The Mentalist: I See Red People

Speculation (based on the season finale trailer) that may be considered spoilerish ahead…

I’m moist with anticipation for the season finale of The Mentalist. I’ve been waiting for another crack at that dastardly Do-No-Gooder, Red John, since the season one finale. You don’t even know how bad I want that bastard behind bars.

Or should I say… that BITCH.

And that’s where we get to the spoilerish speculation. I’ve had this theory since last season’s finale that Red John is a woman. In a The Usual Suspects style twist, I thought it would be revealed that Rosalind Harker is Red John.

If you’re rusty on your Mentalist history, the season one finale introduced Harker (Alicia Witt), a blind woman who had dated Red John. Of course her blindness makes her incapable of describing “him” physically. I was hoping it was all a ruse, that her blindness was a hoax so well done that she fooled even Patrick Jane. Who would expect the quiet, blind, pianist?

I started doubting my theory towards the end of season two. Worse, I started doubting that the show could resolve and/or develop the Red John situation to my satisfaction. I was worse than right. I was wrong.

I happened to catch the trailer for the season 2 finale, and it all fell into place. Remember last year when supposed psychic Kristina Frye (Leslie Hope) told Jane that his daughter died peacefully in her sleep? What at the time seemed like an attempt to give Jane some peace was actually an admission that she is the killer!

Need more proof?

• Last week, Hightower referred to Frye as “the blond”, and I immediately launched into a five minute tirade about her hair being far more red than blond, how dare she refer to it as blond, blah blah blah. Duh.
• She’s the only person that has come close to rivaling Jane’s intellect and cunning.
• Jane asked her out. Oh, the painful, painful irony.
• She’s been hiding in plain sight since early on, making her first appearance in the 7th episode, which is necessary for a satisfying reveal.
• Tim said, “Maybe she’s Red John,” during last week’s episode, but apparently I didn’t hear him. I was probably still ranting about her hair being red.

All of Red John’s accomplices so far have been women, which acts as both a misdirection (all of the accomplices refer to Red John as a man) and foreshadowing that Red John is actually female.

I am tempted to immediately drop to my knees in fealty to the almighty writers of The Mentalist, ye who have crafted such a kickass mystery and deftly written the subtle sleight-of-hand required to pull it off, but I don’t want to jinx it.

Handmade Awesomeness: Fall Premiere Edition

It’s Fall!  Crunchy leaves, apple cider, and best of all… our favorites tv shows are back!  Can you guess which returning series these handmade goods from Etsy.com represent?

From the TV Casualties Cookbook: Carrot Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Icing

What goes better with TV than food?  Especially food of the sugar coated variety!
If you’re going to be a fat ass couch potato, you might as well get there eating awesome food.

This recipe was originally from Bon Appétit, but I’ve made some improvements.  Take my advice and don’t go fouling it up with raisins – or worse – nuts.

Carrot Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Icing

Ingredients
Cake:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (or a mix of nutmeg, ginger, and allspice)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup yogurt
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil
• 4 large eggs
• 3 cups grated peeled carrots (about 10 average sized carrots)
• (optional) 2 tablespoons crystallized ginger

Icing:

• 10 ounces cream cheese (if you only have 8 ounces, substitute an additional 4 TB of butter)
• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup pure maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°F and set out the cream cheese and butter for the icing so it can get nice and squishy soft.
Grease two 9-inch-diameter cake pans. Whisk flour, baking soda, salt and spices in medium bowl to blend. Whisk sugar, oil, and yogurt in large bowl until well blended. Whisk in eggs 1 at a time. Add flour mixture and stir until blended. Stir in carrots and crystallized ginger. Divide batter between prepared pans.
Bake cakes until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean, about 30-35 minutes. Cool cakes in pans 15 minutes. Turn out onto racks and let cool completely.
Using electric mixer, beat cream cheese and butter in large bowl until light and fluffy. Add powdered sugar and beat at low speed until well blended. Beat in maple syrup and vanilla. Chill until just firm enough to spread, 30 minutes.
Place 1 cake layer on platter. Spread with about 1/3 of the icing. Top with second layer. Spread remaining icing over entire cake. Garnish with cinnamon or crystallized ginger (optional).
We think this cake is really best after it’s been refrigerated (not that we can wait).

Kitchen Nightmares: Gordon Ramsay Takes a Bite Out of Culinary Crime

“We’ve got fucking fur on fucking potatoes.”

This is one of Gordon Ramsay’s many gripes about the first restaurant he visits in the original UK “Kitchen Nightmares“, which is finally available on DVD.

Had I been left to my own devices, I probably never would have watched this show. I made it through the first episode of “Hell’s Kitchen” a few years ago, but Ramsay was such an unbearable prick I couldn’t stand to watch another. “Kitchen Nightmares” came highly recommended by a friend with good taste in television (Hi Justin!), so I decided, begrudgingly, to watch.

The general idea of the show is simple: Ramsay spends one week with a failing restaurant and tries to turn it around. The problems for most of the restaurants stem from the same basic ingredients – naive owners that don’t have the balls to confront their lazy, arrogant chef(s) whom are often attempting to serve “fine dining” cuisine without the skills to back it up.

The producers of “Hell’s Kitchen“  seem to have based their entire show around the first episode of “Nightmares“, culling Gordon’s signature “moves” directly from it – mainly berating the contestants and either spitting our their food or dumping it on them.  (Episode 1 has an F-word count of 75, in case you were curious.) However, unlike “Hell’s Kitchen“, in which Ramsay comes off as fake, melodramatic, and a bully, “Nightmares” shows Ramsay as someone who is passionate about food and the restaurant business. His anger is warranted. The chefs and owners in “Nightmares” are essentially throwing money away. After a few minutes of watching the chefs in action, I generally feel like they have it coming, and some of them are producing such disgusting food that I’ve questioned ever eating in a restaurant again. While he may engage in a bit of theatrics (like when he dumps an unsatisfactory dish into a potted plant), he genuinely cares about saving these struggling restaurants.

Overall, “Nightmares” is really entertaining, especially for a food show. It focuses more on the practical side of the restaurant business, and though it has a documentary style format, it still has the life-and-death feel of an elimination show without the phony judges and politics. The actual public ultimately decides whether these businesses succeed or fail. Ramsay is brutally honest, but the asshole knows what he’s talking about.

Handmade Awesomeness: Cops & Robbers Edition

To celebrate the release of the seventh and final season of “The Shield” on DVD, we rounded up the coolest crime and punishment themed handmade goodies we could find!

Introducing “Nurse Jackie”

After months of heavy advertising, Showtime finally unleashed “Nurse Jackie” last night. The dark comedy marks Edie Falco’s full-time return to the small screen (she did have an awesome guest run on ’30 Rock’). The hype paid off: after record ratings, Showtime immediately ordered a second season.

Jackie (Falco) is a no-bullshit nurse with strong instincts when it comes to her patients. She also has chronic back pain which has resulted in her addiction to painkillers. It’s the Showtime version of “House, M.D.“- darker and dirtier than anything on network tv. So far, so good.

Jackie sums up her character with one line of dialogue: “I don’t like chatty, okay? I don’t do chatty. I like quiet, quiet and mean. Those are my people.”

Dialogue like this gives Falco the opportunity to show how sharp-tongued and witty she can be. It’s quite a departure from the slightly dim, mostly shallow Carmella Soprano. It immediately reminded me of her brief stint on “Oz” as a corrections officer. After all the years as Carmella, I still knew she was a talented actress, but I forgot how smart and funny she is.

As a medical show, I’m also mostly pleased with the accuracy so far. I’m an RN, so this is my TV pet peeve. Timothy often makes fun of my outrage over a misplaced tube or misused needle. (So I’ve yelled at the screen… more than once.) It’s not my fault so many shows are chock full of inaccuracies and pure bogusness. I was relieved that “Nurse Jackie” has very few. The only one worth mentioning is her scrubs. Form-fitting, stylish scrubs are nearly impossible to find.

On the other hand, as a comedy the show’s tone is uneven. There are many funny scenes, but a few play like laugh track laden sitcoms, while most inhabit a heavier and darker realm. This isn’t uncommon for a pilot, and I’d guess the writers and directors will find their rhythm by the second or third episode.

Overall, “Nurse Jackie” looks like a keeper. This looks like the perfect role for Edie Falco, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s Emmy buzz in her near future.

Showtime has made the pilot available free for download on Amazon. Download it here.

Killshot: Resurrected From the Depths of the Weinstein Vaults

Yet another shelved movie comes to light on DVD this week in “Killshot.” You already know the Weinstein routine – reshoots, delayed release dates, editors removing a major character (Johnny Knoxville), producer Quentin Tarantino removing his name, and a theatrical release covering a pathetic five theaters. What’s left is a movie gutted to just 90 minutes – essentially a straight to DVD release.

Mickey Rourke plays Armand ‘The Blackbird’ Degas, a half Native American hitman for the Toronto mob. Blackbird’s first rule on the job is that you kill anyone that sees your face. (Except for Rosario Dawson because he loved her in “Rent.”)

During a job in Detroit, Blackbird manages to royally P.O. his former boss by snuffing “one of his best girls.” (Bros before Hos, gentleman. Bros before Hos.) So he runs to the sticks, where a pseudo-psychotic small-time criminal named Richie Nix (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) attempts to relieve him of his wallet and car. These two knuckleheads bond over the experience and decide to team up, Captain Planet style. Richie hatches an elaborate scheme to extort some cash from the owner of a real estate agency by – wait for it – threatening to kill him if he doesn’t pay. (Why didn’t I think of that!)

TV Casualties Rating:

Run Time: 95 minutes

Directed by: John Madden

Written by: Hossein Amini, Elmore Leonard

Starring: Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Diane Lane, Thomas Jane

Theatrical Release: 01/23/09

DVD Release: 05/26/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: $18,000

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: N/A

As in all pulp crime stories, the plan goes horrible awry. The two miscreants arrive at the real estate office during lunch hour (Classic mistake!) and confuse a realtor’s husband, Wayne (Thomas Jane), with the man with the deep pockets. Wayne makes short shrift of the criminals, of course, defusing their plan, saving his lovely wife and breaking pretty much every window in the building – all with one length of pipe.

Wayne and his wife Carmen (Diane Lane) made a grave error during the bungled heist, though: they looked at Blackbird’s face. (Let’s not forget Bird’s very clear “See my face – shoot your face” rule.) The couple enlist in witness protection and head to Missouri for a few bland scenes before we get to the big confrontation.

“Killshot” is more style than substance, and even the style loses its luster after 15 minutes. The characters are paper thin and boring, and even though this is a talented cast, the performances are equally dull. Gordon-Levitt plays the only character with any color, but he goes so far over the top, you’re begging Blackbird to put a cap in his face after five minutes. Rourke has solid moments but spends most of the movie talking in an annoying clipped English (to prove he’s part Indian, I guess). Similarly, Jane speaks with a ludicrous accent that I can only assume is his attempt at sounding like a Detroit-native. Instead he sounds more like the “Da Bears” skit from SNL. Despite the fact that Lane graces the posters and DVD cover, she’s the least compelling of all.

If the Weinstein’s were going to give “Killshot” such a non-existent release, why bother with all of the editing and reshoots in the first place? When a movie is stripped down for a straight to DVD release like this, I always wonder what could have been. What exactly was in the 30+ minutes they left on the cutting room floor? How would Johnny Knoxville’s character have fit into the plot? We will likely never know.