awaited movie or TV mini-series to tidy things up.

Own it and make weekends out of it. Once in a blue moon a certain magic manifests amongst us. One that never fades.

And there is always music in the air.

How do I know? 

A gentle giant told me.

A Whole New Universe Of Intelligent Laughs

In the cult tradition of Spartacus, the halls of every science department now echoes: "I AM SHELDON"!

Currently into its sixth season, The Big Bang Theory proved to be one of the most funny TV sitcoms ever aired. Even if the show seems to have slowed down form its initial explosive impetus, I had not laughed out loud this hard ever since the best days of Frasier and Seinfeld - and Big Bang Theory is consistently brilliant!

Sheldon Cooper is unavoidably the king of the show - the massive black hole this Universe revolves around if you will. A child prodigy, now a 24 years old theoretical physicist PhD with absolutely no social skills or known sexual drive. Sheldon may be on the verge of unifying the fields but cannot drive a car to save his life or break a smile even remotely resembling that of a mere homo sapiens.

His equally super-intelligent (yet sexually confused at times girlfriend), Amy Farrah Fowler, received a far more enlarged role since the fifth season. However, she was not a very good addition and she unbalances the show. Her character only manages to blur the focus form Sheldon (there is only room for one idiosyncratic genius!), diffuse a number of comically charged situations and gum up the show's flow.

Leonard Hofstadter is Sheldon's roommate and primary ...keeper. An experimental physicist himself (who Sheldon tries to "help" by steering him towards a teaching career), he juggles Sheldon's idiosyncrasies with his personal neurosis - not to mention his crush on his neighbor Penny. Which crush, like lunar eclipses, follow a predicted yet unavoidable periodicity.

Leonard tried his hand in a long-distance relationship with his friend Raj's sister, Priya, but he seems to be gravitating back towards Penny once more.

Howard Wolowitz is the only one with no PhD (and Sheldon will never let him forget it). An engineer (whose crowning achievements were a mechanized arm that is used in the space shuttle and a liquid waste management solution), he also managed to wreck the Mars Rover in hopes of landing a girl (but he made sure no one can prove anything).

The fact that he is a short man with a severely outdated and misguided sense of fashion, still lives with his mother, insists on using a collection of pickup lines straight from men's magazines advice columns - and yet carries himself as God's gift to women is just hilarious.

Howard used to be the show-stealer. Whenever he entered the scene you just knew he would offer such an outrageous perceptive that would render you speechless. Now, if only Howard's character was allowed to continue in its stellar trajectory. He has been weighted down by his fiancée, Bernadette, who is very likeable, but also is cramping his style. Not to mention that she, slowly yet inescapably, is turning into his scary mother.

Rajesh Koothrappali is a particle astrophysicist with a fashion sense close to absolute zero and a severe case of shyness - to the point that he cannot speak in front of women unless inebriated. He takes the "metrosexual" lifestyle a little too literal for his own good and he keeps using the "poor Indian" defense even if his father is a rich doctor who drives a Bentley. His character, even in the current sixth season, remains underdeveloped.

Then there is Penny. She is the proverbial good girl next door who came to California with stardom aspirations but so far works as waitress and suffers a sequence of bad boyfriends (Sheldon has in fact calculated the exact number of them, extrapolated from a bell-curve that started at 14)- and, obviously, from her neighbors.

The show unavoidably makes use of previous sitcom combinations (the odd couple, the unfulfilled love-interest mismatch, the fish-out-of-the-water) but even if one manages to discern them they are used in such a fresh manner that all that is left is great entertainment!

The way to truly enjoy this is to own it on DVD. The writing is so smart and the jokes fly so fast (many of them non-verbal) there is just no way to savor it during its weekly air time. Well, may be Sheldon could but then again, who can compare his intellect with his?

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Season 1: The Transporter Malfunction

   Season 2: The Friendship Algorithm 
Season 3: The Gothowitz Deviation 

Season 4: The Apology Insufficiency

 Season 5: The Beta Test Initiation

A Slice Of 60's Innocence (That May Never Have Been)

I like the cars with huge fins
and severe over-steering.
The minted escapism
of international flights.
And the cutting edge
of polyester shirts.

I like the manual cameras
and doors with single locks.
Vices than kept us human,
cold war machinations
and cheeks that could still
blush from time to time.

This was the under-informed generation.
Men with a lot of leeway
but also a sense of duty,
Women finding their wings.
And taking them.

The year is 1963.
JFK is still alive.
Andy Warhol is reproducing Elvis.
Love is tasted. Lost.
And found again.

Thank you for flying Pan Am.

A Carousel of Nostalgia

When things get bad, we tend to look to the past. And the bleaker the future looks, the further back we search for comfort. As the new millennium keeps disappointing us, TV shows set on the 50's and the 60's (once a rarity) keep growing in numbers. Many have tried and failed. Mad Men tried and closed the deal. And have been doing so for 5 seasons now.

Meet Don Draper (Jon Ham), a Madison Avenue water-walker (and based on real life ad-man, George Lois). He is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. He is brilliant and secretive. He wants to keep walking the tight rope with no safety net. And definitely no contract. He is a chain-smoking, hard liqueur guzzling, womanizing alpha male. He is a loving father of three, married to a picture-perfect ex model. He has it all. And yet he cannot find peace. Because he learned early on that the world is always yawning at your heels, eager to yank everything you love away.

From bursting with joie-de-vivre Roger Sterling (hilarious John Slattery) and ever scheming Pete Cambell (baby-faced Vincent Kartheiser) to the gorgeous women (such as barbie January Jones and refined Jessica Paré as his first and second wife, respectively), the cast is one perfect pick after another. And the writing is brilliant, reproducing the tastes and smells and nuisances of the era around Camelot, while drawing you in to the personal stories of characters polished yet inevitably flawed.

The 50's and the 60's were before my time so it is not nostalgia that makes me love the show. Yes, I find the era mesmerizing and (probably undeservingly) less complicated. If nothing else, though, back then they knew how to dress. Women looked feminine and men looked manly. You see January Jones on the red carpet, for example, all dressed up and groomed for a Hollywood function - and that modern image cannot hold a candle to herself dressed for everyday(!) life in the 50's. When did we loose it? When did we decide men should stop wearing suits and hats and women should start wearing sweat-suits outside the house? I, for one, blame the hippies!

This is one of the best TV shows ever. Seasons 1 - 5 have been already completed whereas season 6 is eminent - and the show has already been green-lighted for a 7th season as well. As I have said again before, good TV is best watched on DVD. Make weekends out of it. It is much more enjoyable to watch an entire season in a couple of days than having to wait week(s) between episodes. And (quite ironically, in this case), you will not have to suffer the...commercials.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

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Season One: A Carousel of Nostalgia

Season Two: Take it. Break it. Share it. Love it

Season Three: Framing Phone Calls

Season Four: Hams Worth Fighting For

Season Five: Something Beautiful You Can Truly Own