RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!!!

This blog never really became what I envisioned when I roped a bunch of my friends into joining it several years ago. Like everything in my life, I went into this project with an awesome idea, noble intentions and, ultimately, too short an attention span. In the years that have passed since this blog went comatose there has been an abundance of amazing television. I have had opinions on these shows, but aside from the occasional tweet or Facebook post, I have kept these opinions to myself. I was content to continue doing so until that rat bastard Damon Lindelof roped me in with his new series "The Leftovers". HBO started airing teasers for the show before and after Game of Thrones. I was intrigued by the concept of the show, but as a fan of Lost I instantly wrote it off when I learned of Lindelof's involvement. The scars from all the unanswered questions and nonsensical bullshit that plagued the later seasons of Lost were still too fresh for me to allow him back into my heart. Fool me once, etc. The pilot episode came and went without me giving a single, solitary fuck. But in the back of my mind I had this annoying little voice nagging at me, reminding me that I really was still interested in the premise of the show and that allowing myself to possibly miss out some really fine television because of the shortcomings of a completely different show is pretty dumb. So I swallowed my anger towards Lindelof and eventually watched the pilot.

Right off the bat I could see Damon's Cheetos stained finger prints all over the show. Hugely flawed characters. Questions that would probably never be answered. Dark, wry humor. But there was something different about this show. This show made me feel... something. Feelings I wasn't accustomed to feeling about television. This show doesn't make me happy. It doesn't excite me. It doesn't give me hope. In fact, that is what makes this show so distinctly different. It gives me the OPPOSITE of hope. This is a dark, bleak show that confuses me. There is a puzzle to unravel, but with each piece put into place the picture becomes more and more dreary. This show makes me feel things I'm not comfortable feeling. When I finished the pilot I had to take a shot of tequila and a shower. What in the hell did I just watch? Why do I feel so bad? This show literally makes me feel like my soul is filled with dog shit. It is... I dunno. Heavy? Yeah, that's it. This show is heavy as hell. So heavy, in fact, that I'm going to be reviewing every episode right here. This show is so good that it has motivated my lazy ass to bring back this failed blog. We'll see where it goes from here. If things go well I might start reviewing other shows, but one step at a time.

Hugs and kisses,
Garza

The Corner - Episode 2

So the focal point of the first episode of this thing was the pops - Gary. He had it all but then lost it all but still has a son who is 15 going on jail or maybe college ONLY TIME WILL TELL (but time will most likely be in a mini-series format). This second episode, that kid - DeAndre - is the focal point. And this episode made me think that HBO probably hasn't pushed this award-winning mini-series into the public consciousness so obviously because damn, it's a fucking trial run for The Wire, and they probably want you to drop the $589 on The Wire box set as opposed to whatever two discs of this thing would cost you (which being it is HBO, is still probably like $129... them motherfuckers have a 1980s VHS ninja movie brand new when it came out notion of charging people for things).
Many times through this episode, De'Andre is straight up an early version of Neiman (or however the fuck you spell it, probably something linguistically correct but wrong on purpose like "Naymin"... man can you imagine how fucked people's names are going to be once all these kids who text each other constantly start having babies too early, holy fuck there's going to be kids named things where you have to use four different sets of wingdings plus an ampersand, two numbers, and that spanish n thing to spell correctly... but anyways, that kid that was Weebay's son, that's who De'Andre is, but first), even with the cops talking about how he needs to cut his hair, and he has to give a speech and doesn't want to wear a suit but is smart because he can do things if only he had a chance. If only he had a half a chance. Knowwhatumsayin?
Anyhow, much like The Wire, this shit is well enough written and has some great fucking actors, most likely picked from the streets. A fun drinking game to play while watching is spotting actual The Wire characters in other roles. There's officer Sydnor, and he's a delinquent but loveable teenager. There's Prop Joe, except he has a high top fade and works in a sneaker store and don't know shit about Air Jordans. There's the straight haired dude who was the front owner for Avon's strip club, except he still has straight hair in a ponytail but is a recovered drug addict with a regular job and a nice car. There's the short fat white lady principal lady from the Kids Are Fucked season of The Wire, except she is some sort of manager person in a crab factory store of some sort. Hell, you even see walls and blocks they used in The Wire in this, because of the graffiti or the hill or the porch that Bunny and his wife were always sitting on. That's where De'Andre's aunt lives.
The hard part at this point is this thing only has six episodes, and having watched The Wire, and it being written and conjured up by the same pack of dudes, I have to assume the tragic end of De'Andre is going to be the end of this thing. The funny thing at this point is I was absolutely confident that the dude playing De'Andre was actually the same dude who played Marlo Stanfield, but with hyphy huntsville dreads instead, and my wife was like, "you stupid," and made a joke about how I think they all look alike having grown up in Farmville, Virginia, don't I? I internetted it the next day and she was right; I guess I'm racist and don't even know it.
The first one was called "Gary's Blues" and this was "De'Andre's Blues" and the third is called "Fran's Blues" which is his mom, who is straight up fucked and the least likeable character in this shit. Like I hate her.
The Corner is also not so over-the-top brutal as The Wire. Like the drug dealer dude beats up people, not kills them. I don't even think anybody has died yet. Two episodes into The Wire and there'd be a serious body count already. This of course worries me because I'm going to get into the wrong person as a character and that's gonna be the asshole that is the one death this thing is building up to climactically, to show me just how fucked the ghetto is.
You know what show? I been around the ghetto enough when I lived in Richmond. I know it's fucked already, seriously fucked. You can't change that. And you motherfuckers entertaining everybody with how fucked it is, what changes? Nothing. Awareness is overrated. Nonetheless, I look forward to Fran's Blues episode because I hate that bitch. She triflin' as fuck.

The Corner - Episode 1

(I know there's some stupid fucking website stamp on this stolen image, but google image search has changed itself apparently to make it harder for me to find appropriate copyrighted material to use in unread blog posts... you'll have to deal with this.)


When I signed my multi-year personal obligation for content to TV Makes You Retarded, I originally was like, "Oh snap, I'm gonna rewatch stupid HBO series from Netflix and do the stupid meta-scientifical nonsense I've always wanted to do but been afraid to do, since the internet feeds on immediacy and doesn't give a fuck about some old shit." And this is what I still intend to do. But intentions and deliveries are always two completely different shits, especially with a mad genius lethargic minor league drug addict genetic alcoholic chicken farming piece of shit like myself. It is really really really hard to deliver on everything you plan on delivering to the internet when you're busy searching through the porn spambots on craigslist casual encounters to find a Filipino transsexual to help you give your mistress her first double penetration experience. (Really, transsexual is the only way to go in such a situation, because the real thing feels so much better than a dildo, but you don't want to have another dude banging on your girlfriend that your wife doesn't know about.)
Well, it turns out in not paying attention to my stupid queue, and not watching the first one, I ended up with both discs of The Corner HBO mini-series without even really knowing what the fuck it even was, other than some shit that was on HBO and came highly recommended by artifical intelligentsia programs by my previous likes and star-ratings. Turns out that Roc aka Charles Dutton grew up a drug addict in 1980s Baltimore or something and did a pseudo-documentary mini-series that was basically a trial run for The Wire. In fact, upon watching the first episode and realizing how much The Wire came from this (end credits showed all the same dudes and jews and brainstems were involved in this as that), I am very surprised the internet has not told me about this The Corner before.
Let's face it, large chunks of the internet are dominated by white guys who grew up as part of the hip hop generation and have opinions for you. And for this bulging demographic, The Wire is usually the standard show they are like, "Oh man, best TV show ever, nothing has ever been more realistic," even though most of these guys have never been in a ghetto ass environment like that more than two or three times, and those were usually to buy weed with a black guy they worked with at some sort of restaurant they worked at during their college years. Also, that demographic loves to be the type to be ultra-more down than anybody else and know the super obscure great hotness that nobody else is ultra-down enough to know about yet. That would be The Corner. Except it isn't.
The first thing I was struck by was how this is basically the Every Black Person Who Ever Was In The Wire casting competition. I was having a great time figuring out who was who to match up, like "Where did I know that guy from?" The obvious one was Lester Freeman, who plays a junkie in The Corner. He does not work at all as a junkie because he's going on these well-enunciated soliloquies, and it doesn't work. He works perfect as Freeman, and in that show, your average TV watching faggot would likely think, "Man, this Lester Freeman dude is a great fucking actor." But in The Corner, he really middling, and not very good.
Other guys I noticed were Clay Davis' limo driver (who plays a junkie in The Corner) and Lt. Daniels first wife - the black one (who plays a junkie), and the one that tripped me up because of his unmistakeable voice which I recognized before I could match the characters was that guy who was the campaign manager for the white politician asshole in The Wire (he plays a junkie in The Corner).
The main junkie is played by T.K. Carter, who I don't recognize but the name is familiar as fuck. He either was the black guy on Designing Women during a scab year of contract dilemmas or he used to be on The Steve Harvey radio show back when I worked with black people and we'd listen to that at the jobsite. But he does a great fucking job being subtle about things, just generally being a good fucking actor.
Basically the story is this - main junkie dude (named Gary) used to have it all - a Benz, a job, an old lady, a house of his own, all types of good shit, but then he got cracked out and now is fucked and lives in his parents' basement again. His former old lady and him had a kid who now is 15 and starting to feel the draw of the streets, so could fuck his own life up right quick.
You see, Baltimore used to have it all too - black people with corner stores where the jews who ran it were good dudes and hired local kids, flowers on the sidewalks, black dudes singing doo-wop in groups on the corner, but then it all went to shit. This seems to be blamed on crack, which "changed the game" as is said a few times. But now everybody is back to heroin (referred to mostly as "heron" in street vernacular because there is no "I" in heroin since it takes your soul), which to me seems worse. In my lifetime of experiencing fucked up people, heroin junkies tend to be much more depraved and apt to do really screwed up things for drugs or money than crackheads. There's a certain amount of comedic relief even to crackheads, because they are so crackheady. But heroin junkies... oh man.
Which this is the problem I had with the first episode of The Corner. The junkie dude is just now getting to a deeper part of his addiction, to where he gets arrested for the first time. But he is supposed to be a junkie, but with morals. His parents still let him live in the basement, and his 15-year-old kid still talks to him and even hooks him up sometimes. This is not a heroin junkie, at least not as far as I've known.
But hey, it's TV, so it's not supposed to be real, even if this is a faux documentary to try and be real. It's realness is the realness of the streets, and how we've all gone to hell. Which we have of course. But at least they make nice TV shows about it so we can enjoy, in the comfort of our own homes in front of our big goddamned TVs, how realistic this hellish life we all are ultra-down with and completely understand truly is.
I look forward to the second episode though. My wife hated The Wire because it was too depressing since everybody sucked, and she liked this better but foresees the same thing happening. I mostly am anxious to see who shows up first - Prop Joe or Omar - and whether their character will be a junkie or a junkie. Being I have not actually looked at TV Makes You Retarded Yet, I will simply assume that the common reviewing/recapping method is to give it a power viewing ranking from 1 to 123, with an up-to-ten plus-or-minus factor in the three categories of Awesomeness, Introspection, and Need-To-See-Itness, which would be a 92 (pretty good, kept me interested as fuck), plus 7 (seeing the realistic suckiness of black people in the ghetto is always great to me, because I used to really like DJ Quik music, but it could really use some titties, being it's HBO, and me liking titties), plus 8 (very serious, which you shoulda known with Charles Dutton involved, because that motherfucker is nothing but serious, which I guess being a black hunchback from Baltimore will do to you), and plus 10 (duh... semi-obscure pre-cursor to The Wire... for one or two threads, you could be the coolest person in your favorite message board).