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Post by NicoleMarie on Jan 4, 2005 21:27:43 GMT -5
What I mean by the banner is when the second part pops up, the wording is blotted/smeared out. I can see the first part but, not the second part. I cannot see the rest of the coment. I cannot see the words after "trekkies". I wasn't sure if it was my computer or what. It probably is. LOL Thanks though!
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Post by Metella on Jan 5, 2005 13:01:59 GMT -5
I can read it just fine, it must be your computer. Sorry Charlie.
I also had a hard time taking that the Nanny was so gullable (sp?) she wasn't super smart; but handling the kid & the parents showed she wasn't totally lacking some brain power; how could she NOT know about how easy it could be to take pictures ///// geez, every digital now you can hold about your head and snap off a "godview" picture. This one was weak.
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Post by Summerfield on Jan 5, 2005 21:27:57 GMT -5
Regarding tha nanny...it's what I like to refer to as New Yorkism. Sure she grew up in Vermont...she's not a native New Yorker...therfore she must be stupid. Hey Rene...wake up!
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Post by waterlily on Jan 5, 2005 21:37:06 GMT -5
Summerfield, René Balcer is from Montreal not New York.
I didn't view the nanny as stupid; naive, fragile...yes. But her character wasn't developed well enough for us to get the full picture. Yet the Mertz trust her with their son, so she must have had half a brain.
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Post by Observer2 on Jan 6, 2005 6:11:46 GMT -5
If you want to read about the real-life case the “text messages from God” aspect of this episode was based on, here’s one link (to get others, Google the combination of words: Sweden nanny murder message God). This link has a nice picture of the real-life nanny. news.bbc.co.uk in Google.com cacheStrangely enough, in real life, the nanny managed to be mentally, emotionally and morally weak enough to be conned into committing murder by “text messages from God” without being fat. I guess truth really is stranger than fiction. Of course, in real life she was part of a rigid, controlling religious community, which makes people much more vulnerable to that sort of thing. But that kind of background takes time out of an episode to establish... a few lines here and there add up. So much easier to simply signal the viewers that she was weak minded and morally feeble by having the character be fat. This was not the kind of situation we saw in Eosphoros, where a fat woman was more vulnerable to manipulation because she felt lonely and rejected, and the man made her feel accepted and loved, giving him a great deal of emotional power over her. This was a straight-up case of someone being portrayed as emotionally and morally weak and – despite Goren’s feeble protestation – stupid, and the character was cast as fat to help signal that kind of characterologic weakness, to help make the manipulation seem more believable, since there was no reference to the cult-like background. I would bet money that the powers that be at Criminal Intent could not imagine a slender woman in the role as written. Of course, they’re not alone. Studies have shown a pervasive negative bias against overweight people in our culture, and just such intellectual and characterologic weaknesses are part of that negative perception. Unfortunately, since I’m not quite so affected by that particular stereotype, I still didn’t find the fictional version of that manipulation-to-murder very convincing. There were other aspects of the show that I did like. Perhaps chief among them was the Biblical recitation by Carver, in Vance’s rich, mellifluous voice, with a delivery that conveyed a deep feeling for the text – a treat to listen to *and* some added insight into Carver’s character. Very nice. The improved role for Eames continues. I especially liked her convincing tough cop response when she heard that the guy had locked himself in the car with his lawyer. The oblique reference to the loss of her husband was nicely done – underplayed, as usual for her, but with enough feeling for those who know her voice to recognize it. Someone on one of the boards commented that the rotating camera angle on Goren as he looked up the shaft was a bit much. I had the opposite reaction. I like the occasional in-joke in a show, and how could anyone have resisted the opportunity to take his odd angle approach to looking at things to it’s natural extreme? It reminded me of that one panel in the Mad Magazine spoof – especially when I saw it out of context in the preview – but I liked this version better because it seemed quite natural. The episode as a whole struck me as a fairly dry procedural, more like L&O original flavor, with very little insight into the “criminal intent” aspects. There was little sense of how and why such manipulation can work – the balancing of parlor-trick ‘miracles’ against the person’s inner moral sense (oh, yeah, that was dealt with through casting); and the extent of insight Goren used to push Victor into a confession was little more than an assumption that he had a full dose of male pride and poor impulse control. That may be a slight oversimplification, but not as much as it would usually be for a Criminal Intent episode. I would rather have seen the shoddy building developed into the central focus of a episode of its own – with the amounts of money and corruption involved, a murder or two would be easily believable – leaving room for a more fully developed version of the text-messages-from-God plot, with more development of the dynamics replacing the crumbling-building-as-fulfillment-of-prophecy element. Of course, that would have eliminated the recitation by Carver – one of the high points of the episode. Oh, well. I guess there was bound to be an episode even I didn’t like, sooner or later. I know there were a few other things I did like as I was watching it, but they didn’t make as strong an impression as they otherwise might have. I’ll give it another chance when USA shows it.
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Post by LOCIfan on Jan 7, 2005 11:31:53 GMT -5
Observer2,
I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of the use of an overweight actress to telegraph information about her character vulnerabilities. Your observations are dead on! Especially given what I've read about the real life nanny, whose religious and social background made her uniquely sensitive to the manipulations of the text messaging murdering mastermind. The real life scenario is fascinating and frightening and presented a great opportunity for the LOCI writers to explore issues of faith and the nature of how far a well-meaning individual can be pushed in the direction of evil when devotion to God is added into the mix. If she was following God's directions, does that mean she believed what she was doing wasn't wrong? Although the text messages were real, though not from God, would that mean she was criminally insane at the time of the murders? What if she was conflicted -- fearing that the murder was wrong, but wanting to obey the comands of her God? Would that make her criminally insane? And, as you point out, this is not at all like the situation in Eosphoros where April's weight made sense as a part of her entire character, and made good story sense in that it showed how she was vulnerable to manipulation by someone who seemed accepting of her body. Massage therapy was involved there. We could see how April would have felt extremely uncomfortable exposing her body to someone, and then how relieved she must have felt when she found someone who told her she was beautiful. Plus, the real life character April was based on was also obese.
In View From Up Here, Anne Marie's weight adds nothing and explains nothing about her character. Her background is left a blank slate. What's really too bad about this episode is that Anne Marie is the most interesting character in the entire show, and we learn next to nothing about her.
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Post by chief on Jan 9, 2005 7:17:35 GMT -5
I agree, weak episode. I, as another post put it, thought that this was the period when D'O might have had his medical problem. There seemed to be a lot of holes in the story. I found myself asking How did he/she come up with that? chief
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Post by trisha on Jan 9, 2005 10:26:07 GMT -5
Even though I didn't see the whole ep, I agree that this is one of the weaker ones of this season. I doubt that this is the episode in which Mr. D'Onofrio suffered from exhaustion, though. Besides the lack of a stair climbing scene, which is what caused him to pass out the first time, I recall hearing that there were other episodes in the can to keep them going while VDO recovered, or if needed, while a replacement was found to fill in for him. I suspect that, if the episodes are being aired in order, we won't be seeing the episode in question for at least another week or two.
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Post by Sirenna on Jan 9, 2005 16:04:08 GMT -5
I hope everyone had a happy holiday!
I still haven't re-watched this one so the plot vagaries mentioned in the posts will escape this time.
I'm not as skeptical as others about using text messages from god as a plot device. After all people see and trust religious images in grilled cheese sandwiches what makes modern tech any less likely an option?
I don't see, myself, a connection between the overweight nanny and her morality or lack of it. Are we not guilty of picking and focusing one element of her appearance - her weight, excluding other aspects and then imbueing that one element with our own points of view that, in this case fat = morally lax? Maybe they picked her because she had brown hair (or knew the casting agent?) In other words her being fat, which is relative to the eye of the beholder anyway, is not an issue here for me.
Now in terms of her being morally lax, I actually thought, and Goren being somewhat sympathetic to her lent weight to this, that she was one of the more moral characters in the ep. After all she did what she did, misguided, maybe mentally diseased, as it was, because she had true faith.
I think this was the episode where Vincent fainted. Perhaps the show ommitted that scene because he was unable to finish climbing the stairs because of illness.
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Post by Metella on Jan 9, 2005 19:35:41 GMT -5
I'm all bouncing all over these lasts posts ...
I think this was not the episode for the same timing reasons as Trisha. I think that the nanny was only cast to look lower class; sometimes that would be fat, sometimes that may be ugly or shabby or dirty. I think the actress did a fine job of looking shyish, I didn't like her facial expressions in the interrogation room, they reverted to more stereotypical "stupid" than what I saw in the other scenes. Other than that, I say she was casts for her acting & because they could "make her up" to look like a poor nanny; as opposed to a well educated one working on a further career. I also thought she was one of the more moral characters in this show; now that's sad to say! What a bunch of pathetic humans; makes me shiver that a whole building could be so morally vacant.
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Post by Patcat on Jul 9, 2006 22:19:50 GMT -5
There are a lot of LOCI episodes I find I like more as I see them. This is the only one that annoys more the more I see it. And it's not the episode as a whole, although the plot is a jumble and Mr. D'Onofrio is considerably muted. It's Adam Goldberg's performance. I think this may be the worst performance in the LOCI world--although, fortunately, there aren't many candidates for that category. Is this just me?
Patcat Patcat
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j2g
Rookie
Posts: 11
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Post by j2g on Jul 9, 2006 22:29:42 GMT -5
No, I agree. I saw this one for the first time tonight on Bravo, and it came across as a waste. A collective of tenants inside a faulty building is a rich premise, but in the end it was just about a jealous lover. And Adam Goldberg was terrible.
Joe
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Post by Techguy on Jul 10, 2006 3:11:47 GMT -5
Not only was Adam Goldberg's performance as Victor awful, he looked like the human equivalent of an unmade bed with unwashed sheets throughout the episode. I know the wife was drunk, but no amount of alcohol could explain why she would choose to sleep with a scruffy lowlife BOY vermin like him when, by her own admission, her husband was more a man than Victor would ever be. When one of the characters openly voices my own thoughts and reasons underlying my disbelief and objections, I know from the get-go the episode won't get off the ground credibility-wise. Victor, and AG's portrayal of him, is one of the worst, if not THE worst CI villains ever. Those responsible for casting this episode should have given more thought to Victor's persona, and the writers should have fumigated and disinfected the script before shooting started on this incomprehensible mess.
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Post by Summerfield on Jul 10, 2006 7:34:03 GMT -5
Techguy, you hit the nail on the head with your assessment! I'm thinking this may have been the episode where VDO collapsed. I think he did so just to get out of the awful mess!
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Post by madger on Jul 10, 2006 17:49:26 GMT -5
Techguy, once again you found the perfect words to express my feelings about this episode. Once when very drunk, maybe, but to actually go back for more of this guy when sober, yuck! and his voice was so annoying. I felt I needed a shower after watching him. madger
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