Category: Arts & Entertainment
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To Be in the Venture Compound in the Summertime
I’ve got 2 Venture Brothers-related confessions to make: first is that before he showed up in the series, I’d never heard of Klaus Nomi. Second is that until last week’s episode (“What Goes Down Must Come Up”), I’ve thought this season was clever but not hilariously funny. This episode had me dying, though. (Yeah, I’m…
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The Right Hand of Doom
I really wanted to love Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and for the first 15 or 20 minutes, it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. There’s a really clever flashback to Hellboy’s time growing up on an army base (previously only seen in a two-page gag story called “Pancakes”), and a…
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An Inconvenient Contaminant
I saw Wall-E last week for my birthday (thanks, Rain!), but have been too busy distracted buying stuff and staring blankly at computer screens to be able to write anything about it. It’s so good I can’t think of a better word to describe it than “wonderful.” At this point, it’s a given that any…
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All up in her griddle
A couple weeks ago, my satellite went out, and I seriously considered just canceling the service altogether. Even if I were home long enough to watch TV, all the shows I’m most interested in are available on the internet. And if I ever do get free time, wouldn’t I be better off going outdoors, or…
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Iz not so great, aktually
This “half-season” of “Battlestar Galactica” ended last Friday with an episode called “Revelations.” I don’t really have much to say worth a spoiler warning, but if you want to know nothing about the episode, you might want to skip this post. Maybe the series has always been like this, and I just couldn’t tell because…
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Spoilers
Last month, news came over the wireless that Steven Moffat is taking over “Doctor Who” when its fifth season starts in 2010. I didn’t think much about the announcement, since I haven’t been paying much attention to the series. It’s turned into kind of a shrill, nonsensical mess with increasingly overwrought finales. Even though it…
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MST3K at Comic Con
Via Andrew P Mayer’s blog, there’s an announcement that almost everybody who ever appeared on Mystery Science Theater are going to be speaking at a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con: We now have full confirmation of the upcoming panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, Friday, July 25, 7:15 p.m. On the panel will be:…
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Espinazo
It’s an old cliche that Hollywood takes the hard work of creative people and squeezes all of the originality and innovation and intelligence out of it, to dumb it down for the mass market. I never really believed it, though: instead of this big, faceless, creativity-sucking entity, isn’t it easier just to assume that some…
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Sine intellectus non
Speaking of TV shows: did anybody else understand what the hell was going on with this week’s “Battlestar Galactica?” (Called “Sine Qua Non.”) It felt to me like what would happen if you took all the components of a BSG episode, fed them into a computer: Stand-off at gun-point Apollo makes speech about making tough…
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Tales of the Expected
Okay, the “Lost” people are totally making this stuff up as they go along. At least, I hope they are, because if the season finale of season 4 really is what they’ve had planned since the end of season 3, then they’ve been yanking our chains for a year. It’s not that it was bad;…
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Cine Puro
Memorial Day weekend seemed like as good a time as any to make some progress on the Netflix queue, in the form of a style-over-substance double feature. In one of the special features for The Orphanage, executive producer Guillermo del Toro describes a couple of scenes as “pure cinema.” He’s talking about the scenes without…
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Indiana Jones and the Appendix of the Forbidden Links
My on-again, off-again mind-meld with Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com seems to be back on again, with her review of Indiana Jones 4. The part she describes best is the first scene where (possible spoiler?) Indy runs into Marion: When he sees her, his face shows what can only be described as pure delight, and it’s…