Pointless Nonsense

Bill — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:36:57 +0000

Touch looked like a mix of Mercury Rising and Knowing, but it turns out to be considerably more emotionally manipulative than I could’ve possibly expected. Just absurd amounts of cheesiness. And an emphasis on fate, which always pisses me off.

Kiefer Sutherland is a single father who busts his ass at his blue collar job to take care of his special needs son. Also, he’s a 9/11 widower because that makes it sadder. And the government is going his son away! That’s, too, is because that makes it sadder but also because it brings Gugu Mbatha-Raw, an improbably hot child services rep, into his life. Together, they discover that Kiefer’s kid has magical math powers that predict phone numbers where Kiefer is needed to save lives or something. Also, Danny Glover knows all about the magic math powers, but reveals nothing even remotely helpful.

Elsewhere, a smartphone that no one ever charges travels around the world recording stuff and taking pictures and doing all sorts of shit over the course of what seems like weeks. But again, never needs charging. And results in a ridiculous Rube Goldberg solution to a bunch of characters’ problems all at once.

Bill — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:34:55 +0000

Unsupervised is an animated show that FX premiered last week after Archer, and I’ve been torn on whether to keep watching or not. On the one hand, I like the concept, about loser 9th graders with no parental supervision, which seems like an idea you could get a ton of mileage out of. And I like some of the voice actors, co-creator David Hornsby (Rickety Crickett/Emily Deschanel’s husband), Kristen Bell, and Romany Malco. But on the other hand, Justin Long’s voice is completely wrong for his character. He sounds like Justin Long, when he should sound like… not Justin Long. And not many of the jokes really landed. I dunno, I guess I’ll watch tonight’s episode and see if it improves any.

Bill — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:18:10 +0000

Haywire was not, as I’d hoped, the super exciting action/spy/thriller that would launch Gina Carano’s career as an action star and maybe make me not hate Channing Tatum. After a somewhat rocky start featuring a lot of C-Tates dialogue, it actually got pretty good for a minute with a pretty good action scene in Barcelona, but it ended up being a little too straightforward. These movies just seem to work so much better when it’s unclear who the protagonist should trust and there’s an almost dizzying amount of plot twists.

The cast was both impressive and odd, though. Michael F. Assbender, Bill Paxton (who actually hadn’t been in a movie since 2007), Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor is quite the group. But then there’s Tatum, and Gina Carano’s skill is pretty limited. Though she is quite badass and easy on the eyes (and that lip biting gif they use on Filmdrunk at the end of every article that mentions her was no fluke, she really does a lot of lip biting), I can’t imagine she will ever play a part that doesn’t call for lots of kicking and punching.

Bill — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:57:58 +0000

Random videos:

This is by far the best thing that happened at the golden globes:

They did a thing for the 10th anniversary of Look Around You, the fake British science documentary series, and produced this incredibly weird intermission video for the event:

Starting with a transparent image and reverse google image searching for the most similar image over and over again is pretty fascinating. (there are a couple of frames that contain some topless women (I think from that Spartacus tv series)… I’m astonished it didn’t go off the rails at that point, but it was only a couple that I saw)

Just in case someone missed it, this is a wonderful incorrect guess on Jeopardy:

The delivery is a little weak, but this guy’s interview with Yvonne Strahovski is still very funny:

This trailer for “The Worst of CGI” is pretty amazing. Although I don’t fully understand the clips of Hitler. Perhaps, they are holocaust deniers who think all this Hitler footage is fake, in which case I shouldn’t be supporting the trailer to their movie.

Magic Johnson should not allowed to narrate basketball highlights. This is kind of painful to listen to.

I love it when reporters on the sideline get hit with soccer balls:

And this K-Pop comes, strangely, via Warren Ellis’ website. Ellis usually likes weird electronic music influenced by 80s pop, or strange ambient stuff, but he had some guy post his top 6 records of 2011, and right in there was this. (the best part is around 1:33 where a little blonde Korean girl appears to threaten to slit someone’s throat with a switchblade comb)

Bill — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:12:54 +0000

The Shadow Line is a a BBC series about a murder that has both the police and criminals trying to figure out what happened. It has a downright glacial pace, with long periods of silence, extremely minimalist music. It’s also a rather complex plot with a few different groups of people trying to figure out what’s going on, and unfortunately, my constant inability to remember characters’ names makes things a bit confusing. But it’s also a dark, violent crime thriller, and I do tend to enjoy the hell out of these things.

It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Christopher Eccleston, which was my main reason for watching it. I’ve barely seen Christopher Eccleston in anything, and one of them (GI Joe) was quite crappy, but he struck me as an excellent actor (especially in his brief stint on Heroes). As it turns out, neither Ejiofor or Eccleston have particularly interesting characters, but Stephen Rea totally steals every scene he’s in as a ruthless and cold villain.

Bill — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:16:33 +0000

Lost Girl is a show that is new to SyFy, but it turns out to be a Canadian show from 2010. It’s a pretty generic supernatural premise: this girl has crazy abilities but doesn’t know anything about them, then she learns she’s not the only one, everything you know is a lie, etc., and it turns out that she’s “special” and probably will end up being part of some bullshit prophecy or something. I expect it to be kind of dumb, but I don’t care.

Anna Silk plays the main character, and she is really hot. She sorta looks like a hybrid of Kate Beckinsale and Mary-Louise Parker, the pilot has lots of outfit changes and a nice sideboob scene (though possibly a body double), and she has a special power that makes women really hot for her, which means there is a pretty decent chance of her making out with some other hot women at some point. So, yeah, I’m not proud of it, but I will be watching the crap out of this.

(also, a quick check of youtube for the aforementioned sideboob scene didn’t turn up anything (although the internet didn’t completely fail me, it looks like one could download it here), but it did result in a whole lot of people making those shipper videos for her and another female character, so Geebs may also be watching the crap out of this)

Bill — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:19:12 +0000

Alcatraz is not created by JJ Abrams, but he’s a producer, and his influence is all over it. It feels like Lost and Alias and Fringe: slick production values, the pilot throwing a lot of mysteries at you, supernatural elements, the same music from all his shows, and characters that you’re not sure if they’re good or bad. Unfortunately, it didn’t grab me as much as the aforementioned shows’ pilots. That said, it’s a science fiction show with a network TV budget and a hot blonde girl as the lead, so it would have to be pretty bad for me not to watch it. And it’s not bad at all. Just a little disappointing, I guess.

Bill — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:19:38 +0000

Black Books is a series I was interested in because it was co-written by the IT Crowd guy, stars Green Wing/Episodes‘ Tamsin Greig, and features generally funny guy Bill Bailey. I knew nothing else about it, including being ignorant about the fact that it was about a guy named Black who owned a bookstore. It turns out to be a very traditional sitcom. Multi-camera, cheap sets, laugh tracks, and all that. Which is rough sometimes (as it is on The IT Crowd), but it’s from 2000, so that’s forgivable. And it’s generally quite funny.

Dylan Moran stars as Bernard Black. I sorta know him from both Shaun of the Dead and Run, Fatboy, Run, but here he’s using a fantastic always-drunk-sounding voice that’s not over the top exaggerated word slurring, completely perfect for his character (it’s slowly becoming clear that he’s a barely functioning alcoholic), and generally very amusing. Tamsin Greig, despite being younger here, is considerably less attractive than she was in Green Wing (which she wasn’t super hot in anyway, but she was cute). I think she hadn’t found the right hair style yet. And Bill Bailey is Bill Bailey, though a little less nerdy and a little more neurotic than he normally plays.

When I first started watching British shows (which was really not that long ago, 2006 or so), I was amazed at how every new show I tried had at least one actor I recognized from a previous show. I’ve now seen enough of them that it is completely unremarkable when I see familiar faces, but it was still kinda cool to see a pre-Office Martin Freeman in the pilot.

Bill — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 01:39:13 +0000

The Finder is the re-tooled spinoff from the backdoor pilot that aired last year on Bones. Sadly, my favorite part of the backdoor pilot was Saffron Burrows’ kinda trashy British bartender chick, who no longer appears in the first episode of the real series. Instead, we get a hot US Marshal of mysterious ethnicity who vaguely resembles Sarah Shahi, and a blonde juvenile delinquent to appeal to the Geebs demographic.

The premise is that this guy, ex military, has some kind of brain injury that gives him a compulsion to find lost things, and also allows him to see connections that others can’t, giving him an amazing ability to find stuff. Which, to be honest, is really stupid. I’m worried that his ability will start to seem like magic, and the connections he makes go unexplained, at which point I will probably quit watching, but the first episode did a pretty good job of laying out the thought process.

What it didn’t do was have a good opening, with a downright awful line of dialogue: “It’s a fact of nature like the world turning and internet porn.” It nearly made me immediately drop the series just because I hated it so much. It resembles a joke, in that it does not make literal sense, but there is nothing remotely funny about it. Just saying “internet porn” does not make something funny.

But anyway, I stuck with it and it was fine. Unfortunately, I’m a total sucker for mystery shows that go for the light comedy rather than the heavy drama (which is why I watch every show in USA, even the stupider ones), so I’ll likely stick with this even though I don’t like it that much.

Bill — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:17:33 +0000

I’m taking a break between Stargate seasons to knock out a couple of British shows that are on Netflix. The first is a documentary series, Stephen Fry in America. I first was informed of its existence from this video of him at an Auburn-Alabama football game, which pretty much gives you the idea of it. He travels to all 50 states (shortchanging some with a minute or so, like Delaware and Idaho) across 6 episodes, and it’s interesting to get an outsider’s perspective (sort of, I think he actually lives in America a lot of the time). The best two parts so far (I’m on episode 4 of 6) are Fry’s complete hatred of Miami (he seems to have loved just about everywhere else, but had nothing good to say at all about Miami) and Ted Turner being a kind of hilarious jerk towards him when he visited Turner’s Montana bison ranch.