GALACTICA: VARIANTS

DR. WHO TRIBUTE VID

2012-01-25T11:43:00.001-08:00

THE CROWDSOURCED STAR WARS FILM

2012-01-22T02:59:00.000-08:00

It is complete, and entertaining. I've never understood the religion that has sprung up around Star Wars. Great first film, a classic. Empire Strikes Back was more adult and sophisticated and just as good in its own way. The third film - with the cutesy carpet dwarfs - was pretty terrible and the prequel trilogy was simply awful - all very pretty to look at, but rather badly written. Animated Clone Wars has the nuance and edge lacking in the films. South Park's complaint about the "fixes" are valid, and Robot Chicken's spoofs are genius.

GENIUS VIDEOGAME SPOOF OF BSG

2012-01-09T16:33:00.000-08:00

[thank you Anonymous poster for the tip]

LINK: http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6683770/battlestar-galactica-rpg

DICAPRIO CASTING A MISFIRE FOR CLINT

2011-11-07T16:22:00.000-08:00

Leonardo DiCaprio is a character actor. Great as a youth in This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, he was almost a parody of a leading man in Titanic with his fey, boyish look and manner (which didn't stop an uncritical public from making the film a huge success). He's had a few good parts since, such as Catch Me If You Can and The Departed, but much of his work has seen his people and him making some weird or not-quite-right choices: The Quick and the Dead, Gangs of New York, Blood Diamond (with that awful fake accent), and Aviator (a very uneven performance that veered from very good to outright caricature). Now it's clear that he was terribly miscast in Clint Eastwood's new biopic J Edgar. I'm glad to see DiCaprio drifting back to character parts, but this big, showy type of character is not the way to transition into quality character roles. Character actors have the longest careers and often the most interesting titles in their resumes, and DiCaprio has had his fill of fame and has plenty of money and women, so if he's smart, he'll do the occasional leading role and stick with well-written and appropriate character parts. What is so crystal clear from just the stills and film-clips making the rounds for the pending release of J Edgar is that DiCaprio failed to capture the inner being that was J Edgar Hoover. It's all in the eyes. There is an evil queen lurking inside that head of J Edgar and DiCaprio didn't come near it. The image composite I've included shows you (and these are the best examples of DiCaprio getting sorta close I could find). Brilliant New York actor Kenneth McMillan captures the essence of J Edgar without even trying in his performance of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in David Lynch's Dune (1984). The real J Edgar Hoover was a power-mad aggressive homosexual predator who would look you over like a piece of meat. Those who encountered him in an official setting would often perceive this as a powerful person taking stock, but anyone with any gaydar knew when he was sizing up a piece of man-meat with those eyes. There are all kinds of gay men, but one particular type take on a portion of their mother's persona - often with mincing little facial gestures or physical flourishes, and Hoover was this type. Even from the still and clips it is clear DiCaprio missed it entirely.

TIME FOR THE INHUMANS?

2011-11-03T00:38:00.000-07:00

The X-Men franchise has proven that Hollywood can actually respect the source material when it comes to some much-beloved Marvel comics, and I have long hoped they would never touch my favorites besides the X-Men, The Inhumans. But I've had a change of heart and think maybe it's time. They are really better as ancillary characters - they seem more mysterious. Most important is that a director who specializes in moody atmospherics be chosen to realize them onscreen - their representation on film should be surreal.

I'm not so excited about the upcoming Avengers movie, since it has none of the characters I would put in the lineup: Vision, Quicksilver, Wanda the Scarlet Witch, Dr. Strange, Nova and Black Panther.

THE SHUFFLING DEAD

2011-10-16T21:39:00.000-07:00

Tonight's return of AMC's Walking Dead had a scene near the beginning where our intrepid band of survivors decide to leave Atlanta for the highway and a military base. Of course a radiator blows on one of the vehicles and they become trapped by a hoard of zombies walking past - that don't seem to smell them or sense their heat. Move along, nothing to eat here. Then, in an even stupider turn of events our cop hero chases after the two zombies who've flushed the innocent little girl out from under a car and the run and run through the woods and rather than just pop off two heads shots with his gun and be done with it, he hides the little girl in a hole by the creek ... an alligator den? ... a zombie corpse hole? No such luck in this series without irony or humor, the little girl escapes unharmed when it would have been so much more satisfying for smarty-pants cop to stuff her in a zombie feast-cave or have some raccoons eat her, or for the zombies to catch her and tear her apart for snacks. Aw, now it's Little Girl Lost. And why didn't he use his gun? (and he lost his rifle chasing after her) ... so a fake speaker-stone was used to smash in the zombie extras' heads. After the commercial break we'll see if they are now lost on their own - a little side-plot, or if they merrily skip through the forest back to the road and their companions - oh, a worse plot gimmick - she's wandered off on her own and now they must search for her while avoiding zombies. Meanwhile, a screwdriver to the eye of one zombie and some other close zombie kills don't seem to get dangerous zombie splatter on anyone - or it is harmless because our characters aren't afraid of it. This is one dumb show.

THE THING REMAKE - WORSE THAN YOU COULD IMAGINE

2011-10-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

Why did I think for a second that this film might be good? It is terrible in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin, other than to say that Hollywood studio system cookie-cutter movie-by-committee produces crap like this. The advance press on the film kept saying how much the filmmakers respected the original 1982 John Carpenter version ... well, if true, they never understood what made the first film so good.

This version is entirely without suspense, features full-frontal CGI creature effects, terrible casting, a worse script, and feels like a child't connect-the-dots exercise more than a movie experience. Rather than tie this film to Carpenter's 1982 version it feels more like a companion piece to the first awful X-Files movie. In instance after instance the film tries to reference the Carpenter version and lifts bits completely but comes off entirely stale with zero feeling of continuity. They really should make a drinking game as a companion to this version, so you can pound a shot of booze every time you recognize that's from the other film [alcohol poisoning for everyone!]

In horror, what lurks in the shadows and our imaginations is much more frightening than what is seen clearly in the open. Monsters that hint at their presence (or scuttle by quickly) send your mind reeling whereas CGI creatures with insect appendages and toothy maws center-screen and well-lit, just make you want to laugh after the fifth time. Modern horror films speed the action up, now we have fast zombies and a Thing that whips around it's flower-arm and rips organs right out of victims one after another ... your liver ... and your pancreas! Just as with the slow dumb Zombies in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, it is the relentless, unstoppable creep of evil which is frightening - not the whip-snap of a monster's fleshy tentacle. Duh.

The Gen-X / Gen-Y idiots responsible for greenlighting and ordering certain things be in this movie should be tried and convicted for bad filmmaking. Obviously some studio suits came in with their marketing charts and said the movie needed Americans, blacks and women in order to sell tickets to those moviegoers. It is my recollection of the Norwegian station from the Carpenter version it was all white, male Norwegians. A good story and a good script and the black and female audiences would still have come to see the new version without their surrogates in the film as characters. A good, scary film will draw an audience, every time. This exercise in movie-by-marketing-committee deserves to see a huge loss on this piece of crap.

The lead actress is a blank and a bore and her character - if you can call it that - is just an archetype of the brainy, no-nonsense science nerd with some looks, and is so badly written maybe it isn't the actress's fault. There is no internal logic as to why the senior and veteran members of the Norwegian team would start to follow her or listen to her, or why she suddenly is Sigourney Weaver in Aliens by the end of the film - toting a flame-thrower and treading bravely into the alien's lair. The time period is referenced once at the beginning "Winter 1982" but the hair, clothes and cultural idioms are wrong and nothing else suggests the era - nor does anything suggest the absolute remoteness, harshness and isolation of the place. There are way too many people at the base, way too much equipment, the place internally is way too spacious and the suggestion of the cold and the harsh elements is almost dispensed with it is done so poorly (especially the plastic snow on windshields).

This is the kind of bad movie you leave the theater feeling like you got mugged.

LISTEN TO THE MAGIC

2011-09-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

Best portions of the soundtrack from Vangelis's Bladerunner music

NEW THING MOVIE - DUMBING IT DOWN FOR GEN-X / GEN-Y

2011-09-29T23:23:00.000-07:00

I was originally excited to see the new version of The Thing, but after seeing the trailer not so much. Once again the Gen-X/Gen-Y suits that now run studios and make the films have less sophisticated tastes and talent and are dumbing-it down.
What made John Carpenter's The Thing a masterpiece of horror was it's slow pace and sense of remove. You felt the isolation of the people, you felt doom closing in and the unrelenting attack of the alien even if you didn't see it.
It is the same complaint I have with modern zombie pics - they are smart, fast zombies now whereas the original zombies in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead were slow, dumb zombies and ultimately scarier ... an unrelenting force coming after you that you can outrun in the short-term but which will never stop for any reason is far more frightening ... the scariest thing in the new zombie series on AMC is that half-lady hungrily crawling around. The trailer for the new Thing shows lots of quick-cutting, fast-change special creature CGI effects, a girl (shamelessly going after the female demographic when they don't need to given the classic status of the Carpenter version), yet it supposed to take place in the Norwegian camp earlier in the story referenced at the beginning of Carpenter's film. I hope I'm wrong - the casting and production design of the film look good.

PETER DINKLAGE GETS AN EMMY

2011-09-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

I'm shocked - shocked - that he won this year for Game of Thrones. He deserved it, sure. But these awards shows never seem to give it to the right person, rather they give an award later on for some sucky part after you've already turned in outstanding performances. I predicted he'd win next year for GoT, since his character will have a much bigger, juicier part. An award well-deserved, Peter, and for a body of consistently good work. He may be the first actor who is physically a dwarf to transcend the stature issue through his talent. People think of him, and what he can bring to a part, and then consider that he's shorter than average.

SAM ROCKWELL'S MOON

2011-09-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

Director Duncan Jones' Moon (he's David Bowie's son) is pretty good - not great. Aesthetically it borrows from 2001, Alien and some other good sci-fi films for its story of a clone learning he's a clone from his clone. Rockwell has been one of my favorite actors since I first saw him in the terrific Lawn Dogs back in '97. It's a tour-de-force performance opportunity for Rockwell, but he underplays it a bit which makes the film all the better. There is a bit of an inside joke to the film because there are lots of shots of Rockwell's butt.

AN ALMOST PAYDAY FOR COLIN FARRELL

2011-08-16T13:28:00.000-07:00

Update: Review below
The unneeded remake of Fright Night with star Colin Farrell looks to take the box office crown this weekend, and I'm thrilled because one the best actors working will finally get a great payday worthy of his talents. [update: the movie tanked at the box office due to bad marketing] He's the big name attached to the picture and will get the big chunk of coin. Colin Farrell has done superb work in every part he's ever touched and I hope he works in film for many more years to come because he elevates the material he's in. Fright Night is his first big commercial movie in a while. He's mostly chosen more interesting character parts (The Recruit, Ask the Dust, The New World) and worked with interesting directors (Terrence Malick, Oliver Stone), although he did do S.W.A.T., Minority Report, and the recent Horrible Bosses (in a goofy character turn). Farrell is a true talent. Do one of these commercial films every fourth film, buddy, and you can have plenty of money and do the type of parts you find more challenging the rest of the time. Colin Farrell box office

REVIEW: Terrific. A perfect remake that for once stays true to the source material in content and tone. It was light and fluffy fun then and it is that now, but updated for the times. And the always entertaining Christopher-Mintz Plasse will one day get a very meaty dramatic role and get nominated for awards.

io9 STICKS THEIR FINGER IN J.J. ABRAMS EYE

2011-08-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

But they didn't seem to get many takers. Not too many comments and not much buzz around their gesture.

A recent article by io9 invites readers to come up with a better ending to LOST, noting that J.J. Abrams (the show's creator) is well aware of the mostly negative response to the show's ending. Now that my brain surgery is done and I have some time, I'll finish the better version in the next few weeks. Some of the story already exists here ... we deserved answers to the numbers, time-travel, and so many other questions.

HARRY POTTER AND WEAK ENDINGS

2011-07-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

I never read the books - wizards and potions and all that is not really my thing, but I did enjoy the H.P. movies as they came out - especially the 3rd one by director Alfonso Cuarón (which was more adult and sophisticated in tone and imagery).

Warner Bros. absolutely got greedy by dividing The Deathly Hallows into 2 films: the first half felt draggy and heaped with exposition, whereas the grand finale Part II felt rushed and anticlimactic. It's great when filmmakers want to be true to the source material of much-beloved written works ... but so often they forget the adage that A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words. You can never convey the depth and nuance the written word allows, unless it is a line of dialog, all you can do is represent it visually. Sometimes you get lucky and a terrific actor conveys with one facial expression a whole chapter's worth of story. It is my sincere hope that Warner Bros. will release a combined and truncated version of Deathly Hallows as one 3 1/2 hour film ... it would work so much better.

My beef with author J.K. Rowling is the meek ending she gave the story. I guess she didn't want a bunch of crying children coming up to her asking, "Why did you kill Harry?" so she opted for a tacked-on happy future for the main characters that sets them nearly 20 years into the future. What was most perplexing is why the villain, Voldemort (played with his usual excellence by actor Ralph Fiennes), waited until his power was weakening to launch his final assault on the good magic of Hogworts and to have his final battle with Harry Potter.

As each Horcrux holding part of Voldemort's soul and power is destroyed by Harry and the gang, Voldemort grows weaker, so by the time Voldemort faces off with Harry in the forest he's down a few, and by the final battle at the school, his horcrux tank is empty. Lastly, whether written that way, a decision by the director (David Yates), or the actor's portrayal, when Voldemort faces off with his Goth army of evil wizards against the now seemingly-vanquished good guys amid the rubble of Hogworts, it is positively a ho-hum moment, when the full evil of the once human Tom Riddle (now Lord Voldemort) should have exploded into a gloriously vulgar display of mayhem. Someone this evil and now devoid of humanity should be cruel and vicious and a bad winner - wantonly murdering before settling down.

Instead we get a who's who of bit players having heroic moments (including everyone's favorite character actor Alan Rickman) and über nerdboy Longbottom (or whatever his name was) gets the big dragon-slaying (er, snake) moment with the magic sword. This Warner Bros. flick was really feeling like Disney toward the end there. And Harry and Voldemort's face-off? Voldemort goes limp in the middle of his money-shot and Harry's wand-bolt vaporizes the big bad man.

Oh yes, the best example of how books don't often translate to film is the whole bit with Who Controls the Elder Wand? I saw who used it and got a lot of exposition through the characters about who had possessed it, lost it in battle, won it in battle, and enjoyed its allegiance ... didn't care - what I saw mattered and I saw Voldemort use it and have it run out of juice at the end.

Too bad Rowling didn't have the courage of her initial convictions and had Harry Potter die - sacrificing himself to vanquish that evil, twisted Tom Riddle/Voldemort.

ICE AND FIRE - WELL DONE GAME OF THRONES

2011-07-06T16:47:00.000-07:00

Loving Game of Thrones on HBO - casting is near-perfect, and if you're going to steal dialog, steal it from I, Claudius by all means. Very entertaining. I'm usually a spaceships, aliens, lasers kind of guy, and don't go much for the trolls, elves and fairies, but this is much more fun than Lord of the Rings. Longer post and review to come.

FALLING SKIES - TERRIBLE

2011-07-03T22:29:00.001-07:00

Think you've seen and heard it all before? You have, and done much better. This show is a colossal bore - the worst mixture of Jericho, Red Dawn, the original V, and countless other post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It tries to lift from Independence Day, the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, a few Stephen King stories, but fails. The show looks cheap, for starters, and the Library Guy (Noah Wyle) is much better in those mystical Library movies because he isn't hampered as he is here with mountains of cliches and story and scenes that go nowhere that no actor could overcome.

Plot-wise, you see a bunch of dirty people spewing hackneyed dialog as they wander about and do stupid things and you can almost name the show or movie or story they stole this scene from, or that line of dialog - and everything just seems so obvious. TNT should dump this show and just rerun The Lost Room - that was a good show.

CASTING NEWS - UPCOMING REMAKES

2011-06-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

Christina Hendricks of Mad Men would be a perfect choice for Wonder Woman, as aintitcoolnews is reporting that the Danish director who's probably going to get the WW gig (Nicolas Winding Refn) wants her - article here ... she may be 36 but it is Wonder Woman, not Wonder Tween ... we'll see how he does with the Logan's Run remake - he's already cast the perfect actor in the role of Logan - Ryan Gossling.

GOOD SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS

2011-06-20T13:55:00.000-07:00

X-Men First Class is terrific - more sophisticated and nuanced than I had ever hoped to expect. Wonderful script by a whole slew of people, and tight, focused direction by Brit Matthew Vaughn. Casting was superb and Kevin Bacon does his best work. January Jones steals most scenes she's in and the ever reliable James McAvoy is perfectly cast as young Xavier. The swinging 60s element Vaughn and writers brought to the proceedings was a much-needed humorous and textural layer - evoking The Avengers television series with a wink to modern reinterpretation of the 60s a la Austin Powers. Characters I had always loathed or which bored me in the comics way back when were given new meaning and life. Bacon's Sebastian Shaw and Jones' Emma Frost to name but two. The whole Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy subplot remained, thankfully, well in the background and did not impinge upon the story of our characters. Fun to see Michael Ironside in a bit part - he and Kevin Bacon must have the most credits among living actors in Hollywood. Hated what they did with Havoc. What idiot Gen-X suit on the 20th Century lot decided they had to mess with his history and power? Havoc is the younger brother of Cyclops, so the films will have to reconcile that somehow if they put Havoc in the current timeline X-Men series which is poised for more films according to producer Lauren Shuler Donner. They turned Havoc's way cool all-white plasma spheres into some dumb set of red-colored slicing energy discs. Havoc was always my favorite X-Man and you got none of the troubled kid energy from him in the film and the white plasma balls could have been so effectively portrayed the use of SOUND. Are there no Ben Burtt's anymore?

Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides was also terrific, my favorite of the film series. This one was a stand-alone story and more adult than the others. Johnny Depp held the camp perhaps too much in check this time around. Wonderful casting - Penelope Cruz is such a thankful respite from the over-earnest Keira Knightly, she nearly steals the film. Then the ingenue playing the mermaid gets her scenes and she steals the movie, then Ian McShane as Blackbeard steals the movie, and Jeffrey Rush steals just about every scene he's in (all that stealing, they are pirates after all). Fun, what a summer blockbuster should be. The music, unfortunately, was a bore in both films. I'm noticing more and more that scores for these big films are becoming so much the same and without distinction. What happened to using culturally-identifiable instruments to evoke far off lands or surreal music to evoke surreal locales?

EAR IT IS

2011-06-08T18:31:00.000-07:00

Haven't been posting much ... had a little trip for a surgery (which went well). Now that my health issues are taken care of, I will finally get the LOST and BSG stories done by the end of this year. BBC America is gonna start showing BSG mini and later seasons soon.

QUESTOR

2011-05-16T20:43:00.000-07:00

Wonderful pilot never picked up. Terrific performance by Robert Foxworthy. Pre-dates the depth and nuance of the Cylons in BSG reboot. Possible greenlight for new series based upon Gene Roddenberry's original.

KANDYSE MCLURE

2011-04-22T01:10:00.000-07:00

Sweet gal. Stopped by my work the other day. We didn't realize it was her until she was gone. Pretty as ever.

A GREAT DIRECTOR GONE

2011-04-09T13:04:00.001-07:00

Sad. Sidney Lumet was one of my favorite directors - a true master filmmaker. I especially loved the atmospherics he brought to his films. For me Network was a cultural touchstone. Even at 12 years old I recognized its power and how when popular tastes trumped this film and the Oscar went to Rocky (blecchh!) instead of Network, the dumbed-down masses had won (and Reagan was elected not long after). The Offense, Network and Q & A were my favorites.

THE STATE OF AMERICAN FILMMAKING

2011-03-28T02:03:00.000-07:00

It's pretty terrible. Sucker Punch looks like just the worst piece of overwrought trash to come down the pike since Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were producing films together. Kevin Smith's films signaled the contribution Gen-X/Gen-Y have to make to modern film, and I predicted many moons ago on my now defunct I Hate Gen-X satire website that it would only get worse as the Gen-Xers and Gen-Ys took the executive positions (through nepotism mostly, of course) at film studios. X/Y have not read much, nor understand storytelling, and thus they remake and remake classic old films and campy television shows from the 50s - 80s because they don't have any original ideas and wouldn't know how to communicate them anyway, since texting is their major method of speech and they think technological devices make them cool ... OMFGROTFL. I do look forward to seeing Hanna, but I have a feeling it will feel more like Bourne Redundancy than anything approaching an actual story with fully fleshed-out characters. The trailer already has the always good Cate Blanchett shown in a bad red wig and seeming rather campy. The poster shows there truly never is anything original in Hollywood - not even poster images. The winter scenery makes me think of terrific movies that had snow, especially Black Robe.

BATTLE LOS ANGELES - CUT-AND-PASTE-FILMMAKING

2011-03-14T21:51:00.000-07:00

Blackhawk Down + District 9 + Cloverfield + War of the Worlds + US Military recruiting films + faint character sketches does not a good movie make. All in all Battle Los Angeles is entertaining but if you get that feeling you've seen it all before - you have. I was never much of an Aaron Eckhart fan, but he won me over in this film, since he carries nearly the whole thing on his shoulders and does a fine acting job. Think Kurt Russell in Soldier and you get how he played the part of Staff Sgt. Nance - all clench-jawed internal suffering and heart. Handheld cameras shake us through the story of a rag-tag bunch of Marines plus others picked up along the way as they battle an alien invasion from the moment the film starts. A brief flashback lightly sketches out our caricatures, er, characters, and then we're caught up to realtime and in the fight. Mix a healthy dose of cliches with a heaping helping of implausibility and you have the plot which culminates with our hero, Staff Sgt. Nanace, doin' some real "John Wayne shit" and the tide against the alien invasion is turned and the Brain Bug, er, Command center is taken out. As far as aesthetics go, pretty lame aliens, spaceships and weapons. The CGI was fine, but nothing interesting, and ships looked way too much like District 9 junkers, and the weapons were just screwy tracer-type ballistics. The aliens looked a lot like paler versions of those from Independence Day fused with flattened Robocop uniforms. This is the sort of film SyFy Channel makes three times a year.

YAPHET KOTTO IN STAR TREK?

2011-02-28T23:13:00.000-08:00

If only. One of my favorite actors ... my how it would have changed the franchise and given it more balls. Next Generation was always my least favorite of the various Star Trek series (original is hands-down the best, of course). Article: Other Actors Almost Cast in Star Trek

DR. WHO + MUPPETS

2011-02-16T01:48:00.000-08:00

FILE UNDER: WHY?

2011-01-24T21:05:00.000-08:00

I guess ever since the Star Trek creators released the first blueprints of the Enterprise way back in the 1970s it has become de rigueur to create such supplements for popular science fiction television and films. So now the BSG team has released their big map of the 12 Colonies. They 'solved' the elephant in the living room of how you have 12 inhabitable worlds in one star system by making it a quad-star system. Ho-hum. If they had wanted to do this right, they would have hired Michael Hall of the much-too-smart-compared-to-the-show Galactica Science website - he would have come up with something truly ingenious. The whole 12 different planets thing always makes me think of this:

Unrelated: I got to meet LOST's Michael Emerson (Ben) the other night (cool guy, of course) and told him about my LOST blog (link is upper right)

ANOTHER FINAL FIVE

2011-01-06T23:36:00.000-08:00

This time it was the SyFy Channel's unceremonious dump of the final five episodes of Caprica. I haven't made it through all of it yet, and wound up watching eps partly out-of-order while selecting during playback (which, strangely, didn't seem to matter), but I was actually far more entertained with these eps than with the earlier shows that came down the pike (or is it Picon?).

Love the dykey chubster schoolmarm monotheism leader-lady - she would be great in an over-the-top comedy (maybe new episodes of Absolutely Fabulous if they make 'em? - she could square off against Mo Gaffney), and the Tauron tattoo-mobster subculture was fleshed out and made more tangible but it was still a terrible direction to waste the audience's time in the first place. The whole cop-show subplot was just a needless waste of screen time too (someone on staff is a fan of The Shield?), and the roughneck terrorist trainers were a bore.

They still hadn't brought together the Robot/Real Zoe/monotheism/Cylon culture strands into anything approaching a satisfactory weave ... and Zoe's Rivendell manifestation was just dumb and then minutes later was penetrated anyway. And who is that other girl? Oh yeah, Esai Morales's character's daughter. Why is she still around? - she is useless, and if it is to bond he and Daniel Graystone as fathers who lost daughters, wasn't that dealt with in the beginning? It's like Nina and Michael say on Project Runway edit edit edit! So much of that junk can be thrown out.

I don't have high hopes for the new BSG entry into the Let's See How Much We Can Fuck Up the Legacy of a Good Show Sweepstakes: the prequel series being developed. To say something positive about these last Capricas, I did think the production values looked quite expensive, and I like seeing Eric Stoltz get work (his best is Waterdance).

RE-EXPERIENCING THE GLORY

2011-01-01T17:13:00.000-08:00

It's been over a year or so since I last watched the BSG miniseries, so today I enjoy it again - such rare entertainment: smart, sophisticated, refined. It shone brightly for ever so brief a time.

IN PRAISE OF GUY

2010-12-01T13:50:00.000-08:00

First discovered the terrific Sam Rockwell in Lawn Dogs (an excellent and very underrated film, with a truly American story - rare) ... here is a link to the movie on Hulu

TIME TO FIX THE BSG ENDING, MR. MOORE

2010-11-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

Now that Caprica is no more and the prospects for Blood & Chrome are limited, it's time to return to the 2003 source material and do it right

MUSIC TO MAKE YOUR MIND WANDER

2010-11-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

One of the greatest tracks ever - good quality audio for this clip

ZOMBIE OVERLOAD

2010-10-31T23:00:00.000-07:00

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.

GALACTICA 4.0

2010-10-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

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."

BOBBY: "YOU HAVE THAT LOOK"

2010-10-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

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)

CRAPRICA RETURNS

2010-10-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

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.

PARALLEL LIVES

2010-09-04T18:39:00.001-07:00

"Your agonizer, please"

LOST - A BETTER ENDING

2010-08-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

Video enhancements now up ... to remind us ...

LOST - A Better Ending

LOST - BAD ENDING

2010-07-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

LOST ended terribly. Not quite as bad as the abomination that was the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but close. In an almost identical fashion, the writers of LOST carried on about how "it's about the characters" (the same way the BSG creators did) as their cop-out for failing to provide answers to the many mysteries they fashioned in their story and instead gave us a weepy chick-flick ending with a late-in-the-third-act-major-character-and-plot-development and a deus ex machina ending.

ALL GLORY ...

2010-05-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

I've switched the content of this post and the previous post so the comments here are actually in response to the previous post's former alternate story (now linked in above post)

LOST - THE END - STICK A CORK IN IT

2010-05-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

REVIEW
The sad news is that the ending to LOST was indeed Deus Ex Machina and was almost as bad as the Battlestar Galactica ending (but saved its crappiness for the final episode cluster rather than stretch it out for a whole season).

Note to LOST storytellers and Hollywood in general:
STOP BEING SUCH FUCKING LAZY WRITERS!

Every single fan idea about the mysteries of the island and the story and every bit of fan fiction about a proposed ending was better than what the high-powered, paid, professional writers of the show came up with. Egads.

The big island climax comes with Desmond descending into the Golden light cave since Jack had been badly stabbed by Smokey/Locke so couldn't be lowered by rope down into it. Desmond goes down but is not converted to smoke. And the golden light was less glowy - in fact, once Desmond got to the cave (which looked like leftovers from one of the Pirates' movies or a Laura Croft set) it looked more greenish-yellow and was much more muted. And then when Jack goes down into the cave - oh wait, our hero can descend by rope into a deep cave with a gaping stab wound! - and puts the drain-plug "cork" back into the hole the light is reddish. Weird how having the cork in let the water flow yet pulling it out dried up the flow (tampon companies are you watching?).

What was most distressing for me was how syrupy and sentimental it all was. I wanted answers and a final spectacular showdown between Smokey/MIB and Jack/whomever (not some cheesy Kirk on the sandstone rocks in Chatsworth and styrofoam boulders) and to find out what the island actually is. I got that queasy feeling I had when I watched the worst part of any Star Trek ever: the scene in Generations where Picard wakes up in the diffusion-filter pinky-out doily parlor with children and a Christmas tree.

First Ron Moore and David Eick give us a great show (2003's reboot of Battlestar Galactica) with so much promise only to basically abandon it to simplistic angels and god did it for their big deus ex machina ending, and now JJ Abrams, Cuse and Lindelof (and the rest of the writing team) decide they're too lazy to bother weaving together their vast and myraid collection of story elements they'd concocted and did their own version of god did it: it was all a dream - Jack's death fever-dream of his life as he ascends that tunnel of light to heaven.

On an entertainment scale I'd give the episode a 5 out 10 and I'd give a 3 out of 10 for living up to its potential.

This is what you gave us, LOST creatives: an unfinished masterpiece. Yes, the adage goes an artist never finishes his work, he merely abandons it, but at least with Michaelangelo we have a vast body of his works and thus the unfinished sculptures are understood on their own merits and technical brilliance. He said he didn't create the figure(s), he liberated them. You LOST guys were working on one series and just walked away from its complexities rather than face them. [Imagine Jersey accent]: Yo, it's lika a body - comin' outta da rocks deh - jus leave it, it's good enuf. You were never liberating a brilliant and complex story, you were just randomly chiseling and then quit.

The LOST-Untangled (with muppets) is now up and is much much better than the live-action slop we got.

ANALYSIS PRIOR TO AIRING OF THE END
[I gave the show's creator/writers way too much credit]
Ouroboros (the snake eating its tail - the endless cycle) ... time repeating. In Battlestar Galactica there was the constant refrain All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again and it looks like that's what we'll get with the finale of LOST. You can't fracture time, it will always re-set.

I see the main conflict as Eloise vs. Desmond. Eloise has carefully manipulated people and events to create a happy timeline - the Alt+B as I've been calling it, where her son Daniel is alive and pursuing music rather than science. Eloise killed her son by shooting him on the island when she was younger than he was and she was pregnant - possibly with Daniel - an ultimate time-paradox. Eloise was trapped after that with the knowledge of what would happen but she manipulated what events she could to destroy the island reality or at least the relevant peoples' knowledge of the place in Alt+B.

Her pendant at left is an open Ouroboros, telegraphing that she believes time is not a closed loop, so believes she can fracture it and proudly wears this sentiment as jewelry.She knows there are now two timelines and wears that knowledge as well.

Eloise can't control the discoveries nor the impact of her son's time experments in the timeline in which Desmond goes to see him at Oxford and I suspect that it is Faraday's time experiments which set this all in motion in the first place, he is the Ouroboros - time loops again and again because of him. Eloise helped explode the bomb to undo her murder of her son, which allowed her to see the alternate timelines.

Eloise's husband, Charles Widmore, in the island reality has blasted Desmond with electromagnetism but never really explained why. I suspect that Widmore had reason to believe that Desmond would be able to see both (or all) timelines through this exposure since the island had displayed unusual magnetic properties and other phenomena. So island Widmore activated Desmond's quest in the Alt+B timeline that is fracturing all of Eloise's hard work. There should be a showdown between Desmond and Eloise. If the show it true to form I expect some rich irony in the outcome. Desmond may think he's doing all of our characters a favor in Alt+B but he is probably provoking time (and the island) to re-set.

There seems to be a balanced scale effect happening - most evidenced through Ben: as he grows more sweet and principled in Alt+B he becomes more evil on the island. Desmond is active in Alt+B but passive on the island.

The concert in Alt+B seems to be where it is all set to manifest (kinda cheesy). Desmond is assembling the principals there while Smokey/Locke is still trying to assemble who he has left on the island. Smokey want them to die - but they must kill each other (even if by accident) and now he has his instrument - Ben will do it.

The ending could have gone many different ways but the show's creators and writers had to narrow it down somehow and I'm okay with a Desmond-Eloise face-off. She is the Controller, so carefully trying to shape one reality to give her and the others happiness (the price is their ignorance), and most importantly have her son's life back. Desmond is the destroyer - but perhaps unwittingly. It would be most helpful to find out Widmore's motivation for putting Desmond in the magnetic field and see a shot of Desmond's POV in that magentic field, and if we don't get that information the writer's have been lazy or sloppy.

I see the island as a living thing - although not sentient - that exists outside of space and time. It can't be found unless it or its agents find you. It is a time-space well, drawing to it those people also outside of spacetime. Again, a paradox: people the island seeks have to have been to the island to acquire such properties. I'm sure hoping Abrams, Lindelof, et al are not going the Battlestar Galactica route and we end up with another deus ex machina god explanation ... I'm worried because of Allison Janney/Earth Mother Hippy's comment about the golden light in the cave, "a little exist inside all men."

Now, Smokey/MIB/Locke has one motivation - to destroy the island - MIB shattering the wine bottle after Jacob gave it to him is his way of telegraphing that he will not even try to remove the cork to get free (remember, Jacob told Ricardo/Richard that the island is the cork holding the evil on the island?) ... no, MIB/Smokey will break the bottle - attempt to destroy the island itself ... the only way this seems possible is for him to let the light out of the cave

LOST - WHAT THEY DIED FOR - REVIEW

2010-05-18T23:15:00.000-07:00

[updated]
Much better episode than last week's Across the Sea, but again some puzzle pieces felt hammered into place and not carefully inserted where they would naturally fit (Widmore's sudden death, Anna-Lucia pops up, Ben's turn to evil)

Jacob Explains It All For You worked okay - yet his driving force was to atone for some guilt about throwing his brother ManInBlack into the Golden Cave - yet he seemed to have no problem with spending 30 years with some crazy Earth Mother Hippie who killed his real mom and forced him to take on the horrible responsibility of guarding the reverse Pandora's Cave: goodness, but also an evil wind (to contrast with Pandora's Box: all the world's ills, but also hope)

Yin and Yang, baby, that's where it's at with LOST ... black & white ... loose and tight ...

As Ben is humanized in the Alt+B parallel timeline (fighting on behalf of Locke, warm-hearted feelings for Delenn, oops, I mean Rousseau, and her daughter) he becomes more
d e l i c i o u s l y evil "I want to watch" in the island reality [clearly, what goes up in one reality must come down in the other] and even viciously shoots Widmore dead. Yea !, bad Ben is back! And Billie Jean King was Jason-ized, shut-the-hell-up with a teen-slasher-film slash [nod to Potiphar, you called it ... or you know things].

Sawyer shows a little puppy-dog I fucked up face to Jack since he got the sub blown up and people killed but Jack lets him off the hook - he [Locke] did it, Jack growls. So deathlist for this ep includes: Widmore, annoying glasses lady (BJK), and maybe Richard. I'll bet Claire and Miles (and Pivotal Penny) get to join the list in the finale, and SmokeMonster may thrash Kate, Sawyer and Hurley just for fun.

All those names written on Lighthouse light-base (I guess that's how Jacob found his lost souls to bring to the island) and on the cave ceiling, not so mysterious after all. Kate, you can be the one, if you want, but since you're an adoptive mommy now, I crossed you off.

And when the moment came for the Candidates they didn't even try a To Tell the Truth fake step-forward - no one besides Jack even expressed the slightest interest in the job. So, as completely expected, Jack took the job (and took the drink of the stank river water - or maybe it tastes of golden light?)

Was Richard killed? Just like that, an unceremonious quick Smoke-Monster-tendril thrash ... almost off-camera? Laaaaaaame ... if that's really the end for him. They give his character one of the best episodes of the whole series Ab Aeterno - almost cinematic in its beauty - and this is his end?

Desmond is a busy little bee over in Alt+B, lining up all the kiddies to fracture island reality (jail breakout - well transport van, actually) ... it seems Widmore's little magnet experiment let him see the view to the other side as I said a few eps ago [note: re; 'Beautiful View' image of window at left - I had it in my huge image folder and lost track that I had saved it from a wonderful Greek photographer's site called toomanytribbles - apologies for lack of credit and here is the photo link]

We finally catch up with Miles, Richard and Ben and we end up at the condos - Miles feels all twitchy because he's standing on the ground where Richard thoughtfully buried Ben's daughter (pound in another puzzle piece), then Miles decides he'll race around the jungle alone rather than hide from Smokey/Locke. Ben shows his special place in the closet and then says howdy to Smokey/Locke and leads him to where Widmore and BJK were hiding and gleefully watches/participates in their murders. He is desperate to know what was whispered about Desmond.

Back in Alt+B wheelchair Locke goes to see Dr. Jack and is ready to "let go" and be operated on to perhaps restore some leg function ... after good Ben tells him that Desmond didn't want to kill him really but for him to let go. In the Yin-Yang what-goes-up-must-come-down equation of the two time-streams if Locke does this in Alt+B, then Smokey/Locke will lose power on the island.

And at The End, when the show creators re-set the story, who else will join the intrepid cast on their journey on Oceanic 815 for the movie version?

Even if all was obliterated but the Alt+B timeline by the end of the tv show, the same scenario would manifest again albeit a bit differently for the film version because you can't really change things.

Epilogue: It seems there has been a long cycle of humans who were brought or somehow made it to the island and always one that figures out the golden light needs protecting and this mission overrides all sense of morality and other human and social imperatives in order to uphold the mission.

LOST - my alternate ending

2010-05-18T15:50:00.001-07:00

Here is most of my alternative to Across the Sea and here is my alternative (some of it) to tonight's What They Died For

LOST FINALE SNEAK

2010-05-17T23:50:00.000-07:00

Final promo trailer is pretty terrific and is promising a lot:

LOST, my ALT+B version

2010-05-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

I've added a Hurley scene to my ALT+B version of Across the Sea (click for that post) ... I've kept the aborted plane scene but that's all. I'll add my version of What They Died For before Tuesday night's ep. Spoilers (major) have leaked out online - the events in the final The End episode, but I'll ignore all that. You can find it on io9 and I believe Dark UFO also if you want to read it. It doesn't seem terribly interesting to me if it's accurate and not some fake-out. Like Battlestar Galactica's ignominious end, they LOST creatives seem content to just gloss over or ignore a lot of the mystery they've created.

[Synopsis - highlight]
Alt+B - Desmond is interrogated by the Police for the hit-and-run on Locke and for being at the hospital. Widmore pulls strings and bails him out - they have a talk in Widmore's car: he has indulged Eloise's craziness (as he sees it) for a long time, but her seemingly prescient knowledge made him very rich. Desmond ...

Island - we finish the Desmond rescue by Sayid and Desmond convinces Sayid that he feels dead on the island because he is, and tells him his life in Alt+B is what counts and says he can show him a glimpse of it - Sayid allows Desmond to choke him and Sayid sees flashes of the Alt+B timestream and his life with his lady love. Sayid takes the gun, sits on the edge with his back above the well and shoots himself - his body falling into the well. Desmond is horrified at the violence, but understands and runs off into the thicket ...

Hurley is seething, angry at himself for getting his group in SmokeMonster/Locke's clutches. He has caught up the group as they head toward the coast and the sub. Hurley has a rock, he works his way close to Locke and finds his opportunity and smashes his head with it - Locke transforms into SmokeMonster before their eyes and wraps its tendrils around Hurley and lifts him, choking him. Hurley is determined and stares into it. Smokey puts him down and Hurley spits the words, "You need me, and until you don't you won't kill me." Smokey transforms back into Locke. Hurley addresses the stunned group, "Until Jacob picks which of us is to replace him he won't kill the candidates - you (Jack), you (Sawyer), and me." Locke, also seething, trasforms his arm into Smokey and grabs Claire and dashes her against a tree - killing her.

more coming

LOST - KLUNK ... rattle ... rattle

2010-05-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

Hmmm. Where to begin and how many words to waste on Across the Sea? We sadly got the Battlestar Galactica No Exit episode info-dump, albeit a bit more cleverly shown than told to us - but entirely unnecessary. There was no need for this episode of Jacob's and MIB's backstory at all. It served to diminish those two characters and make their former mystery mundane. And the Allison Janney Mother Earth woman - oh no you dint, and don't get me started!

Several LOST puzzle pieces were crudely hammered into place (the "Adam and Eve" skeletons, the dagger [and where did this finely-crafted piece of metal come from?], the origin of the Smoke Monster cave-sausage, the donkey-wheel) but so what? Again, the mystery of those elements were rendered mundane. The black rock and white rock have no deeper meaning other than they were play-pieces to a game MIB found as a child and Jacob was always white and MIB always black.

When you tell a story that has mystery, if you are going to reveal the mystery to your audience you want to wow them - give them goosebumps, not insult them or bore them.

We're supposed to believe that Jacob stayed loyal to this woman who murdered his real mother all those years yet never went over to the people where his brother MIB was living once he got old enough to find out about sex? So for 30 years he just helped Earth Mommie with her weaving? Dumb. Er, what about when Jacob was globe-trotting and lining up our LOST crash survivors for their big journey in all those sideways timelines? I guess time-travel to cover that will be explained in a future ep? Who was Earth Mommie? She got there "by accident" too, but seemed to have answers - who gave them to her? I like Allison Janney. I've met Allison Janney. But she is no Jack Kennedy and she was woefully miscast.

If they were going to commit to a character like this they needed someone who could convey a more sinister side.

This ep was a real let-down - just short of ridiculous I'm afraid. The mystery of the island turns out to be a surreal golden light that lies hidden deep inside ... kind of silly. Visually, we've seen it before

My version is way better (what I have so far is in the next post)

HOW LOST SHOULD END

2010-05-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

Tonight's ep - Across the Sea [review to come]

... I think they've made a huge mistake giving us the backstory of Jacob and the Man In Black - we'll see them as boys and Allison Janney plays some kind of know-it-all Earth Mother. It's always lame to introduce new characters late in the 3rd Act. I think they should have left who and what they are exactly a mystery to be resolved later (in movies or tv movies).

My version: Highlight for Cliff's notes (pun intended)Alt+B Charlie jumps to his death in front of Desmond. Island Desmond talks Sayid into getting him out of the well. Alt+B Eloise shows up to stop Desmond from killing Locke at the hospital. Island Hurley sees Michael and Libby again and guess who he will listen to.
We are in the Alt+B timeline and Desmond has tracked down Charlie again. Charlie is standing on the edge of a very high, very steep cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean - his eyes closed, the wind sweeping through his hair, the sun on his face.

"Charlie," Desmond intones, "don't do it." Charlie opens his eyes. "You again?!" "How did you find me?" Charlie demands. Desmond replies, "It took some doing. You don't have to do this. I've seen what you've seen, and I know what it means." Charlie laughs a contemptuous laugh, "It doesn't mean anything." Charlie inches forward and Desmond stops his approach. "That's where you're wrong. This reality, Charlie - this one - is the one that matters." "This reality is Bollocks -" Charlie snaps back. "Charlie, something happened to me in that other place you've been seeing - where we've had, have lives. I saw things, I know things. If you die here, you'll live there." "She's there," Charlie replies. "But it is a prison there - a hellish place with no peace." Charlie ponders his words and looks into the setting sun, "and I have no peace here." Charlie falls forward, down and down and crashes into the sea below.

Back on the island, we see Sayid approach the well from Desmond's POV and and lean over. Sayid points his gun at Desmond's head. "You don't seem afraid," Sayid says. "I'm not - of you, Locke, the island, or any of this." Sayid ponders this for a moment, "Why not?" Desmond stares at Sayid intently, and the rudeness of the pointed gun fills the space between them and Sayid puts it away. "Because, none of this matters, Sayid." Sayid cocks his head at Desmond's conviction, "I'll be back." Desmond patiently waits and then some strong vines are thrown down and Sayid leans over, "Climb up, and tell me more."

Alt+B finds Desmond searching through the hospital for Locke. He rounds a corridor and there stands Eloise. "Leave him alone, Desmond." "You!" Desmond is startled. Eloise stands her ground in the empty corridor, "You don't know what you're doing." Desmond narrows his gaze at her, "I know exactly what I'm doing." Desmond starts to walk toward her to go past, she pulls a gun from her purse, "You're bringing chaos to order Desmond!" "Precisely." Desmond pushed past, she fires the gun as he goes for it and a shot rings out into the hallway - in the distance can be heard screams and sound of running as people peer around corners to see what is going on. "You'll destroy everything!" Eloise is stern but choking back sobs. Desmond has control of the gun and takes if from her hand and drops it, holding her - more for control than an embrace. "Do you think you're the only one who sees?" she demands. "I saw during that explosion - all of our lives, all of the timelines - that place didn't let me die and I've tried to create one version of life with some peace and happiness ever since and I won't let you destroy it!" Desmond senses the approach of people and security and takes Eloise and they duck into an exit stairwell - he takes her up a couple of flights and then corners her against the wall. "Now, listen! I have seen very recently - and what I saw says the timelines are closing in - there is only this reality and the island. He has killed the man who lived in the foot of the temple -" "Jacob," Eloise interjects. "... and he has taken over John Locke and he's trying to get free of the island. I see bits and pieces but it's as if I'm there and here." Eloise grows soft, "What about my husband - over there?" "He put me a machine - magnetism - and somehow that brought me here." Eloise puts her hands over her face, "Oh no, he doesn't know what he's done." "Maybe he does." Eloise ponders this and grows hard again, "No, we are happy here - the horrors of that place forgotten and never to be known by any of them!" "You only care about your own happiness!? What about their lives? You'd trap them in hell, knowing what you know?" Eloise stares at Desmond intently, a floor down security can be heard opening the door and talking. Desmond looks away toward the commotion and Eloise pulls out a stun gun from her purse and zaps Desmond - who falls unconscious and she makes her getaway, but not before shouting down to the floor below, "He's up here!"

[New Addition 5/16]
Back on the island, Hurley is lagging behind as Smoke Monster/Locke leads the group (Kate, Sawyer, Jack, Claire and Frank) toward the submarine. It is nighttime, and they are back on the main island after their failed attempt to use the plane on the little island (they realized that with no runway and sand in the engines and the C4 Widmore put on there it was a no-go). It is now night and Hurley is hearing the whispering in the jungle. "You're lagging behind, Hurley," Locke confronts him. "Yeah man, I not so sure I think this is a good idea." Locke just stares at him, "Pick up the pace." "Yeah, well I've gotta pee." Hurley peels off into the jungle and Locke just stares after him, disgusted, "Well, don't listen to anybody." Hurley tromps off and shoots back a disdainful look. In the thickness of leaves he whips it out and starts peeing and up walks Michael. "You couldn't wait until I'm through?" Hurley asks. "It doesn't matter. Just get to that submarine. It's your only way home." Hurley has finished, wiped off and starts to head back, ignoring Michael. "Listen to Locke, Hurley." Hurley bites his lip and turns abruptly. "I think that listening to you has put us all in danger and that the last thing I should do is listen to Locke." A voice comes from the darkness, "Listen to your heart, Hurley." It is Libby, stepping forward. Michael is taken aback. Libby stares him down, "Go away Michael." Michael reluctantly complies - walking off into the darkened jungle. "It's great to see you." Libby smiles. "He's coming, you have to go. Listen to your heart, Hurley, it's a good one. You'll know what to do when the time comes." Rustling alerts Hurley to Locke's presence. "Are you done? we need to go." Hurley looks back to where Libby had been standing, but she's gone.

HOLLYWOOD SET TO RUIN GODZILLA ... AGAIN

2010-05-06T17:37:00.000-07:00

io9 is reporting that Legendary Pictures' reboot of Godzilla is considering this concept for their version of the Godzilla monster.

Stupid stupid stupid. Didn't they learn the first time? Robot Chicken makes the point perfectly in this hilarious spoof clip [located lower right on linked page]

There is only one Godzilla - the Japanese version - which means putting a man in a rubber suit! It means that iconic roar. It means radioactive blue-plasma breath.

LOST - THE CANDIDATE ... UH-OH

2010-05-04T23:11:00.000-07:00

Well, let's start with the death list and injury roster!

I think I counted Smoke Monster/Locke shooting to death 17 or 18 people, he snapped the neck of at least one other, and in his smoke form killed at least a couple more (Sayid conveniently knew how to disable Widmore's EM fence).

Crazy Claire killed at least a couple of the expendable Widmore people (but, alas, Billie Jean King clone still lives for another ep at least) ... no sign of Widmore. No Desmond this ep. What happened to Miles?

Next ep, Across the Sea, is the flashback to how it all began - the backstories of Smoke Monster/Man In Black and Jacob. So that only leaves the eps What They Died For and a 2-parter, The End to explain it all.

After this ep, I'm kinda feeling shorted. Too many of the principals crowded together but not doing much. They go to the plane planning to fly it away (er, with what runway and with blown sand in the engines and no gas?) - but Smoke Monster/Locke finds a bunch of C-4 Widmore had hidden away on the plane to blow them all up (specifically Smoke Monster/MIB/Locke because that's who Widmore is after). Locke then leads them to the sub - they'll leave that way. Jack says he'll stay behind but Kate gets shot and so he helps get her on the sub (after pushing Smoke Monster/Locke in the water they way kids at camp do) and then climbs aboard himself. Sawyer is playing boss and says to leave Claire, who stupidly doesn't seem to notice that they're leaving without her.

But wait, there's a twist! Our main characters escape in the sub, but meanie Smoke Monster/Locke put the C-4 in Jack's backpack and it has a timer, but Jack realizes they must not do anything because the island won't let them die, they can only kill each other or themselves if they try to disarm the bomb - Sawyer can't process that in his Cro-Mag brain and finishes his fit of machismo and a quicker timer now races to ZERO and Sayid suddenly grabs the explosive device and runs with it and saves most of the rest of them and gets ... blown to bits. A sub door flies loose and kills Jeff Fahey's pilot character (they kept him around all this time to kill him like this?), and Sun gets trapped and Jin decides to stay with her and they lovingly drown together. Sayid tells Jack about Desmond and then tells Jack "It's going to be you" i.e., our candidate. Weirdly, Sayid tosses that off almost as a throwaway line, mumbling almost and looking down and almost out-of-frame (writers', director's choice?).

Only Sawyer (who saves Jack), Hurley, and Kate make it to the beach. Hurley breaks down and sobs and they shorted Jorge Garcia a real moment - he could have conveyed Hurley's deep sadness and the futility of it all if they've let his emotional reaction play out longer.

In the Alt+B timeline lots of Jack (and everyone intersecting again - Jin in the hospital hallway with flowers for Sun ... Leela - er, I mean Katie Sagal, pops up re; father stuff). Dunno what's up with the creepy dentist who seems to know stuff and intones mysteriously to Jack. The father complex stuff is played out and Jack tries to reach out to Locke who again refuses him. A music box is left to Claire and she and Jack open it but don't really listen to it's tune nor look through it more thoroughly ... oh, and bad acting alert: Emilie de Ravin (who plays Claire) didn't even attempt to move as though pregnant - that fake baby strapped to her real tummy didn't seem to weigh anything when she moved.

This episode felt very much like that Dave Chappelle skit Wrap-It-Up

LOST - THE CANDIDATE

2010-05-04T20:16:00.001-07:00

Pre-viewing: Jack has a choice to make

LOST INTERVIEW - LINDELOF

2010-05-01T02:50:00.000-07:00

Ain't It Cool News has a couple video clips of an interview with LOST showrunner and main writer Damon Lindelof (seems like a really cool, unpretentious guy) here ... looks like 'ole radii is calling it correctly so far: down to 2 timelines and some will get off the island and some won't

- some will "go on a journey."

Lindelof plays it coy with regard to Desmond not being in the final cast photo but I take that to mean that Desmond dies in both realities in order to fracture the link once it is re-set to the Alt+B timeline.

Now, if he would just read my critique of his Star Trek ... they need to fix some things for the next film [click image for readable screen-cap of the review]

Some spoilery info is up ... next ep, The Candidate, seems to be focused on Jack of course [he's offered that Faustian bargain] ... and the one after that - Across the Sea - seems to deal with Jacob and MIB - and the teenage boys are them in earlier lives

IN PRAISE OF A REGULAR READER

2010-04-30T15:23:00.001-07:00

Blogs, and various other internet contributions people post sometimes sit out there all alone as some remnant to history that a thought was thought, words and/or images were composed for maybe - no one. For a while a particular YouTube video, or a snarky blog, or Twitter feed or whatnot gets popular and sometimes has a meteoric rise - having touched the zeitgeist just right in the cultural G spot to get a lot of notice (82nd Airborne soldiers dancing to Lady GaGa anyone?).

Many talented and creative people have stopped by here over the time I've had Galactica Variants up and running (originally to celebrate the reimagining of Battlestar Galactica) and I appreciate that some found what I did here entertaining and maybe even thought-provoking. This posts wishes to thank my most consistent comment-poster. If you are a Heinlein fan, check out this story [Note on image mash-up: The Breen were in Star Trek pantheon, Daft Punk looks like them, ending of story and Heinlein]

LOST - PREDICTIONS

2010-04-26T23:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, just 4 episodes left (the finale, The End, is a 2-hour ep):

The Candidate
Across the Sea
What They Died For
and The End

Time for predictions:

The Candidate - Jack is a candidate for both MIB/SmokeMonster/Locke and Jacob and he must choose to be on the side of good or evil, which will determine the fates of everybody else. Likely, he will be given a Faustian bargain by MIB/S.M./Locke that goes something like this: "You can go back to your life, and have no memory of any of this, but you must A. make sure I get off the island; B. Kill all these other people." But Jack will opt for C [see below].

Across the Sea - This will probably focus almost entirely on the Alt+B timeline [see post below for Alt+B] and how Desmond battles Eloise's order with his bringing of chaos - to send reverberations to the island reality that can fracture the balance and free the souls trapped there to live out in the Alt+B timeline. There will probably be Penny in this ep, and she'll probably have to die. Desmond will reveal to some (at least Jack and Penny) in the Alt+B timeline what he knows about the island reality.

What They Died For - The title implies we'll get explanations, but probably not fully satisfying ones, or else there is no mystery left for any movie versions. Something along the lines "maintaining the balance" is probably what we'll hear - Smoke Monster remains trapped and they can carry on their lives in Alt+B. The science will probably come into it here, Jacob intervened in all their lives because in a future timeline he met them all and thus knew these specific people had to be compelled to fit into that island timeline ... it could be that MIB/Smoke Monster has been messing with electro-magnetism and time to try to free himself all along. The Dharma people were drawn by the strange magnetic properties and physics anomalies and were trapped in his web.

The End - The "end" is, of course, an open end - A, because they have a movie to make, and B, because the struggle between good and evil is never-ending in the minds of most people who believe in that kind of thing ... Desmond will let everyone know that their lives exist in other time streams and urge them to let go of what happens to them on the island - doesn't really matter if they die, so long as they accept it so they don't remain trapped like Michael and the other "whisperers." Hurley and the rest of the gang, most of them, will let themselves get killed. Desmond will let Jack know that he must stay and his life on the Alt+B timestream will have to end - he will only live on the island.

Now, a recap from The Candidate that factors into the finale - Jack is a candidate for both MIB/SmokeMonster/Locke and Jacob and he must choose to be on the side of good or evil, which will determine the fates of everybody else. Likely, he will be given a Faustian bargain by MIB/S.M./Locke that goes something like this: "You can go back to your life, and have no memory of any of this, but you must A. make sure I get off the island; B. Kill all these other people" ... since Jack is our ostensible hero he will choose the noble course, C., and sacrifice himself and take over the Jacob role and be forever locked in perpetual struggle with MIB/S.M./Locke

LOST - SPOILER ALERT - THE END

2010-04-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

io9 is reporting that a call sheet was found for the final ep of LOST and that it gives away some juicy details. The link is above and you can read what the call sheet says on the shooting schedule, and it is exactly what I expected [hightlight below section]

Jack sacrifices himself to hold MIB/SmokeMoster/Locke on the island, so he is the new Jacob after all ... with Desmond the facilitator ... so Jack and Locke will be forever in battle: the father/son dynamic of their early bond torn asunder and twisted all around

It sounds chilling, the way they have the showdown set-up ... and it leaves us with our primary antagonist and protagonist for the inevitable movie version

LOST - ANSWERS SCHMANCERS

2010-04-22T02:17:00.000-07:00

This latest episode - The Last Recruit felt forced. For a brief time while watching I got that queasy feeling I had during the No Exit episode of Battlestar Galactica ... but the feeling passed because the LOST ep wasn't nearly as bad. No Exit is where BSG totally lost it and just became terrible.

With Last Recruit, we've seen some worrying signs, but the show didn't step over the line ... yet. Way too many loose threads were sewn together - from Sun seeing Locke on an ambulance stretcher right next to hers as she's being wheeled into the Emergency Room, to cop Sawyer catching Sayid at his girlfriend's house, to a shiny new sailboat MIB/SmokeMonster/Locke had hidden away, to Jack ready to operate on Locke, to Ilana at the office to - and this was the big groaner - reunite Jack and Claire - who ends up being Jack's sister (oh, and I'm sick of Crazy Claire anyway). It was a most inelegant episode and I hope the nadir of what's left - I certainly expect better from here on out.

The Billie Jean King lookalike who works for Widmore calling in missile strikes on MIB/S.M./Locke was just stupid - no way around it. Even if they hit him dead-on, er, couldn't he just transform into smoke and have the missile and explosion harmlessly pass through him? I must say, I think the LOST Untangled spoof is better than the ep.

LOST - UNTANGLED

2010-04-21T02:07:00.000-07:00

New to me - LOST Untangled is on the ABC website and uses Muppets to re-enact the previous episode and explain it - hilarious

LOST - THE POWER OF LOVE

2010-04-16T02:26:00.000-07:00

Lots of touching moments in LOST these past few eps, and I'm beginning to get that love transcends all feeling ... which, in poetry and movies can be nice but in a time-travel/vortex/alternate universe/evil-held-prisoner surreal television show can come across a bit, smarmy. I'm hoping the love stuff isn't going to be the end-point but a means to get there.

Lady Miss Kier has something to say on the subject:

And a lesser-known (but terrific) track by Deee-Lite that sorta works with the theme also:

V - GETTIN' CHEESY

2010-04-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

Another show in no hurry to go anywhere, V

All the parameters of the story are known but they don't move things along - it is descending into soap opera. This show had low expectations, exceeded those with its initial 4-ep run, and now just 2 eps into its regular run and it's a bore already ... it would work better as an over-the-top Spanish-language telenovela (complete with lustful and I'll-kill-you stares) or as ... porn - ooh, lizard-human gettin'-it-on (visualize Candy Clark and David Bowie from Man Who Fell to Earth)

GUILTY PLEASURE - STREET PREACHER

2010-04-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

Here is a fan-made a compilation vid of one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite guilty pleasure films - Johnny Mnemonic (directed by the artist Robert Longo). I love it when an actor surprises you with their performance. Action star (and former husband of Grace Jones) Dolph Lundgren is terrific as the hired assassin Street Preacher

HUGO X2 - TIMELINE ALT+B

2010-04-13T20:31:00.001-07:00

The parallel lives / alternate reality / coexisting universes / prime number / cannot upset the equation concept should be expanded upon in tonight's ep ... and I expect we'll see Hurley win his lotto jackpot with the other set of numbers. The prime this time is 53

post-viewing update: Well, despite the still image floating around with the different set of winning lotto numbers, we didn't yet see that scene and we got no Hurley's dad (boo-hoo) and just the one scene (previewed often) with his mom in the ep Everybody Loves Hugo. Sideplot took away a bit of the mystery when Michael appeared to Hurley at Libby's grave and later revealed that he was trapped on the island, as are many others - strengthening the purgatory aspects of the island vis-a-vis the good vs. evil component of the story.

We got the two Hugo realities and the two Desmond realities, and as with Charlie, the Alt+B timeline (as I'm calling it) that the LOST writers are focusing on as they close the show seems to be where our characters get glimpses into the island reality that has made up most of the show. They seem to be dispensing with all but two timelines.

Desmond has seen, and he is now hell-bent on changing outcomes.

He served an almost Jacob-like role in the Alt+B timeline getting Hurley to pursue Libby and have that date on the beach that never happened on the island ... mission accomplished (Hurley kissed and sparks really flew - he saw the other reality - the post-crash island - in flashes and the rich golden color-saturation) ... kudos to actor Jorge Garcia - it is always a mark of a fine actor when they can just silently react to something and convey deep emotion or move a scene along. Garcia was just terrific, as was actress Cynthia Watros - who played Libby in three touching scenes.

Desmond even staked out John Locke and ran him over ... and back on the island MIB/Smokemonster/Locke threw that Desmond down a well (despite knowing Desmond has some special magnetic properties, as did the well) yet Desmond is completely content with whatever happens to him on the island.

I'm pretty convinced that the EM field Widmore subjected Desmond to with his machine either lets Desmond transcend both realities simultaneously or he saw enough to know that what he does in the back-on-the-mainland reality is much more important than what he does on the island. I suspect we'll get a flashback at some point showing us Desmond's POV of that moment in the EM field. Despite Eloise's admonition not to "break rules" he is breaking every rule he can to upset the balance.

If Eloise is determinism then Desmond is the bringer of chaos.

LOST SECRETS REVEALED - XAVIER STARCHILD

2010-04-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

Just look at the audience's faces! Okay, so this is just a clip from the mincers over at RuPaul's Drag Race - but I have a feeling LOST audiences may react the same way to some of the coming revelations ... Sawyer becomes the new Jacob! If you want a Galactica-Science level analysis (why did you take the site down Michael Hall?) go over to at-largely, where investigative journalist Larissa Alexandrovna has applied near superstring-caliber analysis to the plot machinations.

And here is Xavier: Renegade Angel, set to music, with a different kind of trippyness not so far from the LOST world ... here's Hulu's Xavier content

LOST EQUATION

2010-04-07T15:20:00.001-07:00

Well, let's see ... take one plane crash (or several), one mysterious island, a smoke monster, some secret government science/military program, time-travel, electromagnetic disturbances, ghosts, a nuclear bomb, and bunch of intersecting lives and what do we get?

LOST - PARALLEL LIVES

2010-04-06T23:55:00.000-07:00

Ah, now we have it. The LOST writers are uniting the good vs. evil and time-travel streams into one story and it involves all of the principals having intersected before, during and after the plane crash, and Eloise Hawking (Daniel Faraday's mother and wife of Charles Widmore) seems to be the fulcrum upon which the whole time-travel element to the story pivots and will be resolved. She knows the answers and her consciousness seems to transcend the various time-streams of parallel lives we've been shown.

This Desmond-centric episode, Happily Ever After, finally brought back the sci-fi time-travel stuff, and as expected, returned Faraday to the equation.

So it looks like Mommy Eloise screwed up the time-stream originally somehow and she raised her son in one time-stream to skip music for science so he could try to right her wrong (something to do with the bomb probably), and she probably married Widmore because he had the money she needed to make things happen.

Widmore's daughter Penny and Desmond have some special time-equation properties also because they seem to factor into the events that led everyone to the island. Desmond must intersect with Penny in all time-streams and Desmond is impervious to huge electro-magnetic discharge as shown in Widmore's experiment early in the episode.

The whole subplot with Charlie was pretty good ... in this time-stream he's had a vision and seems to invite death by pushing limits on everything - hoping to have the revelatory moment he recounted to Desmond earlier. Charlie forces their car into a marina and Desmond has a flash of another time-stream also - he sees written on Charlie's hand "NOT PENNY'S BOAT" and then has visions of Penny and the two of them together.

Desmond is Widmore's favored errand boy/dealmaker in this time-stream and he tasks him with seeing his wife to break the bad news that Charlie's band won't be performing and this will disappoint her son (Faraday). She takes the news in stride and only turns into the predicted witch when Desmond mentions trying to find Penny. Eloise tells Desmond not to look for her to just leave it all alone.

Faraday overhears and takes Desmond aside and tells him he thinks they've lived other lives and are seeing flashes of these other lives and that he, Faraday, blew up a nuclear bomb in one of these other lives. Desmond looks at him like he's a wackadoodle until he says Penny is his half-sister and he can tell Desmond where to find her.

Cool back-and-forth between time-streams and story arcs this ep - well done. And at the end when a resistant Desmond is checked, found healthy, and released from the electro-magnetic experiment Widmore had subjected him to on the smaller island, he is a changed man. He wants his Penny back, and knows to go with the flow to get to her. Widmore told Desmond he'd have to make a great sacrifice, so likely that will end up being Penny (probably to set the time-streams right again).

Now I don't know how they are going to join up the supernatural with the science, but next ep is Hurley and his I see dead people, so maybe the ghosts will glue together the time-travel and good vs. evil for us. My worry is that the writers will give us a Schrödinger's cat scenario, whereby the nuclear bomb detonated on the island - with its weird magnetic properties opened a rift in time and now allows various time streams to co-exist with the island as an inersection point to all those people involved. My guess is the bomb serves the same role as the guy with the gun in the top Schrödinger Cat image - upsetting the balance.

AS CAPRICA TURNS

2010-04-05T20:50:00.000-07:00

Egads. Caught up with End of Line on Hulu. Could this show get any more soap opera? Hey, Bonner Hammer, are you drawing the 13-45 female demographic you targeted? I sure hope so, because there is little here to watch other than weepy wimps spiral around one another in their despair. Sad wifey and the musical dirge almost made me want to slit my wrists!

Daddy Adama finally finds his daughter - and she turns in a Sofia Coppola-level acting performance (circa Godfather III) before popping Dad right out of the virtual New Caprica forever. She's going to stand alone in the virtual world! Who cares? Why is this character even in the show? Is the to be the Yin to Zoe's Yang? (sigh) ... they have made a good actor, Esai Morales, into such a pussy it is hard to watch. To appeal to a female audience you don't need to turn the men into women Bonnie Hammer.

Dyke-y schoolmarm has a face-off with a kinda weak guest star playing the fellow terrorist in the infinity symbol-one god faction and yet another subplot is introduced (a power struggle among the monotheists) ... yawn.

The story is finally pushed forward with a little exposition from the defense contractor lady and now 100,000 robots are to be delivered like today (er, did anybody build any?) so now Zoe/Cylon must bust out and she reveals herself to nerd-boy who works for Daniel Graystone and he freaks and hits the alarm. Her first murder - he deserved it and off in the Mom minivan goes our Cylon escapee! A couple ships from Aliens chase her down a deserted highway and the other schoolgirl (Zoe's friend) is supposed to blow up schoolmarm to prove her terrorist worth (as her part of the bargain for getting the robot smuggled to Gemenon - are you following - do you care?)

So our mid-season cliffhanger leaves us with depressed wifey having jumped into the river from a high bridge (or did she?), schoolmarm escapes explosion by seeing depressed wifey, Daniel Graystone's world is crumbling, Zoe is off to the robot races, and a bunch of other characters are doing stuff that's in the scripts too. This show is lame.

LOST - FINAL EP TITLES

2010-03-31T15:20:00.000-07:00

ep   6-15     4 May 10   Across The Sea
ep   6-16     11 May 10   What They Died For
ep   6-17     23 May 10   The End (1)
ep   6-18     23 May 10   The End (2)

[presently no info on these eps - check back periodically,
at some point some info about each ep will be posted
- click on title: it is a link]

LOST - THE PACKAGE

2010-03-31T15:03:00.001-07:00

Well, this was a set-up episode that had little content.

Unless you count the dull-as-dishwater Sun/Jin backstory (there's a sink right there in that restaurant kitchen and Jin doesn't have Sun wash her bloody hands?) How and why Sayid happened to be the contract killer who killed the other contract killers hired by Sun's daddy to finish off Jin is about all that is of interest there - like if we were still in season 4.

MIB/Smokemonster/Locke can't cross the zapper fence. He goes all the way across the island to get Sun then bops her on the head and leaves her there?

Billie Jean King (oop, I mean Zoe) and Whitmore bring "the package" on their mini sub, and it's Desmond?

Desmond and Sayid have a nice stare across the water? Don't ask, don't tell.

LOST - TEASES WITH ADS - NUMBERS A PI CHART?

2010-03-29T18:03:00.000-07:00

New ad (via this link found on Gawker)

Are they pulling BSG type clues? Have our LOST characters divided into Black Rock and White Rock camps? I don't see Richard. I don't see Jin. Charlotte ends up evil? No Claire. I figured Desmond and Faraday would be back, but not that Miles would survive to the end.

Or, if we go by the backgrounds, then the LO people get to go back to the big city and the ST people stay behind - with Locke the new Man In Black and Sawyer our new Jacob. Sayid gets to live? Ben leaves the island? Hmmm. Hmmmmmm. For whatever it's worth the numbers on the left add up to 89 (Sayid-16, Jack-23, Sun-42, Hurley-8) and those on the right 19 (Locke-4, Sawyer-15) - totaling 108 of course (I know, Kate ... see below). We're talking active numbers - not those people who have had their numbers crossed out (like Ben) on the lighthouse gear.

Well if the BSG Last Supper pic was so simple as to be left-to-right L (Laura) N (Natalie) Tigh to reveal the final cylon as represented by the missing person behind the Grail cup (ELlen Tigh), then maybe the new LOST poster is just as simple ... B S K J S H D (if we add numbers based on the alphabet of the initials to the characters' names = 73) ... L C S J F M (adding = 61) ... 73 - 63 = 10, or 73 + 63 = 136, or 73 X 63 = 4599 ... or, er, maybe not

Now, upon closer inspection (namely at this website ... great close-ups) it appears Kate too has a number - as shown on the lighthouse panel, and it is 51 ... that revises the number to 159 if we add her to the others composing 108, and there goes our Valenzetti equation - so maybe Kate saves the world?

In an earlier post I pointed out that Jack's number, 23, is the only prime number among those left and it should be noted that 1-5-9 are the next sequence of three digits that follow 3.14 in pi (3.14159265358979323846 .... ). 159 is also a Woodall Number ... but what is of note is that Woodall numbers are conjectured to be composites (nearly all). Kate (51) surviving might tip the balance from the 108 of the Valenzetti end-of-the-world timeline to a reset state due to her compositing her number with the others'. Here's Wikipedia on the number 159 (are you reading Larissa?)

So Kate will tip the balance somehow (the bad girl made good) to fracture the Valenzetti equation and save the world - with Locke the new MIB and Sawyer the new Jacob on the island, with Faraday forever hitting that reset switch?

LOST - AB AETERNO

2010-03-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

I loved the episode ab aeterno (trans: since the beginning or for long ages) - Richard's story. It featured a wonderful performance by actor Nestor Carbonell and a well-written backstory that featured Richard as Ricardo, a kind-hearted man from 1867 - a deeply-grieving widower who had been wrongly convicted for murder while struggling with a greedy doctor for medicine that could have saved his sick wife.

Ricardo is himself saved by an ancestor of Whitmore and chained to the below-decks of the same shipwrecked wooden sailing ship Black Rock we've seen before (remember the Richard/Jack dynamite scene from last ep?). A storm hits, which we find out later was Jacob causing this ship sailing to the New World to wreck on the statue of Taweret, and thus strand Richard on the island. Everybody dies eventually but Ricardo (before he had good English) and TOSM (The Original Smoke Monster) face off - TOSM makes a couple really cool appearances where he viciously murders everyone except Ricardo (TOSM even has sparks at his tip) before Man-In-Black appears (Smoke Monster's human form) to Ricardo. A struggle ensues for Ricardo's soul. Ricardo had a vision of his wife before meeting MIB - was it an hallucination? Was it MIB manipulating/tormenting him?

Ricardo's offered a Faustian bargain by MIB and accepts, he will stab Jacob - whom he does not yet know (then living below the foot of the statue) with the silver ceremonial dagger so he can be with his wife again - but Jacob sees him coming, bests him, and offers him another deal - be the person who vets new arrivals for me, he tells him - help sort out who is ultimately good and who is evil at their core. So, in essence, we have Richard as Tattoo to Jacob's Mr. Roarke.

Up to this point Carbonell transcended the script with his performance, then the writers gave him a line which served the plot but was at odds with what we were seeing. Jacob tells him, no, I can't bring your wife back and I can't absolve you of your sins (Ricardo was devout) ... then the poor forlorn fellow who seemed devastated, hopeless, and ready to die moments earlier to be with his wife says "I want to live forever" W-T-F ?? [see comments for another take on this]

Jacob and MIB have another little chat - this time on a mountainside looking over a valley, not the beach (but here's the old pic) and Jacob gives MIB the bottle of wine he had used earlier as an example to Ricardo "Evil is like the wine in this bottle - the cork is the island, holding it here." Of course MIB smashes the bottle. Also White Rock appeared (prior to its scale days) - when Ricardo had returned to MIB after failing to kill Jacob - Jacob asked him to deliver it - clearly signaling to MIB that Jacob considered Richard in the white camp at that moment - or it's simply their in-joke - a Black Rock smashes Jacob's temple, so Jacob will turn this agent of destruction - Ricardo - into a white rock of goodness.

So the sci-fi time-travel elements of LOST fade further into the distance as we get a redux of the LEXX season 3 story arc (Fire and Water) and the end of BSG (angels, and god did it) - a showdown between good and evil as what underlies all phenomena on the island and in their lives leading up to the island.

Touching scene at the end where Hurley shows up when Richard/Ricardo has had enough (in his time-frame he's walked from the dynamite scene in the Black Rock last ep) and shouts to the air for the MIB/TOSM to honor his deal - which was an offer forever.

Hurley it seems can talk to more than just Jacob - now the dead wife, Isabella (sporting spiffy modern clothes) appears to Hurley (and eventually to Richard) and the love-through-time couple have their touching reunion - We are already together she tells him.

Hurley regularly communicating with Jacob, and now other spirits too, would lead you to believe that he is the clear front-runner to replace Jacob, as he is clearly the most pure-of-heart. But we were left with a shot of MIB/Locke standing a ways away watching the love reunion so maybe it was MIB appearing as Isabella to both Hurley and Ricardo, and it was all a perverse manipulation.

If the writers intend one last sojourn to evil before their grand finale then it was a fake-out - but so far it seems pretty straightforward - a march toward redemption for most of our star characters.

Over at at-largely, Larissa has another similar but much more complex reading of the situation

BILLIE JEAN - IS NOT MY LOVER

2010-03-22T20:59:00.000-07:00

With the guest appearance of Zoe on last week's LOST, the clues are lining up

Zoe is the last letter of the alphabet, or Zed for 0 ... Zoe looks like Billie Jean King, who was/was not afraid of the male penis the way Zoe here is/is not afraid of the gun Sawyer holds to her face ... Billie Jean King ended male dominance of tennis in the so-called battle of the sexes in the 70s ...

Zoe will be the agent that brings to an end the domination of the Smoke Monster on the island

The Legend of Billie Jean came out in 1985 - numbers which add to to 23 - Jack's number ... the movie starred two actors named Slater (Christian and Helen), one male who represents the female-oppressing monotheism of Christianity and the other, female, who represents the pantheism of nature-worship and multiple gods of both genders

Michael Jackson's Billie Jean came out in 1983 - Michael Jackson's initials, MJ, add up to (M=13, J=10) ... 23 - Jack's number ... 1983 adds up to 21, plus 2 for the two years until LoBJ came out and that equals 23. It's all about Jack ... and Billie Jean, er, Zoe will help him realize that

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 add up to 108 which, if you subtract from 350 = 242 ...2+4+2 = 10 and the dollar is divided by units of 10. Now $3.50 is what the Loch Ness Monster kept trying to get from Chef's dad on South Park in the Succubus episode ... the word succubus has 8 letters (Hurley), one vowel (U) used three times which if added to the one representing the vowel equals 4 (Locke), and if you take the one vowel (1) and put it in front of the five consonants you get 15 (Sawyer) ... Sayid (16) is part of the code 1623 that activates the security fence that can keep the evil Smoke Monster out so he will have to work with Jack - Since 42 is Sun/Jin we can split that in two, or 21 each, when added together makes 3, but since there are two of them it is 6 which is the same number of Wimbledon titles Billie Jean King won! [Who knew this would be so easy to figure out?]

Here's someone who explains the meaning of numbers even better than I do

ROBOT COMING OUT -CAPRICA EP. 8

2010-03-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

Er, no one spoke up at the demographics meeting (about appealing to women and tweeners) that the robot coming out line was really stupid? Daddy, inside this robot body there is a real girl!

Nothing says love like a father exploiting a childhood fear and burning his daughter to show he loves her!

Daddy's so mean - don't make me shoot the dog!?!

LOST - MISFIRE

2010-03-16T21:41:00.001-07:00

First big misfire of this final season - Sawyer and Miles are cops. And Evil Locke says, "I'm the smoke-thing." And Locke has a heart-to-heart with Kate (I wanted Oprah to mediate). Locke is better as the scary, silent enigma.

Yet another small island, yet another plane, yet another group of survivors (well some were decaying and drawing flies) ... oh, and the submarine, "He's waiting for you." And guess who's back, the architect, er I mean Charles Whitmore, and he and his people are looking to catch and/or kill Smoke Monster/Locke. Plane or sub - what will Sawyer take? Lots of flashbacks with character overlap: Kate-Sawyer-Miles-Charlotte. Hope next week is better (Richard's story)

THE 12 COLONIES, ER PLOTLINES, OF CAPRICA

2010-03-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

Still in no hurry to go anywhere, we now have more story streams to follow. The wife has a past as a wack-job, but wait, maybe she has religious visions - which interest her new alcoholic best friend - the Sappho schoolmarm. She sees her long-lost dead brother. Daddy Adama finally makes it to Virtual Caprica (which seems to have leftover battles and a the look from Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow) ... and I'm sure it will take him several episodes to finally find his daughter (ho-hum). There is a subplot with a business rival from another planet battling Daniel Graystone (ho-hum again), and the subplot with the nerd who works with the robot I guess fits the tweener demographic. We had to watch a dumb representation of Pyramid which looked just like the set and game that 7of9 played in a Voyager episode. And next week we get to see daddy lecture his teenage robot. All that's missing from this show is Natalie Wood and flip hairdos.

WALLACE, 108 - THE 'DANIEL' OF LOST?

2010-03-07T00:36:00.000-08:00

An investigative journalist I like, Larisa Alexandrovna, writes on her blog at-Largely the most compelling theory I've read so far (other than my own) about what the LOST story is about and where it's going. She's linked on this latest post to her overall theory which is dense with science. As we found out with RDM's Battlestar Galactica reboot, so much of what seemed carefully crafted story threads during a show's run do not necessarily ever get woven together into an elegant tapestry which creates a stunning and fully realized picture of what we are supposed to understand.

I think Alexandrovna is giving the show's creators/writers too much credit. In television you never know how many years you'll get to tell your story nor if certain actors will leave the show, etc ... it is a fluid process making a television show and such a dense and richly complex theory as she has laid out seems to me to be beyond the original vision of the show's creators. If they end up there, I think it will be more through creative mental gymnastics to tie the loose threads together masterfully with what they've dangled up to now than by design. The number sequence and the importance of the Valenzetti Equation are at the heart of the mystery and Alexdrovna has come around to my way of thinking that the key is Jacob seeking his replacement.

Alexandrovna discovered through TiVo rewinds that there is a name which corresponds to one of the shows key numbers, 108. Lighthouse reflector glass rotated around a marked circumference - and at numerical marks it showed reflected images of the pasts of various show characters. Mark 108's name is Wallace ... which gave me a knot in my stomach. Remember when Daniel was referenced on BSG at the end of Season 4? Daniel turned out to be merely a word - a writer's trick used to provide backstory - a really really cheap out. We never saw Daniel, he didn't matter, we only know he was "sensitive" because we were told that, and that's all we knew. Introducing a pivotal character late in Act III is a cardinal no-no in screenwriting. If this Wallace appears and is important then LOST is taking the easy way.

The cave markings and lighthouse let us know which numbers belong to which characters and the lower the number, the seemingly more important. The numbers are also Hurley's winning lottery ticket numbers, so clearly he is a fulcrum upon which the story pivots. He's remained alive, fat, and healthy and can see Jacob.

4: Locke
8: Hurley
15: Sawyer
16: Sayid
23: Jack
42: Sun /Jin ?

There is only one prime number among them, and that is Jack's number 23. Not only because he's the ostensible star of the show but also because of the prime (as I guessed earlier) of course Jack is Jacob's replacement. Other logical conclusions we can draw is that odd numbered people get killed first or are do not cut it as candidates, as only Jack's number and Sawyer's number are odd and not yet crossed out. This new realization causes me to amend my earlier view that Kate would be the last candidate, now I think it is Sawyer - for the dark side with Smoke Monster/Locke. If the show is to be about a balance of power between good/evil - dark/light - black rock/white rock ... then probably Sawyer will be Jack's counterpart at the end.

Why the island has its strange properties presents the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum for the writers: did human endeavor alter reality and manifest at the island or was the island always a living thing that drew its desired humans to it for its own ends? That now is the more interesting question for me.

CAPRICA GODFATHER MATRIX SIN CITY DYNASTY

2010-03-04T23:54:00.000-08:00

Egads, so early into this show's run and it's strayed so far afield of its ties to Battlestar Galactica that it's hard to even know what the show is about. We got to see the Adama clan be very Tauron and do their version of sitting shiva for the dead, complete with some clapping (here, I've put a link to another famous clapping situation) ... Adama senior's hunky gay brother takes his shirt off to reveal Maori-like tattoos (why, exactly?) and we got to watch the other chick stuck in this version of the Matrix meet some unsavory characters and de-rez them (Tron, LawnmowerMan anyone?) and earn gold coins like in an 80s era videogame. Subplots galore - board meetings (Robocop), the dreaded word "closure" was uttered - ugh, the virtual nightclub world turns out is part of an entire surreal city (Dark City, Bladerunner, Sin City, etc) ... too many ideas - none fully formed (other than let's film the robot and switch back-and-forth between it and the girl!). As Michael Kors says, "You need to edit edit edit." The Esai Morales character seems weak, unfocused and ineffectual and he's supposed to be the rock of the family that later gives rise to William Adama, Admiral of the Colonial fleet fleeing the Cylons? The show has elements that look good, and a couple interesting things happening but overall so far it's pretty bad. It doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.

CAPRICA - IN NO HURRY TO GO ANYWHERE

2010-02-21T22:46:00.000-08:00

I wasn't going to watch this show but as I'm often up very very late I catch the 2am or 3am reruns and so I'm current to the episodes.

Daniel Graystone: Ineffectual and dull as dirt. Mrs. Graystone: Shrill, stupid and a bore. Adama by Esai: Hemmed in so far by bad scripts. Robot/Lolita: the cheerleader on Heroes is more interesting. Mobster Brother: Actor betrayed by bad writing. Schoolmarm: Only character I like or have any interest in (and that creepy robot/computer entity behind the "confessional" screen). Grannma Adama: backstory we don't need. Little William Adama: actor is good but he's pretty irrelevant to the story. Virtual Clubworld/Etc: Eh, seen it all before. Representation of Caprica and the other Colony worlds and people: Pretty terrible, almost no difference and more like Dark City than Ancient Greece. Production Design: the one truly bright spot - slick and nice-looking. The Plot: Drags on interminably when we know what needs to happen next and want to get the fuck there already without the side-steps and diversions. Longevity: Methinks this model will last but one year.

LOST FANS, WATCH OUT FOR ANGELS

2010-02-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

I've caught bits and pieces here and there of the enigmatic show LOST and watched part of Season 4 and decided I'd watch all of Season 6 (the last year) as it airs, so I've just finished with the most recent 4th ep on Hulu and I think LOST just flashed me its junk.

I have a little bad news for die-hard fans, so stop reading now if you don't want your hopes dashed. It seems that LOST may well fall into the trap that Ron Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica suffered (for which this blog was created to originally celebrate before that show imploded and I became a critic) - the dreaded deus ex machina.

Below I have clues to the final eps, with each major character getting an episode built around them - leading up to the replacement for Jacob as the story's ultimate goal (Much like the reboot of The Prisoner [my review here] was about James Caviezel's young idealistic man taking over for the tired old man played by Ian McKellen).

In a nutshell, LOST is being reduced to a good-vs-evil story and they couldn't have made it any more literal.

Smoke Monster Locke picks up the white stone off of the scale in Jacob's secret cave and tosses it off the island into the ocean. Get it? Jacob was good, Smoke Monster bad (now in Locke's body) ... and the scale represented the balance that existed before Ben was manipulated into killing Jacob.

Smoke Monster Locke (we got to see from his smoke monster POV at one point in the ep) is seducing Sawyer so he will end up being the Judas character no doubt - a bad boy to the last. We got to see the characters' names and numbers so that will be explained at some point - the whole numbers game they've dangled again and again. So for the next few eps real-time on the island (whatever that means there) bad things will happen to bring it all to a head now that the scale is tipped in favor of evil. This good vs. evil theme was explored thoroughly in Lexx during its 3rd season. Expect several major LOST characters to die.

Here is the link to my source for info on the upcoming eps (there may be a better source out there): ep guides ... and here is what the next eps have to offer according to that source [my notes in this color]:

S6-Ep5 Lighthouse - Hurley must convince Jack to accompany him on a mission, and Jin comes across an old acquaintance [Claire reintroduced]
S6-Ep6 Sundown - Sayid faces a difficult decision, and Claire sends a warning to the temple inhabitants [Sayid dies I bet]
S6-Ep7 Dr. Linus - Ben-centric of course [insight into why he's such a weasel?]
S6-Ep8 Recon - A Sawyer-centric episode [probably about his betrayal and death]
S6-Ep9 Ab Aeterno - A Richard Alpert-centric episode [Richard was a candidate who didn't measure up I'm guessing, hence his long tenure on the island]
S6-Ep10 The Package - A Sun/Jin-centric episode [watch, the couple will live to get off the island]
S6-Ep11 Happily Ever After - A Desmond-centric episode [time-travel explained by the interloper with a touch of Faraday I bet]
S6-Ep12 Everybody Loves Hugo - no info [Hurley's turn in the spotlight]
S6-Ep13 The Last Recruit - no info [my guess is it will be Kate]
S6-Ep14 The Candidate - no info [Jack, of course]

So through deduction it appears that all of the terrific chill-inducing strangeness of the show and the fascinating time-travel elements are going to be reduced to some cosmic need to maintain a balance between good and evil. Now since Jacob has appeared to Hurley in a dream (or as a spirit, whatever) is he like Yoda and more powerful in death? Is the white Polar Bear a representation of Jacob? Will the white rock turn into the bear and swim back to shore?

Science fiction fans love atmospherics and ideas. All you have to do is show us light-beam weapon, call it a phaser and we get it. Tell us there is some number sequence at the root of nature and/or the power behind the island and we get it - but we expect some explanation and for it to be creative. I, like many fans, would love for the mystery to be richly textured and goose-bump inducing when it is finally revealed - but I won't get my hopes up. I truly hope JJ Abrams doesn't let us down as badly as Moore did with BSG.

JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE STILL AMAZING

2010-01-31T16:00:00.001-08:00

John Lydon is one of the most magnetic performers I've ever seen (saw him with PIL in '88)

Best Joy Division song ever ... for better sound quality: here

Best live Siouxsie ever (Robert Smith of The Cure on quitar this tour)

The Orb - Fluffy Little Clouds

One of Cocteau Twins most ethereal

Cocteau Twins with a little bit of menace

Terrific acoustic version - Ian looked like a young Mick Jagger then

[watch the bass on this one]

load, check it, quick, re-write it ...

too ruff for some ...

... kinda light for these guys ...

No video but here are links to good audio tracks for two of my favorite Thrill Kill Kult songs -
StarMartyr and Badlife

THE INVADERS

2010-01-21T20:03:00.001-08:00

SyFy had a marathon of the old classic The Invaders the other day. Forgot what a terrific show that was. Tight story, good guest stars, knew what it set out to do.

HEROES - GAAHHH ... RETROVISION.TV

2010-01-21T02:31:00.000-08:00

Yikes, I write a post in praise of a really well-written Heroes ep a couple weeks back only to have the 2 follow-up episodes kinda suck ... well, the most recent ep really sucked. So, no more posts about Heroes [but I must mention that Heroes actress Ali Larter is a doll, met her again tonight]. I did find this great site that has lots of old sci-fi gems: Godzilla movies, original Outer Limits eps (not available in all countries) most look terrific, no commercials, just click on the tag cloud at right for your category ... awesomeness! RETROVISION.TV

ZE PLAN, ZE PLAN

2010-01-11T01:10:00.001-08:00

Okay, I finally saw Battlestar Galactica: The Plan tonight on its SyFy airdate and was pleasantly surprised. It is about the best cut-and-paste I've ever seen. Making Cavil the focus and the brilliance of actor Dean Stockwell is was gave it heft. My troubles with the overall story - particularly Ellen as the 5th hidden Cylon and the entire Oedipal nonsense to the Cavil-Ellen relationship (oh, and let's not forget model 7, the unseen Daniel) are well-documented on this site in post after post, but The Plan could not address those - being locked in as it was by the previous episodes.

This would have made a wonderful side-story during one of the long let's-sell-DVDs-to-the-scifi-nerds endlessly long hiatuses USA/SciFi exec Bonnie Hammer imposed upon BSG fans. Certainly it was miles better than the dumb and useless Razor miniseries. I was disappointed, however, that in The Plan there was no Roslin (oh, an extra's leg in one shot), no DeAnna (okay file footage in one shot), and that again it was so gritty and literal. Thankfully Ellen was hardly a presence. I knew I'd end up watching it eventually, and think the editors deserve awards for poring over all that footage of earlier eps to get their paste clips. Olmos did a terrific job with the direction - lot's of good reaction shots - especially when Cavil knifes the little boy. The whole idea that love is his real enemy was, er, not so good. Certainly there were problems - Cavil has his own little area of the Galactica complete with Hooker-Six and they regularly have little coffee klatches with a Simon, Doral and a Leoben ... hmmm

THE SNARK AT io9

2010-01-08T11:46:00.000-08:00

Now it's perfectly normal for there to be a difference of opinion about art - a painting, a film, a television show. But a couple of posts over at io9 have made me realize that what I really like about that site is its Gawker media design layout and images, and the writing much less. Rarely is there an article I actually want to read. Also, the clear Gen-X, Gen-Y and 00 age-range of the writers reveals itself too often - especially with their lame lists of bests and worsts (their age shows through their lack of inclusion of many superior or inferior works to which they've clearly never been exposed - true enthusiasts would seek them out regardless of age ... but I digress). Two recent posts over there trash the latest ep of Heroes, which I really liked. They don't get it. Lots of speculation about what should have been done in terms of offing this character or that, or which direction the story should take. What they don't understand, clearly, is how good writing tends to be either a journey or a full circle. The most illuminating and deep writing seems to follow the Hero's Journey archetype as delineated by scholar Joseph Campbell: the protagonist must step outside the circle of community/conformity and take literal and/or figurative journey of discovery and returns to his/her community and changed and enlightened individual. Hence, the story arc of Heroes Season 4 is returning the story to its roots, and the elements that put it on the map in the first place. All the pretentious snark in the world doesn't change the fact that the io9 trashing of Heroes Let It Bleed are simply wrong. From my own experience, there were at least 3 or 4 times I would do posts here on Galactica Variants while Battlestar Galactica was on air only to see a particular writer lift parts of my posts. Lazy writing, unimaginative writing, and, er, borrowed writing are the result when you're under a mandate to produce content I guess. Heroes is an uneven show, no doubt about it, but it has found its essence again (we'll see if that lasts) and the io9 snarks don't get it.

WELL-WRITTEN HEROES EP

2010-01-05T19:08:00.001-08:00

The mid-season premiere (Season 4, ep. 13, Let It Bleed) was extremely well-written by series creator Tim Kring . I loved it. Over the course of this 4th season the show has steadily veered back to where it began and it's exactly what I wanted: the evil Sylar, persecuted and misunderstood mutants, and the cheerleader as the fulcrum of all their fates.

I've really liked the new storyline with the cult-leader semi-villain Samuel as the device to bring focus to the mess the story had become in Seasons 2 and 3. The actor portraying Samuel, Robert Knepper, is terrific, as are many of the new secondary characters in the disjointed in space-and-time Twilight-Zoneish carnival in which they live/hide. There has definitely been a reboot to the show and I'm guessing that Mark Verheiden of Battlestar fame has been a guiding hand in this story-focusing and writing-honing process. The show once again has clarity, depth, humanity and menace. It feels much more adult than the past two seasons and never was that more clear than in the writing in Let It Bleed.

I could just gush and gush about bits of dialog and especially how again and again the dialog and situations took sharp turns from what appeared to be a straight walk into cliche. We saw archetypal situations throughout the 2-hour episode and were not only surprised at what people said and did but a bit astonished at the sophistication of the writing. Truly adult and in some cases very wise words. The cheerleader has now shown us how she's earned her stripes as the voice-of-conscience among this motley crew. This episode marks the restoration of Heroes and I certainly hope it portends to more like it. If you haven't seen it, you should watch it above on the Hulu embed. Visually, I've enjoyed the color-saturation and soft-focus and the tighter framing of shots - it has a more surreal feel this season.

THE STAR TREK LIST

2009-11-30T15:15:00.000-08:00

I re-watched the new JJ Abrams Star Trek film recently for the 2nd time and was not as happy with it as I was the first time I saw it [my IMDB review is here scroll down to bottom of page] ... which got me thinking about making a list of the best Star Trek - in all its forms. Now Star Trek was the first television I ever remember seeing. I was 3 when it first hit the airwaves and I am a purist for the original series. I remember I thought Spock was cool before I knew what cool was. And Kirk was dynamism personified. What made the show great, and a classic for the ages are the moral core to every strong storyline, the bold and vivid production design and colors, the great sound effects, the creative and progressive ideas about a potential future and how it would look and feel, the thoughtfulness of these archetypal characters, and the strength of the relationships among the crew of the USS Enterprise. Every iteration since the original has been a step down (or several).

So here is the list of the best:
1. The Original Television Series
2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
3. Galaxyquest [absolutely it deserves a place]
4. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
5. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
6. Star Trek (2009)
7. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
8. Star Trek: First Contact
9. Voyager (the final 2 seasons)
10. Deep Space Nine (the final story arc)
11. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
12. The Animated Series

Meh:
Star Trek: Generations

Here is the list of the worst:
1. Nemesis
2. Insurrection
3. Enterprise Series
4. The Next Generation Series
5. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Over time I will flesh out this post

THE PRISONER - EXPLAINED

2009-11-20T11:54:00.000-08:00

Many reviews were quite negative and a lot of people seemed to not understand the story. I thought it was terrific - a finely worked piece of art. Here is the explanation of the story for those who didn't get it:

Six (James Caviezel) in the real world was determined to figure out what he had been working on for the secret mega-corp headed by the Two character (Ian McKellen) - it turns out Two is an eccentric rich fellow who wants to fix broken people and constructed a Matrix-like Village in which these peoples' minds could live and prosper within the confines of the construct and its rules. Another person held the construct in their mind - the wife at the beginning and the doctor/love interest later ... and this person had to be asleep or the construct began to unravel (the holes). The whole point of the story was that Two wanted to replace himself and he cultivated Six because of his strong moral compass. The trials and tribulations Six went through were to test his mettle and by the end he proved himself and Two was able to move on. Six indeed became a prisoner, but a willing prisoner - bound by love.

IN HINDSIGHT, SO TRUE

2009-11-16T21:58:00.000-08:00

Click for >> Clip #2 ... 1:10 to 1:30 ... priceless

HEROES FINALLY WORTH WATCHING AGAIN

2009-11-04T12:39:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed Season 1 of Heroes but it just became incomprehensible and downright ridiculous as Seasons 2 and 3 unfolded ... there were so many new characters, time switch-backs, subplots, secret organizations and double-crosses that it just became laughable. After most episodes you found yourself going "who cares!?" Thankfully the powers-that-be seemed to find the edit button and have pared Season 4 down to size and returned the focus back to the original story (using a time-travel plot device and an interesting new Baltar-like hero/villain) ... and the show holds your interest again with Sylar the dark villain once more. If they would only write Claire's father's character out of the show! [And if they could move the scenes along more quickly - gads between commercials very little seems to happen]

V Returns Tonight on ABC

2009-11-03T17:06:00.000-08:00

The campy 80s sci-fi series V returns tonight on ABC. Sci-Fi Channel has been airing the old series in saturation and you can see why sci-fi wasn't taken very seriously for a long time there - when you only spend $12 on your special effects, sets and costumes you get shlock. Early word is the reboot is good.

Around L.A. some trickster put up these signs on the bus stop ads (funny):

SORRY EJO, GONNA SKIP 'THE PLAN'

2009-10-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

The review on io9 of the video release of the telefilm The Plan - the "last" installment of the Ron D Moore version of Battlestar Galactica confirms all of my worst fears. I'm going to take their recommendation and ignore it - there's no point in reheating and making a new sauce for spoiled food.

UFO

2009-10-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

This was a fun show. The theme is great (Hawaii 5-0ish) ... supposedly UFO is being remade too and they'll screw it up for sure (unless Bowie's son [Moon] or Coppola's son [CQ] directs - they get the zeitgeist) ... I've got my own thoughts on the reality of UFOs here ... more on the original series here

... and here's a fun new lamp for alien abductee believers

io9's BSG THE PLAN TEASERS

2009-10-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

Bah. My worst fears realized. I had hoped the last installment of Battlestar, The Plan, would redeem to some extent the gawdawful ending to the series but these new io9 teasers utterly negate that hope. Instead of getting inside the Cylons' heads and seeing things as they do it looks as if its soap-opera time and they'll merely replay scenes we've already seen (Doral blows up, Cavil tells Boomer "one shot in the head," etc.) with the priority being to connect-more-dots to flesh out the tortured, convoluted mess of Ron Moore's finale. Ellen as the Fifth - it's the Pam wakes up in Dallas of our era.