Things

So hey, how’s it been? It’s nice outside.

Since last I wrote, I’ve seen The Avengers twice, Sound of My Voice, a few concerts, and probably some other stuff I can’t remember. I’ve spent a lot of time outside and have had no impulse to write about anything, but it’s all just piling up and I still have a vague sense of responsibility for some reason. Now since I’m taking the day off to recover from Meshuggah last night I’ve got some time to kill. Here we go.

The Avengers is super great as expected. It seems anything Joss Whedon controls is destined for wonderfulness, and now that he’s a got a familiar property to play with he’s finally getting the recognition he deserves, breaking pretty much every box-office record there is like Chris Nolan and James Cameron before him. It’s certainly not a perfect movie, but as far as super-hero stuff goes it’s what it needs to be, and Whedon’s penchant for witty dialogue and excellent handling of large principal casts makes it crazy entertaining.

Sound of My Voice is basically garbage. Don’t bother unless you like being bored and only enjoyed Lost before they started answering questions, except that’s not really even a valid comparison because Lost is good.

As I mentioned, I saw Meshuggah last night along with Decapitated and Baroness. Decapitated were pretty boring, probably because I don’t really know their songs at all, but they struck me as border-line deathcore of a sort I don’t really dig. Baroness kicked all sorts of ass and included a few songs from their yet-to-be-released Yellow and Green album, which seemed okay for the most part. Meshuggah owned the stage of course. I had to push my way out of the crowd though because the middle of a Meshuggah audience is no place for a short, bespectacled music lover.

The night before that I got to see Reggie Watts with some friends. I’m only passingly familiar with him so I probably didn’t enjoy the show as much as I might have, especially since as soon as any sort of music starts playing the speech-center of my brain shuts down completely and words lose all meaning to me. His standup was pretty good though. Very nerdy.

I saw Converge a while back too, which was just extremely excellent. It’s the second time I’ve seen them but this time I was much closer to the stage, which is really the only way to experience their ridiculous intensity. Jacob Bannon is a monster of a performer. They played a number of new songs, which didn’t really sound like anything as revolutionary (for them) as Dark Horse did before Axe to Fall was released, but they were definitely solid and I look forward to them. I only caught one of the opening acts, Loma Prieta, which sounded nothing like music at all and made me wish I’d remembered to bring my earplugs.

I watched some shows too. Some friends got me into Adventure Time, which is a great cartoon made for pretty much everybody, drawing from stuff like Dungeons and Dragons and Candyland, with both childish and adult sensibilities throughout. It’s a joy to watch. I also caught up with Justified, which seems to almost be a spiritual successor to Deadwood, starring the same Timothy Olyphant and guest-spotting a bunch of other alumni. It’s fantastically written and almost every episode is a gripping reprieve from some other less-awesome shows I’m still holding on to.

Community is not one of those less-awesome shows. It’s probably the most awesome. Shame that it probably won’t be next season though. We’ll miss you Dan.

I think that’s everything.

Game of Thrones – Season 1

Winter is coming yo.

So this is show is awesome. HBO is good at making stuff. Of course it doesn’t hurt that it’s based on one of the most highly praised fantasy book series ever, and the writer George R. R. Martin is a producer and wrote one of the episodes. It also has a fantastic cast, and a pretty decent budget.

It’s a story of family ties, honor, idiocy, betrayal, scheming, war, and a little magic. The several houses of Westeros vie for the throne for different reasons while a gathering darkness threatens everyone’s existence in the cold North. A host of interesting characters, including the inimitable Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister and Sean Bean as Eddard Stark, have long conversations about their idea of how the world works and make lots of mistakes; unlike in a lot of other shows, these mistakes come with definite prices. Much like in The Walking Dead (the comic, not really the show), no one is safe. It lends a sense of danger unlike I think I’ve seen in television before aside from shows like The Wire or Breaking Bad.

While it is a sort of high fantasy, there is very little in the way magic, and I’ve seen no elves or dwarves anywhere. There’s a lot of dragon talk but you’ll have to watch the show to find out how that works out. There is some sorcery, but it happens behind closed doors and is regarded by pretty much everyone as something that should be avoided at all costs. It’s kind of refreshing to see something this realistic in this setting.

These past ten episodes have ranked up near the top for me, and I can’t wait for more. I’ll probably break down and read the books before the next batch comes around.

Some TV Stuff

Well, I haven’t seen any new movies in a  bit, and I’ve been kind of neglecting TV on here for a while. Not many of the shows I’ve been watching have really inspired me enough to write a full post. I could probably do it for a couple of them, but I think it’s easier just to do a little for each one here and be done with it.

The Event

Since I just finished watching last night’s finale, I figured I’d start with this, possibly the most interesting failure of the last batch of Lost clones. I initially had no interest in it based mostly on the name, which reminded me of The Happening. Not a good selling point. Anyway, there were a few semi-positive previews on some blogs I read so I figured I’d give it a chance. It focuses on a few characters in government and a cool, extremely earnest hacker/genius/hero type dude who are faced with alien invasion not too dissimilar from that of V, except here the aliens don’t actually look like lizards, they don’t have a spaceship, and they don’t want to eat us. Instead they just want to move in, which might require a substantial trimming of our population. Also they’ve been here for 60 years already and can make shiny portal things.

It’s not really a bad show. It’s miles better than FlashForward and V, and at times it’s almost gripping. The problem is that the characters don’t have much dimension, and are never given the opportunity to adjust to new circumstances, as whenever some seemingly game-changing thing happens, the resolution always involves replacement of characters and basically just going back to normal. I realize this is a common trait of network TV shows, but if you’re going to replace Lost you’d better try a bit harder. The Event will not be returning this fall, and I’m okay with that, especially after the perfectly ludicrous closing of the finale.

Castle

I’ve been keeping up with this show for one reason: Nathan Fillion. He’s a funny, charismatic dude, and he does have some input in the show, but it seems great actors need good writing and direction too. If only Joss Whedon could take it over. Nathan’s role as a successful mystery writer helping out a homicide policewoman is sometimes fun to watch, and occasionally the other characters make it bearable as well, but Castle is probably the most formulaic show I’ve ever seen, putting even House’s cookie-cutter plots to shame. It really becomes a chore to sit through the same beats over and over without any real progress in the overall story arc. There have been a couple interesting episodes but I can’t really remember them. I probably even missed a few because I couldn’t bring myself to give it my full attention every week. I’ll probably watch next season’s premiere to see how the cliffhanger turns out, but if it resolves as I expect it to then I don’t think I’m going to stick with it.

Chuck

Chuck is a stupid show. Almost every decision the lead characters make is idiotic, they never learn anything, and the insistence on involving unbelievable relationships in every episode’s plot is just tiresome. Still, it’s a show that panders to my nerdery, the characters usually have a kind of likeability, Yvonne Strahavski is incredibly gorgeous, and Jayne Cobb is in it. When I first tried the show while the first season was still airing I dismissed it after a few episodes. I later came back to it and fell in love; now that I’ve been watching it as it airs since somewhere in the second season, the appeal has died a bit, but not enough to make me abandon it for the final season coming up. I hope the writers can come up with an actual conclusion now that they don’t have to keep stretching things out in hope of renewal.

House MD

Sevens seasons is a lot. Any show with this longevity should expect to be losing its edge, and I think that was very evident in last night’s finale. Every season-closer I can remember before this one was something of an event, almost a triumph of drama and character development; this time it was more like any other episode, with a half-hearted attempt at shock value. It was laughable. There was far too much reliance on House’s relationship with Cuddy this season. It worked sometimes but it was mostly just retreading the same issues that we’ve seen before dealing with House’s inability to do his job when he’s happy. Olivia Wilde’s absence from the cast for most of the season definitely hurt the show in my eyes, but I’m quite happy that she’ll be in a number of the movies I’m looking forward to because of it. There were a few episodes that broke from the usual formula, and I wish they’d do it more often, but the addictive quality that used to be there seems to be gone.

The Office

Now we start getting closer to something that might be considered quality. The Office has been around almost as long as House, but it’s managed to do that without relying on formula quite as heavily, to its benefit. The characters are still great, the comedy has lost most of its edge but remains charming, and the rather major upheaval in the loss of Steve Carell was handled pretty well, although the real fallout is yet to be seen. There were some very funny episodes amid the usual kinda-funny stuff up until the last few which were mostly very fun to watch. I really enjoyed Ellen and Gabe’s breakup and the ensuing feud between Gabe and Andy, which brought about some of the best line deliveries of the season. Will Farrell's brief stint as manager wasn’t the greatest but worked well enough. It’s still a good show after all these years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if next season is its last.

Fringe

Much like Chuck, Fringe is a show that I initially dismissed after watching some of it, but came to love later. In my last post on the show I wrote about how I happened to drop in on an episode that basically blew my mind, pulling two universes on top of each other with fascinating results. The third season continued the storyline in an admirable fashion, with the two realities taking turns episode by episode with the alternate versions of the characters we’ve come to love. Sometimes it got a bit silly, what with the soul-magnets and whatnot, but for the most part Fringe remains a solid sci-fi-ish show with likeable characters and interesting plotlines. The monster-a-week formula has been mostly discarded in favor of a larger story, and it’s been working pretty well. I’m definitely looking forward to the season that we all expected not to happen.

The Chicago Code

I haven’t seen any other Shawn Ryan shows like The Shield or Terriers, but from what I understand they’re all similar in a few ways; the characters are complex people with the desire to do good while not really doing it all in a way that’s generally accepted as good, and the shows themselves are incredibly solid. Both hold true for The Chicago Code. It’s the story of a new lady police superintendant, Teresa Colvin, who has a strong desire to clean up the Chicago government, which is traditionally plagued with corruption. She puts together a small taskforce of cops she trusts, including our hero Jarek Wysocki, to find the dirt she needs to put away the evil one politician at a time. The trio of Teresa, Jarek and the despicable Alderman Gibbons are very well drawn, and all three of them fit the bill of good intentions versus questionable methods, to varying degrees of violence. Gibbons in particular is an interesting case, as he’s definitely an evil man, but he does seem to have the betterment of Chicago as his main goal, or at least that’s what he thinks; it may be he’s just serving himself. Jarek is fantastically played by Jason Clarke as a good police through and through while wrestling with his demons. Teresa, played by Jennifer Beals, initially seemed a bit unbelievable to me but eventually became more of a human character with an uncompromising method.

Aside from the cast, the show is just gorgeously filmed; it’s probably the best HD programming I’ve seen on network TV, with constantly crisp and vibrant colors in every shot. The use of voiceovers might be overdone sometimes but here it’s used well, especially in the first episode, which involved the moment that really hooked me into the show. It’s an extreme shame that it’s been canceled, but the finale really worked as a series closer.

Community

This show is made for people like me. So many episodes are dedicated to parodying over-used tropes or honoring great films, and doing it hilariously with a great cast of loveable, unique characters. Oddly some of the faults I burned Chuck with count as merits for Community; no one ever really learns anything. They remain the same people after every episode. It works here for some reason. Anyway, the film-culture jokes are great, Abed continues to crack meta in the best moments possible, and the paintball episodes kick ass. By far the best comedy currently on TV, at least that I’ve seen. Can’t wait for more.

Now that these seasons have ended, I can now get back to some Netflixing when I’m not watching excellent shows like The Killing and Game of Thrones, and maybe write a bit more than I have been. I watch too much TV. Now let’s count all the grammatical errors I made, because I suck a proofreading!

DONE.

Deadwood

This show is awesome. Can’t really boil it down any further. It’s up there in the skies with The Wire and Breaking Bad, and all those other shows that I haven’t seen yet. The reason it’s so awesome is its extreme focus on characters and squeezing tons of incredible performances out of its actors. The dialogue is some of the most difficult to understand yet wonderful prose I’ve heard in a televised program, and the episode/season structure is extremely satisfying without relying on contrived cliffhangers for almost the entire three-season run. The great shame though is that it had to end prematurely with a rather large thread left untied, and it seems that it will forever remain so.

Now that I’ve started with something that would better fit in the conclusion I guess I’ll write a bit about the plot. The show is loosely placed on a real place called Deadwood, in which the majority of the characters are based on real people who really were in Deadwood in the late 1800s. However, a lot of dramatic liberties were taken to better serve the story. Anyway, this guy Al Swearengen is the owner of a saloon, and basically controls the camp that will later become a town. He’s a very smart, foul-mouthed man with good intentions but an uncompromising method. He has many, very loyal friends who help him to control and protect the camp. Not among them, at least at the start, is Seth Bullock, a moralistic man with little control over his fiery emotions who uses his position as a sheriff to give himself some outlet for his hatred of evil men. These two men are at odds for the majority of the show’s run, making for some terrific battles of character. Eventually though, greater dangers than the clash of their own egos arrive, and compromises must be made for the preservation of their livelihoods.

I can see now that if I start listing the characters further, this will never end, so you’ll have to take my word that they’re all fantastic. So there’s lots of stuff dealing with conflicting moralities, racism, honor, dishonor, loss, love, and death, as you’d expect in a western. It’s so much more than just a western though; it’s more like an epic Shakespearean play with F-words every two seconds. One theme that I noticed cropping up a lot was the characters’ need for control; several would constantly lash out at their underlings whenever they felt a lack of control or that they were being belittled by others, making them seem both petty and human. There’s just so much emotion in this show it’s ridiculous.

As expected I can’t really do Deadwood justice. To do that I’d have to write a few essays, and I really don’t want to do that. I’m done with highschool, thanks. I’m just going to have to leave this at it is and fume in my chair cursing HBO for cutting this wonderful thing short before it was meant to end.

Boardwalk Empire – Season 1

Steve Buscemi. Omar. Ladies. Guns. Gangs. 20s. Boardwalk Empire.

I don’t really need to write anymore, but I guess I will. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I normally have a strange problem with gang fiction. I’m still not entirely sure why. Classics like The Godfather and Goodfellas largely bored me. The first season of The Sopranos seemed like a chore. Reservoir Dogs I’ve grown to like, but the first time I don’t think I’d yet acclimated to that level of gore. Now, Boardwalk Empire comes along with all its insane pedigree, the above mentioned people/things and Martin Scorsese, it had better well knock my socks off. Oh look, there they are lying on the floor.

This may be because the gang aspect is a bit different from those other stories; Steve Buscemi plays a so-called elected official, Treasurer Enoch “Nucky” Thompson. He’s not the head of the family, he’s just the guy that runs everything. Not everyone respects him. They only really respect what they might be able to get out of him in exchange for money, so-called allegiance, or political favors. Again, I don’t really know why, but it seems I like this sort of character more than Marlon Brando’s. It may be because he’s less of an asshole than Tony Soprano. Anyway, Steve Buscemi is always great as a character actor, and here he plays the lead equally well.

Nucky is the Treasurer of Atlantic City, New Jersey. AC runs on alcohol and gambling, and now with Prohibition in effect, even more money is to be made. People will spend more on stuff if it’s illegal. As such, he who controls the liquor controls the city, and Nucky Thompson is that man, though he doesn’t appear that way to his adoring public; he gives seemingly heartfelt speeches to the temperance groups supporting Prohibition, and courts a women who admires him for his moral standing. This woman, Margaret Schroeder played by Kelly Macdonald, starts off as the faultless housewife and slowly becomes that which she hates while realizing her admiration for Nucky was ill-founded. Most of the other characters are in on it from the start, like Jimmy Darmody, the son of the previous show-runner who’s been out to war and has returned with spiritual scars. Nucky is like a father to him, but that doesn’t keep the old man from using him as a gun.

Jimmy starts out partnering with a young Al Capone. Al proves to be an unreliable jokester, which eventually drives the two apart, and Jimmy finds a new partner in Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), the chilling phantom-masked war veteran who shares a sort of brotherhood with Jimmy’s battlescars, although his are both unseen and dramatically visible. He’s probably the most interesting character on the show. Shame he didn’t have a bigger role. Another actor who should have had more screen time is Michael Kenneth Williams as Chalky White, who only gets a couple chances to show his acting prowess; but when he does, you know Omar’s still dangerous.

Not everyone is Nucky’s friend of course. He has plenty enemies, both in the dark underground and the pious government. The most intriguing one of these, for me at least, was Federal Agent Nelson Van Alden, played by Michael Shannon. Here’s a man who takes his trade all too seriously while most of his compatriots are more likely to side with the man with the booze. The bulk of his devotion to duty is part of his almost psychotic religious intensity. He imagines himself the poster-child for Christianity while I doubt many churches would want him representing them. The guy’s got a bit of a righteous anger problem, and it’s relentlessly entertaining. His attempts to nab Nucky in the act lead to some of the most gripping scenes in the show.

There are a few more notable characters and lots of plot, but this post is getting too long and I don’t think I can make it entertaining. It’s a good show. The first episode, directed by Scorsese, was a bit hard to follow but it set the bar for quality quite high. After that every episode was a bit slower but just as gripping, and almost always featured some sort of violence or skin (Paz de la Huerta has an aversion to clothes). It never got boring. It really was like watching a twelve-hour movie. I’m a very character-oriented kinda guy, and every character on the screen was made either likable or despicable to a level not too far from The Wire. I’m definitely looking forward to season 2.

The Walking Dead – Season 1

This show was by far my most anticipated show this year. Pretty much every star aligned to make this the best thing I could imagine. Frank Darabont, director of The mother-flippin’ Shawshank Redemption, took my beloved Robert Kirkman graphic novel and decided to make it into a TV show. All of the publicity that came out before the premiere had me giddy; all of the actors were basically ripped straight from the black and white pages, one or a few of the episodes were to be directed by someone who had a hand in Breaking Bad, and Robert Kirkman was writing a script for an episode as well. It seemed that this would be a realization of something I had previously thought impossible.

The great thing about The Walking Dead is that although it is a zombie story, it also isn’t. It’s primarily about a group of people and how their lives and minds are effected in a world where everything is dead and hope is so very rarely seen. Each character becomes a different person, some more than others; the trauma of a post-apocalypse is wonderfully examined in a supposedly endless story of survival, breakdown and perseverance of the human spirit. Frank Darabont understands this very well. That doesn’t mean the zombie element is left by the wayside, far from it; their gruesome faces are seen in every episode, and AMC doesn’t seem to shy away from dismemberment at all.

The plan is to use the comic as a sort of basic outline for the series instead of a rote history. There’s plenty room for expansion of the cast and storylines, and no doubt things will be omitted as well. I’m fine with this as long as it fits, and they keep the more pivotal moments intact. So far they’ve done a pretty good job doing just that, except maybe for the addition of a location and character that just didn’t work out very well for the last episode. There were some other characters added to get right into some more varied social issues right off the bat instead of waiting until later, as there was of course no guarantee that the show would continue after the first six episodes. These new guys did seem a bit too stereotypical for Kirkman’s style, but I don’t think it was a particularly bad move to include them.

The bits that didn’t change are perfect. Every member of the core cast from the comic is dead-on, both visually and characteristically. Glenn (the asian guy) is particularly amazing in this aspect. Rick Grimes, played by Andrew Lincoln, is perhaps a little too melodramatic at times but pulls off the character very well. He’s of course the most important element, as he goes through the most visible changes, both physically and mentally. I have confidence that he’ll keep the quality high.

This first season did a fantastic job of introducing the story to the small screen. The ratings were near the highest of any cable drama ever. This is probably due to the fantastic marketing it got. AMC is awesome. It was not without issues, some more glaring than others, but overall it was just a joy to see the pages brought to life so well. There were a few knots left untied which are pretty easy to figure out if you’ve read the comic. Not sure how I feel about those. Perhaps Darabont will surprise us. The writing staff is going to change a little for the next season, so anything could happen really. I just wish we could get the season 2 premier before next October.

Rubicon Season 1

AMC’s been doing some wonderful things for TV lately. Breaking Bad and Mad Men have both been incredibly great dramas, and The Walking Dead promises to be everything a lover of the comic could hope for; it seems the channel known for its taste in movies knows a thing about shows as well. When I first heard news of Rubicon, the early synopsis didn’t wow me very much, but I knew that it had to be quality stuff to be broadcast alongside Draper and Co’s flagship.

Rubicon is a conspiracy show. That’s why I didn’t initially think much of it; I hold almost no interest in conspiracies, and have little respect for theorists thereof. The fact that this story is about an actual conspiracy doesn’t really assuage my disdain for it, as it only bolsters the mindset. Still, it’s a good drama aside from that and there are some likable characters in it. Will Travers, played by some guy I’ve seen in other things that I can’t place, is a supposed genius intelligence analyst who discovers a conspiracy involving his place of employment and some large corporations. He gets help with his theorizing from several people who are probably a lot smarter than him (smart enough to protect themselves), including an older guy named Kale who seems pretty cool. Will’s small team of analysts has some kind of entertaining sub-plots, and were occasionally fun to watch and maybe care about. His secretary’s hot but pretty one-dimensional. The baddies are made to be a little less ominous than they could have been while being kept on the outskirts of the drama.

The main nit-picks I have with it mostly involve Will’s behavior in the context of him supposedly being really smart. This may be my own fault, as I often think of myself as intelligent and thus compare Will’s actions to what I would do in his situation. Every time he needlessly confronts someone who’s following him or messes with a bug in his room I yell at the TV “DON’T DO THAT! You’re just calling attention to yourself!” I have to remind myself that I really don’t know anything about espionage and would probably screw up a lot more than he does.

It’s a “cerebral” show. That means stuff doesn’t happen very much, but it’s supposed to make you think. Therefore, the majority of it is pretty boring for someone who doesn’t care about what the characters seem so worried about all the time. It picks up a bit near the end though. I can’t complain about the quality of the acting or the cinematography; it’s all skillfully done. I guess it’s just not the kind of show I like. Bring on the zombies.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia seasons 3-5

Season 3 was really good, much like Season 2. It pretty much took the second season and just kept going, except it was funnier somehow. I can’t remember much specifically though. Season 4 was good, but it felt more like a chore to me; I think the problem was the Gang’s shenanigans got just a little too brutal, as pictured in above in the episode “The Gang Gets Extreme: Home Makeover Edition,” in which they kidnap a hispanic family and destroy their home while somehow thinking this is a good thing. Sure they’re stupid, but it’s just a little bit too unbelievable to stay funny and just becomes horrific.

Season 5 was better than 4, but I don’t think it quite recovered enough to make me love it again. There were some great moments and some not so great ones. It was still a bit of a chore to get through it. I can’t really think of anything interesting to write about it.

Then there was the Christmas special, which was amazing. It was good to finally hear them let out a few F-bombs and push the disgust-boundary without resorting to torture. It was also nice to learn a bit more about Charlie and Mac’s childhoods; the extras on the DVD contained a few short scenes of kid actors depicting stuff they had talked about before, and they were pretty hilarious/touching. I wish the whole show was this good.

Now I’m hearing rumblings that the new season airing now kind of sucks so far. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Seasons 1 & 2

I don’t often write about individual season for TV shows, but recently it’s gotten a bit easier to make myself write about things, so why the hell not? I’ve been meaning to start watching this for a while now and thankfully a friend had all the DVDs available for lending, so I didn’t have to pollute my Netflix queue. Now that I’ve gotten through the first two seasons, I have thoughts; not many mind you, but more than usual.

The first season is only seven 22-minute episodes, and I got through them very quickly, but this is because I was watching them with my friends while playing board games, so my attention wasn’t that dedicated to it. Still, I could tell it was very funny and got the gist of the plots. It centers around three guys and a girl who own a bar somehow. All four of them seem to be self-serving morons of some degree. I don’t always like asshole characters, but they’re done right here, and I’ve fallen in love with all of them. Each episode is pretty much self-contained and involves some idiotic caper that starts perhaps somewhat innocently and gets blown completely out of proportion by “The Gang’s” propensity to do everything completely wrong in order to gain something from it. I’m pretty sure they never really learn anything from their mishaps.

The second season is basically the same, except it’s ten episodes and Danny DeVito’s in them. According one of the extras on the third DVD, DeVito was only available for 20 days of filming, so all his parts were done first; this meant that all 10 episodes had to be written before principal photography. Considering the actors are the writers, this is a huge deal. I have massive respect for these guys, especially in light of the genius that is Season 2. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the first. DeVito’s ridiculousness fits in perfectly with the rest of the cast’s antics. Every episode seems to get consistently funnier.

One of the coolest things is that the show looks like it’s almost entirely adlibbed, but it’s not. Sure there’s a fair amount of improv but for the most part everybody follows the script while making it all feel perfectly natural, which makes it even easier to laugh at these people who are pretending to be idiots. Good show. Not sure I’ll be able to catch up with it before the Season 6 premiere next week, but it’s good enough to maybe get me there in time.

FLCL

It’s been a while since I last watched any anime. I hit a couple stinkers and lost interest I guess. So it took a friendly gathering to get me to try it back on again. Half of us in the group had seen this before, and it seems that they had all liked it a lot, but couldn’t really describe it. After watching it with them I think I’m in pretty much the same boat. Still, I’m going to write what little I can about it.

I don’t think the title is really an acronym, it’s just an approximation of “Furi-kuri,” which is said a number of times in the series but never really defined. It has something to do with the powers of an alien-girl which turn your body into a sort of inter-spatial hub for transportation of magical bass-guitars and giant robots, or perhaps it’s just puberty. Puberty does seem to be one of the major themes in a very off-kilter/metaphorical sort of way. The main character has two love interests but isn’t at the point where he really knows what love is, and in generic anime fashion he can’t handle their advances, although it’s forgivable since he’s only twelve years old. Aside from these two points, there doesn’t seem to be much at all holding this show together.

It’s probably the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen, up there with Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo and Paprika. I was told there’s a lot of symbolism but all I really saw was a bunch of crazy crap. There’s a factory in the shape of a giant clothes-iron, the aforementioned forehead-spewed robots, astral pirate gods, loads of panty-shots, hectic manga interludes, water-based reanimation, pyromaniacs, spontaneous disappearances, and much, much more. It makes no sense at all until maybe half-way through the three hour run, and even then it’s pretty much indecipherable.

Still, it’s entertaining. I assume a few metric tons of hallucinogens went into its production costs.

Pushing Daisies

Here’s another one of those shows that just couldn’t keep me hooked, and took me a rather long time to finish, joining the ranks with Angel and The Sopranos (of which I’ve only seen the first season). Neither of those were bad shows really, and it’s the same with this one. Angel picked up later on and I can’t really come up with a good reason why I didn’t enjoy The Sopranos. Pushing Daisies, however, is a bit easier to analyze in this regard. It’s just too damn sweet.

I don’t mean sweet like “Hey that’s a sweet car bro,” I mean saccharine. Pretty much every character’s main features are cuteness and lovability. The relationships are filled with a devotion that borders and often crosses the creepy line, and every “cute” trait that an actor possesses is accentuated in every way possible. Every color is vibrant. The main location in the show is a pie-only restaurant. It’s just a little bit ridiculous.

There is a reason for this though. The show is about death, straight up. Other shows such as Six Feet Under have tackled this in different ways, but Bryan Fuller decided to take the extreme polarity route to make it seem less morbid. Every episode deals with a murder of some wacky sort, and the main cast does there thing to solve it. This thing is the main conceit; Ned, the main character, can bring people back from the dead by touching them. Of course there’s a catch: if he leaves them alive for more than a minute, some other thing of roughly the same size and in the same area must die. He can touch the newly revived again to set them back in their graves before that minute runs out in order to avoid such an occurrence, but there have been a few notable instances where he held back, namely his dog Digby and his girlfriend Chuck. You have to remember that he can never touch them lest they fall from their coil of mortality, which becomes pretty much the main plot thread throughout the two seasons.

Aside from Ned and Chuck we have a few other pretty cool characters. Emerson Cod is a private investigator who uses Ned’s gift to get more money (but he’s pretty nice about it). He’s probably the biggest source of laughs with at least one dismissive one-liner per show, such as “Where'd I put that rat's ass I could give?” Also there’s Olive, who embodies the show’s sweet/cute gimmick to a fault. She’s got a sickeningly high voice to match her diminutive stature and elfin features, coupled with a tendency to show a lot of cleavage whenever she’s in front of the camera. She’s got a thing for Ned which makes for an entertaining but somewhat dreary love triangle. Then there’s Chuck’s two aunts who don’t know she’s alive. One’s a hardass and the other could be Olive’s mother if she were a blonde. Keeping them in the dark becomes another main plot thread, although it’s a bit odd that they dismiss the possibility of letting them in on the secret so finally, stating that the shock would kill them (I think they’d be alright).

So anyway it seems the rest of the world, or at least those with ratings boxes, had the same reaction to the show as I did. It had a truncated first season due to the Writer’s Guild strike of ‘07, and the second season floundered. The final episode’s shooting had wrapped before they knew it was cancelled, but enough people loved the show that they were able to pull together enough money to piece together a sort of resolution montage that really was quite touching. I can’t say I would have been all that excited about a third season, but it was often entertaining in its extremely quirky little way, and television is a bit sadder without it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

The only other Nickelodeon show I think I’ve seen is Invader Zim. Now that I’m not 8 years old anymore, I generally don’t tune into that channel. However, I am a nerd, and according the the current nerd consensus, I am required to watch this show that aired a few years ago. I remember seeing ads in stores and whatnot for it and being generally dismissive of them. Apparently I shouldn’t have done that. It took a crappy movie to bring the discussion of this show’s merits up enough to get me interested.

So the show is about this kid Aang who is the reincarnation of a line of powerful “benders,” or people with the ability to manipulate the traditional elements with martial arts. He’s been frozen in a giant ball of ice for a hundred years while the world is ravaged a by a war that began in his absence, perpetrated by the obviously evil Fire Nation. He’s discovered by a brother and sister from a Water tribe and thus begins their three-season adventure and quest to end the war.

Since Aang is a kid, he hasn’t had time to master the four elements; he was born an Airbender and he’s pretty good at that, which is a good thing because all the other Airbenders are dead at this point, presumably from a sort of Herodic holocaust meant to get rid of him, which he missed by running away and getting himself frozen. He still has to learn the other three though and in a specific order for a reason that isn’t really explained beyond a traditional association with the four seasons. This leads to a lot of traveling and meeting esoteric characters of varying interest in locales firmly compartmented into the four elemental categories. The core cast grows a bit, including the antagonists who are really quite well developed, although those who are given special attention of course eventually join the main group to be good guys.

Each season ends with an epic battle of sorts, in line with the Tolkein method of fantasy, which is a pretty solid method to follow. These battles lead up to the finale where Aang has to face the Fire Lord, and make the decision whether to kill him or let him live, since this is a kid’s show the outcome is pretty easy to predict for the most part. I think it ended well enough though.

It isn’t all business, far from it. Especially in the first season it’s a very goofy show, pretty much what you’d expect for an American kids’ comedy, but usually not embarrassingly so; it borrows a ton from Japanese animation in both drawing style and cultural themes, but leaves out most of the crap. Its been said that a lot of it is very similar to Studio Ghibli’s stuff which is anything but a criticism. As the show progresses it gets less and less goofy and more ominous, while keeping the light-hearted fun from being totally stifled with somewhat filler-y bits. The action scenes are always a treat, and some of the romance is almost entertaining but usually just pretty awkward.

There are a bunch of references to other shows, not all animated, like the creepy violin crescendo from Lost after Aang realizes he’s on a weird island, and one episode is filled with anime references in a string of dream sequences. Incidentally both of these episodes were in the third season which I thought was by far the strongest.

It’s a pretty fun show all told, although I don’t think it really hit me as hard as most people I’ve heard talk about it. Certainly not as much as it affected M. Knight Shamalamadingdong. I don’t plan on ever watching his interpretation; this show should not be brought to the big screen, it’s just too much of a comedic/action epic to treated properly without making it stupid, as proven. So if you’ve written the show off based on that monstrosity, please reconsider and check this out for some good clean fun. It’s on Netflix instant watch, so there’s not a whole lot stopping you.

FlashForward

This show tried really really hard to be Lost. I think a lot of shows will be doing that for a while now. They even brought in one of the main Losties, a hobbit known as Meriadoc Brandybuck. Too bad they didn’t get the writers. I guess that might be a bad assumption, I’m not sure whether they got any of them or not. I think it would have been a better show if they did though, since it wouldn’t be that big of a feat to make it more entertaining.

The premise kind of kills the show in the first episode. You pretty much know how the series is going to end, because every person on the planet (almost everyone that is) gets to see about 2 minutes of their lives a few months in their futures. These futures are revisited seemingly ad infinitum throughout the 22 episode run, so we don’t even have the chance to forget what’s going to happen and be all surprised. Of course, one question the show asks repeatedly is whether this future can be changed, and it seems it can. However, the stuff at the end changes very little and thus makes for a pretty dull finale.

The future gimmick isn’t really the reason the show fails though; In and of itself it’s a pretty interesting trope. The real failure is the characters. Much like the other ABC POS, V, there isn’t a single really likeable character in the whole thing. The main guy, seen lovingly manhandling the asian dude in the picture I chose, is a highly annoying, serious, stupid, and repetitive pile of emotional trainwrecks. His angry buddy there is equally stupid if a little less annoying. The rest of the cast varies in its blandness but never gets anywhere near its target of say Hurley or Sawyer. Even Jack is better than these cutouts.

The setting is often boring too. It’s a big ol’ sterile FBI center for the most part. I will admit it was all miles better than V’s pathetic CGI sets though. There were even a few kinda nifty sets once in a while, like some weird place in the middle-east and stuff. Meh.

Anyway the show got cancelled. The end of the finale seemed to be setting up for another season, but now those threads will never be woven. I’m okay with that, really, because I almost give a small crap about where it could go, and would therefore probably have to watch season 2 if it had been approved. Thanks TV studio executives, you finally did something right.

Fringe – Season 1

I saw the pilot quite a while before the show went on air. I didn’t really like it. Dunno why. I didn’t start watching again until somewhere around midway through the second season which just wrapped up recently, when I suppose I was bored or something. As it happens, that episode would turn out to be one of the highlights of the season, in which a whole bunch of crazy whatsit happens. Kinda made me wish I’d been keeping up with the show. So, a few episodes later, I made myself buy the first season on Blu-Ray, and got watching. It’s been a good ride.

Fringe is very similar in premise to the much-loved X-Files of yore. However, it has much higher production values, and according to the bits of X-Files that I’ve seen, it seems to have a bit more of story-arc setup although it definitely has monster-of-the-week thing going on. Also Anna Torv is way hotter than Gillian Anderson ever was. Another difference, as far as I can see, is that Fringe is much more science-based than its predecessor, which often got into very mystical thingamajiggers. Still, the “science” is only just based in reality and relies on pretty nutso extrapolation to make it entertaining; and entertaining it often is.

The cast is quality. Anna Torv is of course the resident hottie FBI agent, and does a great job of communicating her emotions despite her somewhat immovable face. Walter Bishop (John Noble) is an old slightly bonkers mad scientist turned good guy with a mission to right the seemingly endless wrongs he’s committed in his forgotten past, and his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) is his reluctant caretaker and generally badass smart dude. His character as a whole is a bit blander than the rest of them though, I think. In a slightly lesser role we have an alumnus of The Wire, which is almost always a good sign; Lance Reddick plays a prominent Homeland Security agent who tells the main group what to do in his wonderfully commanding voice. There’s also a cow.

This first season’s main story arc has been quite slow and hasn’t really gotten very far. The episodes that I’ve seen from the second season seem to suggest that it keeps going at about the same pace. Still, it’s an interesting progression that could eventually become really frakking cool. It’s a bit of shame that I’ll have to wait several months to see more of it, but I’m committed to buying Season 2 when it’s available.

Lost

I first heard of Lost while getting my hair cut. The woman cutting my hair described it as a very gripping show, but since she was a woman I didn’t give it much thought (I'm a bit on the dumb side sometimes). Then later in college I started seeing short TV spots with Dominic Monaghan (Charlie) featured, which prompted me to make Hobbit jokes. Still later one of my roommates was watching an episode of Season 2 (maybe the premier), and after some scoffing I decided to give it a shot. Not long after the episode ended I got my hands on the first season and burned through it. I became one of the show’s infamous proselytizers.

Now, four to five years later, the show is over. It was a far different beast from that excellent first season, but not at all in any negative way. Starting as a seemingly simple castaway drama/character study, it became a nerd’s dream of supernatural weirdness and mysterious hooks; the audience never really knew what was happening. It became a hugely discussed thing. Everyone had a theory, others several, and most of them were wrong most of the time. I think the writers had a lot of fun watching what the viewers came up with and doing the opposite.

Although I didn’t love all of the characters, the majority were well-written and wonderfully acted. The female cast was of course a joy to look at throughout the series; Evangeline Lilly is seriously good at wearing shirts. The guys ran the gamut of character types, from Jack’s bloated sense of responsibility to Sayid’s dark broody badassery, from Hurley’s constant comedic relief to Faraday’s awkward genius. Some were only around for a while, but for the most part they burned brightly. Benjamin Linus was only supposed to be around for a few episodes (I might be off on the exact timeframe) but Michael Emerson’s performance was so great they expanded his character to remain for the whole series.

There were some missteps, mainly in Season 3, where there was a fair amount of filler and unfortunately necessary character drops, but Season 4 picked up strongly after that. For the most part every episode was highly anticipated. I will miss this show (until I get the massive blu-ray set and spend the next few years trying to watch it all again).

Most people at this point are discussing the finale a lot. I don’t really have a lot to say about it; it wasn’t that mind-blowing, but it was nicely executed and very character-focused. There probably weren’t many better ways to end a show with so many possible paths. There was a definite sense of closure without spending too much time on every line of questions that cropped up throughout the six seasons of madness; my memory for TV show events seems to be not that great, so I don’t even recall the majority of the loose ends. I think it’s good that they left some of the mystery intact.

So, now that it’s over, my Tuesday nights probably won’t be quite as exciting, but that’s okay. There will be other great shows. Lost will always be one of the best.

V

It’s going to be hard to write this without using lots of nasty words, but I’ll try.

I’m not sure exactly why I watched the whole season. It must be some kind of self-hate. It started out boring went downhill from there; the characters are flat, the story is uninteresting, the visuals are 4th-rate, and they made Morena Baccarin look ugly. It’s like they took notes on Heroes, except they ignored the first season.

The show is about some nazi-lizard race from space that want to take over Earth covertly for some reason. They do this by donning artificial human skin, hair and other visible thingies, and acting like humans in all sorts of places. Then once they’re sufficiently entwined in human politics and whatnot the mother-ships swoop in and act all benevolent-like. This of course would work great because humans are idiots. Oddly though, some of the aliens on Earth have absorbed human emotions (aliens can’t have those normally, they’re aliens!) and therefore must rebel against their mother race by being idiots like humans. Thankfully the normal aliens are kinda stupid too.

So then we have a human resistance that teams up with the alien converts and decide the best way to combat political invasion covering up a few murders here and there is to not try to expose them at all, but instead use use half-wit military/guerilla tactics to make themselves look like terrorists. Good job!

I never saw the original series but I bet it’s miles better than this junk. Not even one Lost and two Firefly alumni could save it. Even a pair of cylons showed up once and failed. Even with the boring characters though, I think the part that made me hate it the most was the absolutely dismal CGI. Every single scene in the V spacecraft was blisteringly obvious. The compositing was always blurry as a censored Japanese film, the shadows were all wrong, and the movement/perspective just brought it all together like a dang puppet show. I think the reason it’s getting renewed is because they spent a whopping $20 on virtual sets.

I must be spoiled by sci-fi shows like Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and even Stargate SG-1. The latter two had humor going for them, which was partly what made them enjoyable. BSG was just excellent through and through while keeping the humor mostly low; V had basically none at all and not much else. It tried to be a serious series. For that to happen I have to care about the outcome. I just hope it all stops.

I think this “review” is about as coherent as the show. I can’t be bothered to write quality for something this bad, I just wanted to say it sucked. So there you go.

Dollhouse

I don’t remember why I didn’t write about the first season at all, but I think now that the show’s over I should put out some thoughts. So here ‘goes.

Dollhouse, if you chose to ignore it, is about a secret-ish organization that wipes people’s minds and imprints them with custom personalities for rich people’s fantasies. Sounds pretty great right? Yeah, nothing could ever go wrong there. Actually yeah, a lot of stuff can and definitely go wrong, which is what makes the show at all worth watching. I guess that’s normal isn’t it; entertainment isn’t entertainment without conflict. I don’t know why I’m stating the obvious.

This show definitely had its ups and downs, but since the great Joss Whedon was mostly in control of it, the ups were pretty darn high. I’d say about a third of the 26 episodes were excellent, a third were okay, and the last third, usually the first few episodes of the season, were pretty bland. I put a lot of the blame on Eliza Dushku, probably unfairly. I just don’t like her very much. Every episode that Alan Tudyk made an appearance was absolute gold. I wish he’d had a larger role; but I suppose if that had been the case his appearances would have been less powerful. Oh well.

As a sci-fi show, it was pretty okay, but I think I’m constantly comparing it to Firefly in my head and therefore it gets the short end of the stick. Topher was fun to watch as the nerd of the group, although his techy ramblings are better suited for a less educated/disenchanted audience methinks. The lower budget for this show really had an impact of the believability of the technology.

Really, this show was made for Joss Whedon fans. I don’t think the audience was comprised of much more than that. The usual female empowerment theme that Joss loves so much was there, which I guess might have brought in some more, but in order for that to happen they first need to get past the layers of nerdery and the sexy facade meant to bring more guys into it. I guess it wasn’t that much of a facade though; Joss loves to fill his shows with pretty people, and I commend him for it.

Ultimately, I think it’s a good thing the show is over. I don’t think it was really even meant to go as far as it did. It was just something Joss was doing for Eliza before he finally abandoned television for pastures that couldn’t cancel him. Still, it’s worth watching if you’re a fan.

The Sopranos – Season 1

Like The Godfather, everybody likes this show. I can see why people might enjoy it. However, I didn’t like The Godfather very much. I thought Goodfellas was boring. The Sopranos, so far, has been less than my favorite show ever.

Yeah yeah the acting’s pretty good and there’s some skin and nasty language to spice things up, and the story’s okay I guess. Something about it just doesn’t keep me riveted like say The Wire or Dexter. I don’t like the characters; that’s probably the problem. I don’t identify with any of them. They’re all kinda assholes. Really it almost seems more like a sitcom to me than a drama a lot of the time.

I’m not saying I never enjoyed it. There were some good moments and good episodes; I can’t think of any in particular, except maybe one of the last few. It took me a long time to get through this season, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get to season 2.

I guess I just don’t get mobster fiction.

Six Feet Under

So, I’ve gone from my longest watch straight to my proportionately shortest watch. This show has five seasons at 12 or 13 hour-long episodes each, and I’ve stayed up late and angered my parents by sitting around in my room in order to finish it in about nine days. I watched Breaking Bad’s first season  in pretty much a single seating, but that was just seven episodes. No big deal. The reason for that was that it was a fantastic show, and it holds true for this one as well.

Six Feet Under revolves around a family-owned funeral home somewhere in California. That is, it centers on the family and their relationships with each other and their friends/enemies/loves/etc. In fact, all of these traits are often present in the same person. Everyone in the show is flawed to varying degrees, which sometimes made it difficult for me to like them depending on the flaw. I guess a show this close to my pessimistic view of reality just makes me mad.

Of course, there are good times along with the bad, which makes it watchable. The actors is superb, the writing is great, and it doesn’t rely on cliff-hangers nearly as much as most other dramas I’ve seen. A pretty cool trick they use extensively is the dream sequence, which almost always includes a conversation with a deceased loved-one. It’ usually made obvious that it’s not some mystical communication with the dead; rather, it’s all in the mind of the dreamer and a product of their emotional state. These mind-ghosts are a great way to get inside the heads of the characters without crappy voiceovers or whatever. Sometimes they’re funny and sometimes they’re pretty horrifying, but they always get their point across.

Every character in the show can be analyzed to hell. If I had the inclination I could probably write essays on them for quite some time, but I definitely don’t. The common theme for them is a seemingly self-imposed spiral to destruction. Everyone makes bad decisions over and over. Usually everything looks great for a little while and then just goes to crap. Cue the next disaster cycle. Repeat until the sappy montage at the end of the series. It was good to have a positive resolution.

It was a good watch, and I’m glad I watched it. Now I’ll be quite happy to find something light-hearted to enjoy.

Angel

This one might take the cake as the show that took me the longest to watch (aside from those that I watched while they were still airing). I think I started it about a year ago, although the majority of that time was spent not watching it. The first and second seasons really didn’t make me want to keep going. That’s the thing with this series; unlike Buffy, which for me had a pretty much constant hook, this show started out mostly bland and later turned into a completely awesome piece of entertainment.

As has been observed by people more observant than I, Joss Whedon works best with a big cast of core characters. The show started out with just three, and then stuck with four for quite a while. It was really boring. By the end this number had pretty much doubled, although it changed pretty frequently. There were also more fringe characters who stepped in once in a while.

Of course, even with the big cast the show didn’t really step up until season 4, when it finally transitioned from an almost purely episodic feature to a cohesive storyline for most of the season. Watching episodes back to back is a lot more fun this way; I tend to think it would be even cooler week by week, with all the anticipation from cliffhangers and whatnot.

The final season is really where everything shone the brightest. There was another epic storyline (several really, they all just worked together) that made continuing the marathon Angel sessions fun, a bunch of sultry babes, and lots of really good acting and dialogue. Joss was able to contribute much more to the show since he had no other projects at the time, and it shows.

It’s really a shame the show was canceled; apparently it happened due to Joss’ impatience with WB’s bureaucratic BS. He called them up for an early renewal, putting them on the spot, which prompted them to get all pissy and moronic. No more Angel on the screen.

Thankfully (sort of) the stories for both Buffy and Angel are being continued in comic form. I’ve checked out some of them and have been very confused, but I figure I’ll give them another shot soon. I like comics.