Yea, well, when I first read it.....I guess it's my age....I thought of the JR from Dallas. Threw me for a loop for a minute because it didn't make sense...LOL
^^It must be an age thing... since that is exactly what I thought when I typed it. Hey... when can we actually start DISCUSSING this series... I'm trying to be so good not to spoil it for newbies but geez, a girl can only wait so long! ETA: Now that I've finished the show, I've gone back to reread various reviews that I posted earlier. I stopped when they started to talk about stuff I hadn't seen yet. So... I missed this wonderful line in Maureen Ryan's review after episode 11. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/orange-is-the-new-black_b_3612375.html How great is Kate Mulgrew as Red? Now you know why I watched every single episode of "Star Trek: Voyager."
I'm planning to go back and find all those videos you posted JRulez which I didn't watch before since I didn't want any spoilers. I think some are in the HiJS thread. I guess we need to use spoiler codes still if everyone hasn't finished it yet. WATCH FASTER!!!
I've started my rewatch. Just finished the pilot ep again. My audio is an issue sometimes, and I'm hearing lines that went over my head the first time.
Looking fwd to your comments JRulez! I would like to do a rewatch but I'm crash watching Mad Men finally. All the stuff people have been bugging me to watch, the stuff without space ships, I'm getting out of the way. I'm on season 4 of MM. I have one friend who has spent the last two years telling me in a swoony far away voice that her ideal man is Don Draper and I've been watching MM in shock with this in my head.
You know how men don't listen and dumb women are attractive? Well, women don't listen and asshole men men are attractive. It all evens out in divorce court.
In shock because she was right... or OHHHHH so wrong. Thoughts on my rewatch. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS When I did my rewatch of the pilot, I was struck again by the "expected" themes. Girl on girl action in the shower... A$$hole guards (male & female)... Stupid newbie guards (Oh puhlease... flirting with an inmate on your first week, with a stick of gum???) Rookie inmate mistakes... "This food is disgusting." Scary encounters between the races and within your race/"tribe"... ("Friend of yours?"... "No, that was my mother.") And the beginning of rapprochement between and within those same "tribes. ("You know, you CAN buy flip flops in the commissary." ... and of course... "She's {Red} your mother?" ..."Nah, maternal figure.") What I didn't expect was all the flashbacks to her life of lesbian romance and crime 10 years ago. I didn't expect to see her nebbish boyfriend pop the question on a beach before she went to prison. I didn't expect to see the "hard as nails" Russian cook, crying because the popular (all blonde!) girls back home won't let her play with them. ("Did you count to 10?" I think Galya has a history of acting out, don't you?) And I REALLY, REALLY didn't expect to see Piper's long lost lesbian lover walk up to say "Hi" at the end of the pilot, just as our Blondie was having a melt down of EPIC proportions. I got to admit... Red was right. Piper "was" sweet... sickly so. If I had met her in the real, not incarcerated world, I would have disregarded her as "just another yuppie"... and if I had spent any serious time with her, I would have disliked her immensely as a fraud. Her guilt-ing the boyfriend into the clense, and then not having the cojonnes to own up to her own failure was emblematic of how she ran her life. "You know EVERYTHING about ME!" railed Larry in episode 2, shaking the court documents detailing Piper's life of crime. "How can I NOT know this about YOU!" Yeah "Pipes", what else haven't you shared with him. What else are you still keeping from him, as you hug him goodbye in the visitation room while Alex winks at you over his shoulder? I also didn't expect to see some integrity from this same yuppie, as she tossed the food Alex gave her in the trash, and went about her business showing Red that she could apologize with actions and not just cheap words. Gawd... I LOVE this show and its just the first 2 eps!
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS Episode 3 Lesbian Request Denied: For a show about a WASPY blonde, we certainly spent a LOT of time in the last ep on Red's back story. In this ep... we do the same with Sophia's (?) transsexual backstory. I got to admit, the first time around I didn't have a clue what the fire fighter was doing in the burnt out office with his digital camera and the (what I now believe is) unfortunate home owner's credit card statement. But I have to be blunt... Sophia is as self centered/self obsessed as our dear little Piper Chapman, if not more so! I'm not just talking about everything that led up to her incarceration... but the idiotic, myopic request she made of her wife in the visitation room. I wanted to stand up and shout "You GO Girl!" when her wife not only said "No." to the idea of smuggling drugs... but that she laid out the reasons for saying "no" in unequivocal terms. I loved her reasoning for trying to stand by her husband Marcus/now wife Sophia... and how she brought the reasons for staying in the marriage AND the reasons for saying no to the smuggling, back to their son. At least someone has their eyes on the prize. Sophia's only redeeming moments were in refusing to go to Pornstache/Mendez for the drugs. Again, the first time around I didn't notice the Christian Right "Meth head" getting paid off by Mendez for the blow job in the closet... but Sophia did. It was "good" to see there were some things even she wouldn't stoop to, for her meds. Then again, I'd have preferred her "stooping" rather than putting the wife into jeopardy. Speaking of wives... I laughed when Crazy Eyes went bat-shit crazy on Alex's a$$ at lunch when Alex was bugging Piper. (did you hear how SHE got back into Red's good graces? She had to rub Red's feet for 45 minutes!) And Piper got what she "deserved" by leading the crazy lady on. Hell, even Healy warned her to let Crazy Eyes down carefully. But did she listen? I'm sure she thought she did. I'm sure she THOUGHT she let Suzanne down easy. But Suzanne isn't Larry, and she isn't Alex. Maybe if Piper googled Suzanne's love poem like I did, she would have had a clue with whom she was dealing. Its from a collection called "Deplorable Love poetry" SUNRISE MY SWEET Before I met you, the sun looked like a grape. Now the sun looks like a mass of flames. Speaking of flames, Have you felt the heat of the flames Of my love for you? Assuming you have, did it make you uncomfortable? If not, would you please fan those flames With the constant reassurance that you also love me? Although you probably don't love me, Because nobody ever has, I have this irrational hope that perhaps you could be the one To finally bring a little [joy] to my pathetic life, To love me for who I am, And believe in me Even though I don't believe in myself-- Because I'm not actually sure if I exist Or if I'm the figment of someone else's imagination. In a world where Piper's family and friends all find THEIR travails over her incarceration to be the most important thing in their lives... From the Mother who tells friends Piper is on a mission to Africa, to her best friend who's more upset that Piper won't attend her during the birth of her first child than she is that Piper has a "prison wife"... to the brother who fears mother will come to visit and put "Creative Cal" in the Christmas Newsletter" since "Perfect Piper" is no longer perfect, to the fiancé who's complaining he has to masturbate his troubles away, with or without orgasm ... finding a troubled woman in prison who's more captivated by your blonde hair and preppy smile than she is with her own pitiful existance is probably surprising. So the fact that this crazy lady takes her displeasure out on your rejection by peeing on your floor in the middle of the night should be NO surprise to you... at all. After all... she DID throw her pie for you.
Just finished the season, awesome, can't wait to see how they left us hanging resolves itself in season 2 in 2014.
I think someone was asking what Kate's FB page was posting lately; here's one that just appeared in my news feed: Critics At Large: Orange is the New Black: Not Your Father’s Prison Series http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2013/07/orange-is-the-new-black-netflix.html
Don't know what my father watched. But my Mother liked The Prisoner in the 60s. Hogans Heroes? My Grandmother liked Tenko and Prisoner from Cellblock H in he 80s. Oz is kinda inbetween, it really should be "my generation" except when it was on, I was getting drunk and fucking every night, so who gave a damn about TV really? Prison Break was for stupid people who thought that they were smart. I was talking about Porridge on the Bus the other day. The muppet who played Godber, apparently "invented" Kate Beckinsale. What a clever clogs.
Pornstache is awesome and tragic! He's a How NOT to guide. His comeuppence, and they're not there by half already, is go be awesome. Pornbeard is worse.
Nice one! Here's another. http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/why-you-need-to-stop-what-youre-doing-and-watch-orange-is-th And a cast of characters/actors... http://www.buzzfeed.com/louispeitzman/a-guide-to-the-cast-of-orange-is-the-new-black Of course, not everyone agrees with us, but then again some people prefer to play the contrarian. http://popwatch.ew.com/2013/07/26/orange-is-the-new-black/ At least Denise admits she stopped after just three episodes. Can you believe she dropped it because of Alex's eyebrows (I personally have issues with her hair color) and 1 scene with a bloody tampon, 1 with regurgitating peppers and 1 of public urination?? God help us if she made it to the final scene of the finale! I can understand how she feels about the "all men are terrible" charge... then again she did stop watching too soon. Lots of women get smeared with that charge in this series... and not just the ones in the prison. If she hung around, she would understand more about the life of desperation many of these men (and women) lead, she would also meet a great fellow named Baptiste who thus far has done nothing worse than marry someone besides Miss Claudette... and deliver girls to work in the "merry maids" sweat shop. I can definitely see how she might not "like" the protagonist. What Denise doesn't realize it that she doesn't have to like Piper to enjoy the show. Piper may be the "everywoman", our entrance in to the prison drama... but like most of us she is found lacking in some/many ways. The point of her/our journey is to face our faults and find a way to rise above them. I think its funny that Denise complains that stuff that happens in the series didn't happen in the book. The book was a memoir based on Piper Kerman's life in jail. The series took that skeleton of an idea about a transient money transporting lesbian for a drug cartel turned yuppie heterosexual fiancée headed for prison and ran with it in ways that make advertisers and subscriber seeking media companies sit up and take notice. I certainly did.
Yes indeed. From reading some reviews of the book, it seems her actual memoir may show little remorse (it's just a dumb thing she did in her '20s and got caught doing), not much self-searching in prison, and is more self-serving than what Jenji Kohan has come up with here.
JRulez thanks for your great reviews, keep it up! I was thinking how you have these fucked up people in prison who get fleshed out as real sympathetic characters you understand and it's great but all the people outside of prison are still cardboard self absorbed prats. That silly friend pressuring Piper to make a call about her soap business from prison, my god just get your shit together and get someone to help you and build up your business so your supposed bestie has something to come home to. So how did she end up so silly? We don't get to see this because the story is dull like so many people who have had entitled lives. The mother is PAINFUL PAINFUL PAINFUL I can't imagine being that person if my kid was in prison. I would devote my entire year to supporting them and listening to them and not saying any judgmental things to them. The mother seems too much of a caricature when I'm watching it but then I remember that if I was in prison my mother would 100% be making negative comments about my hair every visit. And suddenly it seems quite realistic Larry is just way way way in over his head and he was long before Piper got arrested. She's erratic and he's easy to push around on her whims and he hasn't yet understood how unjelled her personality is. Because he is quite jelled, he's a lump of Jello. We have lilly pilly flavoured jelly here, and sometimes jello, I bet that would make a great artisinal soap. Purple and tangy and perfumey. But Larry isn't that interesting. Anyway.. the story of how these people got to be such self absorbed gits might not be very interesting. As to pornstache I think he was dropped on his head a few times as a baby. It IS interesting to see that he's not only a grade A abusive asshole he's also utterly fucked up in his own head. Not that it engenders any compassion.