Tonight, the Idols go acoustic. This is going to benefit some of them (Carly Rae), and be a very different experience for some others. The real question is: how the hell is Enrique Iglesias even remotely connected to this theme? Regardless, we’ve got ourselves an intimate circle setting and Ben learned that it DOES cut like a knife, so it appears to be time to go acoustic with Canadian Idol.
[Zack gets a great line in about Mulroney’s finger: “Ben is showing us what happens when a Mulroney hitchhikes.” I must admit, can’t resist a good Mulroney joke.]
We get an introduction to Enrique that makes him out to be some sort of music god. Not so much.
Martha Joy – “True Colours” (Cyndi Lauper)
Enrique thinks she was nervous, but that she didn’t show it. After a plug for Cyndi Lauper’s album (She did the show recently, after all), Martha starts into a raucously loud acoustic version of the song. On the one hand, she does some really nice vocal stuff in here, but none of it seems natural or emotional at all. This is Martha training how to sing a song emotionally, not actually tapping into the song at all. It sounds great, maybe, but it just doesn’t feel the least bit organic. Even when she goes acoustic, it just doesn’t sound right.
What the judges think: Jake agrees with me entirely, Farley says we need to accept her lack of emotion and focus on her solid interpretation, Sass thinks she did good in her style of that song (While making us aware it was the wrong one), Zack felt there was one really bad note but that she is the littler mermaid. I don’t know what means, but…I don’t think it was a compliment.
Acoustic Assistance: Not really. That song didn’t really need the entire string set, the guitars and the piano, so it was a really overly busy unplugged rendition that didn’t change her style much at all.
When Showtime’s Weeds returns for its third season on August 13th at 10pm, there will be few surprises for fans of the series. Weeds is a sitcom that works on a very precise cycle: mother and pot dealer Nancy makes advances in her field of choice, is faced with a terrifying reality, and then is forced to deal with the consequences before clawing her way back to the top. At the end of Season One, she realized she had fell into bed (literally) with a DEA agent, which then became the overarching development in the show’s second season.
When NBC released promotional images for Heroes’ second season this weekend in preparation for Comic Con, there was something about them that bothered me. Ever since the first season ended, I have been hoping against hope that producers would not be stupid enough to sustain the life of the evil villain who was thwarted at the end of the show’s first season. Alas, it appears that they’ve made the decision: Zachary Quinto and his character, Sylar, will be around for Season Two. And this, my friends, basically kills any of the resolution of the show’s first season. These are the reasons why Sylar must die for this series to continue with any level of quality.
A lot of great things happened in the first season, but paramount amongst them was all of the Heroes coming together in the end to defeat Sylar. If Sylar doesn’t die, then this would have basically all been for nothing: Hiro’s training and resolve wouldn’t have resulted in his murder of Sylar, but rather just a life-threatening injury. This emasculates everything Peter, Claire, Hiro and everyone else went through if he just slinks off into the sewers. They stopped the bomb, sure, but the evil serial killer who threatened their livelihood? He just got hurt a little.
Cultural Learnings 