Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/17716
Tony Danza’s English Class The actor earns an A in the reality series Teach TV by DEAN ROBBINS You can’t help but groan hearing the premise of Tony Danza’s new reality series, Teach: Tony Danza (Friday, 10 p.m., A&E). The aging TV actor sets himself up as a 10th-grade English teacher in an urban Philadelphia high school, with a camera following his every move. Is it fair to make these poor kids pawns in Danza’s late-career vanity project? Probably not, but I have to admit that Danza won me over. He may be earth’s most charming man, and his childlike enthusi- asm for teaching is infectious. With wire-rim glasses and graying hair, “Mr. Danza” works hard to reach the students and get them excited about literature. As a one time student teacher myself, I sympathized with his problems, including tailoring his lessons to an insanely wide range of learning abilities. The students howl in protest over Danza’s quizzes: “If half the class did horrible, then it’s obvious it’s something the teacher did!” Mr. Danza may have won me over, but the kids will obviously be a harder sell. Law & Order: Los Angeles Wednesday, 10 pm (NBC) The only reason for Law & Order to open up an L.A. franchise is to leech off La La Land glamour. The series still uses those two clanging eighth notes at transition points to signify high seriousness, but in between we get Lindsay Lohan look-alikes, tawdry stage mothers, bratty socialites, high-end salons, glittering clubs, designer drugs and tiresome name-dropping (Avalon, Chin Chin, etc.). Two tight-lipped detectives (Skeet Ulrich, Corey Stoll) walk through this Hollywood Babylon like a modern-day Friday and Gannon from Dragnet, lending a whiff of unintentional camp. It’s sad to see the series become less interested in Law & Order than Beverly It’s All About the Chicken The Social Network (Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS Facebook is both fun and addictive, so it’s no surprise that the Facebook movie The Social Network (121 minutes) is also fun and addictive. Even at two plus hours, there is not a boring moment in the whole picture. The typical biopic intro is subtly shifted so that at first it is hard to tell what is taking place in the now and what is occurring in a flashback. Director David Fincher (Se7en, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) may not have been the obvious choice, and the subject matter may have sound- ed like a bad joke, but the final product is amazing. Open on Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) engaged in an intense back and forth exchange with Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). Rarely has Eisenberg managed to play a character so perfectly, but he is probably aided in playing the irritating smart dude with a chip on his shoulder by the fact that most of his roles to date involve his being an irritating smart due with a chip on his shoulder. Whether Eisenberg finally found the right role to play, or the writer is just that good, the character is believable and nuanced. He is featured as just on the verge of being interest- ing and likeable, and then managing to say exactly the wrong thing in exactly the wrong way to lose whatever sympathy he has managed to gain. I admit to having little interest in elitist power games, and Zuckerberg’s obses- sion with joining the Harvard elite via acceptance into an exclusive club seems like a waste of energy for someone who is otherwise so inner-directed. At the same time, his anti-establishmentarianism is evident in his overall passive-aggressiveness (and his insistence on wearing flip-flops to his hearing). Anyhoo, after a bad date Mark hacks into Harvard’s ubersecure network and demonstrates that smart nerdy boys can be sexist pigs too. His roommate Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) provides him with a key algorithm, and together they create the seeds of what will eventually become Facebook. Unfortunately, their 24 UCW OCTOBER 13-19, 2010 close friendship is threatened when Eduardo manages to make friends that Mark doesn’t. This leads to some interesting situations involving feeding chicken ... to a chicken. Enter the Winkelvoss twins (Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella). They decide to recruit Zuckerberg, but their partnership isn’t all they hoped it would be. Here’s where it gets interesting. I am not inclined to offer sympathy to a trio of obviously privileged young men grown arrogant in their favored social position. Neither am I inclined to identify with Zuckerberg, who makes and breaks his promises to the very elite he envies and intends to join. However, from a legal standpoint it is very hard to tell who is in the right. On the one hand, the Winkelvoss twins and Narendra do offer the impetus to Zuckerberg’s creation. On the other hand, without Zuckerberg, none of the three had the intel- lectual capacity to realize the proposal that comes off as a rip-off of MySpace and Friendster anyway. Harvard’s president makes a wonderful suggestion that would improve my relationship to other people to an amazing degree was it to be widely adopted. To whit — quit whining that someone stole your idea and come up with a new and better idea. Nobody cares that you almost got a Bingo — everyone is far too busy either being happy for the real winner or preparing for their next game. Not only does the movie do a lovely job of presenting real people with real personalities, there are some great lines mixed in with the real life story of something that most of us use on a daily, if not hourly, basis. The script is funny, and the only real issue with it is the attempt to simplify all Zuckerberg’s actions down to a girl. HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM The Vanilla Ice Project Thursday, 9 pm (DIY) Vanilla Ice posed as a tough-guy rapper in the 1990s, and he continues posing in his new reality series, this time as a home renovator. He fixes up houses in Palm Beach, Fla., though he still claims to be a hip-hopper who tours the world with his hit “Ice Ice Baby.” “I ain’t leavin’ rappin’!” he says, strutting about in uniform (shades, tattoos, baseball cap at cocky angle). I imagine the tough-guy-rapper persona will be difficult to maintain after this series, though. “We’ll ad colorful perennials, stone pathways and dramatic lighting for dimension and beauty!” Ice says outside his latest fixer-upper. I bet even Jay-Z would have a hard time setting that line to a hip-hop beat. & Hills. Harry Loves Lisa Wednesday, 10 pm (TV Land) I like reality shows that prove Hollywood celebrities are just like us. In Harry Loves Lisa, TV Land cameras capture the domes- tic life of TV stars Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna, who struggle with problems all of us can relate to. Hamlin frets about his shaky career; Rinna frets about media messages that undermine her daughters’ self-esteem. Then there’s Lisa’s obsession with her lips, which have appar- ently been blown out of proportion by plastic surgery. This prob- lem is a bit hard to relate to. Lisa sees a surgeon who disapproves of her startlingly prominent top lip: “The lower lip should really be about 20% larger than the upper lip,” he says. I guess Hollywood stars are just like us … except for top-to- bottom-lip ratio.