Category: Television & Movies

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Ramblement

No particular focus for tonight’s entry, so you’ll just have to keep up.

I guess we can do a Red Dwarf-style JCC reunion now. For months on Facebook, I’ve been looking for my friend Mark, with whom I hung out a great deal around the end of high school and a few years afterward; I remember he singlehandedly helped me move all of the heavy furniture into my Garrison Avenue apartment in late ’94 or so. He was also part of the surreal, please-tell-me-you-guys-were-high-when-you-did-this video experiment called Jump Cut City, a.k.a. JCC (a new and improved mini-site for which is horrendously overdue; until then, this’ll have to make do). About the time that I made the horrendous mistake of letting myself get bumped up to a salaried position at Fox 46 (translation: every moment of your life was now owned by the station), I dropped out of contact with a lot of people. Mark’s one of the ones I regret losing touch with the most, and tonight I was lamenting the fact that I couldn’t find him online anywhere.

My wife asked, “Have you tried the phone book?” And maybe this is a testament to the pathetically enormous amount of time I spent on the internets, but I had to admit that no, I hadn’t thought of that. Turns out she also knew him at around the same time – she was working at a comic book store that he frequented. She was eager to call him right then and there because, she reasoned, surely his head would explode at the very thought that two of the strangest people he’d ever known, two people he’d never really associated with each other, had gotten married and produced offspring who would carry our very strange genes forward.

So out of the blue we called him, and made his Saturday night more surreal. It’s been at least 15 years since I talked to him, and he sounded exactly the same. There’s much lost time to make up for, and I’m sure there are a lot of laugh-until-whatever-you’re-drinking-is-ejected-nasally moments ahead too, because there’s definitely a get-together in the works. But man, do I feel stupid – look in the phone book? Surely we have the technology to move beyond the phone book.

Slipped (mini)disc. For years, I’ve stubbornly stuck by my minidisc player instead of joining Generation iPod. Partly because it appeals to my curmudgeonly retro-tech side (Atari is to iPod as Odyssey2 is to minidisc), and partly because…well…it still works, why replace it? My wife and I have, between us, two Hi-MD players (which hold a gob of stuff on a single disc – for example, about two dozen full-length Doctor Who audios) and one NetMD player (which holds approx. 5 hours of stuff on a single disc). The great thing about these is that you can build up as many discs full of stuff as you like and swap them out on a whim: no “uh-oh, stop the world, I’ve gotta go back to the PC to put stuff on here.” Of course, there’s a lot of “upload stuff to the machine” time up-front, but before a lengthy two-way solo road trip to, say, a neighboring state’s capitol, that whole swapping-discs ability is awfully handy.

The weak link in the minidisc chain, however, is the software required to load stuff from your PC onto your MD: a horrific C++ monstrosity called SonicStage which crashes at the drop of a hat. Worse yet, when it gets into a “crashing spree,” there’s a better than even chance that it’ll corrupt the table of contents file on the disc and force you to start from scratch. I tend to leave some stuff on my music MD for months; as you delete and add things, the oldest items slide to the top of the TOC (hint: the top entries on my music MD’s TOC have involved members of the Finn family for many months). Having to rebuild the whole damned disc gets a wee bit old. I’m not a huge iTunes fan, but so help me, SonicStage may yet be the defining factor that gets me to become a Pod Person. I should be sitting up at one in the morning, thinking “Yay, it’s finally working!” and blogging while transferring months worth of tracks over to a freshly-formatted disc. Ugh.

And speaking of long drives through Oklahoma… …I’d say we now have an official “stay tuned” on the subject of OVGE (the major Tulsa-based video gaming convention) for later this year. I have no idea when or where or how big or how small, but all I have to say is…count me in. I’m already being asked if I want to exhibit at shows like CCAG and Video Game Summit this summer, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s no way I can make it in person. I’ll try to line up some way for the CGE DVDs and the old and new PDF DVDs to be there if there’s already an exhibitor I know and trust there, but the problem there is that I’m actually running a little tight on inventory – I have to make sure, in sending stuff out for non-local shows, that I’m not hindering my ability to fill online orders, and PDF Level 2 and the Brown Box have suddenly been moving fairly well thanks to mentions on a number of sites I hadn’t even sent the press release to! Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised – and maybe I shouldn’t admit to being surprised – but I had no idea that the project registered on that many people’s radars. I’m still quietly wondering if there’s not another application just waiting to happen with the same basic format as the PDF DVDs; what it could possibly be, I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions. In the meantime, I’m also open to the next OVGE show – no way am I missing it a second year in a row. OEGE energized me to get back into the swing of things for the first time in a year, and now I’m ready for a show where I don’t have nearly 20 years on the average attendee. 😆

Bea Arthur...IN SPACEGood night, but not goodbye. I’d be remiss if I didn’t include at least a passing mention of the passing of Bea Arthur (see what I did there? I didn’t actually mean to do that there, but…eh, let’s move on). Long before the Golden Girls, she was Maude. I probably first saw her on the Mary Tyler Moore Show as a wee lad, but I don’t remember it; the first thing I saw her in that left a mark – more of a painful welt, really – was in the utterly bizarre cantina “sketch” of the much-maligned, aired-only-once Star Wars Holiday Special. I generally don’t crap all over that legendary show the way most folks do – in fact, I have a soft spot for it just for its sheer surreal-ness – but man, the portion of that special that featured Ms. Arthur was off-the-scale awkward. Imagine, if you will, a musical number set in the Star Wars cantina, lamenting how sad it is that the bar is closing, in a family-viewing-hour special based on a movie that’s incredibly popular with kids. Add to that the “life under the Gestapo” underpinning of the whole scene (the bar is closing because of an Empire-imposed curfew), and poor Bea had the dubious honor of singing and dancing her way through an “oh my God, did they really just do that?” segment of a show that was already strange enough. But she was a trouper about it – and for that, my hat’s off to her. A true talent who, for her trouble, really should’ve been made into an action figure, because whatever she was paid for appearing in that special, it wasn’t enough. Hey, that reminds me…

Torchwoody. Maybe an unfortunate pun there, but for the Doctor Who-and-related toy collectors out there, scificollector.co.uk popped a surprise announcement that they’re making a limited advanced run – 1,000 of each! – of the wave 2 Ianto and Captain John figures available now. They’re in different packaging than the “wide release” wave 2 figures will be, but the figures are actually the same. When released in June or July – painfully close to the San Diego Comic Con Doctor Who exclusives – the second wave of Torchwood figures will include Ianto, Captain John, Toshiko and the goofy business-suited Blowfish character (the one who stopped his sports car long enough to let an old lady cross the street in the first episode of season two; why this character was deemed more worthy of a figure than Owen, I can’t even begin to speculate).

OK, I warned you this blog post would be disjointed; I’m gonna bip it in the nuds now before it gets downright surreal.… Read more

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Television & Movies

So said we all?

Coin detected in pocket...So…that’s it. I’ll be as non-spoilery with my thoughts as possible.

I got a chuckle out of Ron Moore’s cameo (reading the magazine article toward the end).

For what it’s worth, the ratio of what was paid off and tied up vs. what was left open ended did not displease me. This was a conclusion that did not leave me so disappointed that I got pissed off at the entire run of the show for wasting countless hours of my life (i.e. Voyager, Enterprise).

The people who complained about the Shadow War wrapping up a few episodes into season 4 of B5? I’m sure they’ll launch an all-out bitchfest about this one. There’s no shortage of action, but the writers did not neglect our need for closure either. Anyone who expected the entire show to end with pyrotechnics (A) will be disappointed, and (B) didn’t know this show very well.

Overall…a satisfying ending…and a welcome one. Galactica’s been exhausting to watch. I noticed, in the Big Frakking Special, that there was a lot of interview time given over to the question “How dark is too dark?” Galactica went too dark a few times for my tastes…and way too dark a few other times.

But I think, for at least a few decades if not longer, we’re going to see this Galactica put on a pedestal, and not entirely unjustly. Entertainment Weekly said it best a few weeks or months ago when their reviewers decided that Galactica, even more than 24, was the one popular entertainment that really captured the zeitgeist of this decade better than anything else. And sure, to some extent, that’ll date it down the road. I mean, it’s not like, 40+ years on, we’re talking about a TV sci-fi show that captured the zeitgeist of the sixties, because what relevance would that have to anything going on now…?

Oh. Yeah. Wait. Cancel that. I think Galactica’s importance on the TV landscape is pretty secure. 😛

But what about its entertainment value? There’s the real iffy thing. Often thought-provoking, I found Galactica simply too dark in a few places to be truly entertaining. As Evan became mobile, and aware of the idiot box, Galactica became a thing to avoid – a thing to download and watch later, in the dead of night after the boy was asleep. I’ve talked to some of my friends with young ones who are in the same boat. And here recently I’ve struggled to be in a mood to watch it at all.

I’ll probably be sitting out Caprica altogether; maybe I’ll check out the upcoming early-release DVD of the pilot, and make my decision then. But as demanding and exhausting as Galacitca has been…I’m not sure I’m up for more of that. At this rate, I’ll be doing good to stick with Lost until the end. I’m ready for a little more escapism in my diet – and the revised-Galacticas and Losts of future TV seasons will probably have to do without me for a while.… Read more

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Funny Stuff Television & Movies

Wow! Normally they just arrest some shirtless redneck.

Boxleitner barfs lightning!OK, a funny story from my early days in TV, before I get Babylon 5 off my brain again.

My first TV job was technically “board operator” at the local Fox station (which isn’t even the local Fox station anymore). When I started, everything was switched live, and commercial breaks were a nerve-wracking rapid-fire Chinese fire drill of tape swapping. Somewhere in there, two things happened to bring a little bit of sanity to the proceedings: it was decided that the local breaks for network programming should be done from pre-built reels, and then at a later date, the station purchased a computer-based system for running spots, and an automation system to go with it. The two were even connected – you’d program the automation to take the local breaks and it would autofire that computer. Wow! I’m sure the resolution and storage capacity of that setup would be laughable now, but back then it was right out of the future.

Local programming, however, was still “built” – i.e. the appropriate commercials were literally insert-edited (or at least they were supposed to be) onto the tapes in question. Let’s say you had an episode of Love Connection; in the gaps left for local breaks, you’d insert-edit the local commercials on the log, one at a time; this was called “building” the show, and it was done at a little edit bay in the back of the control room. You were supposed to be building shows in between commercial breaks.

Now this, of course, was the first step down the road to disaster. The computer system had a “playlist” loaded into it for each broadcast day. If you were “building” shows during prime time, which often happened if the previous shift didn’t get it in gear, you had to walk a tightrope – moving the computer system forward so it could insert commercials into the show you were building, but you had to be done with that procedure, and have the playlist moved back to the right place, so the automation system could catch the next break in real time. If you didn’t stay sharp, the automation system would fire the wrong break from the wrong show (and that break probably wouldn’t time out the same as the break it was supposed to be running – i.e. coming up 30 seconds short), or…it could be even worse. Since the computer spot system ran through that edit bay, technically, what the automation system switched to in order to play spots wasn’t another A/V output from that computer…it would switch to the output of that edit bay. If you were checking or building a show when the automation fired a break, nobody would see commercials: they’d see you screwing around with the tape.

Are you with me? Because here’s where it goes horrendously wrong. Imagine you’ve got some nutty board operator in his early 20s who’s gotten far enough ahead on building his shows that he’s going to kick back during prime time and do a little bit of unauthorized editing – to the tune of making a dub of the latest fresh-off-the-satellite episode of Babylon 5 without the commercials in it, to be dubbed to VHS for his own private collection. Who this person could be, I’ve no idea. He might even be a theoretical person who doesn’t actually exist. (If this entirely hypothetical individual had known that such things as “DVD box sets” of entire seasons of TV shows were only a few years away, maybe he wouldn’t have bothered.)

So here’s the disaster: at the appointed moment in prime time one Saturday night, the automation system will send its signal to the computer to play a commercial break, and simultaneously switch to the output of that edit bay. But that edit bay will be otherwise “occupied” doing something that, let’s face it, it isn’t really supposed to be doing. A tape will be running, so the commercials won’t be seen – at least not for a moment until the horrible truth sinks in for our hypothetical board op.

(Let me just take a moment to point out that, really, this Rube Goldberg setup where the entire edit bay had to idle to run commercials was one of the lousiest jobs of wiring I’ve ever seen. My room at home is set up better than that. This was just a bit…well…lazy.)

Here’s how the train wreck all comes home. The show in prime time is Fox’s own Old Faithful of reality shows, Cops. The show segment is coming to an end with the gruff announcer talking about what’ll be happening in the next segment. Then the automation, which has been correctly programmed, triggers its break at precisely the right time, right after the announcer says “When COPS returns!”…

…and then the automated switcher jumps to the edit bay, and instead of commercials, gets the following Delenn quote from In The Shadow Of Z’ha’dum: “BILLIONS WILL DIE!”

Whoever this hypothetical board op was, I don’t think he ever managed to hit a stop button so fast in his life. Still, the local sponsors had to be impressed – that was quite a tease for a lousy episode of Cops!

At some point, I think it was decided that the hypothetical board op was safer working at an edit bay in the back of the building, putting together promos and stuff. Quite right, too. Probably never worked in TV again after that. 😉… Read more

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Television & Movies

Lost Tales and found appreciation

Babylon 5For some reason – maybe a bit of boredom, admittedly – I watched Babylon 5: The Lost Tales for what has to be…well…frankly…the second time. For some reason I’ve just had B5 on the brain lately, and for some reason it’s been bugging me that I’ve seen, to pull an example out of nowhere, The Fall Of Night probably 20-30 times. I watched The Lost Tales once, on the day I bought it, and I was so put off by what I saw that I never went back for seconds until now. … Read more

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Television & Movies

Torchwood: Children Of Earth trailer

Interesting – not really what I was expecting at all. This is the five-episode season that’s supposed to play out one episode per night over a single week. Supposedly it’ll air almost simultaneously (i.e. same day) on the BBC and BBC America in July.

As for what I wasn’t expecting…I guess I thought “Children Of Earth” was going to be more metaphorical than literal somehow. Kinda like the Children of Time. I’m also still a little bit bummed that, in a year that’s going to be light on Doctor Who, we’re only getting five episodes of Torchwood and they’re blowing the whole wad in one week (again, metaphorically speaking).… Read more

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Television & Movies

Battlestar fatigue

Holy Frakking CrapI’m not sure what it is, but my reaction to the final 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica getting started is falling into the category of “Good, let’s get this over with.” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed the series overall (otherwise I wouldn’t do goofy stuff like this little animation you see running here), and I think it’s a show with great value now and in the future; I forget which magazine it was that nominated Galactica over 24 as the show with the most insightful artistic peek into the national mindset of the Bush (Jr.) years, but I believe that’s a really fair assessment.

Could it be that, as ready as I am to kiss off the Bush years, I’m also ready to see the back of a show that’s epitomized them pretty well?

The funny thing is, my feelings about Lost starting up again are a bit more upbeat, and yet at the same time, there’s still a little bit of “let’s get this over with” there too. Despite its utter lack of spacecraft and robot assassins, Lost strikes me as the more fantastical show; it’s just more “out there,” and – perhaps more importantly – it’s fairly apolitical. The same goes for Doctor Who and its spinoffs; compared to Galactica or even Lost, keeping track of the continuity and backstory of Who is a nearly epic task, but even the newer, more emotionally-involved Doctor Who isn’t quite as taxing as Galactica. I’d cite Babylon 5 as the most direct antecedent of Galactica, and as dark as it went, it still had more of a sense of fun. Galactica has done an outstanding job of laying out its sociopolitical background and developing its cast of characters, leaving us thinking about the disturbing lack of easy answers, and keeping our eyes busy with its visual effects (and Tricia Helfer, who’s kind of a visual effect herself). But for the past couple of seasons, I guess it’s been nagging at me – the question of how entertaining the new Galactica has been. Last night’s beginning of the sprint down the home stretch, which included most of our heroes coming off the rails and descending into an alcoholic stupor or just plain suicide, hammered that question home. Throught-provoking? No question of it. But has it wound up too dark for its own good?

Maybe right now, we need a little bit of escapism. Or maybe I do. Given how I’ve grown to feel about Galactica, the further thought has occurred that I may not be up for Caprica. Let’s see how the new season of Lost – and the gaping lack of Doctor Who and related shows – hit me this year.… Read more

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Television & Movies

Number Six and Khan have checked out

Patrick McGoohan IS The PrisonerPatrick McGoohan, the creator, writer, frequent director and, oh yeah, star of The Prisoner, died earlier this week at the age of 80. Sadly, McGoohan’s only Emmy wins came from guest shots on – of all things – Columbo, but one has to imagine that he had to be aware that there was massive, if belated, critical acclaim for The Prisoner as well. I was hoping that maybe he could be persuaded to put in a cameo appearance on the new version AMC and Sky One are shooting to air this fall.

I hope that, in all the eulogizing, the man gets his due as not just the actor, but the creator behind the Prisoner as well. It’s fairly well known now that McGoohan devised The Prisoner as a response to the kind of get-off-scot-free, consequence-less adventure of the spy series he was starring in (Danger Man, a.k.a. Secret Agent Man), and in going for the gusto and creating a show that was designed to be a massive mindf#$%, he really secured his spot in the TV history books – in a way, The Prisoner was kind of like the precursor to Burn Notice…after dropping a healthy dose of acid. Shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica (at least the new one) borrow liberally from The Prisoner’s playbook (J.J. Abrams has, in fact, copped to Lost being an overt valentine to The Prisoner), and respect is due.

There’s something trippy and solidly 1960s about The Prisoner, and yet something timeless as well – any serious student of television as a medium for quality storytelling and social commentary should watch through the entire series at least once.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!And it’s also time to bid Ricardo Montalban farewell – Fantasy Island is closed for business. Say what you like about Mr. Montalban or the sort of shows and movies he appeared in, but regardless of what role he was playing, the man just oozed dignity. I don’t ever recall seeing him just phone it in – even if he was appearing in something that seemd a bit lowbrow (the first Naked Gun movie, for example), he found the absolute conviction of the character he played and did not let it go. If he was playing an over-the-top villain, he did not allow that character to be anything less than a force to be reckoned with. You didn’t smirk at the very sight of the man. And sure, while there are a whole raft of cliches that emerge over time with repeat viewing (something that can happen with anyone), or through his abundant commercial spokesperson/voice-over work, there’s never a sense that he was just going through the motions. And you better believe that it’s that absolute conviction in whatever he was doing that kept the man employed in such a variety of roles throughout his life.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Television & Movies

Meet Matt, the new meat…erm…new Doctor Who.

Matt Smith IS the Doctor...whether you like it...or not!A few folks seem to be waiting for me to weigh in on the choice of relatively unknwon 26-year-old actor Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, and I kinda wanted to wait until I’d seen the Doctor Who Confidential episode that introduced him. (By the way, if this episode of DWC doesn’t pull that particular show’s highest rating ever, I’m going to eat the nearest hat.) The interview with him on DWC doesn’t seem to have inspired much confidence in some quarters, but I really don’t think that interview is going to be the best display of what this guy’s bringing to the part. Look at it this way: after going for a dark-horse, one-in-a-zillion audition for one of the most prominent character roles in television, anywhere, you suddenly get the call that you’ve got the part, you get to sign a boatload of contracts (probably including more NDAs than anyone this side of a military covert op), and then you get rushed into a deer-in-the-headlights interview for inclusion in a mini-documentary that’s being slammed together at high speed so the BBC can beat the tabloids at their own game.

I wouldn’t expect to see Matt Smith – or anyone else for that matter – at his best in such a scenario. I do, however, remember seeing him in The Ruby In The Smoke with Billie Piper, and looking back, it may or may not comfort anyone reading this to know that I felt like he “read” older on the screen than he actually was when that was made. The same may also be true with Doctor Who. We just don’t know.

One very significant thing that I took away from the DWC episode is that Steven Moffat (the new showrunner, for whom this is a dream job that I don’t think he’s likely to rush into and screw up) talked at great length about wanting to hire a 40-something actor, and yet he and the other new producer were knocked out by this guy’s audition. If Smith’s audition performance was impressive enough to make an avowed Doctor Who traditionalist like Moffat do an about-face on his casting plans, then isn’t anyone the least bit curious as to what Smith might be bringing to the table? I’m curious to say the least.

It’s a really bold move for the BBC to reveal Smith over a year before we’re going to actually see him in the role; of course, Doctor Who fandom being Doctor Who fandom, this means there are more than 12 months worth of “emo Crispin Glover Doctor” gags to look forward to. Yay? If I had a dime for every time I was uncertain about a new incoming Doctor, or a Doctor I hadn’t seen before…I’d now officially have a dollar.

On a more humorous note, while I was bracing myself for the day when Doctor Who would be younger than me, I wasn’t quite ready for 10 years younger than me – when I was watching The Five Doctors, the eleventh Doctor was in diapers.

Speaking of guys in diapers, Evan spent so much time sleeping today that I was worried. I suppose he’s recovering from the fight his body had to put up against whatever stomach bug bit him on Thursday, but…yeah. I admit, I’d creep into his room and check to make sure he was still breathing. He was sleeping that much. Hopefully it’s all uphill from here; it’s not like him to be lethargic, and he was in a pissy mood all day – I could tell he was bothered by the absence of his own energy.… Read more