Did Robert Frost Have A Turkey Quota?

The Hope Zion family must band together to overcome the tragedy and move on to the next chapter of their lives-- a last episode caption.

The medical drama Saving Hope, in the plethora of medical dramas spiraling outward since the innovations of St. Elsewhere, which have yet to be matched by commercial productions, relies very heavily on its metaphysical gimmick, and in broader Hollywood terms, this gimmick, deployed left, right, and sideways, (as in the recently canceled Midnight Texas, which made a heroic effort to substantiate the grievance and perplexity of gender fluidity, failing rather like an anemic carnival) is a concession to the human insistence on spirituality. Michael Shanks simply doesn't have the range to play Dr. Kildare peeping in on the stairway to heaven, which may reflect way NBC shelved the series in its second season. As Charlie, Shanks is henpecked into his privileged information by these civil, more or less disconcerted human souls refracting in the distorted florescent lighting. The secondary reason the series bites the dust north of the border is because it's simply a bad emulation of the American scene. Joseph Iavarone's death at the hands of his neighbor's plug shot in my county of adolescence is a much more graphic representation of America on edge in its post-9/11 edge, and the CBC can never accurately embrace the cowboy and indian games we Americans play in our cancered suburban sectionalism. Why Hugh Laurie and David Strathairn can capture it in a deftly concentrated episode like "Lockdown" is a reflection of Laurie's ability not to fear his own cruelty and Strathairn's ability to condense gravity into on emotive weight at least equal to the force of a metric ton. This is how great acting conduits great dramatic moments, dying in the fusillade of life like a sligshot toward reincarnation that is never exactly the same, despite the bastardization of quantum mechanics onto the popular imagination via the witticisms of Brian Greene.

Elizabeth Banks, Bitch Unwitting

As directors, are the Guard brothers trying to emulate anyone in particular? With an actor of David Strathairn's caliber, you would think The Uninvited would have more ambitions than its twists, and the bets I made at the midpoint of the film were fairly accurate, though I was off an interstice about the extent of the protagonist's delusional state. Mental illness actually does have its own internal logic, though I did not pursue the counseling techniques therapists use to empty the candy dish. Emily Browning's near angelic naivete is almost a facade, but not quite. Insanity can alter superficial facial expressions, but it can also suck you into its own vortex. I had a client or two like the character Anna, sympathetic and even attractive women of whom I thought, "If they know I'm there for them, if I advocate hard enough, I can make their suffering stop," since I felt it as I felt my own. In other words, mental health contains this same dichotomies found in disabilities: there is mood disorder, there is mental illness, and then there is (more rarely) the sick sick, the insane like the Mildred Kemp of the movie, who provides the counter intuitive plot, which does not mean this was in any way particularly challenging, or genuinely horrific; there were seeds, however, grains within the jump cuts, that signaled there was an interesting story here, but no one involved had the stomach to reach harder for it.

I am rushing, as I need to sit down and make a schedule if I am going to make one last grand effort towards a stabilizing career as a senior, but I may return to this, and sweat my diction on the grindstone.

Locked In, the Kantian Concerns

When House was a fresh and unique network morsel, a nurse wrote a column, on Salon, perhaps, that the cast "did everything," and her complaint was accurate but ignores the narrative intent of the show, which was to examine human nature through medical detection as Doyle famously developed it for a reading Victorian audience as it headed into the 20th century, and as I professed on LiveJournal, which I am leaving in an agonized and frustrated fashion, I missed the homage to Holmes initially, a lazy ass who needs Wiki for everything but will not help them with their entries, at least not yet, but that the allusion did not sink in at first is understandable. I have read some Doyle in print, but not a great deal. His detective mostly filtered through my perception due to video, and when I think of Sherlock Holmes, I think of Jeremy Brett, who is my favorite Holmes actor. Canonical but modern. I do not readily take to Doyle's diction, and that remains the case despite free kindle downloads. Shoot me, I'll grin while you pump the bullet into me, and say that House at its best was more than an examination of the price of genius, and episodes like "A Simple Explanation" and the later "Lockdown" illustrate the alienations of our increasingly complex domesticated existence. You have to be a follower of the series to appreciate these micro moments as great dramatic episodes, but Lockdown pulls it off without a hitch, with the banal and the urgent and the tragic interlocked like a small fifty minute work of art. The give and take between Laurie and Strathairn, who is also increasingly one of my favorite character actors, is nothing short of agonizingly, hair rippingly perfect when it comes to the irony of the human condition with life swirling on about the dying and the existential in monotony. It also illustrates why I am a little weary of using shared experiences for affirmation. No, the hundreds of personal narratives that New Mobility publishes are not valueless, but they are bad journalism that distracts from reforms that would help those of us who have been wounded by the ideology that Cassie the fraud and Josie the pedestrian dike with MS tirelessly embrace. Louise wanted to share that she had crushes and dark impulses too, and gee, my experiences are not unique, just as Dr. Nancy Rubel tried to help me see that she was not perfect, and divorced, and had her parents in her head. I may still have her card where she called me a strong woman, and I am, just as she was a savvy therapist. This doesn't change the fact that disability centers, and state vocational offices, have a certain ossified sterility about them, and we need reforms.