yes I'm riding a unicorn - it was the only thing I could find

Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated is an answer to a question best posed by professional internet loudmouth Chris Sims as ""we all know these characters, but wouldn't it be great if they were in a show that was in any way watchable?" Mystery Inc is quite watchable, though for me this is likely to do with the constant stream of references to John Carpenter movies, from the team hanging out with the DJ from The Warriors to a soundtrack that sounds like something Carpenter would do himself to visual references to everything from the Fog to Christine to Ghosts of Mars.
At one point Fred -shortly before the team in typical Scooby Doo fashion splits into two groups comprised of Shaggy, Velma and Scoob in one, and Fred and Daphne in the other - delivers the line "I could really go for a salty clam right about now" while looking deep into Daphne's eyes and I am not sure if it's deliberate...
This probably tells you all you need to know about the show - it's smarter than it needs to be, just self-aware enough not to let it get in the way of being it's own show rather than the 11th incarnation of something first made in the 1970s, and I watched pretty much all of it over the space of four days because it was genuinely the only thing I wanted to sit down and watch at the time.

I can find a block of Phillipine cooking shows but no Liverpool kick off

Tweet-blogging time again as I play catch-up on the stockpile of new shows I have accrued during my downtime:

Come on Franklin and Bash - please do not be shit.

Hmmm...

Someone has seen the Defenders. I wonder if they know it got cancelled after one season.

Although I liked the Defenders. Despite the crippling drawback of having Jerry O'Connell in it.

Defenders had an episode where Jim Belushi defended a bear in court. Big shoes to fill, Franklin and Bash. Big shoes.

Malcolm McDowell! Yay!

This is alright, but I can see these two leads becoming tiresome very quickly.

A Clockwork Orange movie poster is on the wall of the main characters' home? But Malcolm Mc Dowell's in the cast! This is blowing my mind!

McDowell is amusing in this - probably the best thing in it - but I suspect he's given up on his career.

Holy shit, is this a real building or really good CGI?

WHO WOULD MAKE A BUILDING LIKE THIS?

Yeah, that was alright. Some gratuitous tits, but I'm not really offended by those, so I thought this was alright. A decent replacement for the Defenders, but just as fluffy and inconsequential.


I know nothing about Necessary Roughness beyond that it is not based on the movie from the 1990s that was the last thing in which Scott Bakula was appropriately cast.

Fuck, but he was hopeless in Enterprise. Note to Star Trek producers: "affable" is not the same thing as "charismatic".

I recognise this woman as the actress I keep confusing with Marisa Tomei, and there's symmetry for you, as she was a topic of discussion in Franklin and Bash.

Hmmm... not sure I'm fussed about the premise that seems to be rearing its head so far.

"I will cure you - OR ARE YOU CURING ME?"

I'm really not feeling it.

I'm not sure who the audience for this show is supposed to be. Teens? Menopausal women? Sports fans?

It has disparate elements but no focus or agenda. It's everywhere and too predictable. Not sure I'll bother with the second episode.

Ah who am I kidding? I haven't shouted at the telly once, so I'll probably watch the next one, but so far it's not that it's bad as much as it is uninteresting. A criticism that would mean more coming from anywhere but my blog.

the local hep cats are gonna dig this crazy joint

There's a complaint leveled at the superhero concept that it detracts from heroism that occurs in the real world, and while that's a complaint that I can certainly understand in the context of a genre which typically operates in extremes, it's not one I necessarily agree with in blanket terms (1) given that superheroes are both aspirational ideals and fictional characters who do actually have to be doing something on the page or screen to keep punters' interest from flagging - Superman can't refrain from blowing out forest fires because it detracts from the sterling public service provided by firefighters, for instance, Batman can't refrain from administering CPR to a junkie because it might detract from the credit due paramedics, Spider-Man can't refrain from stopping a mugging because it might make cops look bad, and so on. The superhero needs to DO stuff, preferably good and worthy deeds rather than a constant and interminable battle of wits with colourful terrorist masterminds as seems to be the norm of late in most of my funnybooks, and I don't blame writers for resorting to theatrical heroics to help tell us character A is a good egg for whom we should be cheering. Nonetheless, Captain America: The First Avenger is a movie about a guy who wears a flag and fights Nazis around the time they were just getting it in their heads that the answer to the Jewish Question was pretty much what they did at Babi Yar only in a more efficient manner - some sort of camp perhaps? - and making a film about someone calling themselves Captain America was already going to be a tough sell (certainly in a day and age when comics publishers and movie makers can't even bring themselves to use "and the American Way" in any project involving Superman despite it being a pop cultural idiom at this stage devoid of political meaning to anyone but those trying to strike a pose as a concerned liberal) before you got to that no-one in their right mind, no-one with an ounce of sensitivity or common decency would make a superhero movie where the main character battles against a background of concentration camps and industrialised genocide (well, maybe the writers of X-Men: First Class, but the Nazis would probably be the good guys in that script), and Captain America does at least avoid this pitfall, firstly by having the action start before the Nazis cottoned onto using camps, then advancing the action to a separate WW2 battlefront of laser cannons and hulking steampunk robo-men far away from the horrible truth of what went on circa 1943 and Cap's final battle with Hugo Weaving's mincing leather-clad panto-queen Red Skull.
Captain America as a movie and as a character is sidelined from the real war and instead fights a dieselpunk version of it where he can dress like a tranny on the frontlines and jump towards the screen while things explode behind him like the 1990s John Woo visual trope love-in never ended and we can sit like morons lapping it up to our heart's content. This here is a stoopid fillum, but by not treading on the toes of history or whizzing on the graves of those who gave their lives and those who had them taken, it's not a heartless one, and I think it deserves props for that just as much as it deserves criticism for not having any story arc for the main character beyond "was bullied, now isn't", which happens at least twice across the film, first when puny Earthman Steve Rogers is bullied for being puny until he gets some steroids that make him able to beat up who he pleases, and then again when he's despised as an all mounth no trousers showboat propaganda tool by the real soldiers of the WW2 front in much the same way real Vietnam soldiers despised John Wayne for making Green Berets (according to Oliver Stone), right up until Steve - bafflingly still garbed in his primarily-coloured show outfit - disobeys orders and goes behind enemy lines to free those same soldiers who despise him from captivity. That's about it for character arcs, really, with even the death of his closest friend seeming to be rather loophole-friendly for those familiar with the fate of Bucky Barnes from the Captain America comics of recent years and not actually adding much to any kind of grand theme beyond that chaps die in war.
Admittedly I went in knowing the film to be little more than set up for next year's Avengers movie, but I'd still have liked there to be something of consequence happen rather than a vague "this is what I did before I was froze in ice" that's not really self-contained enough to be a classic superhero movie in its own right, though it's still pretty good fodder for an evening's entertainment, and however scattershot the time jump at the end may seem in story terms (and God knows what the non comics-literate viewer made of it, or the lack of any sense of closure to the WW2 story that comes from Cap's fate and the Red Skull just sort of 'going away' at the climax of their showdown), Cap's final line is oddly bittersweet and probably helps argue that the whole point is that his life and story gets uprooted from one place to another. I also like that in portraying Cap, they've taken at face value the notion that the America in Captain America's name represents fraternity rather than nationalism without having to lecture the audience about it.

Unfortunately, I also got to grips with Captain America: Super Soldier over the weekend, too (I can actually play videogames again - YAY!), and it's a far more ugly experience. The PS3 game based on the film is clearly the product of the makers playing a lot of Batman: Arkham Asylum and that is certainly a good place to start, but they then go and ruin it by returning to the bad old days of the plot to games being an afterthought by getting the game's accountant or tea lady or whoever is passing the office to write the script, which is leaden with cliche and occasionally mean-spirited in a way the movie was not, with terrible lines like "you haff outlivt yorr usefullness!" appearing in a non-ironic or knowing way and some lazy storytelling like Cap talking over his radio earpiece to other soldiers despite this being WW2 and not a Call Of Duty game - although there's plenty of nods to some of that franchise's ideas in here, just not as well-realised as the source material. Perhaps I'm spoiled by games like Mirror's Edge or Jak 3, but I do expect more from my game stories these days, and this is especially important in games that are palpably shoddy in their construction like this one is, though I suppose I'm probably the one at fault for thinking the makers of shovelware, even the writers, would attempt better.
It's pretty much what you might expect from the idea of an Arkham Asylum game with Captain America and shield-throwing shenanigans instead of Batman: a room-clearing exercise with the odd bit of climbing and very light puzzling along the way to the inevitable boss scraps that are more frustrating than they are actually challenging by the inclusion of groups of standard goons who rush you in the middle so things aren't "too easy", reducing fights that should be rewarding and fun to frustrating and random.
I know it's shovelware and I've probably already lost the right to throw stones after admitting that the poor story was what disappointed me most in a videogame, but even so, it's unengaging as a game and equally unengaging as a narrative exercise and if it wasn't so darn easy to rack up trophies for my PS3 online profile I'd probably have pawned it off on some unsuspecting relative already. I'm not angry at Captain America: Super Soldier, I'm disappointed.


(1) Although I'd agree that DC comics have taken things too far by having Wonder Woman be present in the Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima war memorial statue in Arlington and photographs of the event that exist in the DC universe. Why someone would ever think that a good idea is beyond me.

Why can't I be like other men? Why must I have FEELINGS?

It's 11:33pm on a clammy Friday evening in July and as I type it's getting near that time the beering starts and I congratulate myself on wasting another week on my aimless path from birth to death
It is an achievement, too, as no matter how sick I've been in the past I usually work through it, to the point that the only genuine sick day I've ever taken in my life (the others being your basic skiving days taken off for music festivals, metal gigs, or wanting to play Grand Theft Auto) was when I had the flu and couldn't actually stand up, and even my boss knew I was ill on that occasion because it was payday I was taking off. It could be a Catholic guilt thing, but I have long adhered to a better theory - there's no point taking time off if you're too sick to enjoy having time off and you're much better off in work when you're sick because you'd be miserable there anyway so you may at least get paid for having a lousy day.
It might be a Catholic thing, all the same. I am vaguely aware there are other theological outlooks like Protestantbyterianism and witchcraft and such, but I can't speak for them.

Anyway, after a few false starts - the last few posts on this blog, apparently - it's back to work I go - that's the short version of this post. After physiotherapy, I have been weaning myself back into using my hands not by large amounts of pornography but through Lego Star Wars, two elements about which I normally could not give a hoot in combination make for a laid back gaming experience impossible to dislike, but I've platinumed the shit out of that so it's work time again.
I gots me a few strips owed to people, a graphic novel to finish, and a stack of probably horrible American television shows stockpiled to watch on the pc whilst I doodle, including Rescue Me, which I cannot stop watching even though it is a show which the makers scheduled to run at a time when it could best take advantage of the ten year anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Classy.

Anyhoo, if I owe you a strip, it'll appear in the near future. Meanwhile, I gots to get my drink and my Scooby Doo on.

and now I'm Ann Coulter - as you may have noticed, I'm coming slightly unhinged

Rather than review Al Ewing's entertaining pastiche of pulp noir (particularly Jerry Aherne's Survivalist series) in Death Got No Mercy - a book I bought on the basis of it having a cover which features a man fighting a bear - I thought I'd let the work speak for itself:

The three punches took less than a second to throw, and he felt one of the bear's ribs go with the last one...

He'd killed a bunch of folks, sure - but there came a time even that wasn't much consolation.

Cade had never killed a woman - though he'd been accused of it - but he wouldn't have a problem if the circumstances came up.

Cade wasn't in the habit of trusting people who nailed him to the middle of the street.

(page 88 - Cade beats a man to death with his own jawbone)

"Can't have a king with no bling, a ruler without a jeweller. You want loyalty - be royalty."

"Down here a man's leadership skills can be a matter of life and dinner."

He never knew San Francisco had such a thriving banking community.

"I'd like to know if you're serious about being deleterious. Eat someone for me."

Cade had killed his first man at age eight. He knew how easy it was once you'd started, kid or no kid.

(Page 111: Cade kills and eats a man raw)

(Page 112: he kills and eats someone else)

Cade figured as long as he was wishing, he'd like a pony.

Twelve hours without killing someone. Cade figured it could be done.

Cade was a lot of things, but happy wasn't one of them.

Cade wasn't a man troubled overmuch by fashion.

He figured he could sit through an episode of Rules of Engagement if he had to.

There'd never been a time he hadn't wanted to kill anything that moved.

Cade shook his head. He wasn't a man to hold back much when it came to killing, it had to be said.

But Cade was sick and tired of feeling things.

When he was in the mood for it, Cade could be a real stone cold son of a bitch.

Some inner gear slipped and snapped, the jagged metal teeth of it tearing at the workings of his soul, damaging them beyond any repair.

It was as if the time spent beating his only child gave him strength.

It was clear, in other words, that this was a problem Cade would have to solve himself, despite being all of eight years old.

If he was lucky, he was about to murder the city of San Francisco once and for all.

He was a man who'd shot his own conscience in the face so he could murder easier when it came time to.

He'd seen enough of San Francisco , and he had a strong feeling San Francisco had seen enough of him, given that he'd killed about ninety-eight per cent of it with his own two hands.

WHY? Why is it always the best people... that gotta take time out of their day to see dumbasses get buried?

The Nine Lives of Chloe King answers the oft-posed question: Why didn't that Catwoman movie get its own tv series?

Answer: because it would have been fucking awful.

Basically it's MTV's Teen Wolf but with a girl and not as enjoyable. The girl is played by the actress who played a teenage succubus in axed supernatural drama The Gates - a show about well-known monsters living in a gated community, a concept pretty much ripped off from Monster High. You'd think that being based on a line of children's dolls would be a show's biggest problem, but I'm going to go ahead and suggest that using a fifteen year old actress as part of the eye candy contingent in your show aimed at 25-30 year olds runs a close second - seriously, I have no idea why they thought they needed to go there when Rhona Mitra - who is not what you would call shy - is in the cast. Anyway, that still-teenage actress is in this now, and it's not a step up.

I'd sooner be blog-Tweeting about Teen Wolf, actually. Because that would mean I was watching Teen Wolf instead of this. MTV's Teen Wolf is not perfect by any means, but it is much better than it has any right to be.

Unlike Chloe King. This show is bad, but I do like that they've cast a redhead in the lead role. That's progress for you.

I am pretty sure the list of shows about someone who is secretly a cat people is a lineage of failure.

The Catwoman movie, Dark Angel, Birds of Prey - although in BoP I liked how Huntress would do something athletic and this would mean her cat powers were in action, so she'd kick someone or cartwheel and there'd be this "RREOW!" sound effect like a tiger growling. Oh hey, and all female-centric, I notice. Has there ever been a show about a dude with cat powers apart from Manimal?

I guess tv execs just know better than to try and top Manimal.

Manimal does not show up as a real word in my browser's spell check. FAIL.

Oh dear. We are being shown that she has cat people powers by the actress jumping off a small box onto the ground.

The parkour in this is not as good as that seen in CBBC's MI: High. It actually looks like a Youtube video of someone spoofing parkour videos by being bad at parkour.

SWEET CHRIST IN HEAVEN WHAT AM I WATCHING?

I do not advocate violence against women, so when I say "the girl in this show needs to be punched in the face" I am merely being colourful in how I voice my disdain for the unlikeable character she plays.

The girl in this show needs to be punched in the face.

Well that was certainly an hour long drama in the fantasy genre made by ABC.

It occurs that since she dies in the first episode's opening scene, this show is technically about the EIGHT lives of Chloe King.

I usually like bad television, what's going on here? I'm actually happy that's over.

Don't gimme any of that Doctor Doom jive

Thoughts on XIII: The Series based on the pilot:
Stuart Townsend, of whom I always say that he has never - even by accident - starred in anything that was good, and who was fired from playing the part of Aragorn so he starred in Queen of Darkness instead? Safe to say he does not make good career choices, does Stu, but I'm inclined to give the man the benefit of the doubt as he might be a common factor in many terrible shows, but he's never stood out as being the worst thing about any of them. He could have raped nuns onscreen for two solid hours and still wouldn't have been LXG's biggest problem.

There is some clumsy exposition in this show:
"My sister - the former President of the United States--"
"You're the head of national security and--"
"You're the head of the CIA, George--"

So a 20 something man at the peak of physical health has "a heart attack" while in an empty room and nobody performs an autopsy, yet they can still diagnose death by cardiac arrest?
Interesting approach to logic, XIII: the Series.
I mean, even if they just called it a heart attack on paper, why did they go through the ruse of dosing him with magic heart attack medicine (like what Hannibal Smith got in that A-team film) just to fake a heart attack that no-one is ever going to physically examine him to diagnose?

A telephone media file just infodumps what the writers can't be bothered telling you in organic ways: "and nine months later he was elected president, and this guy has a terminal illness" stuff like that.

Wasn't this guy just shot in the chest with a high-powered rifle? Only he's pretty spritely.

That is not a bullet wound, that is clearly a smear of jam.

"they recruited you to stop a conspiracy that would have taken down the entire government--" Words spoken in this show by an actual human being. No lie.

"This is an Irish Cladh ring" and immediately pipe music starts playing. Classy - reminds me of that episode of Murder She Wrote where a Native American actor appears onscreen so the background music changes to this "om pom-pom-pom, om pom-pom-pom" war drums-type thing, even though the character he was playing wasn't a Native American or anything.

God this actress is one unconvincing martial artist. She's literally just waving her hands in front of the camera at one point.

Well, at least her stunt double is making an effort.

Townsend drawing on his Irish genetic heritage of drunken wife beating to make this scene look convincing, I think - if you look closely at his lips during the fight you can see he's mouthing stuff like "yer a huuuure!" and "Ah gave yeh everythin!"

Always wondered why casting directors don't just cast stunt people instead of using actors with no onscreen presence or charisma. I mean, what have you got to lose by casting a stunt double in place of an actor you already know to be bad? Chuck Norris got his stuntmen buddies parts on Walker: Texas Ranger and it made not a jot of difference to the quality of the show.

Wow but that is some really bad No Sale what would happen if a man hit a woman in the face with a length of metal pipe. (SPOILER ALERT: nothing at all)

I think the lesson here is that you direct for television by turning the camera on and then leaving the set.

I have to admit, if I was sneaking into the Whitehouse, I'd do it by punching a guard right in the guts while he was right in the middle of a conversation with another guard on the radio. I mean, that's just common sense.

"He is the link to an operation so dark no-one in Washington knows its purpose" and that would be why they were questioning him when he was in jail. Sarcasm, of course. They were not questioning him at all, even though we saw the guy jailed for several months (or at least several months in tv montage time).

The episode ends with an angsty voice-over that hasn't appeared until the final moments of the show - nice storytelling consistency, Bruh.

And night vision is represented by Photoshop's Neon Glow filter. Hilarious.



All in all, Stuart seems to have picked another winner, but once again, he's not the show's main problem - that would be how dumb, unengaging and arbitrarily derivative it is. He's actually good in it. Not got huge presence, but he's solid, though he needs to work on keeping his accent in check.