Category: Arts & Entertainment
-
Bad-touching the Internets
If you missed last Sunday’s “Venture Brothers,” like I did, because DirecTV sucks, and they broke their deal with TiVo to reinvent the wheel and release a buggy-as-hell crippled DVR that you have to use if you want HDTV but it breaks just a few days after you get it and so you have to…
-
We Can Rebuild Her
An entry on the Sci Fi Wire blog says that David Eick, one of the creators of the new “Battlestar Galactica,” is planning a “complete reconceptualization” of the series “The Bionic Woman”. I called some of my contacts in the industry and obtained a top-secret document detailing the proposed story arc for the first season:…
-
How not to make “Event Horizon”
As our lives get increasingly hectic and confusing, it becomes dangerously more and more likely that one of us is bound to look up from what he’s been doing and suddenly realize, “Oh, shit. I just made Event Horizon.” Paul W.S. Anderson has lived through this experience, and he’ll tell you the only way that…
-
Bleak House
Tonight I watched hours and hours of two series that have a lot in common: 1) they’re both shown on the SciFi channel, 2) they’re both revamps of notoriously nerd-ridden franchises, and 3) they’re both awesome. Battlestar Galactica Nothing cheers up a Friday like suicide bombings, descriptions of eyes getting plucked out, nighttime death squad…
-
On Dharma-tattooed sharks and the metaphorical jumping thereof
If there’s one thing I learned from that lame “Lost Experience” game that ran over the summer, it was this: don’t let marketing guys create content. Actually, it was this: however “Lost” does end, it’s going to be a disappointment. My first reaction after seeing the final wrap-up of the game (youtube is down at…
-
The Blue and the Greying
Several years ago, someone recommended I watch Sherman’s March: a Meditation to the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. I’m glad I waited so long to finally see it. The premise of the movie is that filmmaker Ross McElwee received a grant to film a documentary about…
-
Making Comics
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud has gotten a lot of praise over the years, and it’s justified. It’s well presented, and it has some genuine insight into how art works (not just comics) and how people communicate. And even when you don’t agree with the points he makes, the book itself is an excellent example…
-
I could watch “Heroes” for just one day
Entertainment Weekly just ran an article about Rosario Dawson in which Kevin Smith calls her a “hot geek.”. Which to me is like saying “compassionate conservative;” it just doesn’t exist. The terms are mutually exclusive. For those of us who were nerds back when being a nerd meant something (mostly it meant rejection and shame),…
-
PS: Boners!
I was thinking more about those Hummer ads, and something just occurred to me: For decades, we’ve had hundreds of ads for dozens of products where the underlying message has been the same: Buy this product and you’ll get a huge boner. In the past few years, advertisers have been able to run commercials for…
-
Walt Disney’s Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
I must be all kinds of dense, because I’m having a hell of a time making it through The Odyssey. I was meaning to be reading it for pleasure but I can’t tell one name from the next and it just feels like homework. So I switched to The Once and Future King. And it…
-
Restore the Balance (you impotent, self-indulgent little stain of a person)
Car commercials are getting a lot more aggressive lately. Used to be the worst was that Mistubishi ad with the creepy woman in the beret pop-locking in somebody’s passenger seat like she was having an event. Now it’s hard to watch commercial TV for too long without feeling like you’ve been assaulted. VW has been…
-
Vast Wasteland
It’s counter-intuitive, but having a TiVo encourages a healthier relationship with the television box. You’re always hearing from TiVotees who go on about how they watch less TV than they did before they got one, but now I’ve got proof. Over the past month I’ve been subjected to more TV at my parents’ house and…