Mary-Louise Parker is one strange cookie.

I think the first time I saw her was in Fried Green Tomatoes, waaay back in 1991 (I can’t believe that was actually 15 years ago. WHAT?), where she played the tragic-young-sweetheart-turned- battered-housewife-turned-surprisingly-sassy-best-friend. Good chick flick, actually. Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet. Anyway, I was around eight years old at the time, but I distinctly remember that even back then, I couldn’t decide whether or not Parker was pretty.

Now, obviously, Mary-Louise Parker is strikingly pretty. By normal people standards. She’s small, has a great body, very unusual eyes, and amazing skin. She would be the belle of any ball that I, for example, might find myself attending. That said, the woman has one of the strangest mouths I have ever seen, and sometimes, I swear, her eyes kind of go blank and stare off in unknown directions. However, there’s no denying that she’s got moxie. She’s kind of like… Juliette Lewis crossed with that fast-talking woman from The Gilmore Girls, Lauren Graham.

Weeds is a Showtime comedy/drama about a youngish suburban mom who ends up dealing pot to make ends meet after her husband suddenly drops dead. Weeds is also most definitely a Mary-Louise Parker vehicle. She is the mom, the central character, and the whole series was destined to float or sink in tandem with Parker’s star power. And really, when all is said and done, the whole thing floats. It practically swims. Fifteen years after my first introduction to her, I have finally reached my decision: Mary-Louise Parker pretty much rocks.

There are maybe two or three things you have to watch out for with Weeds:

1. Do not let the first couple of episodes throw you off. It starts out with a heavy Desperate Housewives vibe, and I, for one, do not consider that to be a good thing. (In my opinion, Desperate Housewives is one of those shows that had its moment in the sun but will definitely not stand the test of time. The plotlines border on unfunny ridiculous, Eva Longoria’s midget sexiness can only go so far, and everyone knows deep down in their hearts that Teri Hatcher is really quite scary looking.) Just give Weeds enough time, and you will be pleasantly surprised by its staying power and satisfying plot/character development.

2. At some point in the series, especially the episodes where they go to visit the legal pot clinic (it’s set in California) and, later, end up at the marijuana expo, you will be struck speechless. You will be overcome with an uncontrollable desire to relocate to southern California, or maybe Amsterdam. You will ask yourself, why, WHY do I not have that kind of access to that kind of quality? You will call your friends, and people you barely know, yelling about how you all deserve better, how you need to form CONNECTIONS. You will solemnly sit at your desk, devising complex plans to forge relationships with better dealers.

3. You will laugh yourself silly, especially when the prodigal brother-in-law character (played by the relatively unknown Justin Kirk) gives Parker’s barely pubescent son a comprehensive how-to talk about masturbation in season 2, episode 3.

In closing, the most beautiful thing about Weeds is that it’s on the air RIGHT NOW. Every Monday, a brand new episode airs, and every Tuesday, you can find it on the various torrent sites. As a bonus, that hot black dude from The 40 Year Old Virgin plays Conrad, an insidiously hilarious in-the-know dealer who eventually allies himself with Parker against his better judgement.

Come, friends, and join me in my newfound appreciation of Mary-Louise Parker and her character’s enviable access to hemp, the wonder plant.

A movie called “The Net” came out In 1995, the year I moved to America. God. Almost twelve years ago. Before Google, before Wikipedia, before iTunes and Amazon; in the heyday of dial-up America Online. HA.

The Net was a Sandra Bullock vehicle: Sandra, post-crashing buses with Keanu and making mind-love with Sly, but PRE-crashing cruiseliners with Jason Patric and exploring the ripe comic potential of a manly woman in a beauty pageant. (TALK about a FISH out of WATER! SO hilaaaaaaaaarious!) It was a delicate time for Sandra, but The Net was masterful, and it pulled her through.

‘95 was kind of a big year for computer/internet movies. “Hackers” came out that summer, too — and while it’s hard to imagine now that Angelina sexing up SickBoy could be anything but a smash hit, I’m pretty sure that at the time, The Net was a bigger box office draw. In it, Sandy plays a disheveled, withdrawn, but still-fairly-attractive-in-a-hermitlike-way hacker-type person. Then … oh, I forget the details, but basically, mysterious, technologically savvy evildoers steal her identity and make her life hell, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to clear her name and stop some larger catastrophic event. I’m almost certain there was a final showdown at a computer convention, complete with one of those scenes where you see a copy/download progress bar on a computer screen slowly fill up to 100%, which it needs to do, while the bad guys are getting closer and closer and closer.

The reason I bring this up is simple: I did all my Christmas shopping today, in two hours.

Online.

There was this scene in The Net, right at the beginning, where they are establishing that Sandra truly is a hermit: sitting sullenly at her messy desk, she orders HER PIZZA via the INTERWEB, with just a few clicks of the button. THEN we find out she does lots of magical things online, like banking and getting groceries delivered. It soon becomes clear that the entire movie is a hysteria-tinged warning, a vision of a dystopic future where it will be possible for people to practically withdraw from society, to lose their very humanity. She does everything online! She never sees people! THIS IS WHY IT WAS SO EASY TO ERASE HER!!!!!

I remember, at the age of twelve, being particularly impressed by the pizza thing. It seemed wildly futuristic at the time. Now I do it on a weekly basis, sitting at my messy desk.

What worries me most of all is that I just don’t have Sandra’s mad hacker-type skillZ to get my identity back when they erase me. I have no big floppy disk with which to upload/download something pivotal at a convention while angry, burly men close in upon me. I don’t even know where I would find a computer convention. Why do they even WANT my identity anyway?? So I know my way around Amazon.com, so what? IS THAT SUCH A CRIME? Why ME?? WHY???

Maybe tomorrow I will go properly introduce myself to the deaf old lady who lives next door. Just so SOMEone will know the difference when they replace me with a streetwise hooker named Ruth and give me her identity instead. (You know. Cuz Ruth is probably real good at what she does, so she’ll be able to fool people like family and flatmates.)

Yes. That’ll foil the wily, eraser-wielding bastards. They’ll never see the deaf old lady coming.

I saw Grizzly Man for the first time a few weeks ago. It was an interesting movie; painful to watch at times, but excellent overall. Anyway, I can be a bit slow on the uptake, and it wasn’t until I was halfway through the movie that I realized it was by Werner Herzog. This held some personal significance.

When I hit age eleven or so, my sneaky dad started sitting me down and slipping weird foreign films into the VCR (or rather, I thought they were weird at the time, since none of them starred Keanu Reeves or involved a speeding bus). At first, I balked at the injustice of being forced to watch anything black, white, and subtitled. By age fifteen I’d developed a secret love for Toshiro Mifune.

I remember most of the movies we watched together, but there was one in particular I could always picture with crystal clarity. It was probably the first incredibly good movie I ever saw; it was certainly the first ‘boring,’ grownup movie I truly enjoyed. I thought about it now and then over the years. I wanted to watch it again. A while back I decided I was gonna track it down, once and for all, and find myself a copy. Only problem was, I could not, for the life of me, remember the title or director. All I could recall was that the title had the word “God” in it.

Do you have any idea how many movies have the word “God” in the title? I do. 788.

Still, in the end, I persevered: the movie was Werner Herzog’s Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. (Apparently, what I remembered was the ALTERNATIVE title: Every Man For Himself and God Against All.) I ordered it, rewatched it, and confirmed to myself that it is, indeed, a fine film. I highly recommend it. (The actual true story it’s based on is pretty fascinating, too, if you’re up for some light German-historical-anecdote action.)

Yes. So. This has been my circuitous way of saying that Werner and me, we gots HISTORY.

Tonight, as I indulged in my favorite hobby of Not Sleeping, it occurred to me that both Grizzly Man and Kaspar Hauser are fairly bizarre, especially considering that they were structured around/inspired by true events. Thinking specifically about how singular Herzog’s interactions were all through the Grizzly Man interviews, I decided to wikipedia him. I figured he was bound to be a slightly interesting character. I was wrong.

PEOPLE. It turns out that Werner Herzog may well be The Coolest Man Ever:

- Herzog once ate his own shoe after promising to do so in an
attempt to inspire then-fledgling filmmaker Errol Morris.

- On January 26, 2006, Herzog helped to rescue actor Joaquin
Phoenix when his car overturned after a brake malfunction
on a winding road in Laurel Canyon, CA, near Herzog’s home.

- Herzog once jumped into a cactus patch after one of his actors, a dwarf,
survived being set on fire and run over by a car while filming.
Earlier he had stated, “I’m going to jump into a cactus if you all survive.”
He allowed the crew to film and take photographs of him executing the stunt.

- The original vinyl release version of Joy Division’s posthumous album
featured the following groove notations: “The chicken won’t stop,” etched
chicken tracks across the grooves, and “The chicken stops here.” These
are all references to the grim finale of Herzog’s film Stroszek.

- On 3 February 2006, Herzog was shot with an air rifle by a
crazed fan during a BBC interview. Herzog said afterwards:
“It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid.”

He responds to getting shot with “NOT A SIGNIFICANT BULLET”(!?!?!!) and creates a “grim finale” that appears to revolve around a chicken. The man has clearly attained true greatness.

I know what movie I’m watching next.

Few things in life give me more comfort than the knowledge that I have multiple seasons of a good TV show on tap, that I will be able to watch them consecutively and that there is no immediate danger of running out. During my five year hiatus from watching American television, countless shows had the opportunity to pile up multiple seasons, and so I’ve had a steady supply of this particular warm, fuzzy sensation since I started playing catch-up this spring.

Watching 24, however, has provided a very specific sub-strand of this sensation, one that has – dare I say it – proven itself to be EXTRA satisfying.

Now, considering how ubiquitous 24 has become, pretty much everyone must now be aware of the central gimmick of the show: each of the twenty-four episodes in each season represents one hour, the full season forming a full day in the life of Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorist agent played by Kiefer Sutherland.

To be perfectly honest, when I first heard of this premise through the insane marketing campaign that accompanied the pilot episode, I thought it sounded downright irritating. I was also under the distinct impression that Kiefer Sutherland was some pale, slightly creepy dude who whispered all the time (not unlike David Caruso from CSI Miami). These fairly baseless early opinions were only confirmed by the show’s immense popularity (the plebeian masses clearly had no taste) and the few scenes I caught while flipping channels (Kiefer hissing creepily into a walkie-talkie, EVERY TIME). So about a month ago, when I found I’d exhausted my extensive TV archives for the time being, it was with a fairly resigned, stoic mindset that I finally turned to 24. (And no, you naysayers, NOT watching anything was never an option.)

The first season of 24 really is probably the most straightforward. In it, good ‘ol Kiefer has to foil a terrorist plot to assassinate the impossibly noble Senator Palmer, a scriptwriter’s wet-dream version of an ideal presidential candidate. He’s just so decent, so thoughtful and dignified, that I can only compare him to Mufasa, of Lion King fame. Don’t look at me like that. You know you cried when he fell off that cliff and Simba was all sad and nuzzling at his lifeless form.

Anyway, as you might imagine, poor Kiefer ends up having a seriously chaotic day, filled with kidnappings of family members, the willy-nilly killing-off of characters who actually seemed like they would be around for a while, totally unpredictable betrayals, and oodles of intense, walkie-talkie based whispering. And the twists, people! Oh, the twists!

Naturally, each progressive season is crazier and more twist-filled than the last. That said, I still think the overall quality is pretty consistent, and it’s kind of nice to break the tension with an absolutely ludicrous mountain lion vs. teenage girl faceoff every now and then.

I think the reason that 24 was so EXTRA satisfying, as I said at the beginning, is that each season stands alone: there’s a central issue, and, 24 hours later, a conclusion of some sort has been reached. At that point, wild-eyed and unkempt, surrounded by empty cartons of chinese takeout, you can relax, secure in the knowledge that all is well, that Kiefer has got it all under control, and hey, whispering can be kind of sexy, like, SOMEtimes. Then you can go to sleep. Sweet, sweet sleep.

DISCLAIMER: If you watch enough 24, then at some point you will think to yourself, YES, Goddammit, Due process be damned! Kiefer needs ANSWERS! Torture is the only option! Obviously, all other facets of morality are simply farcical in these desperate times! In fact, torture is justified whenever Kiefer deems it to be so! Just get out of his way, you asinine, by-the-book clowns! The end ALWAYS justifies the means, you IMBECILES! (And also: Hmmm. I wonder if the good guys ever actually get to the bomb with like, four hours to spare instead of four minutes, so there’s plenty of time to get the bomb experts in and evacuate the premises and maybe hang out and eat lunch, etc., or if it’s just a law of the universe that at some point, frantic activity during the final countdown MUST occur.)

Luckily, I am happy to report that most Machiavellian trains of logic start fading as soon as Kiefer disappears from the screen. Good ‘ol whispery Kiefer.

Over the last five months or so, I have seen no less than thirty TV shows. No joke. I made a list. And I don’t mean like, catching an episode or two when I happened to be home; I don’t even own a television set. I’m talking full series marathons on DVD or downloaded torrents.

What this says about my general mental state is… well, whatever it is, it’s not the issue at hand. The issue is that EVEN THOUGH I’ve seen thirty different shows since my last birthday, when it came to writing the first entry for this TV blog, I knew without a single moment’s hesitation which show to start with. Oz.

Ooohh, Oz.

For those of you who’ve been under a rock for the last decade, don’t get cable, or maybe just aren’t American, “Oz” was an hour-long HBO prison drama that ran from 1997 to 2003. The name Oz became a cultural buzzword for shocking television, largely because of the show’s frank portrayal of prison violence and brutality, especially gay rape (followed later by controversy over subplots involving actual gay relationships). Reviews were stellar for almost all six seasons, usually including terms like “hyper-realistic,” “harsh,” “gritty,” and “disturbing.” It was generally acknowledged that HBO had done it again and created a damn fine show.

The whole time that Oz was actually on TV, I was either too young, too at boarding school, or too out of the country to partake of the goodness firsthand, so my experience with it was limited to distant grownup murmurings and jokes on Conan. This state of affairs never sat too well with me; my unholy love of above-par television cried out against the injustice of it all. But then, time passed. My thirst for hyper-realistic grit, while unquenched, began to fade. Maybe some things were just never meant to be…

Ah! But then, but THEN, summer 2006 rolled around. I suddenly found myself directionless, torrent-savvy, and, Glory Be, confident of my ability to handle gay prison sex scenes. Finally, the time had come to address the lack of Oz in my life. All six seasons of it. This was going to be EPIC.

19.5 gigabytes of excruciatingly slow downloading later, a friend came to stay with me for a couple of weeks, enlisting my help in finding an apartment in London. Secure in the knowledge that the show was now safely on my hard drive, I consoled myself with the thought that some actual human interaction would probably be good for me. We spent the next twelve days calling real estate agents and getting caught in the rain. It was a period of ups and downs, dizzying highs and terrifying lows, but eventually we closed in on that final property. All we had left to do was wait for some phone calls.

The only remaining problem, really, was that we were dangerously bored. Any conversation that was going to happen had already happened. Two weeks, twenty-four hours a day. Literally. YOU try it and see if you still have the energy to come up with new and interesting topics. We now knew each other’s family histories, views on music and religion, culinary likes and dislikes, ablution routines, and bizarre sleeping patterns. Desperate times were afoot. We needed a shock to the system. Something gritty, perhaps. Maybe even hyper-realistic and disturbing.

Cue Oz.

Words fail to adequately describe the four-day roller coaster ride that ensued. We laughed, we cried. We cringed a great deal. We didn’t leave the house.

The basic premise of the show is that within the confines of the fictional Oswald State Correctional Facility (nicknamed “Oz”), an idealistic administrator named McManus has set up an experimental wing called “Emerald City,” which he gets to run however he likes. In this wing, there are a number of different ethnic groups constantly at war with one another, either for personal reasons or because of complex power plays. There are the “Homeboys,” black gang members who intake copious amounts of heroin and include the likes of Adebisi, a violent, hyper-sexual super-criminal, and Poet, who often breaks into impromptu riffs about life in prison. There are the Latinos, whose one-time leader Alvarez gets tweaked out, cuts his own face, goes insane, and stabs a guard’s eyes out, all while somehow remaining a sympathetic character. Sayid, leader of the devout and militantly drug-free Muslims, also goes through one of the more interesting character arcs I’ve ever seen, struggling with his faith and pride over the course of the various seasons. And then there are the Aryans, the one group with absolutely no redeeming qualities, a bunch of bald, needlessly malicious crazies led by the captivatingly evil Shillinger. Wikipedia has a fantastic rundown of all ten ethnic groups and the various main characters: link to it at the bottom of the post.

Bottom line, it really is an incredibly well made show. The first three or four seasons are absolutely solid, a perfect mix of emotionally involving characters and complex, layered plotlines. People you hated in season one, you’ll find yourself rooting for in season four. Things get a little loopy towards the final seasons, but it’s in a deliciously ridiculous way, as if the writers wore themselves out and started daring each other to slip in this or that bizarro plot twist. At one point in season five, for example, a bearded LUKE PERRY (yes, THAT Luke Perry) joins the cast as a fallen TV evangelist caught embezzling money, manages to offend some people, gets himself walled up in the cafeteria (as in, they stick him behind a wall and close him in with brick and mortar), and then gets BLOWN out of said wall in a freak gas explosion, only to ASCEND TO HEAVEN (or so it seems) from his hospital bed. I mean, COME on. THAT is good television.

A word of warning: at some point during the course of 56 episodes, in between the nail-biting suspense, secretly delighted covering of eyes, and yelling of abuse at fictional characters, my friend and I started slipping into Oz-speak. We made flippant references to “GenPop,” the general population of the prison, and how going there would be a rude awakening for those used to the experimental unit of “Em City.” We called all the characters by their nicknames and discussed their interactions and motivations at length; multiple heated arguments definitely occurred over whether Keller really LOVED Beecher or was just using him. Most disturbingly of all, we also started threatening to shank one another at the slightest provocation (ie. the throwing of a pillow or the misplacement of a lighter). I realize some of you may not be up on your prison lingo: a shank is an improvised weapon, usually made by sharpening some everyday object (a toothbrush handle, perhaps) into a fine point. Shanks are used to stab people, most often in the kidneys or stomach. From HBO’s portrayal of it, general shanking etiquette seems to involve taking the victim by surprise, either walking up to them casually in a deserted hallway, pouncing mid-chat in line at the cafeteria, or cornering them in the exercise yard while they’re innocently shooting some hoops. It’s aaaall over in the blink of an eye.

Yeah. So maybe just don’t watch the whole thing in one go.