Month: June 2016

Summer means a revisit to Damian Lewis as Agent Double OO!

My girl’s a year older since I first wrote this and her tastes have crossed over to the dreaded tween territory. Also, I’m no longer a stay at home parent. Still, when I’m lucky and we have the time, I can convince her to tune into my favorite animated programming: Phineas and Ferb. I’d love the show even if Damian didn’t make an appearance, but icing on the cake is that he did! Here’s a revisit of my post from this time last year. Enjoy!

In short, the series gives us Phineas, a chatty clever American kid, and his taciturn and even more clever English stepbrother, Ferb, getting into all kinds of shenanigans as they attempt to stay busy during…summer vacation! On their tail is persistently annoyed and shrill teenage sister Candace who seeks repeatedly to “bust” them, and never manages to, thanks to serendipitous help from subplot characters: evil scientist Dr. Doofenshmirtz and his nemesis Phineas and Ferb’s pet platypus, Perry. Perry is a secret agent for the spy organization O.W.C.A. (The Organization Without a Cool Acronym). Love it so far?

Now, I, like most stay at home parents, try to tune out what I can so as to stay moderately sane. But, I found myself paying attention to Phineas and Ferb. Earworm title sequence and songs, fun characters, great writing all worked to pulled me in. I mean really: Dr. Doofenshmirtz, the vaguely Eastern European CEO of Doofershmirtz Evil Incorporated given to long monologues, on an incessant mission to control a mysterious “Tri-state area”, always defeated by a clicking purring platypus? “Ah, Perry the Platypus, as always, your timing is impeccable. And by that, I mean completely PECCABLE.” Who can resist writing like that?

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Life with Charlie Crews, Season 1: Episodes Five and Six

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Charlie Crews and me: I confess I did not watch Life as closely as I did Homeland or Billions earlier. I kept it in my stash for a long time and my husband and I then binge-watched both seasons in a couple of weeks with no real opportunity to digest it. That is why I fell in love with Holliedazzle’s idea to re-visit this fantastic show and dive deep into it the moment I heard about it!

Crime fiction and me: I had a phase in my childhood that I told everyone I would become a detective when I grew up! It probably started with Charlie’s Angels at a young age, continued with Magnum P. I. and peaked with Murder, She Wrote. I also religiously read Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple together sealed the deal for me.

Los Angeles and me: I confess L.A. is not my cup of tea. Having said that, I always love films and shows that display the city they are filmed in with its good, bad and ugly and Life is no exception. In fact, the wide variety it has in all things makes Los Angeles the perfect setting for the show.  Continue reading “Life with Charlie Crews, Season 1: Episodes Five and Six”

Happy Father’s Day to Damian Lewis

No doubt many people get married and start families because it’s the thing to do, a natural progression in life. Not everyone takes the time or effort to really think about what it means to bring new life into the world or go forth on the venture with conscious intentionality. How many times have we heard (or ourselves thought) David Byrne’s immortal refrain:

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself: Well…How did I get here?

Following Damian as we do on this blog, we’ve seen at every turn that he seems to have entered his current life with full intentionality. You sense, in his various relationships prior to Helen, what we know of them, that he was always quietly in search of someone to settle down with, someone to have children with. Not all men think this way, I’m guessing, particularly attractive men who have no shortage of female attention. A lot of guys fantasize about the attention that Damian has always gotten, right? So, if you’re lucky enough to be Damian Lewis, why settle down? Why let a woman and the resultant children cramp one’s playboy style? But, no, Damian, even though he IS Damian, wanted the wife and the house and the family. And how beautiful the stories we hear and the images we get of him in arguably the most important role of any man’s life, the role of father. Here are some of our recollections of Damian being a Dad.

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They call him Dad

Dad is a word which can evoke a minefield of emotions simply because the word is personal to each of us and our personal circumstances will affect whether the word evokes positive or negative emotions.

Being a Dad (in real life) can be all kinds of difficult and rewarding. With father’s day approaching we take a look at Damian Lewis as an onscreen Dad.

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“Love is the strongest power there is.” – J.K. Rowling

Probably because I lost my dad at a young age, I am a true sucker for loving father-daughter relationships in fiction. Today I give you some of my favorite moments with Damian Lewis as screen dad. Even though the characters are quite different in each relationship, there is an overarching theme: A lost soul who finds meaning in life through his love for his daughter.

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Brody and Jess love story is over way before Brody returns home. Jess is in love with Mike even though she tries her best to start all over again with Brody. Chris, as much as happy to have dad back, is used to Brody’s absence since he was a baby when dad left for war. Brody does not know his son, and seeing how close he is to Mike, does not seem to try his best to get to know him. So it is all his daughter Dana that connects Brody to family. I know Dana has never been popular with the viewers but I love this independent, open-minded, headstrong young woman who LOVES and NEEDS her dad. She genuinely tries to understand the lost soul that Brody is. She is the one who does not want to believe, but in fact believes, Carrie when she comes to tell Brody is about to do something really bad. And it is Dana’s LOVE for his dad and Brody’s LOVE for her that stops the suicide mission: “I’m coming home, Dana.” Continue reading “They call him Dad”

Billions on Sky Atlantic, Episode 6: The Deal

imageedit_13_6627786066Billions Episode 6, “The Deal”, on Sky Atlantic has all the ingredients of a season finale, but, thankfully, isn’t. We’ve got surprises in a tepidarium, a war time speech rallying the troops, a valuable piece of crumpled up paper thrown across a conference room table. Under it all, we get the true ethics of the game laid bare, and, at the same time, we get Damian playing Bobby hunched inwards, closing ranks, in self-preservation mode.

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Here are our recaps and discussion of the episode.

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