February 2012
9 posts
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The Week In TV 26/02/2012
30 Rock, Season 6, Episode 7: Leap Day
I’ve gone back on forth on 30 Rock’s sixth season, which has produced just as many rotten apples as it has real winners. “Leap Day,” whilst hardly up there with the show’s glory days, was at least a cheery, optimistic sort of affair, which counts as something from a show that’s become increasingly mired in its own...
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Young Adult (2012)
Following the success of Juno, a hyper-literate primary-coloured approach to teen pregnancy, screenwriter Diablo Cody moved to TV with The United States of Tara. Ostensibly a show about the wacky shenanigans of a woman (Toni Collette) with dissociative identity disorder and her quirkily-troubled family, it morphed into a complex and intimate examination of the effects of mental illness on one...
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The Week In TV 19/02/2012
30 Rock, Season 6, Episode 6: The Tuxedo Begins
A mostly fine episode of 30 Rock, albeit one that leans too heavily on an extended Dark Knight gag that comes several years too late. When Jack is mugged by a seemingly respectful man, his gripes about New York becoming a cesspool of crime and decrepitude dovetails with Liz’s own grumbles that nobody follows the rules anymore. As Jack...
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Martha Marcy May Marlene (2012)
We first meet Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) laying the table for dinner at a seemingly benign rural commune, but the heavy way in which she thumps the plates down suggests that there’s something darker underneath the scenes of serene communal slumber and back-to-basics manual labour. Fleeing the commune for what one would assume to be safe haven in her sister Lucy’s fancy lakeside house in upstate...
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The Week In TV 12/02/2012
30 Rock, Season 6, Episode 6: Hey Baby, What’s Wrong?
A curiously over-long episode that, one suspects, might have been a lot funnier if it was cut back to its regular half hour format. 30 Rock has always been suspicious of Valentine’s Day sentiment, but this episode veered a little too close to misanthropy for comfort, especially on a show that, in its prime, always celebrated...
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The Week In TV 05/02/2012
30 Rock, Season 5, Episode 5: Today You Are A Man
After four episodes that seemed like a solid return to form, this week’s 30 Rock was a little more ho-hum. In a neat mirror to Alec Baldwin’s contract negotiations offset, Liz and Jack enter into a negotiation-off, with Liz learning from an old tome written by Jack himself back in the 80s about how to overcome your opponent. And whilst Liz is...