Take Five
By George Rose
July 28, 2009
Each episode is fast paced, informative, well acted, closes old doors and opens new ones, is full of twists and turns, and never goes to a commercial break or ends an episode without making you want to throw your controller at the TV screen. J.J. Abrams really knows how to make you love TV and hate life at the same time. I laughed, I jumped in fear, my draw dropped in shock, I got butterflies in my stomach and, yes, I even cried. I almost want to cut my vacation short so I can go home and borrow Seasons 2-5 from a friend, but for now I'm still enjoying being stranded on the island of Chios. If only there were a hatch around here for me to explode open with dynamite found in the Black Rock, or a small plane filled with the dead bodies of fake priests and Virgin Mary statues full of heroine. I guess I'll just have to settle with the arrival of my own version of "the others", my cousins and their friends who just arrived yesterday.
Overall Rating: A
National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985) – watched/written on July 25, 2009
Warning: stop reading this article right now if you want to end it with a good recommendation (Lost). I've seen National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and Vegas Vacation, and thought they were mildly entertaining. Since I am on a Greek vacation, I thought it might be appropriate to catch up on another one of the Griswold family adventures, especially one with a title similar to my current experience. Suddenly pretending to date a woman doesn't seem so bad. In fact, I just realized how much funnier it is than anything European Vacation has to offer. Maybe I should write a screenplay.
It all begins with the Griswold family as contestants on a game show called "Pig in a Poke." They've already won numerous prizes but have to option to pass them all up for a chance to win a special prize. The title alone sort of gives away what the prize will be AND whether or not they'll win that prize. Lo and behold, they won a two week trip to Europe. This is just one of many predictable moments we're offered.
This Vacation movie series finds humor in replacing their children, Audrey and Rusty, for each film, while the parents, Clark (Chevy Chase) and Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo), always remain the same. In Vegas Vacation, they were attractive children, so I wasn't so bothered by their oddball hijinks. Call me shallow, but if the director of European Vacation was going to have the young stars act a fool and make them constantly complain about A FREE VACATION (those spoiled brats), she could have at least cast cuter kids. A chubby girl with a bad perm? Don't worry, she's dating a beautiful blonde jock. Lord knows how, but she is. Her brother is a red headed, freckle covered 15-year-old with braces, yet the European women seem to find him irresistible. None of this movie is realistic. Even worse, none of it is funny.
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