Category: Television & Movies

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Funny Stuff Television & Movies

Surely I’m not the only one…

Well, a little preamble here. My wife has been home now, either madly pregnant or madly mom, for almost three months. In that time, she’s begun to watch an inordinate amount of E!, which – from my own observations in passing through the room – has got to be one of the most inane, disposable, worthless channels on the cable lineup. I can see taking in one episode of True Hollywood Story now and again, maybe once a month if there’s a good one on, but sitting there watching it non-stop? Jesus. Discovery evidently isn’t putting seasons of Deadliest Catch on DVD fast enough for us.

Keeping Up With The CardassiansAnyway, I’ve gotten to see a number of promos lately for something called “Keeping Up With The Kardashians”, and surely I’m not the only one who hears that title and immediately makes the mental leap to these people instead. Now that’d be an interesting reality show – talking about the good old days of the Bajoran occupation, comparing notes on torture techniques, and sanding down those pesky neck ridges. That’d almost make more sense. Who the heck are the Kardashians? Maybe this is just the sound of me being older than dirt, but isn’t a prerequisite of celebrity that people recognize you on sight or on mention? Who are these people? Sorry, E!, but you’re cheating. You don’t get to invent celebrities just so you can build reality shows around them. How Truman Show is that?… Read more

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Critters Gadgetology Home Base Should We Talk About The Weather? Television & Movies

Of dogs, storms, and really amateurish artwork

We had a pretty loud storm tonight, but there was more fanfare about it on TV than there was actual storm. (It had raised all kinds of hell in Tulsa, though, so it was worth at least watching the TV coverage to keep an eye on it.) One big clap of thunder woke Evan up. This was also one of the first times in months that Xena came into the house. I’ve gotten to where I let her sit out rainstorms out on the side deck, but when we’re talking hail and worse, yeah, I’m a softie, the dog gets to come in. Naturally, she crashed out, Olivia played with her tail, Obi slept next to her, and she stood guard over Evan. Everybody loves the little guy.

Today was one of those days where I just didn’t have the brainpower to do anything useful, and was leaving the Avid powered down for the whole day (the first tornado watch was popped on us before noon), so I did a little bit of just-for-the-sheer-heck of it design work, and joined the ranks of those who do fan-made Doctor Who DVD covers. Rather than do the 37th cover for some well-known episode that hasn’t even officially been released yet, however, or a “fantasy football” cover for a lost story, I decided to go way off the beaten path: I thought I’d do a DVD cover for a fan film. I altered the basic template a bit and added the now-standard “From the world of BBC-TV’s Doctor Who…” wording that accompanies spinoff productions like Big Finish’s Dalek Empire audios, and came up with this:

Daemos Rising DVD cover

(You can download the full-res printable version here. The nifty 3-D mockup abo0ve was generated by an insanely useful program called Imandix Cover, which you can download free here.) While I’m happy with the intent of the artwork, the actual execution is just a bit crap – since it was all done with screencaps from the DVD itself, the main artwork, when you look at it really close up, is very pixellated. Still, I’d like to think I wasn’t a zillion miles off stylistically; I’ve posted it to the forums at Outpost Gallifrey, where I’m sure that my assessment of “crap” may be confirmed very quickly. 😆 But not to be dissuaded, I’m already working on another cover, this time for a series of irreverent “I Love The ’80s”-style documentary segments that aired in 2003. So if I want to burn these to DVD, I can put a cover on the DVD that’ll look something like:

Who @ 40 Weekend DVD cover

I tried to be a little more…well…artistic with this one. K-9 and the time vortex are screen grabs, while the TARDIS is a 3-D model that I rendered myself. I’d like to tackle Shakedown: Return Of The Sontarans soon, just because…well…it’d be kinda relevant at the moment. 😉 For giggles, I ran my old Countdown To Looking Glass cover through Imandix, which didn’t like the dimensions and chopped some of the artwork off:

Countdown To Looking Glass DVD cover

…oops. Guess I need to take that one back to the drawing board before I go too far into Who territory. Though ironically, I still like the CTLG artwork better than either of the Who pieces.

Also on my to-do list: an official Doctor Who DVD cover for Olivia vs. the Dalek. 😆… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Television & Movies

Columbus better buy us some freakin’ dinner next year

Today is Columbus Day. (Well, what’s left of today at any rate.) I thought about it a bit, and I recalled that on Columbus Day last year, my wife and I did a marathon 26-hour round trip to northern Illinois and back to pick up an Avid system that I’d won on eBay. Getting that machine home and operational was what emboldened me to escape from the TV station grind, which has something to do with why, this Columbus Day, my wife and I are again spending a great deal of time in each other’s company, taking care of Evan. It’s funny how many cycles and circles one can read into this whole thing if one wants.

We also watched some Burn Notice today, finally getting caught up with the whole show. It’s an interesting little series, that one, and hey, it’s got Bruce Campbell, so it can’t be all bad. I’m not sure I’m as googly-eyed over Gabrielle Anwar as everyone else who’s seen the show seems to be, but hey, that’s just me. In some ways, Burn Notice is also dangerously informative about…well…how to do certain things. MacGyver, it ain’t.

Evan’s doing okay; the other day while I was watching him sleep, I glanced at his hand and he had a little “live long and prosper” thing going. I thought it was pretty funny, if accidental, but there are certain members of the family who go around mumbling stuff like “don’t get him started on that geeky Star Trek shit” who probably wouldn’t be as amused. Much more interestingly, I’ve started introducing him to music. Some time back I picked up all three volumes of Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds For Baby, and they’ve proven to be a big hit with Evan. He’s completely mesmerized by that stuff. Most people filed Raymond Scott as a footnote under “the guy who actually composed a bunch of the stuff that Carl Stalling adapted for the Warner Bros. cartoon music”, but Scott was also a great innovator of electronic music in the early to mid 20th century. In some ways, he was paving a road that others such as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop would follow, messing around with purely electronically/electrically generated sound. Soothing Sounds is one of those experiments; it’s all very electronic, but it’s also just about hypnotic. It’s repetitive, a bit of highway hypnosis for the ears, but gradually more complexity is introduced and then phased out again to keep things interesting. Evan laid on my chest, and if he wasn’t almost asleep, I could see in his eyes a sort of mental “Processing…” progress bar – what is this? I hope this was just the first of many, many listening sessions for us. Music is simply one of the greatest things there is about being human, and I look forward to sharing more of it with him.

I’m working on a mix minidisc for him, with a random playlist, consisting of the Raymond Scott material, as well as other electronic music that I went back and listened to and found stuff in a similar vein – again, the early BBC Radiophonic Workshop music (reviewed here) and a bit of Hot Butter (reviewed here) and Famicom 20th Anniversary music for good measure, with a smattering of Bedtime With The Beatles too. A little something to stimulate and soothe at the same time. I’m sure there are folks out there screaming “Why not classical?” I’ll get around to that in due course, fear not. I can comfortably go from Radiohead to Rachmaninov in a single sitting, and eventually it’s my hope that Evan will have at least as broad a musical palette, if not more.

Oberon snuggled up next to Evan the other night when the little guy was being colicky. He rubbed all over Evan’s hands, sorta like if you don’t pet me, I’ll pet you! Evan didn’t mind; it didn’t distress him any more than he already was. I just thought that was incredibly cute. Obi’s gone from being the goofy cat to being the goofy cat who’s proving to be an incredibly loyal companion to someone he’s just met. We couldn’t have deliberately picked a better one.… Read more

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Television & Movies

A question that leaves me Blinkered

I’m sitting here watching Blink, my favorite episode of the third season of Doctor Who. Now, bear in mind I’ve already seen it, but I’m up for watching it again and again because it’s just that good. And I got to thinking: I loved Love & Monsters last season. Both of these episodes had very minimal involvement from David Tennant, and Blink just won the poll for the season’s scariest monsters (quite rightly, I gotta say). L&M was a little bit less acclaimed. But…why didn’t anyone think of doing a full 2009 season along the lines of these episodes? Or maybe even have full involvement with whoever’s playing the companion – Freema or Catherine or whoever’s there – and do a bit of a “looking for the Doctor” season. If David can only be fully involved for three episodes or whatever, have that cap off the season.

The precedent’s already been set, why not?

Oh, and Sci-Fi’s “next week” promos = teh suck. Just give the whole freakin’ plot away, why don’t you? Jeez guys. I can still do promos, ya know. Call me.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Television & Movies

Two completely unrelated thoughts

Nothing new to report on the baby front. We went swimming today and we’re just generally enjoying this whole three-day weekend jazz.

We watched the Star Trek: New Voyages episode World Enough And Time today. I’ll analyze it more thoroughly in a review for the site’s fan film section at a later date, but as nicely-made as it was, it made me realize something: I’m starting to feel like the world of Trek fan films is a momentous wasted opportunity. They’re produced well (hell, some of the production values easily rival the last episodes of the last TV series), acted earnestly, and they represent a fantastic group effort of will. However, they don’t say anything to me. I have yet to see one hit on a social issue like the original Star Trek did, and that’s really bugging me. These people have even fewer levels of censorship to deal with than Gene Roddenberry ever did: it’s just them and the ‘net and the audience. That cuts out so many layers of network bullshit that it just boggles the mind. But most of what we’re getting is just stuff that connects the dots between points of Star Trek continuity, without doing the one thing that has actually kept the original series on the map all these years. I’m aware that the next New Voyages will be a restructured version of David Gerrold’s never-produced AIDS/gay-themed TNG script Blood And Fire, but that’s a 20 year old script. I’m convinced that Roddenberry would be jazzed that the fans are making Trek now, but I’m also convinced that he’d be doing 30,000 RPM in his grave to see that no one’s touching big modern issues with it.

I find the fan films entertaining, but there’s just a nagging feeling of fandom-with-its-head-up-its-own-ass here. Star Trek broke ground and made people think in the 1960s. Have the fans forgotten, or just lost their nerve?… Read more

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Cooking With Code Funny Stuff Television & Movies

Open the blog bay doors

Best. WordPress. Sci-Fi. Theme. Ever.

I am SO tempted. You have no idea. 😆 You can get it here. If any of my pals wants to start a WP blog with this theme, give me a shout, I’ll be happy to host it for you. I can even install the plug-in I use that will automagically duplicate your entries at Livejournal if you like.

Or maybe I should just sit down, take a stress pill, and relax…… Read more

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Serious Stuff Television & Movies

We’re the good guys, Michael

I have been a very, very infrequent viewer of The 4400 on USA. My wife’s been following it more closely. I caught a pretty good chunk of Sunday night’s episode last weekend, since she was already watching it, and I realized two things very quickly:

1. I had no freakin’ idea what’s going on in the story anymore.

2. I had no one to root for.

I was really more concerned with the second point than the first, otherwise I would’ve been watching The 4400 all along. I’m sure that if I was more into the story, I’d probably have some insider’s knowledge that the plotline is a lot like Galactica: basically good people having to do some fairly shady things for survival’s sake. I remember, after part 1 of the Galactica episode Pegasus aired, I stomped into theLogBook’s virtual writers’ room and complained that the rapacious crew of the Battlestar Pegasus was one step too far over the line for me: the story had officially gotten too dark. And I think I remember making the same comment about the cluster of six “Others” episodes at the beginning of the third season of Lost – sure I wanted to know more about the Others, but I just wasn’t interested in seeing Sawyer tortured or beaten to a pulp week after week. In both cases, the shows righted themselves after these moments of extreme darkness, and in the discussion of Galactica, it was pointed out to me that, as much trouble had been taken by the writers to show what kind of grey-area, situational-ethics decision making our heroes on Galactica had relied on to survive, the Pegasus crew had to be shown to be even more questionable in their judgement and conduct. I can grok that.

I’m sure the situation is the same with The 4400, but not being an avid follower of the story, I just don’t realize it. What nagged at me is that, unlike Lost and Galactica, I couldn’t tell who was supposed to be the bad guy. I was able to divine the differing agendas and philosophies of the two main characters on either side of the divide, but both of them were exhibiting such reprehensible behavior that I couldn’t see who I was supposed to root for. But what struck me was that my wife, who has been an avid follower of The 4400, said “I don’t like where they’re going with this show.”

I know we live in the age of the anti-hero, in an age where there is no such clear-cut decision that isn’t a questionable one. I know we live in an age where there are worse monsters walking among us than a couple of well-dressed, eloquently-spoken TV characters who have intensely charismatic dialogue written for them that outlines their worldviews and why they oppose…well…whoever the heck it is they happen to be opposing in this week’s episode. And I know we live in a world where players on both sides of any given conflict, however well-meaning their motivations, display reprehensible behavior. The people on TV have got nothin’ on the real life villains on both sides of the playing field.

But geez, people. Give us some hint of who’s on the side of the angels, however misguided they may be. The tale of someone who sets out to fight the good fight, falls and is redeemed is a morality play. The tale of everyone falling and not finding redemption is just nihilism. I’m not asking for characters wearing white hats or black hats, but instead just the barest hint of an honorable motivation somewhere.… Read more

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Television & Movies

Blasto from el pasto: Doctor Who a la KVIE

Doctor Who a la KVIE 6 SacramentoI own every existing full Doctor Who story on VHS. Quite how this happened would require a whole dissertation on the 1996 tornado, a friend of mine in Sacramento, a massive box of tapes, hours of dubbing, whatever happened to all of the “retired” SVHS tapes discarded by Fox 46, and boxes so heavy that their shipping costs rivaled some countries’ gross national debt. I had these tapes long before BBC Video really got with it and made everything from the series available, due to the generosity of my friend Mark, and I’ve been dubbing off the B&W ’60s episodes to DVD-Rs en masse while housecleaning, so I can discard the much bulkier tapes later. Why those particular episodes? With the remainder of this year’s DVD releases almost entirely in the Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras, there seems to be a clear signal that the lower-selling B&W episodes are being put on the back-burner when it comes to DVD releases. Also, I’ve only had to dub three Troughton adventures (The Krotons, The Dominators, The War Games), because almost all of the second Doctor’s complete stories are on the market already (there aren’t that many that are complete and therefore marketable). Somehow I doubt that we’ll be getting The Gunfighters (purportedly the worst episode in the show’s entire history), The Sensorites (the story in which Susan describes her home planet as having orange skies and silver leaves, a description that the new series made sure to follow up on in The Sound Of Drums) or The Romans on DVD anytime soon. I’m popping them into Amaray keep cases with covers by talented fan artists like Simon Holub, Lee Johnson, Thomas Evans and Tom Payne, and slotting them in among the official releases happily.

But what I really love about these, and what I’m preserving carefully alongside the main course of each adventure, is the introductory material produced by Sacramento’s PBS affiliate, KVIE. Three presenters would, on a rotating basis, provide a wealth of background material on each story in about three minutes before the show. I could go on about ogling their meticulously-built TARDIS console, Police Box and Dalek props that appeared on set, but what made these intros so great was the piles of trivia, background and quite frankly educational material layered into each one. Historical stories were given some real-life context, missing episodes were noted (and viewers were encouraged to go check out the novelizations of those stories from the library – a shrewd move that suddenly puts this silly old sci-fi show on the map as an educational item), and ties to the show’s past and future adventures were pointed out. The BBC should be including these on the official releases whenever they deign to release a 1960s story on DVD. The presenters are personable, even if their costumes verge on convention cosplay contest goofiness, and they clearly know their stuff – they’re both knowledgeable Who fans and capable public speakers.

I don’t know where these three, or their more-than-handy prop and stage crews have wound up, but this entry is a salute to all of them. Very, very well done. You guys clearly did this for the love of the show, and that’s what makes this stuff so special.… Read more