Monday, January 26, 2009

IF HE PUKES, YOU DIE: We haven't talked yet this year about Big Love, a show on which I blow hot and cold, and that may be because the Big Dig has rerouted itself through KCosmo's TV and blogging time. I did want to mention something that I've been noticing increasingly, though: the way that Bill Paxton plays Bill Henrickson with such thinly-disguised malevolence.

Henrickson is, outwardly, not a villain. He's a God-fearing man with few overt vices, more practiced in the art of self-denial than of self-indulgence (though not without exception), and attentive to the dutiful discharge of the full range of his familial obligations. There is nothing interesting about Bill outside the way that Paxton shows us what Bill tries to hide. Henrickson bares his teeth when he talks; his anger flashes in his alert eyes even when Bill is smiling. And his conduct, expecially with Ana, shows that while Bill talks a big game about celestial rewards, he has baser appetites that he is unwilling or unable to suppress. When I watch Paxton's Bill Henrickson, I can never forget Paxton's other iconic role, his Chet Donnelly, the physical embodiment of appetite, though I often also register Vincent Donofrio's Edgar from Men In Black, a slick, gooey monster poorly hidden behind the rubbery skin of an actual human. Or am I just being too hard on the old four-timer?

The other thing I had to say about last night's episode was that "why are you massaging that bird’s anus with a Q-Tip?" marked the first time I've ever had to interrupt a sit-up in progress to laugh.

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