After seeing such an intelligent show dumbed down, I went to the Jump the Shark site, where a lot of people have complained about Monk's new assistant. Among the complaints about her lack of acting ability, someone said, "She asks for a raise, talks about Trudi and searches for Monk in the graveyard with the same face of stone!!!!!" I never thought of that before. She does seem to not have much emotion, but I don't think she's a bad actress. But it is a good phrase to use when describing people who seem flat, such as: "Wow, Bob really has a face of stone. He never changes his bland reaction."
One of the more amusing comments about just how lame Monk has become is this:
While entertaining and interesting in the beginning, this show is now aiming squarely for the nursing home demographic. Old folks sitting around watching the show, shaking their heads and smiling at "that crazy monk"... anticipating when he'll put his hands in front of his face like a mime and do an exaggerated look around the room. It's become a caricature of itself, much like the later Columbo shows, but with even less of a plot.
I never watched Columbo, but I get the point. I hope they can find some good writers among the thousands who are trying to make it in L.A.
2 comments:
I'm sorry to hear the Monk new season premier was a bust. It has been perhaps the only US show to air on Japanese TV (on NHK's BS) that I can enjoy watching. Of course, previous contenders like "Will and Grace" or "Greg and Dharma" set the bar pretty low.
As for the nuclear bombing (great transition, eh?), I've been to both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to both museums (Hiroshima's is far more shocking). Both beautiful cities. Given the US casualties in Okinawa and elsewhere in the Pacific, the brutality of Bataan, the kamikaze bombers, the suicides by women and children to avoid US soldiers, and so on, I think they were regrettably proper and certainly effective in bringing a surrender. Without them, how bloody would the land invasion of the main islands been (cf. Okinawa)? A Canadian I know here in town happened to bring this topic up the other day; a vocal Dem Yank on hand and I brought up Okinawa (surprised the Dem agreed with me), but the Canadian drew a blank--it was just those bloodthirsty cowboy racist Yanks, right?--though he conceded we might have a point.
When I went to the Hiroshima museum, I was shocked to see Japanese jr. high kids laughing, pointing, mimicking the mannequins of A-bomb victims, skin melting off their bodies and they creep to the river to die with marginally less suffering. It made me quite angry, but I didn't say anything to them, feeling guilty as I was (the tiny sack of someone's thumb's skin (thumbnail still attached) haunts me still.
Are you responding to a comment I made on your site? I need to check out that post again--I remember it being about kids laughing at an exhibit.
Maybe they were laughing out of discomfort.
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