frame²

It's down to the final two crews, and if I remember correctly I predicted that Beat Freaks is going to be one of the final teams. It's down to Beat Freaks and Quest. It's an all out boy vs. girls team.

I have been rooting for Beat Freaks since the beginning, only because they have been consistently good and you definitely don't see girls doing headspins in any type of dance performance. But at the same time Quest, the all boys group have been phenomenal throughout the show, and the judges have been giving them a REALLY REALLY hard time. JC (gag!) claims they do too much "posing" and not enough transition. Okay "bubblegum pop" boy... let's see you come up with YOUR OWN moves without using choreography. Anyway, I'd be really surprised if the boys end up winning.

The judges/producers really really want a girl team to win. Don't get me wrong... they would be totally deserving of the first group to be all girl, winning a dance crew contest. But I would hate for them to win because they were a pretty good girl dance crew versus a phenomenal girl dance crew, against Quest. Because to be quite honest, overall I find Quest to be so much more fun to watch, and so creative in their routines.

Last night's performance was.... bleh. The challenge was incorporate different styles of street into their routine. Beat Freaks was a flatliner. I felt they hardly fulfilled the challenge and even without the challenge their routine was just boring. There was no "wow factor" to it. If you were to go on last night's performance they shouldn't win. See for yourself:

Quest on the other hand... WOW! Fell out of my chair a couple of times with the stuff they pulled. It was sharp and absolutely fun watching them have fun doing what they do. Can't say enough about them. They even received a standing ovation from the judges. Check it out:

Burn After Reading starts with Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) who works for the CIA on a non-threatening level. Osbourne Cox quits after they demote his position. When he tells his rigid uptight wife, Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), she puts together divorce case without his knowledge. During this case she makes a copy of all his financial/personal records onto a disc to give to her attorney. The attorney's secretary loses the disc at a gym.

Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) are best friends who work at this gym. Frances is a dopey lovable, overly hyper questionably gay guy friend. Linda is an insecure plastic surgery obsessed lonely, chronic Internet dater. When they discover the disc, they find out it belongs to Osbourne and attempt to blackmail him. Things really don't turn out quite as planned, and through a series of miscommunication and unfortunate events help to unfold the story.

I honestly didn't know what to make of this story, except I was left just as confused as the writers were. The movie didn't know what it was. The movie thought it was a dark comedy, then a drama, then a romantic comedy, then a suspense thriller. It was bipolar is what it was.

If the Coen brothers had left it as specifically a drama or a specifically a comedy it would've been really great. But because you confuse the viewers by trying to throw everything into one big pot, it's just a big mesh and you can't distinguish one taste from the next, so you sacrifice a great potential.

And the ending. Oy! Do not even get me started. It was a half-ass ending of "We don't really know how to tie this up, so let's just kill everyone."

Mamma Mia an ABBA themed musical, set the day before Sophie's wedding. She reads her mother's diary to hopefully find out who her father is. Instead she discovers that she has 3 possible fathers, so without her mother's knowledge or permission, she invites all 3 mysterious men, whom her mother hasn't seen in 20 years.

I love musicals. Fantastic examples are Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Grease, Newsies, etc. (not listed in any particular order) If it's done right it's just a really big music video. The dancing and songs especially are what I love about this genre. You are already emotionally involved in the story and music always helps to amplify that emotion the character is conveying.

Mamma Mia was... corny, at best. The transitions of acting to singing just didn't come off well. The scenes were choppy and the songs and dancing weren't really well done. No doubt that Meryl Streep has a good voice, but she's going in her 50's(?) skipping and jumping around in an overall. I like her better as Miranda Priestley in Devil Wears Prada.

The whole movie came off amateur. The songs went on a bit too long, or maybe that's because it just wasn't really that enjoyable. Muriel's Wedding was a better ABBA themed musical then this. I actually fast forwarded through the movie only to discover a very predictable ending.

Again I don't know if this movie is just bad, or if it was a bad translation to film like Rent was. (God, that one was just as awful, if not more, because I loved the Broadway version so much.)

Coraline is based on the books by Neil Gaiman.

Coraline Jones moves to a new house and on top of feeling sad and alone from the move, her parents ignore her completely. They are both writers and incredibly involved with their work, and the mother especially is annoyed everytime Coraline is in her presence. Upon exploring the house, she comes across a door that has been wallpapered over. After pestering her mother to help her find a key, they find one, with a button as a handle. With her mother present, they open it, only to find that it's a brick wall.

During the night she is awoken from her sleep and sees little white mice leading her to the door. This time it leads to a tunnel. On the other side is the exact opposite of her mother... with buttons as eyes. At first all seems to be an ideal world.

I'm a HUGE fan of Nightmare Before Christmas, so without a second thought I went to see this one. (FYI: It seems a lot of people are confusing this little fact that Tim Burton DID NOT direct Nightmare Before Christmas. He wrote and produced it.)

I was kinda disappointed with this one. There wasn't much else to the story. It wasn't a story where it had a beginning, middle and end. We dont' know how that door got there. We don't know why the evil woman on the other side captures little children. We just know she's there and Coraline went through it and defeated the evil woman.

The story wasn't really captivating enough for me, which is a shame because the animation was simply fantastic.

For the handful that have actually been reading my blog, I've been absent because I've been OBSESSED with The Wire. It's 5 seasons centered around the Baltimore, Maryland criminal, judicial and media system.

The overall writing and events are so raw, compared to the filtered crime shows on the network, such as Law and Order, or CSI. You get to see the detectives working the case getting personal in certain situations or just joking around amongst the guys.

Season 1: The Streets
Probably my favorite season, it revolves around the drug dealings on the street. You see the interaction of business being handled from the corners where the transactions take place. The market depends on the addicts staying addicted to the product. Avon Barksdale leads the most prominent gang in Baltimore and follows an old school code and takes his business seriously. The group of investigators trailing to capture Avon involves Jimmy McNulty, a black sheep in the police who constantly breaks rules and burns bridges by not following the chain of command. Through the investigation you see the frustration as the unit doing the investigation is constantly challenged with obstacles that the Police Commissioner and the justice system puts out, as well as trying to be one step ahead of the gang, by putting wire taps on the pay phones being used.

Season 2: The Docks
They step away from the streets and focus on the blue collar section of Baltimore. A family works cohesively to steal shipments coming in from a certain ship, overseas. The stolen products range from electronics to various items that could be sold for profits. But the case takes an interest when a cargo arrives and a secret compartment of dead girls is discovered. McNulty who was demoted to patrol the docks joins his old team to help solve the case, which turns out to be the importing of the drugs to sell to the dealers for the streets.

Season 3: The Streets Part 2
We focus back on Avon's crew, but this time we see the dynamics higher up in the food chain. The story of seeing the pressure between Avon and his second in command, Stringer Bell, is all too familiar. You have two partners in a business that don't see eye to eye anymore. Stringer, a business man at heart, attends business classes at the local community college, and tries to apply real world economics into the street business. Avon, struggles with his partner's idea of trying to apply them to a business that isn't conventional. Stringer's investments with the political circle leads you into a world of dirty politics, where money does make the world go round. Avon would rather use the old and ancient form of making the world go round: guns and power.

Season 4: School System
We follow 4 kids entering a school system where the education system is in a deficit of $54 million dollars. The school's main concern is to meet the minimum requirements of the state to receive the funding, meaning, each student really only has to show up to school at least once a month. ONCE A MONTH! After that it doesn't matter whether these kids pass the school, they usually will advance to the class most appropriate to their age group, known as "social promotion". Test scores are bumped and adjusted to meet the requirements. The relationships between the frustrated faculty who do want to make a change, and the kids who have no other choice but to work the streets is heartbreaking.

Season 5: Media
We all know the media is a powerful tool. It controls the world. They choose what you see, and what you don't, how you should feel, etc. This season parallels with an investigation where McNulty makes up a serial murder case, to divert funding to those that need it, when the new mayor backs out on his promise to focus on crime prevention and instead routes the money towards the education debt. We follow one reporter who starts out by embellishing quotes, and then all out making up quotes, which eventually leads to making up stories. When his editor discovers this and shares it with his editors, the reporter is instead rewarded because his stories make up the front page. We get to see why something makes the front cover, and why something gets pushed back further into the paper. We see why some stories get more coverage and why others are cut down.

I don't feel I did any justice explaining the show, but it's definitely high on my recommendation list. I'm not going to lie and say that this show is just as fun to watch then it is to talk about... it does move along slow. But much like the real world, the stories are there. It's subtle and hidden beneath another story. Everything ties in together, and each character is going to have you hate them and love them from minute to minute. Then there are the other characters you'll be pleasantly surprised you'll be rooting for.