Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 4:23 pm Posts: 3721 Location: Canada
I've seen it on The Movie Network a couple times. It's a really good show. One of the episodes I saw had Gary Busey guest starring as himself, which was hillarious because Gary Busey is insane.
Joined: Sat Feb 12, 2005 6:30 am Posts: 6116 Location: NC
jimmac24 wrote:
Watched it once, didn't like it at all. The only HBO series I haven't enjoyed until the horrific new show with the ugly ass Friends dunce.
You gained back the point you lost when you said you walked out on Clueless, with that comment. Her new HBO show is the very epitome of garbage. You can see it's influenced by BBC's The Office in the worst way. Her character in particular, tries to be a female David Brent... and it just does not work whatsoever.
"It's anal sex night at Ari's house, so if you don't mind I'm gonna go home and punish the wife."
I really like this show. I think Jeremy Piven totally carries it and I probably wouldn't like it nearly as much without his character. Same with Ian McShane on Deadwood, but I watch Entourage every Sunday.
_________________ This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 1:14 am Posts: 37778 Location: OmaGOD!!! Gender: Male
I don't miss it. My wife hates it, but I really like the characters and it has some great cameo every week. I loved Val Kilmer as the paranoid pot guru last season.
_________________ Unfortunately, at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Flower Children jerked off and went back to sleep.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 4:51 am Posts: 6944 Location: Long Island Gender: Male
this show is amazing, but johnny drama and pivan's characters ARE the show, and the whole aquaman theme this season is fucking hysterical, I watch every week.
Television's most bracing summer pleasure, for two years now, has been Jeremy Piven as Ari Gold on HBO's comedy "Entourage." On a forthcoming episode, Ari, the show's peremptory Hollywood agent, experiments with a new way of answering the phone: "You got Gold." His caller responds with disbelief. Is that Ari's new affectation? The likable jerk smiles to himself. It just might be.
Mr. Piven is often described as a classically trained actor because he did plays in Chicago and was more or less home-schooled at the Piven Theater Workshop, which was founded by his parents. His talent is for histrionic characters, the kind that allow for full-scale acting, with elocution, formal blocking and even hints of dance. He has appeared in movies with his friend John Cusack, including "Say Anything" (1989) and "Grosse Pointe Blank" (1997). While at Drake University, Mr. Piven played Julius Caesar, whose haircut he has revived for "Entourage."
Last season some viewers complained that "Entourage," which focuses on a movie star and the hometown friends who mooch off him, was fake-insidery, inaccurate about Hollywood or so full of private jokes that only its producers (including the creator Doug Ellin and the actor Mark Wahlberg) could think it was funny.
But none of the accusations stuck, and the show that started off confident has become indomitable. The intricacies of male interdependence - the infallible hierarchy, the twin fears of marriage and solitude, the generously distributed rage - all contribute to avid comedy. "Entourage" contains the delicious poison of a David Mamet play: it makes you lose your moral bearings and cheer for depraved sleazeballs to - come on, please, God - reach their paydays and cripple their enemies and close their deals.
Here Ari Gold is a hero. On a beautifully blocked show that thrives on the endangered group shot, Ari stands in the margins of the core foursome. (That's the languid movie star, Vince, played by Adrian Grenier; his pompous brother, Drama, played by Kevin Dillon; his manager, Eric, played by Kevin Connolly; and the stoned Turtle, played by Jerry Ferrara.) But Ari is also the ministering angel: Beverly Hills to their Queens, savant to their ingénues, Jew to their gentiles. Guys depend on him for income, advice on comportment, introductions and Lakers tickets.
In his irrefutable magnanimity and his considerable stake in the success of others, Ari is more than a snake; at times, he comes across as almost a maternal presence. (And when he's snubbed by indie artists, he takes it in stride, well aware that he's not the talent.) But, of course, Ari also depends on Vince, Eric, Drama and Turtle. Though he's powerful, his authority as an agent waxes and wanes, and his most bankable client is clearly Vince. He can't afford to alienate Vince's friends, particularly Eric, who not only has Vince's ear, but also has developed Hollywood instincts of his own.
Still, Eric frustrates Ari. When the independent film that Eric championed for Vince gets into the Sundance Film Festival, Ari can't hand his rival the victory, and he lashes out: "You know 'The Station Agent,' Eric? Monster hit at Sundance. It's about the midget who lives by the train tracks. Last time I saw him he was in a FedEx commercial. They were overnighting him to London. Sundance is a great festival for little people. You should kill over there."
To the assistant of an elusive executive, he offers dictation: "I want you to pass this message along to Dana. Tell her that I still have the pictures from Cancún. Tell her that I'm going to start a Web site. I'm going to take a full-page ad out in The L.A. Times advertising it. Tell her it will be called I'mahollywoodexecutivewhore.com and that no password or fee will be required. Tell her I want a call back."
Many of Ari's showdowns take place on cell- or speakerphones while the men are in motion, a device that allows Mr. Piven to bring the full force of Shakespearean monologue antics and scenery chewing to what might otherwise be television's monotone pseudo-naturalism.
But no one wants standard television acting from Mr. Piven. For him the writers produce Pacino-caliber rants, armored personnel carriers of uninterruptible braggadocio that Mr. Piven floors for several sentences until, in response to a question, he jerks the wheel hard to the left. On this season's premiere, he tried to talk Eric out of confessing infidelity to a girlfriend.
"No, no, no confessions," he said. "Do you read the paper, you idiot? You hear about this guy? He confessed to a murder in 1973 with no clues. Yeah, they're going to give him 25 years. Shut your mouth. Do not say a word."
Ari continued: "Just relax, it's Hollywood, baby. Everyone strays sometimes."
Eric went for a street riposte: "Yeah? Did your wife?"
Mr. Piven, who had been flying high on sophistry, let his mood darken. His face looked bruised. "That's the mother of my kids, Eric," he responded.
The way Ari gears up for or comes down from one of his expletive-laced arias is almost as entertaining as how he delivers them. Mr. Piven has devised a set of tics that consist of self-manhandling. He tends to slice his face almost in half with one hand, to rub his nose or an eye (intimations that Ari has a coke problem flicker through the series); he does this to conceal amusement, temporary humiliation, a loss for words, a flash of despair.
(Curiously, Vince seems to have picked up the gesture, which can be seen in another forthcoming episode titled "The List." Is he doing coke too? Or just aping his better?)
For all this, Ari has a curious moral authority. His help-you-help-me posture of deference to his client makes him sympathetic, the object of the viewer's inadvertent rooting interest. But he also has something the others don't: an actual family. In spite of his posturing, he fails to evince real interest in the starlets, prostitutes and D-girls that pack the parties he attends; it's distinctly possible that he's faithful to his wife.
Which makes the scenes between Mr. and Mrs. Gold especially rewarding. As Ari's wife, Perrey Reeves is haughty but conjugally ambitious; she may even be scarier than he is. In couples' counseling, she complains about Ari's temper and then waits icily for him to display it. When she scolds him for taking a cellphone call, he explodes in rage.
Ari's wife gives the therapist a look of victorious case-resting. She excels, as her husband does, at brinksmanship. This therapeutic exercise is another one-on-one sport, and she's won.
"Entourage" represents so vast an improvement over HBO's "Sex and the City" that it makes that show seem, in retrospect, like nothing more than a one-note celebration of pluckiness, devised for a tweener reading level. By contrast, "Entourage" does not patronize its characters or its audience: it is a multilayered, adult and thoroughly funny show about various male fantasies of teamwork and individualism.
Ari may be expressing the show's complex first principles when he says, with absolute authority, "First of all, there is no 'we' in 'I'."
_________________ Unfortunately, at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Flower Children jerked off and went back to sleep.
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