10.31.2010

ZOMBIE OVERLOAD

AMC's new series The Walking Dead is the umpteenth entry into the already overpopulated zombie pantheon. What is there now, like 100 zombie movies, shows, etc.? Only about 5 or 6 are truly good, with the best being George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Walking Dead tries to have it all ways. It's a little bit 28 Days Later, a little bit touchy-feely, a little bit cop show, a little bit NotLD, and a little bit Shane. Overall, pretty lame. This is one graphic novel comic series that doesn't translate. The acting is sub-par, especially from the Starsky and Hutch leads. The only cool thing in the whole premiere episode was the Upper Torso Lady, crawling around in hunger. The zombies seem to be the mostly slow-moving, mindless Romero type, but the zombi-fied wife of the helpful black guy was able to remember the house she had formerly squatted in and focus her eyes into a security peephole - uh, right. The zombies are rendered so trite and not scary that you'll find yourself more scared by the douchebags and social misfits that populate those online dating ads during every commercial break.

10.29.2010

GALACTICA 4.0


Caprica is mercifully cancelled by the Sharktopus Network (nee SyFy), and instead they'll try to squeeze some more Cylon juice out of yet another incarnation of BSG - this time called Blood & Chrome, which will be about the young William Adama and his part in the first Cylon war. We'll know immediately if SyFy and David Eick (producer on BSG 2.0 in 2003 and showrunner for B&C) intend to screw up the new version if they fail to cast the same actor as Husker Adama. Here is Eick in his own words ... Ah, if only they'd skipped Bionic Woman reboot, Caprica, and instead focused on a 5-year story arc for BSG 2.0, we could have had a satisfying ending with no Ellen as the 5th, no "Daniel," no angels, and no "250 thousand years ago."

10.28.2010

BOBBY: "YOU HAVE THAT LOOK"

Bobby (to Dean): "You have that look."

Dean:
"What look?"

Bobby:
"Like you're going to do something stupid."

Became a Supernatural fan. Another show I never watched until years after it began. Just finished the 5th season and it had a terrific story arc and good ending (for once). It is possible to create a satisfying ending for a television show - maybe someone should tell Ron Moore and Damon Lindelof. It was a bit self-serving with the prophet-as-writer device, but it was done with humor and fit with the tone of the show. A very entertaining series and tons of good character actors. The actors who play the angels seem to be having the most fun.

Here's a link to the Hulu eps (with a link there to the CW site for the show)

10.09.2010

CRAPRICA RETURNS

Up late and accidentally hit upon the return of Caprica around 3:00am on the Mansquito Network (SyFy they call it) ... even worse than before, if that's possible.

Every single thing I liked about the 2003-2006 Battlestar Galactica reboot is slowly being sucked out of this show, as if they let some of those teen-angst vampires that stalk every media nook-and-cranny nowadays loose upon the show to suck what little life it had right out of it.

Terrible ideas drive this show, which should be no surprise because lunch-lister Jane Espensen has been put in charge - and she was always the weakest writer on BSG. Way too many story threads overlap and bump into each other - like a schizophrenic was put in charge of making the area rug for the foyer. Every evocative mention and image of the 12 colonies in BSG is made cheap, and dumbed-down for Caprica. There is no magic, just the mundane.

What ever happened to the gold sky of Caprica? Key timeline error: if Daniel Graystone invents the robots and one generation later William Adama is the key military leader fighting the Cylons, when was the golden age when robots and man and the gods all lived together from the mythos of the earlier show? Bah.

The look of the show grows more like Stargate meets Sin City, the high-style slickness to the look of the Graystone parts of the story are completely undermined by this whole mafia subplot. Really, what a joke. My cat can cough up a furball with more interesting elements that these Caprica episodes. We've seen it all before, and done better.

Have mercy, kill this show soon.