Category: Television & Movies

Here there be spoilers if you haven’t seen last week’s episodes. (If you’re a LiveJournaloid, sorry ’bout this – on my WordPress blog, there’s a handy “more” button here that allows those who don’t want to be spoiled rotten. For some reason, LJ doesn’t translate this into a “cut.” Dunno why that doesn’t make the leap when everything else short of smilies and left or right justified graphics work just fine.) … Read more

This went over well earlier in the year, so I’ll see if I can try to make it a regular thing again.
Jericho: As if things weren’t already dark enough, Walls Of Jericho took us into some seriously dark territory. We really need a payoff on who the hell Hawkins is, why he moved to a place that was already the middle of nowhere before the bombs started falling, and how/why he’s still connecting to the outside world. If he’s supposed to be on the side of the angels, the producers took a pretty bold chance with making him so utterly unlikeable in this episode, especially given that he treats his entire family like he’s dressing down a bunch of unruly people who are lower on the org chart than he is. It’s a decent show, probably the best thing on the air this season for folks who really dig Lost, but we need to start paying some stuff off fairly soon. (November sweeps would be my guess…)
Lost: I’m fascinated by how this show can continue to reveal shocking new facets to the main characters without completely trashing what has gone before. Just like Jin has revealed a checkered past, turns out Sun has too, and how. I almost thought we were going to find out that Jin could speak English all along, just like Sun could. As for the Others, I guess things aren’t so cut-and-dried about the island having a magnetic attraction that would keep any boats in its “orbit” – otherwise why would “Ben” be so freaked out that Sayid, Jin and Sun have a boat? Could the whole thing about all of the incredibly specific coordinates and headings given to Michael have been a smokescreen, to keep Jack, Sawyer, Kate and Hurley from thinking that anyone could hightail it out of there? I thought the World Series gag was cute, but it went on just a little bit too long. And call me crazy, but I have yet to really believe a word that “Ben” has said, particularly not the bit about living on the island his whole life. The series continues to play out in an incredibly compressed time frame – we find out that no more than a week has passed between Two For The Road and this week’s episode. One thing I’m mystified about, going back to the videotape of the World Series, is the continued use of the Umatic 3/4″ VTR. When that was the machine used to play the orientation tape for the Pearl station in ?, there was a logical reason for it – the Umatic was in wide use circa the early 80s (and that tape was “copyright 1980 the Hanso Foundation”). When the Others clearly have some modern conveniences in their little holiday village, I wonder what the point of the World Series video being on a 3/4″ tape is. (Sorry, little stuff like that bugs me. It’s been years since I had to do anything involving 3/4″ videotape.)
Doctor Who: I’ve already made my thoughts known about this episode in the review in theLogBook’s episode guide section, but I’m just curious, for those reading, about how the U.S. audience (and not necessarily diehard fans) responded to Sarah Jane’s return. Did folks recognize her from 25+ years ago, or is she now just too obscure a point of continuty for anyone to remember?
Battlestar Galactica: Does anyone else think we’re going to run into some Boomer problems down the road? I’m fascinated by that character, partly because she’s evolved into both the enemy and a member of the family. I like that the Colonials are leaving the injured “skin jobs” to rot, rather than putting a satisfying bullet through their heads that would enable them to download and immediately tell their superiors what’s going on. Very smart – something Starbuck should’ve figured out with Leoben. (Talk about a kid who’s going to have some issues…) Another fascinating paradox is that I have both more and less respect for Ellen Tigh than I had before this season. I respect her (deeply flawed) decisions to protect her husband, and I pity her for the things she’s had to do on his behalf. In the first two seasons, I just thought of her as – quite frankly – a skanky lush, but in the first three episodes of this season I think we’re seeing more of the character’s heart.
The real question mark here, with the rescue scenario, is how Starbuck’s story is going to play out. I think we know, more or less, how everything else will end up to restore the series’ status quo, but I can’t even begin to fathom how we might extricate Starbuck from her situation. Will she wind up bringing that kid back to Galactica with her?… Read more

ABC has been riding the horse really hard on this show, boasting about the huge amount of advance praise it got before its premiere. I finally got around to watching last Wednesday’s premiere, which I taped because I figured that there must be something to all that praise. Honestly, having seen the pilot episode, I now find myself saying “….what??”
The premise is simple: ten people are trapped in a bank when a robbery attempt goes down, and held hostage; only nine of them get out with their lives. One of the robbers comes out in a coma, and the other comes out saying it wasn’t his idea. And yet no one on the outside, even after intense interrogation of all of the survivors, can really seem to get a clear picture of what happened, how the one robber would up being so badly injured, and what exactly led to the killing of the bank teller. These nine survivors find themselves clinging to each other, feeling like no one else can understand what they’ve been through, and so on. The pilot starts to set up that they’re feeling distant from their everyday, pre-robbery, pre-hostage-situation relationships, some of them are probably going to have affairs with each other (this already happens with at least one couple in the pilot, with some fairly straightforward hints about at least a couple of other couplings forming in the future, and so on.
There are some problems with this basic setup that I’m seeing already. I’ll probably give The Nine two or three more episodes to see how things play out, but at the moment, I’m just finding myself ambivalent about the whole thing. One thing that the advance reviews nail on the head is that John Billingsley (formerly Dr. Phlox of Star Trek: Enterprise) is the breakout member of the cast. (Though I will say that, in the hour following Lost, in which former Party Of Five cast member Matthew Fox plays a doctor, it’s funny to see a show in which former Party Of Five cast member Scott Wolf plays a doctor.) Billingsley’s character, Egan Foote, isn’t the only sympathetic character in the group, but by the end of the hour he and Chi McBride (whose performance I always enjoy in just about any non-Secret-Life-Of-Desmond-Pfeiffer vehicle he shows up in) are just about the only two characters who haven’t displayed some serious flaws bordering on the unlikeable. Foote is a henpecked husband who has begun to feel as though he can’t get anything right, and in the opening act of the pilot is clearly making serious plans to commit suicide. (Granted, this too could be seen as a character flaw, but I feel for the guy.) During the hostage crisis, Foote shows a heroic side that he didn’t even know he had, and once the crisis is over, he lightens up considerably, clearly realizing that he’s been given a second chance. He’s still overly critical of himself, having grown accustomed to others being overly critical of him, but he seems ready to seize the day – he’s almost the only joyful character in the bunch by the end of the thing, to be truthful.
Why no joy for everyone else? Clearly The Nine is going to be a show about trauma. The American viewing public is well acquainted with this over the past five or so years, thanks very much. Now, the thought occurs that The Nine could deliver some interesting, character-led perspectives on dealing with trauma, where that coping can take you for good or ill, and possibly even on the uniquely western phemomenon that is declaring oneself to be a victim of something. That would be interesting. The trailer for the second episode, however, seems to show standard cop/lawyer show stuff. I could watch Law & Odor: Criminal Stench if I wanted to see that. (Note: I don’t dislike the L&O franchise, that’s just an amusing little title I came up with the last time I cleaned a litterbox.) I’m much more interested in the trailer’s scenes showing Egan stepping forward to claim his fifteen minutes of fame.
About the mysterious 52-hour standoff that will slowly unravel in flashback, that comes across as an extremely forced mystery. Sure, a lot can happen in that time, but the thought that we’re going to spend a whole season, maybe even more, slowly uncovering 52 hours just isn’t really anything that’s hitting my buttons. With Lost, at least, you have backstory to unravel – who are the Others, what happened to the Dharma Initiative, and so on; The Nine tries to twist Lost inside out, putting the mystery in the flashbacks and putting the character development in the present – which means that, eventually, you’re going to run out of mystery. Even Invasion didn’t limit its mystery element to the past.
Which brings me to ABC’s brag about the overnight ratings for The Nine:

Excluding only last season’s finale of “Lost,” which ran into the hour, “The Nine” produced ABC’s largest audience with regular programming in the time period since last September and its top Adult 18-49 rating since November – since 9/28/05 and 11/30/05, respectively.

So, in other words, the last show that did as well as The Nine was…Invasion.
When I’m seriously thinking that I’m going to wind up fast-forwarding through the next 2-3 episodes of The Nine just to get the scenes where I can see what happens to Egan and what happens to McBride’s bank manager character, I wonder why we couldn’t just be getting a second season of Invasion at this rate. (Before anyone accuses me of losing perspective here, re: Invasion, bear in mind that I do understand the cold, hard math that explains why that show is off the air – I’m just saying that the same numbers may soon apply here.)… Read more

I watched some of this morning’s Christie’s Star Trek auction online, and my head is still reeling from what I saw. Y’know, I did see some stuff that would’ve been killer to have if it were within my financial reach – man, just think of the fan films you could make if you had some bits and pieces of the real deal (and I hope to hell that some of the folks splurging in New York today have that aim in mind). The pilot consoles from the Enterprise-E were some of the tastiest stuff that went in the morning auctions that I saw before I had to finally get to sleep. What blows my mind is that two empty wine bottles with Paramount art department “Chateau Picard” labels went for more than those consoles. C’mon, if you’re gonna spend enough money to finance part of an episode, get a foreground “hero” prop, people, not foam rubber stuntman phasers that can’t leave their holsters.
I was stunned to see a great big honkin’ Star Trek: First Contact Borg cube model go for tens of thousands. Tens of thousands! You know, I’m a Star Trek fan. Still. And I think I’m a fairly big fan. But for the amount that the aforementioned model went for…God, the stuff I could do with my house. I could add rooms (plural) for that kind of money. Or I could pay off the mortgage in toto (meaning that I’d send the money to the bank inside a little dog).
I still think I’m a big fan, but I’m clearly not on the same planet as these people. My wife and I have been attending some classes on reducing debt, increasing savings, and just generally getting out of the hole, and I guess they’re having some kind of effect on my fundamental thinking when I watch something like this auction and wonder out loud to every winning bidder, “Do you really have that kind of money to spend on that? How far in debt are you going for those Chateau Picard wine bottles?” I mean, if these are people who have the means to get the stuff without sliding into a pit of debt that’s deeper than the hole where the oil creature that killed Tasha Yar lived, cool. God bless ’em. More power to ’em. But as much as I might drool over the Enterprise’s pilot consoles, I no longer think I’m the kind of person who would even give a moment’s thought to hanging a big question mark over the next house payment just to get them.
Guess I’m not as big a fan as I thought, eh?… Read more

Because everyone’s interested, here’s how my VCR will be wearing the same six-hour tape thin week after week this fall (assuming we don’t have the traditional every-other-day power failure that kills my VCR programming):
Wednesdays

• 7:00pm – Jericho (CBS)
• 8:00pm – Lost (ABC)
• 9:00pm – The Nine (ABC)

Fridays

• 5:00pm – Night Stalker (Sci-Fi, through Oct. 13)
• 7:00pm – Doctor Who (Sci-Fi)
• 11:00pm – Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi – late showing is less likely to have credits screwed with)

Saturdays

• 9:00pm – Star Trek remastered episodes (Oct. 20-TFN)

Some thoughts immediately occur. Filling a watching a six hour tape every week is not a drought of SF on TV by any stretch of the imagination – hell, it’s more like an embarrassment of riches. But upon further examination, one of those six slots is occupied by a show that’s already over and done with (either a year ago or 37 years ago), and a further two slots are filled by shows that are continuations or re-imaginings of past shows. (Not that I’m complaining for even a fraction of a second about having Doctor Who back on the air, especially not when it’s as smashingly good as it is on a consistent basis, at least for my money, and not that I’m complaining a bit about Galactica – just pointing out, shall we say, a creative technicality.)
To balance that out, it’s a rare fall schedule that has two brand new shows that intrigue me enough to start taping them from the word go. And yes, I’ve already seen all of this season’s Who episodes, and I’ll happily watch them again. I actually like to see where Sci-Fi “invents” commercial breaks – they seem to to judge points of dramatic tension quite well that lend themselves to ad breaks. (At the very least, they seem to judge that better than CBC did in season 1.)
It’s been quite a while since I’ve had that kind of a regular viewing slate. I’d get started watching Heroes, except I don’t have any 8-hour tapes handy.… Read more

Wow, Wednesdays may be busy viewing nights for me this fall. Jericho‘s pilot episode, which aired last night on CBS, seemed to hold some promise, despite some trips to the well of cliché. The basic premise is intriguing – a nuclear explosion far on the horizon signals the end of life as a small Kansas town has known it. The cast is appealing enough, though I have a feeling that future episodes will lean more and more on the younger cast members, and the ongoing mystery of precisely what is happening and who is responsible is something I’m looking forward to unraveling. There’s a zinger of a moment where we find out from one of the characters that more than one nuke has laid waste to the American landscape that suddenly makes the whole story that much scarier. Though large portions of the pilot episode are cliché-ridden, this is a case where a few of the moments outweighed that. The imagery of the mushroom cloud in the distance is an awesome sight, and the stunned reactions of the people who see it make for cinematic moments that are almost Spielbergian in intensity, combining an unearthly quiet with a horrifying vision. I’ve literally seen that scene in my nightmares. And I have to give them credit – it looked a lot like this. Only without Skeet Ulrich.
Ulrich may, sadly, prove to be the weakest link in the show’s ensemble cast, but that may just be because his character doesn’t get any kind of a profound moment here that lets the actor shine. Surely this will change, and he’ll have that opportunity, as the show goes on. There’s another character who intrigues me in that he seems to know exactly what to do and how to help when it’s needed most. Is he just a really helpful guy? Or does he know more than he’s letting on?
The mainstream entertainment media is billing Jericho as CBS’ answer to Lost, when structurally I find it reminds me much more of Invasion and, to an extent, Jeremiah. The comparison to Invasion makes me a little uneasy; sometimes it seems like Lost and Battlestar Galactica are fulfilling everyone’s need for entertainment that often ends on a downbeat note and there isn’t room for more. Ongoing suspense pieces such as Invasion, Threshold and Surface have failed to cut it in the last year, and there have even been complaints that popular shows such as Lost and Galactica just weren’t advancing their respective plots enough.
The writing seems to be on the wall for the serialized drama, which is a damn shame because (A) I prefer it to manufactured competition “reality” shows anyday, and (B) the day of the serialized drama should be here and now with the advent of DVD. But networks don’t make shows for DVD – they make them to grab prime time ratings. And the sad fact is that the general audience whose money the networks want are going to gravitate toward Dancing With The Stars, not toward a downer show about the aftermath of an assault on civilized society and its effects on the families in a small town. Top that off with the fact that Jericho is going up against Lost in its Wednesday night time slot, and you can probably kiss this show goodbye.
Jericho seems like it has an opportunity to be an engrossing, intense show. Enjoy it for the fraction-of-a-season that it’ll probably get.… Read more

Just saw this on mst3kinfo.com:

MIKE IN ARKANSAS
Mike Nelson will be delivering a lecture at the Donald W. Reynolds Campus and Community Center on the campus of Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia, AR on October 31, 2006 (Halloween). The lecture is scheduled for 7:00 pm, and there will be an autograph signing session afterward. Admission is free and the public is invited to attend.
Visit https://www.saumag.edu for more info about the Center.

I don’t make it a habit of rushing off to see celebrities and get autographs, but for Mr. Relson, I just might do it.… Read more