Shmatta, shmatta, shmatta

13 04 2014

1. Sometimes free  cost too much.

Exhibit A: Under My Skin preview. Boy o boy o boy. The actors were. . . fine, given the script, but that script? Holy hell.

2. I’d stopped bitching about Bones because I’d given up expecting anything better than it had become. I still watched it, though, out of some, lingering, interest.

No more. It’s sliding down, losing whatever bits of charm it had retained. When Fox decides to lay those tired bones down I’ll probably watch the finale, but between now and that day in 2025, I’m out.

3. Oh thou fookin’ Zeus! DO NOT CUT YOUR NAILS ON THE TRAIN! In which of the multiverses is it OKAY TO CUT YOUR NAILS ON THE TRAIN?

None of them! That’s how many: NONE OF THEM!

4. To end on a good note: I finally got out my bike to ride to the gym yesterday.

Last year, I rode all winter, but this year the snow gave me the excuse I needed not to bundle up against the cold.

I’d been biking at the gym—(ma-)lingering health issues have kept me off the treadmill—but I’d much rather peddle my way somewhere than nowhere.

And look, I even refrained from using the requisite Talking Heads lyric. . . .


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Another one bites the dust

15 03 2014

I am an extremely lazy television viewer.

Not in the sense of not moving from the t.v. my external monitor, but in that I’d rather watch old shows over and over again than deal with the uncertainty of new shows. I watch to unwind, not get wound up.

There’s nothing wrong with such inertial sensibilities, at least as regards t.v. (and, it must be said, movies), but it does tend toward staleness. Thus, the only way to expand the comfortable old choices is to watch some new stuff.

Eureka worked out; Fringe did not. I’ve liked most of Waking the Dead, at least what’s available on Netflix, but it does seem like it headed toward MI-5 kill-everyone melodramatic cynicism. (Wallender is all right, tho’ a bit predictably dreary; don’t know that I’ll be revisiting that one, tho’ I may watch new episodes.)  And I’ve got some ‘new’ shows in my queue— Battlestar Galatica, Orange is the New Black, Top of the Lake, and a coupla’ other Brit-drams—which I’ll get to. Eventually.

Oh, and Leverage? Big enthusiastic fist-bumps for Leverage! Yes, formulaic and cartoonish, plot-wise, but since the show doesn’t take itself too seriously and the characters are witty and human and weird, well, big enthusiastic fist-bumps for Leverage!

So, anyway, another new show I was watching was Agents of SHIELD. I thought Thor was dumb, haven’t been interested in Iron Man/Captain America/The Hulk, zipped through an awful lot of the Avengers, and I have never been nor am I now a Marvel or DC Comic geek. (I only know about that distinction because of what I’ve read on TNC’s blog.) Still, sci-fi, strange tech: I could be up for it.

And so I watched. Some episodes I liked, some I didn’t, but I wasn’t so bothered as to stop watching. It was kind of mediocre, but I wasn’t so invested in the Marvel world that any plot problems really bothered me. It was slow in bringing everything together, but what the hell.

Well now I’m at to-hell-with-it. No, it wasn’t the poisonously oblique plot lines or the rushed intensity of the characters relationships to one another.

It was the beatings. The torture.

I’m not generally bothered by onscreen violence, and there isn’t overly-much in AoS—the expected battles of good-vs-bad guys—nor its it terribly graphic. That’s fine.

What’s not fine is the good guys beating the shit out of people they have in custody and having that be okay.

A few episodes ago Good-Guy Ward got the information he needed from a perp by threatening to have him sucked out of the plane.

This was not a problem for any of the other Good Guys.

In a more recent episode, another suspect was beaten (the Good Gal beating him was only stopped because she was needed elsewhere), then threatened with having his tongue pulled out and sundry other torments by yet more Good Guys.

Again, not a problem for the Good Guys. Which pretty much makes them not-Good Guys.

(I keep hitting the wrong key and typing “Good Goys”. Which, I guess, most of them are. Goys, I mean. Definitely not Good.)

This wouldn’t be a problem for me if this were all somehow to demonstrate the shadiness of the Good Guys and the moral peril involved in trying to be Good while sometimes doing not-Good. But that’s not how it’s set up: we’re supposed to cheer how bad-ass our Good Guys are.

Fuck that.

The Clairvoyant is bad because she (and, c’mon, she’s gotta be a she) engages in the crudest form of ends-justifying-the-means consequentialism. SHIELD has put the earth in danger and thus can’t be relied upon; someone else is gonna do what’s gotta be done to protect the joint.

Which makes her different how, exactly, from the Good Guys? Why shouldn’t I take her side?

Screw ’em all; I’m done.

So now I have space for another show. Maybe Friday Night Lights? Or how about Breaking Bad? At least we know (almost) everyone on that show is bad, right?


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The Sneakers theme

30 11 2013

Are you watching Leverage?

You should be watching Leverage. Good actors, good characters, good dialogue, good humor, good-hearted (if sometimes sketchy, somewhat schematic) plots.

And capers! It’s a caper show! Yay capers!

Streaming on Netflix. G’watchit.


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The birds all sing as if they knew

10 11 2013

Yeah, they did it. Surprise, surprise: did anyone really think a mere church burning would stop them?

I’m talking about Brennan and Booth on Bones, of course. They got married. Of course. After numerous obstacles (because psycho-killer Pelant wasn’t enough of one) they married in a white tent, with Cindy Lauper singing “At Last.” Of course.

It wasn’t terrible, as these things go, but utterly entirely predictably predictable. I mean, why introduce the former-priest pal-o’-Booth at the beginning of the season unless he’d be the one to perform the ceremony?

Oh, about that: If these two were so tight, why didn’t we meet Mister Former Priest Bartender before this? And where were Jared and Russ? Did these brothers not even merit a mention?

Bitch bitch bitch, I know. I’m not hate-watching Bones—really! I’m not!—but it is true that I’m grumpy after almost every episode. Why am I even bothering?

One, even though it’s nowhere near as good as it was in the first 4 or 5 seasons, it’s still not bad. The plots have gotten pro forma, but the writing is still pretty good.

Two, I like the characters. Hodgins is my favorite, and I like his relationship with Angela (even if he is a bit too moony), and I like Cam quite a bit. Booth & Brennan may both be a bit stale, and Caroline has been softened too much, but she still gets some good zingers.

Sweets is all right, still slightly annoying, and Daisy is still very annoying—which kinda endears her to me. The rest of the interns are, whatever, interns, and it seems as if they dropped Mr. Southern Gothic from the line-up, which is fine with me. (I liked the actor just fine, but Edgar-Allan-Poe they overheated the character’s backstory.)

Three come Friday night I am not at all ambitious, so sitting down to watch Bones, even in its exhausted state, works for me. I’m mildly entertained, which most Fridays is enough.

That last may be the most important reason I’m still watching the show. There are other shows I will theoretically check out (Orange is the New Black, Scandal, Top of the Lake, The Bridge, Misfits), but I’m just really. . . lazy when it comes to getting to know a new cast & set of storylines.

Anyway, I keep thinking This season will be the last, so the coda-reason is that I want to be there not just at the end, but through the end.

If it ever ends. *Sigh*


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Better run run, run run run away

20 10 2013

Pelant is dead. Finally.

The ending was, I dunno, anti-climactic? thin? underdeveloped and over-determined? Yeah, all of those—but at least it’s an end.

I was going to skip this episode of Bones, then decided just to skip ahead to see if Pelant got his or got away yet again. Only after I saw that he’d been shot dead did I go back and watch the entire mediocre episode.

Should I rant yet again on what a bullshit bad guy Pelant was? That turning him into the man who was both nowhere and everywhere, a super-evil super-genius was mechanistic and boring? Oh, and turning him into yet another Brennan-obsessive (in an attempt to add psychological depth to his non-character?) just made me miss the far more human, and humanly terrible, Howard Epps?

Maybe not, tho’ I will offer a mini-bitch of “enough with the geniuses”—they’ve been on my bad side all week.

The plot, such as it was, did introduce the possibility of a New Bad Guy, or, as Pelant suggested, Bad Broad. What a breakthrough: from mastermind male serial killer to master (or mistress?) -mind female serial killer!

Whatever. However it plays out, it’d be nice if the producers don’t cock it up the way they did with Pelant.


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Thinking the point was step on every crack

9 10 2013

I’ve been dilatory (cause: laziness) in continuing my reviews of Fringe.

That’s because (in addition to laziness) I did not continue watching Fringe.

There are basic leaps one needs to make whenever watching science fiction (or police/security procedurals), and for the most part I leap away. An FBI agent has a math genius brother who’s able to fulfill his teaching and research obligations to his university while also romancing his former grad student and chalking out formulae to help solve crimes? Okay. An FBI agent who partners with a socially awkward forensic anthropologist genius and her wacky pack o’ squints and their cool tools in order to solve crimes? Sure. An FBI agent whose sister was stolen by aliens when he was a boy paired with a rationalist medical doctor-slash-FBI agent to chase down oddities and supernaturalities in order to discover the truth out there? Sign me up. Hop hop hop.

An FBI agent who partners with a lobotomized genius who accidentally killed a lab assistant and whose been locked away in an asylum for 17 years as a result but now runs a lab in a spare basement room at Harvard in order to chase down oddities and cross-dimensionalities (while romancing that lobotomized genius’s son)? Wellll. . . .

I like the characters, I really do.  Olivia seemed like a real person, and I like(d) her relationship with Charlie and Philip. Nina Sharp is a fabulous cypher, and William Bell is, well, Leonard Nimoy, so, okay. Astrid, the FBI agent-turned-new-lab-assistant, is pleasant, but mostly a non-entity. Peter’s hinted-at background as a criminal matters not at all—and no, one doesn’t need to be a criminal to know dodgy-yet-conveniently-helpful small-timers—and his ambivalence about hanging around his head-chopped dad is meant to connote a kind of agony but shrinks into mere irritation. Still, one can hop along with these two.

The problem, really, is with Walter. He was apparently a real sonuvabitch pre-brain scoop, but while he retains his genius and enough of his memory, he’s mostly just pathetically creepy. He has a hankering for weed and candy, keeps a cow in his lab, and shuffles quite convincingly between his burbling beakers. He giggles at the thought of some of his experiments and appreciates the weirdness the Fringe Division throws his way, but coupled with his constant mispronunciations of Astrid’s name and his keening for his son’s love, his own weirdness comes off as less lovably eccentric than, well, pathetically creepy.

As I write that, I wonder if the show wouldn’t have done better to have pushed even further on the creepiness. The other characters periodically voice their concerns about his trustworthiness, but more because he’s pathetic than that he’s creepy. Had he retained some of those characteristics which made him such a piece of work before, Walter might have become something much more compelling than a quivering mass of goo in a sweater.

This is not a great leap (!) on my part: Alternate-universe Walter, who retains all parts of his brain, is an arrogant, vengeful leader out to destroy those who are destroying his world. He turned out to be far more complex than goo-Walter, and offered a far better character through which to consider how far one should go in order to defend oneself—and one’s world.

Still, as good as “Walternate” was, the extended stay in the alternate universe in season 3 leached away a lot of my enthusiasm for the show. I like dips into alternate universes (one of the best episodes of the terrible Star Trek: Enterprise was bad-ass Enterprise) and well as skips across the timeline (at which Star Trek: Voyager excelled), but I do not react well to permanent shifts in the time/storyline. At all.

I thoroughly enjoyed Eureka, but when they time-shifted the series in the fourth season, I stopped watching. When the fifth season hit Netflix, I did go back and rewatch the entire series, but that shift was something I had to get past. I did—Eureka‘s comedy-drama sensibility helped—but had the show not acknowledged, through the necessity of the characters themselves constantly managing that shift, that they had just messed with something good, I would have stayed gone.

Fringe was hampered in this shift-management insofar as Peter was the only one aware of the previous timeline. The other characters apparently come around (I did dip in and out of season 4), but, coupled with the cross-posting of “Fauxlivia” (yeeks) in the regular universe, I just thought, This shit is too much.

And the fifth season? Haven’t seen it, not least because the setting has been shifted once again, this time into the future, where our plucky gang has to save the world from, apparently, genocidal Observers. Whatever.

I’m not saying I won’t go back and finish it out. But that will only happen once I no longer care so much about those characters, and thus am no longer so bothered by the artless manipulation of them.


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There is more than one of everything

3 08 2013

Two things.

1. I not only don’t mind spoilers, I kinda prefer them.

I don’t know when this happened, when I began to prefer to know how things work out rather than just waiting to find out, but now I do.

There’s more to this than that, but, for now, this’ll do.

2. I’ve been watching and more-or-less-enjoying Fringe.

I got interested in Fringe maybe a year ago, when I’d see teasers for the latest episode on Hulu. At first, I ignored it, then I thought, Huh, that might be interesting, as I flicked past, then thought, Huh, if that shows up on Netflix, I think I’ll give ‘er a go.

It showed up on Netflix.  I’m giving ‘er a go.

And while I did do a bit of skim-spoiling of the show on Wikipedia, I decided to, y’know, actually watch the show to find out what happens.

There are some things I like about it and some things which are quite ridiculous (even for the grim sci-fi/conspiracy subgenre in which it exists), but I mostly like it. I liked X-Files before it went off the rails, and Fringe clearly owes a great deal to pre-derailed X.

I also thought, prior to tonight, that while it is in many ways a more sophisticated show than X-Files, it is a lesser one.

And then the last scene of the episode. I was not expecting it. I think I stopped breathing for a moment or two.

I don’t know why, I can think of so many reasons why it shouldn’t have stopped me, but stop me it did.

I won’t spoil it for you; I was glad I hadn’t spoiled it for myself.


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Do whatcha gonna do

14 07 2013

Late afternoon and all I could think of was how sticky I was. An ice cube where my cleavage should be wasn’t going to cut it.

Time again for the a/c.

The cats reacted predictably, giving me reproving looks along the lines of what took you so long, cheapskate? They’ll get theirs, tomorrow, when I turn off the air and open the windows and abandon them for my office.

Anyway, I finished watching Eureka last night and have moved on to Fringe. Eureka will likely make it into that round of shows which I re-watch because I like the characters and I like the dialogue and I’m having that kind of day or week in which I like knowing how things turn out.

This actually gets in the way, the liking knowing how things turn out: I re-watch old Bones and Numb3ers and Buffy and Waking The Dead and shy away from movies I’d probably like and shows which, once I’ve seen them, I’ll want to see them again.

I did, on dmf’s suggestion, watch Wallander, and I’ve seen a chunk of the first series of Luther, but too often I’m unwilling to stretch myself beyond the familiar. I’ve heard good things about The Bridge and Orange is the New Black, but will I bother with something that might catch me unawares?

That’s really it, isn’t it: I don’t like to be caught out, and that dislike has metastasized beyond defensive behavior and into defensive viewing. Which, to be frank, is silly.

Oh, I don’t have a problem deepening all kinds of bitsy issues, but, honestly, some days I do just need to get over myself. I fret about stagnating and changing my defaults and on and on and then I fret over watching a fucking television show.

Which, to be frank, is silly.

So I’ve watched the first episode of Fringe, and it’s sci-fi-y and police-procedural-y and it stars Joshua Jackson and Blair Brown and Kirk Acevedo who I like and Anna Torv who I don’t know but who has great eyes and—wait while I put my hand where my cleavage should be—Lance Reddick, who is always the most interesting man on the screen.

(He lives in Brooklyn. My chances of running into him are nil and my chances of making any kind of impression on him are less than nil but oh my. My oh my.)

Fringe and Lance Reddick and sarcastic cats in the conditioned air: it ain’t much, but in the bowels of July, it’s all right.


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Brothers in arms

23 06 2013

It’s a modest little show, charming without being precious.

Eureka. I’m (re-)watching Eureka.

I’d happened upon the show at either Hulu or Netflix, watched it here and there, skipping around enough to keep loose track. I liked it, that’s all.

I don’t know if it would qualify as sci-fi. I guess so, insofar as it doesn’t really fit into any other genre—even with a sheriff at the center, it doesn’t really count as a police procedural—and with all the  future-tech, it is fictionalized science. Anyway, I like science fiction, I like clever writing, and I like odd characters.

And on second viewing, I’m latching on to the characters. This isn’t deep stuff by any means, but I’m enjoying how they relate to one another. There’s romance and friendship and antagonism and collegiality and over time it’s. . . nice to see how it all plays out.

The primary relationship is probably that between Sheriff Carter and Global Dynamics head Allison Blake, with a close second that between Carter and his daughter, Zoe, but for me, the central relationship is that between Carter and Henry.

It’s a real friendship between these two, and the actors, Colin Ferguson and Joe Morton, have good friend-chemistry. More than that, they acknowledge that they’re friends, and note on regular occasions how important that friendship is to both of them.

‘Buddies’ aren’t anything new to television, but these guys aren’t buds: they don’t drink beer and knock each other the shoulders and misdirect whatever affection they have toward one another toward, say, a basketball game or a car. They like each other, and that’s enough.

I think that’s one of the reasons I so like Numb3rs. At the center of that show is the relationship between the brothers, Don and Charlie. Don’s a bit of a hard-ass and the genius Charlie is annoyingly needy, but they check in with one another, as brothers. They look out for each other, get on each other’s nerves, and are still working through the weirdness of their childhood relationship.

It’s not a one-time thing, the working on the relationship, and I think that’s what sets apart Eureka and Numb3rs from buddy shows. It’s just there, from episode to episode, and sometimes it’s frayed and sometimes it needs work, but the friendships are demonstrated in their constancy, not in some grand epiphany.

It’s nice to see that, in men. And for them, too.


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And lay all your lazybones down

18 05 2013

I’m not gonna talk about the final episode of Bones.

Why not? Because I didn’t watch it.

Oh, sure, I skimmed through it, and watched the last few minutes, but I hate this latest psycho and I hate this storyline and I triple-hate the goddamned wrench-everything-out-of-joint cliffhanger.

Pelant, that’s the psycho killer’s name. Had to look it up. He’s horrible.

Yeah, I know: psycho killer. But I mean, he’s horrible as the resident psycho because he’s like goddamned Freddie from the Friday the 13th pics or, even more, like Stefano DiMera from Days of Our Lives, springing back into the picture, just because.

(I was actually a devoted As the World Turns fan for a number of years back in the day, but I watched enough Days to know the score. And, of course, DiMera kept returning, so it wasn’t hard to remember him as an über bad guy.)

And that, precisely, is the problem with Pelant: he’s an über bad guy. He’s a computer genius who’s able to kill a bunch of people and get away with it. He frames Brennan for murder, and while Team Jefferson ends up proving her innocence, Pelant is somehow able to pass himself off as an Egyptian (!) citizen and get released from custody and into the arms of Egyptian officials, easy-peasy.

Then he returns (of course), drugs Hodgins and Angela and threatens their baby, then finds a job at a security firm, from where he steals all of Hodgin’s money (by almost blowing up an Afghan school for girls—don’t ask), kills more people, escapes from this high-security joint, and then kills a vet in order to . . . oh, christ, am I really recounting this?

Then he comes back to menace Team Jefferson and inflict psychological torture by splitting up Brennan and Booth.

Why not just have the guy go BwwaaHAHAHAHAH! I have you in my evil clutches now!

Seriously.

Bones has had serial bad guys before: Howard Epps over seasons 1 & 2, the Widow’s Son in 3 & 4, (and the Gravedigger! I forgot about the Gravedigger, across seasons 2-5) and then the boring sniper guy in season 6, and now this guy, nerdy superkiller Pelant.

You’d think that it would be hard to top a ritualistic cannibalistic serial killer in the no-fucking-way department, but at least in that theme, they allowed for the requisite amount of humor, and, in the end, they didn’t bother dignifying the guy with a name. He was just some creepy dude who Booth shot and killed, the end.

Brennan once referred to Epps as a “creepy serial killer” (actually, in explaining why she broke his wrist, she said something along the lines of “he touched me with his creepy serial killer hands”), and that about sums it up. He’s introduced as a guy about to be put to death who  insists upon his innocence; by the end up the episode it’s clear that he’s played the team and that he’s even worse than first thought.

One of the things I really liked about this storyline was that, in the episode in which Epps escapes from jail and comes after the Jeffersonian team (of course!), his constant invocations of his genius are undercut. At one point Zack reminds Booth that Epps isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.

Yes, exactly: Epps might be very smart, but he ain’t no superman.

That’s what I’ve been missing in this whole stupid Pelant storyline: cutting him down to size. If he’s just going to pop back up after every blow, then why bother even making him a human being? He’s a cartoon psychopath, an avatar of evil, and utterly uninteresting for his demon meep meep ways: there’s no hook, no dimensions, just the flat sketch of a none-too-clever plot device.

Bones will be back next season—have to pull ’em back from that cliff!—and I’ll probably watch it. But where I once used to enjoy the show, now I’m just enduring it.


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