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.

Seeing as I'm still drawing robots that I don't want to spoiler by pasting pics on the blog, instead here's a quick snapshot of Nancy Drew getting along famously with the animal kingdom as usual.

The story behind this sketch is a scene from the first Nancy Drew story, which is inexplicably described as a "mystery" novel despite being about the search for a copy of a will and having the title 'The Secret of the Old Clock'. SPOILER ALERT - it's in the old clock.
It was a choice between the exciting boat scene where she runs out of gas and floats there in the lake for a few hours, the blood-pumping car scene where she drives around and gets lost, or the frantic shopping scene where she haggles over a dress, but I choose this scene in the end because it lends itself to a vaguely amusing image of Nancy about to be horrifically scarred in an animal attack, as around forty pages in a good mauling would have helped up the pace of a rather sedentary novel about a nosy cow who wanders about until mysteries solve themselves. I guess this was what passed for empowering girlyism in 1930, though I'm not entirely sure how it caught on as a series of books, nor how it eventually led to women in the army and stuff.

Watching:
Dollhouse finale - Meh. I've seen all of it now, and while there was admittedly more to it than 'child-like whores fulfill any male fantasy and occasionally something goes Wrong with the process', there wasn't that much terribly interesting about what was there. Some decent twists and the odd glimmer of potential in the death throes, but the only really interesting concept was the post-apocalyptic setting of the epilogues, and I'd rather have had a series about that instead of one where Eliza Dushku got beat up, stripped, or cried every time we were supposed to care a jot about her character. C+

Listening:
Prodigy - got me a hankering from somewhere for those old-school beats they excelled at before Fat of the Land came along and turned them into a pantomime, in much the same way that I never realised what a bunch of middle-class wankers the Manics were before Everything Must Go became a fixture in every 4x4 on a school run. Oh God, now I want to listen to Holy Bible...

Watching: Star Trek: Phase 2. A fan-made sequel to the original pop-cultural landmark rather than an original continuity of new characters, Phase 2 has some pretty horrendous acting. That's pretty much my main take on it, as it overshadows almost everything else, which is a shame given the effort involved that's yielded a damn fine recreation of the original series' visual aesthetic, right down to the garish studio lighting.

The FX let the side down by being significantly better than what would have appeared on the original series, but alongside the remastered episodes do highlight how little the show really needed retooling for later iterations given both it's recognisability worldwide, its place as a cultural artifact of the mid-20th century, and also as a meta-franchise that now supports an entirely canon alternate-reality retelling as a box-office draw alongside the series itself. This is the route that a new tv series should have taken, if only to spare us Picard's jumpsuited communists wandering the galaxy avoiding fights.

Standout moment among the bad acting and dialogue of latest episode Blood and Fire is probably James Cawley's Kirk noting in passing that his nephew Peter is gay and not being terribly concerned, but that's what we'd expect of Kirk at this stage, as the man has seen more fanny than the gynecologists of seven worlds and has little to prove to anyone, I imagine, though this is still a bit of a coup for the show given it's co-written by Star Trek veteran David Gerrold, and none of the official series ever managed to represent the gay community beyond seedy allusions in the otherwise-great DS9 that reduced homosexuality in the Trek universe(s) to something only indulged by the morally ambiguous or outright evil - though in fairness, you can lay exactly the same allegation at its feet about the portrayal of interracial couples.

Still, it's a great little series if you can get past the shortcomings of the acting and dialogue, but in fairness there are few 'proper' actors among the cast of mostly-fans - though those that are (such as TNG's Denise Crosby) seem to be going the extra mile of recreating the bad acting that surrounds them to the point that it probably helps the view of it all as something mates ran up after putting a few drinks down their neck.

So I'm watching the Human Target pilot as it's now a tv series. Based on the comic book character created in the 1970s but unquestionably popularised of late to the point where a televised adaptation is seen as an option by the work of Peter Milligan for DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, the trades are a good first port of call for those pretentious dicks who think they're too good for comics, alongside stuff like Strangers in Paradise, crudely drawn biographies about the holocaust/Middle East, or - I dunno - comics about rape told from the female point of view or something. Jolly stuff, you know?

Anyway, I'm watching Human Target, and about ten minutes in, it's about as good as any other show of its ilk that I watch, like Leverage, for instance - except while I watch and occasionally enjoy Leverage, it's still just a big ol' heap of shit at the end of the day and I'm indulging as much as I am watching it, and that's what human target is. It's a big old pile of shit, and given the pedigree of some of the comic tales, which are not what you'd think of as difficult to adapt, I really had to ask myself "Why is this show so shit?"

It's one of those mysteries that solves itself, really.
There's a bit halfway through where two guys are having a bit of fisticuffs in a runaway train car, and all I could think of was the leaked script adapting Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic that basically opened with Sandman having fisticuffs with his evil brother and he says something like "You won't defeat me, Sandman - I'm the king of bad dreams!" and that's the level of comic book adaptation you're getting with Human Target, especially when Chase speaks to his clients for the first time and I genuinely wondered - based on the words coming out of the mouths of characters - if the writer had ever actually met another human being.
If you can indulge bad television and miss the kind of show that pushed a lone male protagonist against the world in a shooty/runny kind of situation four times an episode, it might hold your attention, but otherwise you might not care for it. If you're diehard fan of the comics, you should avoid it like the plague, unless you like to tear things down for being terrible, in which case you can probably come up with a decent drinking game to play during episodes.
"When someone says Chase is a loose cannon, you drink beer. When the music swells really loudly to tell you what to think or feel, drink beer. When Chase poses and tells the bad guy how he totally pwns the current situation, drink a shot. When Chase makes an amazing deduction that's suspiciously like that bit in last week's Monk, take a shot."
Awful television - naturally, this does not mean I won't be watching next week.

Watching:

Book of Eli - one of the failings of Fallout 3 was a lack of video sequences to tie together the main plot and stop the eventual resolution feeling like a bit of an anticlimax, but there's probably enough similarities between that and this to imagine what it might have been like if one of my favorite time sinks had a better bookend than a Ron Perlman voiceover. The visual trappings of Eli are quite dour and the theological subtext might trouble some of your more argumentative liberals, though the idea of thousands of years of Christianity reduced to just another bunch of words on a shelf might offset that on an intellectual level. The rest of the film, while competent, falls short in terms of entertainment and - oddly - artistic merit compared to other post-apocalyptic offerings of more humble means, though the one film that kept coming to mind was Patrick Swayze's Steel Dawn, possibly because of the western influence on the story, setting and main character - but it's an unfavorable comparison given that the Swayze-starrer had brevity and a lightness of touch to proceedings born of the low budget and embarrassing 1980s vision of post-apocalyptia, while Eli is sombre, overlong, and has an ending that's a bit like the end of an episode of Smallville in that it just won't finish. It's a journeyman adventure, and all things considered I've had more enjoyment from watching horrible no-budget DVD travesties like She-Wolves of the Wasteland or America 3000 by dint of not having high expectations to meet. For definitive wasteland fiction, A Boy and His Dog or Damnation Alley probably remain a better bet.

Reading:

Wolverine: Origins #43 - More of the usual murderous fun from Marvel's biggest draw with small children as he has a slow day and only disembowels one person for a whole book. I'm sure he'll be back at his all-ages best next month, but in the meantime, it's great to see 1980s staples Cloak and Dagger doing something other than filling space on team books written by someone with more of an eye on the comics internet and what it's talking about than a plan what to actually do with old-school favorites once they're jammed into a glorified cameo, which is pretty much all C&D have been doing since their stint on Marvel Knights ended about ten years ago, particularly in Runaways, where they did little more than jobbing to get newer characters over with that title's fast-shrinking monthly readership. Here, Dagger is admittedly little more than a joke, reduced to a damsel in distress/"chicks don't understand a man's pain" role, but it's at least a meaty role with some sort of emotional substance and palpable sense of danger to it, and the 20-something Cloak and Dagger don't spend all their time banging on about 'the good old days' of comics from the writer's youth, which is a comic book trope of which I am thoroughly sick to the back teeth.
The Boys #38 - I get two impressions from this comic. 1 - that Garth Ennis is writing about non-whites again and you either have an opinion about that by now or you don't, and 2 - that he's seen Aliens more than once. Ennis is always readable, of course, but The Female didn't really need an origin and that's what this issue is.

Drawing:

Nothing at all - it's saturday, bugger off!

Watching Push, I'm struck by a few things.
1 - This is pretty silly without being much fun, which strikes me as a bit of a waste.
2 - Dakota Fanning seemed to be doing alright until she had to play a drunk. Perhaps I should be more forgiving on account of her being two years old and probably not getting tanked off her fanny that much what with the acting and stuff taking up any of her time not devoted to... erm, whatever it is girls that age get up to, presumably stuff with ponies or shoe shopping - but no, I shan't be swayed here: she plays an utterly unconvincing drunk in the same way Chris Evans plays an unconvincing anything at all, and no goddamn way is that an absinthe hangover. Do your bloody research, girl.
3 - One of the actors is called Digimon and that is fucking awesome.

Checked out Sherlock Holmes over the holiday, and it was okay. Not great, but okay.
Ritchie has shown more of an interest in the idea of mockney Brit-cool than any deep love for the cultural weight of icons like Holmes, and it does show a little in a few sequences and moments when I thought more of Viz's 'Raffles the Gentleman Thug' than the inherently patriotic bohemian distracted by his own physical cravings that served as the lynchpin of Holmsian fandom for over a hundred years now. I also felt I wasn't even imagining the homoeroticism in some instances.

As I said before, not a great film, but far from a bad one.

Wandering about Belshaft in the wee hours...

Checked out the Odeon sci-fi all-night anime marathon: it had it's ups and downs, but did improve greatly when those who'd come along to find the presence of subtitles a source of shock and confusion eventually became too tired to continue a running commentary beyond "for fuck's sake, stick your cock in her!" in a half-hearted sigh every half hour. We got a goody bag full of what I would charitably call tat if I was charitable man and not a cynical one, so I shall call it crap: a BPM energy drink that was actually the green brand (which contains no caffeine), a packet of Bear in the Big Blue House bacon flavour corn snacks, a packet of Doctor Who stickers, a pencil, an offer to see Almost Famous, and glowy stick which they asked us not to use.

Anyhoo, the Odeon itself is a reasonably-placed multiplex and we were early enough that for some reason we ended up going to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which you may be surprised to discover I did not think was very good at all. It was packed with 8-10 year-old girls who gasped and drew breath when the 16 year-old 'native American' (it says on the casting call) pulled off his shirt, but surprisingly, the kids were much quieter than adults usually are at these things, and there was an air of audience participation to the viewing that began with the sighs of puppy-love for Teenage Wolfman (a wolfman) and arguably reached a nadir when the sight of Twilight (a dracula) and his girlfriend traipsing through the trees like something from a Hovis advertisement had the entire audience in stitches. New Moon's biggest problem is that it just isn't a knowing or self-aware film, which might have helped detract from the fact that it is a nonsensical and self-important one that suffers from something that the audience didn't really need spelled out as clumsily as it is here: Twilight is a wanker of a character, while the slightly more intense Teenage Wolfman seems to deserve a better break than he actually gets but is still an ethnic character in a white man's summer movie and for that reason alone you know he ain't gettin' the girl and it's got nowt to do with doomed romance and everything to do with the sensibilities of the middle-class America that made and watches this guff in the first place.

After that, we hung around for a bit and then wandered into the first anime movie of the evening: Mamoru Oshi's dour and pointless Sky Crawlers, the story of immortal kids drafted to wage 'safe' wars on behalf of nations through corporate third parties. According to other cinemagoers, the original novel was a commentary on the undemanding nature of anime fandom and the film was deliberately made to have a slow pace and obtuse story, but no matter how much you go out of your way to replicate the trappings of a bad plot and a lousy film, you still end up with a bad plot and a lousy film and it's not art, it's just poor film-making. My main gripe was that there are no clues to the situation for the viewer to unravel, a character just wanders in at the end and spells it all out for you, which might be a deliberate artifice for all I know, but is still pretty lame.
First Squad is the story of a team of Russian super-teens killed during WW2 who are resurrected to fight a zombie hoard of Templar knights raised by Gestapo mystics to turn the tide of battle on the Russian front. Their only link to the world of the living is the pre-teen Russian samurai Nadya, who must brave the land of the dead and jailbait SS kung-fu twins to win the secret war the world never knew about, and the whole thing is interspersed with live-action interviews with (fictional) WW2 Russian vets, historians and psychologists. It's a bit goofy, but fun nonetheless, with a nice design sensibility, even if the animation isn't what you'd call great in places - though it's always functional.
Time of Eve held it's English-language premiere - for all of five minutes before the film had to be stopped as the subtitles on the print were actually off the bottom of the screen and couldn't be fixed, so I have no opinion on that. Instead the screening of the current revamp of Gainax evergreen Neon Genesis Evangelion was moved forward and it looks as cheaply-animated as ever, with several episodes chopped down to make the first part of a trilogy. I've seen most of this around ten years ago and it was just as overrated (though undeniably solid) then as it is now, albeit there's the odd extra frame of animation thrown in here and there in the new version.
King of Thorn is a post-apocalyptic story about a small group of characters escaping from the cryogenic suspension chambers in which they were supposed to sleep through the destruction of the human race - except then it isn't about that and goes a little bit off the rails. You might guess a twist or two, but the big picture remains an unmistakably anime tale full of visual excesses and logical failures as only the Japanese can do with an utterly straight face, but it's a seriously mad bit of business that went down well with the audience.

They spent millions of pounds on ^^this^^ and there are dozens of people homeless in Belfast. Just sayin'.
It reminds me of that Thundercats episode where they discover gold on Third Earth and Panthro bends it into a necklace then throws it in a bin.
Homeless people.

The Belfast Eyesore.