Movies and TV Homeland on Showtime - Page 18

**BigRedChief** · 10-11-2011, 08:40 PM

Looks promising. Lots of good actors and a premise with lots of potential.

keg in kc · 12-18-2012, 10:18 AM

I've still only watched half the finale. I can't believe how bad it's been, aside from the really cool moment with Quinn in Estes' bedroom.

Thig Lyfe · 12-18-2012, 10:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by keg in kc

I've still only watched half the finale. I can't believe how bad it's been, aside from the really cool moment with Quinn in Estes' bedroom.

The last half actually makes me hopeful that season 3 will be a return to season 1 quality.

**OnTheWarpath15** · 12-18-2012, 05:00 PM

Spoiler NSFW:

Spoiler!

To borrow from Saul, this is the smartest and dumbest ****ing show on television.

How the **** did Carrie and Brody leave Langley? That place would be on lockdown.

What the **** is Carrie going to tell Saul after being missing for over 16 hours?*

I got caught up in a "Honey Boo-Boo" marathon? Took my meds and went to sleep?

Sloppy.

*actually, more than 16 hours. Best case scenario from CIA to a place you could hike across the Canadian border (Lansdowne, Ontario) is 16 hours round trip, not counting the time it took to get the forged documents.

**OnTheWarpath15** · 12-18-2012, 05:49 PM

Excellent review of the finale by Sean Collins of Rolling Stone:

Spoiler!

Where do you even begin?

Alphabetically by character, I suppose. Because yeah, for every one thing that worked in "The Choice," Homeland's woeful second season finale, there were three things that didn't. Yeah, my jaw dropped from the twisted brilliance of Al Qaeda releasing Brody's suicide tape, but it dropped again, in the bad way, over the cheesy suspense-movie score when Quinn creeps up on Brody at the lake, and over Carrie tearing into Saul's personal life during their argument for no apparent reason, and over Nazir hitting the little memorial attended by CIA functionaries instead of the eventual big one attended by the majority of the federal government from the president on down. But that's almost irrelevant, because in fiction, plot holes and missteps don't matter if you still get where you need to go. Homeland didn't, not even close. It blew it on a character-by-character basis.

So, Brody: A character who passed his sell-by date all the way back when his bomb and his storyline failed to detonate at the end of Season One lives through yet another season, ready to return for the world's most unlikely and now least credible romance. His continued existence makes a series staffed nearly top to bottom by seasoned showrunners look as in love with its own characters – too in love to do what the story requires – as any first-time novelist or sophomore screenwriting student. For a show all about the consequences of terrorism and counterterrorism, it sure is intent on sparing its leads from them. And the constant George W. Bush won't-get-fooled-again routine is now so old and so exhausted of potential that it's ruining a previously pretty perfect performance by Damian Lewis; his talking-down of a gun-toting and enraged Carrie in Estes's vacant office following the explosion was dire. We put up with Brody's implausible survival after the end of Season One in hopes that the show knew what it was doing, that the character in combination with Carrie was such dynamite that it was worth postponing the explosion. Instead: another clumsy attempt to have their cake and eat it too. I'm not biting this time.

Then there's Carrie, a character who spends half the episode so blithely confident that she'll be asked to rejoin the CIA despite hiding the existence of her mental illness and the extent of her relationship with a double agent and oh yeah, her collusion in the assassination of the vice president of the United States that it reads like the manic ideation she takes pills to prevent. I mean, it'd be totally crazy for them to ask her back, right? Right! But then the show does it anyway, and offers her a goddamn promotion! That's Homeland throwing its future away just as surely as Saul says Carrie would have done had she stayed by Brody's side. You can't trust a series that sets up a crazy, pie-in-the-sky daydream and then makes it come true.

Sometimes, when a storyline comes full circle, it just makes it easier to see how long it's been spinning its wheels. With everyone who could have blown up her spot regarding the hit-and-run up in smoke, Dana's entire season comes back to the final episode of last season, and whether or not she believes her dad is a terrorist in his heart of hearts. The conversation they had, her defense of him to the investigators, her devastation when she sees the confession tape, her perfunctory drawing of the curtains when she sees the press show up—all of that could have happened in exactly the same way the day after Brody's failed attack instead of after some mystery mole's successful one. Everything in between might as well have been Bobby daydreaming in the shower on Dallas. I kind of wish it was – then "Q&A" would have been an all-time great episode of television period, instead of an all-time great episode of television with a dopey car accident at the end.

Next up: Peter Quinn, the Wolverine of Homeland. Don't get me wrong – that lingering shot of Peter sitting in the corner of Estes's bedroom, the way it just. wouldn't. let. you. turn. away. was deeply creepy and unnerving. It didn't hurt that he suddenly sounded like Richard Harrow, either. But what good is a black-ops buttonman to do your dirty work if the buttonman is willing and able to un-press himself? So he's Jason Bourne now? Or the Punisher, insistent that he kill only bad guys? It's comic-book morality, and I very much doubt that you get to be the kind of person Quinn must be to have the job he has and preserve that superhero ideology. The guy they trust to carry out super-duper-illegal assassinations of American citizens on American soil is also a mensch who defends Carrie's romantic entanglements and turns off the spycam when his target gets amorous?

It's tough to hold this against actor Rupert Friend, a strangely magnetic performer who normally gives Quinn the look and vibe of your middle-school friend's mysterious college-age brother, but man is that some phony-baloney Jean Reno in Leon: The Professional hitman-with-a-heart-of-gold bullshit. And it further muddies the waters of an already needlessly sloppy allegory for CIA malfeasance. Why invent Dar Adal's black-ops shop when we know, for a fact, on both the show and IRL, that the highest levels of government routinely order drone strikes that kill innocent civilians by the hundreds? Given that this was the set-up for the entire Brody/Nazir storyline, shouldn't that be plenty to work with right there?

And Saul – oh, alright, Saul's cool. Well, mostly. It's ironic, in the "No, Alanis, it's unfortunate" sense of the word, that Mandy Patinkin was given his best material in the show's worst stretch of episodes, but the one-two punch of his rat-in-a-cage rage while detained by Estes and his clipped, painfully blunt, verge-of-collapse phone call with his estranged wife Mira was a knockout combination. (For real, what a great idea to have her resurface as a character at that moment. Our sense of out-of-nowhere relief mirrored Saul's own.) And since performance trumps plot holes every time, you might, might, even be able to overlook his deep, deep involvement with a double-agent believed to be responsible for the murder of hundreds of people inside ****ing Langley – let's face it, the Agency should have thrown anyone associated with this disaster of an operation off the aircraft carrier with the late Abu Nazir. But they had to go and ruin it with that goofy-ass final shot, in which he reacts to the discovery that Carrie's still alive by widening his eyes and breaking into a lopsided grin like the CIA's highest-ranking Muppet. That this is a callback to Carrie's season premiere-ending smile only makes it worse. That was awesome. This just made me want to shout "Stop looking like a Dr. Seuss character and start placing this woman under arrest."

Look, this episode got off to a strong start, and not just because it jettisoned TV's worst theme song. The opening shot of Brody and Carrie with their hilarious Whole Foods grocery bags? I was so ready to watch the agonizing flameout of the Odd Couple's bittersweet attempt to recreate the magic of their woodland weekend. Even their conversation in the cabin, which consisted almost solely of portentous dramatic irony ("There's no secrets right now," "My only real plan now is to be a good person again," "Maybe this will all end in tears," the amazingly clunky "The thing is, Brody, I also love –" "Careful . . ." ". . . being with you" exchange), couldn't dissuade me from the belief that hey, maybe Homeland's turning it around, maybe they're going to go where they need to with these characters at last.

Instead they concocted a terrorist attack that, were it to happen in real life, would fundamentally rewrite America's source code, and used it just to uncross their star-crossed lovers so that they could live to fight and **** and flee another day. In every way it's a grievous misreading of what made this show matter: pushing the examination of the War on Terror, and the audience's ability to continue to like its fundamentally good-hearted protagonists in the face of their morally and emotionally disastrous actions, as far as they can go. They chickened out. They pulled back. How can you watch a show about matters of life and death that so fundamentally lacks the courage of its convictions? In "The Choice," Homeland chose not to choose. They chose poorly.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/n...#ixzz2FRzd9MKJ
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Sorter · 12-18-2012, 06:00 PM

Seriously, this season has mainly been garbage and the finale was awful. I love this show but it jumped the shark a long time ago.

**BigRedChief** · 12-18-2012, 07:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sorter

Seriously, this season has mainly been garbage and the finale was awful. I love this show but it jumped the shark a long time ago.

I hated the love BS between Carrie and Brody. Lame ass shit. But, after that, starting with the guy who kills the bad guys it started to get redeemed. I thought that scene in the bedroom was awesome.

Saul is a great charector and the acting chops on Mandy Pantinkin are off the charts for TV. I never saw the bombing coming. Wonderful acting by Claire immediately after the bomb. And then the episode went back to displacement of reality. Mandy's acting at the end going from praying to smiling at Claire was off the charts too.

I not ready to proclaim its jumped the shark. There is too much talent on this show. I just don't see that talent letting it go off the rails.

Sorter · 12-18-2012, 07:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

I hated the love BS between Carrie and Brody. Lame ass shit. But, after that, starting with the guy who kills the bad guys it started to get redeemed. I thought that scene in the bedroom was awesome.

Saul is a great charector and the acting chops on Mandy Pantinkin are off the charts for TV. I never saw the bombing coming. Wonderful acting by Claire immediately after the bomb. And then the episode went back to displacement of reality. Mandy's acting at the end going from praying to smiling at Claire was off the charts too.

I not ready to proclaim its jumped the shark. There is too much talent on this show. I just don't see that talent letting it go off the rails.

God I hope so. I did think that about Dexter too though...

kcxiv · 12-18-2012, 09:06 PM

i havent watched season 2, but i hear people saying that season 2 turned this show into a joke and its just really bad now, is it true? i was going to just wait and watch them all back to back to back, but now im not sure i want too.

keg in kc · 12-19-2012, 12:57 AM

Finally watched the rest of the finale. Wretched from beginning to end. Wow did this show just completely go off the rails this season.

KC_Connection · 12-19-2012, 05:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fruit Ninja

i havent watched season 2, but i hear people saying that season 2 turned this show into a joke and its just really bad now, is it true? i was going to just wait and watch them all back to back to back, but now im not sure i want too.

Great up until around episode 6 this season then it got quite crazy. There is still potential here, but it remains to be seen whether that previous quality will return.

KCUnited · 12-21-2012, 08:41 AM

Blew through the entire show in nearly 2 weeks. Season 2 went from something on Showtime to something on TNT.

Molitoth · 12-22-2012, 12:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fruit Ninja

i havent watched season 2, but i hear people saying that season 2 turned this show into a joke and its just really bad now, is it true? i was going to just wait and watch them all back to back to back, but now im not sure i want too.

This. I was awaiting to download the entire season at once instead of week by week.... but after the terrible reviews of season 2, I'm just going to retire this show from my watch list and leave it on a high note (season 1).

KCUnited · 12-22-2012, 12:32 PM

The storyline with Brody's daughter nearly made it unwatchable on its own.

Hootie · 12-22-2012, 12:33 PM

at least it made a little sense at the end...she was the only one who understood who her dad really was

KCUnited · 12-22-2012, 12:40 PM

Maybe it already exists, but somebody should put together a season 2 goofy facial expression gif collage of Carrie, Brody, and his daughter.

10-11-2011, 08:40 PM
BigRedChief Has a particular set of skills Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: On the water Casino cash: $1128962 VARSITY	Homeland on Showtime Looks promising. Lots of good actors and a premise with lots of potential.
Posts: 80,181

12-18-2012, 10:18 AM	#256
keg in kc oxymoron Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: OP/KC/Whatever Casino cash: $9556299	I've still only watched half the finale. I can't believe how bad it's been, aside from the really cool moment with Quinn in Estes' bedroom.
Posts: 58,682

12-18-2012, 05:00 PM	#258
OnTheWarpath15 MVP Join Date: Sep 2005 Casino cash: $3821115	Spoiler NSFW: Spoiler! To borrow from Saul, this is the smartest and dumbest **ing show on television. How the did Carrie and Brody leave Langley? That place would be on lockdown. What the ** is Carrie going to tell Saul after being missing for over 16 hours?* I got caught up in a "Honey Boo-Boo" marathon? Took my meds and went to sleep? Sloppy. actually, more than 16 hours. Best case scenario from CIA to a place you could hike across the Canadian border (Lansdowne, Ontario) is 16 hours round trip, not counting the time it took to get the forged documents. Last edited by OnTheWarpath15; 12-18-2012 at 05:40 PM..*
Posts: 60,402

12-18-2012, 05:49 PM	#259
OnTheWarpath15 MVP Join Date: Sep 2005 Casino cash: $3821115	Excellent review of the finale by Sean Collins of Rolling Stone: Spoiler! Where do you even begin? Alphabetically by character, I suppose. Because yeah, for every one thing that worked in "The Choice," Homeland's woeful second season finale, there were three things that didn't. Yeah, my jaw dropped from the twisted brilliance of Al Qaeda releasing Brody's suicide tape, but it dropped again, in the bad way, over the cheesy suspense-movie score when Quinn creeps up on Brody at the lake, and over Carrie tearing into Saul's personal life during their argument for no apparent reason, and over Nazir hitting the little memorial attended by CIA functionaries instead of the eventual big one attended by the majority of the federal government from the president on down. But that's almost irrelevant, because in fiction, plot holes and missteps don't matter if you still get where you need to go. Homeland didn't, not even close. It blew it on a character-by-character basis. So, Brody: A character who passed his sell-by date all the way back when his bomb and his storyline failed to detonate at the end of Season One lives through yet another season, ready to return for the world's most unlikely and now least credible romance. His continued existence makes a series staffed nearly top to bottom by seasoned showrunners look as in love with its own characters – too in love to do what the story requires – as any first-time novelist or sophomore screenwriting student. For a show all about the consequences of terrorism and counterterrorism, it sure is intent on sparing its leads from them. And the constant George W. Bush won't-get-fooled-again routine is now so old and so exhausted of potential that it's ruining a previously pretty perfect performance by Damian Lewis; his talking-down of a gun-toting and enraged Carrie in Estes's vacant office following the explosion was dire. We put up with Brody's implausible survival after the end of Season One in hopes that the show knew what it was doing, that the character in combination with Carrie was such dynamite that it was worth postponing the explosion. Instead: another clumsy attempt to have their cake and eat it too. I'm not biting this time. Then there's Carrie, a character who spends half the episode so blithely confident that she'll be asked to rejoin the CIA despite hiding the existence of her mental illness and the extent of her relationship with a double agent and oh yeah, her collusion in the assassination of the vice president of the United States that it reads like the manic ideation she takes pills to prevent. I mean, it'd be totally crazy for them to ask her back, right? Right! But then the show does it anyway, and offers her a goddamn promotion! That's Homeland throwing its future away just as surely as Saul says Carrie would have done had she stayed by Brody's side. You can't trust a series that sets up a crazy, pie-in-the-sky daydream and then makes it come true. Sometimes, when a storyline comes full circle, it just makes it easier to see how long it's been spinning its wheels. With everyone who could have blown up her spot regarding the hit-and-run up in smoke, Dana's entire season comes back to the final episode of last season, and whether or not she believes her dad is a terrorist in his heart of hearts. The conversation they had, her defense of him to the investigators, her devastation when she sees the confession tape, her perfunctory drawing of the curtains when she sees the press show up—all of that could have happened in exactly the same way the day after Brody's failed attack instead of after some mystery mole's successful one. Everything in between might as well have been Bobby daydreaming in the shower on Dallas. I kind of wish it was – then "Q&A" would have been an all-time great episode of television period, instead of an all-time great episode of television with a dopey car accident at the end. Next up: Peter Quinn, the Wolverine of Homeland. Don't get me wrong – that lingering shot of Peter sitting in the corner of Estes's bedroom, the way it just. wouldn't. let. you. turn. away. was deeply creepy and unnerving. It didn't hurt that he suddenly sounded like Richard Harrow, either. But what good is a black-ops buttonman to do your dirty work if the buttonman is willing and able to un-press himself? So he's Jason Bourne now? Or the Punisher, insistent that he kill only bad guys? It's comic-book morality, and I very much doubt that you get to be the kind of person Quinn must be to have the job he has and preserve that superhero ideology. The guy they trust to carry out super-duper-illegal assassinations of American citizens on American soil is also a mensch who defends Carrie's romantic entanglements and turns off the spycam when his target gets amorous? It's tough to hold this against actor Rupert Friend, a strangely magnetic performer who normally gives Quinn the look and vibe of your middle-school friend's mysterious college-age brother, but man is that some phony-baloney Jean Reno in Leon: The Professional hitman-with-a-heart-of-gold bullshit. And it further muddies the waters of an already needlessly sloppy allegory for CIA malfeasance. Why invent Dar Adal's black-ops shop when we know, for a fact, on both the show and IRL, that the highest levels of government routinely order drone strikes that kill innocent civilians by the hundreds? Given that this was the set-up for the entire Brody/Nazir storyline, shouldn't that be plenty to work with right there? And Saul – oh, alright, Saul's cool. Well, mostly. It's ironic, in the "No, Alanis, it's unfortunate" sense of the word, that Mandy Patinkin was given his best material in the show's worst stretch of episodes, but the one-two punch of his rat-in-a-cage rage while detained by Estes and his clipped, painfully blunt, verge-of-collapse phone call with his estranged wife Mira was a knockout combination. (For real, what a great idea to have her resurface as a character at that moment. Our sense of out-of-nowhere relief mirrored Saul's own.) And since performance trumps plot holes every time, you might, might, even be able to overlook his deep, deep involvement with a double-agent believed to be responsible for the murder of hundreds of people inside **ing Langley – let's face it, the Agency should have thrown anyone associated with this disaster of an operation off the aircraft carrier with the late Abu Nazir. But they had to go and ruin it with that goofy-ass final shot, in which he reacts to the discovery that Carrie's still alive by widening his eyes and breaking into a lopsided grin like the CIA's highest-ranking Muppet. That this is a callback to Carrie's season premiere-ending smile only makes it worse. That was awesome. This just made me want to shout "Stop looking like a Dr. Seuss character and start placing this woman under arrest." Look, this episode got off to a strong start, and not just because it jettisoned TV's worst theme song. The opening shot of Brody and Carrie with their hilarious Whole Foods grocery bags? I was so ready to watch the agonizing flameout of the Odd Couple's bittersweet attempt to recreate the magic of their woodland weekend. Even their conversation in the cabin, which consisted almost solely of portentous dramatic irony ("There's no secrets right now," "My only real plan now is to be a good person again," "Maybe this will all end in tears," the amazingly clunky "The thing is, Brody, I also love –" "Careful . . ." ". . . being with you" exchange), couldn't dissuade me from the belief that hey, maybe Homeland's turning it around, maybe they're going to go where they need to with these characters at last. Instead they concocted a terrorist attack that, were it to happen in real life, would fundamentally rewrite America's source code, and used it just to uncross their star-crossed lovers so that they could live to fight and ** and flee another day. In every way it's a grievous misreading of what made this show matter: pushing the examination of the War on Terror, and the audience's ability to continue to like its fundamentally good-hearted protagonists in the face of their morally and emotionally disastrous actions, as far as they can go. They chickened out. They pulled back. How can you watch a show about matters of life and death that so fundamentally lacks the courage of its convictions? In "The Choice," Homeland chose not to choose. They chose poorly. Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/n...#ixzz2FRzd9MKJ Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter \| RollingStone on Facebook
Posts: 60,402

12-18-2012, 09:06 PM	#263
kcxiv In Search of a Life Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Central Valley, Cali Casino cash: $8807996	i havent watched season 2, but i hear people saying that season 2 turned this show into a joke and its just really bad now, is it true? i was going to just wait and watch them all back to back to back, but now im not sure i want too.
Posts: 29,110

12-19-2012, 12:57 AM	#264
keg in kc oxymoron Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: OP/KC/Whatever Casino cash: $9556299	Finally watched the rest of the finale. Wretched from beginning to end. Wow did this show just completely go off the rails this season.
Posts: 58,682

12-21-2012, 08:41 AM	#266
KCUnited Cheat Death Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Land of Drincoln Casino cash: $328244	Blew through the entire show in nearly 2 weeks. Season 2 went from something on Showtime to something on TNT.
Posts: 35,535

12-22-2012, 12:32 PM	#268
KCUnited Cheat Death Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Land of Drincoln Casino cash: $328244	The storyline with Brody's daughter nearly made it unwatchable on its own.
Posts: 35,535

12-22-2012, 12:33 PM	#269
Hootie Banned Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Dallas, Texas Casino cash: $10004900	at least it made a little sense at the end...she was the only one who understood who her dad really was
Posts: 56,356

12-22-2012, 12:40 PM	#270
KCUnited Cheat Death Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Land of Drincoln Casino cash: $328244	Maybe it already exists, but somebody should put together a season 2 goofy facial expression gif collage of Carrie, Brody, and his daughter.
Posts: 35,535