The Candy Snatchers (1973) – DVD

November 2, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Tiffany Bolling, Susan Sennet, Ben Piazza, Vince Martorano
screenplay by Bryan Gindoff
directed by Guerdon Trueblood

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Hypocrisy and bet-hedging are exploitation hallmarks. Cecil B. DeMille is the patron saint of this cinematic subset, where the money shots are often placed between moralistic quotation marks in order to give outs to the voyeuristic viewer. When The Candy Snatchers tries to convince itself it's about more than the rape and grunting for which it's clearly been designed to showcase, it's entertainment enough. This is a film where dollarbook Marx rubs shoulders with the sub-Sirkian moral inversion of bad people good/good people bad–a film whose attempts at social commentary and "drama" are so strained as to run the gamut from puzzling to hilarious. And though it eventually has to follow up on the leering and brutality that is its stock-and-trade, its delusional contortions are elaborate enough to dazzle and amaze when its mission statement falls to pieces.

The Sting (1973) [Legacy Series] – DVD

September 22, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B (DD)/B+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Robert Shaw, Charles Durning
screenplay by David S. Ward
directed by George Roy Hill

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Sting has hung on tenaciously despite widespread critical neglect. Though it was rapturously received in 1973 (copping seven Oscars in the process), subsequent generations of critics haven't really had the inclination to go over it like a murder scene for clues to its brilliance. It's the Neil Simon version of vintage crime: well-written in a pejorative sense, it thinks every thought through for you instead of allowing you to participate in the experience. There's a place for this kind of movie, but a slight disappointment is almost unavoidable–all these talented people could surely have done something more with the milieu than refurbish Scott Joplin with Marvin Hamlisch arrangements.

Hustle (1975) – DVD

July 20, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Johnson, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Steve Shagan
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1955, Robert Aldrich directed Kiss Me Deadly. Ending in a fiery conflagration that suggested the end of civilization, its chief selling point was the chance to watch a bunch of degenerates lose their last shred of decency. And because it transgressed norms that would not be fully shattered until a decade-plus later, it had a nasty kick that was hard to shake. Flash forward twenty years to 1975, and the director is in a bit of a bind: with norms everywhere falling like a stripper's pasties, it's clear that civilization has, indeed, come to an end–not with the bang of Kiss Me Deadly, but with the whimper of Hustle, a film that flaunts its creep credentials with such pathetic stridency that you can't even raise the enthusiasm to take offense. You're merely bored with a director whose raison d'être had been rendered obsolete.

The Bob Newhart Show: The Complete First Season (1972-1973) – DVD

July 19, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image B Sound B
"Fly the Unfriendly Skies," "Tracy Grammar School, I'll Lick You Yet," "Tennis, Emily?," "Mom, I L-L-Love You," "Goodnight Nancy," "Come Live with Me," "Father Knows Worst," "Don't Go to Bed Mad," "P-I-L-O-T," "Anything Happen While I Was Gone?," "I Want to Be Alone," "Bob and Emily and Howard and Carol and Jerry," "I Owe It All to You… But Not That Much," "His Busiest Season," "Let's Get Away From it Almost," "The Crash of 29 Years Old," "The Man with the Golden Wrist," "The Two Loves of Dr. Hartley," "Not With My Sister You Don't," "A Home is Not Necessarily a House," "Emily, I'm Home… Emily?," "You Can Win 'Em All," "Bum Voyage," "Who's Been Sleeping on My Couch?"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching old movies, even when they're bad, is like watching our collective hopes and dreams speaking to each other as they drift into history. But watching old television, even when it's good, is like trying to decipher the messages from a distant and very stuffy alien race. I wanted so badly to rise to the level of "The Bob Newhart Show", because Newhart himself is very funny in a non-classical way. Alas, his show is strait-jacketed by an outdated format that current TV viewers (let alone moviegoers) will find utterly incompatible with anything that came after. Despite its self-image as being above the pack in intelligence, it's incredibly limited, to the point that you look at the cinema of the same era and wonder how they could ever be temporally linked.

House Calls (1978) – DVD

July 7, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Art Carney, Richard Benjamin
screenplay by Max Shulman & Julius J. Epstein and Alan Mandell & Charles Shyer
directed by Howard Zieff

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover House Calls is an unusually sharp entry in the normally anemic romantic comedy genre. Standard rom-com procedure is to be as inoffensive as possible, or at least sniggeringly condescending towards whatever is potentially offensive: that famous faux-orgasm in When Harry Met Sally… is a reminder to the audience that they're racy and adventurous, thus releasing them to be as uptight and cowardly as they really are. Not so House Calls, which possesses a surprising level of maturity while managing to take a few good shots at capitalist medicine. None of this is enough to help the film amount to more than a solid romantic comedy, but with such weak competition in the field, it can't help but look sparkling by comparison.

Best of “The Muppet Show”: Bob Hope, Dom DeLuise, George Burns (1977) – DVD

June 29, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Muppets, Music, Television

Image C+ Sound C Extras D

by Walter Chaw In a summer whose renewed interest in variety shows has brought us embarrassing spectacles ranging from a peculiar celebrity dance competition where ex-heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield does a Karloff in tuxedo pants to the hard-to-witness disinterring of moldy oldsters and one-hit-wonders croaking out their old hits and covering new ones, look back to the heyday of "The Muppet Show" and wonder how something like it ever made it to the air. The themes that Jim Henson's electric Kool-Aid acid trip tackles through its tacky sketches, instantly-dated guest stars, and cobwebbed musical interludes run the gamut from loneliness (a disturbing rendition of Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" in which a Muppet mutilates and pickles himself) to war (a version of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" sung by forest animals being terrorized by mad redneck hunters) to exotic burlesques that predict the melancholia lacing The Dark Crystal and the eternally underestimated The Muppet Movie. Running concurrently with Jimmy Carter's presidency (1976-1981), it's the product, as it can only be, of the Carter administration in the United States: all goofy good intentions, bad fashion, rampant hickism, and confusion.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – DVD

June 13, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert Blake, Billy "Green" Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

Electraglideinbluecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a priceless scene in Albert Brooks's Lost in America where our white-collar hero David Howard (played by Brooks himself) has to deal with a motorcycle cop. About to be ticketed for a minor infraction, David informs his tormentor that he's living out the dream of Easy Rider in his Winnebago–whereupon the cop, incredibly, professes the same with regards to being a bike cop, and tears up the ticket. The joke is that a lumpy bourgeois in a camper and a policeman in anything can bend the rebellious ways of that film to their own establishment end, cancelling out both sides in a puff of semiotics. But what was a throwaway in Lost in America is the whole movie in Electra Glide in Blue, a film centred around motorcycle cops that owes a serious debt to Easy Rider while blowing its us-vs.-them dichotomy out of the water from the other side of the line.

The Cincinnati Kid (1965); The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Junior Bonner (1972) [Western Legends] – DVDs

June 7, 2005Posted in1960s, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller, Western

THE CINCINNATI KID
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. and Terry Southern
directed by Norman Jewison

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston
written by Alan R. Trustman
directed by Norman Jewison

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I imagine our American readers are astonished to learn that Norman Jewison is lionized in English Canada. Rest assured, it's not because we think his films are better than flimsy liberal mush (even if we pretend otherwise)–it's because for the longest time, he was the biggest fish in our cinematic pond. Until the rise of Cronenberg and his many disciples, Jewison was, expat or not, the highest-profile Canuck director in the game, and our nation's disbelief at his success has allowed him to seem more important than he actually is. Though he's good at nice-guy friendliness rendered with a modicum of craft, anything more ambitious comes off a little strained. Thus, his downplaying of the grim parts of The Cincinnati Kid makes the film a tolerable entertainment, while his self-consciously "creative" The Thomas Crown Affair wears out its welcome pretty fast.

My Brilliant Career (1979) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

May 29, 2005Posted in1970s, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Blue Underground, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image A Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B
starring Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Wendy Hughes, Robert Grubb
screenplay by Eleanor Witcombe, based on the novel by Miles Franklin
directed by Gillian Armstrong

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Miles Franklin is ready. Australia is ready. Judy Davis is very ready. But My Brilliant Career never seems to leave the starting gate. There's no denying the care, craft, and skill that have gone into realizing this crucial international moment for the Australian New Wave, but it's all been funnelled into the externals: the trappings are beautiful, but their omnipresence makes for quite the claustrophobic experience. Stuffy Leslie Halliwell managed to find My Brilliant Career a "pleasing but very slow picture of a time gone by," ignoring the fact that the "time gone by" was brutally stifling its indomitable lead character, and while part of this can be chalked up to Halliwell's general thickness, it's hard to deny that you notice the décor long before the struggle that it frames.

The Longest Yard (1974) [Lockdown Edition] – DVD

May 27, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Prison, Sports

**½/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Burt Reynolds, Eddie Albert, Ed Lauter, Mike Conrad
screenplay by Tracy Keenan Wynn
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The more genteel segments of the viewing public will instantly have their tolerance level challenged by The Longest Yard. In the prologue, disgraced ex-quarterback Paul Crewe (Burt Reynolds) receives the third degree from the woman to whom he has become a disgruntled man-whore, only to respond by grabbing her by the face, lifting her off the floor, and tossing her on her ass. On the commentary track of Paramount's new DVD, the filmmakers express surprise at the cheers this scene got during test screenings, but as there's no other in-point but matinee idol Reynolds, there's really no other way to respond to it. And as the scuffle naturally leads to a car chase where he dumps her Maserati into the drink (serves you right, young missy thing), complete with attendant insouciance to the police, there's only one conclusion to draw: Burt Reynolds is one bad mofo.

The Hunting Party (1971) – DVD

May 24, 2005Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK, Western

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Oliver Reed, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Simon Oakland
screenplay by William Norton and Gilbert Alexander & Lou Morheim
directed by Don Medford

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pity poor Candice Bergen. First, her rich and brutal husband (Gene Hackman) rapes her before heading off to work, then she's kidnapped by Oliver Reed's gang and nearly raped by L.Q. Jones. Later, Reed rapes her, though she's strangely not upset on her second go-round. Still, she has plenty of opportunity to get worked up when Jones tries to rape her again. Hackman is clearly annoyed–if anyone's going to be raping anyone, it ought to be him, and the gauche competition so challenges his manhood that he sets out to shoot the (ahem) nice-guy rapist and his would-be rapist gang. I sure hope Bergen was well-compensated for her time, though I can't imagine what could compensate for sitting through the result.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) – DVD

March 21, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Green Bush, Diane Ladd
screenplay by Robert Getchell
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers The zeitgeist made Martin Scorsese and his mentor John Cassavetes artistically simpatico in 1974, when the two helmed "women's pictures" independent of each other's counsel. It was the beginning of women's lib, and Warner hoped to corner the market via Ellen Burstyn and her pet project Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, while it would seem that with his brilliant A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes just wanted to say something hopeful about marriage to counter the prevailing propaganda. Both pictures were demonized in certain feminist circles for yoking their heroines to knights in tarnished armour, but in the case of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, they were preaching to the compromised.

Boxcar Bertha (1972) [The Martin Scorsese Film Collection] – DVD

March 7, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, Bernie Casey
screenplay by Joyce H. Corrington & John William Corrington, based on Sisters of the Road by Bertha Thompson, as told to Ben L. Reitman
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers Although a Martin Scorsese retrospective could easily survive the absence of Boxcar Bertha, the film is a cornerstone of the director's filmography: Without it, there is conceivably no The Last Temptation of Christ–Bertha herself, Barbara Hershey, introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis source novel during production–and no Mean Streets. Because he'd been toiling away on the Hollywood fringe after getting fired from his would-be sophomore effort, 1970's The Honeymoon Killers, for shooting everything in master (an experiment he would repeat to great acclaim with The King of Comedy), Scorsese agreed to helm AIP's umpteenth Bonnie and Clyde wannabe, an in-name-only sequel to the drive-in sensation Bloody Mama (which incidentally starred his future muse, Robert De Niro). "You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit," went John Cassavetes's immortal response to the results, a critique not so much of the work itself as of Scorsese's decision to play the hired gun. Thus aborted his mission to position himself as one of the California film brats conquering the industry, as Cassavetes's tough-love approach spurred him to return to New York and resurrect the idea for Season of the Witch, a thematic follow-up to Who's That Knocking At My Door that eventually became Mean Streets.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976) [Special Edition] + The Loveless (1982) – DVDs

March 5, 2005Posted in1970s, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Millie Perkins, Lonny Chapman, Vanessa Brown, George "Buck" Flowers
screenplay by Robert Thom
directed by Matt Cimber

THE LOVELESS
***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Willem Dafoe, Marin Kanter, Robert Gordon, J. Don Ferguson
written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw Looking and feeling a lot like a classic 1970s Seka porno flick, Matt Cimber's seedy, disquieting The Witch Who Came from the Sea straddles an exploitation line in telling a simple tale with an unexpected degree of pretense and, if only occasionally, artistry. History suggests that most of this is due to the contribution of cinematographer Dean Cundey, working here early in his career in his preferred 'scope format and offering the sort of stunning seaside-tableaux counterweight he would employ to greater success in John Carpenter's underestimated The Fog. His landscapes dwarf the lost heroine of the picture, swallowing her whole in the ocean of her past, her obsession with television commercials, and the culture of machismo that manifests itself in 1976 Southern California as muscle beaches and professional football. Opening with Molly (Millie Perkins) telling a tale of her long lost sea captain father to her two nephews (shades, again, of The Fog), The Witch Who Came from the Sea finds its themes topical even when its presentation skews often and badly into the unfortunately-dated.

Circle of Iron (1978) – DVD

January 11, 2005Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, DVD, Fantasy, Martial Arts

The Silent Flute
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring David Carradine, Anthony De Longis, Carl Maynard, Erica Creer
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Stanley Mann
directed by Richard Moore

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You can't exactly call The Silent Flute a good movie. This "mystical" martial-arts extravaganza, an early pet project of Bruce Lee that he abandoned after becoming too famous to care, is pompous in its pretensions and shallow in its follow-through, which under normal circumstances would damn it to well-deserved ridicule. But there's something strangely poignant about its stumblebum view of Zen, filtered as it is through a bunch of well-meaning Hollywood westerners bending over backwards to honour something they don't understand. The sheer earnestness of the thing wins your begrudging respect–it's brave enough to be what it wants to be even if it doesn't really know what that is. Somewhere, Jack Smith is smiling.

Straw Dogs (1971) – DVD

November 22, 2004Posted in****/****, 1970s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B Sound B
starring Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna
screenplay by David Zelag Goodman and Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon M. Williams
directed by Sam Peckinpah

by Walter Chaw Straw Dogs is about an evil man who has so divorced himself from animal logic that he's become monstrous. He's cruel to his wife, comparing her to a child when she's lonesome and an animal when she's amorous, and he blames her for his detachment from himself. She gets impatient during foreplay if he chooses to take a moment to set his alarm or remove his watch, ergo she must be a nymphomaniac of low breeding. At one point, she mischievously changes a "plus" sign on his chalkboard to a minus and he changes it back so that it looks like a crucifix: the instrument of his martyrdom, the faith of his castration–the ideology that seeks to isolate him from his bestial nature. Finally, when she wishes to run away, he loses his grip on carefully-nurtured civilization, slaps her across the face, and orders her upstairs to the bedroom in the same way that Victorian women were banished from the room upon outliving the delight provided by their servile domesticity. This monster moves to a small Cornish village, where he insists on the creature comforts of home, paid for by a grant to study mathematics, of all things. And in the village the monster ultimately finds himself amongst men of a truer nature.

The China Syndrome (1979) [Special Edition] – DVD

November 11, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas, Scott Brady
screenplay by Mike Gray & T.S. Cook and James Bridges
directed by James Bridges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover For long passages, The China Syndrome is the usual Hollywood liberal tripe. A compendium of "social issues" more name-checked than dealt with, it was clearly assembled for the greater glory of a bunch of rich white entertainment professionals rather than for the oppressed and threatened individuals who have been forced from centre stage. So obsessed with the spectacle of the principal cast being heroic is The China Syndrome that for an agonizing stretch, it fails to communicate anything besides the nobility of Hanoi Jane. But though the film is boring to look at and painful to listen to for an hour or so, once it sorts out its priorities, it has a certain grip as a spooky end-of-days industrial thriller. What the film says about nuclear power could be fit into twenty words or less, but it says it loudly and clearly and with enough editorial skill to help you forget the sins of that sluggish first half. Whether that serves the "message" I leave entirely up to you.

Cannonball (1976) – DVD

October 11, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring David Carradine, Bill McKinney, Veronica Hamel, Belinda Balaski
screenplay by Paul Bartel and Donald C. Simpson
directed by Paul Bartel

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On paper, Cannonball is a no-brainer, with the thought of re-teaming Death Race 2000 director Paul Bartel and star David Carradine looking as tantalizing as it does obvious–the gravitas of the latter having so successfully anchored the satirical jabs of the former. Alas, Roger Corman's low threshold for resisting an easy buck seems to have saddled Cannonball with the thing that interested Bartel the least, forcing him to shoehorn his attempts at spoofery into a road-race format where they don't really belong. Thus the film is constantly at cross-purposes with itself, crushing the satire under the wheels of expediency and diluting the adrenaline rush with comedic asides that now lack relevance. The result jerks forward like a beginning driver trying to pop a wheelie. A few choice bits hint at a better movie, but that's it.

Zachariah (1971) – DVD

October 6, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mexico, Musical, Western

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring John Rubinstein, Pat Quinn, Don Johnson, Country Joe and the Fish
screenplay by Joe Massot and Philip Austin and Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor (known as Firesign Theatre)
directed by George Englund

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Think back with me, for a moment, to a bygone era when rock was strange: a hippie-descending, proto-glam period when the buzz was off the love generation but a bumbling mystic energy remained–when record producers were getting into bed with the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mick Jagger could be seen in the gender-bending gangster drama Performance. It was a self-aggrandizing, frequently ridiculous time, but it had a tolerance for eccentricity that's impossible to find in our Britneyfied MTV age and for which I can only be wistfully nostalgic. Lacking both the money and the conceptual force to fully realize its acid-western ambitions, Zachariah isn't even close to being the quintessential flashback to those days (it may in fact simply be cashing in on a trend), but its half-flubbed attempts at pop-surrealism seem a tonic now that the mainstream pop landscape is largely imagined by accountants.

Mork & Mindy: The Complete First Season (1978-1979) – DVD

September 27, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Television

Image A- Sound B+
"The Mork & Mindy Special," "Mork Moves In," "Mork Runs Away," "Mork in Love," "Mork's Seduction," "Mork Goes Public," "To Tell the Truth," "Mork the Gullible," "A Mommy For Mork," "Mork's Greatest Hits," "Old Fears," "Mork's First Christmas," "Mork and the Immigrant," "Mork the Tolerant," "Young Love," "Snowflakes Keep Dancing On My Head," "Mork Goes Erk," "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," "Mork's Mixed Emotions," "Mork's Night Out," "In Mork We Trust," "Mork Runs Down," "It's a Wonderful Mork," "Mork's Best Friend"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover When you're a kid, you're introduced to the movies and TV shows that pleased your elders and think: did people really believe in this stuff? You see the stilted acting, the forced situations, the alien ways of relating and decide that we've made progress–that we'll never be that dumb again. Then the years go by, and you forget the things you watched as a kid, and for a while, you think you're still living in that sensible golden age–until you revisit those childhood pleasures and gasp in horror. At that point, you realize not only that some of the things you worshipped as a young pup are as stilted, forced, and alien as the aged entertainment you once derided, but also that there are kids alive today who are scoffing at these museum pieces and writing you off the way you wrote off your parents. Such is the case with "Mork & Mindy", a Garry Marshall sitcom to which I was religiously devoted as a credulous six-year-old; now, after enduring all ten-plus hours of season one, I'm forced me to ask: did I really eat this stuff up? And will I burn in cultural hell as a result?