Archive for September, 2007
Bionic
Back to You
Fox, Wednesday nights. The newest comedy from Kelsey Grammer, having shaken off Frasier for the first time in over 20 years, he’s back playing a news anchor in Pittsburgh. From Wikipedia…
“Chuck Darling (Grammer) and Kelly Carr (Patricia Heaton) were co-anchors of a Pittsburgh news program that had great on-screen chemistry, despite constant quarreling off-screen. However, Chuck left to take a job elsewhere. After an embarrassing comment he made resulting in his firing from a large market LA newscast, Chuck has returned to Pittsburgh after 10 years to become anchor on the newscast he originally left. Chuck also learns that he is the father of Carr’s 10-year-old daughter.”
Absolutely awful. Terrible. Spectacularly bad. Maybe one joke in the whole episode that will raise a smile. And even then, a grudging one. Leads into the equally awful ’Til Death on Fox, meaning that it’s in good company. I know comedy is hard, but surely Grammer should be able to recognise how badly this one stinks.
Bionic Woman
NBC, Wednesday nights. Straight into Wikipedia…
“Bartender Jaime Sommers struggles to make ends meet in San Francisco, California, while serving as a surrogate mom to her teenage sister. Nearly killed in a car accident, Jaime is saved by a cutting-edge operation — performed by her boyfriend, Will Anthros — that leaves her with advanced bionic prosthetics and implants with extraordinary new strength, among other artificially enhanced gifts. Now, however, Jaime must figure out how best to use her new abilities while embracing her new bionic identity.”
This could have been great, and there’s been no shortage of money spent on it, but it’s really quite average. There’s a big fight scene in the rain that feels so staged, like they’re merely going through a set of choreographed motions rather than having a real fight, and that’s really what the whole show feels like. It could just be because the first episode of a Bionic Woman show obviously has to explain to you how she becomes bionic, and you therefore already know how most of it is going to go, but the writing and acting just feels very flat. Might pick up with time, I’d certainly give it another couple of episodes to see how it goes, but it’s not the big opener they needed.
Shades
I finally got lamp shades for the hall and the back porch, ending a search which started back when I got the house. They’re not what I was looking for, settling instead for a few cheap ones first seen months ago, but it makes such a difference to have them up rather than bare light bulbs. With the clocks up, and some more pictures on the walls, it’s the finishing touches that really make the place seem more like home than it did before.
Superbad
Tremendous fun, and the better of the two Judd Apatow involved movies to come out this year (Knocked Up being the other). Jonah Hill takes a lot of credit for making it what it is, he’s just funny to look at, before he even says anything. But it’s the two cops that steal the show, writer Seth Rogen (the star of Knocked Up) and Bill Hader. Great music, grounded in reality (they all really could have gone to your school), and McLovin will become a film icon. IMDB. 4/5.
Pilot
Chuck
NBC, Monday nights. It’s a really hard one to boil down into a couple of sentences, so I’m just going to let Wikipedia do it for me…
“Chuck Bartowski is a socially awkward twenty-something who works as a computer expert at the Nerd Herd (a parody of “Geek Squad”) at his local Buy More (a parody of “Best Buy”), a local electronics retailer (a CompUSA store was used), with his best friend, Morgan Grimes. Chuck’s sister, Ellie, is a doctor who is constantly looking out for his best interests and wants to help him find a girlfriend. On the night of his birthday party, Chuck receives an e-mail from his former Stanford University roommate, Bryce Larkin, who is now a “rogue” CIA agent. When he opens it, he unwittingly downloads an entire server of sensitive data, once only available to the Government of the United States, into his brain. Both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency want the intelligence returned to them and dispatch agents of their own, Major John Casey and Sarah Walker, respectively, to retrieve the data. Because the disk with the government information breaks, Chuck experiences flashes of memory activated by certain subliminal triggers, he must use the knowledge he now possess to help the government thwart assassins and international terrorists, thereby upending his previously uneventful life.”
This was one of the, if not the, best of the new season pilots that I saw. The whole premise is completely ridiculous, but it’s executed with enough flair and with a strong enough cast that it’s highly enjoyable. How they’re going to manage to keep it going for x number of seasons however, I have no idea. It seems like the plot idea could have made a good two hour movie, but having him somehow go out every week and stop another assassination attempt or terrorist attack thanks to the information in his head is going to be stretching the credibility probably a little too far.
Journeyman
NBC, Monday nights. This always just sounded like it was going to be a Quantum Leap rip-off, since it’s about a man travelling back in time helping people. But from the pilot, it’s actually not like that at all. From the big W…
“The series centers around Dan Vasser, a normal man who, for an unknown reason, begins jumping back in time. He soon learns that each series of jumps follows the life of a person whose destiny he seems meant to change, although it doesn’t always turn out for the better. While in the past, Dan reconnects with Livia Beale, his ex-fiancée, whom he lost in a plane crash. And Dan may find that Livia has a secret life of her own.”
I was actually pleasantly surprised by this. I liked it when the Livia story had it’s own little twist, rather than it just being this guy pining for his dead girlfriend. And I liked it when at the end of the episode he managed to prove to his wife that he really was going back in time, rather than it being a continuous story where he has to explain his disappearances all the time. I did think it was a bit silly when he sat down in a bar with his friends from ten years ago and they didn’t really notice that he was any different (if I were to do that people would wonder who the hell I was). But on the whole, it shows good promise, if you’re willing to keep up with another weekly drama with a running story.
Reaper
The CW, Tuesday nights. As always, here’s the pedia…
“On Sam’s 21st birthday, his parents are behaving very strangely and Sam himself is seeing hellish visions and experiencing odd events. His father (Andrew Airlie) eventually explains that they had promised their firstborn child to the Devil (Ray Wise) because Sam’s father was very sick. Although the couple intended to cheat the devil by having no children, this plan goes awry when Satan convinces their doctor to lie and tell the couple that they cannot conceive in exchange for wiping his gambling debts clean. Sam is born shortly thereafter.
After informing him of his fate, Satan explains to Sam that he must serve as his bounty hunter, tracking down souls that have escaped from Hell and sending them back using his new powers (which have included telekinesis and electrical powers) and vessels (with a Italian inscription reading: “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” / “Leave all hope, you who enter”) specially designed for each job (such as a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner). Although Sam initially balks, Satan tells him that should he refuse, then Sam’s mother’s soul is forfeit. Unwilling to sacrifice his mother and convinced that he is doing good in the world by tracking down evil souls, Sam accepts his fate and, with the help of his slacker friends, begins his new life tracking down the corrupted souls trying to escape their own eternal rewards.”
This got great reviews before the pilot aired, and I’m really not sure why. It was really only very average, with a promising concept let down by what can only be described as dull writing. Ray Wise is fun as Satan, but you get the feeling that the writers thought the jokes were hilarious (a Dirt Devil as the first vessel, I’m sure they were splitting their sides), when in reality they just seem lazy. As is always the case, it’s hard to tell how a show is going to turn out from just one episode, but this isn’t one I got to the end of and immediately thought everyone should see.
Wednesday, September 26th 2007 at 11:16 pm / TV / Permalink / Post Comment »
Way
No Way Out, starring Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman. It was on Sky, and I just recorded it on a whim because it sounded good from the description. A huge surprise, all the things you’re expecting from the start just never turn out the way you think they will, which was just great. But Costner is just so unwatchable and the 80’s synth soundtrack makes the thing feel so dated. Unlike American Psycho where the 80’s pop music was used for good, here it’s just laughably bad. Definitely the highlight of the film weekend though, although only just. 3/5.
Shoot
Continuing my run of average films this weekend, I go and see Shoot ’Em Up. I was looking forward to this one, because it sounded great from the description, but it’s really just a 90 minute Bugs Bunny cartoon, complete with carrots. And you know how in a Bugs Bunny cartoon there’s no real tension when Elmer Fudd or Wile E. Coyote is chasing him? Well that’s what it’s like here. It’s too easy for Clive Owen’s character, there’s never any real danger. But it sure looks good, is inventive, raises a smile or two, and the cast seem to enjoy hamming it up. It just could have been so much more. 2.5/5.
Oh yea, and I turned 28.
Psycho
Continuing Christian Bale weekend, American Psycho. I don’t know why people love this film so much, it’s so average. There are many great scenes, the best of which involve 80’s pop in some form or another. The Hip to Be Square scene is a total standout. But the end is a total cop out, not to mention hugely confusing. Most of the rest of the film is all over the place. Bale, is of course, excellent. But I wasn’t half bored by the end. 2.5/5 I think.
Yuma
3:10 To Yuma was hated by the other two members of the group that went to see it, but I kinda thought it was OK. The scenery was spectacular, and it’s really well shot, with good cowboy fun. And Christian Bale is always compelling. But the leader of the enemy gang was ridiculous and so obviously gay, and I guess it depends on whether or not you believe that Russell Crowe’s character would do what he does at the end. A hard one to score. 2.5/5 probably.
Charlie
I mention the Ebert thing to Graham and he lets me know about another project doing the same thing with Charlie Rose. Now I was introduced to Charlie’s interviews on the DVD for Rushmore, where they had a segment of him interviewing Bill Murray. Unlike most US television interviews, there’s no style over substance - it’s just a table, a black background, a good interviewer and comfortable guests. And comfortable guests open up and talk about things they wouldn’t normally. Like Aaron Sorkin who tells all about why he left NBC, or Jason Alexander, who talks all about Seinfeld salary negotiations and explains why paying them as much as they did was the worst thing for television they could ever have done. You learn things, you see a side of celebrities you wouldn’t normally see. And hey, if you’re into US or world politics and want to see some intimate chats with various important politicians too - then you’ll be right at home (although I’m shallow, so I stick with the celebs).
Ebert
We’ve started to hit that stage of the internet where storage is cheap enough and broadband is pervasive enough that it’s possible for people to store a whole crazy boatload of video online and push it out to whoever wants it. This means that the smart media companies are starting to realise that they can take all the thousands of hours of video they have sitting in vaults, digitise it, and get it online for easy access. The really smart media companies are doing this for free, paying for it through advertising.
Roger Ebert is somebody who seemed to understand what the Internet could do for him a long time ago, all his written reviews have been online for years, and his TV show, Ebert & Roeper, has long been available as a podcast, albeit an audio only one. Well now there’s The Balcony Archive, a collection of 5,000 movie reviews taken from both Siskel & Ebert and Ebert & Roeper TV shows. It sounds daft, but it is kinda cool to be able to go back and watch reviews of films that would be later seen as classics, like Die Hard or The Shawshank Redemption (both of which I’d link to, but I can’t work out how to do it through their flash interface). I’m sure the work to get all these online was long and painful, but it’s more than worth it, and the completist and archivist in me just likes the fact that all these things are just there, ready to be watched at the click of a mouse.
Motorway
The British motorway network is actually quite impressive. I drove back from London to Hamilton today, an almost 400 mile journey that took me around 7 hours. It would have been less, but I got stuck in roadworks on the M1 when leaving London that left me crawling along at a snails pace for quite a while. I did the whole thing in one go, only stopping to get fuel around the half way stage. The wonder of sat nav kept me pointing in the right direction (although granted, once I got onto the motorway it’s not particularly complex, pretty much just go straight north), and The Beatles, Queen and some 70’s Disco kept me entertained in the CD player.
It’s a lonely journey, I’m not sure I could be a truck driver constantly going up and down that route all my life, and not just inside the car but outside it as well. The further you get north, and especially when you get into Scotland, the traffic on the motorway really dwindles down to hardly anything, which is just great when there’s three lanes to play with. It seems that nobody wants to visit this end of the country.
I don’t mind driving long distances like that at all, and felt just fine when I got out of the car at the end. There is a small part of me that would want to drive from one end of the country to the other, just to say that I’ve done it.
Picadilly
Picadilly Circus. Like Garth says in Wayne’s World, “what a shitty circus”.
It’s a Times Square wannabe of course, but it’s barely in the same league, let alone challenging it for the top spot.
York
Travelling down to London this weekend as Andrea moves down for her masters year at university, and stopped along the way in York (where her sister resides) in order to break the journey into more manageable chunks. Once there, we took a walk into the centre of the city to get some food and stretch our legs. Andrea has been there before, but I’ve not, so it was basically a beeline for York Minister. Good God, that’s a big church. If only the time and effort had been put into something less… imaginary. I would like to go inside, just to get a better feel for the ridiculous lengths people will go to in order to worship their chosen deity, but a proper visit will be required to get the best of the place.
What did it occur to me though is that I have now been to both York and New York. I wonder if this is a pattern that I can continue elsewhere. Is there such a place as Zealand?
Smarties
With Andrea heading off to university next week, she’s not going to be around on my actual birthday (23rd September fact fans), so it was decided that today would be my official fake birthday. Rather than the normal slap up gourmet meal, instead I had a full kids birthday party. There was mini-cheese burgers (these were good to hold in your hand in pretend that you were a giant), sausages on sticks, sticks with cheese and pickled onion, mini sausage rolls, rice crispy cake, cupcakes and little marshmallows dipped in chocolate with smarties on the top. It was a veritable feast and far more food than we could realistically handle.
This was of course followed by party games, from pin the tail on the donkey (or reindeer, as the picture became) which was an absolute dead heat, to pass the parcel (see if you can work a way to play that with just two people). As the birthday boy, I won them all by default.
It may sound daft, but a silly birthday party like that is going to be far more memorable in the years to come than if we’d done something more befitting of my age. A hearty round of applause for Andrea for putting together something that far exceeded any of my expectations. It was awesome.
Ringtone
Also in the Apple announcement last week was the fact that you could now buy ringtones for your iPhone from the iTunes Music Store for 99 cents. As long as you’ve already bought the track itself from them. Oh yea, and as long as it’s included in the 500,000 songs that qualify.
So let me get this right, I already own the song, and can play it at any time I want just by hitting play or copying it to my iPhone and playing it on there. But now I’m expected to pay more in order to cut most of the song out and have it play automatically when my phone is receiving a call, rather than manually. So I’m paying for what exactly? The convenience of hearing only the middle of a song at random points throughout the day, rather than the whole song any time I want?
There must be something in the water over in Cupertino.
Fat
Run, Fat Boy, Run, genuinely better than expected British comedy. No real surprises, but some proper laughs, a great cast (Dylan Moran and Hank Azaria particularly) and written and directed with enough style to make you care whether or not he makes it in the end. 3.5/5.
Usermesh
usermesh.com, usermesh.net and usermesh.org.
All registered by me.
It’s a long, hard slog coming up with domains these days. Even when you do come up with something really cool the chances that it’s already been thought of by somebody else is increasing all the time. And nine times out of ten the person that thought of it isn’t even using it as a website, it’s just got some advertisements on it in the hope of making a fast buck. The word irritating barely covers it.
I wholeheartedly recommend Instant Domain Search though, it made the whole process much less painful than it would have been had I had to do an individual whois search on every idea that me, Graham, Mark, Jennifer and Andrea came up with.
Fingers crossed the site will go into some sort of testing phase by Christmas. Ideas that were originally planned for tvnexus.com will ultimately find themselves a home here.
Touch
There was an Apple special event today, and you know how much I like writing about these things.
Straight off the bat, a $200 price cut for the iPhone. That was a surprise to everyone, especially those early adopters that have already shelled out for one. But they should know that’s what happens in tech, things get cheaper. Even if Apple had waited a year to drop the price, those that had bought one in the two months before the price drop would still be pissed. Somebody is always going to be. I’ve been bitten by this problem many times before.
The rest of the announcements were all iPod updates. Shuffle gets new colours. Nano is now wider and shorter, and can play video, also in new colours. The iPod itself is now the iPod Classic, with up to 160GB of hard disk space. Which still isn’t big enough for my whole music collection.
The interesting bit, for me anyway, was the iPod Touch. Which essentially looks like the iPhone without the phone part. And I’ve already placed my order for the 16GB model, as it seems like it’ll come in handy on those long journeys down to London to see Andrea. Oddly it looks like it lacks the email program, which seems like a strange decision to make. Why keep some iPhone style functionality on there (web browser, calendar, contacts) but remove others? Surely they should just be running the same software on it. Google Maps and YouTube also appear to be missing in action.
Not out until the end of the month, at which point I’ll post a picture of it’s shiny body being held by my fair hand.
Trains
Why is booking a train online so god damn hard? And was it always this way?
I remember when thetrainline launched, and when I used the site a little back then (it launched with a bit of a fanfare) I don’t remember it being as ridiculously confusing as this. Firstly it actually recommends that you search for single rather than returns (but aren’t returns usually cheaper?), but whatever it is you search for you’re presented with a whole bunch of confusing options, fifteen different ticket types, the ability to only match up certain journeys with one another - it’s a giant clusterfuck basically. To top it all off, if you want to check the price then you have to signup. Sigh.
The National Rail website is essentially the same system, but it tries to help you out by hiding some columns of radio buttons when you select other ones. This should help, but in turn actually makes it more confusing, as the cheap fare you want on one side can’t be paired up with a cheap return fare on the other, so you end up with a ticket that costs barely 20 quid to go one way, but 200 to go the other.
And that’s the other thing that stands out, the pricing. Are they kidding? With all the government promises to reduce carbon emissions and get people to use public transport, it’s no wonder that more and more people are flying instead, it’s not only simpler to book (I could book Ryanair flights to London in minutes, with clear, simple options) but it’s a fraction of the price as well.
At least it appears that way, they don’t exactly make it easy to get a price.
New
Not only am I up to date, but the blog also has a fresh new design for 2007. Even though it’s September. And it’ll be 2008 soon.
The pictures at the top were all taken by Andrea at Irvine Beach, and there were so many great ones it’s just a shame I can’t use them all. My thinking is that every now and again I’ll stick a new set of pictures in rotation to keep things fresh.
As is always the case with a new design, there may be issues with your particular browser. I’ve tested with IE6, Firefox and Safari and it looks the same in all, but if you see anything amiss then let me know.
