ENTOURAGE
Season 4 Episode 11
“No Cannes Do”
Written by Doug Ellin and Rob Weiss
Directed by Dan Attias

Vince and the boys are set to leave for the Medellin premiere at Cannes, when a red level terror alert delays their flight by three hours. With time to kill, Billy asks for a meeting with Anna, whom he wants in Silo. E reluctantly sets it up and the meet goes down.
At the meeting, Anna is clearly seeking help from E as to whether she should take the project, but E doesn’t give her any indication either way.
Meanwhile, LAX gets shut down completely and the boys have no way to get to Cannes. So Ari gets Lloyd to scramble, and they find that the last private flight getting out has been chartered by Sydney Pollack.
Ari gets in touch with Pollack (who turns out to have been Ari’s client once, before Pollack fired him) and manages to wrangle 5 seats to Cannes.

Following the meeting with Anna, Billy is now even more convinced he wants her in Silo, and is willing to re-write a part to fit her in. And because Billy wants her in, Vince wants her in too. But E doesn’t really believe in the script, so he’s caught in the middle: he’s supposed to convince one client to say “Yes” to a project he’s not 100% behind because his other client (and best friend) wants him to.
E then gets a call from Anna, and since they aren’t leaving for Cannes just yet, goes on over to see her.
After having read the script, Anna doesn’t get it, and wants E’s honest opinion as to whether she should do Silo or not. At first, E convinces her that she should do it. But during their toast to celebrate Anna’s new film project, honesty comes into play, and E admits to his crush on Anna, and Anna admits she thought he was cute too.
With all that honesty out there, E ‘fesses up and admits he doesn’t like Silo.
Cut away in what turns out to be a sadly truncated subplot. (E tells the boys later on that Anna fired him.)

Getting to the Van Nuys airport, it turns out that Ari miscounted the number of heads. It looks like Turtle is about to forego Cannes, when Vince says it’s everybody or nobody, and they’ll just have to find another way to get to Cannes.
Fortuitously, Kanye West shows up, and Turtle knows him. Seems Kanye is headed out on his own 727, and when Vince and the boys ask him if they can make a stop at Cannes, Kanye says “Yes.”


During all the “will they get to Cannes or won’t they” drama, Ari is caught between Mrs. Ari (who’s annoyed at Ari because he just can’t come out and say that he doesn’t really want her to come along on this boys’ field trip) and Lloyd (who’s annoyed at Ari because he promised that if Mrs. Ari wouldn’t go to Cannes, that he’d take Lloyd; when the Pollack head count goes into effect though, Lloyd is the first to get deep sixed).
So Mrs. Ari goes on some vendetta shopping and Lloyd takes Tom on a cruise, and both wife and assistant still love Ari before he wings his way off to Cannes.

So this one’s a great episode, despite having Anna Faris say “Bye-bye” in a very “blink of an eye” way. She was a lot of fun and I’m sort’a bummed to see her go after just 3 episodes. But hey, at least she was here.

(Images courtesy of hbo.com.)

ENTOURAGE
Season 4 Episode 10
“Snow Job”
Written by: Doug Ellin and Ally Musika
Directed by: Ken Whittingham

We return to developments on the Lost in the Clouds adaptation Billy is supposed to be working on.
Dana Gordon freaks when Walsh sends in a script called Silo, which is a futuristic space epic that has absolutely zero to do with Lost in the Clouds. Since E is MIA (more on that later), Ari has Vince read the script himself to see what the problem is. (Besides, Vince is producing.)
Thus begins a crisis as Walsh refuses to write the script the studio paid for (the money already having been spent so he can’t even return it). Ari zooms into Kill Mode and offers up Richard Kelly (who kicked my a$$ into orbit with Donnie Darko) as the new writer/director to replace Walsh. But after reading the script, Vince finds he loves it and wants to do this movie instead of Lost in the Clouds.
Vince even winds up talking to Walsh on the phone, Billy having locked himself into the bathroom with a bottle of whiskey and a gun, since he believed he’d frakked Vince up good with Silo. Of course, Vince loved the script, and the gun wasn’t loaded anyway.
Vince then tells Ari to read the script, and to make it happen.
Ari keeps on going on Kill Mode, bysteps Dana Gordon, and goes directly to her boss, Richard Wimmer (John Heard). What follows is a great scene where Ari Gold, SuperAgent, works his magic, and convinces Wimmer that Silo is the summer tentpole the studio needs to get it out of the red. When Dana is asked for her opinion on the script, she describes it as “Blade Runner meets Field of Dreams,” and Wimmer is sold.
At the end of it all though, Dana’s still pissed and wishes Ari would just die. (I love Dana.)


And while all this drama is going on, E is on his first day on the job as Anna Faris’ manager, at a photo shoot way up in the hills where cellular reception is nonexistent.
At the shoot, E meets Anna’s boyfriend, Dave (CSI: NY’s A.J. Buckley), who’s been hanging around Anna of late, since the CW passed on his pilot.
Dave is opinionated, ultra-critical, and jealous that E may have a thing for Anna (which of course, he does). Dave winds up making a complete a$$ of himself, and Anna dumps him.
E arrives as the boys, Ari, and Billy are toasting to Silo. Demanding to know what went down, E is tossed the script, and when he flips it open, asks, “Where’s the snow?”


As with the previous episode, this one’s a great half-hour, as we slide back into Hollywood mode and see Vince’s new project coming together. We also see E getting in deeper with Anna Faris, and not being available for Vince and Ari when the whole Silo thing exploded. It should be interesting to see if (or when) Vince will call E out about his responsibilities.

(Images courtesy of hbo.com.)

ENTOURAGE

Season 4 Episode 9
“The Young and the Stoned”
Written by: Dusty Kay
Directed by: Mark Mylod

It’s one of those episodes that has nothing to do with the wheeling and dealing for Vinnie’s latest project, but it’s nonetheless a solid half-hour with two out of three subplots that get my vote.


Subplot 1: While trying to find his way to the gang’s new digs (courtesy of the Lost in the Clouds check), E’s Aston-Martin is rear-ended by Anna Faris, who happens to be in nothing but a towel (she’s just come from Pilates is just the start of a semi-long, involved story). Since Anna doesn’t have any of her insurance papers on her, she gives E her cell number.
E feels they had some kind of Moment, but he gives her a call only to find out she gave him the wrong number. Tracking her house down via Star Maps, E drives on over, and Anna claims she gave him the wrong number ‘cause her phone is new and she’s totally number dyslexic.
Since she ended up trashing her tires in the accident, Anna’s waiting for a cab that’s already late to take her to a meeting. E volunteers to drive her, and finds out that it’s a meeting for her new project, a romantic comedy trying to be something more called Brown-Eyed Girl, a script E remembers since Vince passed on it a while back.
When Anna pressures E into telling her what he really thought of the script, he says he didn’t like it and thought the third act just didn’t work.
Later on, Anna calls E and asks him out for dinner. It turns out that a) she wants to pick his brain for his thoughts on her career; and b) she’s got a boyfriend, who calls her during dinner.
Anna ends up asking E to be her manager.


Subplot 2: Mrs. Ari is asked to reprise her role as town slut Kendall Scott for the anniversary of The Young and the Restless. Ari, possessive and mindful of the fact that it’s a daytime soap, isn’t thrilled about the offer. When he finds out that part of what Mrs. Ari is supposed to do is to seduce Latin soap hunk Javier Gracho (whom Lloyd, solid fan of Y&R that he is—he hasn’t missed an episode in a dozen years—has as wallpaper), he freaks.
Ari visits the set and when he’s told by the missus in no uncertain terms to get lost, he pays Javier a visit. Prepared to lift Javier up from the wasteland of daytime TV, Ari dangles the promise of primetime and Ugly Betty, just so long as Javier doesn’t kiss Mrs. Ari.
Javier spoils a shot when he doesn’t liplock with Mrs. Ari, and points to Ari when he’s asked what’s wrong. Exasperated that Ari won’t let her be kissed, Mrs. Ari grabs Javier and kisses him herself, after which, they do the scene.
Later on, an argument in the Gold master bedroom. Ari’s just really jealous that some other man is kissing his wife, and Mrs. Ari is pissed that Ari suggested she’s aged and that she’d suffer from being shot in High Def. It turns out that Mrs. Ari was asked to return as a regular, but she’s happy and content with her life (she did walk away from acting for this), and she just wanted one day to have this little crazy on-camera “fling” to assure herself that she’s still quite the desirable hottie.
The Golds then have hot monkey love. (Ari’s such a lucky dog.)


The third subplot involves Turtle, three girls, a cop, and some weed.
Despite that less than stellar subplot, “The Young and the Stoned” is a great half-hour, with the introduction of Anna Faris (who’s always struck me as a really funny actress far too big for the Scary Movie franchise) playing herself. There’s always such promise whenever someone plays themselves on Entourage (or, more accurately, a version of themselves), and when it’s over a number of episodes (as Mandy Moore did in Season 2), the results can be truly excellent. I’m looking forward to more of Faris.
That, coupled with the Y&R subplot, take this episode through the roof.


(Images courtesy of hbo.com.)