Arts & Entertainment – Page 53

For want of double-paned windows, the kingdom was lost

I saw Beowulf in IMAX 3D at the Metreon this afternoon. Anybody who has interest in this movie but hasn’t seen it yet for whatever reason, I’d say that 3D, whether it’s the IMAX version or not, is really the way to go. It delivers pretty well on the spectacle, and that kind of thing is pretty much the only reason to leave the house to see a movie these days.

Incidentally, I’ve always liked the pre-show they do at the Metreon’s IMAX better than the actual movie. They start the drums going and light up behind the screen to show you where all the different speakers are; as far as “look how bad-ass we are” marketing goes, it’s pretty cool.

As for the movie itself: did I mention you should see it in IMAX 3D? I think it says something that this one seemed calculated to carry through as a big Christmas season event movie for this year, and the attention has already pretty much worn out. It’s not that bad, in the end; it’s just kind of unremarkable.

The biggest problem is that a lot of the movie is just really, really silly. Not long after Grendel’s mom makes her appearance, it turns into something else, and it becomes pretty obvious that the absurdity of the beginning was intentional. The problem is that the absurd part takes up what feels like half the movie (I wasn’t keeping an eye on my watch, I can only say what it felt like).

You’ve got a bunch of actors from all around the UK and whatever faux-UK part of the US John Malkovich comes from, all done up in CG with paunches added or removed and a fetishistic attention given to moles and hair and stubble. And they’re all so loud that it annoys a really badly-designed Grendel to run in and start bustin’ up the place to get them to shut the hell up already. Then Ray Winstone’s modified head on somebody else’s really modified body comes in and promises to “kill yore mahnstah!” and strips naked for an extended fight scene that seems cut from an Austin Powers movie.

Then a bunch of stuff that’s not directly from the poem happens, and the movie turns into a cross between God of War and a late 90s post-modern liberal thesis on the themes of adultery and the role of man in an ancient poem. It was jarring to see the movie suddenly taking itself so seriously. And I guess if you were just expecting action and spectacle as I was, you could complain about its alteration from hero’s quest adventure story into deconstructionist reinterpretation of the hero’s quest and adventure story itself. But really, Neil Gaiman’s name is right there on the screenplay; being surprised at that would be like going in and being surprised that everything is computer-generated.

The only genuinely weird, complaint-worthy thing about the story is knowing how feminist Gaiman tends to be, and trying to reconcile that with the fact that Robin Wright Penn’s character still just comes across as a dead-eyed, emasculating bitch through the whole movie. Kind of like what you’d get if you crossed Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings with Hillary Clinton.

As I said, the 3D was well done. I’d been a little worried at having to sit through a 2-hour movie all in 3D, but it’s almost never gratuitous or headache-inducing. The CG isn’t quite as creepy as you might think, but for the most part it just seems unnecessary. There are moments where you’ll be impressed, until you realize that you’re impressed that a splash of water looks like real water, or some bearded dude swinging an axe looks like a real bearded dude swinging an axe. A lot of people slaved over a lot of workstations to reproduce something you could get just by turning on a camera.

The more spectacular stuff, that really depends on its being CG, all struck me as extremely competent, but artless. Sure, you need CG to have a guy flying around on the back of a big golden dragon, but in terms of screen time, those scenes are relatively brief and not particularly memorable.

The only scene in the movie where doing it all in CG paid off, was the first meeting between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother. That’s the scene that’s in all the trailers and promotional material. It’s got a great look to it, it feels like an interesting place, and it creates a truly memorable image. (And again, they cross the line into silly when they give her high heels).

But you’ve still got to wonder if it was worth the effort, though. Angelina Jolie looks like an artificially-constructed person anyway, so you’d think they could’ve saved some cash and just put her in a gold bodysuit and started the cameras rolling. And I guess it’s encouraging for all of us chubby, hairy guys, that we now have the technology to turn Ray Winstone into a young buff dude. But if you’re looking for a guy with a weird accent, muscles, and a disturbingly hairless body, I’ve got to wonder why you don’t just cast Gerard Butler or something instead?

Say what you will about populism filmed with stylistic excess; at least that’s an ethos.

No Country for Old Men is about as close to perfect as you’re ever going to see in a movie. Not a single shot is unnecessary. The pacing is perfect; both for the movie overall, and for individual scenes that feel as if they were meticulously orchestrated down to a fraction of a second. Almost all of the performances are absolutely dead-on (the mother-in-law felt like she’d just come in off the set of “Mama’s Family”). The dialogue has a perfect rhythm and it perfectly conveys the character. There are no artificial moments; I’ve heard real people use exactly the same cadences and expressions as these characters. The plot stays completely true to the characters and the theme. The sound design is flawless. The suspense scenes are so perfectly executed, they act as a reminder that yes, movies can make you feel something. The movie has enough confidence to show exactly what it needs to, no more and no less. There are no cheap gimmicks, easy outs, or implausibly pat resolutions.

If any filmmaker other than the Coen Brothers had made this movie, it would probably be his masterpiece. The problem is that it was made by the Coen Brothers, so you have to unfairly compare it to their other movies.

And I ended up disappointed, because it just seems superfluous. They’ve made movies that convey all of the “meat” of No Country for Old Men, in a single scene. We already know they have an almost sadistic sense of how to make the perfect suspense scene; they proved that the second the newspaper hit the screen door in Blood Simple. We already know they can convey despair (Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There), or blind rage (Miller’s Crossing), or coldly senseless violence (Fargo). This movie just felt to me as if it were made by extremely talented filmmakers who happened to be big fans of the Coens. Because ultimately, it’s missing its soul, that spark that separates very, very good work from genius.

Before I’d seen it, a friend described No Country for Old Men as “kind of like Fargo, but not funny.” That’s pretty accurate, except I’d take it even farther and call it the anti-Fargo.

They’re very similar movies. Both are about honest cops in a relatively simple and peaceful environment, being exposed to genuine senseless evil, all because of a basically ethical character who makes a single immoral decision. But where Fargo had moments of humor, No Country for Old Men is almost completely humorless. Where Fargo is ultimately uplifting, No Country for Old Men is relentlessly nihilistic.

One of the criticisms frequently made against the Coens is that they’re too arch, too concerned about the style of their movies to care about real characters. I’ve always thought the opposite: they genuinely love their characters, they like hearing them talk, they like seeing how they react to situations, and they like seeing them come out stronger in the end. (Except for Blood Simple, which is really just a bunch of suspense scenes taking advantage of the fact that all the characters are impossibly dense). I don’t get that sense from No Country for Old Men; they don’t hate the characters, they just really don’t care that much about them at all. I mean, they’re all going to die eventually, anyway, so why bother?

After the final monologue and the cut to black, I just felt kind of cheated. Definitely not because I was expecting a quick and easy resolution (spoiler: there’s not one), but because it just hung there, as if I were supposed to be impressed that it didn’t give me a quick and easy resolution. It struck me as sophomoric, in the literal sense: I felt like I’d just had to listen to two hours of a talented but pretentious college sophomore who’d just discovered Nietzsche.

And I just sat there in the dark, thinking, “Really? ‘Evil is everywhere, and life is random.’ After all this time, that’s all you’ve got to tell me?” For a moment, I thought I saw my father in the distance carrying a horn filled with fire, but as it turns out it was just the usher telling us the movie was over and it was time to leave.

All of this I’ve seen before, and I will watch it all again.

I got back from Thanksgiving to find the “Battlestar Galactica: Razor” movie waiting for me. On a scale of 1 to 10 I’d rate it radical. (For comparison, the episode where they get off of New Caprica rates a holy crap that was wicked awesome, and the one where Starbuck gets kidnapped on a farm rates a 3).

Really, it only earns a “radical” for showing the old-school Cylon Centurions, and for dropping a few bombs as to the overall storyline, with Starbuck’s “destiny” and the Cylons’ plot. But the rest of the movie suffered, because it did the stuff the series doesn’t usually do — show big set pieces and the details of “side” stories. There’s a sequence where a bunch of Cylons attack the Pegasus at a shipyard, and it is pretty impressive, but it mostly serves of a reminder of how well the series conveys an epic space battle without actually showing the space battle.

And it’s the same for the story. We already knew that Admiral Cain was a bitch, from when she was on the series. The movie just revealed that wait, no really, she was a total bitch. There’s a half-assed attempt by Adama at the end of Razor to say that “I’m not sure I would’ve done differently in her situation,” but that just seemed like a feeble attempt to add depth and moral ambiguity to a character that had neither. And in the end, it made the whole Pegasus story seem smaller and less interesting. The more they show of the spacefights, the more you realize how small and forgettable they are; the more they show of the characters, the more you realize how two-dimensional and unlikeable most of them are, and how all the plot threads are a little convoluted and flimsy.

I mentioned that when I first saw seasons 1 and 2, I saw most of the episodes out of order, and missed a couple. As a result, I had the sense that everything was much larger and deeper than it really is. The show excels at suggesting more depth and scope than is really there; when you watch everything in order, it starts to stretch the plausibility.

For instance, I know that there are only 12 Cylon models, so it makes sense to keep seeing the same ones over and over again. But how come there are over 40,000 humans, but there are still only 4 or 5 people in the military? We keep seeing and hearing other ones, but it still comes back to Apollo and Starbuck being called in as not just the best pilots in the fleet, but the only ones capable of acting as bouncers for a summit meeting, hostage negotiators, mining facility inspectors, secret raids on Cylon Base Stars, etc.

There was a scene in Razor where they assembled the entire good guy cast into one place to stare at a spaceship on green screen, and it was kind of comical. You could almost hear the actors’ cars in the parking lot, their engines still running. This set up a cool plot element for the final season, and it tied into the “web episodes” pretty well, but it still suffered from the syndrome of having about 4 people in the entire galaxy to which everything of any significance happens.

But it ultimately doesn’t matter, of course. I’m still going through the episodes on DVD in order, and I’m still enjoying the hell out of them. I’d feel a little better if we didn’t have to wait until March for the final season to start, but at the rate I’m going, it’ll probably take me that long to get caught up.

In the event no actual movies are available, the Internet may be used as a substitute.

They’ve been warning us for years that the onslaught of digital distribution, torrents, iTunes, rental-by-mail services, and the new entertainment-in-pill-form (not available in some markets) was going to change everything. What they failed to warn us about were all the tragic implications of the entertainment glut.

Case in point: there are currently movies by Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers showing in theaters available for anyone to watch, but I have yet to see either. Instead, I watched The Omen: 666 the other night, just for the sake of getting my Netflix queue moving again. Other stuff I’ve watched since those movies have been released: the unforgivably abysmal Highlander: The Source on Sci-Fi; four episodes of the TV show “Ghost Hunters;” an episode of “Ace of Cakes” (that I’d already seen!); 300 again, only to see if the Blu-Ray made things better (it doesn’t); Superman II, to see if it’s as good as I remember it (it definitely isn’t); and Ratatouille to see the new short (awesome) and to see how long I could last until the objectivist undertones made me turn it off (about 20 minutes).

So I can’t really make the argument that I’m avoiding the theaters because there’s good stuff to watch at home. To be fair, though, it’s usually more exciting to read about movies on the internet than it is to actually watch them. The potential energy of the DOOM trailer could have powered a city, provided that city used engines running on perceived awesomeness. The reality couldn’t have sparked a penlight. So here’s more stuff on the internet about movies!

There’s a new trailer for Cloverfield (previously just called “1-18-08” or “Untitled J.J. Abrams Project”) that’s not only renewed my interest, but has got me even more excited. The teaser was so indescribably cool that I’d put myself on a media blackout for the movie, afraid that finding out too much about it would pour cold water over everything. But it looks like the “filmed on home camcorder” gimmick is used throughout the entire thing, which is a brilliant idea: it’s a first-person monster movie! I’m predicting it’s the one really great scene from War of the Worlds (the flaming train), repeated over and over again. Or, it’s The Blair Witch Project with a big budget and CGI. But I still have a month and a half to be optimistic.
Kevin Smith’s blog has a post about his crush on Seth Rogen and the casting for his movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno that would be so over-the-top gushing and self-effacing you’d think it was impossibly phony, if not for three things: 1) Kevin Smith’s turned self-effacing into an industry; 2) It’s nice to believe that at some level, it’s still possible for Hollywood to break down to just people working on stuff they’re fans of; and 3) Seriously, who doesn’t love Seth Rogen? He’s got pretty much the same aura as Kevin Smith himself, which is that whether his work is brilliant or not, you just can’t help rooting for the guy.
For the record, The Omen: 666 wasn’t all that bad, considering. But that may be just because I think the original is one of the stupidest movies ever made. It’s basically two hours of dozens of people telling Gregory Peck his son is the Antichrist, and his being too dense to catch on (“Hmm, no, I’m still just not seeing it.”). At least the remake was slightly more plausible, in that Julia Stiles really did seem like she didn’t like the kid. And Liev Schreiber came across as more of just an uptight overprivileged white guy than a total idiot. So in short, the remake was inessential, but if you’re going to insist on making a remake of The Omen, they did about as good a job as you can possibly do.
Rome isn’t a movie, but I feel obligated to mention it again since I was ragging on it earlier. Once you get a few hours into it, it’s really engrossing and very good. The production values were high enough to cancel it after two years, and they remain high throughout. But what really sells it is exactly the kind of thing you only get from episodic storytelling: a story that feels epic and ridiculously detailed, simply due to repetition and the ability to see a bunch of “smaller” scenes. You don’t see huge battles on this show, but you see how the battles affect the dozens of people the story follows. It also bugged me in the first few episodes how much of the stories seemed to be based on random chance or coincidence, but they had Caesar explicitly mention that in one episode, which makes it okay. In fact, that’s one of the themes of the series, how fate pulls Pullo and Vorenus into making a huge impact on Roman history. Plus: frequent nudity.
The short film “Your Friend the Rat” that comes on the Ratatouille DVD is excellent. It feels like the Pixar guys got the chance to throw every possible style of animation and art style at the thing, and it’s just bursting with the feeling of a ton of absurdly creative people finally getting an outlet for their talent. It feels a lot like the classic Disney shorts of the 70s, and even a little like “Schoolhouse Rock,” in that it’s not afraid to bounce all over the place in different styles. I think that alone was worth the cost of the DVD.

So this Thanksgiving weekend, I’m in Georgia at my parents’ house without much to do. Am I going to see The Darjeeling Limited or No Country for Old Men or even Beowulf, or am I going to read the same RSS feeds and watch hours of the worst programming the Food network and Sci-Fi channel have to offer? (Note: if you’re the betting type, odds are strongly in favor of the second one.)

Tensions Mount as Rival Factions Set To Conquer Lucrative Making-Fun-of-Movies Territory

Astute readers will notice I haven’t been updating this weblog, and that’s because of a desperate attempt to get caught up with work. (That’s what happens when every time you get stuck writing, you run to the safety of The Orange Box and watching Japanese movies from the 80s about schoolgirl detectives). But it’s still my obligation to give a news update in the world of things that are interesting to me:

Joel Hodgson announced a new project called Cinematic Titanic, which sounds like a relaunch of the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 concept. Details are there on the website, but in brief: it sounds similar to what the RiffTrax guys are doing with Film Crew Online, licensing a bad movie and putting out a DVD release with the commentary baked-in.

And considering that Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu are involved, it’s very likely that it’ll be more of a high-concept thing, with an overall storyline and more sketches in between the movie segments. (For RiffTrax and The Film Crew, they don’t try to hide the fact that all their energy goes into the gags during the movie, and the rest is just gravy).

Other good news is that Frank Coniff and Mary Jo Pehl are signed onto the project as well. And they’re planning to release the (first?) DVD before Christmas, and do a live show in San Francisco! But the live show is only open to ILM & Lucasfilm employees. Of all the times to quit working for Lucas, 7 years ago!

I’m sure this will just rub salt in the recently-healed partisan wounds that have divided our nation for so long, and we’ll soon go back to seeing lame “Who’s your favorite? Joel or Mike?” questions popping up all over the place. But for those of us who loved all of MST3k, it’s great news.

Also also: according to MST3Kinfo.com, the last remaining members of the MST3K gang have rebooted Best Brains, Inc. with a weekly animated series about Crow, Tom Servo, and Gypsy. No guesses here as to how that’s going to turn out, but it should be interesting.

Now that making fun of movies is turning into a growth industry, I’ve just got to get my work done so I can listen to the RiffTrax for Raiders of the Lost Ark in time for the new stuff.

Delinquent Schoolgirl Yo-Yo Detective, you’ve shattered every bone in my heart.

On his Invincible Super-Blog, Chris Sims wrote a fine review of the 1987 Japanese movie Sukeban Deka that was enough to make me put it at the top of my Netflix queue, and for that I’m thankful.

Still, it’s hobbled by the old “aren’t those Japanese people wacky?” mentality that doesn’t really capture the sheer awesomeness of a movie like this. I mean, he hits on the old stand-bys of tentacle rape, bukkake, and goofy translations — frankly, it’s all just a little too easy and obvious.

An hour after reading that review, I was already hungry for a more detailed analysis of the movie, one that I could tell apart from all the other reviews (you see what I did there?!?) of wacky Japanese action fantasies based on a TV show based on a manga. So I’ve prepared the following photo essay to explain exactly why Sukeban Deka: The Movie is required viewing for anybody who likes things that are awesome:
Continue reading “Delinquent Schoolgirl Yo-Yo Detective, you’ve shattered every bone in my heart.”

“I’m about to go analog on your ass.”

I just want to make sure everybody else heard that, and it wasn’t just me.

In “Bionic Woman” this week, Isaiah Washington’s character interrupts the completely pointless training sessions between the Bionic Woman and Yoda-san, telling her she needs to bring out the animal inside herself, and he actually says the line, “I’m about to go analog on your ass.”

That really happened, right? ‘Cause I wouldn’t want to declare that a TV show isn’t just bad, it’s the opposite of everything that I stand for, on the basis of a single mis-heard line.

And speaking of NBC and catch-phrases: “ME WANT FOOD.” How long can “30 Rock” keep going without a single bad episode?

In a sense, it is OUR so-called “civilization” that is truly the more uncivilized.

Or, Shallow and Not Particularly Novel Insights Gleaned from Watching Return to the Blue Lagoon on Satellite Just Now:

It’s got Milla Jovovich in it! For some reason, I’d always thought The Fifth Element was her first movie.
Even in her jailbait days, Milla Jovovich was shockingly beautiful.
The “Brian Krause” in the movie is the blond, angel-looking dude from “Charmed.” He’s not Peter Krause, the perpetually-unshaven guy from “Six Feet Under.” So if you’re watching the movie just to see how they got a fairly average-looking, hairy guy who must’ve been in his mid 20s at the time to run around on a beach in a loincloth for an hour and a half and not look completely ridiculous, then you’re going to be disappointed.
In the first five minutes of the movie, they show the tender young lovers of the first one face-down on a boat, dead. Then they wrap the bodies in canvas bags and throw them overboard. That is awesome.
It makes the “Return” guys’ adventure a lot less impressive when their only struggle is moving into a two-story house built by uneducated teenagers.
Milla’s reaction to her first period: initial horror, followed within seconds by… delight? Gas? Mischievousness? It’s difficult to read.
Watching this movie made me vividly remember my own adolescence, growing up naked and unashamed on a South Pacific island.
Actually, my own adolescence was spent growing up clothed and very much ashamed in the Bible Belt. And we would scan the channels desperately for movies like The Blue Lagoon and Losin’ It and Porky’s, anything, anything to get even the barest glimpse of the good stuff.
We had a cable box with a dial on it, and I’d spend at least an hour every night trying to turn it to that sweet spot halfway between channels where you could see the barest glimpse of teh boobies on Cinemax.
When we actually got HBO, and you could watch “The Hitchhiker” and see almost everything, it was a total disappointment.
Puberty sucks.
But not as much as it must have sucked having to be on a film crew making an entire movie dedicated just for the desperate and pubescent.
Even on those terms, Return to the Blue Lagoon is a total cock-tease. They had a mom on the island, who explained sex to them! There’s like a total of 2 minutes of youthful abandon; the rest is sitting in a house that somebody else built, making goofy euphemisms about menstruation and masturbation, fishing, and comically misunderstanding how to put on Western clothes.
And even if you’re supposed to be the son of two stupid people, stripping off your clothes and having the villain chase you into a shark-infested coral reef is the lamest ending ever.
Holy crap, Milla Jovovich was only 15 years old when that movie was made! That’s just kind of gross, and now I feel bad.

Aw, man! But… but she’s so pretty!

Michelle Ryan from Bionic Woman from NBC.com Tonight was a bad night for TV. Two shows on the DVR that I really tried hard to make myself like, but I just couldn’t do it.

“Bionic Woman” is just plain not good. It’ll trick you at first, because if you hear the overall concept (minus the belligerent hacker lil sister), and just catch glimpses of it, you might think it has potential. And if I didn’t mention it yet, the star is really, really pretty. But it just keeps on failing. I’ll watch one more episode just because it looks to be Bionic Starbuck-centric, but after that I’m dropping it.

I hope I’m not spoiling it for anybody, but the boring but generally likable fiance of the boring but generally likable star apparently died sometime over the last week — since he just had a clearly non-fatal bullet wound at the end of the pilot, I’m guessing he had a sudden aneurism or something. And it’s too bad, because somehow his dullness combined with hers to make a character who wasn’t exactly interesting, but was at least more appealing than everybody else back at Super Secret HQ. Miguel Ferrer, and a holy-cow-I-never-saw-that-coming Asian guy who’s a martial arts expert, and a harsh woman who drives a GTO, just can’t make up for Oscar Goldman.

And I hate to kick a jackass when he’s down, but if you’re trying to bring in fresh exciting new blood to invigorate your show, Isaiah Washington is a bad, bad choice. And then having him exchanging banter about What Color Is Your Parachute? is just embarrassing.

I hope I don’t end up sounding like Isaiah Washington when I say that watching “Pushing Daisies” just gave me the creeps all over. I watched it on the recommendation of a commenter here, and I really wanted to like it. But as I was afraid of, I had about the same reaction to it as I had to Wonderfalls. It was just way too fey and precious and pleased with itself. (And I’m the guy who loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer!)

Barry Sonnenfeld was Barry Sonnefelding the hell out of it, and it showed. Really high production values. Clever concept. Smarter-than-average dialogue. Clearly distinct from anything else on network TV. And a good bit of it hit just the right tone for a romantic black comedy.

But come on. Even Wes Anderson would call out the show for being too affected. And it’s all so brightly-colored but with a sinister undertone!, complete with the narrator from the Walgreens ads. And the characters banter with puns about rumination. And it’s just full-to-bursting with that insufferably confessional, blatant allegory, the same kind that drags down Tim Burton’s “I’m a tortured soul ’cause I’m different!” movies. Here you’ve got a woman who lives with her eccentric spinster aunts. And a taller, thinner Kevin Spacey-looking guy who was close to but tragically separated from his mother and emotionally distant from his father, who falls into a gloriously romantic but completely non-sexual relationship with his spunky dream girl.

By the end of it, I was overcome with the need to eat a steak and read Maxim.

Giving Up

Wait, why did we have to light our bunsen burners, again? All right, I guess I’ve got to give up fighting against “Heroes,” since somewhere along the line it beat me into submission. I can’t really complain about watching it against my will or better judgement anymore, since I’ve actually started to genuinely like it.

Sure, they have a high school class light up their bunsen burners right before a discussion about Charles Darwin. But they also have a high school girl deciding to cut off her toe with a pair of scissors, just to see what’ll happen. They’ve got goofy Irish gangsters in what’s shaping up to be some lame cliched bank heist. But the whole seven paintings and villains who can sneak into closed interrogation rooms is a great way to do a murder mystery. Plus, time-traveling samurai and wonder twins who cry deadly plague tar might be able to make up for The Incredibly Hot Hulk’s reappearance next week.

I admit it, I’m completely intrigued.

And I’m guessing that the fact we’ve got precocious little girl child star who dreams about the boogeyman, means that when Veronica Mars shows up, it’s going to be awesome.

Also: on “How I Met Your Mother” they’re totally setting up Robin & Barney to get together. Which’ll be a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

Could we try it again, a little darker this time?

I’ve been reading Rain’s updates on the new TV shows that are coming out, but for some reason it still didn’t click with me that there are new TV shows coming out. It must’ve seemed relevant to me at some point, since my faux-TiVo has been recording all this stuff. The cat only records the “Lengths of String Moving Slowly then Very Quickly” documentary series on the Discovery channel (and, for some reason, “CSI: Miami”), so I must’ve been the one to set it.

Still, it was a surprise to come home from work and find a big chunk of programming begging to be watched. There’s no point in mentioning “How I Met Your Mother,” since that series has built up so much goodwill with me that they’d have to make an entire episode of the cast just making fun of me specifically and showing naked pictures of me while they point and laugh before I’d quit watching. I’ll never understand how a show that’s so relentlessly likeable could always be on the verge of cancellation, so I just hope that people keep spreading the word and it stays on the air. At least until we find out who the mom is, or until the slap bet runs out.

There’s not much point in mentioning “Heroes” either, since I just don’t get what’s going on between me and that show. Just like it was with most of last season, I watched the whole pilot rolling my eyes. And just like it was with last season, I’m compelled to keep watching. (Announcing that Veronica Mars is going to be on it just made it completely inevitable). I just hope that they don’t try to make the guys with the Worst Irish Accents Ever into recurring characters.

The first new show I saw was “Reaper,” which answers the question that’s been bugging every human for decades: What would it be like if Kevin Smith directed “Dead Like Me?” As it turns out, it’s not bad. I’m not jumping up and down or starting the local chapter of the fan club or anything, but it’s interesting enough, reasonably entertaining, and the writing and the performances are all above average. I don’t know if a show can just be “solid” and survive without a huge marketing campaign behind it, but I’d like to think so.

For a show with its concept (a slacker’s parents sell his soul to the devil, so he’s forced to send escaped souls back to Hell), it was surprisingly straightforward action/comedy. Still, it had just enough clever bits to stand out: Ray Wise as the devil, an interesting take on the battle between Heaven and Hell from the devil (“I’ve seen how this plays out. God wins.”), and a (bad) guy getting sucked under a zamboni and leaving a long trail of blood on the ice. It’s laughably obvious that they originally wanted it to be darker than it turned out — a friend of the leads is badly injured halfway through the episode, then the episode ends with the two leads giving a recap and setting up the rest of the series. But then the very last shot clumsily inserts badly-injured guy, as alive and kicking as LL Cool J at the end of Deep Blue Sea, as if he’d been standing there listening to the entire conversation but not saying anything. That actor must have one hell (hey, funny!) of an agent.

And speaking of wanting it dark, how about that “Bionic Woman?” After watching the pilot, I’m a little creeped out at how accurate prediction from a year ago turned out to be. It’s not dead-on, of course, but there are eerie similarities, which leads me to one of the following conclusions:

I have untapped psychic abilities;
The makers of the show have been reading my blog;
There’s only so much you can do with “The Bionic Woman” and a guy who likes digging up TV series from the 70s and “reimagining” them darker and edgier.

The third is the most likely, which puts me in an interesting position, because I can’t decide whether I’d rather see a darker, edgier version of “The Love Boat” or “Fantasy Island.” (Extra-credit challenge to Mr. Eick and his production house: “Three’s Company.”)

I liked the pilot well enough, and even though I wasn’t blown away, I’m hoping the series lasts a while. I’m not all that intrigued by the Black Mesa Secret Military Ops stuff, or all the predictable drama they slathered on, but I do like the cast. Bionic Starbuck is 1000 times more interesting than the main character, but the rest of the cast is still interesting enough to keep me watching. And keep me hoping for more bionic catfights.

I’m still wondering what it is about NBC that makes people look so weird, though. The aforementioned Bionic Starbuck kept reminding me of Heath Ledger as the Joker, for some reason. And Michelle Ryan is so beautiful it hits eerie, then wraps around to being beautiful again but oddly off-putting. (Plus, she does a dead-on perfect American accent.)

That’s all I’ve seen so far, and likely all I will see until the heavy-hitters of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Lost” start up again next year. Everything I’ve seen has been fine, but it says something that the best TV I saw tonight was a year-old episode of “The Venture Brothers” that I’ve already seen four times, and it still had me laughing out loud.

Deja Vu

Koo-koo for kukris
I don’t know what got up the butts of the Rotten Tomatoes people, because I liked Resident Evil: Extinction an awful lot. It’s exactly what I was hoping to get out of a Resident Evil movie. There are a lot of reviews which dismissively compare it to a videogame, to which the obvious responses are: 1) No shit! It’s called Resident Evil; and 2) that might not be such a bad thing.

This one feels more like a videogame than any other movie based on a game that I’ve seen, and a lot of the stuff works for exactly the same reasons it works in games. There’s the save point at the beginning, a little dirt race sequence, lots of walking through nondescript interiors with guns drawn, and then walking through a dark cluttered medical lab surrounded by messages scrawled in blood and bodies impaled on spikes before the big final boss fight.

And for a movie about zombies, it seems a lot more like a Frankenstein’s monster creation stitched together from scenes and ideas out of other movies. There are the expected bits taken out of the first two Resident Evil movies, but they’re entitled, they picked the best parts, and it ends up feeling like closure to a series instead of just repeating the same old thing.

But as it goes on, it turns into a game of “Name that Movie” when you keep seeing set-ups that are eerily familiar. It hits on the obvious, of course — there’s a couple of scenes at a gas station that are straight out of Dawn of the Dead, then a couple of sequences lifted almost verbatim from Day of the Dead. Then there’s the sequence that’s like The Road Warrior, then The Birds, plus The Empire Strikes Back. And if you look real close, you get hints of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Akira, and kind of almost Enemy of the State. I’m sure that people who’d seen more cheesy action movies than I have would be able to spot more.

That all makes it sound completely unoriginal, and it mostly is. But I’ll take a movie that’s solid, exciting, entertaining, and unoriginal, over one that thinks too much of itself and fails.

One weird thing that kept bugging me: I couldn’t tell if they went in and airbrushed/photoshopped the lead actresses’ faces during close-up scenes. They all had this really weird much-too-smooth look to them, and it was distracting. I couldn’t tell if it was over-compensating desert make-up, or if they really did go back and edit the move in CG to make all the women look freakier.

I was genuinely disappointed to read online that this is the last in the series. Because the end of the movie sets up for a sequel that would be one of the most awesome action movies ever made. I was ready to just sit in the theater and wait for them to finish making the fourth movie.

In any case, I hope they can come up with another franchise for Milla Jovovich as good as the Resident Evil movies. Because she’s just fantastic in these, but keeps winding up in garbage that doesn’t take advantage of what she does best — which is playing a beautiful woman who doesn’t put any effort into or value on looking beautiful (unlike Ultraviolet), who has a handle on what’s happening (unlike The Fifth Element), and could totally kick your ass.