Cynical Cinema

I love Rent-A-Goalie. It just keeps getting better and better, and season three starts off great tonight at 9:30 on Showcase. Cake, the proprietor of the Rent-A-Goalie enterprise, discovers there is a secretive cabal of hockey people called “upstairs” dedicated to keeping hockey in Canada at all costs. When Cake gets blamed for the upcoming move of the Edmonton Oilers to Texas, he runs afoul of Upstairs. Guest starring in tonight’s episode are Paul Coffey, Phil Esposito, Darryl Sittler, Bob Probert, and Hayley Wickenheiser. Watch it.

I have just discovered my favourite character on television. And he appears on one of my new favourite shows. I have never seen Billable Hours before, until I caught the premiere episode of season three. It airs tonight on Showcase at 9:00 p.m., and it’s one of the funniest shows on TV. Very reminiscent of The Office, in that everyone works at a company where it isn’t exactly clear what their business actually is. It’s a Canadian production and it’s great. Brandon Firla plays Clark, the most caustic, sarcastic and hilarious character on TV. This show is well worth checking out, and season three begins on Showcase tonight.

Rescue Me, one of the best shows on television, stars Dennis Leary, and it was really affected by the writer’s strike. Scrambling to put something together to get back on the air when the strike ended, they came out with a series of what they called “minisodes”. Tiny little five-or-six minute episodes of the show, one scene at a time, to get the ball rolling before the next season really begins. These minisodes are going to be running Sundays at 10:45 on Showcase, and the first one is tonight. It’s a quick scene where Sean struggles with a fast, and refuses to break it, but gets tempted with Lou’s homemade donuts and a cigarette. These minisodes are all terrific, but they’re easy to miss. What with being so short and all. You might want to use the PVR for these ones.

Season Four of Weeds begins tonight on Showcase, 10 p.m. I still love Weeds, four years in. The concept of a TV show about a weed dealing suburban soccer mom frankly, sounded awful to me when I first heard about it. But Mary-Louise Parker, Kevin Nealon and Elizabeth Perkins make it work. In fact, Nancy (Parker) makes this show sing. She is just magnificent. At the end of season three, she had just burnt down her house, and the DEA had discovered her stash and her drug operation. And Celia (Perkins) was being questioned by the cops. As season four begins, Nancy and her family are on the run to a border town in California. The DEA is interrogating everyone else, and they all pin the grow op on Celia. There are some really strange scenes involving Celia and the agent questioning her. Sort of a really twisted Basic Instinct interrogation-seduction thing. Bizarre. But worth it. Check out Weeds tonight.

So…if the Trailer Park Boys formed a band…Cock’d Gunns reminds me of many movies and TV shows. Trailer Park Boys, in that it’s a bunch of improv guys abusing drugs and alcohol, swearing their heads off, accompanied by an inexplicable camera that records their day-to-day activities and insanity. It reminds me of This Is Spinal Tap, in that it’s done in an improv style and it’s about a band that thinks they are much better than they actually are. But most of all, it feels Canadian, it’s funny, and it’s about bizarre lowlifes. So more than anything it reminds me of Fubar. And that’s a good thing.

This half-hour series is the story of Cock’d Gunns, a fictional band shot in a mockumentary style as they try to become the biggest band in the world. In the first episode, the band recruits a drummer, who has no clue how to play the drums. But he seems to have a lot of money, so they can pay their rent, order Chinese food, and drink more beer. So they let him stick around. They have also found a manager, who has dubious qualifications at best, and that is causing a rift in the band. And, of course, since this is the debut episode of the show, they must of course play their first gig as well. The show is funny, it’s very Canadian, and it’s very rock and roll. It airs on Showcase for the first time ever tonight at 9:00 p.m. Eastern.

There is actually a controversy brewing in Canada over the Canadian porn channel. Like, there isn’t already porn all over TV and the internet. Kids are just as likely to be exposed to porn now as they were before. The real controversy ought to be over whether anyone really wants to see Canadian porn. Ever. The series Webdreams makes a good case for Canadian porn being less interesting than any other kind of porn, but still profitable. After all, it’s naked women and men and it’s porn. It will make money. It costs eleven dollars to produce, and makes at least twenty-two dollars when it’s sold. Simple.

But at the same time, I really don’t understand the appeal of a show like Webdreams. It’s a show that chronicles the behind-the-scenes aspects of the adult entertainment industry, mostly here in Canada. It follows people trying to break into the adult industry. Season three follows two guys trying to get into producing gay porn, a guy who has starred in several movies but is moving on to be a director, and an internet bondage girl who wants to become more mainstream. Make the slightly bigger bucks, you see. So…what’s the audience for this show? I understand that some people are fascinated with porn. But they are simply fascinated with the porn itself, are they not? Do they really care about what happens behind the scenes? Are they really pulling for some no-name internet porn chick to make it to the big time? Am I missing something here?

It strikes me that people want to see actual porn. And as I’m sure we’re all aware, there is porn everywhere. The only people who would watch this show are the ones hoping to catch a glimpse of the actual porn in action. And since those glimpses are few and far between…why bother? I’ve just watched episode one of season three, and it made me irritated. And that’s all. This show is staggeringly boring. And the third season begins tonight at 10:00 p.m. Eastern on Showcase.

Saving Grace is a show on TNT in the States and on Showcase here in Canada. Season Two kicks off tonight, at 10 p.m. Eastern, and it’s solid. Holly Hunter stars in her first TV series as Grace, a hard-drinking, smoking, promiscuous detective in Oklahoma City. In the first season, she apparently has a string of one-night stands, an affair with her partner, and she kills a pedestrian in a hit-and-run with her Porsche. An angel appears to her and tells her she has a chance to do right again. I say “apparently” because I had not seen this show before. And I’m disappointed that I haven’t. Showcase specializes in the type of shows that you don’t normally see, with flawed characters, dark humour and creepy situations. And Saving Grace certainly qualifies.

I got a chance to see the first episode of season two today, and this really is a remarkable show. In the season opener, Grace has managed to capture and kidnap the priest who molested her as a child. While she is keeping him a prisoner in her house, she manages to kill a man who was on the FBI’s most wanted list. The internal affairs department begins an investigation after that shooting, because it gets reported that she was drunk at the time. It’s a powerful, dark and troubling episode to begin season two of a series that is better than most. Check it out tonight.

The Riches is a TV series that airs on FX in the States and on Showcase here in Canada. The first episode of Season Two airs on Showcase tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern time. It’s very good. The show stars Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as Wayne and Dahlia Malloy, the parents in a family of traveling con artists. In the last season, they got into a car accident that killed a wealthy couple named the Riches. Rather than going back to the itinerant lifestyle to which they are accustomed, the Malloys decide to upgrade their status in life by assuming the identity of the Riches. Izzard pretends to be Doug Rich, a lawyer, and the con is going successfully. At the end of season one, their scheme is discovered by Pete (Arye Gross) who is a friend of the real Riches. Pete is threatening to blow the whistle when Dale (Dahlia’s cousin) bludgeons him to death. Izzard and Driver are very funny, and the rest of the cast is fantastic as well.

The series is compelling and unusual. It is certainly like nothing I’ve seen before. Season two opens with Wayne (Doug Rich) discovering that Pete has been murdered by Dale, and a tense confrontation ensues involving a security guard, a gun, a lot of booze, Dale, Wayne, and Hugh Panetta (Gregg Henry). Hugh is a real estate mogul with a massive amount of money, a substance abuse problem, a wife who has just left him, and a gun. Wayne is now forced to accept Dale as a partner in crime, while Dahlia and the family are away and on the run. Season Two of The Riches is starting off, tonight, with a tense showdown and a lot of good old fashioned grifter fun.

Trailer Park Boys has long been the best show on Canadian television. For me, it was an acquired taste, and it wasn’t until about the middle of Season 2 that I started to really enjoy the foul-mouthed criminal antics of Ricky, Julian and Bubbles as they sold weed and stole shopping carts and spent time in jail. I am now completely sold on the show, and when I got Season Seven on DVD from Alliance Films, I sat down and watched the entire thing in one day. In the seventh season, Mr. Lahey is back on the police force, tension develops in his bizarre three-way relationship with Barb and Randy, Ricky’s father is more of a drunk and sadder than ever, and Lucy announces that she’s having Randy’s baby. Which kind of sounds like a soap opera. And it is - only with a lot more guns and idiocy and foul language.

As far as trailer parks go, one would hope that Canadian trailer parks are not well-represented by this show, and that ours do not compare to the ones that make constant appearances on Jerry Springer south of the border. But one has to wonder. There is something about Trailer Park Boys that (despite the insane plot twists and bonkers characters) seems oddly authentic. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the show is oddly familiar. Like, maybe, just maybe, if the people I know started abusing lots of substances, lost about thirty points off their IQ, and decided that a life of crime wasn’t such a bad thing, this might be what it would look like.

There are some memorable guest appearances during Season 7, most notably Sebastian Bach who shows up as a model train enthusiast and really shows that he has the ability to laugh at himself. Here’s how the season plays out, basically: Leahy is back on the police force, and the other cops hate him. Phil Collins moves back into the park with a giant RV, and starts a cheeseburger chip-truck style business with Randy. When Phil and Randy see corrupt cops beating up Leahy, they run over to help, only to be beaten themselves. When those corrupt cops try to kill all three of them, they are saved by Ricky Julian and Bubbles. In order to get back at those cops, they set them up by staging a scene, filmed by Bubbles, in which they beat Ray with baseball bats. In return, Lahey gives Ray his license back, he rents a rig, and Bubbles comes along for the ride in order to get to his train show. Ray gets busted for soliciting a prostitute, and Bubbles is stranded and goes a little (more) crazy. Ricky and Julian pick him up and drive him to the train show, where Sebastian Bach is the speaker of note, and he is hilarious. He has a crazy beef with Patrick Swayze, the two of them having battled it out in the model train world for some time. (Swayze does not appear in the show.) So Bubbles, now completely out of it, steals Swayze’s train on the way out, and they take it back to Canada, where Julian and Ricky come up with a plan to run the model train track through the woods and into the States, so that they can smuggle weed with it.

OK…you with me so far? If you are, and it sounds hilarious, pick up Season 7 of what continues to be the best Canadian TV show, Trailer Park Boys.