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It's Monday November the 28 around 10:17PM and

A Night In the Life of Jimmy Reardon

So we watched the big ticket CBC movie Intelligence tonight. It is kind of smaller scale traffic with perhaps not enough storylines. The more the merrier, actually. But it certainly did its job well, and made the most out of the subject matter. The main character on the crime side Jimmy Reardon (Is there any connection to the 1988 River Phoenix film "A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon") is a Tony Soprano-esque worrier who isn't totally comforatable in his place in the world - but aren't all drug kingpins. But that always helps when the show calls for dirty work endings - that they pull off with no problem or remorse whatsoever.

The musical score choice - with just a slight hint of a middle eastern vibe - was a nice surprise and fits in well with the darkness of the story and the setting of Vancouver. The main characters were well played, although some of the lessor ones - Reardon's brother for instance - could have been better served with some better motivations. Overall, they should probably make this into a series - although a suggestion might be to do it Soprano style and blow it up larger for maybe 10 episodes a season, rather than more and spend more money on it. It was also nice not to have a show end, OC style, in a music video montage of all the characters to say Death Cab For Cutie or something more Vancouver. In the words of Matt Stone and Trey Parker In Team America:

The hour's approaching to give it your best / And you've got to reach your prime / That's when you need to put yourself to the test / And show us the passage of time / We're gonna need a montage / Ooh, it takes a montage / Show a lot of things happening at once / Remind everyone of what's going on / In every shot, show a little improvement / To show it all would take too long / That's called a montage / Girl, we want a montage / In anything, if you want to go / From just a beginner to a pro / You need a montage / Even Rocky had a montage / Always fade out in a montage / If you fade out it seems like more time has passed in a montage...

Oh, and last but not least. The show may also benefit from the whole "Fat Clooney" adventures with Syriana, set to open up in the next few weeks. (Completely unrelated, if you look closely on the Syriana website the first review pull quote is from Ain't it Cool News, not some big media company. Interesting. Oh and they have an interesting podcast).