It’s warming up—it’s all the way up to 28°, which is a major improvement over 22°. Forties today, fifties tomorrow and Saturday, sixties on Sunday and seventies on Monday. I like that trend.
Still laboring at the work in progress. Didn’t get it finished, but will do so tomorrow, I swear.
It’s been a while since a new comedy intrigued me, but I checked out the new Matthew Perry show, Mr. Sunshine, last night. I like the opening sequence, which basically repeats the show’s title followed by a severely half-hearted “yay” as the sun’s smile turns into a straight line. What has the show got going for it beyond Perry, who plays Ben, the manager of a busy San Diego arena? Well, how about Jorge Garcia (Hurley from Lost) as the maintenance guy. “Two years ago you told me you only wanted to hear me say ‘yes.’ It’s tricky, because you don’t always ask yes or no questions.” And James Lesure (Mike Cannon from Las Vegas) as Alonzo, Ben’s perpetually upbeat, every glass is more than half full, ray of sunshine. He confirms the rumor that Ben’s new assistant once set a guy on fire. “But the guy’s okay, though, right?” Ben asks. “Well, she did light him on fire, so…he’s not great.” Perfect delivery. And then…and then…there’s Allison Janney, who plays a cross between Phoebe from Friends and Walter Bishop from Fringe. Generally oblivious pill-popping racist who runs the whole show. “See that oil painting? They don’t do oil paintings of people who don’t own things.” Her cultural insensitivity is trumped only by her obliviousness. She tells an audience of kids (and her estranged adult son) that the reason she does things like this is because she never had any kids of her own. One of Ben’s main jobs is paying off people to keep her foot-in-the-mouth disease out of the press. I even laughed at the ax-wielding clowns (longest joke setup ever) and the exchange between Perry and Jorge Garcia about the runaway elephant. (“You can’t possibly mean that. Say it in Spanish.”)
During Justified I saw a preview for a new FX show called Wilfred that looks odd and intriguing. It stars Elijah Wood as a guy who is about to commit suicide, gets interrupted, and from that point forward believes that a friend’s dog is actually a guy in a dog suit. I’ll have to check it out at least once.
Speaking of Justified, it’s back for season two, and it looks like we’re in for a re-enactment of the Hatfields and the McCoys, with one family being the Givens and the other being the Bennetts.
The new episode starts off exactly where Season 1 ended, and gives Raylan a reason for staying in Harlan County, sort of. He makes “peace” with the Miami mobster who’s been trying to have him killed and turns down an offer from his former boss to have his old job back. Funny scene when the former boss shows up just when Raylan has given the mobster a standing 10 count (including a time out to take a phone call). The Fed has to take them well away from the house to find a place that isn’t bugged.
Back in Lexington, Raylan just wants to go home, even if home has crime scene tape across the door, a prominent blood stain on the bed and two body outlines on the floor, the type that you always saw in old crime stories but hardly ever see any more. He has to surrender his weapon into evidence. When queried about what he’ll get to replace it, he says he’ll probably get another the same. “Should probably think about an Uzi,” his boss tells him. He gets debriefed about the shootout (“Just because I’ve shot the occasional person doesn’t make me a thief.”)
On to a new case, to take his mind off the ongoing investigation. Rachel asks him to ride shotgun on a trip out to “Rabbit Holler,” a backwater community known for rednecks, moonshine and marijuana. As a black woman, she’s not comfortable there. Turns out Raylan knows everyone in town, and they all know him. The case involves a sexual predator named Jimmy Earl Dean, who happens to work for the Bennetts. They claim they didn’t know anything about his proclivities. “We’re reefer farmers,” Mags says. “We don’t consort with sexual deviants.”
When they finally track the guy with three first names down (after he has a chilling run in with razor wire that looks like a spider web), there’s an amusing confrontation at a gas station. Raylan is itching to shoot the perv, but he knows what sort of paperwork will be involved if he does, so he tries plan B. He shoots the guy with the gas hose. The guy produces a weapon (he’s not the brightest candle on the cake) and Raylan schools him on the chemistry of weapons and gasoline. “The key word in ‘firearm’ is ‘fire.’ That should be a concern to a man soaked in gasoline.”
At the end, we see that Boyd is plying his trade by working as a dynamite specialist in a mine (“fire in the hole”), though he probably has an ulterior motive. And then there’s the most chilling scene of the episode, when Mags confronts the father of the girl who the perv was after, reprimanding him for “going outside” the community by calling a tip line. She brings along some of her special moonshine, a blend called apple pie that tastes of cinnamon. Except she laced his glass first with a relatively fast-acting poison. Even if they got him on a life-flight helicopter, it was already too late, she says. She reassures him that the poison was all-natural, from plants up in the hills. She consoles him as he dies in front of her. “You get to know the mystery. You get to see your Sally Ann,” referring to his recently departed wife. It’s tender and it’s cold at the same time. Amazing scene. Mama Bannister is going to be a force to be reckoned with.
