Tallguy Productions

Ten years?!?! No!

2009-04-08T05:49:00.003-07:00

Good grief! The Matrix is TEN YEARS OLD!

Rather than babble about the first time that I saw it, and how I didn't WANT to see it, but it was free, and how I then had to drag people to see it and tell them "I KNOW it has Keanu Reeves in it but it's AWESOME!", and even throw in a couple of crying baby stories and how people in movie theaters suck (and that was ten years ago) I'll just point you to XKCD (warning, four letter word): Here. Wow. And I thought I wanted to forget about the Star Wars prequels. I actually HAVE forgotten the Matrix Se-- Um, what was I talking about/

Star Trek: It's out there.

2009-04-07T11:58:00.002-07:00

There's a certain threshold of reality that has been passed now the people have actually SEEN Star Trek. And I CAN'T STAAAAAND IT!

In case you missed it: Here.

Yes. ALL of the spoilers are out now. Hide!

Andy Hallett - Angel's Lorne - RIP

2009-04-02T07:45:00.002-07:00

(Ah, forgot to click "Post".) This was sad. 33! Gadzooks, I know he was under a ton of makeup on Angel, but I had no idea he was so young.

I missed going to a karaoke night hosted by him for charity at one of the Columbus comic conventions. That would have been something.

Maurice Jarre RIP

2009-03-31T08:34:00.002-07:00

Maurice Jarre died day before yesterday. That night the Wee One and I started watching Lawrence of Arabia. (Gosh, that's a fantastic movie.) Jarre's score is such an epic part of the movie it's almost comical in the same way that Steiner's Gone with the Wind is to modern ears. Maybe Star Wars will be like that some day. Maybe it already is.

Jarre was my first film composer. Dad had the LP of Grand Prix. It opens with the orchestra making race car noises. How can a two year-old not love that? But it also has the main theme. A few years later I saw Disney's Island at the Top the World. The theme for the airship Hyperion is total Jarre. It was the first time I ever recognized that sound that Jarre has. Firefox has that same kind of feel, so does Enemy Mine. (I'm sure someone who actually knows composition theory or whatever would say "Oh,
well that's just this this and that." Then I could find all the music
like that that I wanted.)

He's gone now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Jarre Aged 84.

Old guys... IN SPACE

2009-03-27T13:16:00.002-07:00

Not that I post here anymore, but I missed Shatner's birthday on Sunday. And Nimoy's was yesterday! Kirk and Spock are SEVENTY-EIGHT! Wow. So... They were younger than I am when they started making Star Trek. Eeesh.

3D... IN SPACE!

2009-03-26T14:50:00.000-07:00

If I keep this up I might start posting again.

This is just neat: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/3d_resources/index.html The models appear to be all in .3DS, but I haven't tried looking very hard. I should learn to convert meshes. Official NASA 3D!

More BSG thoughts

2009-03-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

Some additional thoughts:

I was really really bummed that they didn't play "The Cylons were created by man" intro (or whatever) one more time. I don't think Bear even used the "pling pling pling pling" Cylon / Six theme in the finale. Oh, and did they drop "a home called Earth" for the last half of the season? I only noticed in the last ep.

Giving credit where credit is due: Of all the crazy stuff they came up with and tried to make make sense in the final two hours the thing that felt the most natural and satisfying was explaining the Opera House visions that Baltar / Six / Laura / Athena had.

Oh, yeah: Um, where's Xena? The last two hours of BSG ever and she's busy? Huh?

Poor Chief. On every level. You have to wonder what his life was like on Earth One?

Bear McCreary: Take a bow, sir. Your work just got better and better. Looking forward to the Season 4 CD. I sing "Roslin and Adama" to my daughter. (She likes it, but not as much as Beethoven's Ninth.)

I'm listening to the soundtracks for S1-3 and it's helping me remember the good parts. There was some great stuff. The three hour pilot. Starbuck down. The Hand of God. Pegasus. Scar. "One year later". The boxing match. Apollo's speech at Baltar's trial. Starbuck's return. The Cylon Civil War. Earth One. BSG took some stupid turns in the last few years and it was a far cry from the perfect that was the first season and a half. But I'll miss her.

So say we all.

Boom boom boom.

And That, As They Say, Is That

2009-03-23T19:02:00.001-07:00

Ok, I've gotten countless emails saying "Where are my BSG reviews?" Wait... Ok, they weren't countless I just hadn't counted them. Um. Three. Whatev.

Where did I leave off? I guess I didn't do any of S4.5. Not great. I might change my mind if I watch it again. I had a much higher opinion of S3 the second go-round. (Except for three or so episodes. Those were still boring as dirt.) I loved the first half of S4. Something about 4.5 just didn't click for me. It wasn't so much that they were making it up as they went along as it was that they were making it up as the went along and it was stupid. There were a couple a serious cop-outs. Nicky not being Tyrol's kid was a real loser moment. Especially since when we found out Tyrol was a toaster Moore assured us that he knew what he was doing and Nicky would be just a significant as Hera. Ah well.

Oh, and for the three people that read this that care? The Final Five aren't immortal. They aren't even especially long lived. They just traveled at light speed for a few thousand years. So for them it was only a year or two. (Months?) Relativistic travel. Go read Speaker for the Dead.

We'd pretty much given up after the episode where Six and iTigh's kid died (keeping Hera special). Or at least I had. The mutiny was ok. The "falling apart battlestar" storyline should have been introduced more gradually. Now we know why they did it but it was still a little too rushed. So yesterday we sat down and watched the last FIVE HOURS of BSG. And were largely un-disappointed. (Unless you're a die-hard Kara/Lee shipper. Sorry, sweetie.)

First off? I want my glowing white spaceships. Grrrr.

It was a bang-howdy finish. And it felt like it should have happened about a season and a half ago. Finding "Earth" actually felt pretty natural. The Hand of God in all of BSG was something that had been sorely missing for a few seasons. As I will constantly grouse about, first season BSG managed to balance the spiritual, the political, and the soap opera with thrilling space action so so so perfectly. It was really missed. It was nice to see the echoes of it here. All Along the Watchtower even felt nicely woven in. Why not?

The big "let's go get Hera" op did not feel anything other than "Heck, it's the end of the show. Let's blow it all up." Sometimes you have to roll the hard six when you know you're not coming back next season.

Nice to see that Wild Bill is still consistently inconsistent. A suicide raptor mission? Who'd be crazy enough to try THAT? Oh, yeah, Wild Bill like nine episodes ago.

Six and Baltar! Yay! I'm a Six/Baltar shipper. Who knew? That was a thread that was never successfully picked up from when Caprica and Gaius met up back on New Cap. It was also nice to see Gaius be smart again. Gaius is supposed to be a jerk, but he's also supposed to be brilliant. They were always much better at the jerk part.

NOT. ENOUGH. STARBUCK. AND. LEOBEN. Come ON! They dropped the ball so much on these two it was like New Years in Times Square. Starbuck meets her destiny and turns out to be an angel and Leoben isn't even there to say "Wow, whatdayaknow?" Bleah.

And the whole Kara Thrace: Harbinger of Doom? Yeah, that was so -- Wait, you can't even dismiss that as "we changed our minds"! They were still nattering on about it an episode ago! How does THAT make sense?!? And how is this the FINAL chapter of the human race?!?

So did anyone else come to the conclusion that Starbuck's dad was the Thirteenth cylon? -- Um, apparently so:

How about fan theories over the show, like mention of a missing Cylon named Daniel? After his name was mentioned, the fans just went wild online. Did you intend for that to happen, and was he supposed to inspire this big fan-driven backstory?

RDM: You know, the Daniel thing is going to be one of the great fiascos of the show, in terms of what fans thought and what the truth was. Because Daniel was not intended to be anything more than an interesting bit of backstory in that episode. And that's how we approached it. It was just a story that Cavil and Ellen tell each other, that sort of goes to the idea of who Cavil was and how deep his resentments were, and his jealous nature - and [we wanted to] do a Cain and Abel allegory. That was all it was. And then after the show aired. I started picking up all this stuff about how fans were obsessing about Daniel and how [people thought] Daniel was Kara's father, and he was the big surprise. I started thinking, "Oh sh-t, slow down people, I don't want you to really get
invested." I usually don't like to go out there and say, "Oh, that's a bad theory," because part of the enjoyment of watching the show is coming up with ideas. But this was gathering such momentum, I didn't want people to be going into the finale and really be waiting for the Daniel shoe to drop, when there's no shoe. It's one of those things where you're inside the show, [and] you look at it, and go one way. And then it's broadcast, and an audience sees it, and then they seize on this piece that you never really anticipated, and then you're sort of amazed. And you're saying, "Slow down, no - come back."

So much for THAT.

The whole "Clyons losing resurrection" plot was still silly. That should have been backed up on disk someplace. Seriously. And WHAT was THE PLAN? Other than a miniseries this fall? If Cavil hated having a human body so much why was he so all-fired hot to get resurrection back? Why not just go back to the Centurions?

But it was really nice to see Tyrol choke the felgercarb out of Tori.

Did Hotdog make it? He'd be the only Nugget that did. EDIT: Looked it up. Well, he wasn't explicitly killed, so I call that a win!

They finally got to kill off Racetrack and Skulls. They even made a gag about it.

"Could we PLEASE not tell her the plan?"

They didn't hook up Boomer and the Chief. Nice one.

I'm glad the Fighting Agathons made it, but I'd have been ok if Helo had bought it fighting for his daughter.

Sam flying the fleet into the sun was a little unsatisfying. Flying off someplace undetermined might have been better. It wasn't a bad send off for the Old Girl as far as it goes, but it was somehow not quite a satisfying as it should have been. But they played the theme. That goes a long way.

Lee got the short end, as he almost always did. And he was upstaged by Kara the Friendly Ghost, as he almost always was.

The most perfect and natural and easy part of the whole episode was Laura and Bill. (iTigh and Ellen wasn't bad either.) And the dying leader lead her people to Earth. With the help of a crazy maybe dead viper pilot. Bill at Laura's grave was one of the best images of the whole series.

Annnnnnd the Six in Baltar's head and the Baltar in Six's head were ANGELS???? What the frak?

Well, there's still Clone Wars.

30 Years Ago There Were Those Who Believed

2008-09-17T17:45:00.000-07:00

Thirty years ago I was wandering through a new mall in a new town (Valley West Mall if I recall correctly) and in the hobby shop I saw new models for something called a Colonial Viper and a Cylon Raider. Being the young lad that had just moved from New England I wondered why fighters from the American Revolutionary War had space ships.

At my grandparents house we gathered at the TV set and watched this new show. "There are those who believe that life here began out there..."

Thirty years later I have to say that it holds up much better than one might expect. The effects are top notch. I remember my mother being somewhat amazed (alarmed?) when I spotted John Dykstra's name in the opening credits and noted that he did the special effects for Star Wars! (Yep. Been a nerd for a looooong time now.)

The THEME! I'd be hard put to come up with a cooler TV theme. Some come close (Wild Wild Wild West). The music over all was quite good. (We'll all just skip over "It's Love, Love, Love". It was the 70's.)

The cast was good. Starbuck was the highlight of the original series, too.

Yeah, it's really hokey. (REALLY.) I guess you can look at it and say "So twelve planets full of humanity are mercilessly slaughtered and then those that didn't die are shoved into a rag tag fleet looking for a place to survive? Sounds like happy Sunday night entertainment to me!" (See "Moore, Ron".) But what really strikes me watching the two hour movie (that ran for THREE hours with commercials - that was a late Sunday night for a fourth grader.) now is that this was a story about The Good Guys facing off against an Implacable Foe who, when offered peace, turned around and visited total genocide (helped by an insidious insider and a credulous political class). This was not only 1978 when that sort of thing was not a popular notion, but on the very night of the signing of the Camp David Accords. Wow. I can see why Moore was drawn to taking a more serious bent with nuBSG. Sometimes I think it would be nice if he took a less "people just suck" attitude.

BSG was our Must See TV for the rest of the season. Yeah, there were some not so swell eps (wait, who gets shot down and has to make nice with the natives this week?). But there was also Gun on Ice Planet Zero and Lost Planet of the Gods (where WOMEN *gasp* became fighter pilots! Yep, moving ahead fast in 1978). Commander Caine was SOOOO much cooler back then. I'm still waiting for the Crystal Ships to show up on nuBSG. And Fred Astaire was Starbuck's DAD!

Thirty years? Well frak, that doesn't seem very long at all.

Terminator - 202 - Automatic for the People

2008-09-16T17:10:00.001-07:00

Ok, so remember last year when getting new identities was a big deal? Now John not only just gets to show up at school (a new school? His old school?) but he also ditches at will and nobody cares? What happened with the girl who threw herself off the roof because "everybody saw" and they showed us at the beginning of forty-six episodes last season? (Now someone's going to tell me how they resolved that and it was important. S'ok, I can handle it.)

Ok, welcome back to this week's babbling about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I not be sure if it be time to talk like a pirate yet cause it's errrrrrrrly or if it would be more fittin' like to wait until the tide turns and the next recap bein' afterrrr Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrrrrrr.

Still good. Not as good as last week but far better than many season 3 episodes of BSG. And we got to see the alley from The Terminator for all of about four seconds. But it was there. And it still had a bum. (He didn't ask about a bright light.) They picked up some old threads and did fun things with them. We're still in our spooky "Can Cameron be trusted?" vibe. Which they have to be careful with because right now they're calling wolf. We follow up with Charlie and Ellison. Solid, and probably more going on than I was left feeling at the end. Oh, and we have a little more idea as to the shape of the Future War.

I miss Sarah doing the narration. Just saying.

And now, matey, there be spoilers ahead.

So we get the new JC. (Er, John Connor.) Gosh, he's sulky. But they've got that cool password when they call each other, so that's nifty. Might not be too tough to crack, but at least they're thinking a little bit. The new girl friend is really, well I was going to say weird, but right now she's pointless. I do like that John is still very heavily aware that he's never going to have what is commonly called "a life". It's never going to end for him. They can hit that note as hard and as often as they'd like as far as I'm concerned.

I can't think of the last time I've seen this much Christian imagery on TV (in a more or less positive light). And in sci-fi adventure no less! And because of where they're hiding, lots of it is Catholic. Huzzah! I was wondering what religion is like in 2029. Derek prays. That's an astonishing detail. (To me, any way.) Of course, this is Derek (and Kyle) Reese mk. II, since they both got to be born AFTER Judgment Day since the timeline shifted around.

Not much interesting Cameron this time around. For a moment I thought that the T1000 was being Cameron. That day will come, I'm sure. I did like when she told John essentially that he couldn't be trusted. Almost as good as when she said last season that she didn't have to listen to John because he wasn't John yet.

It's amazing that you can have a character with her name on the show, but I still worry about her. I spent about half the episode dreading what was going to happen to Sarah. You really get into her head: Is this how it happens? Is this when she starts to die? Does she really only have six or seven years to live? (Seven seasons? They may have thought this through more than I thought...)

Derek isn't quite as loose-cannon-y as he has tended to be. He almost seems... Mellow. It's interesting to learn more about the war. That there are resources to be had and positions to defend. BUT...

Skynet has SEVERAL nuclear reactors now? What does this mean for the future?

Hey look, it's Shirley. Don't blink! I was surprised when they replaced nuclear science guy with a normal Terminator, not a T1000. They haven't quite revisited how scary those things are.

Scary dying future man (who carried a bullet inside him through time - nice) - how did he find out about The Plot? And who wrote all the future stuff in blood? What was it? More power plants? Hope this becomes clear later, cause I didn't quite follow it at all.

Ellison is almost as miserable as John. I wonder what will go on with Mr. and Mrs. Charlie.

Just occurred to me: Sarah's parents are dead (well, mom is) but Kyle and Reese's folks might still be around somewhere. That interests me.

Yep. Still loving this show.

The Device Has Been Modified

2008-09-14T20:49:00.001-07:00

Can you believe Portals is over a year old? This makes me want to play it all over again. I'll be nicer to the Weighted Companion Cube this time. Honest!

9/11 2007

2008-09-11T05:38:00.002-07:00

This will be the third year I'll make a 9/11 post. And it will be a blissfully uneventful day.

September 11th, 2002 we knew SOMETHING would happen. The 2004 political conventions it was pretty obvious SOMETHING would happen. Certainly the elections SOMETHING would happen.

This year's conventions went by with a yawn regarding security. Flying has become a modern day nuisance. Nobody has tried to blow up their shoes in years.

Thank you Mr. President and all of the men and women who have made that possible for the last seven years. That day the idea that this wouldn't happen again (and soon) was almost unthinkable. But we've done it so far. God willing, we will manage another seven.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.1 Samson and Delilah

2008-09-09T19:23:00.005-07:00

Happy Birthday, Star Trek!

Um, I mean, Oh look! A post! There must be television! No I will not blog my reviews of Bones. And if you're lucky I'll leave you out of my opinions on House, M.D. What else am I going to talk about, politics?

No! Wait! Come back! I was kidding! (For now.)

So here we are. Back for a second season. Please don't cancel my show! It's so good right now! I tell you, that was some soothing, relaxing, low key television. (Ok, maybe compared to the later seasons of Angel.) Yikes!

This was Terminator. Last season there were some obvious and mostly successful riffs on The Terminator and Terminator 2. IMHO they did well with it because they managed to stay surprisingly faithful to the continuity of the movies while they were busy coming up with their own stories. It was one of my favorite things about the show last year. Last night (we'll see if I really post this on Sept. 9) tapped into the "it's going to kill ALL of us! RUN!" panic that the first movie did so well.

Bear McCreary continues to be the hardest working composer on TV. Didn't realize that the singer in the beginning was Shirley Manson. Makes sense, of course. (She's SCOTTISH?) And yes, Bear, I immediately thought of the "When the Man Comes Around" montage. But it worked. Now give me my soundtrack of the BSG midseason closer. Thanks.

Alright, mateys! Here be spoilers!

Ok, I didn't see this coming at all. I was thinking we'd have a whole "how do we put Cameron back together" storyline. I didn't think that the car-bomb was just the beginning. And who knew Summer Glau could be so scary? And then she turns around and make you say "Awwww, you're not REALLY going to chip her, are you John? ARE YOU?" That was horrible. In a really great way. I was a little disapointed at the relatively neat wrap up. I had a few resolutions of my own. It seems that this will be hanging over them for a while though. And I really like that Cameron thinks this was a terrible idea. I love that about her: That she's more ruthless than Sarah.

I think (I hope) this is where John comes into his own. This is where John gets his own agenda. This is where John starts to know that nobody can lead him except him. That his judgment is best. (And if it doesn't involve Cameron or MAYBE his mom, he might be right.) Last year I thought John was the weak link of the show. Any time I think that I might be able to beat up John Connor, that's bad. (Furlong was a punk, but he was feisty.) This "new" John might be fairly tough. And I really don't think that's going to sit well with Uncle Derek.

Not much Ellison. That's too bad. I really really like Ellison. Looks like he's going to get his own special hell this season.

Ah, we have a budget this season? So bring on the T1000s. I'm not as crazy about that idea as I might be. But it does continue the time-travel tangle that has made this show so much fun so far. Not sure about Shirly yet. Did they show really need a Lex Luthor? But we'll see.

Sarah. Yeah, Sarah still rocks. Sarah is still harder than nails and makes PBJ sandwiches. It looks like she's taught John well. I'm sure that's not going to go well at all. Her name is on the titles, but it might be the John Connor show this season. But who knows?

Um, see you round, Charlie.

Ok, that was a fun hour. What's next? Oh, that's right, you're going to get cancelled in four episodes. (What? Of course I'm an optimist. Why?)

All along the watchtower!

2008-07-21T19:57:00.003-07:00

No, not that one.

Good grief! It's WATCHMEN! Seriously! I don't think there's anything (other than some of the particulars of the costume design, and even then it's close!) that isn't a frame out of the comic book. They're even keeping the logo the same. I would think that this is the sort of trailer that if you didn't know the comic you'd say "Um. Ok. That looks... Busy." But if you DO know the book, every frame sets you tingling. Especially Osterman in the disintegration chamber. That got me more than the crystal city on Mars. Oh, and of course the Comedian getting tossed out the window. Yowza.

(For the unwashed, look here.)

p.s. Googling for the image at the top of this post led me to this. Small world, eh?

Thirty-nine!

2008-07-21T19:55:00.004-07:00

Forty years ago the world saw the last July before man would land on the moon. (Sorry, it slipped my mind yesterday.)

Gotta get me a good Apollo calendar going this year. If I'm nice, I'll include the Soviets.

Meanwhile I'll be holding onto thirty-nine with my fingernails.

Star Wars at 30 - Sorta

2008-07-20T10:03:00.003-07:00

Ahhh, an historic day. Doesn't all the hoopla about Star Wars turning thirty seem like a really really long time ago? Well over a year, yeah?

Well, thirty years ago TODAY, Star Wars finally quite playing at the Cine Capri.

Sadly, I would not be a resident of the Valley of the Sun for another 23 days. Ah, well. It would be 15 years later before I saw Star Wars on that storied screen. And by then it would say "A New Hope". But Han would still shoot first.

BSG 412: Revelations

2008-07-07T20:06:00.003-07:00

It's over. Well, at least until 2009. Rumors abound that they may be making more movies like Razor. Hrmm.

But for now the cast and crew are having parties and kicking back on the beaches, 'cause they're DONE.

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! Hooooo-gosh, SPOILERS!

Cylons are outed. Earth is found. Gee, it seemed more complicated than that.

See? I TOLD you he should have told Bill.

This had one of my favorite scenes in all of BSG: Lee trying to pull his father back together. I love the character relationships on BSG. Helo and Starbuck. Tigh and Bill. Laura and Lee. But none of them hold a candle to the Adama family. Ok, I'll include Starbuck in that. But father and son... Whoo. Almost all of my favorites are those two. The very first scene of BSG I ever saw was "I didn't know this was about picking sides." (Bastille Day, season 1.)

My other favorite thing in this ep was Tyrol. He is SO relieved that they found him. He's giddy. Aaron Douglas has knocked every pitch they've given him out of the park.

For some reason, I eally dug the costumes at the end (the field jackets). Man, it looked COLD there. Brrrrr.

Starbuck and Sam. Wonder how that's going to go? Oh, just went back and re-watched the end. Not well. (Ok, Kara is less crazy than Tori. Yikes.)

Kind of like the season three ender, this is kind of two episodes. It's the human / cylon impasse and it's finding Earth. They managed to wring every drop of tension they could out of both.

Speaking of Tori, wow, I thought Baltar held a grudge. Laura tells her to comb her hair and stop sleeping with Baltar and suddenly Tori's ready to feed her to the Cylons. Balanced.

The thing that kills me is that they're making the cylon / human alliance work. They really are. Mind you, here in the U.S. we've taken more than a hundred years to get over slavery and the civil war. Wonder how long it takes to get over a twelve planet genocide?

LEE! Aww, I love it when Lee gets to be cool. And why doesn't Starbuck pick up a phone? (Oh! The drama!)

There was a horrible, horrible moment when I was afraid that Starbuck's viper was going to be the fifth cylon. It went along with the silly hope that if it was it would talk like William Daniels.

Then the jump to Earth. Starring Bear McCreary. Ohhh that was good. If you go look at his blog you see that it was every bit the work that it sounded like. They're going to make me wait another year and a half for the CD, blast them.

You just held your breath waiting for the other shoe to drop. You knew this wasn't really the end. There's another ten episodes! I liked that they're not making Earth the end of the show. Myself, after all of this, I need a little more closure than that. (They continue to make BSG the anti-Voyager. Or the Voyager that should have been.)

But tonight you got to soak up some wonderful, wonderful performances. You knew that these people would tell their children "This is when we found Earth. This is where I was. This is who I was." Bill and Lee Adama were in CiC as father and son, with Laura Roslyn as leaders that are and leader to be. Karl and Sharon Agathon were together with Hera. Gaelen Tyrol and his son Nicholas. Kara Thrace held vigil at the wall of the fallen (as did others) with Kat's photo. Sam Anders stood with her. Saul Tigh was alone.

This morning I rewatched the end. You knew it was coming. You knew SOMETHING was coming. And then that long, slow pan over our cast. And it's pretty much the whole cast. Bill looks like he wants to trash his office again. Laura looks like she should have seen this coming. D'anna wants to explain, but can't (she's REALLY dismayed and looks like she feels somehow responsible). Helo and Athena are together. Baltar is alone. Tori reaches out to Sam! (Away, evil wench!) Six goes to Tigh, not Baltar. Leoben looks like a man who has just had all of his faith taken away from him by force. Tyrol is alone as well. And Starbuck looks like she was lied to.

See you next year.

So say we all.

Begin Bombing

2008-07-07T20:05:00.000-07:00

Yay! Look at what I found!

WaaaaAAAAAlll-E

2008-07-06T20:40:00.002-07:00

LATE! Everything's LATE! (I've mostly written my BSG finale review. Good thing I'm not getting paid for this. Then again, if I had been this would have been on time. And had better punctuation.)

Since I've written this a week ago there has been a rather amusing WALL-E lash/backlash. Go look for it. Laugh. You'll read it again in a minute: We get FTL. We win.

Ah. Well, I've made my first mistake this morning: I read Lileks before I wrote my WALL-E review. Oh, well.

PERFECT. Like, Incredibles perfect. Like, when do I get to see it again perfect.

Ok, elephant in the room time: "Hey, ain't you a planet hating Republican?" Why, yes. And that's one of the many things I LOVED about this movie. I've been muttering somewhat cynically (it's what I do best) that this movie depicts a world where we've "used up the Earth". Well, that's supposed to be the end, isn't it? Nope. We are able to move a goodly chunk of the populace into very comfortable space while we put the Earth back together. I call that a win! But now I've seen the movie, it's even BETTER! It isn't a BSG "Oh, it sucks to be out in space and everyone is DEAD." No! Everyone is ludicrously comfortable! So much so that we're supposed to 'tsk tsk' at them for their obviously over-done comfort! For a rampantly consumerist society, they've managed to develop an enclosed environment that thrives at "MORE MORE MORE!" levels for SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS. (I'm sure there's a dark side: Soylent Green - in a cup!) And the other thing that no-one has touched on? They're all NICE. We only meet a few people in the movie, but they're all friendly, well meaning, and, ok, maybe more than a little bored. We should hope for such a future. Oh, and we've apparently developed CRAZY good FTL. Not bad for a dying species. (Oh, and they all seem to be, well, American. *cough*)

Plus, it's NOT global warming. It's not carbon footprints. It's not the ozone layer. (It's a little Haliburton.) It's good old fashioned post-apocalyptic pollution. It's not a warning, it's a McGuffin. (And it's GORGEOUS.)

But enough of all that. Oh, this is a wondrous film. WALL-E has heart and soul to spare. He's just so... so... well, blast it, he's CUTE. He's everything anyone gets into animation for in the first place. There was much concern (still voiced by people who haven't seen the movie) about a kids movie with no talking for the first 40 minutes or so. Hey, there was no talking in Tom and Jerry or the good Pink Panther cartoons. Or Roadrunner for that matter. And this is sublime. In ten minutes alone you'll get joy, wonder, laughs, and melancholy despair. For a start. The last few days bits of the movie have been popping back into my head. (WALL-E before he has his morning sun, for example.) Some of the beginning almost has an "I am Legend" vibe.

The trailers for the movie are just about right. There are a couple of shots that I'd take out. But 1) they lie to you (my favorite trailer technique) and 2) they show you enough to get you into the movie and hold a LOT back. So this will be brief because the movie moves into spoiler territory rapidly. There's a stretch of the movie that pretty much is just the first trailer. (WALL-E hitting himself in the head with the paddle-ball is still making me laugh.)

I can't go into much about EVE (certainly not All About EVE) without spoilage. But I love that it's the GIRL who is the "kill everything that moves psycho robot". Heh. Again, it's the Superman / Lois Lane thing: It's not that EVE is THAT lovable. It's that WALL-E loves her SO much. The scenes on Earth after EVE meets her "directive" are some of the sweetest in movies ever. You'll never look at Pong again without giggling.

Gee, WALL-E starts up with a Mac sound and EVE looks like a flying iPod. Who owns this company?

Pixar continues to be Story Writing 101. Everything pays off. The movie runs on rails. It's so tight it squeaks. Why don't THESE guys write an Indiana Jones movie? I'm sure this will be even better a second time around when you know where it all goes.

This is Pixar doing sci-fi. Ohhhhhhhh! It's so BEAUTIFUL!

From Wikipedia: "After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt they "had really achieved the physics of believing you were really under water, so I said 'Hey, let’s do that with air.' Let’s fix our lenses, let’s get the depth of field looking exactly how anamorphic lenses work and do all these tricks that make us have the same kind of dimensionality that we got on Nemo with an object out in the air and on the ground.'"[5] Producer Jim Morris added that the film was animated so that it would feel "as if there really was a cameraman".[8] Dennis Muren was hired to advise Pixar on replicating science fiction films from the 1960s and 1970s, including elements such as 70 mm frames, barrel distortion and lens flare.[9][10] Scale models were made for Muren, which he used to teach Pixar."

Muren! The Old Man of ILM! Jinkies! Pixar is the CG studio that is trying to look like MOVIES instead of video games. Stanton is slated to do John Carter of Mars next. How Pixar will pull that off, I have no idea. But at least it will look like David Lean instead of Michael Bay.

And the sound. It's Ben Burtt. The man who gave us lightsabers and R2-D2. Who re-popularized the Wilhelm Scream. Oh, all movies should sound like this. Thirty years later and he's still amazing.

And if you're as obsessive as I am, stay for the credits. It's cool. Not Iron Man or Pirates cool. But cool.

So, yeah, I liked it.

Go.

BSG 411 - The Hub

2008-06-14T06:32:00.002-07:00

SPOILERS. Good grief, go watch the show for crying out loud! What else do you have to watch? (I have my shiny new John Adams DVDs waiting for me! Huzzah!)

This is almost it. In fact, by the time you read this, it's over until next year. Wonder what horrible cliff-hanging atrocity they'll visit on us this year? (Some of you know. Soon, I too will know. Arrrgh.)

So, it was expected, but it was still cool. "Two days ago". We get to see what happened to our wayward babes. The hybrid takes the gang hub hunting. Interesting mission for the hybrid to be on. Wonder what her motive is? Airlock hooks up with old, dead friends. GB preaches to the toasters and then goes to confession. Helo finds the weirder parts of being married to a Cylon. D'Anna gets in touch with her REALLY sarcastic side. Husker doesn't get to finish his book. Jane gets to write some funny stuff for Airlock and GB.

Skipping ahead, they did it. They really did it. They got rid of Cylon resurrection. (Mind you, I'd think they'd be working their shiny toaster butts off to rebuild it, but I'll go with it for now.) And Helo managed to do it. ("You are not married to the entire Eight production line." Hee!) Good for Helo. Yes, you're guilt ridden. Sorry about that. Yes, you're very, very decent. We know that. Congrats on turning down the Eight that isn't Athena.

Elosha! Awesome! (Wish they'd bring back Billy. Maybe on her next vision.) I think that we've seen the end of the show, right here. Galactica is empty because everyone has left (probably for Earth). It's just Bill, Lee, Kara, and Laura. If you watch B5 you probably get this right away. Or maybe not. We'll see next year, won't we?

Laura and Baltar yelling at the hybrid was hilarious. Very Giles and Anya. (It's a Buffy writer, I make Buffy references.)

Mary McDonnell is terrific. The total paralysis she shows when Baltar tells he that he gave the Cylons the access codes. She knows that she HAS to do something. Something awful, irrevocable, and immediate. And she's so overwhelmed by this that she can't even breathe. And then she saves his life. This will be interesting to say the least.

Bye bye red-shirt Pike. We knew you were for it sooner or later.

Um. Did they just kill Boomer?

Three comes out of the box and is mad at everyone. Gotta love that. Baltar used to be that kind of unpredictable. I miss that. We'll see where it goes. Laura the final Cylon: Didn't buy it for a second, Ron. Not in the preview. Not in the show. Better luck next time.

So I wonder when / if they'll start showing a Cylon survivor count? And if all the Cylons are "mortal" now, will they continue to reproduce? There are two-and-a-half human/cylon children now, right? (More if you count Lee. Kidding.)

I'm not sure how Laura thinks that she can contain Three in the middle of a baseship. Seems the odds would be the other way. But that's our girl, always the gutsy move. What's going on with the non-plotting sixes?

Still no Leoben. I cry fowl.

"I love you."
"It's about time."
So say we "awwwwwww".

BSG 410 Sine Qua Non

2008-06-12T20:26:00.002-07:00

Look, Ma, LATIN!

Wow. I had an easier time keeping track of this show when it wasn't as good. Huffin' and puffin' to get curren'(t).

SPOILERS. But good grief, I'm writing these so late (and posting even later) that you should be caught up by now. The show might even be over by this time. (I'm a small voice from the distant past and the like.)

So the president and co. have been whisked away on a Cylon basestar. Wild Bill has to find out what happened. The red-shirt from Demetrius finally buys it (under unseen circumstances). Lee becomes president thanks to the return of Romo "Badger" Lampkin. And Husker reads a book.

Nicely done guys. Sometimes it's cool to just let a cliff-hanger simmer. We also realize (She Who is My Wife and I) that we had NO idea who was on the baseship. (I'll still call them baseSTARS thanks much.) We swore up and down that Starbuck was still on board. Guess not.

So we get to see everyone in the fleet do what we did at the end of the episode last week. "AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!" And then we get to see the aftermath of events that we didn't even get to see. With any really cool luck, we WON'T get to see them. Just cause I'm ornery that way. I'd rather catch up to everyone in real-time rather than have the time-worn (oh so worn) BSG tradition of "48 hours ago".

Hey look, Wild Bill is going crazy over people he loves again. I think Laura is the bomb too, but will you stop risking the whole human race for your personal interests? Just saying. I'm looking forward to the episode where it's one of his closest loved ones vs. the safety of the fleet and he actually chooses the fleet. He's like a really stoic version of Helo when you get right down to it. Of course, that one time it would be Lee. Poor Lee.

ROMO LAMPKIN! Huzzah! Ok, how many people do you know that see imaginary people, robots, pets? Not many? Well, on BSG I think that if you're NOT seeing imaginary people (robots, pets) that you're the odd one. I think they could have done just fine without the Fight Club cat.

Dead Natalie. Very sad. If I was a more bitter, petty man I'd say "Here's that mortality you were after!" And there are almost consequences for Athena. Very nearly. So close.

So, did the resurrected sixes, twos, and eights get boxed by the Cavils? (Did Natalie die before or after they found the remains of the hub? Did she resurrect just in time to be blown up?)

There has been a depressing dearth of Leoben in these eps. Are we ever going to see a Simon or a Doral again? Other than right before they say "All Will Be" (heh heh HA HA HA HAAAAA HAAHHAAA!) "Revealed"?

iTigh is acting with his whole eye this ep! Michael Hogan rocks. Still think he should tell Bill. So Admiral Tigh, huh? (And why is he Admiral? Why not Commander? Why is Bill still an Admiral?) And it doesn't seem like the end of the world like last time. Wow. He should still tell Bill. (In case you missed it - and I did - Tigh was wearing his Admiral's pips a couple of weeks early a few episodes ago. Oops.)

Where's Anders? Anyone seen Tyrol lately?

President Leland Adama, eh? Well. This will be exciting. Especially when (if?) Laura comes back. It's interesting the WAYS that the Colonial government is falling apart. Laura does what she wants (and can) for the protection of the fleet and the whole quorum is up in arms. Leaks to the press, disregard for her authority, etc. But when Wild Bill just flat out will not deal with a civil leader (Thomas Zarek) then everyone scrambles to throw the poor sod overboard. So let me get this straight: Laura is president again, not by election, just because she's not the one who dragged them all through New Caprica. Yet despite this popularity, everyone is deeply troubled by her "unchecked power". But when it comes time to put the guy who's really in line of succession for the job, that won't stand. I know it's been a long hard four years, but this is the group that put a school teacher, 43rd in line of succession, in the office of the presidency, not because they were happy about it, but because it's the rules. Now they're going to give the job to Lee "my daddy gave me a battlestar" Adama? I'm a little confused over the will of this people and this legislature.

So Wild Bill isn't going to be Admiral anymore. (Kind of solves the whole "he won't talk to Zarek" problem, doesn't it?) "I can't live without her." Awwwwww. Nice to see Bill in the pilot jammies. "Nothing but the rain." I don't know why that line gets me every single time. Godspeed, Husker.

So say we all. Boom boom boom.

BSG 409 Guess What's Coming to Dinner

2008-06-10T21:00:00.002-07:00

Aw, this show just rocks. Fourth season is still (IMHO) firing on all cylinders.

BTW, um, SPOILERS. If you haven't seen the eps, this is not the place
to be looking. Go get the DVDs and then watch the season four eps on Sci-Fi.com. We'll wait. (Sci-fi only has the latest five eps up. Sorry.)

Yes, this will be the third review I'm writing without actually posting anything. Have to fix that. (If you're reading this, I've already posted the other two, problem solved.)

I'm already mocking "All Will Be Revealed" at least as enthusiastically as I did "And They Have a Plan". Just so's you know.

This ep not only had me on the edge of my seat, it had me off of it. iTigh saves the day! Huzzah!

Ok, RDM, the "final four" thing has been a lot more interesting than I ever thought it would be. Especially since you pulled it all out of your backside last season. Kudos.

These episodes are just popping. If they can keep this pace for a whole season we're in for such a ride. It's like the last ten minutes of season 2 ALL the time! They've pretty much chucked the idea of getting new viewers in the last year, so it's ALL for the fans. There's a lot of "connect your own dots" this season. If Tyrol and Baltar are in a scene then it's up to the viewer to remember all of the baggage those two have.

Also, they've gotten back my trust this season that if they don't hit a story every week that they WILL come back to it.

When Demetrius FINALLY jumped and then jumped right into the path of a viper I almost knocked over a table throwing my hands in front of my eyes. THAT's good TV.

The Cylon plots are the opposite of the Cylons last season. i.e. INTERESTING. Every few minutes there's a twist you didn't see coming. And very few of them are stupid. Even better: Just when you think they will be stupid they aren't. Six's double-cross. Well, that's predictable. Wait, Six's DON'T double cross? Whoa!

Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura! They're finally addressing that this isn't a stupid game for power and prestige. Or at least that Laura knows it isn't. 39,673. And FALLING. And Lee seems to be figuring it out again. Go Lee. And the scene with Tory. Heh. Take THAT you toaster!

The show only works best when Laura and Wild Bill talk to Kara and Lee. Seriously. Loved the scenes with Kara and Laura and with Lee and Laura.

It's funny, when they don't use Lee enough I think he's being shafted (and that it's Starbuck's fault). When they don't use Wild Bill I think they're letting him "simmer". Maybe it's because when he IS on screen these days he's kind of a "presence". It's not about him, it's about who he's with. He feels like he's biding his time. It works. Plus they're just setting him up to find out that iTigh is a toaster. Poor Bill. (Three Bills on this show. None have fared too well.)

So the "four" know that the Cylons know that they're there (and now the Colonials do too). And now the Three will out them. So who's going to try and screw THAT up? My money's on Tory. This will get SOOOOOO ugly.

Felix. The latest entry in "TV stars who sing". Nominee for "most messed up man in the fleet" (a favorite against stiff competition). Biggest "Awwwww" moment of the ep: Baltar looking in on Felix. SOOO much better than when Laura ignored Lee for a season and a half.

Hey look! It's ADxA! Don't blink or you'll miss her.

Not enough Leoben for my taste. But he's on a MISSION, so that's cool.

Now THERE's a cozy crew on the basestar. I'm sure it will all go well.

It's a basic rule: Don't give a Boomer a firearm on Galactica. But it was a nice moment with Athena and Tyrol. Tyrol has SO much dignity (in a don't mess with me or I'll kill ALL of you! kind of way) these days. Poor Natalie.

"JUMP!" See ya in two weeks, suckers!

Oh, and by the way, SO SAY WE ALL. (Boom boom boom.)

John Adams - w00t!

2008-06-10T05:56:00.002-07:00

Netflix will be sending us HBO's John Adams mini-series today. I'm am many orders of magnitude more excited about this than I was about Indiana Jones and the Big Green Screen.

LAAAAAZERS!

2008-06-10T05:54:00.001-07:00

Boeing: They love to fry, and it shows!

So, where do they go for their picutre of laser technology? Goldfinger? A phaser? A blaster? No! They go RIGHT for the DEATH STAR! Yowza! I think they overestimate their chances.

Alexander Courage 1919-2008

2008-05-30T06:07:00.000-07:00

Very sad news.

One of my favorite "Sandy" Courage stories (also a good Jerry Goldsmith story) was when Goldsmith wrote Star Trek: The Motion Picture he was told that he didn't have to use the original theme at all (and he didn't want to). As the release date got close the Powers (whether this was Robert Wise or not, I don't know) decided that it ought to be in there SOMEWHERE. As it happened the orchestrator for TMP was... Alexander Courage! So Goldsmith threw it over to him and he used as the music for the Captain's logs. (One of the most charming decisions in that film. Long on gorgeous, a little short on charm.) As Goldsmith tells it, he learned his lesson. He opened every Trek film he composed afterwards with Courage's theme.

Jeff Bond (author of the Music of Star Trek) has more to say: http://trekmovie.com/2008/05/28/star-trek-composer-alexander-courage-dead-at-88/

Check out the documentary on Courage hosted by John Williams!

Excuse me, I need to go listen to The Cage and Superman IV.

Godspeed, Mr. Courage.

The Man with the Hat is Back...

2008-05-27T20:51:00.002-07:00

...and this time he's bored. Well, ok, maybe not THAT bad. But still.

You know, I remember coming out of Temple of Doom with a nagging feeling of disappointment. (I'm not nearly the Temple of Doom hater that most of the world is. I understand the problems. If I haven't already posted the ups and downs of the Indy films - and I think I have - then I'll get to it directly.) But I don't remember feeling the weight of it while I was still in the theater. No, wait. I take that back. When they jumped out of the airplane on an inflatable raft and fell and fell and fell and FELL and then LIVED I knew there was something wrong.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull is a lot like that. A LOT.

My biggest gripe with the movie? Sets! It's all sets! And apologies to Mr. Spielberg because I think there was more location footage than it felt like. Which meant that he shot real places to look like SETS! (I don't care how cool it was in War of the Worlds or even Drive. Don't film car chases in an Indy movie on SETS!)

There were sets in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Well of the Souls. Marion's bar. But 1) none of these were extended with pretty obvious green screen and 2) there were GLORIOUS locations. Peru. Cairo. Heck, even the Nazi island had location shooting. (Look! It's Obi-Wan Kenobi!) Remember when all of the workers are digging for the Well and Indy puts on his hat back lit by the setting sun? Nothing of that kind of scope here. Skull feels very stage-bound and very very VERY small. It reminds me of Hook in that respect. When you're in an Indy movie and the BIGGEST location is Yale, you're in trouble.

Someone once tried to encourage me that at least we'd get a new Williams score. But even Williams does something he never did for the previous Indy scores: He does a direct reprise. One of the first times we hear the Raiders march it's a repeat of Flight from Peru. *sigh* There are a couple more. I haven't bought the score and I'm not sure I will. If you know me and that doesn't make you a little dizzy then you must be made of stronger stuff.

I liked it better than the Mummy movies. I liked it better than Star Wars 2 and 3. There are some very charming moments. There's a couple of good action sequences. (They've never held a candle to the truck chase in Raiders even in the other Indy movies.) They depend on your good will from the last three movies (Last Crusade more than anything else) and they largely get it. I thrilled when I heard the Ark theme. (But it's one of Williams' four or five best themes ever, so that was easy.) There are several very nice nods to Marcus Brody. (He's treated with more respect here than in the entirety of Last Crusade.) It's good to see Marion again. The bad guys are largely forgettable. Take From Russia With Love and add henchmen from North by Northwest. (Oh, and if you're going to take a stance that the anti-communist
paranoia of the 50's was crazy, don't put commies around every corner!
Seems the paranoia was justified, eh comrade?)

"I like Ike." Heh.

But it never made me tingle the way that Raiders did when the old man tells them about the Staff of Ra. That movie still holds the award for Best Exposition Ever. I did like the quieter bits of this film more than many reviewers. Maybe because when it was quiet there was no lame CG or bad bad BAD sword fights. Let's face it, this movie goes a long way on Harrison Ford.

If I never see another damn CG prairie dog again it will be too soon.

The actors were still top notch. Harrison Ford is still Harrison Ford. (Has anyone pointed out that Indy is 8 years younger than Ford in this movie?) If he ever manages to be in a great movie again he'll be terrific. John Hurt is still awesome. Jim Broadbent is still a treasure. I even liked Shia LaBeouf. A lot. (Remember when actors used to change their names if they had names like Archie Leach? Or Shia LaBeouf?) He was almost as cool as he thought he was. And I'll admit that's not nothing.

So there we have it. It's over and done. Better than The Mummy. Not as good as The Rocketeer.

Dr. Jones, adieu.

**** SPOILERS *****

I'm really expected to believe that Indy doesn't think of Marion right away when he hears her name? Seriously?

The A-Bomb looked COOL.

The snake scene had three actors (and an audience) doing a terrific job with a STUPID idea.

I LIKE that it was flying saucers.

THE ANTS ROCKED.

The library scene is a perfect example of a neat idea push just that much too far.

Did Indy move into Dad's house?

Looks like Indy has his mother's ears and his father's theme.

The Ark was a waste. Totally a waste. In Raiders that warehouse was one of the spookiest things in a movie not wanting for spooky stuff. Here: A waste.

Glad they kept the old-school Paramount opening like in the other three. Too bad it led to a blasted CG prairie dog.

And finally, CG melting heads do NOT compete with practical effect melting heads.

BSG 408 - Faith

2008-05-22T05:59:00.003-07:00

SO SAY WE ALL!

Still catching up. Everything is written (and watched) just not posted. But hey, American Idol was something, wasn't it? (And the writers of Bones and House will be receiving a bill from my therapist.)

THIS is the BSG that I love. It's not hard to follow at all, but it's sometimes harder to compartmentalize episode to episode. It's a much more "arc-y" show, rather than episodic. All to the good. End of the show. Full speed ahead.

Apparently they count Razor as the first two episodes of this season. So we only get twenty, not twenty-two. And they're talking a couple more movies. And Caprica.

BTW, um, SPOILERS. If you haven't seen the eps, this is not the place
to be looking. Go get the DVDs and then watch the season four eps on Sci-Fi.com. We'll wait.

Ok, the Four are from EARTH?!?? That's what it sounds like. And again that Starbuck is the Harbinger of Death. (Lovely title.)

THEY SHOT GAETA! As if his life didn't suck enough already. If they kill Felix I will be very put out. I swear, he's just going to start blowing things up.

Kara's paintings continue to be true. Wild thing, that. I think I'm becoming a Kara/Two shipper. Heh.

Anders wants to play with the basestar. Awesome. I do like how they've split up the Four. They're all dealing with different things in different ways. Tory's still crazy though.

Nice to see Athena is still on our side. She's doing better than iTigh. Or her husband.

The Cylons are still "How could you DO this to us? What did WE do?" Um. Baby. Neck. Then nuclear annihilation of twelve planets. And the occasional suicide bomber. Other than that? Not a thing. However, when Natalie Six shot the other Six in the head? Now I have hope for this alliance. RDM might be able to pull this off.

They killed a hybrid. That's so sad. But she seemed pretty happy about it. And Kara is appropriately freaked.

No Baltar. Only on the radio. Cool. (That they did the radio thing, not that he isn't in the ep.)

A CLOCK. Just because you have a countdown doesn't mean it's 33. Or You Can't Go Home Again. But this was great anyway. I especially liked that Helo was really going to leave. I may not hate him so much. Nah, I'm sure that's not true. Hey Karl, maybe when your wife is lost in the inky blackness with all of your friends you might think "Gee, maybe wiping out the toasters wasn't such a bad idea."

Interesting that Laura is all "metaphorical" these days. Arrow of Apollo doesn't mean so much anymore? That seemed pretty literal.

Oh! That was Nana Visitor! I thought there was something about her. Maybe if I'd actually watched Deep Space Nine.

BUT - looks like Laura's back on track to finding Earth. And, hey, THERE'S Wild Bill! Missed you, sir. Maybe Lee will be in the next ep.

Boom boom boom.

BSG 407 - The Road Less Traveled

2008-05-20T05:51:00.001-07:00

SO SAY WE ALL!

Arrgh! A week behind! It's Firefly all over again. (But catching up fast. I'm as up to date as RDM's podcasts and he gets PAID for this!)

BTW, um, SPOILERS. If you haven't seen the eps, this is not the place
to be looking. Go get the DVDs and then watch the season four eps on Sci-Fi.com. We'll wait.

This season is doing a pretty good job of keeping all the balls in the air. We don't touch on everything every week. (Look, an Adama-free episode!) But it keeps you wondering what's going on elsewhere while not boring you with what's going on in front of you.

So, Leoben has shown up with Starbuck three times before. The first time (Flesh and Bone) was awesome. The second time (NewCap) was boring. The third time (bye, bye Starbuck) was pretty cool. I was afraid we were getting into an even / odd thing. Nope. This was AWESOME.

Leoben done right is one of my favorite characters. The coolest thing is that you're never really sure what HE believes. And this ep added an edge of desperation to my favorite toaster. So you REALLY can't tell who's playing who. And forget about Kara and Lee and Anders. Bring on the Cylon v. Cylon rivalry! Whoot!

The Tyrol story is very low key, but it's becoming the most compelling of the Four Cylons story. He's one of the two Four that we've known the longest. And he's not Tigh. (Still mostly not buying iTigh. More in a moment.) And he's the most likely to be all at sea about being a Cylon. Tory is crazy, I honestly don't care about Anders that much. And iTigh has his own set of issues.

So Tyrol and Baltar is a very interesting combination. Especially given Tyrol's faith background.

Baltar and the Baltarians. Not even hating this arc. Which surprises me. But that's ok. A sincere Baltar is a terrifying force. Wonder if they'll ever bring up that GB shot Crashdown? Or that he GAVE A CYLON A NUKE?

iTigh: They should have given him more of this kind of a hook from the beginning. He's got Ellen back. Kind of. At this point I can buy that he'd sell out all of the humans and the toasters too if he can have that. But it took a bit of a jump to get here. He should have told Bill.

Hey look, Helo is making a not so touchy feely stupid decision! (He's wrong, because it's Starbuck, but I'm all for this one.)

Cliff-hanger! See you next week!

Famous Failures

2008-05-16T05:50:00.001-07:00

Y'know, I actually have the last TWO BSG write-ups done. I just never remember to post them. Ah well, three is a magic number.

Anyway, this was cool. Jordan? Seriously?

BSG: 406 Escape Velocity

2008-05-01T18:05:00.003-07:00

So say we all. Really good. Some great scenes. Good pace for the series this season. Written by Jane Espenson and directed by Eddie Olmos. Good times there. Always a laugh riot when Eddie's directing.

SPOILERS! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

First off, I love that Bear McCreary has re-purposed the funeral theme from Act of Contrition (better known as the season one opening titles) as Lee's theme. Maybe he did it a long time ago and I'm only just now noticing. The music has been top notch. Bear's been working hard to get to this.

So the Cylons are all crazy? iTigh, Tyrol, and hoooooh-boy Tory. All nuts. (Is Tory seeing things? Or is she just a sociopath?) Anders (I'm still going to call him #4, yes I know that that's a Simon) seems fairly stable other than that whole Starbuck thing. But anybody hanging around with Kara looks sane by comparison.

Almost no Starbuck! Yay! No Cylons. Booo. No "I'm so bitter" Gaeta. Awwww. The Demetrius' token red-shirt sees another day.

Laura's my favorite. Even more than iTigh. (Have I mentioned that I'm not buying for a MOMENT that iTigh hasn't told Wild Bill? Not even for a SECOND. Is it his programming? Well then they are just machines and they can all be turned off. That was easy. Remember when Six snapped a baby's neck right before calling down multi-planetary genocide? Wacky fun.)

Anyway, Laura. Whoo-doggy. "I'm dying and I'm going to make sure the human race is ok no matter what." Huzzah! Even if she's not The Dying Leader she is totally THE Dying Leader. This arc more than ever convinces me that her cancer remission was just because the show went for a season longer than it was supposed to. Now we're back on track. "I need you to know what I like." Awwww. "I want HIM to see ME." Yaay!

LAURA rounds down to 30,000! When I do that I get grief. But otoh I
figured out that she was wearing a wig. Which she was also wearing in
the Cylon Opera House in her / Six's / Athena's hallucination. Ooooo.

"He thinks he's doing the right thing."
"Of COURSE he does. He's LEE." - Awesome!

Mr. Adama Goes to Caprica seems to be going well. He hasn't gone TOO Helo on us yet. I'm sure he will. The Quorum meets on Colonial one? I guess, since Baltar blew up Cloud Nine and nobody CARES.

Speaking of NOBODY CARES: WE know who four Cylons are. Does anyone else? Remember when that used to matter to people? What's the average size of a fleet ship? How much room does anyone really have to move around? What do these people do with their time? I think most people living in a police state would be positively MOBILE compared to this gang.

Tyrol. Has anyone else noticed that he looks like Orson Welles? Especially when he gets all CRAAAAZY looking. So this will be interesting. I hope he's not just back at his job next week. That's season 3 thinking, that is.

Baltar's back and now he's a prophet. I love how weary/resigned he's become to Six. I don't even think she can convince him to do things with sex anymore. They've become very companionable. (What's going on with the Cylon fleet? Huh? HUH?)

Maybe it's just because of the confines of a TV show, but for twelve planets of people there seems to be a remarkable unity of religious faith. (They argue about HOW they worship but never WHO.) These people have been crammed into ships for years now and this is the first time such a conflict has come up? Nobody has noticed that it's just because it's Baltar?

Nice excuse to get Ellen back. Also a great bit where iTigh tells Tyrol that it's never going to get better. Nice.

Btw? iTigh? TELL THEM.

Next week: Leoben! Yaaaaay! Don't screw this one up like you did on NewCap guys. Don't bore us.

Boom boom boom.

BSG - The Ties That Bind

2008-04-24T05:47:00.007-07:00

SO SAY WE ALL. AGAIN. Seventeen to go.

BTW, um, still SPOILERS. If you haven't seen the eps, this is not the place to be looking. Go get the DVDs and then watch the last three eps on Sci-Fi.com. We'll wait.

A pretty great episode. I'm hoping that this will be more like season 1 and something will come of this and not like season 3 where nothing would. (It's not a Lee story. Those evaporate faster than Ambrosia in vacuum.) It's been four days and I have to admit I'm still a little numb.

Cut to the chase: Go back and watch the miniseries where Wild Bill runs into his wayward deck crew who are sneaking about wanting to give him a retirement present. They are all dead.

Prosna died in the first attack on Galactica when EyesTigh had to vent the air to keep the fuel tanks from exploding.

Socinus died on Kobol. (Way to go, Crashdown.)

And now Cally. Very sad. (I didn't know her maiden name was Henderson.) I always liked Cally. A lot of people wondered at her marrying The Chief right after he broke her jaw. If he had been AWAKE when he did it I'd have been in that camp. (Now why anyone would marry STARBUCK is another matter...) I liked the two of them together. They felt a lot more solid and real than he and Boomer. One of my favorite moments in s3 was when Apollo asked Tyrol if he ever though about Boomer and he said "no", drank his drink, and walked away with a look of "viper pilots is DUMB". Other than being a toaster the Chief is a stand-up guy. Which is why he needs to tell people he's a toaster. Especially now.

She Who Is My Wife is impossible to write TV for. She knew what Cally was going to do the moment she grabbed Tyrol's keys. Then she knew what Tory was going to do the moment she got the baby. I'm fast but not that fast. (But I figured out The Prestige about an hour before she did.)

Alright, Saul. TELL PEOPLE. Tell Wild Bill. Let HIM figure it out. Galen? Your wife is dead. Why? Because one of you toasters is a might touchy about your secret and is getting into "the sensations". TELL PEOPLE. I'll hate all of you fraking skin jobs, I swear I will. Helo will no longer be my BSG punching bag. iTigh should know better. If you'd asked him a year ago to lay down his life for the fleet he'd have done it without blinking his eye. He tried to, more than once (no, not the blinking). And Athena is not only still free, still trusted, but she's off on a super-secret mission with Starbuck. Get some balance, people.

If it comes out that Tory killed Cally, and if it doesn't change Tyrol's mind BIG TIME, I give up. (I won't of course. I watched Black Market and still came back.) I want this to be the tipping point. If it turns out to be Tory vs. iTigh and Tyrol, bring it. Mind you, they did a great job of making it very possible that no-one except Tory will ever know. Cally was crazy and suicidal. I'm ok with that too, actually. (Let's just waltz past the idea that Tyrol's key wasn't on the inside of the airlock and that Tory now seems to know her way around a battlestar better than iTigh or the Chief.)

Oh, if you're going to drop an in-joke like "Weapons locker 1701-D", don't do it when the nerds are supposed to be caught in unbelievably high dramatic tension. It's distracting.

You know, I NEVER liked Tory. I used to just hate her because she replaced Billy.

Every decision made by any half-way responsible person in this fleet should begin and end with "There are 40,000 people left in the entire universe and we are being pursued by an implacable foe that will stop at nothing less than our destruction." Anything past that is details.

Which brings us to Lee and President Bush- er, Rosilyn. I had a moment of hope that Bush Derangement Syndrome had left the show for a while. No such luck. I have to admit that Laura's directive (or whatever they called it) is totally in character. Never let another Baltar trial happen. Ever. Mind you, Tom Zarek didn't want to have the trial to begin with. I LOVE seeing her and Lee knock heads though. I want to see a scene with just the two of them where they have out everything that's happened since Kobol. I want to see how much they used to adore each other.

The problem I have is that all of the rest of the Quorum and the Press (weren't they all supposed to get JOBS after Dirty Hands? And what did THEY do on New Cap?) seem totally agog at the idea of paranoia and security. FORTY THOUSAND PEOPLE LEFT. Someone snuck a NUCLEAR WEAPON onto Cloud Nine a year or so ago, remember? (Gee, THAT guy ought to go on trial.) "But what will our society turn into?" You know what? Worry about that when there are eighty thousand people left. (And why isn't anyone having babies?) This is frontier life. Go listen to Representative Adama's speech again from last season. I'd like to see how ANYONE is accepting that Roslin is President again. The only way that can be pulled off is if she is liked and trusted. (And she's a PRESIDENT, so how can THAT be?) Otherwise she just kind of waltzed in and got appointed. Again. And was Lee just appointed to 1/12th of the legislature? Because the man who argued Gaius Baltar free sure wasn't just elected. So I would think that the power structures in a rag-tag fleet such as this would be more... Fluid. So Laura resorting to legal subterfuge would be pointless and impossible to enforce.

Going off on THAT tangent: I'd like to see what the rest of the ragtag looks like. So far there have been no riots (unless they run out of food or martial law is declared, even then it seems pretty calm). People seem to be getting along pretty well for having been crammed into tiny spaceships for several years with only a short break outside for disease, starvation, and cylon occupation. So, all things considered, these people seem to be GOOD. It's not a fleet of Kara Thrace's. (Oh, sorry.) It seems pretty clear that the Galactica doesn't have marines scattered around the fleet keeping order by force. Of course, we never SEE these people. We only see the selfish and the stupid. I'd like to see more about how these people have adapted. What THEY think of their leaders. Maybe Laura's got a second honeymoon for having brought them through Caprica. Even more so for Admiral Adama. But how seriously do they take their "elected" government? 40,000 people. Some of us have worked for COMPANIES bigger than this. I can't imagine that the same government set up to manage twelve PLANETS would be as effective on this scale. Certainly not more effective. I just think that this "fourteen layers deep" legal intrigue with Laura's directive seems like overkill. Everyone in the fleet is at most only 39,999 people from the president (approximately).

Gotta say, I loved Wild Bill reading Airlock one of her trashy Raymond Chandler (IN SPACE) novels. Very sweet. Then we had the big chewing out scene about WB sending Starbuck off. I'd love to see this divide grow. She Who Is My Wife would hate that. She's the biggest Laura / Adama 'shipper out there. (Don't even get her started on Lee and Kara.) But I want to either see them have to argue to a consensus about something, or go back to something more like first season where they had to dance around each other a bit, because neither could run the fleet without the other. And I'd TOTALLY love to see the Laura was right all along. Right now she says "JUMP!" and Bill growls "whatever" and then he does it. But it's not boring and not out of character, so cool deal.

Speaking of our wayward babes, out on the less-than-rag-tag expedition ship Demetrius, Starbuck is going crazier. I don't like her. Let's just be clear on this. I have no reason to like her anymore. (But I still love iTigh. Funny, eh?) I think her crew is awesome though. What a crowd. Good grief! Can Felix get anymore bitter? Obama would be saying "Dude, lighten UP! It's not SO bad!" Who's the "unknown guy"? Should I recognize him? And if not, shouldn't he be wearing a red shirt? Or are they just going to kill Seelix to keep us guessing? HEY! Where's Hera?!? (And where's ADxA?)

And the Cylons are at war. WOW. So, did they kill off ALL of the Sixes and Eight's except for the ones on the Big G? THAT would be wild. So how long until they unbox the Three's?

A Baltar Free ep. Interesting.

I have NO idea where this is going. In a better world, RDM would. But it's great so far.

Boom boom boom.

BSG - Six of One

2008-04-23T05:42:00.003-07:00

SO SAY WE ALL! (This post has NOT been spellchcked)

BTW, um, SPOILERS. If you haven't seen the eps, this is not the place to be looking. Go get the DVDs and then watch the last three eps on Sci-Fi.com. We'll wait.

Ok, 18 more episodes like that and I'll call BSG the greatest TV show ever. If they can keep it up I'd say that RDM and Co. have gotten a much needed breather and may have even looked back at last season and seen where they went wrong.

I mean, wow. WOW! First we have Starbuck telling Laura EVERYTHING that we (I) said when Kara showed up babbling and Laura was ignoring her. "Why am I crazy and you're not?" Then my wonderful hero, the harder than nails Laura Airlock Roslin (more later of course) says "I don't care" and still tries to shoot SB in the head. THIS is the show that I love. It's about what people DO. It's about what people CHOOSE. And it is rarely about what feels good. (They seem to be making people vaguely accountable for what has happened before. I hope this trend continues.)

I'll interrupt my gushing to note the last error that needs to be corrected. Put Airlock and NFL in scenes together again. With NFL's newfound political career (Zarek? Ha! That answers my question from last episode) this seems more likely. I want to see them toe to toe again.

Aiiieee! I just had a horrible thought, that is most likely not true. Is Lee being shuffled off the show? That send off was awful big! I'll need to go watch next week's trailer again. I'm all cold just thinking about it. I'm assuming that they're just re-writing the show on the fly (and doing a good job of it) and moving Lee into another role. But if not... Brrrrrrr.

ANYWAY, back to the gushing. After the greatest Kara / Airlock scene ever we have the greatest Wild Bill / Airlock scene ever. (I think there was a terrific Kara / Wild Bill scene in there too.) WB and Airlock get to have it out. The biggest thing that I like about this episode is that it really feels like the writer's are finally remembering stuff. (Got to go look and see who wrote this.) Laura as the dying leader. Going back to the myths that used to wander around the fleet daring people to believe in them. WB getting to admit how lost he is and how much he hates this myth stuff even when it turns out to be true.

Baltar: Is he really believing what he says these days? Is that possible? There was a podcast last year where they asked all the cast who they wanted to play other than themselves. They all said Baltar. James Callis said he wanted to play Six... So he could have scenes with Gaius Baltar. Seems RDM took this to heart. Wacky stuff. (Is it just me, or has James become a lot funnier looking since the miniseries?)

Cylons! Last season's Cylon stories were pretty boring. These are possibly more cool than the Galactica stuff!

And since BSG in 8 minutes was so cool, they've done THIS (I'm not sure how this widget thing works, find the recap):

Next up, The Ties that Bind. And then I'm caught up! (Except for Razor.)

Boom boom boom.

...the prize we sought is won

2008-04-15T20:18:00.003-07:00

It's April 15th. Most probably think tax day. But really one of the defining days in our nation's history.

Take a moment for one of the greatest men our country has known, given to us when we needed him most. Sadly taken from us almost the moment his work was done. We will see his like again, I am sure. But we will never know until he or she is gone.

O Captain! My Captain!
Walt Whitman

O CAPTAIN my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,

You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;

Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

2008-04-07T19:09:00.005-07:00

Wow. Bill's blogging again. Must be new TV on.

The short of it: Good solid season opener. Looks like they're laying some groundwork. Looks like Zach is a Cylon. (EyeTigh: DAMN!) (That's from the brilliant BSG in 8 minutes - posted earlier. I need it to be my error sound on my computer.)

Here's a quick rundown on the popular Tallguy character abbreviations (that I find funny at least):

RDM: Ronald D. Moore - producer
Wild Bill: Admiral William Adama.
iTigh (formerly EyeTigh): Col Saul "Toaster's a Poppin'" Tigh - 'cause he's got one 'i'.
NFL (Non-Fat Lee): Lee Adama
Brett: This is a new one. I've decided that Sam "Toaster's a Poppin'" Anders is Brett Favre. Heh. If he gets a Cylon number he can be #4. Bwahahahahaha. Yeah, I'm running with that one.

They DON'T have a frakking plan anymore, eh? Nice that RDM finally admitted it.

Starbuck is back. And showing an alarming obliviousness, she thinks she's only been gone hours even though her hair is WAY longer. Wild Bill thinks he's got it all under control, even though this is Kara "Hey, remember the time we used half our fuel looking for you?" Thrace. I think Laura remembers. Regarding her potential toasterness Our Heroes seem to be doing enough to look good but not enough to be effective. (RDM has been hanging with TSA! ) If it were me? No way I'd trust her. But the fleet hasn't been that kind of paranoid since Kobol.

Wild Bill: He's a little lost here. Wants to be the rational man, big on security. But it's Kara. He's always in trouble there. He's going to be really bummed when Zach comes back and he's a toaster.

Laura: I'd be far more in favor of her hard as nails (where did they get all the nail polish three years after the holocaust?) attitude towards the craziness of Kara if this weren't the woman who sent same said crazy pilot in a stolen Cylon ship back to Caprica to get a museum piece. And set off a political coup in the process. Yeah, that Laura. So Kara can feel the way to Earth. You're hanging with 2 1/2 toasters in an imaginary opera house. Deal.

Hey, now that I look back on it, was that the most brilliant resolution to a seemingly unrelated plot ever? (Helo and Sharon on Cap getting picked up by Starbuck who is looking for the arrow of Apollo) Or at least close? Ahhh, that was writing. Now they would say "You know, we're just tired of it, it's not going anywhere. So they dream that they're at Woodstock and wake up on Galactica and everyone is like, Whoaaa." Love you, RDM. Mean it.

Baltar is interesting again! Still not smart (remember when he used to be smart? Like, "greatest mind of our time" smart? Like, invented a Cylon detector that he then threw away?) but at least interesting. He knows what he's accountable for. An interesting thing is that I don't think they will ever be mad at Baltar for the things he's actually done: not explaining how the colonies were attacked (he had one line about it last season: Treason implies intent), letting Boomer get past his effective Cylon screen, shooting Crashdown, and, oh yeah, GIVING A CYLON A NUKE. That last one is really problematic. I've seen the publicity shots of Baltar, so I kind of know where this story will lead. Again: interesting. At least they're giving James Callis something to chew on this year. (Other than Tricia Helfer and Lucy Lawless.)

I've dimmed a bit on iTigh's whole "That's the man I want to be!" speech. If he was all that worried about shooting the old man in the head, he'd tell people! Especially since four "people" on the fleet know that one of their viper jocks got freeze-framed by a raider. (It takes two months to train in raptors AND vipers, eh? Shiny.) The four of them are no better than Gaius fffRRRAAAAAAAkking Baltar (said with an iTigh growl).

iTigh has never been known for self-inspection. We don't know enough about Tori. #4 can be kind of squirmy. I guess the Chief has been through enough "YOU'RE A TOASTER! *WHACK*" sessions. And Cally would kick his butt more than a little. But no-one said being chrome was easy. Give it up, guys. There's less than 40,000 people left! Hey, Chief. Remember when you were keeping secrets about Boomer? How'd that work out?

So Starbuck is setting up the whole "toasters are people too" plot. She makes #4 uncomfortable with her talk of killing genocidal robots. So he can't say who he is. Awwwwww. A witch hunt isn't bad if they're actually witches! (Of the "I'll get you my pretty!" variety, not the Rosenberg type.) (Wait, that was a reference to Willow Rosenberg, friendly witch on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for being traitors to the USA. I can see the confusion.)

NFL has a new job? Wait, who in "the government" is going to offer Lee "I sold Laura Roslyn down the river" Adama a job? Again: Remember when Lee and Laura talked to each other? One of the balls that got seriously dropped and I so miss from season 1.5. The big MOMENT in the court room would have been devastating if they had actually maintained that relationship.

Speaking of heart to hearts: Every time they lock up a toaster the toaster gets a new best friend. This time it's Laura and Six.

Six is SO much more interesting than the Six in GB's head. Although it seems GB's Six is becoming more like the real one and less May West on Acid. Maybe GB has grown. Naaahh. Again - Tricia Helfer: What a find. They hired a model and got an actress. Good on you, RDM.

I didn't want Helo thrown out the nearest airlock this week, like the traitorous hippie he is. That's always good.

Athena talking to #4 and the chief was nice. The Unknown Four (the UF?) don't know that even the Cylons don't know who they are, I guess. It'll be a mighty fine shindig all round when that comes out.

So next week we see the toasters (the ones not flying vipers) again. Hmmm. Ok. "WE'RE GOING THE WRONG WAAAAAYYYY!"

My prediction: Baltar will be the only one to make it to Earth. Maybe Baltar and Hera.

Boom boom boom.

Charlton Heston 1924-2008

2008-04-06T06:46:00.002-07:00

There will be a lot of better writers than me writing about this in the next few days. And most of them will have at least something to do with this.

You can go look up The Ten Commandments on your own. And yes, it's people.

Oh. Oh, PLEASE don't be true

2008-03-30T10:16:00.001-07:00

This would be the worst movie news ever.

BSG Top 10

2008-03-20T17:36:00.001-07:00

Saul Tigh, keeping it real.

The War for the Future Might Continue

2008-03-14T05:49:00.003-07:00

Just saw this at Hollywood Reporter:

""Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." Fans need not worry: Sources say that "Terminator" will be back. Fox executives like the creative product and thought the finale's performance last week was solid. The network also spent a considerable amount marketing the show, giving Season 2 some cost benefit. Also: The fourth "Terminator" movie comes out in 2009, and as "The Simpsons Movie" proved, there are promotional advantages to film-TV synergy."

Please?

(Yes, yes, yes, the finale review is written I just need to edit and post. Then BSG starts again.)

Dave Stevens 1955-2008

2008-03-13T05:41:00.001-07:00

Dave Stevens, creator of the Rocketeer, passed away on March 10th. *sigh*

What the Frak is Going On

2008-03-06T17:59:00.002-07:00

I was going to try and cut together my own one of these. This is better and WAY funnier. And I don't have to do it. Nice. "Sorry Boomer."

Tone deaf?

2008-03-01T13:15:00.004-07:00

This reminds me of when Hillary played Billy Joel's Captain Jack at a campaign rally a few years ago. Someone picked these clips because they figured it was Jack Nicholson saying cool things. Except a lot of us know the rest of these lines. And I'm not posting ANY of them on my blog. Let alone in a national presidential campaign.

I don't think Hillary would want any of these characters associated with her run for presidency if they were real. Especially... Well, no there's not an especially in the group since Jake Gittes is the most well adjusted in the bunch. Otherwise we have quite the collection of murderers and sociopaths. I want to see Jack Torrance coming through the door with an axe saying "Vote for Hillary!"

But anyway, if Col. Jessep gets his wish (the rest of that clip) then I'd just have to say didn't we have enough of that in the first Clinton administration?

Gee, where was Jessep stationed again? Think he had much of a problem with waterboarding?

Sarah Connor: The Demon Hand

2008-02-26T17:40:00.003-07:00

One episode to go. How do I feel about this? Tell 'em, Greg.

HIGH DEF! Whoooooo! Hey, was this the first week that we didn't see the high school jumper from "Gnothi Seauton"? I'm not sure why they hammered that in week after week after week if they're not going anywhere with it.

Ha! Just heard about a post from the show's creator. There was some question as to how Cromartie's head could travel through time with Sarah & Co. Well, the idea was that it was still covered in living tissue but that it was on fire. So it could time-travel, but it would very quickly be much more Terminator-y. BUT - you can't show a decapitated head with burning bubbling flesh flying through the air on TV (even now). So it looks like just a metal skull that travels through time. And we know from the movies that that's impossible. So just go with it.

Still awesome. These are kind of tough to review / recap the morning after. Things get twisty. So I'll just hit what sticks with me.

Silberman. Yeeeaahhhhhh! I wish they had cast someone a little more reminiscent of Earl Boen from the movies. (Hrmm. I didn't remember him from T3 at all...) I mean going from dark haired and bald to blond with a magnificent head of hair. Also, Silberman was SO much dweebier in the movies. BUT we got Bruce Davison. And he was terrific as always. And it's always nice to see that these people will figure things out when they see a T-1000 going all morphy on them. Enough that he got a nice cabin away from the coming war. I'm not sure I buy Ellison putting him in a rubber room. Sure, he's totally unhinged. Maybe I do buy it. I kind of would have liked Sarah to greet him by saying "How's the knee?"

But what does Ellison do next? She Who Is My Wife was a little surprised when I said Ellison was my favorite character. But he is. I like watching where they're going with him. And he's a Christian that actually attends some kind of service at an organized place of worship (and not just Sunday service either, by the looks of it) and he's not crazy. Does anyone really read King James anymore? But he was my favorite before we found all that out.

"She always did love to dance." Writers room: "Hey, how do we get Summer to be able to do ballet on this show?" Still interesting to watch where this character goes. She's really got her own agenda. I'm not sure if Cameron didn't tell Sarah that the Russian fellow was dead because she's smart enough to know what Sarah's reaction would be or if it's because she really wasn't aware. Not her mission. Brrr.

Cool subplot that the Russian (not to be confused with the Haitian) sabotaged The Turk for the chess match. Wonder how this went down before everyone started hopping timelines? It's interesting that Kyle says in The Terminator that he is from "one possible future" even though none of his or the T-800's actions change anything (and actually set the war in motion). Then in T2 they WERE able to change time. But the groundwork had been laid that time could be changed and that these future timelines might still exist.

Cameron and Derek have set up a nice adversarial relationship. I'm looking forward to more. You know, this is often movie-speak for falling in love. Hee.

John's hitting on all cylinders. For some reason I'd like to see more high school. (Aren't there a couple subplots festering there? Didn't John almost get a best friend / side-kick? Weird girl being locked up by her Dad?) But he's hitting the perfect balance between needy kid and future leader. He wants Derek to stay so bad it's almost subtitled. Wow, a show that actually says boys need fathers. Even boys with superheroes for mothers. The callback to his foster folks in T2 was good. This show is great when it echoes the movies and it's great when it goes out on it's own.

Derek's kind of a slippery character. Like that. It hadn't occurred to me that he flat out lied to Sarah about killing Andrew Goode. (Unless he doesn't know he did it?) But he didn't take The Turk. Which is still out there. And of course we're creating paradoxes like weeds. I liked the scene with Derek and the grass. This really should be paradise for our future warriors. He seems a little too calm about hanging around with young John. And apparently not everyone in the future holds Sarah in such high esteem. Or John.

Oh, and did the pilot say that Cameron is from 2027? So is anyone from 2029 anymore? Curious change...

So, nobody knows that Kyle Reese is John's father. But they've got how many hours of videotape of Sarah talking about it? Hrrmmmmm.

Sarah. This is the first time I've really compared Leana Heady with Linda Hamilton. Heady plays everything so cool. She's so resigned most of the time. Her life has sucked since 1984 and it won't get better anytime soon. But now she's re-playing the scenes that Hamilton did in T2. And I'm not sure she played it raving enough. But she got to say "It's what they do! It's all they do!" Ahhhh.

This is an interesting twist for a time travel story. Usually it's all about "You can't know because otherwise the future could change." But their whole mission is to change the future. Fun.

So The Hand is gone. But Cameron still has metal and a chip. Hrm.

Nothing with the FBI Terminator this week. Probably saving it for THE BIG FINALE. Maybe they'll just skip over that until next season. That might be neat. But maybe not. So I'm sure THE BIG (2 hour) FINALE will be quite the ride.

BTW, we watched last weeks ep on Fox's streaming broadcast. Bear McReary wrote end title music! It's cool. Still not Brad Fiedel's theme (how much does he get paid for the ten drum beats that they use every week?) but still nifty. Got to figure out how to capture that.

Next week: Huge cliff hanger so Fox can cancel us! Think positive!

Dodged Bullet!

2008-02-25T18:20:00.001-07:00

Wow, did I get lucky! I saw the trailer for Jumper and thought it looked moderately cool. Then I read the reviews and found out it wasn't. All the while not knowing it was a Hayden Christensen flick! Arrrrgh!

Tigh in '08

2008-02-24T14:53:00.001-07:00

Ok, seems I'm not the first to think of this. Good, I don't have to put it together then.

Terminator: Catchin up, part III

2008-02-24T14:48:00.004-07:00

Dungeons & Dragons - Feb 18

Hey, it's the third Sarah review that I haven't published. If you're reading this, I've corrected the problem.

Still good. Maybe even great.

But they hit one really false note for me: They showed Kyle Reese. I know all of these actors are making the character's their own. For the most part that's terrific. But Kyle just seemed so peppy. It underlined a big difference between the people from the future in the movie and the ones in the show. In the movie these people were living at the end of the world. Kyle was so detached as to be off-putting. He had never lived in a world like today. He grew up in the "ashes of the nuclear fire". In the show they're just a bunch of guys in a bad situation. They don't seem "on the way out". They also don't seem all that taken aback by 2007. Heck, you'd think these guys would be amazed by running water! (I guess there's a deleted scene from Terminator where Kyle just about loses it looking at a park with trees.) Again, time travel is a lot less painful than in the films. It was cool that they had a fake looking Terminator. I'm sure that interrogation thing will come back. And they got all of the stuff right about Kyle's unit. I'm disappointed that nobody said they were "under Perry". But I'm a nerd.

I think they nicely dodged a bullet by not showing "future John".

BTW, the people are NOT the same as the machines. They're not, so don't even go there.

It was a nice tie-in with the movie though that it was Derek getting captured that tipped off Skynet to where there was a shelter which was attacked in the movie (when Sarah's photo was burned). They're changing timelines around again (although maybe this is the "post-T2" timeline, so it's different). In The Terminator Kyle traveled back from 2029. Now it's 2027. And the war is going on for two years afterwards when Derek goes back. So much for the "final battle".

Also, no Ellison this week. (You know, I still laugh that the Terminator is named Cameron, but only just got that the FBI fella is named Ellison.) But I've decided I like Charlie (Sarah's ex) a lot. I hope they do interesting things with him. The "very scary robot" conversation was terrific.

This plot is reaching Angel levels of complexity. So now Cameron has extra metal and a chip. And "sometimes they go bad". THAT will all go well.

Random thought, I wonder if they'll ever mention that a Terminator killed John's grandmother? I like that the identity of Kyle as John's father is such a closely guarded secret that even Cameron doesn't know it. That might be good plot coming up there.

Sarah's repeating Kyle's litany about the machines was great. (Nerd.) And they will never, ever stop. And of course "there's a storm coming". Still think Sarah's awesome. Still like Cameron (and they're certainly keeping her from being boring). And I'm really digging John. So I call that a win.

Getting a nagging feeling they're going to get canceled though. It's Fox.

Terminator: Catchin up, part II

2008-02-24T14:45:00.001-07:00

Queen's Gambit - Feb 4

Just. Loving. This. Show.

They're starting to pick up on some of the threads they've left dangling. Sarah's ex is a good example. (Good grief, how many father-figures is John going to have? Kyle. Arnold. The Ex. The new Reese.) And the FBI story keeps building and building. More Terminator parts lying around. Isn't that how this whole thing started?

I'm curious who and for what the South Americans that Sarah ran with were fighting. But it's good backstory for John. John gets a little more interesting every week. That's how it ought to be.

Kyle's brother showing up rocked my world. (I'm a geek. I'm not ashamed of that.) Does he not know what happened to his brother? Was the brother sent back first? Arnold was a T-800. But he's been chased by a T-888. Was Kyle completely lied to? Was Skynet (and Connor) sending people back in time before the end of the war and then an old T-800 was all it had left? I love the story, but it does seem to be taking a little bit away from the "final battle" of The Terminator. Maybe we'll learn more.

My only gripe is that the Terminators seem a little too easy to dismember. Arnold held together through some pretty severe stuff. But then, he also broke a little easier (he had to rip open his arm for a fix-up and lost his eye after one little tussle with Kyle). Oh, the "org" part of "cyborg" also died after a car crash and was a rotting corpse hung over his endo-skeleton. That was neat. And I've always thought that they were too hard to get away from. You never see them have to "track" anybody. Although it's very apparent that somebody forgot to set Arnold's sneaky bit to 1. These T's don't have that problem. Also, Cameron was really good at being a teenager when she met John.

Next week: THE FUTURE.

Terminator - catchin up part I

2008-02-24T14:39:00.002-07:00

Yikes, got a lot to catch up on. So here we go. (Don't I have three more Fireflies to do?)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Heavy Metal (Feb 4)

I continue to enjoy the heck out of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. One thing I'm really loving that the movies never got to do (because they were movies) is the time they can take. We're told that the Terminators are these inexorable machines that will NEVER EVER STOP. But we've never seen them have to go after something for more than a few days. We can finally see one of these things biding it's time waiting for it's prey to make a mistake.

My favorite thing continues to be the interplay between Sarah and Cameron. (Heh, that ended in divorce at the 1998 Oscars, didn't it? Oh, wrong Sarah and Cameron.) It's like Spock and McCoy with BIG GUNS and no Kirk to moderate. Maybe John will grow into that role. I think this might be an intentional gamble, holding John back like this, making him less interesting than he might be. I really hope it pays off. I think it just might. It will be really cool if they really manage to make John the leader of the gang.

My second favorite plot is the FBI. I don't know why. But it's a needed element to mix up the kinds of stories you can tell with Sarah's gang. I like that he's really not stupid. Smart people are a welcome addition to any show. Especially smart cops.

Nice touch not showing the fight between security guy and Cameron, just showing his reaction afterwards. If she can't be River then this part is just fine for Summer Glau.

Still wondering what they intend to do if the show runs for four seasons (the new Judgement Day). I'm not sure Smallville ever thought that far ahead.

Of course we continue to see that Kyle Reese couldn't have been more wrong when he said that "no one else gets through". There's armies from both sides flying through time on this show!

Not sure I really followed the "hijacking supplies for Skynet" plot. Maybe Skynet had the time displacement equipment set up early enough that it didn't see the resistance as a threat and was more concerned with shopping runs. I am curious what Cameron will do with her stash. Also, about trapping the terminator inside the bomb shelter: It's a terminator. Won't it be trying to get out? Even if it takes years?

I watched The Terminator this weekend. I had the year of the end of the war totally screwed up. 2029. Not 2017. So Kyle will be a baby or a little kid, if he's even born yet. And in the original timeline he would have been born well after Judgement day. Oh, and we have a date for when Terminator happens. May 12th, 1984. So John has to be born in early 1985. So there's no way he can be 15 in 1999. Close. I guess Sarah was rounding off.

BTW, Linda Hamilton was 27 when she made Terminator (born 1956 - same as Michael Biehn - so I guess Reese would be 6 or 7 in 2008). So she was 43 in 1999. Lena Headey is 34. Dialing back the seven years they skipped, she would have been born in 1965. So her Sarah would be 19 in 1984. Just in case y'all were wondering. While we're at it, Thomas Dekker is 20 and Summer Glau is 26. So neither of them have seen 15 for a while. (Not that it matters, but The Governator is 60.)

Oh! Here we go - from Wikipedia (so it MUST be true!):

According to the script for The Terminator (1984)—available on the Special Edition DVD—Sarah was 19 years old. The film was set from May 12th through May 14th of 1984, placing her birth date between May 11, 1964 and May 15, 1965.

In Terminator 2 Sarah's psychologist states that she is 29. The film itself shows on screen that it takes place when John (born 1985-02-28) is age 10 (between 1995-02-28 and 1996-02-27). This places Sarah's birth date between 1965-03-01 and 1967-02-27, making her 17, 18, or 19 during The Terminator.

The alternate ending for Terminator 2 (1991)—available on the Ultimate Edition DVD—shows Sarah alive and well on August 29, 2029. She is by then a grandmother (and John is a Senator) in a world where Skynet was never able to start its war on humanity.

The tombstone shown in Terminator 3 (2003) reads 1959–1997. The birth year would make her 24 or 25 during The Terminator. Her death was described as from leukemia sometime after the original "Judgment Day" (August 29, 1997).

The "Pilot" episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, picks up Sarah and John on the run in 1999. Her FBI file lists her age as 33 on August 24, 1999, placing her birth date between August 25, 1965 and August 24, 1966. This would make her 17 or 18 during The Terminator.

In the "Gnothi Seauton" episode, Cameron Phillips mentions that Sarah would have died from cancer, had they not jumped forward in time. Cameron also mentions that John Connor sent Cameron back in time to help leap over Sarah's death. At the end of the episode Sarah is at a doctor's office, where her forged drivers license shows her birthday as February 4th.

Still might be my favorite show. (House is a close second.)

If he's stayed a TransAm, we wouldn't have this problem!

2008-02-10T06:26:00.001-07:00

This is too funny. (And when did Val Kilmer start looking fat?)

Superbowl Declaration

2008-02-06T18:11:00.000-07:00

I missed this Sunday. I wish I hadn't. I'm glad I see it now.

Ohhh. Now that's BAD.

2008-01-27T09:05:00.000-07:00

So you're going to be a villain in a James Bond movie. Who do you base your character on? Imadinnerjacket? Kim Jong-il? Heck, the Unabomber? OJ Simpson? Rick Berman?

Nooooo.

Amalric said he modeled his character to some extent on former Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "I've been taking details, the smile of Tony Blair, the craziness of Sarkozy, he's the worst villain we've ever had," he said

Uh huh. Simple choice. Live in France under Sarkozy, live in Syria under Bashar al-Assad. Or Iraq under that cuddly old fellow Hussein. (Walk in the park, that was.) Give us your answer. Take your time...

Quantum of Solace, by the way, is a really depressing story. Bond's not even in it, really other than as a bookend. It's a story being told to him by some Brit official at a party in Jamaica or somewhere about this couple where the fellow was a nice guy and the wife ran around on him with the tennis pro. The fellow commits suicide out of shame and leaves her alone and penniless. See? The Bond books weren't all women and gadgets and car chases.

No fate but what we make...

2008-01-22T20:48:00.000-07:00

Wow. Sarah Connor Chronicles is well worth your time. For the moment it's my new favorite show. I think the first two episodes (there are three) are freebies on-line right now. Tiny spoilers ahead.

They manage some great shout-outs to the original movies. I think the only really heavy-handed one (that still works) is "Come with me if you want to live." The fact that Summer Glau's terminator is named "Cameron" still makes me giggle. They used the ending of T2 (which is the first shot of the show, BTW) to muddy the waters enough so that even the stuff you "know" becomes a little uncertain. Judgment Day has moved around, but it's still going to happen. They even figured out a nod to Terminator 3!

I'm sure the folk that have seen the Terminator movies way more time than I have can find some bigger errors than I did. So far the only detail I think they missed was humans aren't hacking and wheezing and puking after time travel. The timeline seems fairly solid. I'm not sure I ever did the math that T2 happens not too long before Judgement Day - John is born in 1984/85 and he's twelvish. So it's 1997ish (even though the movie was in 1991.) I don't entirely buy that Sarah was supposed to be 18 in Terminator. Sure, ok, why not? (18 looked a lot older when I was 15.) The one thing they really threw out is the idea that there was no more time travel after Reese and Arnold made their first trip to 1984. T2 didn't worry about it too much either. Turns out there was a LOT of time traveling. Of course these people are from farther in the future, so who knows what happened THEN? (Seems like they didn't invent that FX intensive liquid metal.) And time is a lot less circular than it was in the first movie. Again, that also went out the window with the second movie.

This show is giving me some of the same vibe that BSG used to give me when they would pick the solutions that would WORK even if they didn't "feel good". (It all went to heck entertaining and still very watchable heck after Pegasus.) Sarah vs. Cameron is a great conflict. Talk about Tin Man.

The show addresses some of the issues that bugged me about T2 to the point where I didn't even enjoy it anymore (and almost all at the end). (Yes, I know there are deleted scenes that show that Arnold could learn. Don't care.) My favorite fix so far? Cameron is a lot less malleable than Arnold was in T2. She only listens to John. And according to her, John isn't John yet. (I love that.) She'll do the ruthless unthinkable things that future John and Kyle Reese would have done that Sarah might not. She's not nearly as cards-on-the-table as Arnold. There's some secrets to her mission she hasn't let on. And she was clearly devoted to future John. She looks at John with a little bit of wonder and disgust at why he isn't yet who he's going to be.

Sarah is a really terrific mix of the "girl next door" that she was in T1, a devoted mom, and trying to be the super-tough warrior of the future. She's not as accepting of that last role as she was in T2. More like she was in T1. And by this point she's really really really tired. They've also done some nice work with what kind of events would have been triggered after T2. And Sarah is still having some pretty vivid nightmares. (Interesting question: If nuclear Armageddon is a certainty and you have visitors from the future telling you about it's outcome, is it worth prolonging WW II by having the Los Alamos team retroactively whacked?)

John is ok. I like him more than I did in T2. Way more than T3. (Ok, the very end of T3 still rocks.) It will be an interesting sub-plot (even if it's just hinted at) about how he gets from 1999 tech to learning 2008. (And computer geeks knew about browser history in 1999 too. It wasn't QUITE stone knives and bear skins.) What a seven year period to jump. Yikes. There are some historical details they're going to have to catch up on very quickly. And did you SEE who's governor of California?!?

Oh, the time jump. Very nice. Allows them to keep the movie continuity and still not have to deal with it being 1999 all the time. I'm sure we'll learn more about some of the details surrounding that later.

I like the FBI subplot. It always bugs me when the authorities are willfully stupid about the inexplicable. This guy seems convincible. He won't quite be the inspector Gerard of The Terminator. I'm betting he will be part of the team or dead by the end of the season.

I hope they continue to grow the resistance subplot slowly. And so far, no flash-forwards to the War. I hope they're holding those in reserve.

I wonder if they know where they're going with this? We've got three seasons till Judgment Day, right? To say nothing of Terminator 4 with Christian Bale as John waiting in the wings. Will this show really tell a whole story? Do they have a plan?

I wonder who or what they're holding in the wings? What about our friendly psychiatrist from T1 and T2? Will we see Kyle Reese as a kid? That's the biggest time-travel related "Huh"? If JD doesn't happen in ''97 and the resistance apparently gets shifted accordingly, isn't Kyle going to be quite a bit older when Skynet falls? Or is Sarah's Kyle from an "alternate future"? It's all so complicated.

And will Fox actually tolerate having a sci-fi hit? This could be ground breaking. Go writer's strike! (Until we need new eps, of course.)

God speed, Mr. Spock

2008-01-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

Well, however the movie turns out, this just gets the blood pumping.

It's certainly not what I was expecting to see. But it looks cool. And it still feels like we'll boldly go. I've decided I don't give a hang what they do, so long as it feels as fun as old-school Trek. Go, J.J., go!

40 years ago... No, wait...

2008-01-21T08:13:00.001-07:00

I had been anticipating this past Christmas Eve's blog post for some time now. It would be the FORTIETH anniversary of mankind's first ever excursion from the confines of Terran orbit. (Why is "Gaia" so cool and accepted? Terra has always been SO much cooler.) Apollo 8. Frank, Jim, and Bill. Out and about.

Then it hit me: That wasn't the year. You can tell because 2007 doesn't end with an 8. Then it hit me some more: I'm NOT going to be forty this month! Whooooo!

So anyway, forty years ago we were still a year out from the Apollo 1 fire. (I should have noted that last January, but I didn't.) Heck, forty years ago we were still almost a year away from Apollo 7, the first manned launch of the Apollo program, and the first time back into space since Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin splashed down in November of 1966. Put another way: There were no American spaceflights for almost the entire run of Star Trek.

Well, gives me plenty of time to write up THAT entry..

Cine Capri - a Followup

2008-01-06T07:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice link with a TEENY picture of THE BIG GREEN WALL. Read the comments. Lot of info there.

The Cine Capri 1966-1998

2008-01-05T10:43:00.000-07:00

Can anyone believe it's been ten years? Goodness.

The Cine Capri was THE movie theater in Phoenix, Arizona. It showed Star Wars exclusively for over a year in 1977 / 1978. Exclusively. One theater. One screen. Imagine that. If you saw Star Wars in the Valley first run, you saw it at the Capri. I did not. I saw it (at night) in Rocky Hill, Connecticut.

But I got to see the theatrical release of Battlestar Galactica. In SENSOROUND! If I'm remembering correctly, this was the cut where they actually killed Baltar. When they put it on TV they realized that 1) John Colicos was COOL and 2) that people are cheaper to film than robots. (Although they did introduce Lucifer - to an eight year old, this was a subtle and crafty name. But then so was Adam-a.)

Then The Empire Strikes Back opened. Imagine the coolest movie ever made having a sequel - that was ALSO the coolest movie ever made! I know there's been one since then. Ok, X2 is close. But seriously. And this was my first Cine Capri Line. There was this BIG GREEN TILED WALL (that I have NO pictures of). You'd get your tickets, then you'd stand in line next to this wall. There was a small misunderstanding of procedure (get tickets, THEN stand in line) so we didn't get in to see Empire on our first attempt. I apologize for any atrocities I committed or promised that night. I was eleven.

But when we DID get to see it... Oh, my. This was the second Star Wars. We didn't know how it would work. We didn't know that the beginning and ending would be the same for all NINE (NINE, George, you said NINE - not that we WANT three more movies now, thank you) movies. So when the crowd before us came out and I heard THE music... You think I'm excitable NOW?

We didn't see many movies at the Capri when I was a kid. Galactica, Empire, Fantasia (that I sadly walked out on and went to play Asteroids in the lobby. Uncultured twerp.)

The next movie I saw was Aliens (1986). AND we saw it immediately after watching Alien on videotape. I had never seen it. So I got to see them back to back. That was just cool.

Lotta movie over the next ten years. Probably the biggest event was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Lawrence of Arabia had played before that and it had gone long every night that it ran (it had an intermission - I've talked about this). The night Indy opened was no exception. So as we stood in the 100 degree heat at midnight, some over-caffeinated (or whatever) fanboy ran up to the lobby to MOON the camera crews inside. Well, he was running a LITTLE too fast. He wound up slamming into the window with his bare bottom, and cracking the glass! (Hrmmm, do I change the word choice? Noooo...) He then limped off into the night, bleeding a little, and was not heard from again.

Finally got to see the ORIGINAL Star Wars there in 1993. Drove down from Prescott a couple times for it. Ahhhhh. While I was in Ohio they ran all three. The only time the original Jedi played at the Capri.

We saw Independence Day at four in the morning on opening night. It was on, we were up.

Then there were the Star Wars Special Editions. (Little did we know...)

Which means I have to tell the Empire story. Some friends where sitting many rows in front of me. There was an altercation involving 1) my friends 2) a jerk 3) stupid kids and 4) a theater sized cup of Coke. There was flinging and shouting and dousing. But from many rows back, it played like this:

Luke: How am I to know the good side from the bad.
Yoda: You will KNOW. When you are calm. At peace...
Voice: F*** YOU! G**-D*** IT! AAAAARGH!

Gone to the dark side, had they.

A year later there would be a smoking hole there. And then an anonymous office complex. The land was too valuable. And the Powers That Be decided that they would take no chances. There was a night club at the site that nobody cared about. They were allowed to stay open until they actually needed the land. But TPB knew that every moment the Capri stood was another moment for some fool petition to succeed and keep the Capri open. So as the closing credits of Titanic rolled, ten years ago today, they started to dismantle the theater. Some of us got bits of the signature green tiling from the wall (I gave mine away as soon as I got it, but I know folks that have theirs). The next day it was gone.

There are several new "Cine Capri" Auditoriums. They're nice. I like them. But they don't even come close. Not even close.

Movies that I saw at the Cine Capri:

Battlestar Galactica
Fantasia
The Empire Strikes Back
Aliens
Tucker
Lawrence of Arabia
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The Abyss
Back to the Future part II
Back to the Future part III (?)
Days of Thunder
Memphis Belle
The Godfather Part III
Batman Returns
Far and Away
Casablanca
Addams Family
Star Wars
Blade Runner (Director's Cut)
Jurassic Park
My Fair Lady (Added)
The Fugitive
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Belle de jour
Toy Story
Mr. Holland's Opus
Twister
Mission: Impossible
The Rock
Independence Day
Star Trek: First Contact
Evita
Star Wars SE
The Empire Strikes Back SE
Return of the Jedi SE
Contact
Das Boot
LA Confidential
Devil's Advocate
Starship Troopers
Titanic

Star Trek: Of Gods and Men

2007-12-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

Ahhhh, no Firefly to write today. I know, I have Trash, The Message, and Heart of Gold (the REAL last episode of Firefly) to finish. To say nothing of Serenity. Next week maybe. I don't even have those episodes on my iPod and I don't have them near as committed to memory.

ANYway, tomorrow is the BIG DAY. Since I was a small child I have been working as Digital Effects Supervisor on the fan-film Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. (Which I talked about HERE.) Well, ok, since summer of 2006. It SEEMS like since I was a small child. Our director insists it isn't a fan film, and who am I to argue? He's Tuvok. And he was in Die Hard 4.

We premier tomorrow with Act 1 of 3. Go look! We've got the big names, Walter Koenig (when's HE going to be on Heroes?), Nichelle Nichols, Alan (CAMERON!) Ruck, and a host of others.

An unflattering shot of both me AND Walter Koenig!

Suffice it to say, for the effects work we've been doing we're a little on the underfunded side. Which is to say, working for THE LOVE of it. (So very very true!) So our team is a bit rag-tag when it comes to tool sets. I like to think of us as a "multi-disciplined organization". We're working in Lightwave, 3ds Max, Particle Illusion, After Effects, and of course Blender. And we've managed to get it all to work together. AND have jobs, loved ones, and lives. It's been a hoot working with these folks. (Still is. We're not quite done yet.)

I've gotten to visit a movie set with "real" Trek actors, argue faith vs. works with Janice Rand, make faithful recreations of famous Trek ships as well as come up with my own new designs, create full FX sequences from start to finish, and work on scenes that had many hands all working together. I'll have stories and pictures up over the next couple of months. But I'd like to take a moment to gush about my fellow OGAM FX wizards.

Peter Christian, Chris Dawson, Tim Russ, ME!

Peter Christian: Husband, father, really big nerd. Our Associate Producer, Art Director, Producer Handler (I SO kid!), man of many hats. A man who makes Star Trek costumes so good he has had to turn business away. The assembler of this lunatic crew. And he occasionally does FX. (I'll rant about some of his Act III stuff when we get there.)

Chris Dawson: Our Yoda. Heck, MY Yoda. He's our full-time professional on the team. His credits include Titanic, Apollo 13, The Guardian, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and Armageddon. Never let him forget that last one. Actually has worked with CAMERAS and MODELS. To say that he keeps us honest is an understatement. I know my own work on this film has been a hundred times better because I had Chris looking over my shoulder.

Roland Baron: Model maker and texturing lunatic. One of the great blessings of this project coming to a close is that I'm getting to see some of his other work show up on the message boards again. Responsible for my very favorite-est shot of our hero ship in the whole production.

Wil Jaspers: Creator of our hero ship. Also our great BLOWER UP OF STUFF. He was given the task of learning how to run rings around Particle Illusion for all of the rather ambitious destruction that we had planned. It seems he doubles his ability every day. I'd be interested to see what would have happened if we had been on this film for another year. (Most likely divorce and group suicide pacts, but that's another story.)

Henry Gibbens: Sadly left us before his time. (He's fine, he just had to get back to real life.) The guy who knew how to do all of the stuff that WASN'T in outer space. AND the stuff that was IN outer space. Lightwave fellow. Soundtrack collector (his library way outstrips mine). For the first big chunk of our production, the guy who figured out how to make all of my animation actually transfer to somewhere it could get rendered. We miss you, Henry.

Scott Nakada: Maker of props, drawer of storyboards, lover of Okudagrams. The only person on our team who actually knew what an Omega Particle is.

Scott making things look cool.

Matt Boardman: The new kid. In more ways than one. The only person on our team who wasn't alive for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He IS The Next Generation. I think we blew up every ship he ever animated. Nothing personal.

So assuming we don't have our servers crash tomorrow, go check us out. And if we do, be patient, they'll be back up soon!

Firefly - Serenity

2007-12-20T23:00:00.000-07:00

Well here we are. December Firefly was done five years ago. Wow. No blogs five years ago, or at least not in their everyday commonplace-ness that we've come to expect. (Message boards abound of course. Including the Fox Firefly board which I think continues to this day and where Adam Baldwin vents his conservative spleen frequently to all of the crazy Joss Whedon liberals, bless him.) A little TV on DVD. No YouTube. And Joss Whedon (aka Joe Sweden) was making three shows. Yep, Buffy was even still on the air. (Tara was still alive.) Enterprise was new and I wasn't watching it. We had just found out that Episode I was the best Star Wars prequel movie so far. I think I had just started reading Lileks. And of course I had just met my darling bride.

I have three more episodes and a movie to do after this. But this was it on TV. Ending with the beginning. I think they were advertising two new shows during this two-hour finale/premier: American Idol and 24. Heh.

This was it until the DVDs, and three years later, the movie.

"We've done the impossible and that makes us mighty."

I'll never see this opening as the beginning of Firefly. Because we had seen the nine episodes before. This (obviously) was The War. We'd heard about it, just not seen it. I've been told by those that began here that this opening and subsequent transition to "today" was a little jarring. They were thrown into the battle in a war they knew nothing about. This certainly didn't seem to match what they'd heard about. But I like that kind of "in the action" opening. (I don't feel like looking up the latin for it.)

There's of course the moment that Mal kisses his cross before going into battle. The moment goes by in a blip. For those of us "in the know" however this just defined Malcolm Reynolds. I'm not sure how effective or noticeable this was if you saw Serenity first. This is who he was before Firefly. This is what he lost. He lost faith. He lost belief. And he's a might tetchy about them what didn't.

So we have our pre-credits scenes: We see the war, we see it lost, badly. We see six years later Mal and Zoe are still together and they're now with a rag tag crew on a rag tag ship. We meet Jayne, Kaylee, and Wash (and his dinosaurs). We see that our gang lives a little outside the law. We're also introduced to the idea that we have no sound in space. Man, I can't wait for artificial gravity to become so common place that it's easier to get than strawberries. Hee. And we see that Mal is a sad broken man. "We win." This same statement (with Nathan giving the same delivery) will be repeated in the MOVIE Serenity: "This is what I do..."

Here it is. For the last time:

Take my love,
take my land,
take me where I cannot stand.

I don't care,
I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out
to the black.
Tell 'em I ain't coming back.

Burn the land,
boil the sea.
You can't take the sky from me.

There's no place
I can be
since I found Serenity.

You can't take the sky from me.

Back from credits, we find out that Wash and Zoe are married. We see a little more of the conflict between them that we didn't see again until War
Stories. We meet Inara. "Honest living." (Why this is somehow empowering to women is beyond me, but Joss seems to think so.) It's always fun to watch a pilot and see what got dropped from the show. "Ambassador" got shuffled off in a hurry.

But the crew gelled in a pretty quick hurry. There weren't a lot of radical changes. I guess the argument could be made that Mal got funnier. I think he's pretty funny here. I'm always conflicted about Mal's age. Nathan Fillion IS Malcolm Reynolds. But I always get the idea that Mal is written about ten to twenty years older than he is. Jayne is Jayne. Zoe is Zoe. Simon is so Simon I can't stand it. And Book is shifty from the get go. (And Ron Glass just rocks.)

So we get into the plot. We meet BADGER! Badger was supposed to be played by Joss. Not sure why that didn't work out, but it gave Mark
Shepard an uncomfortableness. Badger is my favorite recurring character. More than Safron. Way more than Niska. (They all rock, of
course.)

We're told about Reavers. Reavers are scary.

And then we meet the "passengers". Of course, having seen the rest of the episodes, we know that one of these things is not like the other.
They try real hard (and probably successfully, except he's in the credits) to make Simon the sinister bad guy. And we know what (who) is
in the box because we've seen the credits for nine episodes. Book is all nice and folksy. "Not a grandpa!"

We get our first table scene. We see how important this is out in the black. We see that the family dinner is a big deal even to Jayne. I love when Book says grace, Jayne is the first to bow his head. Of course "Mind if I say grace?" "Only if you say it out loud."

It's terrific that we've seen all of the episodes that come after and it's STILL distressing when Kaylee gets shot. (It always worked with Willow, why not try it again?) The one mis-step this ep makes (I think) is Mal telling Simon that Kaylee is dead just for the heck of it. It's a very Jayne moment. And I don't see Zoe thinking it's nearly as funny as she does.

River is hardly in this episode at all. We experience her more through Simon than anything else. Simon's exposition of what happened is one of my favorite scenes. "It's love. In point of fact." There are some pretty strong bonds among the crew. Wash and Zoe. Mal and Serenity and his Crew. Simon and River leave them all standing.

Dobson would have been a nice surprise if we hadn't seen everything we had. Obviously the idea was that Simon seemed sinister and Dobson was
the aw shucks ok fella. And we get our first (chronological) whiff of Shepard Book: Man of Terrible Mystery when he takes Dobson down. One does wonder if his "confession" to Inara at the end is all an act or no. Guess we'll find out when Joss writes the Book Book.

Then we get to Whitefall. We get to meet Patience. We also get to hear for the first and last time: People suck. To which Mal will ALWAYS reply: Oh no they don't either! And it all ends with a horse chase back to the ship!

The Reavers are nicely weaved through this ep. We get the exposition, we get the chance encounter (with more heartfelt exposition) and then we get the Big Darn Chase. Fox rejected the pilot because they said it was too slow and didn't have enough action. Obviously they do bad drugs. You're doing a pilot, you get to do big movie-like FX sequences. The guys at Zoic are still my heroes. (And now they do Galactica.) I love how The Leaf flies the ship. He's all mister calm as ice-water.

We get the usual pilot-y "this is where the show is going" end. Jayne might turn on Mal if the money is good enough (ha!). Book is in the right place. River and Simon are along for the ride.

I'll have to say that there is almost nothing in this episode that is not skillfully covered (so it works as either intro or recap depending if you've seen this first or last) in later episodes. So I refuse to hear "The show failed because they didn't show the pilot and they showed them out of order!" One, I think the DVDs are out of order (at least as far as Objects in Space is concerned). Two, the reason Fox didn't show the pilot is because they didn't like the show. THAT's why it failed. One of the complaints from the suits was that they wanted something funnier. Like Buffy. So they never really watched THAT show either. I don't think Firefly would ever have been 24, but it might have been Battlestar Galactica. Gorram Fox.

One of my favorite scenes in the whole show ends this episode (and the show).

Mal: "I had a good day."
Simon: "You had the Alliance on you. Criminals and savages. Half the people on your ship have been shot or wounded, including yourself. And you're harboring known fugitives."
Mal: "We're still flying."
Simon: "That's not much."

"It's enough."

Firefly - Objects in Space

2007-12-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

Drat! I got a day behind! (Even in my weeks behind schedule.) So Serenity: The Unaired Pilot will be up tonight...

Objects in Space. Chronologically the last Firefly episode. This one is a lot of people's favorite. I think that's because it's Written and Directed By. Written and Directed by Joss Whedon usually means there's gonna be tragedy and death. In other Sweden shows there would usually be an episode or two that was W&DB that would give the story arc a good hairpin turn. Characters would change, things would happen. This has some of those traits. I think this is kind of River's "coming out" story. Some of this is repeated in Serenity, but such are the needs of exposition.

So where does this episode fall in the Thirteen? On the DVDs it's last. They actually shot a scene with Mal and Inara two different ways so that it can be moved. It speaks to whether Inara has told Mal that she's leaving yet. The way it's on the DVD, she's talking about having told Mal. The way it aired (on the DVD as an alternate scene) she's obviously thinking about leaving. I'm firmly in the camp that it goes right here. Right after War Stories. Before the unaired episodes. This is last on the DVD because it's a good closer. It's Joss' ep, and it ends on a hopeful note. It shows that they saw the writing carved on the wall in blood that they shot both versions of that scene. But in the unaired eps the crew has a better idea of what River can do. And Inara's announcement that she's leaving was pretty clearly the mid-season cliff-hanger. So I'm sorry, but I think the DVD is Joss playing a bit of a George.

It's a good episode. It builds in so many different directions that it's sometimes hard to remember all of it. The opening crew bits with Simon and Kaylee, Jayne and Book, Inara and Mal, Wash and Zoe, all of it watched and experienced by River (hey look, Summer's a ballerina). A little more on Shepard Book: Man of Terrible Mystery. Mal showing us where he lives, all the time: "None of it means a damn thing."

Then "No touching guns". "She understands. She doesn't comprehend." Nice sureal Joss directed moments.

Then we have pretty much the same shock and surprise we got in Serenity. And Simon has no idea. (Hey it was a movie from a canceled TV show. You want miracles?) Little bit of Ariel echoes with Jayne. He's still got his "Money was too good" secret. (See? If this had aired AFTER Trash, Simon and River would have already known, right?) "Wacky fun." Good lines all around. "Did the math."

Then Jubal Early. Ahhhhh. What are the odds HE was coming back? Your good guys are only as good as your bad guys. And he was a really good bad guy. How do we scare the audience? Put Willow- er, Kaylee in danger. And boy, is she in danger. "That ain't no Shepard." Hrmmm. (Guess Joss is finally going to write The Book book next year. So I guess it's really over. *sigh*)

And River gets to be the movie River in this episode. Mind reading genius indeed. This is where it was all going, and I'm sorry we never really got to stay long. First time I saw this episode I will admit that I didn't consider it outside of the realm of possibility that this was the episode where River became the ship. I mean, why not? It was Written and Directed By.

The other thing that I LOVE in this episode is River and Mal. They didn't really have much to do with each other for all of these episodes. Mal doesn't understand her. And she knows what Mal is supposed to be. Mal is supposed to be the hero. There's always something charming about the two of them. "Don't make faces." And of course they end the whole series together in Serenity.

And we end the show with River and Kaylee and Serenity flying off into the black. And Jubal.

It's over. But maybe we can find some Serenity.

Ladies Night

2007-12-19T18:52:00.000-07:00

While I am relieved that a stupid lawsuit actually got dismissed (in NYC no less!), I do wonder how it would have gone if the gender situation had been reversed.

The No-Ballad of Sweeney Todd

2007-12-19T06:03:00.000-07:00

Got the soundtrack to Sweeney Todd this morning. The good - Johnny Depp sings better than Gerrard Butler. Sounds very David Bowie, actually. And Johanna sounds terrific. The bad - he doesn't sing as well as Len Cariou. And Helena Bonham Carter is NO Angela Lansbury. Obviously we'll see what it looks like on film. On the album everyone sounds like they're singing in small apartments but trying not to disturb the neighbors. Restraint is only good up to a point, Tim.

The inexplicable: It's not just the overture. There is NO Ballad of Sweeney Todd! I say again !!!!! And maybe #&$*! I'm piecing together the rumors I have heard and I think it comes up like this: The movie was going to have a chorus of ghosts. Well, the chorus is who sings the Ballad throughout the play. They didn't have time / budget / something like that to do the ghosts. So you cut the SIGNATURE SONG?!?! Um, doesn't that mean your movie isn't FINISHED? To add insult to injury they ghosts where going to be, among others, Tony Head and Christopher Lee! EDIT: Ok, the word is that since the ballad is always sung by a chorus, that it was too "stagey". Um... Whatev.

So, until I see the film, I will put this down as "Not as bad as I thought it would be." (Oh, and Alan Rickman's not half-bad!)

Firefly - War Stories

2007-12-19T05:55:00.001-07:00

Hey, I actually watched this one on air, start to finish! I think it might be the only one that I did.

In the aftermath of Ariel, the crew is living it up good. And "good" out in the black means fresh produce. River and Kaylee get to play on the Serenity set. ("One of you is going to fall and die, and I'm not cleaning it up!") Book is offering his opinions on River's condition and spinning ancient philosophy (or "sadistic crap dressed up with florid prose"). We find out (not surprisingly) that River hasn't been made quite as well as Simon had thought at the end of Ariel. Jayne is being obviously contrite (with the fresh produce).

This is the first episode that has shown any strife in the Wash family. (Well, TUAP does, but that's in two weeks, right?) Wash is really almost as out of his depth on Serenity as Simon. He just handles it better because it's more his choice. He's not nearly as rough and tumble as Jayne, Mal, or even Zoe (warrior woman). He likes flying his spaceship, loving his wife, and playing with his dinosaurs. He's my hero. Annnnd he's a leaf on the wind. Don't forget that.

I'm sure had the show run, somewhere in season two or three we would have seen their courtship. From what we saw in Out of Gas I'm guessing he fell for her fast and when she fell for him she was really annoyed by it. Mal certainly was.

It is nice to see that Joss has no problem with making his stand-in characters obnoxious and wrong. (Xander, anyone? Xander is Joss and Wash is Joss with a spaceship.) Wash and Zoe almost make up for stopping Xander and Anya's wedding. It's good to have a pretty solid married couple on a sci-fi show. And they are neither hopelessly sappy nor fatally flawed. *Sigh* Leaf.

We get our second recurring character: Adlai Niska! I wonder if he would have been the season's big bad? He's just such a lovable scary Russian crime lord.

A little more indication of Shepard Book: Man of Terrible Mystery. And Jayne's opinion that he's not fooling anyone. "Rabbits. Right. For stew."

A torture chamber is a rather interesting place for a quiet little character study. It's great to see Wash and Mal airing out their opinions of each other. Of course, a lot of it is Mal putting on an act. Or at least some of it. This ep has the classic Joss earmark (heh, ear) of going from falling down funny to cover your eyes scary (and maybe back).

It's also got the classic Joss moment where the cliché is turned on it's head. "But sufficient perhaps for one. Ahhhh, you now have--" "HIM. Sorry. You were going to ask me to choose, right?" Heh. What was funny was when I started seeing scenes like this in other movies, and I was surprised when it DIDN'T go the "Joss" way. (Kate & Leopold is the classic example.)

I LOVE the scene when Wash decides that Mal is the hero, and they need to save him. And realizes that Mal is also crazy.

The crew getting the ear is good too. (Only time that Book swears in Chinese, btw.) Then the crew swinging to the rescue is nice. This isn't really a "swinging to the rescue" crew. As we see. I mean, is Simon really the guy you want coming to rescue you? (Actually, I guess yes. Because if he cares he WILL NOT STOP.) Wash's gun is high-larious. And Book, "It is somewhat fuzzier on the subject of knee caps." Ouch.

Ahhhhh, River. Doing the math. (I had a friend who saw Serenity(movie) first. When he went back and saw the show he was greatly disappointed that he didn't get to see River doing THIS stuff.)

Hey look! It's a stupid tacked on Inara plot! I'm told that the original draft tied this into the main plot more. Kind of like Jaynestown. The client comes to the rescue. Dumb plot tie-in.

This was when I was enjoying Firefly like no other show. (Heroes has come close.) Two more episodes to go.

Next week we look at some Objects in Space. Ohhhhh, I got some opinions there.

Firefly - Ariel

2007-12-18T05:59:00.000-07:00

As cool as Firefly has been up to this point, this is when it gets really good. For some reason the next three episodes feel a little bit more "about" something. Go look at Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In both of those shows mid-season is where the story kicked in. Where they went from "wacky fun" to "harrowing plot". Sadly, Firefly will be canceled in three episodes.

The River story comes back to the forefront here (another reason to have Safe later on). Again, some have said that the reason Jayne gets slashed is because he's wearing a Blue Sun shirt. Ok, sure.

It's a good old fashioned heist show. It's the best that Firefly ever did. Train job was ok, but not much about the heist. Trash wasn't as polished as it should have been. This one hit the sweet spot. Plus all the little character bits you could ask for. "Clear." "Could you not do that while we're--- EVER?!?" Wash at hte dump throwing away the life-saving catalyzer (guess it WAS a nothing part). The crew learning all the medical lingo - "If I'd wanted schooling I'd have gone to school!"

The character who really gets to shine here is Simon. When River slashes at Jayne he is so deferential to Mal, both because he's so surprised at River, but also because he'll do anything to keep her safe. Locked in her quarters, but not back in Alliance hands? Fine.

Then we get to see him determined and resourceful coming up with the plan to get into St. Lucy's, and then we get to see what Simon was like back in the World. Brilliant, and probably rather intimidating doctor. "Gifted" is the word.

Again - good River writing. "You're going to suspend cerebral and cardio-pulmonary activity in order to induce a proto-comatose state." "That's right." "I don't wanna do it." Brilliant and creepy but childish and ordinary.

The Blue Hand guys show up. Of all of my disappointments in Serenity (and there are a couple) the fact that these guys never showed up was a BIG one. Scarrrry. And going through airport security would never be the same. One does wonder in the land of the HUGE conspiracy, what attracts more attention - a few grunts that might talk about how they picked up a couple of kids or an entire unit of Alliance's finest? Kind of the Capricorn One school of silly government plots. (What worries me most is the people that think this sort of stuff goes on "all the time".)

Then there's Jayne. Most shows have a character what can't be trusted, you can usually trust them. Nobody's going to really do anything, this is episodic television. We also get to see Jayne's loyalty (for whatever reason) to Mal. He's still a goon and a thug, but he's got his own way of moralizing things. And the payoff with Mal at the end is perfect. (It's also the second Firefly I ever saw, BTW.)

Book and Inara are conveniently out of the way. So, it's like Serenity! Might have been interesting to see what Book would have had to say about the proceedings. Shepard Book, Man of Terrible Mystery would have figured out what was going on from the moment Jayne left the ship. AND had something to say about the Hands of Blue. Good thing he was meditating on his rock garden.

Like I said, this is where it got really good. Right before it ended. *SIGH*

Next up, let's tell some War Stories.

Tallguy's Firefly - Safe

2007-12-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

By this time next week, we'll be done. Again.

And the Tams were Safe. Welcome to the Tallguy Firefly recap. Airdate November 8th, 2002. Incidentally, Objects in Space, the last chronological episode aired December 13th, 2002, five years ago yesterday. So I've really kind of blown this. But it'll be a busy week.

We open with a flashback. We're getting deep into the River / Simon story here. I think this episode works fine right where it is. None of this would have touched me if the only thing I had seen of River was in the previous four episodes. She's not in Serenity or Train Job much. She's just strange in Bushwhacked. Since she's used so sparingly, we need all the River we can get before we get here.

We see that the Tams were happy. And their parents were loving but indifferent. I guess it's tough to cram "idyllic gifted childhood" into a minute and a half. I might have liked to have seen more with Mr. and Mrs. Tam in later seasons.

There's a lot of "built up to" in this episode. You get the notion that Mal and the crew have been dealing with River's shenanigans for a while now. Not just four episodes. And Simon is finally starting to see the life that he's living in comparison with the life he traded. Enough that he can be a little mean to Kaylee. (And they have this fight a lot, remember?)

Also another piece in the puzzle of Shepard Book, Man of Terrible Mystery. I'm not sure they had really made up their minds on this one. Either that or they weren't as good at switching back and forth as they should have been. Some things unsettle the good preacher that shouldn't have if he was really Man of Terrible Mystery. OR we just really don't know what his story was, and it all would have made sense later. I
mean, this isn't Ron Moore we're dealing with here.

My biggest argument for Safe being where it is is that when River breaks into dance with the locals (cause Summer's all trained ballet dancer, right?) it just breaks your heart. Because you've seen how broken and how damaged she is. Like Simon will say later "She just wants to be a kid." If I didn't know River at this point, I wouldn't have seen that. (There's a similar scene for Mal in Serenity. I'll talk about that next Thursday.)

I tend to dismiss this episode as one of my less favorite. (It's got a teeny bit of religious bigotry, but it is after all television.) Then I watch it and it's got many of my favorite bits. Lots of this beats in this episode made it into the movie. Mal saying who is and who isn't part of his crew, and what that means. It also taught me sanguine means bloody. Educational Firefly!

"See, morbid and creepifiying, I got no problem with..."

"Black market beagles"

And of course: "BIG DAMN HEROES, Sir!" "Ain't. We. Just!"

It's still got cows. And it ends at the table. All in all a great episode, really. It sums up a lot of the "western in space" feel that Joss and Tim wanted. And Fox didn't. So MOVE it.

Next up, back to the sanctified "intended" order with Ariel.

Meet the Robinson's

2007-12-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

We saw Disney's Meet the Robinsons last week. What an INCREDIBLY STUPID movie. I loved it all to pieces. It's not quite the Emperor's New Groove, but it's in that vein. Only with time machines, dinosaurs, and space ships. It's basically a bunch of writers and animators just like me who got to play with Disney's money.

I remember seeing an interview with Steven Spielberg on why 1941 was his first flop. He said that looking back on it, he realized that the only people who would enjoy this movie were the people with exactly the same sense of humor as him, Bob Gale, and Robert Zemeckis. Well this is kind of the same situation. And in both cases, I'm that guy!

Worst Pies in London!

2007-12-13T18:49:00.000-07:00

The opening titles to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street are on line. Warning: These ARE disturbing. Not as much left to the imagination on screen as on stage.

What cracks me up is that there is STILL no SINGING in these titles. In the trailers there are a few snippets of Depp kind of singing "there's a hole in the world like a great black pit". But they're not really going out of their way to say MUSICAL.

One of my favorite movie quotes from the Harrison Ford remake of Sabrina was thus:

Mack: The most difficult tickets to get will be for a Broadway musical.
Linus Larrabee: So?
Mack: That means that the performers will periodically dance about and burst into song.

Anyway, brace yourselves. (If the Zombie song disturbed you, don't click here.) Here it is.

Mighty fine!

2007-12-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

I've got nine days. Whoops! Eight! Then it's all over. Well, until the DVDs come out. Little extra stuff there. And of course the BDM. But that's YEARS away at this point.

Welcome back to Tallguy's Firefly recaps. The idea was to review each episode of Firefly on the fifth anniversary of it's airing. Then I got tied up finishing a Star Trek fan film (airs Saturday, December 22nd at 5:01pm - 17:01 - get it?). So here we go rushing through. But like I've said, it's kind of how I watched them five years ago.

Shindig. If you only watched these on DVD, this is sort of a step backwards. There's not TOO much difference in going from Bushwhacked to Shindig, or going from Bushwhacked to Our Mrs. Reynolds. I think the move was really to put Safe a ways back. But more on that next time.

The hologram pool balls are ridiculous and go against the whole "most basic of technologies" vibe of the frontier. But it's SPACE, right? Ah well. Mal being a petty thief just cause it'll bug someone is fun.

Hey look, it's an Inara plot where she is actually is part of the plot!

And now we come back from the credits with my favorite Firefly shot ever. Looking out the bridge window landing on Persephone. And the Leaf almost crashing - again.

BADGER! I was so upset Badger wasn't in Serenity. Especially when they replaced him with twin Badgers. In case you wondered why it seems we've seen Badger before, it's because we haven't. Well, in the order they aired them in anyway. (And it was nice seeing him on BSG.) I could easily see something that built up to a big multi-episode plot with Badger and / or Saffron. Very Angel. But, we're getting canceled in four episodes, remember?

The A plot isn't bad. It's a genuine Mal & Inara plot. Mal gets to be all vulnerable ("I don't like people that killed me") and Inara gets to be torn between two worlds. Kaylee is extremely Kaylee ("How do we know, unless we question it?") There's a sword fight. The guy from L.A. Law is good. There's a Rhett Butler look-alike.

See, this is where Joss cheated. Big time. He talks a big game, about how the Alliance is actually good and benevolent, only not if you're the poor sods what got thumped by them in the war. So really it's just a difference of opinion. Like Vietnam, he says. *cough* Also how he wrote Firefly after reading a book on those shattered souls that lost the American Civil War. But then he goes and gives the Alliance slavery and indentured servitude, rather than just big government indifference. (In Joss and Tim's defense, they did a pretty good job of it in Train Job and Bushwhacked, but not so good the rest of the time.) Then there's the whole River thing. So, the Alliance really isn't muddled at all. They're the bad guys. (And it doesn't reflect well on Inara that she doesn't really seem to care one way or the other. She's pro-Alliance, actually, remember?)

Lot of nice stuff back on the ship while the plot bubbles. The card game is fun. Zoe and Wash being all lovey. River going crazy some more. Some have pointed out that River is tearing Blue Sun labels off the cans, because she hates the Blue Sun Corp, because that's who did this to her. Ok, sure. Coke and Microsoft run everything. Got it. Obviously they never had time to go anywhere with this. River and Badger is cool, especially when you learn that Mark Shepard taught Summer Glau the accent. And Jayne gets to have his Jayne coin land dumb side up kind of a lot. "That's exactly the kind of di-version we could have used."

And it all ends with cows.

Next time: Our crew gets home Safe!

Big Opening

2007-12-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

Too fast! It's all too fast!

Over on TrekMovie.com they had a poll asking if you saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture on opening night. (I didn't, but we saw it within the week. Liked it then. Like it more now.) Over 60% said they didn't see it because they hadn't been BORN yet. Arrrgh.

I saw this and Disney's The Black Hole within a week or two of each other. Both of them had something I'd never seen before, and never saw again with a new release motion picture: An Overture. Just a few minutes of music played over a background. (ST:TMP's was a black screen in the theater. The Director's Edition added a moving star field.)

Films I have since seen that have Overtures: Lawrence of Arabia. Gone With the Wind. My Fair Lady? Sound of Music? Wizard of Oz? Have to go check those. (edit - No. But 2001, King Kong, and Mary Poppins did.) Looks like the only two movies after ST:TMP and The Black Hole to have overtures were Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005).

An overture signaled an EVENT. Something was about to HAPPEN. Heck, these days we don't even have a main title, unless it's trying to be all retro (like Superman Returns).

I realize that the whole purpose of an overture is somewhat at odds with the world we live in. It's intent is to settle you in to the theater. Get you into the movie mood. Well, people don't DO that anymore. They never GET into the movie mood. They're worried about cel phones and blackberries and going back out for candy or maybe over to the next theater for another movie.

Another concession that I will make is that I miss overtures because I enjoy the kind of music that most overtures used to contain. Maurice Jarre, Jerry Goldsmith, John Barry. A rap star overture just wouldn't do it for me.

Another "old school" movie tradition I miss is Intermission. Used to be when you went to go see the latest three and a half hour epic, you'd get a potty break. I remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia at the Cine Capri. Two hours of dazzling desert-scapes. I've never seen the concessions stand so full. Then ten years later I saw Titanic (with NO intermission). Afterwards I've never seen the restrooms so crowded.

Firefly - Out of Gas

2007-12-10T19:46:00.000-07:00

Ahhh, time's running short. It's almost over. Gotta get a move on.

Out of Gas. My very favorite-ist episode. There are some that come close, to be sure. Real close. It's really "These are my favorite and these are not." And even those are really good.

I remember reading reviews of this ep (Television Without Pity comes to mind) that thought the flashbacks were from The Unaired Pilot. That this was somehow addressing the "AIRED IN THE WRONG ORDER" problem. Well, no. This would have been told exactly the same way, aired order or no. And what a way it's told.

I love "out of order" storytelling. Probably my favorite use of this was Steven Soderberg's The Limey. I admit, it catches my interest. I enjoy the cleverness of it. (Having said that, BSG is never allowed to use a "48 hours ago" card ever again.)

I love how this tells about the "core" crew of Serenity. (Notice there's nothing about Book or the Tam's? That's because that was all in TUP.) We never got the full scoop on Inara, but this is a start. Wash joining is another "playing against expectations" moment from Tim and Joss. So is the "genius" mechanic. I'd have liked to have eventually seen more of how those Zoe and Wash came together. But then they canceled the show. And we had the whole Leaf business. Kaylee's is as cute as we'd figure. Jayne's intro explains a whole lot, doesn't it?

But this is really about Mal's love affair with his girl. How Serenity is the fix to all his hurts. The freedom that he lost. This ship is
his new faith. (A little sad, but Mal's a sad character.) Mal and Zoe first walking into the cargo hold is one of my favorites in the whole show.

It's also got a dinner table scene. Always did love them too. There was something different about this aspect of the show. It said a lot about the "family" aspect as well as just adding a reality of life out in the black.

Not a lot of Zoe, since she had to go be in a terrible Matrix movie. But some really good Wash stuff. Wash is almost as much a fish out of water with this crew as Simon is. And as much at odds with Mal, much of the time. By contrast, Kaylee is a little too whiny when Serenity breaks down.

River continues to be built. Again, I'm amazed at how slowly they developed this character. Just little notes here and there. More on that in another two episodes. The best River writing would ground her weirdness in some sort of normalcy. "I didn't get you anything." The best best River writing would ground her weirdness in being Simon's bratty kid sister.

Book seems to be firmly in "humble preacher, way out of his depth" mode. Certainly not the criminal mastermind we glimpse in many other eps.

Quentin Tarantino has much to answer for for introducing the "adrenalin to the heart cures everything" gag.

This ep runs into the same problem that shows up a lot in the series: Space is big. And empty. So it's hard to get lost in. Or snuck up on. And if you "run out of gas" you do tend to keep moving. Go watch Apollo 13, Tim. Never did figure out why the bad guy ship (who's bridge I have stood on, BTW) didn't just hang around and wait for Mal to die. Or why the shuttles didn't see them coming or going. Space. Big. Remember? But it's yet ANOTHER example of someone telling Mal "People just suck" and Mal saying "Oh no they don't."

And the last scene. It's love. In point of fact.

Next up, a mighty fine Shindig. (And BADGER!)

The Comfortable Chair is looking comfortable

2007-12-10T19:37:00.000-07:00

As in "Indiana Jones and the Comfortable Chair".

But... Ok, this just looks cool.

THIS. IS. SPAAARTAAAAA!

2007-12-08T08:49:00.000-07:00

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Heh heh heh heh....

The last time we left...

2007-12-06T19:12:00.000-07:00

It's my brother's birthday, so I have to write something. And I'll usually rant a bit about, and always remember this.

But 30 years after that (and 36 years ago today) we did this:

More here.

Firefly - Jaynestown

2007-12-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

October 18th. So I'm really only a little more than a month behind.
But time is running out for our intrepid crew, so I'll have to hurry. And now I have new BSG to review. Arrrgh. (Grrr.)

This is Firefly gold, isn't it? I mean, JAYNE! The man they call JAYNE! Written by Ben "I'm going to write the funniest episode of Angel EVER" Edlund. Oh yeah, he also created The Tick. And co-wrote Titan A.E. with Joe Sweden (I haven't written in a long time so I'll explain again that this is my high-larious-to-me name for Joss Whedon).

This is a great episode for everybody. Even Inara who has a dumb tacked on Inara plot (that rather lamely intersects with the main plot) has some good moments. "Jayne?!? You're talking about Jayne Cobb?!?" I always kind of got the idea that Morena B. was learning on the job. I think that if they had figured out what to do with her character she would have been a standout.

It's a Jayne episode (it's THE Jayne episode) but it also gives Simon a LOT to play off of. Both of them get to react to the advances and setbacks of each other. "The box-dropping-man-ape-gone-wrong-thing!" And of course Simon messing up with Kaylee was so funny that they did it three times in fifteen episodes. So Kaylee has some good stuff too. "It's. Going. WELL."

Mal gets to be all Mal a lot in this episode. Never at the center but always ready to do what needs be done in the margins. I always thought that Jayne's deference to Mal was interesting. The close of the episode is surprisingly touching for an otherwise laugh-filled ep.

Book. And River. River and Book. River and Book and The Book. And the Hair. With Zoe for good measure. See? Why couldn't Inara get subplots as good as these? "His brains are in terrible danger!" Even when I see that clip in my "The Bug" video it makes me laugh.

Book's speech on the Bible just shows that Joss is trying hard. He knows there are people who believe this stuff, he just doesn't know why. I will give him five stars for a good faith effort on faith. I think this was closer to the mark than Book's ideas on faith in Serenity. (If a man what believes in Jesus doesn't care what you believe as long as you believe, I guess he don't believe too hard, does he?) Again, I'd have been disappointed if the "honest homespun preacher" persona ever turned out to be a total fabrication for whatever diabolical means Book turned out to have. I'd have liked to have seen Mal and Book actually develop the mentor relationship we saw in the movie.

One of the great things about this show was how gradually they built River's character. So folk were better at writing her than others. I'll say Ben was the best. (Joe probably wasn't bad.)

For the "they showed them out of ORDER!!" crowd, the only two relationships that are progressing here are Book / River and Kaylee / Simon. And since they did pretty much this same exact fight three times over the show (including one very late and un-aired), this doesn't seem problematical. River didn't have much to do in Shindig, and I'll have a lot to say about the aired order of Safe when we get there.

Unfortunately the writers can't add. Fess is twenty-six as is pointed out several times. Stitch says that he and Jayne pulled their caper four years ago. Fess talks about Jayne's exploits "when he was growing up". Now I know Fess has some maturity issues foisted on him by his father, but I can't see him calling twenty-two "when he was growing up". Heck, the War for Unification was already over and done by then. I think Mal even had Serenity.

And here are the WORDS!

The Ballad of Jayne

Jayne, the man they call Jayne

He robbed from the rich
And he gave to the poor
Stood up to the man
And gave him what for
Our love for him now
Ain't hard to explain
The hero of Canton
The man they call Jayne

Our Jayne saw the mudders' backs breakin'
He saw the mudders' lament
And he saw the magistrate takin'
Every dollar and leavin' five cents
So he said "you can't do that to my people"
He said "you can't crush them under your heel"
So Jayne strapped on his hat
And in 5 seconds flat
Stole everythin' Boss Higgins had to steal

He robbed from the rich
And he gave to the poor
Stood up to the man
And gave him what for
Our love for him now
Ain't hard to explain
The hero of Canton
The man they call Jayne

Now here is what separates heroes
From common folk like you and I
The man they call Jayne
He turned 'round his plane
And let that money hit sky
He dropped it onto our houses
He dropped it into our yards
The man they called Jayne
He stole away our pain
And headed out for the stars

He robbed from the rich
And he gave to the poor
Stood up to the man
And gave him what for
Our love for him now
Ain't hard to explain
The hero of Canton
The man they call Jayne.

Next ep - we run Out of Gas.

But Lee Majors is Still Alive

2007-12-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

Childhood hero passes away. I'm sure what everyone is thinking is something like "We didn't expect him to live this long." I'm sure Mom and Dad have some pictures of us with Knievel stuff. Pics of us jumping our bikes off of ramps over anything we could find? Well, we didn't let the folks see that stuff.

Best Sheldon EVER

2007-12-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, not ever. But it's up there. Anything that makes fun of Tom freaking Bombadil is good in my book. There is a reason that he has NEVER been in ANY form of adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Radio. Movies. Comics. Lot of time on NOTHING.

The End Was Near

2007-11-27T19:32:00.001-07:00

Wow. Over a month! Sorry.

I know, I'm SO far behind on my reviews. Almost defeats the purpose at this point. But we'll do the impossible, and it will make us mighty. (Actually, since I only watched four of the ten aired episodes live, and plowed through the rest on VHS, this is kind of appropriate.)

Anyway, just a quick post that five years ago at Thanksgiving, I sat down to my Dad's computer and read that Firefly had been placed on "hiatus". The writing was on the wall. We were fighting a war that had already been lost. But we're known for that. It's our way. (And that's better than a plan.)

We Happy Few...

2007-10-25T05:44:00.001-07:00

In case you were wondering, today is St. Crispin's Day. So it's a good day to post this!

Hey look! (At about 1:43) It's little Bruce Wayne in the front row!

Sad Sparky

2007-10-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I'm way behind. Two episodes of Firefly, couple of Heroes (it's slow, but it's good). Been playing Half Life 2.2 / Portals ("...and then there will be cake!") and working on Star Trek: Of Gods and Men (December, we mean it this time!).

But this article caught my eye. And I have to say, Sparky's "life of misery" wasn't so secret to anyone who actually READ Peanuts, not just read the greeting cards. Heck, go watch "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" or "A Charlie Brown Christmas". I'm not saying Schultz was Stephan Pastis or anything. (For one thing, his puns weren't as bad.) But all of the best Peanuts cartoons had a strong undertow of melancholy. And we loved them. I don't know what the book is really like (I still need to get Clarence Thomas' book), but the headline doesn't surprise me in the slightest. "Happiness is a sad song" sounds just about right.

Set Course for Talos IV

2007-10-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

Yowza! I know what I'm doing THIS night. It's Remastered, so I won't get to see the REAL Enterprise on the big screen, but this will still be a hoot.

And those "out the window" shots at the Starbase are outstanding.

Still Laughing

2007-10-06T07:57:00.001-07:00

It's Saturday and Lobot is still cracking me up.

Five Year Firefly - Our Mrs. Reynolds

2007-10-04T19:03:00.000-07:00

Five years later and Fox still sucks. They had my Bug video yanked off of YouTube. Mind you, there's still a TON of Firefly AND Dire Straits videos up there, including whole clips of episodes. Just not mine. But hey, who am I to try and sell their stuff, right? Grrrr. (Arrrgh.)

Gasp! We skipped an episode! Two! Not REAL sure why. I mean, the episode opens with horses, wagons and floral bonnets. To say nothing of the folk talking all manner of peculiar like. So it's not like Our Mrs. Reynolds had a more "westerny" feel (which I gather Fox, um, disliked) than Shindig. But this is OBVIOUSLY why the show was canceled, right? Because they shifted two episodes. Ok, not airing the pilot wasn't bright, but they essentially aired the SECOND pilot. Star Trek did that. I think it was more not having a clue how to advertise it and not accepting anything that didn't have 24 / American Idol ratings. Oh, and their ravenous lust for canceling sci-fi. There's a REASON why Chris Carter shouted loud and often that X-Files wasn't sci-fi.

So here we are with Our Mrs. Reynolds. Written (but not directed by) Joe Sweedon! (Written AND directed by leads to leaf on the wind time. But he totally brings the funny.)

Five years ago I am now officially watching Firefly. Huzzah! And it is one of the best. It has it all. Except River. It has no River to speak of. (Simon has some moments. River has some DISTURBING deleted scenes.) Took me about seven seconds (after I said "Hey! That's Ron Glass! And Adam Baldwin!") to say "Ah. That's the Willow character. And that's Xander flying a spaceship." I didn't figure out that Adam B. was the Cordelia character, but what can you do? Oh, and they had no SOUND when things blew up in space! How COOOOOOL is THAT?

This is an astonishingly quotable ep. "That's a DUMB planet!" "A very special level of hell that they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater." "Nobody's saying that sir." "Yeah, we're pretty much just giving each other significant glances and laughing incesently." "I call her Vera." "QUAINT!" "Some people juggle geese!" "My days of not taking you seriously are definitely coming to a middle." "I wish you hundreds of fat children!" "Is it Christmas?" "I will riddle you with holes." "Isn't that... SPECIAL?"

Inara has some good lines. Morena B. is actually pretty funny. (As opposed to Ron Glass who is high-larious.) YoSafBrige (I'm skipping ahead with the jokes, but I'm a leaf on wind, so sue me) is the companion gone BAD, so Inara actually has something to do! Again, not sure how long they could have kept this up. Yes, I will mention this again. Next week in fact. But it's a nice ep for the Mal/Inara 'shippers.

It's got the classic Joss twist twist twist fakeout. (It's funny! No, it's sexy! Or, funny again. Oh, wait, no, it's actually scary!)

This may be the first mention of "Earth that Was". (Don't recall it in either of the previously aired eps, the skipped eps, or the Unaired Pilot.)

It's got Wash and Zoe being extremely Wash and Zoe at each other. They're very sweet, but they do fight like cats and dogs.

Of course, Saffron was interesting enough to bring back.

And Mal gets to say again how folk don't suck (except Fox). More to the point, someone else gets to tell him how everybody sucks (including Fox) and he gets to say "Oh no they don't either (except for Fox)." Mal is still the BDH. (I'd explain what that means, but we skipped that episode. Stay tuned.)

JAAAAAAAAAAAYNE! The man they call JAAAAAAAAAYNE! See you next week.

Beep beep beep beep beep...

2007-10-04T06:04:00.000-07:00

Fifty years ago today the U.S.S.R. started the space race. Excellent try, guys. On October 4th, 1957 it looked like we had already lost.

Of course, on December 24th, 1968 that was clearly not the case.

But this is where it began.

Now I need to go watch The Iron Giant and October Sky.

Sheldon! Dune!

2007-10-03T06:06:00.000-07:00

Sheldon does more Dune jokes. Here. And here.

Sheldon makes me laugh more than PvP these days. And that's saying something. (It's ok Mr. Kurtz, I still love PvP.)

And in case I never mentioned, here.

(Heroes is still cool. Review up later. I'll try to have this week's Firefly up on time. No, really.)

Rock it out, Lobot!

2007-10-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a really really really long time.

Goodbye, Moneypenny

2007-09-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

Lois Maxwell, the original Moneypenny (and like M, only one of two that were any good) has died.

Until the Brosnan Bonds (and recasting the part for the second time) there was only one director who "got" Moneypenny, and that was Terrence Young (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball). Everyone else made her a goof ball. (Ok, Peter "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" did alright.)

If you count Bond, M, and Moneypenny as "the original three", that leaves only Sean Connery still standing.

For a little more conservatism in your Trek...

2007-09-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

National Review has FINALLY done their Star Trek weekend. Oh my, that's a lot to read... Guess I'll start with Lileks. (You know, I'm supposed to be MAKING Star Trek tonight, not reading about it.)

Everthing New is Old

2007-09-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

Yikes!

20 years....

Unlike Firefly, THIS I watched on opening night. Until I was in college without a TV I never missed an episode. I own all seven seasons on DVD as well as all four movies.

Good job, guys.

Firefly - Bushwhacked

2007-09-28T06:02:00.000-07:00

You know, if you're not watching Firefly -- IT'S TOO LATE! GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE!

This is the firefly ep I tend to forget. Don't know why. It's funny, I always remember the first shot of the show and the last. I always forget some real highlights of the ep. Mal is obviously a big part of this one. Reavers and the war always put him in a good spot. (Wouldn't THAT make a good movie?) We get more exposition here. not all of which is in TUAP. More on Inara. Zoe and Wash. Plus they do recap a bit from the pilot.

This shows off one of Mal's big weaknesses. "I will argue with you for way longer than it takes to explain because no one questions my authority!" Good character flaw. Dumb plot point. (Don't worry. It gets WAY dumber.)

The interviews with the Alliance rock. (And there are some great outtakes with Alan Tudyk too.) "We're private people." "Her legs!" Heh.

I don't think any space shot looked cooler w/o sound than the transport ship 'sploding.

Some AWESOME Book stuff this ep. Sure we all wanted to know who he REALLY was, but I would have missed this book. Very kind. A little meddling. Right a lot. Mal's conscience. (A useful one that can be part of a lot more stories than Inara. I'm still skeptical that Inara would ever have had anything to do other than create unbelievable romantic tension.)

Did you notice how much NOTHING Inara has to do? Ok, she has a nice moment with Simon at the beginning and then later with Mal. "Just when I think I have you figured out." Then Mal promptly proves her wrong. (Or right.) Heh.

Of course I'm not sure as to how well these reavers match the movie reavers.

I think this is the scariest episode that got made. There's a very dark feeling of dread and unknown. They were putting a lot of work into setting up the reavers. Of course this is a Tim Minear ep. I think he had some gifts that joss lacked from time to time.

We start to get a lot more River here. And we start to get that she's special.

Simon rocks, as usual. 'Specially when Jayne is torturing him.

Speaking of which, it's impressive how totally Adam B lives in Jayne. The ballgame, making fun of Simon.

"Piece of JUNK?!?" Wouldn't you just love to see Kaylee and Scotty get really plastered?

As much as they try to do space 'right' they always miss that space is BIG and that there isn't geography to hide behind or fly around.

Another moment that serves double purpose either as a reprise or an introduction is when Greg Edmunson plays the reaver drums. Again, I saw this first and it works fine. So there. I say again, they didn't kill the show by moving THREE episodes.

The ballgame is mission statement type stuff. Life in The Black. No holodecks here.

"May have been on the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."

See y'all next week for Our Mrs. Reynolds!

Heroes! - "Four Months Later"

2007-09-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

Heroes - Yep, add it to my weekly blather.

Ahhh, the start of new TV. For those of you not watching heroes, you oughta be. Avast! Here be spoilers.

They saved the cheerleader. They saved the world. What next?

Well this was a nice start to the scary second season. Last season (that we watched completely two weeks ago) left the follow up a lot to live up to. Nice to see that we're ramping up slow. My first thought is - did ANYONE stay married? My second thought is - that is SOME beard, Nathan.

Do the non-super Bennetts know why they're in exile? (Ok, Mr and Mrs B. are still together. That's nice. But they still have the crazy dog.)

It's a nice relief to see that Mr B (Noah) is still being spy guy. Disgruntled copy center employee spy guy, but still. And Claire's story is still strangely compelling. I don't know why. It has as ordinariness that I like. Did anyone NOT see that the "friend" was going to be "special"?

Mohinder's story still needs some ramp up time. Not so interested yet. Same with Parkman. Although obviously (heh) Molly is going to be one of the hooks to the Big Bad.

The Big Bad killed Sulu! I'm bummed! I hope they don't kill off ALL of the silver agers. (Although I guess Mrs. Petrelli is the last one, isn't she?) (Hrmmm. Are they the GOLDEN agers, and then Nathan and Peter are silver, and Claire is... Whatever you call post-silver age?)

Hiro's story is SO entertaining I can't stand it! It's awesome! Takezo Sensei rocks. The scene where Hiro had to put his glasses back on is one of my favorites so far.

Peter is the cliff-hanger, eh? I figured it was him or Sylar. So, how does one totally disappear when a) one was pretty darn wealthy 2) a congressional candidate and d) you apparently maintain a cel phone plan? But, hey. That's REALLY quite a beard.

Sylar must be busy getting fitted for his ears.

No Vegas people yet.

Well, THIS is what it's like watching week to week. Not SO bad.

Five Years Ago TODAY TODAY!

2007-09-20T21:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, I messed up. Firefly premiered tonight, not on the 10th. Whoops. So go back and read my post from the 10th.

Happy fifth anniversary of Firefly, for real! So Ff opened in a nice cozy Friday timeslot. Of course, so did BSG and that turned out ok... So I guess I'll quit whining in that regard.

See you next week for Bushwhacked!

Rich Mullins

2007-09-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to think of something profound to say about Rich Mullins today, the tenth anniversary of his death. Ten years ago I didn't care. It's been quite the decade.

All I can say is that just a few months later his music would become very important to me. Rich was the soundtrack of my coming back to the Church. An Arrow Pointing to Heaven. Indeed.

I'm sorry I never got to meet him. But he'd probably say that 1) that was no big loss and 2) that I got his music, what more did I need? Probably can't argue with that.

Arrrgh, Matey

2007-09-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

In case ye be forgetting (I was a bit un-memoraful m'self) today be National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrrgh. (Grrrr.)

So I leave ye with this:

And the reflection that talkin' piratical is not too far twice removed from Joss-speak. At least the way Sparrow does it. Now avast ye scabrous dogs and hoist up the john bs sail, see how the mainsail sets, call for the captain ashore, let me go -- er... Arrrrrgh!

(What's a Pirate's favorite WWII movie? A Bridge Too Faaaaaarrrgh!)

Oh. Dear.

2007-09-16T08:39:00.000-07:00

In today's "And Scarecrow and Mrs. King isn't out on DVD, WHY?!?" news:

A CLASSIC TV series of the first order. *cough* Ah well, at least it'll have the Starbuck episode...

9/11 One Midnight Gone - Again

2007-09-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

Another 9/11 past. Gotta be the weirdest national day. Maybe not. But it still gives me a jolt. I almost feel like it should not be allowed as a day. Like the 13th floor of days. "That should be here by 9/11" "That's due on 9.11." I'm almost offended. I hope the nextgen has (almost) no idea what I'm talking about. T know 12/7 in a rather abstract way. It should be like that.

If you were dropped into Feb '43 I wonder how long it would take before you could tell they were at war. If you traded places with someone, how long would it take them to tell we were at war?

Driving to work on 9/11 this week I passed under a bridge with a sign that said September 11th 2001 and a fella with a nice sized flag. I saluted, he waved.

Ten minutes later I passed a sign that said "LEARN THE TRUTH ABOUT 9.11!" Oddly that person did not wait with their sign.

Still living in The Future, I guess.

The Nerdiest Thing I've Read This Month

2007-09-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

Wow. In the year 1987 America launched the last of it's deep space probes. Judgment Day was August 29, 1997. There was that business at Tycho. That's right, gang. We're living in THE FUTURE! Now where's my flying cars!?!

September 13th, a day of remembrance:

Eight years ago today, we lost the moon.

It may have been the single largest tragedy ever in the history of the
planet, having caused the destruction of much of our civilization, as
well as the disappearance of many species, some through direct
catastrophe, many others by disrupting the cycles by which they bred and
reproduced. There hasn't been as much sickness from the radioactive
materials scattered in orbit from Farside Dump as we thought there
would, but it has been bad enough--a thousand Chernobyls, covering much
of the planet. It will be centuries before we know the true costs.

There's nothing in the sky at night anymore except the plain old stars
and planets, just specks of light. No inspiring romantic glow filling
the darkness of the night, no waning tiny sliver to just peek over the
shoulder of the not-quite-dark sky.

No stepping-stone to the stars, either. Without the inspiration of the
moon, few have cared to continue what we started. Even many of the
Martians have come home, because they cannot yet feed themselves
completely for so many there, and some came back to be with their
families for what felt like the end of the world here on Earth.

Lastly, a dedication to those who were lost with Luna, at least some of whom were known to still be alive when we last had contact, but without supplies, without the sanity-preserving contact with home, cannot be expected to last indefinitely, and will likely not last even a generation. Yet some here feel the Lunatics are better off than we are, as they will not have to watch so much of their home die, to be reborn as a world alien to us as generations progress.

Six years ago today

2007-09-11T06:30:00.000-07:00

Not as much fun as five years ago, obviously. But this is not a bad way to make it better.

It's also nice to note that it has not happened again.

Indiana Jones and the...

2007-09-11T06:27:00.000-07:00

Well, here it is.

Still not all that excited. (Prove me wrong, Steve. I dare you.)

THIS is exciting. The flying shots alone will get me in the theater. Oh, and Aliens v. Predator is actually looking cool this time out.

Five years ago TODAY!

2007-09-10T19:40:00.001-07:00

Five years ago tonight I was NOT watching Firefly. This is not strictly speaking my fault. I didn't really have television in the wild and woolly days of 2002.

I don't recall how I heard about ff. Probably because I had started watching buffy on DVD earlier that year. So thanks to DVD and Netflix (a new and exciting thing back in the day) I knew who Joe Sweedon was. (For those joining late, this is funny - cause, like, his name is really Joss Whedon, and if you run it together, it's Joe - oh, you got it? Good. I think it's funny and I keep using it...) Anyway - It was the Buffy guy doing spaceships! And it had Adam "I'm not a Baldwin" Baldwin and Ron "Harris from Barney Miller" Glass. Then I found out it was all westerny, which was just nifty. (Joe hadn't totally screwed with the way I talked yet - so it wasn't "SHINY". Note that I said things like "westerny" ALL on my own.)

So. Here's how it is: l'm going to recap these in broadcast order. Keep in mind that "Serenity (tv)" was shown LAST. There MAY be some ranting about The Powers That Be Fox. Maybe. I will leave any "future" spoilers to the end of each week.

The Train Job
Ahhh, the sonorous tones of Shepard Book. You DVD kiddies have no idea what I'm talking about. Each week opened with an into to the 'verse (that's Ff speak for universe of course). With clips from The Unaired Pilot, Book tells us of the war and how the edges of the System are a rough and tumble place. "Find a crew. Find a job. Keep flying." It bugs me to this day that these intros aren't on the DVDs. Especially since "Keep flying" became such an important part of Ff culture. (They ARE on iTunes along with the "Previously on...". This is the proper way of course.)

The Bar. Our intro to our Big Damm Heroes (ain't they just?). Note the western/Chinese fusion atmosphere. Very Casablanca with a Chinese accent. Did you see the covert and possibly criminal activity on the part of the dancer and the fellow in the brown coat?

"Your move." Whoa. This looks like a TOUGH game of Chinese checkers! The fellow that spoke seems gruff. "I live on the edge." Let's see how THAT works out. This is a Joss show and bravado is not usually rewarded in low stakes situations. See? So very quickly we establish one character as bold and brash, another as cool and competent, and a third as tough but dumb.

"A toast!" Hey! Exposition! More about this war. This big war they failed to win. Which is why Mr. Brown Coat might seem unhappy about it. Also our first Chinese as a co-spoken language. "Browncoats"! I get it!

"Captain." Oh yeah. We knew that from the intro that's not on the DVD.

Jayne. The man they call Jayne. I just saw a Q&A with Joe S. (hey - I'm still laughing) where he talked about how Adam B. kind of screwed things up. We weren't supposed to love Jayne. But we do.

Big Fight. Our Heroes are overwhelmed. Ah. These are THOSE kind of heroes. The lovable losers that are smart and scrappy.

Nice holo-window. Nice moon. It's SPACE!

Our first fiddles!

"We'll rise again." Subtle.

Annnnnd THERE'S our GIRL! She's still lovely, even in her pilot model shape. Guns blazing. Oh, wait... No guns? No space battles?

Wash! The Leaf on the Wind! More folk. Wash is married to the woman. Captain has a chip on his shoulder.

No sound in space!

You CAN'T take the sky! Just can't! Unless you're Fox.

I've always thought this ep was pretty masterful in it's own way. For us what watched it before Serenity TUAP (The UnAired Pilot - keep up) it had to do all the exposition. For you mugs that watched on DVD, it had to be a followup. I think it's grand as both. I never felt lost watching the first time through. A lot of the info from TUAP is doled out over this and other eps. It works as either exposition or recap. Of course this ep also marks a pretty big change in the flavor of the show. Mal wasn't near as funny in Serenity. Funny, but not AS funny. He was gruff and tortured. He'll get that way again, don't worry.

Ok, I wrote most of this on a flight a few weeks ago and forgot about it, so the rest won't be as shot-for-shot, Television Without Pity. (Sighs of relief, I know.) But The Train Job is a great yarn. It's got a TRAIN! In SPACE! And it's got SPACE gangsters! And a SPACE sheriff! It's still one of MY favorites. Even the people that weren't crazy for it when it aired loved it when Mal said "Darn." and kicked the fella through the engine. Wacky fun. I imagine if this really HAD been the second episode well and true, it wouldn't have changed much. They still would have recapped JUUUUUST enough in case you didn't watch last week or didn't remember none too well.

The scene that will be a recurring theme is when Mal is told that everybody sucks and that's just the way the 'verse is (more or less) by the sheriff. Mal essentially says "Oh no they don't either!" ("I do not hold to that," he might say.) He kind of wants it to be that way, because then his life would make sense. But it doesn't. And that's Mal. "You're welcome on my boat. God ain't." Book and Mal. MAN I wish they had had time to go somewhere with that!

Oh, and this ep introduces Adlai Niska. Not saying he'll be any trouble later on or anything...

Annnd we say good night with a shot of the Hands of Blue. As if airport security didn't make us jumpy enough! (Not a WHOLE lot of River in this ep. OR the UAP. She got brought on real slow.)

Next week: REAVERS!

No Kidding?

2007-09-04T06:22:00.000-07:00

You know, I just spent the last few months looking for work. And now I have to go to a job to earn a living.

But somebody figured out a way to get paid for this!

Wow! How shocking! Because that wasn't what I was expecting to hear at all!

"It could also be due to the poor medical outlook for impoverished American ex-pop stars who have no health insurance, he said." So, doesn't that mean that he should take a sample of non-rock star impoverished Americans and find out? If this is the case then they're not really rock stars anymore, are they? I mean, that's not what's killing them, right?

Gorey Trek!

2007-09-02T16:38:00.000-07:00

I love it when my favorite things come together. You know, bright copper kettles mixed with warm woolen mittens, like that?

Well here's a well meaning lunatic doing Star Trek Edward Gorey style!

"...altercation with some Klingons" might be my favorite.

Totally fake

2007-08-29T18:38:00.001-07:00

But made with Blender. And I figured the Mac Zealots would like it.