Tag Archives: Performance

“Grease: Live!”, and Five Observations About The Show

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Like many people that likely watched “Grease Live,” I’m a huge fan of 1978’s “Grease.” I’ve seen it at least a thousand times and watch it every single time it’s on television. So naturally fans like me would go in to “Grease Live” comparing it to the 1978 movie, consciously and sub-consciously. It was a risky venture giving us a live broadcast of “Grease,” but FOX took a gamble, and a wise one by getting in on the live musical broadcast gimmick, starting off with one of the most entertaining musicals of all time. “Grease Live” is pretty much the same as we always knew it, seemingly taking bits and pieces from the 1978 movie and including numbers from the original musical. Surely enough while I was worried about what I was getting in to, a lot of my reservations about casting, and production were absolutely destroyed with what was a pretty damn fun, three hour broadcast.

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Joe Bob Briggs: Dead in Concert (1985)

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“Dead in Concert” is one of the rare comedy specials starring John Bloom as his iconic character Joe Bob Briggs. Briggs himself is a politically incorrect character who revels in embracing stereotypes for the purpose of ironically mocking them. He mocks religion, race, gender, politics, and even speaks about growing up in a small town where dirt was a way of life. Briggs is not one to shy away from being offensive and has a good time making his audience squirm and laugh at some of the most inappropriate jokes. In one instance he royally pisses of an audience member who gazes at him angrily.

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Classic TV on DVD –The Hee Haw Collection (3 Disc Edition) & The Hee Haw Collection: Kornfield Klassics

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Banking on the redneck obsession of the 1970’s, “Hee Haw” is that classic blue collared comedy sketch show that lives on mainly through late night television and syndication in country oriented cable television. My knowledge of “Hee Haw” is comprised mainly of sketches and segments I remember from showings on late night network television when I was but a small child. It’s gained a somewhat resurgence now thanks to the endless callbacks by Seth McFarlane on “Family Guy.”

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Classic TV on DVD – The Carol Burnett Show: Treasures from the Vault, The Lost Episodes & The Carol Burnett Show: Together Again

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For fans that don’t want to pay incredible amounts of money for the complete editions of “The Carol Burnett Show,” but still want to savor in a complete episode of the hit comedy series, DVD’s like “Together Again” exist for you and you alone. Though it’s a little tough to tell what kind of episodes are on these DVD releases and what they feature, these editions are fine snippets of what you’d get if you forked over money for complete season sets. For a primer course, “Together Again” isn’t too shabby for your collection.

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We Are Your Friends (2015) (DVD)

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I really like Zac Efron. I have nothing particularly against him. He’s a nice looking guy with some chops to him when pushed hard enough by a competent director. When he’s really just asked to flash his looks around and literally do nothing, we get “We Are Your Friends,” one of the stupidest, most forgettable movies of 2015. I’m glad I’m not the only person who felt this way about the film, as it was one of the bigger flops of the year. “We Are Your Friends” has no substance to it, and pretends to be about something, when it really isn’t. Deep down it’s a remake of “Saturday Night Fever” and fails to capture any of the substance and complexity that John Badham’s masterpiece obtained.

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Jem and the Holograms (2015)

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It’s hard to imagine a movie this year more sadistically boring and bland than “Jem and the Holograms.” This comes as somewhat of a surprise since director John M. Chu is a pro when it comes to making films that are visually dazzling and marketed toward teens. “Step Up 3” was a fun, beautifully edited, visual feast, while “GI Joe: Retaliation” was a decent follow up to a much maligned movie. So it’s disappointing and crushing to see Chu not even really seem to try. Everything about “Jem and the Holograms” is so vanilla and uninspiring that I never even care about anything happening on screen. I’m not one of the kids from the eighties that watched “Jem,” so I have no nostalgic connection to the animated series, but I can understand that anger toward such a horrible movie.

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Love & Mercy (2015)

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Music bio pics are rarely masterpieces, and while “Love & Mercy” is itself a fine movie, it’s not the entry in to the long library in the sub-genre that’s changed my mind about music bio pics just yet. Much like previous films about musical geniuses, the film gets lost in a miasma of pit falls, including the inability to balance the story of the musician and the story of the man himself. So we’re thrust back and forth in to what ends as a flawed, but above average tale about mental illness, and the creation of art. “Love & Mercy” takes the concept of the bio pic above the norm, focusing on Brian Wilson, the founder of the Beach Boys through two stages of his life. One as a young man, and through his perils as a middle aged man. In both stages he’s enduring the horrors of mental illness and is systematically being victimized by someone in his life that he finds incapable of escaping.

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