Let's just go home and discuss this in therapy like normal people

Watching: Hart of Dixie, which is one of my favorites of the new season openers by dint of being hilariously terrible as few tv programmes are since Smallville rode off into the sunset. Remember that Michael J Fox movie Doc Hollywood? Of course you don't, nobody watched anything Fox made after Back to the Future and rightly so, but how about that opening episode of Northern Exposure where it explained about the doctor being stuck in the town being a fish out of water each week? There's probably loads of examples of doctory fish out of big city waters out there, but those are the ones that I can recall and you probably don't need much explaining beyond that anyway. The big city doctor fish basically comes to a southern town and looks down on the locals for wearing jeans while also trying to get big city coffee and freaking out about the countryside having wildlife in it - it's basically the plot to the Hannah Montanna movie, which I assume you haven't watched unless you have kids, are a kid, are a gay man, are a sex register signatory, or are from Venus and watched it as part of your xenoanthropological study of humankind's weaknesses in preparation for the Day Which Comes in which fire shall fall from the sky like rain and the weak shall be expunged so the strong may serve our glorious lizard masters, and having watched the Hannah Montanna Movie and thought it was alright, that day should probably come sooner rather than later but nonetheless Hannah Montanna is the analogue to which I have briefly committed. Anyway, doctory fish woman doesn't get along well in her new surroundings and then delivers a baby and things get better. It's dreadful and I hope it remains so, that I might continue to enjoy it.
NCIS: Los Angeles is an enjoyable panto if you don't want to engage your brain much during viewing, so it's basically an alternative to listening to classical music while you work. this week someone utters the line "he died in recovery" so I think they should probably rename it. Apart from that, I enjoy seeing Linda Hunt gainfully employed, though my main pleasure is derived from the amazingly terrible dialog because "don't hate the player, hate the game" will never get old coming from middle aged white actors. Never.
X-Men: The Return - the latest anime outing for Marvel's catalog of characters, and equally generic and dull as their Wolverine and Iron Man anime outings. Don't get me wrong, they're perfectly alright cartoons, but they're slower and less inventive than the 1990s Marvel cartoons based on the same characters which - while not great - were still bright and eventful and went out of their way to try and entertain you rather than trying really hard to reinforce that these bright and colorful characters are really serious business now even though they are starring in a fucking cartoon about immortal wolf men with metal skelingtons who fight robot zombie samurais. This is the flipside of making cartoons for older viewers - cartoons that are apologist for being cartoons and for being about comic book characters, so everyone looks glum and wears long jackets and American voice talent tries to make directly-translated speech sound something remotely like a human being talking and the end result, even based on some of the ideas from Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, is drab and unconvincing. It also suffers from a bugbear of mine - shitty theme music. It's often overlooked that the theme tune is an integral part of a show's branding, and the Japanese have long known that it's also what gets kids all hopped up and ready for the show itself, hence their condensing of themes and imagery into the opening titles, or having a really pumped-up theme to get the kids hopping around like loons even before the flashing lights activates their epilepsy. It sets the tone for what will follow, and the Marvel anime offerings have generic, pointless and unexciting themes that anyone could have run up with some pretty basic music software.
X-Men: The Return is not great.

dragging you down to my level and then winning through experience

No long-winded sermons about sci-fi shows today - which I'm sure is a great disappointment to us all - but I should probably mention that I have a strip appearing in the Accent UK Predators anthology, which I keep forgetting about for some reason.
There's a review over HERE if you're so inclined to check out a podcast done in silly accents, though me and Lee get off quite lightly for doing fourth wall-wobbling stuff, which I gather is either loved or hated in comics. Got some other stuff that's appearing in the near-ish future I should get round to whoring, too, like that Zarjaz strip in which I drawed the ABC Warriors and somehow forgot to include guns in the artwork. One day I shall look back on that and laugh, but the way I picture that happening is me wandering around an irradiated wasteland trying to explain to mutant children what computers, comics, or oil were and gradually going more and more insane until I turn into the kind of gnarly-toothed hairball that gets shot by Mad Max while he's on his way to somewhere interesting.

I am going to rescue the babies from the fire. ONLY THE BABIES.

Only a flying visit to the blog - posting terribly late. Back to regular long-winded service tomorrow, I do hope!

TTFN.

The only reason a man should dance is if someone is shooting at his feet

Whoopsy daisy. Someone's been forgetting to update the blog.

Watching...
Hmmm. A few thoughts on Terra Nova, and why is will fail, even though it doesn't have to:

Back when Deep Space Nine finished, senior DS9 writer Ron Moore moved onto Star Trek: Voyager as a staffer, where he found himself butting heads with Voyager head honcho (and later Terra Nova producer) Brannon Braga when Moore decided that a show in its sixth year could afford to grow its characters and mythology and submitted plots for episodes like Survival Instinct and Barge of the Dead, which expanded upon what you could and couldn't do with a 'regular' Trek series by positing heroes as wilful murderers or giving them trips to the actual literal hell and then telling you - the viewer - "fuck yeah, that totally happened."

Moore wanted the show to explore the possibilities that each and every character brought to a supposedly infinite universe of diversity and storytelling possibilities but was stymied by Braga who wanted - bluntly - exactly the same thing, week in, week out because that was what a Star trek audience expected from Star Trek Voyager, and the sad thing is that both men were right - Moore was absolutely correct in saying that there were more stories to be told than were being told within the format, but Braga also had a point in that at that point Voyager's viewers already knew what they were getting and kept tuning in anyway, even if it was for yet another story about Seven of Nine's massive tits wondering about this human emotion we call love, and if you start throwing stories at them about Janeway getting addicted to space drugs to keep her edge or Tuvok having to rape someone every seven years, you might scare off a steady crowd of people who are quite happy with the same homogenised episodic formula plots and stiff period-piece writing style.

Braga knew - or perhaps he was just an intransigent bugger, I can't say for certain but let's give the benefit of the doubt here - that Voyager had to be a certain way because it was the third spin-off of a show that was made a certain way for a certain audience in all its spin-off incarnations, but this also made its future one of diminishing returns because any audience that specific and that narrow could only ever shrink over time to the point it could no longer justify the cost of making a show each week, and with Star Trek: Enterprise (also produced by Braga), this was proven to be the case. Moore, on the other hand, went on to have a significant role in making Battlestar Galactica, a great series that nonetheless lost its way terribly and became a dull parody not only of itself but of regressive sci-fi cliche and bore us a finale that almost beautifully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by reducing a storyline that was already a Terminator rip-off to a Creationist analogue where everyone throws away any semblance of technology - even the shovels they might now need since their fate is to poo in the woods - because... eh. Cortez or something.

Braga was right about season six of Voyager, but unfortunately for him, season six of Voyager was back in 1999, twelve years ago, and sci-fi has moved on. I don't just mean we've had the paradigm shift in how stories are told and to whom that came with Battlestar's earlier seasons, I mean the lowest forms of sci-fi from Power Rangers to Transformers to Stargate SG1 to Warehouse 13 to Haven are shot through with a genre awareness where characters acknowledge their crazy situations and the similarities to plots from movies or tv shows, or have been saturated with enough sci-fi concepts via popular culture to hazard a guess as to how they'll resolve whatever faintly familiar conundrum they find themselves faced with, or at least how to break down their situation into digestible form for their thick-as-pigshit buddies who just want to shoot anything they can't fuck because that did fine for Captain Kirk.

Terra Nova has no genre-aware characters. There is no lampshade-hanging here, no characters pointing out where they've seen the plot to episode 4 before, or pointing out how paradoxes work so their quest to colonise Earth's distant past is thus doomed to failure - they just act as if everyhing is new even though it's old as the hills and cartoons like Kim Possible and Totally Spies - which are both aimed at girls under the age of 13 - have done these plots to death already and so 13 year old girls in these shows would be aware of these genre cliches even before you get to 18 years and over males at whom sci-fi is aimed rather squarely who most likely would know a sci-fi plot or two. Does anyone at any point make a Jurassic Park reference, even in the meta sense as an acknowledgement to Terra Nova producer Steven Spielberg? They do not.

These are therefore not people as we know them and we have no reason to invest in them as they are relics from the storytelling past even though we know this is a show being made right now. We expect at the very least an awareness from them even if we don't actually expect the show to be any good in terms of writing, effects or acting, which it is not, and yet while the show is regressive and doomed to fail because it is not being made ten years ago, there is no reason it couldn't succeed in its own little niche - if only for a while - catering to a smaller audience of sci-fi enthusiasts rather than the pansexual fans of of teen angst and family values bullshit they seem to be aiming at so far - no less than two teenage romance plots run in the foreground while two of the main characters are happily married and woefully uninteresting, so who is supposed to be watching this? At least aimed at sci-fi audiences specifically it could boast that its demographic was teenage and twentysomething males, yet it does not know who it is aiming at and that is why it will fail. Braga once knew the audience he was making these shows for, but seems to have forgotten.



I also watched 2 Broke Girls, which was sadly not pornography as I had hoped. It's crude, not particularly amusing and some of the jokes center around an Asian guy who's one pair of bottle-bottom glasses and a set of buck teeth away from a Jerry Lewis homage.
I expected more from you, America...

He's a gay ultra conservative. Says he's a member of the Herbal Tea Party.

Watching: Transformers Prime, and when all is said and done, that was a fun series if you can get past it being Transformers, which some cannot, as Transformers is one of those franchises - alongside Star Wars and Star Trek - that brings out the sniffy elitism from some quarters of geekdom that admittedly holds more water in the wake of three shitty, shitty films, but I get by with it just fine on account of it being a sound high concept premise for a franchise. The most recent toon had its ups and downs but was a pretty decent show with a good stab at portraying Transformers as an alien form of life rather than just big stompy robots, with planet-sized transforming robot Unicron getting the best makeover this time out when reinvented as The Space Devil, who - after being "cast out" and drifting through space long enough for a planet to form around him and make his waking up a dashed inconvenience for anything unfortunate enough to have evolved on his now green and blue surface, is just the kind of apocalyptic demon you need to cap off your series about ginormous aliens twatting each other in the face with helicopters full of angry soldiers. Not sure about the pseudo-Gladiator/Spartacus riff that reared its head in relation to what the cast got up to billions of years ago, but all told, I enjoyed it even when sober - praise from Caesar indeed.
Revenge - being an update of the Count of Monte Cristo, but with a teenage girl in high society. Sigh.
I was not sure about yet another glossy tv show centered on the one percent of America's population that has wealth, but then: "revenge is a dish best served cold - but it can be AS WARM AS SOUP". Yes, that is an actual line from the show. And they mean it.

Brain farts: Batman Year One (2011)

I recall seeing a poor high school production of the Crucible and what I took from it was that whatever the quality of the individual production, there's no denying the quality of the original work - that will always shine through. So too with the animated adaptation of the last truly great Frank Miller comic, Batman: year One, an origin so definitive that DC have only retconned it three times.

Telling the tale of Bruce Wayne's return to Gotham after his 'travels in the Orient' and subsequent invention of his masked alter-ego, BYO is a great comic book, but it is also a lousy movie. It just does not work, being too literal in some places and too liberal in others when it comes to adapting the source material, with scenes that take up a page in the comic here taking up mere seconds of screentime, characters evilly grinning at the end of dialog so as to give the animators something to do regardless of what this does to the screen presence of the character in question, and on one occasion a character having dialog in the film who didn't speak at all in the comic - the young lady who speaks no English who is on-panel when Jim Gordon interviews Bruce Wayne to discredit him as being Batman is here revealed through her words with Bruce to have been paid five grand to say nothing during the interview - and all this actually adds to the story is that Bruce Wayne likes to pay women to tell people that he is definately not Batman, which to me is a remarkably short-term outlook for someone who plans on people not knowing that he is Batman.

Batman's voice actor is just not suited to the role at all, although Batman here is less than the presence that he is in the comic thanks to the way he's animated. He's also not in it much, and it's hard to see who the story is focused upon, it just has snapshots of different characters over the course of what feels like a few weeks or so rather than a year. Why is Catwoman in this story, for instance? Her plot goes nowhere and adds nothing to the larger story - whatever that might be.

To be honest, I'm not sure this particular story could ever have been a good film as it's been stripmined for ideas by Batman Begins and the cartoon shows so there are no real surprises to be had, and rather than being slavish to the original it might have been better to expand the material and make something more suited to this medium rather than sticking exactly to a script that works - admittedly very well - in another.

As I said about high school productions, the quality of the source shines through even bad adaptations and we can assume that this holds true even across different mediums, but I certainly wouldn't recommend this to anyone. It's too close to the original story to be interesting to comics fans and too basic as an animation to be of interest to cartoon lovers, it is simply - at best - a workmanlike adaptation that for some reason now exists.

just because your hands will be staying above the waist doesn't mean mine have to

Odd moment today while watching the latest Power Rangers: thought to myself "this is quite awful compared to previous iterations" like this was actually any kind of criticism that could be applied to Power Rangers in any form ever. They are all terrible, I admit, but I do have a soft spot for RPM, where the human race has been all but wiped out by a sentient computer virus and the last few thousand humans are killed off in weekly attacks by bizarre monsters who slowly erode the humans' dwindling resources while the back story of each cast member unfolds across the series in non-linear flashbacks that intertwine with each other in subtle ways that aren't fully realised even by the series finale that - against all saturday morning tv show logic - doesn't have a time-travel loophole that undoes the genocide and the deaths of cast members and/or their families like it never happened, it just has the evil computer get smashed and the humans get to rebuild their race on an irradiated graveyard full of wandering psychopaths and malfunctioning leaderless killing machines and everyone acts like this is the greatest thing ever rather than a prelude to an era of unfettered rape and cannibalism.