Monday, September 12, 2011

Larry David, Entourage, Jackie-O

I was wired for the finales of both Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. I thought that both had strong episodes this season. Larry David faltered a few times, especially when he went for shock. I liked especially the episode with the baseball player shunned for screwing up a play in the World Series. I would've run that as the finale and put last night's very weak episode somewhere in the middle of the order. Goofing on Michael J. Fox's Parkinson disease isn't as "shocking" as Larry obviously thinks it is especially when the writing is as lame as it was. Disappointing.

For me this was the best season of the entire Entourage run. It had actual stories with characters changing and lives being altered.. Three major plot cliff-hangers last night and every one of them ended up in standard Hwood Happy Endings. A big cop-out. And Vince getting married after knowing the woman 24 hours (well he'd been interviewed by her before I guess). We'd laugh if this was on a "woman's" series.

I watched a long segment on the Jackie-O interviews now being made public. I never bought into the Camelot bullshit and I had mixed feelings about JFK as President. I certainly would've voted for him again but he struck me as coasting on style more often than substance. Jackie-O was one of the most contrived figures in American history. That bullshit breathy voice, those arch mannerisms and her feigned intellectualism. Hoo-boy. Bad acting. So in real life she takes without question the lies fricking sociopath J. Edgar Hoover tells her about Martin Luther King--how King disparaged the Kennedys, etc. And then she blasts King not being able to figure out (gosh her vaunted intellectualism must have failed her) that Hoover despised King and enjoyed playing him off the Kennedys whom he also despised. Jackie-O was right at home on Aristotle Onassis' yacht where she belonged.

4 comments:

Peter L. Winkler said...

Has anyone besides myself ever noticed how Jackie and Marilyn Monroe's voices sounded so uncannily alike? They both had that same breathy, distracted quality, like they were thinking about something else while trying to answer a question.

Cap'n Bob said...

The rich are very different from us.

Brendan DuBois said...

Funny thing, when the news broke a number of weeks ago about these tapes, supposedly Jackie says that she thought LBJ was connected with her husband's assassination.

A couple of days ago, the NYT ran a lengthy piece about these tapes, with nary a mention of the assassination claim.

Wonder if, er, those tapes got lost or burnt, or had 18 minutes erased from them...

Todd Mason said...

Eh. We'd laugh at ENTOURAGE if it was funny, as it was, sporadically, in its first season. But I admit to wasting time with the finale, as well, just to see how they'd end it. Eh. The bathos carried over from BUFFY SOAP'D, I mean TRUE BLOOD, which at least managed to kill someone(s), probably not permanently.

Kennedy has been the most overrated President, easily, since Washington. Even given the crimes along with the benefits of FDR and TR and Lincoln. But, again, the greatest joke of their mutual careers, the Cuban Missile "Crisis," probably led directly to the death of JFK and the purge of Kruschev and the collapse of the liberalization of the USSR he was fostering...so that both men and their administrations could beat their chests and be Heap Big.

People wonder why I'm so sympathetic to anarchism, when these guys are nearly the best that hierarchies are capable of coughing up.