Well, no, actually I’m not. I’m sitting in a hotel room at the City Inn in Westminster. In the meantime we’ve moved, and most of the boxes have actually been emptied and are now clogging up our cellar – but instead of being at home and helping my lovelier half make the flat into less of a transitional mess, I’m off gallivanting in London.
Okay, that’s not quite fair. I’m here for work, and most of the last three days I’ve been busy working on a commissioning proposal. My suffering fills vast halls hewn from black obsidian stone that cry black sooty tears. Of suffering.
And so that you can share in the suffering, here’s what YouTube comes up with when you search for “commissioning proposal”:
(Anyone sad enough to watch all of that: does it get more interesting at some point? Don’t answer – in all likelihood, you’re clawing bloody fragments of skull and brain from your eyesockets with sheer boredom.)
Okay, I apologise for that icky image and the gratuitous gore. But may I just remind you: COMMISSIONING PROPOSAL.
Good. I feel better now. And this is me telling you: from now on, there will be more frequent updates again. And to finish this Grand Return entry, here are two good things about being in London:
And their cocktails aren’t half bad either. So, next time you’re in London – whoever you are and wherever you are – check out Ping Pong, the best dim sum place this side of the Yangtze river. (Thanks to Monique for introducing me to it!)
Rumours of this blog’s demise are exaggerated and way premature. (Keith up there knows how it feels…) I’m just very busy with the move, added to which I’m off to Dubai for a couple of days, for work. If given the choice, I’d rather not go right now, since I’ve still got lots of packing to do… but I guess at least I’ll have a couple of days of warm weather, which will make for a nice change from what I can see when I look out the window right now. So, more will follow, it might just take a couple of days/weeks.
But to keep you happy for a moment, here’s a little video. Enjoy!
I think I’ve figured out Grey’s Anatomy. They hire a band of lobotomised monkeys reared on a solid diet of bad soap operas and mashed bananas, and those monkeys write a dozen episodes or so that make me think, “If it wasn’t for Bailey, I wouldn’t continue watching this.” It’s the monkeys who are responsible for badly written, repetitive dreck such as George and Izzie’s relationship, or the nth circle of Meredith-and-McWilltheyorwonttheygettogether? hell. And then, just as I think, “I could be using this time to grate my toenails into a fine dust, or stare at a wall, or re-read The Mists of Avalon, they go down to the attic and get the real writers, the ones with talent and who don’t actively enjoy flinging poo at each other, from their cages, and those writers blink at the computer screens. And then they write the big double episodes, where there’s a major disaster, everyone’s covered in blood, people are dying all over the place…
… and the people working at Seattle Grace pull their heads out of their asses with a resounding pop! (yes, I know, you didn’t actually need that image) and show that they can actually be professional. The show becomes as watchable as it was at the beginning. And you care about the characters again.
And then the writers go back to their rusty cages, and out come the monkeys, with yet more ideas: “Ook ook ook, how about Derek sleeping with this nurse, ook ook, and Mere can’t handle it, and-”
This is where we leave the chimps to their work and mashed bananas. Yes, they just showed the two-parter “Crash into me”, and it made me like the series again. It was well written, effectively structured, it was moving (yes, it was also manipulative, but why would we watch hospital soaps if we didn’t want to be manipulated into caring?), it was funny and sad and thrilling. And it reminded me why there was a time when I didn’t try to will Callie off screen every time she appeared, with one short, throwaway line at Sloane’s expense.
Some especially nice moments:
Bailey’s handling of the white supremacist was great to watch – but Christina very much had a point when she told Bailey she resented having been used by her to goad Swastika Man – that she resented, in effect, having been made use of for racial reasons. And Bailey knew it. And yes, it was a bad moment for Christina to speak up, but she was right to do so.
George’s scene with the Tattooed Git. “A black woman saved your life at a great personal cost, so maybe next time you’re looking at your tattoo and you’re thinking how much better all us white guys are than everyone else, you think about that. Because between you and me, if I’d been alone in that OR, you’d probably be dead right now. And since we’re sharing belief systems, I believe if you were dead? The world would be a better place.” It may not read like much, but coming from gentle George with his slight stutter, it packs a punch.
What Bailey does to the swastika tattoo.
Hahn: “You won’t hit on me?”
Sloane: “I can’t promise that.”
Hahn: “If I say please?”
Callie, with the coolest half-smile: “He still can’t promise that.”
Hee!
Apparently, lots of people hated the season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica. They hated the Big Twist (Baltar’s “not guilty” verdict”!), followed by a Big Twist (four of the Final Five revealed!), followed by a Big Twist (Starbuck’s back! And she’s got this weird serene smile on her face!), followed by, well, not so much a Big Twist as a Surprise Reveal: Earth… although is this Earth 2008 A.D. or Earth 10’000 BC? Is it post-apocalyptic Earth, or will the Galactica arrive to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs? Will it bump into the USS Enterprise on one of its time-travelling jaunts?
Whatever will happen, the BSG writers have quite a big task ahead of them. Personally, I loved “Crossroads”, the season finale, but that was mostly due to its sheer audacity, mixed with the fantastic editing and musical choices, as well as the acting which sold the outrageous events to me 100%. But if they don’t resolve many of the open questions in the remaining twenty-something episodes, then my appreciation of their audacity may very well turn into “What the frak were they thinking?!” Still – the last 10 minutes of “Crossroads, pt. 2” had my heart pounding. I’m not talking metaphorically here – everything from the blackout to the congregation of the four to the sitar-heavy strains of “All Along the Watchtower” to Lee realising who’s flying on his left to the final zoom out and reveal of what the survivors have been hoping to find for three years now, all of that got my pulse racing. And since I’d read spoilers (stupid me, I know…) I knew what was coming – yet the way it was directed, filmed and edited made what happened on the TV screen feel inevitable, for want of a better word. Especially the reveal of the four should’ve felt random, because with at least three of the four there hasn’t really been any foreshadowing – but instead, it felt like puzzle pieces finally falling into place, at least for me.
Of course “Crossroads” has raised a couple of questions that will be difficult to answer to our satisfaction. I don’t believe they would have pulled such an audacious number of rabbits out of their hats if they didn’t know what they’re doing, but that’s just me being an optimist. How will they resolve these things? Will they even have time to resolve them?
The final Cylon: is it Starbuck? After all, we did watch her Viper go all kablooie, yet here she is, and in a spick-and-span ship, no less. Or is it Prez Roslin? We did see her share a vision with two Cylons, and she seemed to sense the blackout of the fleet (which also affected the Cylon ships, it would seem) moments before it happened. (For the record: I don’t think that either of those two will turn out to be the final Cylon. It’d be too obvious.)
If Chief Tyrol, Anders, Tori and Tigh are indeed Cylons, are they the same kind of Cylons as the many-copied ones? Do they have multiple copies? If they die, are they resurrected? They are clearly as much of a mystery to the seven more common Cylon models as to the humans. Now that the switch has been flicked, is there more programming in store for them? Any Boomer-shoots-Adama moments waiting for us?
For that matter, the series implied at the beginning that the humanoid Cylons were something of a novelty and unknown before the destruction of the twelve colonies. Yet Tigh goes back to the first Cylon war and before, unless he’s a copy of an original human Tigh. But then again, the Cylons seem to have links to the mythology and religion of the colonists, and those go back thousands of years. We were originally led to believe that man created tinbox Cylons, they rose against man in the first Cylon war, there was an armistice, in the interim the toasters evolved into something more organic (yet the Cylon Raiders are semi-organic, so perhaps there was a biological component to Cylonity from the first – and that may well go back even further than the chromedomes). We were never explicitly told that this was true, mind you – and most likely, the writers will make use of that gap in what we know. They’ll have to. Unless they’ve got some clever-clogs flashy thing that they can transmit through our TV screens to make us forget. (Ed.: They do. It’s called ‘reality television’.)
So, what about Baltar and his head-Six? Is she real? Is she a delusion? Same with Six’s head-Baltar. What are they manifestations of? Which leads us to the final question…
The Cylon God. How does he figure into all of this?
I’m not saying that all of these questions will have to be answered. In some ways, I’m probably more answered in the smaller-scale fallout of the revelations. How will Callie react if she finds out her husband and the father of her child is a toaster? How will Starbuck react to Anders’ Cylonity, for that matter? Or Adama to Tigh’s? But these issues have been raised now over the course of three seasons. They need to be addressed in one way or another, lest we get some disappointing cop-out ending. Chances are that whatever ending they give us, some of the fans will think it’s a cop-out. They already thought that season 3 was too much of a turn-around – too much metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, not enough hot ship-on-ship action. To which I say: what series have they been watching? The metaphysical elements, while not as whoa-inducing, perhaps, were there from season 1. Anyway, enough jabbering from me. I’ll leave you for the moment with two YouTube videos that, at this point, are probably pretty inevitable. Enjoy!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an odd beast. It is perhaps the wittiest series with what would seem to be the dumbest premise: HIgh school chick fights vampire. It was cheesy, it had bad fight scenes much of the time, and many of the actors weren’t terribly good.
Yet what Buffy got right, it got right. In every season, there were episodes that are up there with my favourite television fare ever – and yes, that includes Six Feet Under and Deadwood. Over the course of seven seasons, I’ve come to care about all the characters. That never happened with any of the Star Trek series that I watched as a teenager. Nor did I grow tired of Buffy in the way that I lost patience with The X-Files.
Much of that has to do with Joss Whedon’s characters. They quickly come to feel like people you want to spend time with. Yes, even Angel… and yes, even season 6/7 Buffy, although to a lesser extent. (There were moments – flashes – when I even liked Dawn. I’m sorry.) They come to feel real, which is an amazing feat, considering that these people tend to spend their time fighting rubber-mask baddies and being American teenagers.
Yes, the series lost some steam after season 5 ended. There’s a lot going on in seasons 6 and 7 where I thought, “Yes, I see what they’re doing there… I see where they’re going with this”, but it was less enjoyable than what had come earlier. But I do not get the hate those later seasons get from some of the fans. I do not get the vitriol or the sense of betrayal that you find on the internet. (But then, there’s so much on the internet I do not get…)
It’s interesting re-watching season 2 now (our Sunday morning fare), since this is pretty much when the series came into its own. In the sophomore year, the actors had found their feet and really got their characters, to the point where it didn’t matter that much whether they were great actors or not. The writing had got more comfortable, yet at the same time more daring. In season 1, a later episode such as “The Body” or “Once More, With Feeling” wouldn’t have been imaginable; after season 2, pretty much anything was possible. (Well, not quite. I was only prepared for Whedon’s sadistic glee in doing horrible things to his characters because I’d previously seen Serenity. Yes, Joss, I know what you were doing there, I know what you were going for, and if I ever meet you I’ll be sure to applaud you for your audacity while I repeatedly kick you in the privates.)
So, re-watching Buffy while cuddling up to my loved one keeps me from missing Giles and Willow, and Xander and Cordelia, Oz and Joyce… and Buffy. As Willow said so memorably, “Sweet girl. Not that bright.”
Good thing that Joss Whedon and Brian K. Vaughn (of Y: Last Man and Runaways fame) are doing season 8 in comic book form. Shiny.
If you’re watching a hospital soap, and it introduces a patient whose carotid artery is only protected by a thin flap of skin after an operation, what do you think’ll happen?
Yes, it’s Tuesday, which means that yesterday evening was Grey’s Anatomy. While it didn’t figure any pencils-in-eyesockets, it was still not exactly the show I should be watching while eating merguez. However, what usually ruined my appetite while watching the show was the increasing lack of development as far as the characters and their relationships are concerned. At times, the show now feels like E.R. as scripted by Beckett – for all the romantic back-and-froing, there’s a distinct lack of getting anywhere.
However, while too many of the characters now behave like lobotomised idiots who shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine (they’d probably be taxed by practising the recorder), the patients are where it’s at. The Grey writer are quite amazing, really: it takes them 3+ seasons to make me bored and annoyed with the main cast, yet it takes them 30 minutes to make me care about characters who come into the series to be sick and die.
Can’t say I care yet about Carotid Artery Boy, mainly because I keep looking at him and thinking, “I wonder if it’s full moon already…” Yep, that’s the problem you get when you play a werewolf on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I’d be the same if Leonard Nimoy turned up on House… “Do they have green blood on stock? I wonder…” Putting Greg House and Mr Spock in the same room would be sheer geek awesomeness, though.)
P.S.: Don’t worry, an entry on Fun Home is still to follow. Hopefully even before the move. (Sigh.)
Well, guys… I was going to write a blog entry about this:
Instead, the redesign of the WordPress dashboard (the page where you can write blog entries, among other things) has sorta, kinda screwed things up for me. Looks like I have to go and post a couple of pissed off messages on the forums. The really cool thing is that I can upload images quite easily, but when I try to insert them, the “Insert image” button is located below the taskbar – and I can’t move the window so it’s actually on screen.
(“If I can’t insert images, how come I’ve got the book cover up there?” I hear you ask. Well, there’s an explanation for that, but it’s technical and boring. If you really want to know, write a comment and I’ll tell you… what a sad person you are, that is. And then I’ll explain, showing what a sad person I am. Sad but helpful, and rude to boot.)
But here’s a little something so you’re not completely disappointed. And once I’ve figured out how to make things work properly again, I’ve got lots of things to post: the end of Buffy, rewatching Firefly, and the family tragicomic whose cover you can see above. So, without further ado, here’s some nostalgic madness:
Battlestar Galactica is an odd sci-fi series. On the one hand, it’s much more down to earth than any other series in the genre; in terms of the world it depicts and the atmosphere it evokes, it is remarkably un-SF. Life aboard the Galactica doesn’t seem to be that different from life on some 21st century aircraft carrier (except for the lack of blue sky, fresh air, water and a home port, that is).
At the same time, though, it is perhaps the series I’ve seen that is most interested in metaphysical issues, sci-fi or not. And at least for some of the fans, this element has become too dominant in series 3. I won’t say anything more, because not everyone reading this blog knows how season 3 ends (bode, bode)… but suffice it to say, things go in a direction that makes it impossible to ignore the metaphysical strains of the series as an aberration and that BSG is really about space warfare and about man vs. robot.
***Warning: Spoilers for “Maelstrom” to follow. If you don’t know what happens and are interested: all three seasons of BSG are available on DVD! What’s keeping you here? Go to Amazon and buy, buy, buy! Or get it on Netflix, if my cheap consumerist less-than-subliminal messages fail to do their dirty job on your synapses.***
“Maelstrom”, better known as “the episode in which Starbuck goes kablooey (and this time not in a metaphoric way)”, does something interesting with the metaphysical world of Battlestar Galactica. Are we watching a long, drawn-out suicide that is couched by Starbuck’s mind in spiritual/psychological gobbledegook, because she is too much in denial to face her death wish? After all, much of the series has shown us just how self-destructive she is. Or is there something to Leoben-or-is-he? and his allegations of Kara Thrace’s special destiny? Is there a Cylon Heavy Raider ducking in and out of the clouds – or is it but a Raider of the mind, conjured up by Starbuck’s constantly eroding psyche? (Good thing they didn’t throw Birnam Wood at her while they were at it.)
Either option is possible – but just like we don’t know about the Final Five, or what exactly Baltar’s mind-Six is (a delusion or a chip?) or the Cylon God, we are denied an answer about Kara, as her Viper goes kerSPLAT! right in front of Apollo’s eyes. Are the series creators intent on frustrating us? Are they, as the characters might put it, frakking with us? Or do they, as they claim about the Cylons, have a plan?
I resisted watching Band of Brothers for a long time, just as I still haven’t seen Saving Private Ryan and am not planning to do so any time soon. While I acknowledge Spielberg’s skills as a director, I tend to mind those films of his that purport to be “important”, because usually he mistakes pathos for importance. (I’m excluding Schindler’s List from this, though.) Band of Brothers came out in the wake of Spielberg’s Omaha Beach Party, and I assumed that it would be more American WW2 pathos.
When we watched the first episode, I was afraid that my expectations would be proven true. The main theme of the series, without the context of the actual episodes, dripped with solemn, righteous pathos, like a particularly constipated John Williams on Fourth of July. The episode itself neither confirmed or rebutted my fears, though: it concentrated on the battalion’s training in England, so there was little space for outright heroism. The episode was interesting enough, although it was hampered a bit by casting David Schwimmer as a bullying instructor. Schwimmer did a good job, but it’s more or less impossible to look at him without thinking “Ross! From Friends! and wanting to smack him in the gob.
It was only in the second episode, “Day of Days”, that I came to realise that my fears were unfounded. Yes, there may still be lots of soldierly pathos in the remaining eight episodes, but there was little to none of that here. It’s extremely difficult for a war movie – even for a supposed anti-war movie – not to make scenes of warfare exciting, so the implication is “War is hell… but it’s a bloody adventure, innit?” Instead, the first scenes we get of the characters involved in an actual battle is them sitting in the planes, waiting for the jump, as flak fire shoots several planes to bits. The soldiers are powerless, and whether they live or die isn’t down to their heroism but rather to sheer luck.
We were eating lunch when we started watching the episode, but both of us stopped digging into our sandwiches pretty soon as horrible, frightening, saddening things started to happen on the screen: as a plane went up in flames, and you saw little human specks on fire tumbling from the conflagration to fall to their death. The surviving soldiers’ first direct encounter with the enemy was no more heroic, as they shot a group of Germans on a horse cart from the safety of an ambush, riddling the horses as much as the enemy troops with gunfire. At this point, you got the impression, wartime reality for these men was probably not that different from that of the German soldiers: you point your gun at the guys in differently coloured uniforms and you hope that they die before you do.
This impression that even the Good Fight is a pretty crappy fight became even stronger when Sgt. Malarkey gets to talk to a prisoner of war, a German-American born in the States whose parents decided to move back to the Fatherland. Just after he stops chatting to the young man who, but for the accident of family might have been wearing the same uniform as him, all the POWs are rounded up and shot. Can’t waste time and men on protecting these prisoners.
Right now I’m impressed at the lack of “Rah, rah, Allied Forces!” pathos and very curious as to how the series will continue. After a pretty gut-wrenching second episode, will it be able to maintain this level of intensity?
And, perhaps more importantly, will I manage to remember the names of all the soldiers (looking so similar under their over-sized helmets, where you haven’t even got hair colour to go on) before we get to the end?
P.S.: Talking of distracting cameos by TV comedians – there was this little guy in one of the scenes in the first episode, and I thought, “Man, he looks just like Shaun from Shaun of the Dead… but it can’t be him, because why would they want to cast a Brit for an American?” Well, turns out that Simon Pegg is far from the only Brit playing a US soldier in Band of Brothers. Is this payback for all of those villainous Germans played by British actors?
You’ve probably all noticed that my blog updates have become somewhat infrequent, at least compared to the beginning, where I’d hammer out an entry a day. Don’t worry, this is just a momentary slump (I hope); things are somewhat stressful at the moment, and I don’t get to watch or read as much as I’d like. Even when I do find the time, I’m usually somewhat too tired to appreciate films, series and books as much as I’d want to.
That’s where gaming comes in. I can be as tired as I want, yet I can still get some enjoyment out of Guitar Hero (where I’ve graduated to Hard mode, meaning that I’ve now got five fretting buttons to contend with!) or Splinter Cell. Or I could be “enjoying” Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
CoC: DCotE (doncha love acronyms?) is one of the creepiest games I’ve played since… well, since Thief 3 and that Holy Grail of computer game horror, the Cradle. I’m not particularly informed when it comes to H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos, but for those of you who know even less, Cthulhu is this cheerful fellow:
(Any similarities to a certain crustacean Doctor are purely coincidental.)
The game has a couple of easy scares (boo! decomposing corpse!), but by and large it works with more subtle techniques: half-glimpsed horrors and whispers in the dark. Slowly going insane is as much of a threat in this game as things that go bump in the night. The game starts with the protagonist cuts his stay at an insane asylum short by hanging himself – what follows essentially is a long, drawn-out flashback – an odd way to motivate players to progress: “Just one more level and I can hang myself! Yay!” For the first two, three hours of gameplay you don’t even have any weapons, which makes for an original twist on the genre: for once, the solution to all your problems isn’t unloading a gun in some gilled horror’s face.
And the game has what is possibly the best chase sequence I’ve ever seen or played. You’re woken up in the middle of the night as a couple of shady guys (with serious throat problems, from the sound of it) try to break into your room to turn you into chowder. Your only option is to run, bolting doors behind you or blocking them with wardrobes and the like. Then, a bracing escape via the rooftops while you’re being shot at… and don’t even look down, because otherwise you’ll find out just how Jimmy Stewart felt in that classic Hitchcock movie about a guy with vertigo. I think it was called… “The Man Who Was Afraid of Heights”.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 