Monthly Archives: January 2009

Body Fuzion

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Hey, speaking of old video and VCR effects, here’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done on “Saturday Night Live,” “Body Fuzion:” The best part (apart from the music) is how Drew Barrymore looks like she can’t deliver a [...]

Hey, speaking of old video and VCR effects, here’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done on “Saturday Night Live,” “Body Fuzion:”

The best part (apart from the music) is how Drew Barrymore looks like she can’t deliver a line without cracking up. Also: “Penthels!”

Short-term Nostalgia

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A few weeks ago, I was at a party, doing what I usually do at parties — looking for a way to work the Sam & Max games into the conversation. Talk turned to Adobe After Effects and all the [...]

A few weeks ago, I was at a party, doing what I usually do at parties — looking for a way to work the Sam & Max games into the conversation.

Talk turned to Adobe After Effects and all the cool stuff the kids can do with video editing, and I mentioned the “Behind the Bad” videos Nick and Jake made to promote the Strong Bad games, and that got me going on about all the Sam & Max Season Two trailers. A friend mentioned he’d never seen any of them, so I said I’d put them up on the blog but then forgot.

Earlier I said that the trailer to “Moai Better Blues” was my favorite of the videos, but that was a lie because the one for “What’s New, Beelzebub?” is:

But “Moai Better Blues” is my second favorite.

And then “Night of the Raving Dead”, which was a good bit more disturbing before they added the blurring:

Also good is “Ice Station Santa” (“Ice Station Santa”), especially if you’ve seen the inspiration.

“Ice Station Santa.”

And also “Chariots of the Dogs”, which has references to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” so it’s cool if you’re over 30, and I think this is the one that made Nick start switching to video:

(And they’re all available on the Telltale Videos site for your workday browsing and procrastinating needs).

Fat Man and Little Boy and Jughead

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After watching this week’s episode of “Lost” (called “Jughead”), I think I’ve finally figured out the secret of the island: it loves killing unnamed people. If I were a Flight 815 survivor at this point, I’d be going around to [...]

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After watching this week’s episode of “Lost” (called “Jughead”), I think I’ve finally figured out the secret of the island: it loves killing unnamed people. If I were a Flight 815 survivor at this point, I’d be going around to everyone who would listen, introducing myself and giving a little bit of my backstory. And then, most likely, stepping on a land mine.

I was really impressed; I thought this was just a great, solid episode. It wasn’t full-to-bursting with shocking revelations, but it broke two cardinal rules of “Lost:”

  1. Stuff happens.
  2. That stuff is worked into the story.

Usually, reveals in “Lost” consist of 30 minutes or so of people running purposelessly around the jungle and then everything stops and the music crescendos and then there’s The Big Reveal suddenly followed by a bunch of violins then a cut to black with that sound effect like a bookcase falling over at the end of a long concert hall.

But this one found a way to tell an episode-long story, and mention big stuff throughout, almost casually. Big stuff like (spoilers):
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A Disquiet Follows My Mid-Season Break

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Or, “We Never Said They Had a Good Plan.” So last week was the big return of “Battlestar Galactica” (with “Sometimes a Great Notion”) after months of speculation after a huge cliffhanger and the promise that all our questions would [...]

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Or, “We Never Said They Had a Good Plan.”

So last week was the big return of “Battlestar Galactica” (with “Sometimes a Great Notion”) after months of speculation after a huge cliffhanger and the promise that all our questions would be answered. I didn’t really say anything about it at the time, because I was waiting for the second episode to see if I was just disappointed in the anti-climax, or if the series had finally lost me.

After this week’s (“A Disquiet Follows My Soul”), I’m inclined to think they lost me. The problem is basically that now, I can see the strings, and my suspension of disbelief is completely blown. I think Rain nailed it when she blamed it on lazy screenwriting, although I’d say it’s only half laziness/lack of inspiration, but also clumsy self-importance.

From the start, the series has prided itself on being mature and “edgy,” but at least through the miniseries and the first couple of seasons, it earned that reputation. Now it just seems like self-parody at best, or self-delusion at worst. It’s the “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” style edgy; no thought behind it, just “what’s going to shock people?” It’s catering to the type of people who say things like, “Even at its worst, it’s still better than most of what’s on television,” ignoring the fact that television is getting better, and these days shows like “Knight Rider” are the exception, not the rule.

The big reveal of Earth we’ve been building up to? Look how happy they are and psyche! it’s a wasteland! Suck on that, complacent middle American TV watchers! Following the story of a basically sweet, hopeful character? Blam, suicide! Did you jump? Huh? Did you? And now we’ll blow your mind with the reveal of the Final Cylon! Are you astounde— okay, yeah, we didn’t really expect you to be all that excited about that, frankly. It’s a series of cheap shots, and not particularly clever ones at that.

And what’s got me convinced it’s a long-term downturn and not just a couple of not-particularly-inspired decisions, or a couple of episodes that are “off,” is this interview with Ron Moore that basically confirms these writing decisions are just that arbitrary. Not necessarily what makes sense as far as a series-long dramatic arc, but what’s going to go for the quick surprise or the cheap shock or, more often, the “dark” angle. Because we all know that “dark” means “smart.”

I’m still going to watch the final eight episodes, obviously, since I’ve come this far. But I’ve pretty much given up hope that they’re going to pull off a satisfying ending. Even without the cheap semi-adolescent plotting gimmicks, there doesn’t seem to be any solid season-wide pacing, or any weight to the big reveals. Why did they go to the trouble of bringing back Lucy Lawless’s character just to throw it away? Why is the fact that 2000-year-old Cylons were found on Earth just mentioned once and never repeated? Why does Starbuck’s discovery just result in a lot of clumsy scenes designed to look cool, instead of any notion of a real plot development? Is this “BSG” or “Heroes?”

SPOILER: Caesar dies

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This weekend I finished watching the last episodes of the HBO series “Rome.” It’s been a hard road to the end of the series: it was recommended by a friend on here, but it took me a long time to [...]

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This weekend I finished watching the last episodes of the HBO series “Rome.” It’s been a hard road to the end of the series: it was recommended by a friend on here, but it took me a long time to get into it. And they nearly lost me a few times in season 2, because at times it seems relentlessly bleak and the characters are all doomed to misery. But the series does an amazing job of pulling everything together by the end, and it’s just an outstanding example of what episodic television is capable of.

Warning about “spoilers” on this show is as goofy as warning about spoilers for Titanic, but the series does invent stories for some characters and takes liberties with the stories of others, so be forewarned if you want to watch the series with every single surprise intact. One of the best aspects of the series is how it manages to put a personal spin on all the historical events — even though you know what’s going to happen, it makes you want to find out how it happens, and specifically how it affects the characters.

But the greatest thing about the series, and the thing that makes me want to write about it at length instead of just saying “Rome is pretty cool, you should check it out,” is the way it manipulates the audience’s sympathies. I was extremely pleased with the ending of the final episode — it’s not exactly a happy ending, but an extremely satisfying one — but it’s not the ending I would’ve expected. The events are basically historically accurate, but I never would’ve expected to be rooting for some characters and plotting the downfall of others.

As is appropriate for a series with so much political maneuvering, your loyalties and sympathies are constantly changing. But it’s handled so much more deftly than the twists of a soap opera or the inertia-driven characters of any other long-running series. Over time, your mindset shifts from a contemporary one to an ancient Roman one: you start to expect betrayals, to see the value of “honor,” and to despise weakness.

There are few if any “good” characters in the series — Marcus Agrippa probably comes the closest, and it’s not long before he manages to piss you off. Cicero goes from being an annoying but shrewd politician to being the most venal and despicable character in the series, even though he’s doing pretty much the same things throughout; it’s your perception of good and evil that shifts. The transformation is most dramatic with Servilia, who begins as a basically noble and sympathetic figure, but by the second season couldn’t die soon enough to satisfy me. In a series where all the characters are scheming and duplicitous, it takes a lot of skill to keep the audience’s sympathy, or shift a character subtly enough that they transform from subtly evil to completely evil.

And the best example of that is the best character of the series, Polly Walker as Atia. I’m still amazed that they could take a character like this one — so relentlessly, unapologetically cruel and manipulative — and make it so by the end of the series, you’re cheering her on. As the story nears the end, you find yourself feeling sorry for her. Considering that the show is trying to cover years of history in two hours, not to mention its own version of Antony and Cleopatra, it would’ve probably been good enough just to leave her character arc at that: the villain who gets her just rewards at the end. But she has a brilliant final scene in which she’s telling someone off, the exact same behavior that earlier in the series had you booing and hissing, but here is nothing but a moment of victory. It’s such a well-written character and such a great performance.

I’m still not sure I have the constitution for these HBO series, because they can get so relentlessly bleak. I had to give up on The Sopranos not because of the violence, but because the characters kept making such stupid decisions that I’d gotten just as frustrated and alienated with them as I would in real life. Rome has plenty of violence and gore and nudity and sex (as any good HBO series should, much less one about ancient Rome), but what’s genuinely mature about it is how effectively it manipulates your notion of heroes and villains.

(Incidentally, if you decide to check out the series, it helps to do a little basic research first, if your memory of Roman history is as rusty as mine was. A lot of the major battles are just briefly mentioned, because the series usually chooses to focus on how the battles affect the characters instead of showing the fight scenes themselves. In particular, knowing/remembering the outcome of the Battle of Actium is important to getting the full impact of the final episode. The DVDs have some excellent documentaries in the special features, which give more of that historical background, but they also are full of “spoilers” for some of the more personal stores and events specific to this series.)

(Also: watching the documentaries reveals that Timothy Van Patten of “Master Ninja” fame was one of the directors on the series. Which is a huge draw for any MST3k fan who also likes to watch people in togas having sex or stabbing each other or both.)

(And finally: SPOILER: Brutus did it.)