A revisionary (and, from the looks of it, amazingly entertaining) take on Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson. Directed by Guy “Snatch” Richie!
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Category Archives: Movies & TV
Karla DeVito – We Are Not Alone
Eddie Izzard’s Hilarious Star Wars Comedy
A Few More Disjointed Thoughts on Dollhouse
I’ll post my comments after the jump so I can talk about spoilerish stuff, so if you still haven’t seen the season ender, “Omega,” don’t click to read more… Continue reading
Give ’em Hell, Malone
Had no idea this flick was on the way till someone pointed me to the trailer. It looks AWESOME.
Make Your Own Buffy
Sometimes I’m amazed at what people think to do — and can do. Check this out:
That’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, made out of paper. Somebody did that.
You can too, if you want. You can download the images, print ’em out, cut ’em out, and put ’em together for your very own. Just go here.
Me, I’m just going to watch in admiration.
TODAY ONLY: Full Set of ANGEL for CHEAP @ Amazon!!!
Amazon’s “Deal of the Day” today is the boxed set of all 5 seasons of Joss Whedon’s Angel, usually selling for $125, for only $57!!!
This is an incredible deal, for some incredible television. If I didn’t have all of it already, I’d grab it up.
You can get it here.
Regarding Doctor Who
I was about twelve or thirteen when I first found out about Doctor Who. The Doctor, though he’s nearly a thousand years old, is also only about four months older than I am, having made his debut in Nov. 1963 (I debuted in March 1964). But his adventures were on the BBC, and I was stuck in Bumfu Jonesboro, GA, where we didn’t get much BBC except whatever nuggets got picked up by PBS.
So my first exposure came through Doctor Who paperbacks, that I think were probably just novelizations of episodes from the show. I can sort of remember the covers, and I enjoyed them enough as a young teen that I lamented the fact I couldn’t see the actual series.
Later, and I have no idea how much later, I got to see an actual episode. Maybe it was being shown on PBS, maybe I saw it at a science fiction convention…I’m not sure. All I recall is that I was seriously disillusioned, because the show had really cheesy special effects and was, I think, campier than I’d expected. And I really don’t care for camp as a general rule. Even as a kid I disliked it.
So for most of my life, that was my Doctor Who experience. And I remember instances where I cited the show when joking about low budget genre productions that were really cheesy.
Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction show in the world. The original series ran from 1963 till 1989, there was a TV movie in 1996 that was a failed attempt at relaunch, then the show successfully relaunched in 2005 and is going strong. At this writing, there are 753 episodes. There are also two spinoff shows involving characters who originated on Doctor Who (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures), with a third in the works focusing on The Doctor’s robot dog K-9 from the 1970s.
I watched the TV movie in 1996, and for the first time since reading those paperbacks I enjoyed Doctor Who. I don’t remember anything about it now (I’m going to rewatch it soon to see if it holds up to my older, more jaded standards), but at the time I was disappointed it didn’t go to series.
Then, recently, I started watching the rebooted series that began in 2005, and it’s simply one of the most marvelous television shows there’s ever been. Continue reading
Joss Whedon Hilariously Accepts the Bradbury Award
Joss, showing yet again how freaking funny he is, as he accepts the Bradbury Award this year from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.It’s heartening that the Story God was so inspired by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury was the guy who made me decide to be a writer.
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How to Save Dollhouse (or whatever show floats your boat)
An excellent article on “The Big Money,” which is an offshoot of Slate, breaks down the fruitlessness of trying to boost the numbers of people watching a show as it’s televised if those people are not in the microscopic subset of watchers with Nielsen boxes:
Trying to convince more people to watch a struggling show on TV is entirely useless. The television industry is not a democracy; the only votes that count—scratch that, the only people allowed to vote at all—are the 12,000 to 37,000 households that have Nielsen boxes sitting above their TVs. Nielsen boxes are poll stations for the Nielsen company—the organization that reports all of the ratings for the television industry. If Nielsen doesn’t know you exist, then neither do the TV networks. And if the TV networks don’t know you exist, then tuning in to an endangered show is a waste of everyone’s time. If a show is turned on and Nielsen isn’t there to hear it, it most definitely does not make a sound…
…But the country has only somewhere between 12,000 and 37,000 homes reporting back with data. Compare that with the more than 112 million television-equipped households in this country. Now, even if we assume that these Nielsen readings are accurate—and there are many who believe that’s not the case—the huge gap between 12,000 and 112 million means almost everyone is stripped of an actual voice in the process….The “save our show” campaigns are ill-advised because they fail to take into account this all-important gap between the sample size and the size of the sampled audience.
The way to bypass this shitty system is to watch the episodes of your beloved show online:
The alternative is to drive people where they can actually be counted—and these days that’s online. The Internet offers metrics everywhere you turn. The networks can analyze the number of streams, number of ad impressions, number of page views, number of visits, number of visitors, number of comments, etc. It’s a democratic space where the eyes and participation of fans can actually be seen by the network bosses making the decisions. Unlike with analog TV, online fans can actually speak directly to power. So whether it’s through iTunes, Hulu, or one of the networks’ proprietary streams, the smart way to campaign for a show’s renewal is to stream it after the fact…
You can also record the show on your DVR, then watch it within three days. If you do that, it gets counted. If you just watch the show live through that same DVR, you don’t count. Let me say that again, lest you missed it: if you’re watching your favorite show live, your viewing does not count. Unless you’re a Nielsen household.
So if you want to help Dollhouse stay on the air, or The Sarah Connor Chronicles or Chuck or Gene Simmons’s Family Jewels (gods forbid), do your part by either recording your show on DVR and watching it soon after, or by watching (and even rewatching) episodes online.
And, I point out to you again, the last several episodes of Dollhouse are available to watch free, right this minute, on www.hulu.com. Get thee hence.
Hope for Dollhouse
At the Paley Fest event dedicated to Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon updated folks on the Dollhouse situation with Fox:
We also talked about next season, they called me specifically to say we’ve been hearing you sound a little despondent, being very clear about this, the show is not cancelled. The numbers have been soft, but the demographic is wonderful. DVR is great, they [FOX] are big fans of the show and they’re waiting to see what happens, so now I’ve gone from a place that’s sort of ehhhhhh, they don’t even care, no one loves me, to a place of – God, I can’t believe I’m saying this…hope.
So…fingers crossed. Keep watching the show, or start watching if you’re not, it’s great (remember, you can find the last several episodes online at www.hulu.com).
Joss Whedon Speaks
Story God
Joss Whedon went to Harvard to accept the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism, and science fiction site io9 was there. A few highlights: Continue reading
Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse: Smart as Hell, Kicking Serious Ass
If you’ve been following my reactions to Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, you know I was luke-warm toward it at first, then really annoyed with it, then after seeing episodes 6 and 7, I really started to like it and said it was good, but not quite Joss good yet.
Well, now I’ve seen episodes 8 and 9, and I’m loving the show.
Since episode 6, “Man on the Street,” they have fixed the anthology-show weakness that plagued the first five episodes, and each episode has focused on the Dollhouse and its people rather than on the misadventures of their clients-of-the-week. The evolution of Echo as a character is fascinating to watch, considering there’s not supposed to be a character there, but there most definitely is. Those are some still waters running very deep. And the development of relationships and character backstory gets more and more compelling; in this latest episode, “A Spy in the House of Love,” we find out the major secrets of a couple of characters, one of which is a complete surprise and leads to a much deeper understanding of that character, leaving incredible potential for the stories ahead.
There are many themes at work here. This latest episode played brilliantly with matters of trust, from the first conversation between Echo and her handler Boyd, to the implications of their final scene. And seeing the Tabula Rasa Echo step forward as an instigator of significant action was a masterstroke of storytelling and character; I literally got goose bumps.
That a character with no agency develops agency through her own innate strength, even while devoid of her past and identity, is an incredible dramatic device. This show is all about how people use people, and issues of power and responsibility and all that, but the most important thing it’s about might just be the re-enfranchisement of the disenfranchised.
Who on earth could be more disenfranchised than the dolls? Their very selves ripped out of them, programmed and reprogrammed to serve the desires of others, they are the ultimate slaves. And here we have one of them somehow growing as a person right before our eyes, and you just know there are big things ahead.
And hopefully we’ll get to see all of the big things Whedon wants to show us. Fox is playing its usual bullshit games with the show, and now for some reason has decided to show this entire season (and a tenuous “kudo” to them for doing that, at least) except the thirteenth and final episode. Apparently the 12th wraps up the season tidily, and the 13th is sort of a coda after the fact…but still. It doesn’t indicate that the network is supporting the show, and doesn’t bode well for a second season.
But, hopefully they’re watching the reviews, which have been excellent since episode 6, and will recognize they have a gem on their hands and will allow it to grow. This is not just a damn good show, after all.
This show is Joss good.
[NOTE: As of this writing, you can watch episodes 5-9 at www.hulu.com. The show started really getting good in ep. 6, but 5 is pretty good and has some impact on events in later episodes. If you haven’t seen them, catch ’em while you can.]
A Girl’s Gotta Trim the Hedges
I wish Americans weren’t so hung up so we could have cool ads like this.
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Numfar, do the dance of grief.
Sad news: Andy Hallet, Lorne the green karaoke demon from Angel, has died from heart disease. He was 33.
I didn’t know him except through his work, but his work was so wonderful that I find myself missing him. He was incredibly talented, and by all accounts a very sweet guy.
For years, whenever I heard “Its Not Easy Being Green” I felt a touch of melancholy because it made me think of the loss of Jim Henson. Now it will be doubly sad.
Catching Up With Dollhouse
Earlier, I was pretty hard on Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, which airs on Fox, the network too stupid to make Firefly a hit.
My basic problem with the show was that, while it had a great premise with huge potential, the active structure of the show shoved the things that were interesting about it into the corners and filled the space with bland stories that had little permanent importance to the history the show was building. In other words, the intriguing people running the dolls, and the intriguing things starting to happen to the dolls (especially Echo), were serving as a framing device for stories that were a hell of a lot less interesting.
I wasn’t alone in my response. Many other Whedon fans (and I am, very very much, a Whedon fan) were finding themselves really not liking a show they’re preconditioned to root for. The ratings started weakly, and dropped. Messages came forth from Whedon headquarters, implying that Fox had been too heavy-handed and interfering at first (easy to believe, all things considered), but had loosened up after a while and allowed Joss and his team to start doing things the way they really wanted to.
Give us till the sixth episode, they pleaded. It’ll start to get good.
Well, the sixth and seventh episodes have aired at this point. Major things happened, game-changers. Echo went off-task a few times, which seems to be her hobby. The banal storylines that were unrelated to the main story arc went away, and the stories that replaced them had significant impact on the characters and the arc.
Know what? It’s getting good. It’s getting real good. It’s not quite Joss good, just yet, but I do see that coming, and I’m now enjoying the journey.
Unfortunately, the show probably won’t get to explore its full potential. It is on Fox, where shit thrives and great shows die young, and the slow crawl out the gate and low ratings won’t help. I read that Fox is committed to showing the full thirteen episode season, then won’t rerun the show during the summer. I’m thinking that also means they won’t be picking it up for the next season.
That’s a shame, as I think it has the makings of a great show. But at least we’ll have the thirteen episode story arc to enjoy…or the latter half of it, at least, since the first half kinda blew. And Joss can move on to other things, and those things will hopefully be Joss good. Maybe someday we’ll get to enjoy one of his creations for a bunch of years again. But it probably won’t be on Fox.
Let The Right Subs In, aka Power to the People
Last week, I watched the Swedish independent horror film Let The Right One In. It’s an unusually smart little film, particularly for the horror genre these days, and it’s probably the best vampire film I’ve seen since Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (1993). Or maybe Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987). Its approach to horror is to come at us through character rather than through gore or trickery (which is not to say it doesn’t have some of those too), and in ways it reminds me of the works of Val Lewton in the 1940s.
I recommend it highly. But that’s not the point of this entry.
No, the point of it is, turns out I was fortunate to see the movie on the original Swedish screener DVD. The US release of the film on DVD/Blu-Ray last week turns out to have been something even more scary than the movie itself: a dumbed down version of the movie itself. Continue reading
Saturday Night With Cthulhu
Do you know Cthulhu?
If you knew Cthulhu as we know Cthulhu, oh, oh, oh what a god…
I’ve always loved scary stories. One of the few positive memories I have from my childhood was staying up with my father and watching classic Universal monster movies in a rocking chair. I loved scary comics like Creepy and Eerie and monster comics like Marvel’s Werewolf By Night (I remember, when I was about 9 or so, scrambling around the desolation of our suburban neighborhood by moonlight in a torn shirt pretending I was the werewolf). I could quote Edgar Allen Poe, and read all the horror I could get hands on, from Dracula to “The Monkey’s Paw” to Something Wicked This Way Comes. Well, I read most things I could get my hands on. But horror was among my favorites. Continue reading
Catwoman Purrchance?
While looking around for images to go with my review of the latest Mummy flick, I came across a great shot of Rachel Weisz that got me thinking that she’d be a great Catwoman for the next Christopher Nolan Batman film:
Of course, countless actresses could fill out the catsuit well, and some of them could actually carry off the role (Angelina Jolie and Kate Beckinsale spring to mind). Weisz, though, has an earthy, playful carnality about her, and a sense of deep intelligence, that I think would be ideal.
Design-wise, I think a kevlar-ed up take on the Darwyn Cooke-designed costume Selina Kyle’s worn the past few years would be great:
Gotta have the goggles.
The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Mummy Franchise
I’m in a pulpy mood this week (like most weeks, but even moreso) so over the weekend my son and I rewatched The Mummy Returns. It’s a film that gets a lot of flack for some reason, but I loved it (and the first in the series). As I wrote in a mailing list thread back in 2001:
Put me in the love-it camp.
I think it may actually be the best pulp flick since Raiders, and probably the best PURE pulp flick ever.
It’s nowhere near as good a movie as Raiders, and it IS derivative as hell…but it’s so conscious and playful in its stealing that I can’t fault it. The writer/director clearly loves this sort of material and runs with it.
It’s also flawed in a lot of ways that have to be deliberate attempts to capture the shoddy (yet lovable) consistency of the pulps. For example, Frasier’s character now has a tattoo he’s apparently had since he was a kid. Did they put this tattoo somewhere where we couldn’t have seen it in the first film, like on his calf (to be seen when he’s pulling on his boots) or his shoulder (to be seen when his shirt rips in Doc Savage-style)? No. They put it on top of his wrist, which was plainly seen NOT to have a tattoo in the first film. Such an easy “flaw” was an easy one to address without problem, yet the tattoo is right there in all its glory, screaming INCONSISTENCY!
Or, rather, pulp-like inconsistency. The pulps are full of this sort of thing, as writers reached and dug for any new nugget to twist a story on. I’m a stickler for consistency — I’m the guy who watched carefully in each LETHAL WEAPON sequel to make sure Riggs’s tattoo (plot device in the first film) was still in place. It was. But this stuff is clear and playful homage to the source material, and I loved it.
The first two Mummy flicks were both obvious labors of love by Stephen Sommers, their writer/director. They were amazing showcases for CGI effects, but beyond that they had engaging stories full of pulp action, lots of comedy that did not descend into camp, and wonderful characters performed by perfectly cast actors. Brendan Fraser, as American soldier-of-fortune Rick O’Connell, was a perfect pulp hero, brash and cocky and capable. Rachel Weisz as Evelyn “Evy” O’Connell (né Carnahan) was the brilliant and (extraordinarily) sexy librarian who could hold her own in a scrap. Together they had incredible chemistry, crack comic timing, and the charm and natural repartee of a classic Hollywood couple (like Gable and Lombard, or Loy and Powell).
Throw in John Hannah as Evy’s sleazy but lovable brother, Arnold Vosloo as great villain Imhotep (whose ultimate fate, at the end of the second film, possesses pathos and tragedy), and a host of great supporting roles, and you have some flicks with great characters on the screen at all times. Even the kid who plays the O’Connell’s son, Alex, in the second film is brash and bratty without being annoying, a rare thing in a character like his.
The O’Connell’s adventures continued in a short-lived cartoon that was fairly good, and I remember it fondly as one of the few sources of pulp goodness I could share with my then five-year-old son.
He and I watched The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor last night. When I say it’s incredible, well, you’d darn well better believe that I am lying. Flat out full of shit. On a George W. Bush scale. Because it’s terrible. Continue reading
Under An Outlaw Moon 