TV Review: "Kojak"

I just watched an episode of "Kojak" and am totally confused, because it's a 2 parter. So I'll have to watch TV for the next 167 hours to find out what happens. You know what DOESN'T happen? Kojak DOESN'T get a parking ticket. I keep hearing from my Big Apple connections that a "Kojak" is slang for the perfect parking spot, as Det. Kojak could always find one. But that doesn't make sense- if you're a Police Detective, the WHOLE CITY is your parking spot. You can park on orphan baby if you want! Once I parked in my old high school's parking lot so I could run across the street to the vet's. My neighbor needed me to pickup her fish (Gerald), and my neighbor was really hot, so I pretended to love animals and said I'd do ti. When I came back, my car had TWO tickets. One for no parking, and one for having no roof (it was a convertible; what an idiot). Gerald was pure evil, I'm sure of it. I hated that fish, but he hated me first.

TV Review: "The Rockford Files" (1/13/1978)

I just watched the "Rockford Files" episode "The Gang At Don's Drive-In" about a once great author who's trying to claw his way back into the public consciousness with a new publication. No, not ME. Jack Skowron, the author of the fictitous "Free Fall to Ecstacy." The book has a sort of "Catcher In the Rye" mystique about it within this episode. Personally, I never cared for Salinger's coming-of-age novel. There's nothing about baseball in the whole book, and nothing about bread. No cather, no rye. That may sound like a bad pun, but sports and food are two of the few things that hold my interest. So I didn't care that school library matron Mrs. Ito was offended when I asked for the book. We couldn't even get copies of the Ramona Quimby books because she was convinced "Beezus" was some sort of veiled religious reference. Mrs. Ito, we think, was related to Judge Lance Ito from the O.J. Simpson trial. Remember him? And Kato Kaelin? And Mark Furman? I used to call my cat "Mark FUR-man" because he had white fur and didn't like me, hence his innate racism. Maybe I shouldn't have posted this.

Movie Review: Papillon (1973)

WHAT A DISAPPOINTING MOVIE!

Look at the DVD case... Steve McQueen! Dustin Hoffman! A gritty '70s prison
story! On an island!!! From the director of Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner)! Oh ma Gawd! Let's get this!

The movie starts well. Beautiful, eye-popping photography. Dustin Hoffman
in Coke bottle glasses. Kick ass. Steve McQueen has a crazy plan! I am
going to love this! And then... it just sits there. McQueen struggles to
carry out the plan over and over and over and over again.

The film is based on the book by Henri Cherriririeiei, about his supposed
real-life expoits as a prisoner on French Guiana. His "daring escape" in the
book is reduced to a "stroll down the lazy river" in the movie. After 2 1/2
hours!

Today's directors all grew up watching "Mr. Belvedere," and it shows. But in the 70s, directors went to fancy film schools and were legally ordered to include one long, boring section of character development in their films. Without it, Roger Ebert automatically took away 2 stars from the review and got to eat one of your kidneys (usually the good one). Dog Day Afternoon has Chris Sarandon whining to Al Pacino. Get Carter has Michael Caine touring Birmingham for 40 minutes. And Papillon could lose about an hour of McQueen silently puttering around jail and the ocean and a tropical island and the jungle.

"Papillon" is French for butterfly, and so I am taking this DVD and submerging it in the case for Cocoon, and hopefully Wilford Brimley can metamorph this mess into something useful. Oatmeal?

MISS ROSA-PBS

I know all of you love watching Caillou and Super Y on PBS. They're great teasers for the big gun, Sesame Street, and really lull me into a false sense of intelligence before Elmo splatters my television with cute.

The real attraction, though, is between the shows. Not commercials; PBS doesn't have commercials. Just "30 second sponsorship billboards" to pay the bills. (Charlie Rose demands 63 lbs. of fresh fruit in his dressing room every night, even if they're showing a rerun).

Every half hour, Miss Rosa (the Latina goddess of Public Broadcasting) pops up for 30 seconds to teach me about "naranjas" and "los coches" and any other basic Spanish I can grasp. A quick "muy bien," mentions about the next show, and she's gone. It is gut wrenching.

Miss Rosa is actually an actress with an active MySpace page (shouldn't she be on "MuySpace"?), and I think she lives in Philly. That's hot. Cheese steaks! Geno's! Pat's! No service for people who don't speak English! Rock. I worked with a girl who was from Philadelphia, and I asked if she preferred Geno's or Pat's, and she had no idea what I was talking about. So I punched her in the neck. Then she quit a year later because someone told her "we don't put Chinese people on television."

Back to Miss Rosa, who is insanely attractive. Her demeanor is sort of girl-next-door-gets-sent-to-reform-school-but-won't-admit-it. For a while, they were using odd camera angles and I was convinced she was pregnant. And she was STILL hot. Easily one of the 10 hottest women I've ever seen on TV, in movies, or on the radio (what?). She dresses very teacherly and smiles a lot, and I'm convinced she is steering a generation of young boys away from homosexuality. Or at least confusing a generation of young gay boys enough that they'll spend their lives unhappy and withdrawn. Ouch. Maybe I shouldn't have posted this.

I believe Rosa is married in real life, so I've got to ask: does anyone know where he parks his car, and if it has drum or disk brakes? JUST CURIOUS.