The more of these KGB assholes we kill, the bigger the smile on my face when the bullet finally finds me

I haven't been working much as it's blisteringly hot over here and so mostly I have been catching up on my reading, getting back into novels again and plowing through the late Jerry Aherne's Survivalist pulp series of square-jawed action adventures featuring the unkillable walking genocide that is Dr John Thomas (HO HO!) Rourke, a man who is so perfect that he's often referred to as a god not just by other characters, but also by the omniscient narrator of the books.  Rourke's eyes are so perfect that he wears sunglasses even at night to give anything that walks the Earth a fighting chance to get out of his way before he sees and kills them, and it's evidenced constantly that proximity to Rourke grants mortals a small measure of his invulnerability and capacity for genocide, first in the opening novel when he and "the jew Paul Rubenstein" massacre hundreds of bikers in a stand-up gunfight, and then through the first dozen or so books where characters mow down countless communists and "brigands" without fear of their own mortality until the absolute microsecond that they leave Rourke's divine aura and promptly get shot, captured, tortured or killed.  It ticks over like this for 12 books where the sunglasses-wearing gun-loving main character - with a secret hideout in the mountains he built for the inevitable day that the government fell and anarchy reigned - fights against biker gangs, spear-chucking savages, youth gone wild, women driven insane by Rourke's perfection, and traitorous pedophiles before the whole thing goes officially batshit insane and turns into Rourke versus communists versus Nazis at the end of the world after he and his family take a 500 year nap with which he engineers the advanced aging of his 8 and 10 year-old children so that they can shag his best mate and his mistress when they all wake up, but all told, it's good fun so far, and quite knowing about its own chauvinism and outdated racial and gender politics - despite being a self-confessed chauvinist, Rourke is quite fond of delivering Adam West Batman 1966-style lectures in the middle of conversations in order to correct lazy thinking and stereotyping, usually undermined seconds later when he utters the word "but..."
I have also been reading my way through pulp comic adventures in the Battlestar Galactica universe, with Rick Remender's Classic Battlestar Galactica really hitting the spot in a way that Dan Abnett's BSG books didn't quite manage (capable outings though they were), taking the characters from the tv show and transplanting them into a different medium with some really subtle interplay that underscores the personalities from the tv show rather than simply creates new characters with the same names, as is the case with Tony Lee's Battlestar Galactica: Starbuck, whose title seems to go forward with the bizarre notion that it's putting a spotlight on a character who isn't the focus of 70 percent of  stories already - kind of like doing a miniseries called X-Men: Wolverine - and then compounds things further in its very first image when it uses the wrong tv series as art reference, and then in its first line of dialogue where it wrongly names the Battle of Cimtar - the very first thing we see in the tv series and which has its own entry in the Battlestar Wiki because of course there is a Battlestar Wiki - and then gets the name of one of only 8 named Battlestars from the show wrong repeatedly, which might all on the surface seem like nerdy complaints, but in my defence, (a) this is page one and it doesn't bode well going forward, and (b), it is a Battlestar Galactica comic and I'll go out on a limb and say it'll mostly be fans of the show buying it and we might notice things like this, as I clearly have done.  I think Lee's probably just not much of a BSG fan, which I understand completely, as being a BSG fan is not something one does for a paycheque, it is a higher calling from Lizard Space Jeebus McNee and yes, I am writing this post in my underpants and haven't shaved in a week, why do you ask?

I'm going into that wedding to beat this man in front of God and everyone he knows

I wouldn't say that I dislike Black Box, as that would be inaccurate and lazy of me seeing as English is a wonderfully diverse and colourful language with which to blog and there are much better and more descriptive words like "hate" and "despise" out there for my use, Black Box being one of those shows that in my younger days would have had me wishing misfortune upon its makers not because I needed to chill out, but because I thought it unfair that they should profit in life through a combination of the kind of shameless creative plagiarism where a viewer with a memory that extends to last week can simply tick off in their brain where each and every plot point, character trait and even name comes from  while watching (Homeland, House, Millenium, Perception, Do No Harm, Grey's Anatomy, Crisis - the list is quite extensive as a great deal of feces is strewn across Black Box's wall) and then marries all that with the glorification of misanthropic adolescent behavior that typifies all those television shows that make you want to throw your shoe at the screen in the hope it will defy the laws of physics and travel through the television and eventually hit the characters on the head and the only thing that stops you isn't a sense of proportion but the fear of having to buy a new television because while you really do hate them that much, these shows do not actually make you any dumber.
But it isn't just that Black Box's worldview is hateful, it's also plain old terrible as a piece of television programming in itself, often resembling a pantomime crossed with a mid-90s music video in how it glamorously portrays the soft-focus effects of bipolar disorder as little more than impulse control failure that leads to kinky sex, like a thirteen year-old girl was told to watch Homeland and then create Grey's Anatomy fanfiction based upon her understanding of what she just saw, its breathy-voiced protagonist flip-flopping between personalities even before she actually has any kind of episode, but all told, I think what really got me was my calling that the main character's niece was really her daughter the actual moment her niece was introduced to the viewer, and being proved right forty minutes later when it was dropped like it was supposed to be a twist rather than creative strip-mining from another recent tv offering (Crisis) that you can see coming a mile off because nothing about what you are seeing is original, creative, or interesting, it's just rote tv production for the most undemanding of viewers.
While "shit" still seems a perfectly appropriate word to describe Black Box, after my hissy fit upstairs about writers not making the barest of efforts, I feel it only fair to rub two braincells together and offer "smegma" as perhaps being more accurate, as it conjures up images of something not so much inevitably and naturally excreted in its own time and course as it is congealed into being through a lack of care and attention.
Black Box is a smegma of a programme and I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy.

I'm talking about waking up one day and realising you've wasted your life chasing stupid dreams

So the workshy layabouts of the country are to be taken to task and prevented from getting something for nothing and are to do a real day's work - no, millionaire MPs expenses aren't being cut and no, they're still going to use unpaid clerks to do the work that MPs are paid (less than) "chickenfeed" for, and what is going to happen is instead that the definition of the word "voluntary" is to be redefined to better align with the thoughts of the incumbent stewards of where the bar is set for policy - and yes, that is a torturous turn of phrase just to be able to use the "bar stewards" pun, but you've read the blog before, you know I don't have high standards - if anything it's your own fault for expecting better, and besides, it's not like I'd be entirely accurate if I used the term "elected representatives", is it?  The current lot are neither.
Not that this approach to the unemployed affects me personally, I eventually discovered after being sent on several "help to work" courses (an oddly-named enterprise as they neither help nor supply you with work), as it turned out that I shouldn't have been sent on them at all seeing as I was registered as a carer for an elderly member of my community - registered with the Social Services, no less, so the right hand has literally no idea what the left is doing, or - and I realise that this is a crazy suggestion with no basis in any kind of fact - "help to work" is not meant to help anyone, it is meant to punish the unemployed simply for being by making them jump hurdles of petty beaurocracy, and by "no basis in fact", I of course mean "I and many others have already been told this is the case to my face by employees of the local Job Center" but don't worry, I've not really gone political - I don't give a fuck how quickly we run this third world shithole into the ground - and I am merely making a point about bad tv and shite music like I always do and here it is: the poor are the enemy.
Our television is filled with dramas about the struggles of the rich and the middle classes, our music is filled with odes to the excesses of wealth, our comic books are full of super-powered rich people battling socialism - and every time a new working class family is introduced to Coronation Street, the viewer grumbling begins, every time someone writes a song about the dispossessed they're dismissed as a Billy Bragg-type loser, every time a superhero gets a real job they can't hold onto it because for various reasons it is beneath them or otherwise not to be - remember that time Buffy got a job in a burger restaurant and the fans said it was the weakest point in the series despite it being the closest representation of their own experience they'd seen in a mainstream tv show?  A show about a superhero fighting monsters from popular culture is more of a representation of young adulthood than actual television programmes about young adults... well okay then.
Everything we are exposed to in our culture paints us as the enemy and we can't really be so surprised that Dave "murderer" Cameron has turned on us in his ongoing quest to look like he's clued-in with the consensus experience and not just a millionaire out to smash-and-grab what public services he can for himself and his rich mates before he's kicked out in 2015, which I think we can all go ahead and call right now, though I don't bar a miracle on his behalf as it seems to be the season for it if the baffling canonisation of Pope John Paul II is any indicator - I thought you needed to perform a miracle before you could become a saint, and call me old-fashioned but I don't think "making generations of sexual assault survivors disappear" really counts.

Why no I did not get laid this weekend FUCK YOU.

Go wash up - you all stink of money

I'm genuinely sorry to see Maria Miller go, as if you have come to hate them as much as I do, she was the best thing that happened to the Condems.  I thought she'd hang in there a bit longer, because Lord knows she gave no indication of shame or contrition, only acknowledging the growing public ill-feeling towards her when she made a late attempt to send her aides to sow a desperate conspiracy-theory story painting her detractors as a cabal of bitter homophobes in the Tory press pushing a non-story upon the great unwashed, a conspiracy she continued to push even in her long-overdue resignation letter and which her boss Dave Cameron - some sort of quango appointee, I assume, as he doesn't seem to have been elected by the public to his current office - responded to with an open admission that she was investigated for other expenses wrongdoing but, hey - those didn't come to anything so she mustn't have done anything wrong even that time she definitely did do something wrong and was forced - forced - to publicly apologise to parliament for it.
The entitlement of the establishment throughout the whole affair - not just from Miller, but from Cameron who makes a clumsy attempt to move the goalposts even after the final whistle - is telling, and shows the assumption they work from that public money is their money and that their jobs as public servants exist not to exercise the will of the electorate (fair play they already admitted that when they failed to win the confidence of a majority of it), but as a kind of Rube Goldberg machine which they have to play with in order to find a way to funnel that money into their own pockets.
Miller was an albatross who was dragging the Condems down just as sure as she was being dragged kicking and screaming towards her own resignation, and it's a damn shame she's let them get off as scott free as she herself has, citing even in her goodbye missive that she isn't actually going very far from the teat of public money to which she is entitled to suckle upon.  All that remains now is to see what unelected position within government she is rewarded with.

You better go be the best goddamn investment banker this city has ever seen

Haha it's almost like I have no clue what I am doing.

Watching:
Crisis - a tv show about the kidnapped kids of the American elite being held hostage to the plans of  a CIA operative with a Long Game that's unveiled over the course of the season, a female FBI agent must blah-de-blah-de-blah.  It's by-the-numbers stuff for a 2014 tv show, and not a patch on similar efforts like The Blacklist.
The Blacklist - ex-CIA operative with a Long Game, female FBI agent, blah-de-blah.  Unlike Crisis, there's effort made to present an identifiable format with a villain-of-the-week framework, as James Spader's intelligence broker manipulates the FBI into taking down a list of his customers and competitors while insinuating himself into the life of a seemingly random agent.  Spader does a very watchable smarmy sociopath and the rest of the cast is good even when working with some pretty leaden stereotypes, though the season arc peels back the layers of the onion faster than is usual so there's some brisk character development unusual for this kind of episodic telly.
The Following is a show which stars Kevin Bacon as Kevin Bacon, a hard-drinking maverick with nothing to lose who defies the conventional methods of the FBI in pursuit of a charismatic serial killer as he plays by his own rules, except when he breaks them because he doesn't play by anyone's rules - not even his own.  It is high camp stuff and not to be taken seriously - which I admit may be a redundant observation as I have already pointed out that it stars Kevin Bacon.
I have no idea what Continuum is supposed to be about - there, I've said it. It started out as a sci-fi show about a copper from the future pursuing terrorists into the past, but then it just sort of milled about for a season and a half before becoming dull and scattershot.  I suppose someone must still be watching it, I'm just not sure why I am.

I can't be the only one in the world who likes plaid, man

 Teenage me waited patiently for a Stallone/Schwarzenegger team-up that never happened, and adult me is thinking teenage me would get along fine with the low-budget head-thumping of Escape Plan even if it is a bit slow while adult me probably just wonders why people keep giving Vinnie Jones acting work (adult me has nothing against Jones, it's just that everything he's in, he plays Vinnie Jones).
It used to be I'd get all het up about action films and could argue why Mark L Lester is a better director than Richard Donner because I think action scenes often represent a microcosm of the director's ability - I even sat down and watched the Jet Li/Jackie Chan fight from Forbidden Kingdom 14 times in a row before I thought it safe to deliver the opinion that Rob Minkoff is an okay director, if a bit passive and low energy.  I take action cinema very seriously, and the trashier and more low-budget the film, the more seriously I take it, as big-budget action movies are mostly just meh suffering from overlong second acts that make them unattractive for potential repeat viewing, and to me Escape Plan is a film that often seems like one long second act.  My first thought when the two leads met was "why are they pretending not to know each other?  They met in Expendables." but the film does nothing to capitalise on that kind of self-awareness and plays things very straight - to its detriment, as I think it could have done with acknowledging that both leads have done decent high-concept prison movies already - Stallone in the first half of Tango And Cash, and Schwarzenegger in the first half of Running Man- and concentrated more on soundbites and throwdowns, as what we get is just kind of there - inoffensive, functional and unexceptional.  Adult me thinks it okay, but teenage me would hopefully want a bit more.  I probably should have watched it with booze.

One time I took some acid and when the trip was over I could play the bagpipes and drive stick

I will admit that sometimes you can forget that the bigger picture is that we're actually getting better as a species.  The vegans and the vegetarians have the right idea, of course, we just don't want to admit as much right now because that would be to announce our moral inferiority and culpability in something appalling, so we respond to their perfectly sensible dietary choice with open hostility, denial, ridicule, and even outright lies, and this notion returned to me as I was watching The Dallas Buyers Club, finding it weird - suddenly - to see people walking down dowdy hospital corridors talking about the "business" of tending the terminally ill, seeing money symbols instead of human beings and deciding on the life and death of people based on where a decimal point goes.  This is what the millionaire boys' club of the Condems want for the NHS, so the film is a horror story as much for us as it is for the US audience, possibly more so because we at least have to go through the anticipation of waiting for the full scope of the atrocity to make itself known over the coming years, while the yanks have been brainwashed already into thinking private healthcare is normal rather than yet another example of their money being spirited away into the coffers of the rich, the public debate on Obamacare successfully hijacked - with the gleeful aid of the media - by the tea party donkey show of America's crypto-fascist upper-middle classes infuriated yet again at the idea of altruism, because while bombing anonymous brown children is all well and good, giving them a band-aid afterwards is going too far.
Dallas Buyers Club uses the banality and uniform acceptance of this everyday evil to give its story an antagonist in the form of corporate America and the complicity of uncaring and small-minded government bureaucracy, so it's an easy watch in that regard for a big softy like me who likes things to throw back to the telemovie-of-the-week trappings of the mid-80 as the film does quite often.  It also has a protagonist who's essentially a paradigm for the modern politically-incorrect misogynistic racist dickhead central to much of modern entertainment, only here his failings aren't held up as indicative of a rebel spirit who blazes their own trail, these things are held up as failings to be surmounted so that the character can be less of an asshole, which again is quite welcome.

I seem to have waffled uncontrollably again when I could have just said "good film, I liked it."

I drank three beers and I got like all giggley and tired and I didn't want a fourth

While it still looks lovely, I don't recall Grant Morrison's and Rian Hughes' Dare being quite as adolescent as it seems to be to these jaded old-man eyes, but in my defence, when I got around to reading it I was 13 and its primary audience.
Nestling in the pages of the Rian Hughes-centric Yesterday's Tomorrows collection of the artist's comics and design work - a beautiful-looking object and no mistake - I recall reading somewhere that it was Morrison's rebuttal to the idea of a gentleman upper-middle-class type adventurer as beloved of a certain generation of schoolboys, but that rings hollow for two reasons:
1 - Morrison didn't have any problems at all with the upper classes adventuring and oppressing the weak when he wrote superhero comics for DC for 30 years in adventures aimed at a specific tier of white, male, middle-class North Americans, and
2 - Dare eschews the class system in favor of the more pantomime-y good/evil dynamic, its nods to the class system being little more than parading out some cartoonishly noble Northerners struggling against The Man.
As well as Dare's 4th form political posturing, there's also Really and Truly, a Morrison joint from the pages of 2000ad that I am going to go ahead and assume got commissioned because of the art.  Hughes really didn't get a good script from Morrison during their 2000ad tenure and I wonder why he didn't plump for the more energetic and fun Robo Hunter outings as a showcase - Morrison's name being worth more in terms of attracting the casual comics reader happening upon the book, I imagine.

I got attacked by a duck at the park yesterday

Back from the weekend lull, there were Saturday and Sunday strips, in case you missed them.

Although it ends up playing around with the visual geography of the scene, I flipped that first panel at the inking stage for lettering reasons, so I do actually give it some thought despite all appearances and evidence to the contrary.  See also: no backgrounds, a decision made to keep the foreground art uncluttered even though I always bitch at those who choose not to draw backgrounds. I'm discovering that sometimes less is more, or at least that most things are a subjective experience, which was a lesson probably begun about 30 minutes into watching The Hangover and finding it about as funny as watching a dying child being kicked out of their wheelchair.

Elsewhere, True Detective wraps up its first season and I shan't spoiler anything here in case you're still catching up, but I liked how it continued to swerve between genres before arriving at its destination.  A great slice of gothic Americana with the odd hint of Lovecraft thrown in.

You said you were afraid a fly was gonna fly inside your head and learn all your thoughts

Before you ask, yes, it is deliberate that no-one has a shadow - I was experimenting, dammit!  Do you think anyone would willingly colour and letter something this horribly?  Similarly don't be dissing my whack rhymes, yo - I can't help being white.  So, so white...

Eternally out of touch, I did not care very much for 12 Years A Slave as I found it pointless and dull - "slavery is bad," you say?  Well, thank you for clearing that up, Hollywood, but I feel you could have just said "slavery was bad" and spared me two hours of my life I could have spent watching the next few episodes of Star Crossed, which for all its faults does at least explore racial politics - albeit via sci-fi allegory - instead of just wallowing at the bottom of the social ladder seeing how the worst-off of society are treated like a kind of Benefits Street for white liberals.
There's no lesson to be learned in 12 Years A Slave, no themes, no real sense of the passage of all that time, not even any character arcs, it's just a parade of misery, and what it makes me think of most is Passion of the Christ - worthy subject matter, but makes for a repetitive and dull film that treats bodily mutilation like the subject of a pornographic work, although I liked my mate's description of it as "like Shawshank Redemption, but with whippings instead of bummings."

I don't want my kid raised by religious fanatics, I want it raised by homosexuals

I have most recently watched Hachiko Monogatori and the American remake Hachi: A Dog's Story.  The former is one of the saddest things I have ever seen, while the latter is a film that stars Richard Gere.
There's a certain cultural nuance to the tale of the original Hachiko that is not present in the Americanised remake, but I sadly lack the smarts to explain it adequately and so must muddle through as best I can: basically, up until fairly recently, pets were seen as an indulgence of the well-off classes of Japanese society and cats and dogs were largely community-owned utilitarian animals, and there is a common thread in the dominant Japanese spiritual philosophies that posits the importance of an object or person being true to its purpose and nature, so in the case of Hachiko - a dog who waited loyally for its master to arrive by train each day for the rest of its life after the man suddenly passed away - even though the dog waited in vain and was doomed to never meet its master again, the fact that it waited as it was supposed to is seen as admirable, and helped shape cultural attitudes towards pets as being less an indulgence of the affluent and more an addition to the family unit.  In the American version, the dog is basically thick, so it doesn't know any better than to run away when neglected and simply seek out familiar places, and I would argue this loses a lot of the appeal of the original as Hachiko quite clearly understands that its companion is gone but chooses to wait regardless until their reunion in the afterlife, and we know this because there's a watermark scene halfway through where it shifts from being a feelgood movie about a middle-aged man making an unlikely new friend against the social expectations of the day into forty minutes of your feels gland being used as a punching bag after the dog wanders into the room in the house where his master's funeral is being held and starts crying.  It is as mad and heartbreaking as it sounds.
The Gere version not so much.

The internet said to stay off my feet but then I found this wheelchair in a ditch so now I'm ready to work out

Star Crossed stars the 30 year-old ex-model Matt Lanter as the 16 year-old Space Hunkington (this is not really his name) and the 25 year old ex-model Amy Tea Garden (actually her real name) as Some Chick (probably her actual name), and if I said to you "Roswell meets Alien Nation - go write me a series", you would go off and write exactly this, even though you aren't a writer, you're just someone who was passing me in the office at the time when I pulled my nose out of a bowl of cocaine and you only came in to empty the bins, but it's 2014 and all the writing is done electronically and you are fucked - FUCKED - if you're telling me that no-one uses paper so you don't even have a purpose in this office because you need this job, you have debts - not like "I'm in twenty large to Johnny Fingers and he's gonna break my legs if I don't make good" debts, but it's still 2014 and you have debts like everyone else, so you go off and you try to remember what you can of Roswell and Alien Nation from that one time you caught some episodes in the 1990s at something like 2 in the morning and you put it down there on the page and you print it up and bring it into the office even though you know right there - just like you did when you were writing it - that it's complete horseshit and everyone will see through you, everyone will know you're a sham, no-one will accept a bunch of unoriginal, half-baked tropes reheated like this and that office is just going to laugh right in your stupid fucking face and sure enough I take the script out of your hands and I roll it into a ball - roll the pages into an actual ball - and throw it in your face right in front of everyone in exactly the kind of bullying alpha-male prick display you expect from a cokehead twat sailing by on past successes but little actual ability beyond some passable middle-management skills and I say "FUCK PAPER EMAIL ME THAT SHIT IT'S 2014" so you do and sweet mother of God I tell you I'm happy with it and you maybe wonder in passing why I don't say "it's good" or "it's bad" or make any kind of value judgement at all upon what you are pretty sure is a lousy script but you don't really care that much because you've made it, baby - you're a motherfucking writer now and it's music to your ears when your boss tells you "this is not bad enough to throw in the garbage while you watch, but only just" because this is The CW and that, my friends, is where the bar is.
I've seen worse, I guess.

I don't sleep, I just dream

Catching up on the backlog again with some clumsy but sadly necessary colouring.  I can never get my shit together on Mondays so it's great to have something to relax with in front of the tv so I can pretend I'm busy and not just catching up on my Transformers: Prime watching - or as it was called this (final) season, Transformers: Prime: Beast Hunters, a pointlessly busy title for a pointlessly drawn-out season.  The reworked theme and intro sucked, while the storyline meanders before the animation budget implodes and the season showdown takes place on a giant toilet seat with a PS3 screensaver as a background so overall it's not a great send-off for a series that started out well with some shameless but fun mash-ups of scenes and ideas from sources as disparate as John Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness and Stargate, but there were some fun retakes on Transformers lore along the way.

Don't cut me in front of my kids

I wasn't in too much of a hurry to watch the final three episodes of Treme, because once it was over, it was over forever, and I knew I would miss seeing an attempt to render real Americans on tv rather than just and idealised version of the most well-off representatives of the population as seen in... well, in every damn tv show from America that I watch.
I recall watching the first couple of episodes of the painful Skins adaptation and running into a wall quite early when the show revealed itself as set in Baltimore, and after seeing the Wire I just didn't recognise this place at all and it might as well have been set on the Moon.  This was my main bone of contention with it, though there were other problems it had - particularly that it was a show for cunts - and the same problem followed me to my viewing of Vampire Diaries spin-off The Originals, which was set in a parallel reality version of New Orleans that I didn't recognise from watching Treme for the last few years, not the city itself, the culture on display, the very, very Caucasian-looking cast, and, of course, there was also that it was a show for cunts.

Despite it ruining lesser television for me and making me an even bigger and more obnoxious snob, I will miss Treme.  I like that it was a show unafraid to show a different aspect of American culture than we're used to seeing, as we sure don't need another show about the New York Irish or Italians, valid though their cultural identity is despite many attempts to ridicule the notion of Guidos as all being mafiosas and Irish Americans all "plastic paddies" or whatever - that is their culture and I believe it's real and a big part of their identity and who they are - but enough with whitey on tv, already, he's had a great run and is not exactly under-represented.
I don't know what the next Treme is going to be, but I want it already.

You damned Vulcans and your defined parameters!

Bitten is so bad that when terrorists commit their next atrocity upon the United States, the angry ghost of Jerry Falwell will rise from his grave and say that alongside Paganism, abortion, feminism and being gay, Bitten was why America had it coming.  He will, of course, be utterly wrong.  About the first four.
I don't even know where to start, but probably the lecturer who gets his Jungian theory wrong is as good a place as any (because the scene comes early in the show).  Basically he talks at length about how the concept of the anima and the animus* sound a bit like "animal" so that's the same thing as being about werewolves.  When the lecturer who looks like a male model speaks, the only reaction shots we see are from groups of attractive young women sitting together in the audience.  It generally manages to go downhill from there - and fair play that must have taken some effort - but before we get to that point we also open on a sex scene - the very first thing we see in the very first episode is the female lead riding cowgirl on an anonymous rod, then making excuses to rush outside to turn into a werewolf because apparently she forgot this was something she does.
Basically, Bitten is not a show for feminists, and I don't mean that it has an unhealthy male gaze, I mean that for a show that lingers on them as sexual creatures it does not actually seem to like women very much.  There's a sub-genre in horror that creates an equation between the female menstrual cycle and lycanthropy, and Bitten is an unfortunate addition to exploring this "curse" analogy subconsciously rather than as text, with a character trying to distance herself from her natural "cycles" and being punished for it by turning into a raging bunny-killing monster, and let me be very clear about this: the character actually kills a bunny after turning into a  menstrual rage monster, this happens in the pre-credits sequence moments after the sex scene and the character's stripping in a dirty alleyway.
Oh, and a guy tells a woman she's a slut in the first couple of minutes of the show.  That may also be an indicator of troubling subtext, along with the unsurprising failure of the Bechdel Test in an almost suicidally-spectacular fashion - women don't just talk about men when they're alone, they talk about the fantastic sex they have with those men, even though one of the two women in the conversation is the man's sister.  What the heck that is about I cannot fathom, but I am beginning to have an inkling why the writers might have been thinking about psychiatry lately.

I also managed to check out the Carrie remake for some reason, as I didn't even like the original as I just found it unpleasant more than scary.  The remake is largely a bit of a hoot in hystericalising things while also trying to make it seem like maybe kids aren't inherently evil so much as they are careless and occasionally insensitive - it's a bizarre flip-flop act to be sure, and sort of falls apart later when we get to scenes that take a clear delight in the suffering and murder of children, but up until then, the overblown nature of it was kind of entertaining, if potentially grating to those not inclined to indulge it.




* In Jungian philosophy, the anima and animus are the complimentary "masculine" or "feminine" elements of the human psyche.  Put simply, the animus is the masculine element of the female psyche, while the anima is the feminine element of the male - the writers of Bitten somehow manage to get these two mixed up, and also somehow manage to think that what Jung meant was that everyone is secretly the Hulk.

The Japanese possess unbelievable strength when backed into a corner!

"Intelligence is an optimistically titled show" opines the alternate-universe me who is a bit more of a prick than I am when it comes to reviewing things "because it is basically stupid and dumb and Chuck without jokes" Alt-Me continues, not realising they already made Chuck without jokes - it was called Chuck - and missing that Chuck was really just a repackaged Jake 2.0, which was itself a repackaged Max Steel they tried to pass off as a Six Million Dollar Man homage because no-one wants to admit they based their tv show on a cartoon but will cop to being inspired by a decades-old cheesefest because nostalgia is an accepted coin of the realm in entertainment these days - but yeah, we're at the back of the Human Centipede again.
Alt-Me goes on in the usual rambling fashion about Intelligence being stupid and cliche-ridden, but that's not really a problem in television terms as the Battlestar Galactica remake proved that you didn't have to be original or tell new stories to be considered innovative or fresh, you could just get away with the same old plots genre tv has been churning out for decades as long as you put a new spin on the presentation: mainly by having a straight face and acting like you mean it when you say things like "these evil sex robots are up to something."  It's a bit like the 1966 Batman movie where he's running around with a big black ball with a fizzing fuse coming out of it going "some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!" and in Dark Knight Rises he does exactly the same thing except there's no jokes and no-one ever smiles and for some reason it's the former that's considered juvenile.  Anyhoo, that second Rises one is modern tv in a nutshell: do the same old thing everyone else has done already but don't hang a lampshade on it like you have something to apologize for.
And so to Intelligence, which is, for all its faults, an inoffensive romp whose biggest failing is likely that it's lost the lead to the nearly-identical Blacklist (bar the genre trappings of Intelligence's central McGuffin, of course), though debuting months/years after an identical tv series hasn't done much harm to The Mentalist, Arrow, Being Human, and so on, so Intelligence might be okay, possibly moreso if they stop making Josh Holloway's character so unlikeable in an attempt to make him more like Sawyer from Lost and just accept that he's a naturally likeable chap and try to play to that instead.  I would be lying if I didn't admit that I was laughing really hard at a lot of  how clumsy some of it was, mind, like the exposition that comprises the entirety of some characters' dialogue - the CSI castmember woman person especially is like some kind of machine.

Coffee is the element I float in, my dear - be it exquisite or vile

Seeing as I'm blogging about whatever random episode of tosh I've just watched: how about this week's episode of Castle, eh?
No, I don't see this as being a particularly interesting avenue to explore, either, but here we are.  I am not really sure what to make of Castle, as on one hand it clearly doesn't take itself too seriously, right up until it takes itself deadly serious, and usually these two things happen within moments of each other.  A cynical man - and lord knows I am not one of those - would suggest that it doesn't reward those with the functioning attention span of a normal adult and the writers are just throwing whatever at the screen as it's not meant to create a consistent internal logic or narrative in the way other comedy/murder-mystery man/woman shows like Elementary or even the late lamented Monk do, it's just some stuff on a tv that happens once a week to stop you turning over to see if there's a repeat of Star Trek Voyager on somewhere, and fair play it manages that because of the way it is made, as I constantly confuse Castle with other things, like the Charlie Sheen shitcom Anger Management, which began a sub-plot about a character hooking up with a hippy college dropout character that hasn't been relevant for almost thirty years but someone in a writing room somewhere noticed that some white guys had dreadlocks in a picture of something called Burning Man so that must mean hippies are relevant again, am I right?
Thus the domino effect of unoriginal tv writing began - that strange morphic resonance where a plot that's been worked into a 42 minute episode of one tv show suddenly gets used in another, and another, and another - and tv shows started lining up the same character and plot where a female cast member they didn't know what else to do with suddenly got a hippie boyfriend who didn't understand boundaries, capitalism, sarcasm, and so on - basically, it was a low point for Anger Management and just to put that comment in perspective, it was a low point FOR ANGER MANAGEMENT, so why anyone on the Castle writing staff thought "yep, that's a winner, let's transplant that storyline wholesale into our series" is beyond me.  Mind you, this week's episode had a completely unironic recreation of Kirk's birth scene from the 2009 Star Trek reboot - and I mean, really, really unironic, right down to dialogue, camera framing, setting the conversation between father and mother-to-be over a phone half in an ambulance and the other half in a burning set, near-identical soundtrack choice, and it was not a homage, followed shortly after by a scene which was not a homage to The Fugitive even though one of the characters in the scene was actually called Kimble, and all this was framed by a plot that was not a homage to the plot of Backdraft yet was completely identical to it.  I don't even think it was deliberate - I think the writers of Castle have entered a state where they just take in all the things they've seen elsewhere and the viewer is more or less the back end of their Human Centipede.  It's an efficient process, I'll grant them that, but it's starting to leave a bad taste.

In my experience when someone has to tell you they're all the way in, you'd better hope their tongue works

One of the things I like about the current incarnation of Hawaii 5-o is its willful stupidity and dogged chasing of the conservative American audience traditionally glued to the likes of Bones or Law & Order: Rape Squad by appearing to be an even glossier version of those shows but with marginally more liberal politics, though I have to admit that even I was baffled by the racial and political commentary of this week's outing (season 4, episode 10: "Hoʻonani Makuakane").  Spoilers ahead, obviously:

While attending the Pearl Harbor memorial, Steve McGarratt prevents a Japanese man from shooting an elderly veteran.  The man claims to be an internee from the 1940s whose father was murdered by the veteran when he was caught in the act of stealing the family's ceremonial katana from the tent where they were interned.  Much is made of the shameful treatment of Japanese Americans and their imprisonment, with characters explicitly mentioning onscreen the kind of things that went on - guards brutalising prisoners, even killing them for doing nothing more than saying no to orders - and no bones are made about their legal status: the Japanese Americans weren't soldiers or criminals, they were citizens who were victims of institutionalised racism.
The plot continues: McGarratt questions the truculent, evasive and outright rude veteran who refuses to help the investigation and McGarratt inplies that perhaps the veteran does not like the Japanese, though he bases this on flimsy clues like the man using terms like "Japs" and "of course I hated them" and his being a guard in an internment camp, though the veteran flips the script all up in McG's grill when the vet's daughter comes in and she's clearly Asian, so the veteran says "HOW CAN I HATE THEM WHEN I MARRIED ONE" without a hint of irony.  The exact circumstances of the death continue to be clouded because the official reports have been altered by soldiers in the camp - a cover up - but with "police work" (running around going PEW PEW) the truth is revealed: the veteran didn't kill anyone, it was the little brother of another camp guard, who broke into the camp and robbed the people in it while his brother covered this up and the veteran is guilty of nothing more than lying and obstructing justice for 70 years.  So, tearfully, the Japanese man apologises to the veteran for thinking that he had anything to do with the murder or subsequent cover-up while Steve McGarratt looks on approvingly.

I have not a fucking clue what to make of this episode of television.  Obviously, the main issue for me would be that there is not enough Dano in it and its present-day procedural elements hinge almost entirely upon the deeply dull McGarratt, but it also culminates with a Japanese man who sought not cynical monetary recompense but recognition of the injustice done to his family (they're shown onscreen having their home invaded by soldiers and federal agents who racially abuse them, beat them, then steal that home and property from them), yeah, that guy is shown apologising to his internment camp guard - a man who we are told was a brutal racist - despite the camp guard being a part of exactly what the Japanese guy was accusing him of.  There's other things in the episode, too, like McGarratt putting the Japanese man under "house arrest" - internment by any other name - and acting like the guy should be grateful at this bizarre insensitivity, or the fact that the show on multiple occasions makes a direct equivalence between soldiers on active duty overseas in World War 2 and soldiers guarding internment camps who brutalised, killed, and robbed innocent American civilians and then participated in a cover-up of events for seven decades, to the point that the main characters salute the latter at the start and end of the episode.  It is bonkers logic and I am convinced that something is going on here that I just can't understand because I had two beers before I started watching and the lack of transforming robots or exploding spaceships means that my attention wandered and I missed massive subtleties in the story that made everything a clever and knowing satire.
Fair play, though, in among all the scenes where Japanese America apologises for the inconvenience it caused, the show just rubs internment in its audience's face: "yes, this is what we did!" it says "and some people still defend it!" it continues.  I recently watched my way through the fifth season of The Twilight Zone and the episode The Encounter stated - erroneously - that there were Japanese traitors in the US citizenry, but H5o does no such thing, it rather bluntly puts that to bed with a character shouting the truth at the tv screen.  There's also some clumsy exposition that points out that the Japanese Americans who were segregated into their own fighting unit went on to become the most highly-decorated unit in the history of the US military which is a fascinating story all on its own, and there's even some interesting Hawaii-specific insights to internment, such as how community leaders, politicians and teachers were targeted for internment because there were so many Japanese Americans on the islands (a third of the population) that the economy would implode if they were all locked up, so martial law was instead declared across Hawaii and those capable of organising the populace were removed from it.
I like it when racism is rubbed in an audience's face because it's something that tends to be swept under the rug these days like it isn't a problem anymore, or in the case of some BBC programming, racism is retroactively erased from period dramas, which I just find deeply disturbing rather than "cosy" which is what I assume they were going for, but this hot mess of an episode mixes up all kinds of odd and conflicting notions on the idea of how far America has or hasn't come and if it got me thinking, it's probably got others thinking, too, so as I say, I don't really understand what's going on in this episode, but it at least stirs the pot a little.

I thought I'd changed, but I'd just got good at pretending to like things I don't like

What to say about Who Dares Wins that the the guy who scrawled "shit sandwich" on a wall already hasn't?  It is basically a film where the SAS gun down hippies, but take over two hours to do so - an expanse of time in which members of the real SAS would have gunned down any number of unarmed civilians, heck, even the Met took less time than that to execute that Brazilian electrician.  But when all's said and done, it is not that Who Dares Wins is right wing, misogynistic, unconvincing and riddled with plot holes, it is that it's the most criminal of things where entertainment is concerned - it is boring.

This is my German pill - in case they release the bombs or I'm ever abandoned in space

 So what other unpopular tv shows can I tell you that I think are great?  I have been watching Karl Urban's new televisual vehicle Almost Human, though that seems to be popular enough to survive without my seal of approval, strange though that concept may be.  Just as well, really, because despite enjoying it, I will admit that it is pretty bad.  There's this bit where the villain stops in the middle of a violent kidnapping attempt on a busy street and delivers a bad guy lecture to the guy he's kidnapping about his (the villain's) plan to kill a load of cops and blow up their police station.  Oddly, this very public act is his undoing when some cops look at a recording of the event.  It's that kind of show.

Also watching Tim Allen's Last Man Standing, which has me genuinely flummoxed.  In its first season it was a show about a right wing idiot forced to adopt to the modern world when he realises that the only male heir he has is the infant son of one of his teenage daughters, and despite Allen's off-screen status as a card-carrying Republican gun owner, the character he played was presented as admirable only in that he was willing to change as he accepted that the world he lived in was more complicated than the one he thought or hoped he lived in.  In the second season... not so much.  Once the show was confirmed to be returning, changes were made in the format to introduce a "hippy liberal" character who often espoused straw man versions of left-leaning notions about renewable energy, vegetarianism, unions, and so on, and Tim Allen's character would take every opportunity to correct his thinking with hard facts or sometimes even a stern lecture, sometimes with the aid of other cast members.  Coincidentally, one cast member took off when these changes were to be introduced.  Odd, that.
Where I'm flummoxed is what the show is trying to achieve here: on one hand it's clearly a vehicle for anti-liberal sentiments railing against multiculturalism and universal health care among other things, but on the other hand expressing these sentiments in the blunt and occasionally disingenuous manner the show does just reinforces the first season's characterisation of the protagonist as an arrogant, privileged white male who's lost touch with the vast majority of the rest of the country but believes otherwise because a small minority have chosen to publicly support him.  it would be easy to attribute this to Tim Allen's wanting the character to reflect his own views and thus be a vehicle for his own comedy material at regular intervals in the show, but then why is there no reliable foil or dissenting voice?  Even bad comedy pokes fun at itself, mocks its own tropes or breaks down its characters, and though Allen has made some comedic offerings that are of questionable quality, he does at least have enough experience in the world of scripted comedy to know how these things work and it's odd that something so family-oriented and middle of the road should excise such a balancing element in the hope of creating an Ali G whose central purpose is to pull a fast one on middle America.
So I'm flummoxed because I can't decide if Tim Allen wants me to laugh at his monstrous creation by design or if it's just happening by accident while he fellates his own political beliefs.  In my defence, when he devotes screen-time to footage of lemmings so he can call them "Obama voters" while opining "maybe they think universal health care is at the bottom of that cliff" at the same time he is showing footage of Karl Marx, Allen doesn't exactly make it easy to call.