Back of the Head

I was with my dad at CostCo and made a bee-line for the HDTVs, players, and DVDs, as I tend to do. I says to my pops, I says, "This is pretty cheap." He says, "Get it." I says, "What am I getting for Christmas?" He says, "This." I says, "Okay." The negotiations were short and they should all be that smooth.

I've avoided buying the HD-DVD attachment for my Xbox 360 for as long as I've owned it. I never even use my Xbox to play DVDs. Needing the Xbox to play DVDs or HD-DVDs didn't sparkle with me.When my Xbox died from overheating over the summer and I was without it for two months, it didn't make me want to buy the HD-DVD attachment all the more. I don't like putting all my eggs in the Xbasket.

It's all moot now. High definition DVDs are now a reality for me. And even though Blu-Ray is all but destined to win the HD format war, whatever, I'll deal with getting a Blu-Ray player down the line. For the next year or so, more or less, it's HD-DVD for me.

Now I need HD-DVDs. Not a lot; I have hundreds of standard DVDs and I've no intention of replacing my entire collection. But there's some HD stuff I most definitely want to give the new player some exercise. By the laws of Christmas gift-giving, I can't actually use the HD-DVD player until December 25th, but that doesn't mean I can't start making plans to acquire HD-DVDs. And that's where you come in. Friends, enemies, strangers, hook a brother up with some high def this holiday season. Check out:

Remember, nothing says love like high-definition. (Except maybe, you know, actual love, but you can't get that in HD.)

John: Check that out. I'd love to fly the Enterprise into that.
John: I wonder what goofy sci-fi plot convention would happen if I did?
Lance: sentient micro lifeforms? potential deadly radiation from trying to communicate with them? A lost ship trapped and the crew are all ghosts?
John: Spare me your summary of Voyager season 5.
Lance: sounds more like season 3 actually
John: Only one way to be sure. Pop the DVDs in.
Lance: season 5 was a lot of Borg
John: Is "Borg" the new slang for "crap"? Because you could say the same for the other 6 seasons.
Lance: your lucky I'm lazy...

Even without the big guns of January/February, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and 24, or the midseason arrival (and probable cancelation) of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the fall season looks busier than I expected it to be. I'll probably be testing out two or three of the new shows on top of my normal fare.

My Fall 2007 TV schedule, which doesn't even start until September 19th. My returning shows in bold, new stuff I'm interested in are in caps:

There's another show I wanted to check out. I forget, is it Moonlight? I think that's the vampire detective show. Or is it New Amsterdam, the show about the immortal guy? I forget which one hired Rob Thomas as a showrunner. Maybe I'll just stick with Journeyman. Or nothing at all. Who cares? I gots enough TV to watch as it is.

John: Today I thought I had a new story to tell. I was kicking around the idea of a journey, people have to go somewhere and get something to save someone. Set it in space so there are no limits.
John: I thought maybe the main characters should be twins so both sexes are represented. And maybe they have a bodyguard, like a creature of some sort. And a guide, someone dangerous and unpredictable they can't necessarily trust.
John: Then I realized: That's fucking Star Wars.
John: 35 years too late for that one.
Lance: oh I dont know.. the world is ready
John: You think the time is right?
Lance.: why not
John: Hope my lawyer is better than George's.

This is probably right up there with Principal Skinner's idea of a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life by advanced cloning techniques : Billy and the Cloneasaurus.

With just hours to go before I see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which could render this entire thing moot, of the 23 movies I've seen in theaters in 2007, I have to say at this point Transformers is my favorite. Of course, I know it's a dumb movie and there are a lot of better movies out there. And I can't even really say I love or even like all of Transformers. I've seen it twice and second time around, I was twice as bored at all the Pentagon scenes and just about everything in the movie that didn't have an Autobot and Decepticon in it. Despite all of that, and the numerous things wrong with or dumb about Transformers, it's my favorite so far because of Sam, Mikaela and Bumblebee. I just love the scenes with the three of them.

When I read the leaked Transformers screenplay last year, I thought all of the moments where Bumblebee uses pop songs to "humorously" play off Sam trying to hit on Mikaela were terrible. I'd have bet the farm it was a shitty idea in what read like a shitty script and it would never work. Which is why I was plum surprised that the way those scenes play, they did work. Sure, it's dumb comedy, but it plays and it's entertaining. Shia makes the scenes work, all the way through to his dropping her off at her house, telling her she's "more than meets the eye" and browbeating himself for saying such a stupid line. But the best stuff came later, first when Mikaela and Sam collide and they both get inside Bumblebee for the big car chase with Brawl. The fact that they were both terrified and screaming, "We're gonna die! We're gonna die!" was right on. That's exactly how they should be reacting.

Even better was after Sam and Mikaela beat Frenzy the evil Microsoft Word paperclip and looked up in awe at Sam's car, which was now a 20 foot tall robot. That moment, which is Spielbergian in origin and in execution, was kind of just about brilliant. It might even be the best moment I've seen so far in a motion picture this year. They got the sense of wonder of that moment exactly right, including Sam's speech as he asks Mikaela to get in the car with him (The Call to Adventure, says Joseph Campbell). And then getting her to sit on his lap as Bumblebee drove himself. At that point, Sam Witwicky was the single luckiest boy in the world. He somehow fulfilled the two greatest wishes an adolescent boy can have: to have your own car and to have the girl of your dreams. Plus the best bonus ever: his car can transform into a robot. He has his own robot. And that robot took him and his gorgeous girl to meet even more robots. Even the musical choice underlining the scene was well chosen. (Yeah, it's The Goo Goo Dolls, sure, but it works.) It gets even better for Sam when Mikaela calls his car crap -- Bumblebee kicks them out and then redesigns into an even cooler car. Holy Christ, how lucky can Sam get?

I'm not so old nor am I at all so curmudgeonly that I don't remember being seventeen and having my first car and my first girl. Hell, I wrote a movie of my own about it. I remember what that was like. I knew what Sam wanted and I wanted the same thing. In a way, I was Sam. My car was even yellow. But it sure as fuck didn't transform into a giant robot. Still, car, girl, robot, these are the dreams of an adolescent boy (hell, they're still the dreams of the 30+ old single man) and Transformers makes them real.

All the rest of Transformers that works, the robot fighting, Optimus Prime, Sam saving the world, the nice piece of business I'm glad they gave Mikaela in the final battle where she heroically drove the damaged Bumblebee so they could destroy Devastator, it was all icing on the cake for me. Even all the stupid shit in the movie, and there's a lot of it, none of that matters to me. Transformers gets a pass despite it all. To me, the scenes with Sam, Mikaela and Bumblebee carry the entire movie the way Bumblebee carried Sam and Mikaela at the end as they made out on his hood while Optimus, Ratchet and Ironhide watched. Those Autobots are pervs.

And that's why I love Transformers. Also, Megan Fox is ridiculously hot. I can't wait for the DVD so I can skip past all the crap and just watch the good stuff.

On May 25, 2007 I wrote my review of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End then I spent the day hanging around with my cousin Cindy and my friends Alex and Natalie in New York not doing much of anything. The significance of the date didn't register with me, but for a few million nerds, many of whom blogged online, it was apparently a holy day. May 25, 2007 was the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Wars.

For me the day meant nothing. On May 25, 1977, I was two years, two months and 21 days old. I sure as hell wasn't in a movie theatre seeing Star Wars. I am lucky to be old enough to have been around for many other momentous movie milestones in the last 30 years. I was at just about the perfect age (14) to have seen the first Batman movie in a theatre opening day, for instance, and I vividly remember the summer of 1989 when Batmania swept through America. Two years later, I was there to get blown away by Terminator 2 in a movie theatre. The next year there was Batman Returns. A year after that I was right there for Jurassic Park. A year after that, Pulp Fiction. And so forth. Even before Batman, I saw Lethal Weapon in a movie theatre in 1987 and Die Hard in 1988, both of which also had huge impacts on me.

While I was too late for Star Wars, the first movie I ever saw in a movie theatre was The Empire Strikes Back. Actually, I have no proof of that, I just really, really think that was it. Empire Strikes Back, specifically the early scene of Luke hanging upside down on Hoth willing his lightsaber into his hand, tends to be my strongest and earliest memory of sitting in a dark movie theatre watching something on the big screen. To this day, whenever I see that moment, it registers inside my subconscious as a profound early memory.

In truth however, the first movie I ever saw could have been Empire Strikes Back or it could have been any of the following: Superman, Superman II, The Spy Who Loved Me, Jaws, or Excalibur. I saw all of those movies around 1980-1981. I lived in Manila until I was eight (1983) and the way movie theatres worked there from what I remember, if a sequel came out they would run it back to back with the previous movie. Thus, I saw the first two Superman movies back to back. Same with Jaws. Same with Rocky I-III. Strangely, I know I didn't see Star Wars with Empire. The first time I saw Star Wars was at home on Betamax (seriously, fucking Beta, that's how old I am). I didn't actually see Star Wars in a movie theatre until the rerelease in 1997.

However, I was a moviegoer at a very early age. And the array of movies I saw in those formative years, Superman, The Star Wars Trilogy, James Bond, Jaws, Excalibur, followed by the Indiana Jones movies, the Rockys, and others, all of which I watched repeatedly before I was 12, clearly were the building blocks for the movie nerd I became. Still, May 25, 1977 wasn't a special day for me.

Maybe in a couple of years, I'll tell you about June 23, 1989.

Alex and I (ahem) are both filmmakers. How many pictures did we take in the five days we were in Las Vegas? Five. I brought my digital camera and managed to forget it most of the time. Then when I had it in my pocket I hardly used it. So no pics from Vegas for now, fans. I'll put up an amusing pic or two when I remember to download them from my camera sometime.

The amazing views from the Voodoo Lounge at the top of the Rio. Voodoo Lounge had a much larger space and open air roof deck than Ghost Bar at the Palms had.

Jeff and I getting worked over by Christy, the hardest working stripper at the Olympic Garden on Monday night. That woman was a master at separating a dude from his $40. Also, those two blonde Czech twins... I ran out of money in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mudwrestling at Gilley's Tuesday night started off badly with two unattractive fat chicks in the first match but got really entertaining when a muscular little fireplug joined the fray. This jacked little girl was the Kurt Angle of mudwrestling. She not only dominated every match, winning in decisive fashion, but she busted out actual wrestling moves. She did a gutwrench suplex, a small package, and even an FU. She ended up busting open one of her opponent's mouths, causing a forfeit. You hate to see something like that happen to such a promising young athlete.

Sean and I nerding it up at Star Trek The Experience on Monday. This includes sitting at Quark's Bar drinking Romulan ale, some sort of lager with blue food dye. And we broke a stereotype by finding a very attractive girl at Star Trek, the actress who played "Ensign Thomas" in the Klingon Encounter ride. Man, she was good looking. One couldn't help staring at her when we were in the turbolift. A personal highlight was whispering to Sean, "Wait, what about Ensign Thomas?" when we got locked in a shuttlecraft for the second half of the ride. "Tell Ensign Thomas... I... love her...!"

The Playboy Club at the Palms Fantasy Tower. It was quiet on Tuesday night, nothing was going on, and a Jack and Coke was $11, but it was neat just to be in the only Playboy Club in the world. And those bunny card dealers were not unattractive.

Lunch at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill. I love the bluecorn duck appetizer so much, I'd take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.

Explaining the history of Rome and Julius Caesar to Natalie as we roamed around Caesar's killing time before she and Alex watched Mystere. That was some of the most fun I've ever had droning on and on about ancient history to someone who was actually eager to hear it.

The view from the top of the Big Shot, which is the ride on top of the Stratosphere tower that shoots you a thousand feet straight up over Las Vegas. Not so much fun was the yellow streak that showed on my back when it came to riding the other two rides on the Stratosphere.

The Palomino Club. One of the worst strip club experiences of our lives. Full nudity doesn't mean squat when the strippers are not so much in the looks department. This includes the musclebound she-male who sat on my lap and then started talking about how she has to take her kid to school the next morning. It was every kind of buzzkill imaginable.

The Caesar's Palace self-parking lot, which we visited five or six times and got lost in for the first two.

Not being able to get into The Pussycat Dolls Lounge. It was open Sunday night but we opted to go to the Palomino Club instead, which was a big mistake. To our chagrin, The Pussycat Dolls Lounge was closed on Monday and then had a private party on Tuesday. All I wanted was to sit back with a vodka tonic and watch the Pussycat Dolls dance in a cage. Was that too much to ask? Yes.

Not being able to see the Dolphin and Tiger habitat at the Mirage, which was closed for the season. But considering the brochure warned that "tigers mark their territory by spraying...stand back 8 to 10 feet", I'm not sure that was entirely a bad thing.

On the list for the next Vegas trip: Seeing Bite, the naked vampire show at Stratosphere, Fantasy at the Luxor, maybe a road trip to Red Rocks or the Valley of Fire, and finally, finally getting in that goddamned Pussycat Dolls Lounge. Also, maybe seeing some stand up comedy, like George Wallace. His show's at 10pm, "not too early, not too late."

Going to Vegas on Saturday, back on Thursday. I turn 32 on Sunday, see, and I'm gonna spend that non-milestone on the Vegas strip with four of my bestest buddies: Jeff, Alex, Natalie, Sean.

I've been looking forward to this for months. It's been a while since I've been on vacation, the kind of vacation that doesn't involve attending a wedding or seeing festival films. Maui in March 2005 was the last vacation I had where there were no obligations except relaxation and enjoyment. So it's been a couple of years and I'm overdue.

I'm on vacation . And I mean it. By on vacation , I'm talking about a near-total break from routine. No movies, no television shows, no wrestling, no Xbox 360, no Internet blogging, surfing, downloading, etc. That last one is what I'm most keen on. I'll be glad to spend as much time as possible away from the Internet. (But if you wanna post birthday wishes, I'll see and appreciate them.) I'm not bringing my laptop to Vegas. Sure, I'll have my iPod, a book, a portable DVD player and some DVDs for the flights to and fro, but when I'm in Vegas, my attention will be on my friends and the city itself. They'll provide all the entertainment I need. Man, it's gonna be sweet.

Big ups to my folks too. Thanks to them, we're staying in Vegas for free. They have a time share at a resort called Club De Soleil that they generously turned over for my and my friends' use for the five days we're there. Let there be no doubt that as parents go, I've got the very best.

While I'm gone from work, I set up a temp to hold the fort down. It's interesting getting a temp to cover for you; she can't be shitty at my job but she shouldn't be too good, either. It's like bacon, you want it crispy but not too crispy.

Matt Saracen has the smoothest trying-to-make-you-feel-comfortable-so-we-can-have-sex talk out there. When he appeased Julie Taylor's complaints that the deer head mounted on the wall was staring at her and judging her:

And he went right back at her. When he realized she wasn't ready, he gently let her off the hook and let her know she's under no pressure to have sex with him. Matt Saracen's a good guy. Of course he saved the best line for last when she wanted to cuddle up with him. Big goofy grin:

That was some really good shit, really savvy writing, directing, and acting from Zach Gilford and Aimee Teegarden that avoided all the landmines inherent in such situations. As were the juxtaposed scenes of Coach Taylor and Tami worrying about their missing fifteen year old daughter having sex. And when Saracen blurted out "I love you" to Julie, they earned every bit of it.

Friday Night Lights continues to be an underrated gem. The only glaring flaw of the last two episodes are the diminishment of Lyla Garrity, but I suppose it's a balance for how the Lyla/Tim/Street triangle dominated the first half of the season. It's Julie and Matt's turn in the spotlight and they're the money couple.

February 8, 2007

Be Our Guest

Last night was unexpected super guest star night on the shows I watch.

On Bones, Alex Winter, Bill S. Preston, Esq. from the Bill and Ted movies (and Whatever happened to...? fame) showed up as a sleazy Joe Francis-like Girls Gone Wild producer. Alex Winter's unexpected presence on Bones was reason enough for a geek-out but Bones one-upped that on the same episode by bringing in Stephen Fry as a psychiatrist assigned to Booth. Stephen Fry! A national treasure of England. The narrator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Longtime comedy partner of Hugh Laurie. Last seen as Natalie Portman's boss in V For Vendetta. Best of all, he wasn't just there to help Booth understand why he shot an ice cream truck clown, he bamboozled Booth in the process into building him a barbeque pit and grilling him $50 steaks. Even Mr. Miyagi could learn a thing or two about manipulation from Stephen Fry.

After the double punch of Alex Winter and Stephen Fry, the last thing I expected was another guest star then BOOM! on Lost, who shows up in Juliet's flashback but Nestor Carbonell. At that point, I pointed and yelled to no one in particular: "It's Batmanuel !" Batmanuel, the greatest parody of Batman no one ever saw because no one watched The Tick when it was on FOX for a microsecond years ago. I could hardly concentrate on what was going on in Juliet's flashback because Batmanuel was there.

And this is why I'm looking forward to my week in Vegas next month. I'm in way too deep with geeking out over my fucking TV shows. I gotta get out of here. I need a break where I'm far away from the Internet and my DVR, where I can get drunk, gamble, and have my lap danced on by strippers working hard for my $20. Strippers don't give a rat's ass about Batmanuel. But if I meet one who does, I'm having me a Vegas wedding.

January 26, 2007

Clark's Labyrinth

Maybe it was because of being foolishly hopped up on a pound of PF Changs Mongolian beef, beer, and NyQuil but when I got around to watching Smallville last night before I passed out at 10pm, I thought it wasn't that bad. It was a hell of a lot better than the Buffy episode they ripped off, and I think I liked it more than the similar Hurley "Dave" episode on Lost. Unlike Buffy, Clark's alternate life was all clearly a hallucination by an evil Phantom Zoner trying to get rid of him and not open-ended bullshit that makes you "question reality"; i.e. "maybe the last six seasons you spent all that time watching never happened ." I hate shit like that. Only assholes try that trick on their loyal audiences. Actually, that Zoner could have made things a lot worse for Clark. He actually wanted Clark to have Lana, his heart's desire, and live happily ever after with her in a permanent dream world. That's pretty nice of that evil alien.

Douchebag Clark's subconscious is like Homer Simpson's brain; they're both smarter and understand more than their waking selves realize. Namely, Chloe is awesome. She's the best person on the show and the best person to have watching your back. It's about time he gave her some long-deserved props for sticking by him for these six years. In Clark's subconscious mind, he wishes he could cut Lex's legs out from under him, he's terrified his mom will marry Lionel, and he sees Lana as some sort of delicate porcelain doll with a hypnotic voice he can't resist. Also, Clark seems to be a Boy Meets World fan because his fantasy of being Lana's one true love since they were ten is exactly the same as Corey and Topanga's backstory.

If only the Martian Manhunter would explain why he masquerades as short, older black guy.

In other DC comics-related news:

She's Outta Here!

Katie Holmes is riding the Bat Train out of Gotham, it seems, and the Rachel Dawes character will be re-cast. Personally, I wouldn't have cut her loose for continuity's sake. I don't hate her guts like 99% of the world did in the role and does in real life. Also, I hate switching actors in midstream. I can't watch the Saavik parts of Star Trek III without getting annoyed at Robin Curtis for not being Kirstie Alley. I say you stay with whoever you brought to the dance, even if she's the least popular girl on the dance floor. But whatever. At least Rachel Dawes won't be the focal point of complaining in The Dark Knight as she was in Batman Begins.

November 15, 2006

Wookiepedia

Jeff: Ever seen this? These guys know a lot more about Star Wars than George Lucas does.
John: But who gets all the money? I'd rather be George.
John: Ignorant of my creation but sleeping on a pile of money.
Jeff: With many computer generated women

September 12, 2006

Why Can't We Be Friends?

www.myspace.com/johnorq

Look which 15 year old girl has a MySpace. That's right, me. The story behind this is Jeff set up a Myspace and I was making fun of him because he has no friends except that Tom guy who's everyone's first friend. So I says to him, I says, "I'll set up a MySpace and we'll be each other's only friends." Then typically, neither of us responded to each other's friend requests because we're dicks.

A stupid joke totally backfired, so now I have this stupid MySpace. Unlike most 15 year old girls, I don't seem to have the wherewithal to figure out how to do things like change the background or fonts or add the cool new James Blunt song all the other teen girls like. I don't remember how I managed to get Bender as my profile picture but I consider that a great success. So I suppose I want friends. I mean, that's the point, right?

If you have a MySpace, please be my friend. In fact, imagine me asking in the exact same tone the undertaker Bonasera asked Don Corleone in the first scene of The Godfather:

Be my friend?

Nice. Randy is my first friend who isn't Fivelion Productions or Across the Hall. Thanks, Randy. Welcome to the sausagefest. Gary, Scott, and Evan... any day now.

Note: Sometimes an Invalid Friend ID page pops up. Click it again. My account is totally working. MySpace blows.

August 30, 2006

The New Fall Season

Where the hell did the summer go? I actually did quite a bit this summer: saw a lot of movies, a couple of concerts, some Shakespeare, a wedding (not mine), a little interstate traveling. I took reasonable advantage of the dearth of television, limiting my non-wrestling new TV watching to The 4400 (best season yet) and Deadwood (somewhat underwhelming overall). When August rolled around, I remembered that I was supposed to spend the summer watching all five seasons of 24 on DVD so I can join in with the millions of other Jack Bauer junkies when season 6 launches in January. (I'm halfway to my goal.) I certainly enjoyed not being chained to the high def TV every single night.

Those days are over.

Tonight, my fall TV season starts in earnest with Bones , which couldn't be a better kick off show. I've been missing Brennan and Booth and there's the added bonus of the show not being serialized so remembering the series' dense continuity isn't an issue. The rollout of new and returning shows will be gradual so it will be a gentle ease into the fall season. Until, the first week of October, that is. That's the monumental week when one after the other, my big three main eventers return for each of their third seasons: Veronica Mars, Lost , and Battlestar Galactica . (Which reminds me, I should probably do that Lost season 2 finale recap before 10/4.)

Similar to last year, I'm looking out for new TV series. I won't really make a game of it like before. I'm definitely checking out Heroes and Jericho . I'll keep ‘em if I like ‘em and drop ‘em if I don't. Simple enough.

Here's the line up for the fall:

Monday

9pm - WWE Monday Night RAW ( USA ), Heroes (NBC) 9/25

Tuesday

8pm – Friday Night Lights (NBC) 10/3 (tentative)

9pm - Veronica Mars (CW) 10/3

10pm – ECW (Sci-Fi)

Wednesday

8pm – Bones (FOX) 8/30, Jericho (CBS) 9/20

9pm – Lost (ABC) 10/4

Thursday

8pm – Smallville (CW) 9/28

11pm – TNA Impact (Spike)

Friday

8pm – Friday Night Smackdown (CW)

9pm – Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi) 10/6

Saturday

Pretend to lead some form of social life (i.e. watch the rest of the shit stored up on the DVR)

Sunday

8pm – The Simpsons (FOX) 9/10

South Park 's new season starts up sometime in November so it's not an issue for a while (it just gets added in at the Wednesday, 10pm slot). This is the second year in a row The Simpsons is premiering in September and not after the World Series ends.

I know, I know: Friday Night Lights ? I liked the movie. The trailer looks like the show could be decent. It's a little off-kilter from my normal tastes but I figured I'd give it a shot, why not? Unfortunately, there's already a causality: I wanted to check out Tina Fey's 30 Rock , but that's at 8:30pm on Wednesdays and my DVR is already committed to Bones and Jericho . It's a shame, but it holds to my unofficial no sitcom rule, which now stands with the demise of Arrested Development.

July 24, 2006

Stars Are Blind

I don't like star ratings but they are a means to an end. As I'm not a professional movie critic, nor do I wish to be, I feel no need to write a review about every movie I see. I just write a review if there's something I want to say about a movie, but more often than not, I don't want to say anything beyond, “I liked it, loved it, or didn't.” The star ratings are useful to me simply as a reminder what movies I have seen and what I thought about them. A lot of times, I don't remember what movies I've seen since there are so many (after factoring in what I see on cable and DVD ) and a lot of them aren't worth remembering.

Star ratings can also be misleading however and I admit I'm inconsistent in how I use them. I'm supposed to use star ratings as a means to quickly identify whether or not a movie is good, or if it isn't, how bad it is. The ratings system I put together for myself is skewed towards how bad a movie is. A lot of times, I lose sight of the purpose of my star ratings and use them to identify whether I liked a movie or not.

The **1/2 rating is getting a workout this summer and to confusing results. Even I'm not sure what I mean sometimes when I look at the recent **1/2 ratings I've doled out. According to my own description, a **1/2 movie is “ Decent/Has its Moments, But With Problems.” Vague, but serviceable.

Since summer began, I've given the following movies **1/2: Mission : Impossible 3, A Prairie Home Companion, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, A Scanner Darkly, Lady in the Water. According to me, all of these movies are “Decent/Have Their Moments, But With Problems.” I think that's a reasonably accurate critique for all of them. Whether you liked any of them or hated them, it's hard to argue that at the very least they are all decent movies but they do all have problems.

Here's the thing: I like some of these movies and others not at all. To clarify: I like Pirates and A Scanner Darkly. Enough aspects of each of those movies worked for me; while I can't call them "good" in that I don't think any of those movies suitably overcame the problems they had in either story, acting, structure, editing, or even in initial conception, I still found them entertaining. I can't say the same for the others. These are just purely my subjective tastes at work. I was bored through most of A Prairie Home Companion, Mission: Impossible 3, and Lady in the Water. Most importantly, I didn't care.

There's the rub: I didn't care. I didn't give a crap about Ethan Hunt rappelling, that old fogey radio show getting canceled, or whether the narf would ever get back to the blue world. Didn't give a rat's ass, still don't. I did care about the pirates and about whether Keanu Reeves was falling in too deep while his friends had amusing, drug-fueled, paranoid ravings.

To avoid further confusion, in the future, I will refrain from using the star ratings as a reflection of how much I liked something and just use it to strictly as a gauge on what I perceive to be the movie's level of quality. This will hopefully avoid other misleading ratings like my ***1/2 for Mr. & Mrs. Smith and War of the Worlds last summer (both of those are *** at best but I had a good time at the theatre.) Also, I might just stop giving star ratings to movies I see on IMAX altogether since I generally tack on an extra star just for how much fun the IMAX experience is (the most glaring inconsistency of the summer is my giving the crappy Poseidon *** because it played better on IMAX than it ever could in a normal theatre, and yet I didn't give Superman Returns the extra star for being in IMAX 3D, which I wasn't impressed by.)

I give this explanation of my flawed and confusing ratings system **1/2.

April 7, 2006

Polygamy Ain't Easy!

I always enjoy Bill Paxton's work. When I heard "HBO," "Bill Paxton" and "polygamy", my curiosity was piqued. In Big Love, Bill Paxton lives in Utah and owns a sporting goods store franchise. He has three wives and three families. They all live next door to each other in three adjacent houses. The wives share Bill like a time share; he spends a different night of the week with a different wife. He has seven children. And his big love is a big secret; the Mormon church outlawed polygamy in 1890. The new neighbors suspect something's not right. Bill's second wife is secretly $20,000 in debt and his third wife is an emotional child. His parents live in a poverty-stricken religious commune run by his father in law, who is seen as their prophet. And the prophet has a 14 year old child bride. This is some weird shit.

I'm enjoying the show so far. The show is well-written, which is a staple of HBO shows, and the cast is terrific, especially Chloe Sevigny as second wife Nicki and Ginnifer Goodwin (who is really, really pretty in that Rachael Ray way) as third wife Margene. Although the most interesting stuff to me has been the interplay between the daughter Amanda Seyfried and Tina Majorino trying to be her friend. A lot of that is my Veronica Mars fandom coming though for both of them as alumni of that show. And what was up with Harry Dean Stanton's child bride stealing Amanda Seyfried's iPod? I like the show enough to see it though the season and see how the various storylines play out.

My initial complaints mostly involved the surprising abundance of Bill Paxton's naked ass in the first couple of episodes. Also, I was expecting some sort of comedic take on polygamy, I'm not sure why exactly, so I was thrown off by how subtly disturbing it was. Yet also very interesting. If Big Love teaches us anything, it's that having three wives ain't all it's cracked up to be. It's really quite a pain in the ass. It's probably better to have three girlfriends, like a certain silk pajama-wearing 80 year old magazine publisher. But that's a different show entirely. That show's called The Girls Next Door.

April 5, 2006

Hey Kids! Comics!

Recently, I managed to get a hook-up for free comics. I'm five years past my last phase of comic book collecting and I neither have the interest nor financial means to collect monthly comics ever again. That doesn't mean I don't still like to read them. I was pretty happy a couple of weeks ago to get ahold of a batch of comics I've been interested in for some time. Stuff like the first dozen issues of New Avengers , a lot of Alan Moore 's hard to find work, and J. Michael Straczynski's Supreme Power ( Squadron Supreme ) and his run on Amazing Spider-Man .

And then there's Batman.

Guess Who's Back. Back Again. Jason's Back. Tell a Friend.

One of the first things I read was last year's run featuring The Return of Jason Todd. It wasn't bad. The artwork was pretty good. I'm still not sold on the idea of bringing the second Robin back from the dead as the homicidal Red Hood . The Red Hood was once the identity of The Joker, who killed Jason Todd in the famous A Death in the Family story back in '89. It turns out Joker did an atypically lousy job. Robin's II's come home to roost. The new Red Hood is a killer, popping criminals left and right, which pissed Batman off since he's captain no-kill, even though in a way, Jason Todd is doing Batman's job better than he is. Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the series was when Jason Todd held the Joker captive in a fun house and beat the shit out of him with a crowbar, which is how Joker beat him nearly to death years ago (explosives finished the job, until we find out years later they... didn't.) It's also retarded that underneath his red hood, Jason Todd still wears his Robin mask, so that we know he used to be Robin every time he takes the hood off. What I liked least was Batman blowing out of Gotham for a couple of issues, flying the Batwing around the world to talk to his superhero friends who have also come back from the dead like Green Arrow and Superman. Batman had several awkward go-nowhere conversations with them that accomplished nothing. Expending the time and fuel to fly across the country to have a five minute argument with Green Arrow is something Batman would do if he were a regular on Smallville. And just like in Smallville, it makes no sense. By the end of the run of issues I read, Batman and the Red Hood teamed up to a degree to war on Gotham's crime lord Black Mask. Regarding the killing vs. no-killing issue, mentor and ex-pupil agreed to disagree. Batman still didn't find out how Jason Todd managed to come back to life. I found the whole idea disagreeable. There's not much about the current Batman comics I do like. What about Batman comics from ten years ago then?

Next, I'll talk about Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Batman: The Long Halloween. But not now. I have high definition television to watch.

February 7, 2005

Vanity Fair

Nice! I like!

Hit the deck! Indians!

A few weeks ago I finally saw The New World. If I see a better movie this year, I'd consider it a miracle. I don't know how to review The New World, so I won't, except to say I'm cuckoo for it. Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch cuckoo for it. Suz said I was shaking with excitement during dinner when I was talking about it. I was up all night that weekend on the website listening to the score (It's 2006 - I don't buy CDs anymore) and I haven't done that since I was in high school, when I would listen to the Batman Returns soundtrack ad nauseam. The New World isn't for everyone. Terrence Malick tends to be a love him or hate him kind of director. I love the guy, I love his movie; if he had a 6 hour cut of it to show me, I'd have sat in that theatre for 6 hours. I'd have been all alone as everyone else would have long since walked out, but hey, at least then I could put my feet up.

A weird side effect of The New World is that now, I'm interested in Indians. And I don't mean Native Americans. Well, I do mean Native Americans, but in their non-PC form. I'm talkin' 'bout Indians, specifically movies about the Indians. I had a few things to get through on my Netflix first; other interests like the first Emperor of China (The Emperor and The Assassin, which was good but not great), Gone With The Wind, which had a fantastic first half and a plodding, overwraught second half (Christ, was that movie long), and total shit, The Fog. But now, I'm cycling back to the Indians, those noble savages who owned this land before we took it from them. I picked up the director's cut of The Last of the Mohicans, which I haven't seen since we saw it in the movie theatre back in high school. And I'm going to continue to prolong diving headlong into 24 by first watching the Spielbergo miniseries Into the West via Netflix. Hell, when Tatanka showed up at the Royal Rumble a couple of weeks ago, I marked out. So, for the near future, it's me and Indians. Until I get bored of them, and move onto something else

The Other New World

Surface is done. After only 15 episodes too, the length of a series on Showtime or HBO. NBC says Surface is not canceled but who are they kidding? This show isn't coming back. Now that it's over, I can look back and say the show wasn't good. I did that every week while I watched the show too, but now I have the full scope. The Pate brothers who launched Surface seem to be big Battlestar Galactica fans. Here are the answers to the mystery of the sea monsters in a nutshell. Stop me if you've heard this one before:

The sea monsters were created by man.
They evolved.
They rebelled.
There are many copies.
And they have a plan.

Yes, the sea monsters were created by man. By a vast government conspiracy (yawn, so sleepy) that had cloned a sheep in the 60's, a dinosaur and even a Chinese guy who joined the FBI. Why did the government do this? Why did they create sea monsters? "Because [we] could," says one of the scientists, played by Martha Plimpton. Then she was killed by the cloned Chinese guy. And big-boobied oceanographic scientician Lake Bell and her redneck buddy were pulled along into this vast conspiracy which lost him his redneck family and her not so much, and for what? Turns out nothing.

What about Miles, the 14 year old who befriended a baby sea monster named Nimrod? What happened to him? He was bitten by a sea monster and gained super sea monster electrical powers so he could literally fry the bullies at school. More encouraging was him getting a little girlfriend, a cute one who liked that when she kissed Miles he sparked blue electricity. That's more than Superman got from Lois Lane when he was electric blue ten years ago. Giving Miles the cute little girlfriend and ditching his redheaded douchebag of a best friend was a nice touch. If there was one aspect of the show that improved, that was it.

So how did Surface actually end? What was the sea monsters' plan? It's a good thing this show isn't airing in Southeast Asia because they're not gonna like this: a tsunami. Where did the sea monsters target their tsunami? Where else but Wilmington, North Carolina. Somehow, Lake Bell, the redneck, Miles and his little girlfriend ended up in the same car together just as the tsunami hit. They sought refuge in a church belfry as the waves overtook Wilmington and drowned Dawson, Joey, Pacey, and all the rest. When it was over, the four survivors looked out, saw that everything was now covered by the sea and the sea monsters were in charge, and Lake Bell said...

"It's a new world."

Fade to black. End credits. "It's a new world?" Yeah, and you guys are fucked. You're stuck on a rooftop in the middle of a new ocean with giant sea monsters all around you. How're you getting out? What about everyone else? Are they dead? Drowned? Sea monster chum? Doesn't matter. Show's canceled. We'll never know. That's good writing. Thanks, guys. Way to reward the 8 million dopes like me who sat around watching every week because there was no Arrested Development or anything else on before Monday Night RAW starts.

That's not even what pissed me off the most. It's the final episode of the series and Leighton Meester doesn't even appear at all. What is that shit?! The hottest girl on the show got frozen out of the finale? Bad enough she hadn't been in a bikini since episode 5. They gave her some more to do in the later episodes where she was on her brother's side instead of antagonizing him, but writing one of the main characters out of the finale was shitty, even for this show.

You know who the real victims are in all this? Sea monsters. Finally, there was a network hourlong show about sea monsters. They were being represented, in prime-time! And the humans dropped the ball. Made a shitty show, got it canceled. Now, sea monsters are back to square one. Sea monsters aren't like cops or lawyers or forensic scientists. When will they ever get another show about them? Probably never. The sea monsters got screwed.

January 16, 2006

Great Britain

I hate the word 'cineaste,' just like I hate the word 'fashionista.' While I'm all for a one-word description of "someone who likes movies/fashion," there have got to be better words to fulfill that function that don't sound quite as gay. I mention this petty grievance because every cineaste <shudder>, including myself, has their particular favorite genre, style, or type of movies. I'm finding more and more that some of the finest movies of the last several years, certainly among the ones I cite as some of my recent favorites, have been coming from the UK. The list includes Bend It Like Beckham, About a Boy, Love Actually, Wimbeldon, Layer Cake, Pride and Prejudice, Match Point, all the Harry Potters, and now Millions. True, Paul Weitz of American Pie directed About a Boy and Match Point is a Woody Allen joint, but even American filmmakers seem to be galvanized by the sense and sensibilities found in UK filmmaking.

A decade ago, British films were primarily thought of as Kenneth Branaugh/Emma Thompson productions or stuffy, Merchant Ivory Oscar bait, but in the last several years, more and more Hollywood-style movies have come out of the UK. And a lot of them, as I named above, are really quite good. I daresay better than their American counterparts in some respects. Hollywood still has the market cornered on big budget CGI monstrocities and superhero pictures, although word has it V For Vendetta could change that tide.

I like the British movies. Crime pictures, romantic comedies, thrillers, fantasies, if it's British, it's probably pretty good and there's a better than average chance I'm gonna like it. (Unless it's a Guy Ritchie picture.)

January 9, 2006

Blame It on the Rayne

Filthy reviewed Bloodrayne and his excellent skewering contained a passage that frankly, I didn't know about or expect from this instant classic:

"It's nice when Lokken and Davis hump for no good reason and in a most awkward way. But, we get to see Lokken's tits a bunch there, and they are very nice."

No kidding! I had no idea. I went on rotten tomatoes and checked a couple more reviews looking for some details and found this on slant.com:

"Splatterific impalements and dismemberment are slobbered over by Boll's herky-jerky camera, which also makes sure to capture Davis's tongue caressing Loken's nipple in extreme close-up during Sebastian's impromptu lesson to Rayne on how to screw like a human."

Well now. Not just bared breasts, but extreme close ups of nipple-licking. You know something, he may be the worst director working today, but Dr. Uwe Boll doesn't seem like that bad of a guy. At least in one respect, he has his priorities straight. You can almost admire him for that. We're talking about Kristanna Loken too, who is considerably higher than Tara Reid (who didn't get naked in Alone in the Dark) and Erica Durance on the C-list piece of ass totem pole because of T3. Hotter too.

To quote Filthy once again: "For the actors, appearing in a Uwe Boll is a declaration that they act for money and have costly addictions that must be fed." So I gotta wonder what Kristanna Loken is hooked on that she not only starred in a Uwe Boll film but agreed to get naked it. Has she been that hard up since T3? Things really that bad?

Bloodrayne bears investigating. This sounds like the worst movie I'm gonna have a reason to enjoy. David Poland has a story up on the troubles Bloodrayne has had finding exhibition. I say, fuck its theatrical release. No Uwe Boll picture has ever grossed more than $6 million in the US and Bloodrayne won't even earn that. Why even kid themselves? Theatres should be encouraged to drop Bloodrayne immediately. The sooner it leaves theatres, goes to DVD and can be Netflixed, the better.

November 30, 2005

FOX hates me, that's what it is.

Martin Riggs: Hate 'em back. It works for me.

Oh, I do. I fucking hate 'em. FOX made their mid-season schedule announcement for January to May, 2006. You can read it, but I'll skip right to the part that got me powerful pissed:

...Other January news includes ...
the move of the new hit drama Bones to Wednesdays at 9:00 PM (following the American Idol results show) beginning Jan. 25...

What is that shit?! Wednesdays at 9pm? You know what else is on at Wednesdays at 9pm? Two little shows called LOST and VERONICA MARS. It has already been a thorny splinter in the ass this season to have Lost and Veronica Mars on the same time slot. As I type this, I'm minutes away from my nightly annoyance of sitting down to watch Lost, knowing full well I'm missing Veronica Mars simultaneously. Now, FOX, in their infinite wisdom, throws the only new show this season I really like into that same day and time.

At stake now is the very survival of Bones. Bones is a show in its infancy. When it premiered before most of the big guns this season, it was the number 10 show in America. These days on its 8pm Tuesdays timeslot, it does respectable ratings. But it's a show people still need to discover. I'm no television expert, but it seems to me pitting Bones against Lost for the very same demographics Lost has locked up is akin to homicide. Unless the American Idol audience happens to fall head-over-heels in love with the witty banter between a forensic anthropologist and an FBI agent, they're probably not going to stick around for Bones. A lot of them are probably gonna switch to Lost, one of the most-watched shows on television, which they likely are already watching.

It's shit like this that drives me up a wall. Unless the unlikely happens, FOX essentially supplied the seeds for Bones cancelation. If Bones somehow makes it to season 2, it will be a fucking miracle. Boo hoo, right? Well, I like the show a lot so it sucks for me.

In a perfect world, I would just start my own network, and it would be filled with shows FOX canceled before their time. My FOX would have Arrested Development, Futurama, Dark Angel, The Inside, Tru Calling, Firefly, and a bunch of others. Who would watch my FOX? Good people. Smart people. People who don't give a flying fuck who the next American Idol is.

November 17, 2005
9:07pm

Returning Point

While poised to do the fanboy flip out for the new Superman Returns teaser, I realized after it was over that the material I was reacting to the most wasn't anything I was seeing as much as what I was hearing. Marlon Brando's voice and John Williams' score were playing me like a violin, bringing back a flood of memories and love for Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie, which Bryan Singer is both sequeling and paying tribute to. As beautiful as some of the shots in the trailer were, I found I was less interested in the visuals, what Singer was bringing, than I was by what Donner brought 28 years ago. When the teaser was over, when I was feeling blown away, the fact was I was being blown away all over again by Donner, Brando and Williams (not to mention the unsung hero of Superman, Tom Mankiewicz, who wrote the words Brando said), and not so much any of the new stuff. Which isn't to say I'm in any way not salivating for Superman Returns, but that teaser more than anything made me want to watch Donner's Superman. So I think that's exactly what I'm gonna do. Right now.

"They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show them the way. For this reason above all, I have sent them you... my only son."

November 17, 2005

Dust and Bones

Bones is back on the air and the new episodes since its World Series forced hiatus have justified why it's my favorite new show. Bones just gets better and better. You will recall Bones is the story of brilliant but culturally-deprived anthropolist/author Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) teaming up with former sniper/FBI special agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) as they investigate homicides in Washington, DC and points beyond. The episode that aired on November 8th, dealing with the murder of a foster child and an examination of the foster care system, was my favorite one to date, although this week's foray into the seamy world of hip hop music and crystal meth dealing was pretty good too. The investigations and forensics work are always interesting and the show is devoid of 'shocks' and plot contrivances for the sake of mindless action or thrills. Bones is not an action-adventure show but much more of a character study. The focus is always on Brennan and Booth, their cooperation, their personality clashes, and their game of one-upsmanship tempered with no small amount of mutual respect. The chemistry betwen Boreanaz and Deschanel is the heart of the show. Both actors seem to relish the roles and playing off of each other. The supporting cast is also pretty damn terrific, abound with surprising background and personality reveals as we get to know each member of Brennan's team better and they begin to trust and form relationships of their own with Booth.

One of the reasons why I really appreciate this show is Bones doesn't dumb down or talk down to the audience. All of the characters express themselves with a full vocabulary; people talk both smartly and intelligently (there's a difference), and the subtle stuff shines through. It takes guts in today's TV climate to have a main character like Brennan who is unapologetically, uncompromisingly intelligent and proud of it. Her intelligence (and let's not ignore her looks) makes her rather sexy. Imagine that, a beautiful, intelligent, professional, capable, admirable woman on FOX, the home of The OC and Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy. In addition, Brennan's ignorance of almost every aspect of pop culture is a runner than has not yet exhausted its ability to glean laughs. Brennan's catchphrase, or the closest thing she has to one, whenever any of the characters makes any kind of pop culture reference is "I don't know what that means." Brennan sees the world primarily through the eyes of science and anthropology. Anything else is largely irrelevant to her. To Brennan, a Mercedes Benz "is supposed to be a nice car." This week's amusing reveal revolved around the fact that Brennan realized she "loves" hip hop because of its "tribal" rhythms, which didn't sit well with "all of the black people" at the hip hop club she was in at the time she said this. Bones has its share of laugh-out-loud moments in every episode, but it's always character-based, and never out-of-place or ridiculous. Lastly, watching Boreanaz not have to be grim, letting him smile and joke and crack wise and be cool, is worth it all by itself. In a feat I didn't think possible, I no longer see Angel when I watch Boreanaz, and I'm sure he's thrilled at finally being able to find a role where he can move beyond the Vampire with a Soul and show his range.

In the final analysis, Bones isn't groundbreaking or revolutionary, nor will it be a cultural iconic milestone like The X-Files or Lost are, but it's smart, solidly-crafted, rewarding television. It's worth watching. FOX ordered a full 22 episode season, and barring any sudden plummet in its respectable ratings, I can at least look forward to more Bones as I shake my fist at FOX for canceling yet another of the best shows in television history, Arrested Development. But that's an angry essay for another time

November 1, 2005

Quittin’ Time

Halloween was a day to call it quits.

Christian quit WWE. He’d been in the company six years. Earlier this year he began cutting the best promos of his life and got himself over as Captain Charisma. He was rewarded with a demotion to Smackdown and a won-loss record even Barry Horowitz and Steve Lombardi would snicker at. His contract was up and there was no promise of a reversal of his fortunes if he signed a new contract. Christian saw the writing on the wall and he quit. Good for him, bad for us.

Unless he shows up in TNA, then it’s good for everyone.

Torrie Wilson also quit WWE yesterday. That wasn’t as shocking or ill-received as Christian leaving. Her husband Billy Kidman was fired over the summer and it was just a matter of time before Torrie would leave. She’d done all she could in the company anyway. She’s been naked twice in Playboy, so there was nothing else for her to do. She never learned to cut a decent promo, never developed any kind of character, and never became an even passable wrestler, which curtailed any last money-making run against Trish Stratus for the Women’s Title. We’ve seen the best of and all of Torrie in her four years with WWE so it’s no big loss.

When Stone Cold Steve Austin learned he was going to have to job to Jonathan Coachman at Taboo Tuesday, he understandably took his beer and went home. You can’t really blame the guy. It’s ridiculous to tell one of the biggest stars in the company’s history that he has to lay down for an announcer, fat Goldust and even fatter Vader. That honor will probably go to World Champion Batista now. The irony might be that the match will be booked for Batista to win, whereas otherwise Stone Cold would have had to lose. Austin has a history of bailing when WWE Creative tries to fuck him over, and he’s been right each time he walked.

They say things happen in threes, so there you go. Quite a Halloween in WWE.

Plus I hear Theo Epstein quit the Boston Red Sox. There must be something in the air. If I hadn’t gone home sick from work, I think I might’ve quit too. Maybe it’s not too late.

October 12, 2005

Who Wants to Be My New TV Show? Redux
Or
Why Am I Still Watching Surface?

Thanks to the baseball playoffs, FOX pulled all their shows for the month of October. No new Arrested Development, Simpsons or my official new show Bones (which was picked up for the full season) until November 1 st and thereafter. A weird side effect of half my shows on a month-long hiatus is I found myself continuing to watch Surface. I watched the first three episodes of Supernatural and then happily dropped it. Despite Carla Gugino, a dwarf, Data, and Roc, I lost interest in Threshold, which I still say is a decent show. It might have even gotten better, I don’t know, I stopped watching. Did I mention I dropped The Apprentice? I’m proud of that one. I’m reality-TV free. And yet I’m still watching Surface.

Why am I still watching Surface? The government conspiracy over the sea monsters-subplot is boring and dull-witted. The subplot about the redneck who thinks his brother who was pulled under the sea by the sea monsters is talking to him is retarded. The teenage boy and his pet sea monster subplot is crap. By default, the subplot about the female oceanographer trying to prove sea monsters exist is the best of the lot, but that’s just because it’s poor pickings over all. The big problem with the show is that the audience is shown the sea monsters over and over – we know they exist – but we have to watch the characters slowly figure out the shit we already know in every episode.

Still, I watch. I tell myself, it’s only to kill the hour on Monday before RAW starts at 9pm. I try to justify it by saying, hey, the show is getter better, which is marginally true. It’s still stupid and laborious, the acting is still ass, but episode four (written by David Greenwalt, co-creator of Angel with Joss Whedon) was an improvement over the shitty pilot. Also, I like sea monsters and I just want to see them full-out killing people and taking over the world. That’s all well and good, but I’ll admit there are two other things that have caught my attention.

Surface star Lake Bell has an enormous rack on her.

And the teenage girl on the show, Leighton Meesters, is pretty hot. They’ve managed to put her in a bikini in every episode for no particular reason and they're starting to do the same to Bell. Works for me.

And there we are. Sure, there are hotter women on other shows, many on better shows, many are better actresses on those better shows. Lost, for instance. And Battlestar Galactica. Why, even Smallville (which by the way, has not been a complete abortion so far this season because Chloe has had a lot to do – but give it time) has hotter women overall between Kristen Kreuk, Alison Mack, Erica Durance, and their slew of groin-grabbingly smokin’ Canadian day players.

There are better reasons to watch a show than two hot girls and sea monsters, but I haven’t got any. I’ll be surprised if I don’t drop Surface entirely when Arrested Development returns from hiatus. But if the show turns a corner and those hot girls start having sex with the sea monsters, like the Kraken wants to with Andromeda in Clash of the Titans, or with each other like the women do in Rome, I might have to reevaluate my commitment to Surface.

Antony, Marc Antony

Everyone’s talking about Daniel Craig of Layer Cake becoming the next James Bond. Craig’s an interesting choice. It’s a departure from Pierce Brosnan’s suave and injects Bond with a gruff toughness the character hasn’t had since Timothy Dalton. I don’t have any problem if Craig becomes Bond, but I think there might be an even better potential Bond out there: James Purefoy, currently portraying Marc Antony in HBO’s Rome, would be a hell of a James Bond. He’s got the good looks, the combination of suaveness and a rough edge. Purefoy would be believable in a tuxedo charming the pants off the ladies by night and then assassinating the supervillain du jour the next morning. As Marc Antony, Purefoy plays a hell of a smug, self-loving, badass with a license to kill – perfect for Bond. Get him out of a toga and off his horse and put him in a suit and in an Aston Martin. I don’t know if Purefoy was considered for, offered the role, and/or turned it down, but he’d be my choice as 007.

September 26, 2005

Calling Me Out

Season 5 of the WWE Fantasy Game starts October 10th. I intend to skip this one out. As the first-ever The-W.com League Fantasy Champion, I have nothing to prove to anyone else in the league. I have nothing to gain by beating them all again. Why, SentonBOMBS is the only guy in season 4 I even respect. Oh, and Lance Jr.

I had communication with SentonBOMBS when he called me out to defend my title. That's not how it works. Number one doesn't come to number two. I encouraged Senton to win season 5 if he can. He probably will. My money's on him or Lance Jr. But I see on the message board that people are signing up for season 5, trying to do what I've already done. Another guy, I forget who, also called me out. Call me out all you want, boys. I'm not the one who has something to prove.

Now, it's tempting to come back. I could come back and beat them all again. I'm sure the returning players learned from both their mistakes and my fortunes. It will probably be a tougher go-around. That's not the deterrent. The bottom line is I just wanna watch wrestling without dealing with Monday night draft picks and counting the number of times someone gets hit with a chair or kicks out of a finisher. I earned it.

Whoever wins season 5, be it SentonBOMBS or Lance Jr. or someone else, can expect to take on The Bluth Company in season 6. I'm willing to come back not just to beat the whole league again but specifically to take on the season 5 Champion. Champion vs. Champion sounds interesting to me. So does a trip to WrestleMania 22 in Chicago if I can win the worldwide game.

For now, though, I'm taking the Champion's prerogative: I'm taking a walk.

September 19, 2005

My Dick’s Not Gonna Suck Itself

The 14 weeks of the WWE Fantasy Game season 4 are over and as I always expected, my team, The Bluth Company, finished in the number one spot in The-W.com League. Say hello to me, the first-ever The-W.com League Fantasy Champion. It was never really a contest. To quote Dean Douglas ten years ago when he won the Intercontinental Title from Razor Ramon by forfeit, “It was easy!”

While I didn’t come close to winning the overall game, I didn’t really expect to. I closed the game ranked 146th worldwide and I’m the only person in my league to finish that high in the overall game. So no, I’m not going to Survivor Series in Detroit on WWE’s dime. All I have to show for my effort and victory over my league is pride, such as it is. I’ll take it, though. While it’s by no means a victory in the grander scheme of things, I still ran roughshod over and now rule The-W.com League with an iron fist, middle finger sticking straight up.

The only team that was a threat to me, The SentonBOMBS, completely blew it in the last week, drafting a primarily Smackdown roster on the same week a RAW pay per view was scheduled. That right there won me the game. Prior to the final week, SentonBOMBS had made significant gains on my lead and was only 40 points from overtaking me. But in the end, I finished with a final score of 2961 points to Senton’s 2755. A 206 point difference is dominance by any measure.

Dominance was the key to my victory. After week 7 in the game, I pulled ahead to number one and kept it in a stranglehold worthy of Triple H. My former adversary, Worcester Wrestling Federation, bungled his draft picks and made a series of boneheaded decisions that cost him any chance of overtaking me. A few other teams squabbled amongst themselves in the top five until SentonBOMBS emerged as the best of the lot, but he was still far behind me in points. To his credit, and due to my being distracted by a few things in the real world in late August, he held fast at number two and chipped away at my lead. When he narrowed our scores to a 40 point difference when week 14 began, I got worried. Until he made his draft picks and leaned on Smackdown while I exclusively drafted only from RAW wrestlers booked for Unforgiven, which would be a windfall in points. Right there, he handed me the game on a silver platter. I won the game instantly at that moment, all that was left was to determine by how many points.

When I set out to play the WWE Fantasy Game and joined The-W.com League, I had but one, simple goal: To prove I was better than each and every person in that league. I did that. I thank no one but myself. I share my triumph with no one but myself. I have nothing but contempt for all the losers I defeated. I will not defend my Championship in season 5. I walk away, leaving them all to choke in my dust.

In all seriousness, I’m thinking about playing again in season 6, but for the next few months, I’m gonna enjoy watching WWE without worrying about crunching numbers. Fantasy daft picks made for strange bedfellows: I spent 14 weeks cheering for Chris Masters and rejoicing every Masterlock Challenge because Masters cost only $2.5-million to draft and each Masterlock Challenge victory would garner points for Winning a Match, Participating in a Specialty Match, Winning a Specialty Match, and Finishing Move Points. See, shit like that needs to stop. I don’t want to worry about that stuff for a while.

Someone else who deserves big ups in the game, besides me, the Champion, is Lance Jr. When the game began 14 weeks ago, Lance Jr. had dug in at number 37th in the league. However, Lance rallied in the second half of the game and made a series of smart draft decisions while most everyone in the game was falling apart. By Summerslam last month, Lance had jumped all the way into the top 10 and outpicked almost everyone in the league, finally finishing the game at number 4. Look at that: 33 spots he climbed. No one else in the league improved so drastically in such a short period of time. An unbelievable performance from the Jr.

And now the only thing left for the first-ever The-W.com League Fantasy Champion to do is celebrate my victory the only way I know how: by writing and posting a long-winded, self-aggrandizing essay about it on my stupid website.

I wish I were more like Ric Flair. Now that man knows how to celebrate winning a Championship.

August 15, 2005

What're you trying to say?

Netflix revamped their recommendations system. Based on the 1396 movies I've rated and my previous rental history, the Netflix website performed new calculations for movies and shows "I might enjoy." After it did the new calculations, the Netflix website made the following recommendations to me:

Babylon 5 season 1
Babylon 5 season 2
Babylon 5 season 3
Babylon 5 season 4
Babylon 5 season 5

Also, it says I might like Farscape. Netflix thinks I'm a big fucking nerd.

Hey Netflix, I like porn too, you know.

Almost Dead Like Me

In retrospect, I like Dead Like Me even more than I let on in what I wrote below. It's been a couple of days since I finished season one and season two isn't due in my mailbox until tomorrow, but I'm getting anxious. I really want to get on with watching more of the show and learning what happens next to my favorite grim reapers.

I was also surprised to find out in my research on the show that Ellen Muth is a member of Mensa and likes to race cars. That's pretty cool. She seems like an actor who would be really interesting to talk to.

One weird side effect of watching Dead Like Me is that I'm starting to imagine seeing gravelings. Gravelings are the invisible, ash-toned gremlins on the show that live in graveyards and cause the "accidents" that get people killed, necessitating the reaping of souls.

This weekend, in the stifling 90 degree heat and humidity, my family and I were doing a Brady Bunch-style project and cleaning out my sister's garage. A recent storm had brought a tree down on the roof of the garage and my father was up on the roof with a chainsaw carving the tree up and hurling the deadwood into the dumpster below. There was plenty of opportunity for a graveling, if one existed, to pop in and fuck one of us up. Turns out my father nearly did a graveling's job on his own. While I was shoveling muck and trash into the dumpster, he dropped a six foot branch of the tree practically on me without a warning yell of any sort. Somehow the tree didn't land on my head and a piece of it only nicked my arm. A bit of a close call, but no harm done. Someone up there was looking out for me. Unfortunately, it wasn't my pops.

August 13, 2005.

Reaper Madness

This week's television on DVD viewing has been all about Dead Like Me. I tore through season one and season two is on the way from Netflix. Dead Like Me was created by Bryan Fuller, who is one of the co-creators of Wonderfalls, and the shows are clearly kindred, except instead of modernizing Joan of Arc, Dead Like Me is about grim reapers.

It took a while for Dead Like Me to grow on me. Since the show is about death and dealing with death, it's a somber, more contemplative show. Grim, obviously. George Lass (Ellen Muth) is in the same basic mold as Jaye Tyler in Wonderfalls, a bright, lazy slacker who gets killed when a toilet seat from the Mir space station plummets to Earth and lands on her. She doesn't cross over to the Heaven or Hell but stays on Earth as one of the many grim reapers who take the souls of the dead. George is only 18 when she dies; her grim reaper co-workers have all been around for decades and take her under their wings. While they come from a similar blueprint, George is angrier, surlier, and gloomier than Jaye Tyler is, and because her character has a more lethargic edge to her, Dead Like Me moves more slowly and is far less whimisical than Wonderfalls, especially considering the subject matter of the series. George takes the entire season to come to grips with her afterlife as a grim reaper as she slowly learns to live life more as an undead grim reaper than she ever did when she was alive.

The episodes lose steam when focus shifted from George and her reaper friends to George's sourpuss mother, her traumatized little sister, and her college professor father, whom it wasn't made entirely clear was cheating on her mother. Whenever the show takes on a comedic tone, it got really good. The reapers inhabit human bodies and have to earn a living like anyone else, so they are often trying to scam the recently deceased or their relatives for money or valuables. I could relate all too well to George's amusing misadventures as she tried to eke out a living at the Happy Time temp agency. Jesus, that's pretty much what I deal with every day.

The supporting cast is terrific, with Mandy Patinkin standing out as the grim reapers' foreman, handing out the assignments, musing philosophically about breakfast foods, and dealing with George's foul-mouthed insolence. Rebecca Gayheart, whom anyone my age will forever know as Noxema Girl and Dylan's dead wife on 90210, is delightful in the first five episodes but her character then disappears, succeeded by Laura Harris, as a Southern Belle actress who died on the set of Gone With The Wind in the 30's, became George's roommate and has a story about blowing every major movie star from Hollywood's golden age. She's a pretty terrific character.

Dead Like Me is a pretty good show. Its relationship to Wonderfalls reminds me a little of Voltron. Voltron had the Lions, which was the best and most popular, but there was also a second Vehicle Team Voltron, which was also good but just didn't have what the Lions had. Dead Like Me is kind of like the Vehicle Team Voltron. Me, I always liked both Voltrons anyway, so it's all good.

August 5, 2005

Some random things I’ve been meaning to write about but I haven’t gotten together until now:

I Wonder Wonder Why The Wonder Falls

We're bobbing along in our barrel
Some of us tip right over the edge...

Wonderfalls is the best show not named Firefly that FOX completely failed. FOX had something very special and they pissed it away – shelving Wonderfalls for half a season, shoving it in the Friday night sci-fi death slot, then changing its night and timeslot before canceling it after 4 episodes. I rented the first disc from Netflix and fell in love instantly with the lead character Jaye Tyler (Caroline Dhavernas), the writing, the acting, the music, everything, the whole show. After I finished the first disc, I immediately ran out to Best Buy and bought the 13 episode DVD series set. The layers and textures of this show are fantastic. Wonderfalls modernizes the Joan of Arc legend and turns it on its ear. It works as comedy, as drama, as romance, as an examination of a brilliant but lazy and disgruntled Generation Y slacker-loser who is forced to engage the world around her, and as a metaphor for the struggle between fate/destiny and free will. Also, talking animals are funny. Caroline Dhavernas is an amazing actress possessing a thousand different facial expressions, each one a minor miracle. Caroline, a huge star in Canada, should have been a breakout star here in the States: she's bright and cynical, beautiful and funny -- the polar opposite of the callow, brainless Neutrogena models found in shows like The OC. Jaye Tyler is right up there with Buffy Summers (seasons 1-5) and Veronica Mars as one of the best young female characters in an hourlong series. The rest of the cast is all kinds of great. The 13 episodes together tell a fairly complete story arc in terms of how Jaye evolves from "fate's bitch" into someone who has earned some control over her fate, but there’s so much more that could have been done. Sadly, unlike Firefly, there will be no Wonderfalls movie, no glorious resurrection. The 13 hours of Wonderfalls is all we'll ever have. The unfairness of it makes me want to vomit with rage.

The list of shows FOX has blundered and canceled in the last few years is becoming legendary: Futurama, Firefly, Wonderfalls, Dark Angel, The Inside. I mean, hell, the first three of those were only some of the finest television shows ever produced. But if canceling their best series opens up more hours for FOX to air such worthwhile shows like So You Think You Can Dance and season 4 of The Simple Life, then what the hell do I know? I'm clearly not some genius FOX executive.

Cocksucker

The other great show I started watching is Deadwood. All I knew about Deadwood was that it’s an HBO series and it was supposed to be pretty good. Deadwood is fucking fantastic. Set in 1876 in the South Dakota Black Hills camp of Deadwood, the show is about real people who existed back then: Sheriff Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen, E.B. Farnum, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane. It’s grimy, violent, and probably as authentic a recreation of the Old West as possible. The acting is off the charts: Ian McShane, who plays Swearengen, the de facto leader of the camp, manages to be ruthless, fascinating and sympathetic all at once. McShane might be consistently turning out the best performances on television. There are no real heroes, although Bullock, played with steel-eyed resolve by Timothy Olyphant tries to be. Everyone is compromised, everyone has darkness in their souls. The huge supporting cast and the dynamics of all the characters is gripping stuff. Deadwood is also the only show out there that makes regular use of the word “cocksucker.”

My beef with HBO Home Video is that they charge an arm and a leg for their DVD sets. Deadwood: The Complete First Season retails for $70-$100. For only 12 episodes! Those cocksuckers at FOX only charge $40 for 22 episodes of Buffy or Angel. Even the Paramount cocksuckers, who charge over a $100 for Star Trek series DVDs give you 22 to 26 episodes. HBO is charging $40 for season one of Entourage, and it's only 8 episodes! Fuck that and fuck HBO. The people at HBO Home Video are a bunch of greedy, price-gouging cocksuckers.

Good Night, Sweet Prince

Five cocksuckers - Rob, his wife, their two friends and I - checked out a free outdoor performance of Hamlet last Saturday night along with a couple of thousand other cocksuckers at Boston Common. The last time I did something similar was 6 years ago when some friends and I watched Citizen Kane in pretty much the same spot on the Common, so it’d been a while. Also, the last time I watched Shakespeare performed live was years ago when I saw Patrick Stewart in a one-man performance of The Tempest off Broadway. The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company modernized Hamlet into the present day so that people were wearing suits, Russian Army style uniforms, and carried guns, although they still used swords. They also ventured away from the text occasionally and worked in new dialogue, most memorably when “crazy” Hamlet read the warning label of a floatation device to Polonius. The overall production wasn’t bad, I was more impressed by the two-level stage and the special effects utilized than the players. I did enjoy the mild, brisk summer night sitting in the park under the stars. That’s the kind of thing I hardly ever do and it was quite enjoyable. Occasionally, when I got bored or couldn’t see what was happening on the lower stage because of all the people on the flat-level ground in the way, I looked up at the stars in the clear night sky and made out the Big Dipper and Little Dipper. Those are mainly the constellations I know, besides Alan the Cowboy.

Pepi: Oh papa Homer, you are so learn-ed.

Homer Simpson: Learned, son. It’s pronounced ‘learned.’

The Half-Blood Prince

You might want to stop reading here if you haven’t read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yet because I’m going to spoil the ending.

The new Harry Potter was pretty fucking good. J.K. Rowling was very focused on driving the main story of Harry learning the secrets of Voldemort’s origins. Finally, Dumbledore moved away from being the distant headmaster, giving cryptic aid but keeping Harry at arm’s length. This time, the Headmaster was clearly playing favorites, giving Harry personal lessons and using the Pensieve to delve into the mysterious past of Voldemort. I don’t know how far in advance Rowling plotted out the backgrounds of her characters, but she effectively drew from the previous books and weaved a tapestry together that made sense and was rewarding for everyone who read (and more importantly, remembers) events that transpired in the previous books. There were no stupid subplots involving house elves this time around. Harry drove every plot and subplot. My main complaint is that Hermione was largely relegated to the background but I can't fault the focus being entirely on Harry’s missions to discover Voldemort’s origin and secrets, learn what Malfoy was up to, and discover who the mysterious Half-Blood Prince is. It never occurred to me the Prince wasn’t Voldemort. Book 6 gave me a lot more of what I’ve been looking for from this series: horny high school kids hooking up and Harry going on secret missions with Dumbledore. I have to say, I’ve been callously waiting for the old man to croak since book one, but I was quite saddened by Dumbledore finally dying and the circumstances of how he was murdered. Snape finally showed his true colors. I really liked the blatant set up for the final book of the series: Harry, Ron and Hermione quitting school and going on a quest to hunt down the final four Horcruxes and kill Voldemort. It’s a pretty bad ass scenario that finally kicks aside the crutch of safety and security of Hogwarts. I love the idea of the core three going out on a hunt to kill the most evil Wizard alive. Rowling said that there will be more deaths so there’s no way Harry, Ron and Hermione are all going to come out of this alive. Of the three, the one I’d be most pissed about dying would be Hermione. If anyone should die, it ought to be a choice between Ron, Harry’s best friend or Ginny, Harry’s love interest. Harry can’t walk out of book seven with both Weasleys in his life. One of them has to go, and I’d cast my lot for Ron, the shitty Wizard and shittier Quidditch player. Of course, Rowling could always kill Harry. That would be a kick in the balls, but it'd also take big, brass balls.

July 15, 2005

A Fool's Enterprise

You ever have one of those days when you’re feeling loose with cash? When you feel like buying something just for the sake of buying something so you're looking for something to catch your eye or a deal to fall into your lap? Those are the most dangerous times to be wandering aimlessly in a mall.

I made a bit of a foolish purchase today. I was tooling around GameStop during my lunch break. I saw they’re moving hardcore into selling used games and DVDs. One wall was all used Xbox games and they greatly expanded their used DVD section. The back of my head immediately warned me this was going to be bad news, but against my better judgment, I floated into GameStop anyway. The used Xbox games didn’t tempt me too much. Most games I like that were on sale used Ive already played and beaten. Plus I have Grand Theft Auto San Andreas which I haven’t played in a couple of weeks; I’m way, way behind where Jeff and Rob are on poppin' caps in gang banger asses.

I started skimming through the used DVD section looking for something cheap that maybe I’ve been meaning to pick up for a while but haven’t gotten around to. Something grey, plastic, and odd looking caught my eye in the S section. And there it was.

Star Trek: Enterprise season one. $59.99 in like new condition with all the artwork and inserts enclosed.

Depending on where it’s sold brand new, this set retails for anywhere from $100-$130. There it was for $60. If I’d taken a step back and thought about this, I may have reconsidered. But the voice of Stan’s dad in the Wal-Mart episode of South Park started ringing in my ear.

Randy Marsh: $60! What an incredible bargain!

What would have been more helpful is if I heard Jeff’s voice ringing in my ear, repeating a favorite and accurate mantra of his:

Jeff: You don’t have to buy something just because you can get a good deal.

Yeah, as a blanket rule, Jeff always makes more sense than Randy Marsh. Anyway, Enterprise even turned out a little cheaper than I expected. I forgot I have a GameStop card that gives me 10% on used games and DVDs so all told, Enterprise came to $56.69. I’m pleased I got a pretty good deal. I’m kind of regretting the fact that it’s for Enterprise. I mean, I always liked Enterprise, even when the show wasn’t very good, which was the first three years of its four year run.

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