PRE-VIEWING THOUGHTS
This Friday ep 10: “The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation”
This episode is about vampires and lamentation? How can we NOT make fun of it even before we start watching? Because of course, making fun is the only way to endure all the lamentation I've had so far.
Besides... "Meanwhile, Noser pulls a disappearing act."
Please, let him disappear for good! Let it be for good!
PRE CASE-OF-THE-WEEK IMPRESSIONS
- So the episode starts with some random girl talk in Wendy's apartment and I get bored to death counting the minutes until we get to the beginning of the "middle case," which is *really* when the episode starts. Oh, boy I wish this were a half-an-hour sow and they only showed us the things that matter. This time it took 6 long minutes and 40 seconds to get there.
- So, what if Noser is gone? I mean, you may not hate the character, but what does he have that makes him remotely likable. So far he has done nothing, except say Yo Wendy Watson a bunch of times, and exchanged a few words of hippie wisdom with the other characters. But of course, I shouldn't expect the show to fulfill its promise and actually kill Noser. That would be expecting too much.
THINGS THAT LEFT A GOOD POST-VIEWING IMPRESSION
- Ida's hippie lettuce
- Puppet Vlad turning into a bat puppet.
- The Middleman's means of communication with the insane ventriloquist.
- The Middleman's HQ has Einstein's brain.
- vampire puppet minions
- How odd: Young Noser is much more interesting than Old Noser.
- The Middle Puppet and Puppet Lacey
- Pip's car parked on the handicapped spot.
- I always thought Wendy was too self-absorbed to care or do something about MM's and Lacey's love feelings. Those two would maek an interesting couple, by the way. MM is a grown-up child sometimes, and Lacey is an airhead who has no judgment when it comes to men and lots of other things.
- We've learned more about the characters: MM loves another woman too, Lacey has the worst taste in men, Noser is an accomplished ventriloquist, and Pip has a tiny (at least) nice side.
THINGS THAT LEFT A NOT-SO-GOOD IMPRESSION
- Continuity error: Ida is holding a large stack of money and says, "Marked bills." Then the camera angle shifts, the stack magically shrinks and she says, "don't get any bright ideas."
- The moment the puppet started speaking (its voice and accent were just right!), I automatically thought of this:
I can see me sitting in the basement saying, "I don't like to vatch zese silly episodes, I like to count zem!"
I did see "me" laughing at that! Good call, dtmuller!
- I'm getting tired of repeating that The Middleman is ripping off Pushing Daisies. I really am. But then The Middleman (the show) doesn't seem to be getting tired of repeating itself, so why should I? Anyway, I just noticed The Middleman HQ looks enormously like The Bradbury, in Los Angeles. Which, you guessed right, served as the inspiration for the Liberty in Pushing Daises. Just compare:
http://i376.photobucket.com/albums/oo201/Mad-Pac/MMHQBradburyLiberty_z ps6ee0d6be.jpg
- The scene in which MM hold's Lizzie's "casket" and Vlad the puppet quietly emerges right behind him, honestly, looked like a scene from a Sesame Street skit. Vladdy looked as scary as the cookie monster.
- So we learn a lot more about Noser, but he still looks uninteresting. I'd say it's because almost all we've learned about him was TOLD (by his puppeting teacher) instead of SHOWN. It's the old SHOW VS. TELL rule. And we never got to see his act. And when he was going to do his act on tape, Lacey took the camera from Pip's hand.
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS + GRADEI have to say when they don't make a stupid political or ethnic joke I already think the episode is winning because this show often has things that annoy me greatly, and this time that only happened mildly, and these problems are part of the show's DNA, so that's expected already. The absence of annoyances, the information we got on the characters, and the whimsical puppet vampire jokes push this one to the top of the pile so far. So, this one gets
7 stakes of the purest Carpathian wood. COUNTDOWNThe end is nigh! Just two more. Yay!
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bob-402-252005
10 years ago
So far he has done nothing, except say Yo Wendy Watson a bunch of times, and exchanged a few words of hippie wisdom with the other characters.
"Yo, Wendy Watson" usually involves some pop culture reference, most often a song reference such as
Spirit of Radio by Rush in one recent example.
- I'm getting tired of repeating that The Middleman is ripping off Pushing Daisies... ...Anyway, I just noticed The Middleman HQ looks enormously like The Bradbury, in Los Angeles. Which, you guessed right, served as the inspiration for the Liberty in Pushing Daises. Just compare:
http://i376.photobucket.com/albums/oo201/Mad-Pac/MMHQBradburyLiberty_z ps6ee0d6be.jpg
More like a common architectural inspiration for the two. FWIW, the tightening of the angle of the corner in PD makes me think more of the Flatiron Building in NYC.
- The scene in which MM hold's Lizzie's "casket" and Vlad the puppet quietly emerges right behind him, honestly, looked like a scene from a Sesame Street skit. Vladdy looked as scary as the cookie monster.
Agreed. This week's "so lame it's funny" moment.
- So we learn a lot more about Noser, but he still looks uninteresting. I'd say it's because almost all we've learned about him was TOLD (by his puppeting teacher) instead of SHOWN. It's the old SHOW VS. TELL rule. And we never got to see his act. And when he was going to do his act on tape, Lacey took the camera from Pip's hand.
Yeah, but at least Lacey was right about her being a real knockout. Made me feel old to see that gorgeous, young babe sitting there and hear the backstory in which she was a grown woman when Noser was a little boy, and now he's a young man of age to find his own path in life.
I never figured he was meant to be more than a peripheral character not to be focused on too closely. Just one of those familiar faces who appear a couple of times an episode to exchange pop-culture references in the hallway and walk right in in the morning to mooch coffee.
It would have been interesting to see how his growth as a character would have been handled in a longer run of the show since he's envariably getting more screen time than he appeared to have been originally intended to by the show's creators.
Unless, of course, the comic book makes this impression of him completely absurd.
___________
I'd've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids.
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madp
10 years ago
by bob-402-252005 » More like a common architectural inspiration for the two. FWIW, the tightening of the angle of the corner in PD makes me think more of the Flatiron Building in NYC.
Sure, there were several "common" elements between Pushing Daisies and The Middleman, not just architectural. The thing is that such similarities have appeared in more than one occasion and in different areas, and Daises was made one year earlier.
Specifically, yes, the Liberty is partly inspired in The Flatiron, but the Bradbury was the main influence for the creation of the whole building concept, including the interior.
This is from an interview with Visual Effects Supervisor William Powloski, who worked on Pushing Daises:
But in keeping with the show's visual ambition, they wanted to make the hall look like it was in the Bradbury building, an iconic location for dozens of films, starting with "Double Indemnity" in 1944, and able to accommodate the futuristic vision of "Blade Runner."
Its "outside of time" character made the Bradbury perfect for 'Pushing Daisies,' but the budget didn't allow for even a single standard location shot. "So they paid for me to go in there on a Sunday. I think I took 2,000 photographs with my digital camera. I was there all day. We used the pictures to create a digital version of the Bradbury building so complete that we have the camera move all through it.
http://library.creativecow.net/powloski_william/magazine_pushing_daisi es/1
- The scene in which MM hold's Lizzie's "casket" and Vlad the puppet quietly emerges right behind him, honestly, looked like a scene from a Sesame Street skit. Vladdy looked as scary as the cookie monster.
Agreed. This week's "so lame it's funny" moment
Nah... To me that's just lame... But I did like several of the other puppet-related moments, especially puppet Vlad turning into a puppet bat. In my opinion, the only real vampires are the ones that turn into bats.
Yeah, but at least Lacey was right about her being a real knockout. Made me feel old to see that gorgeous, young babe sitting there and hear the backstory in which she was a grown woman when Noser was a little boy, and now he's a young man of age to find his own path in life.
You're totally right there. I feel the same.
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