Today is the last day of my extremely badly needed vacation. I must say, I feel a bit lousy about spending nearly 2 weeks without doing a damn thing other than watching movies and eating in restaurants, but eh, what’re you gonna do?
As far as entertainment viewing went, the time was pretty productive.
We finished the final season of Soap which was a bit frustrating. Every episode ends with a little teaser of what will happen in the next episode, and this includes the last one. In addition, every season ender had at least 3 big cliffhangers, and this one was no exception. There’s just nothing quite like knowing that a show has been cancelled for nearly the amount of time you’ve existed on the planet when you see the final moments, knowing there’s not a chance in hell of ever finding out how it ends.
We watched both Firefly and Serenity, and I’m pleased to report that the hype is actually well deserved. Firefly is even better than I had been led to believe by the army of rabid internet fans, and in my opinion, doesn’t suffer from the retardation that plagues most of Joss Whedon’s tv work. Once again, it is slightly frustrating that the show was cancelled before any of the major arcs really got anywhere, but Serenity did a pretty good job of making me forget about all the unanswered questions. The only thing cooler than cowboys and space are cowboys in space. I personally think Brokeback Mountain could learn a thing or two from Firefly. Can you imagine how glorious gay cowboys eating pudding in space would be?
I love the SciFi Channel “original” movies, so I’ve set up a very complex rule on my MythTV box to catch them all for me. It now records any post-2003 science fiction movie that airs on SciFi during primetime on friday and saturday nights. Most of the movies are really crappy—see, most of these so-called “original” movies are just movies bad enough to not deserve straight-to-DVD status, so SciFi gets a deal on the broadcast rights—but after being sped up to 1.2X in MythTV they are generally fairly tolerable. There’s just something about the “I need 50cc’s of epinepherine, STAT!” style that watching everything sped up creates, causing all dialog to become intense, tricking the viewer into thinking it is interesting in addition to intense. Also, the running time is cut down a bit, so it doesn’t feel like you’re subjecting yourself to something quite as bad. Painkiller Jane was one of the few that I actually enjoyed soley on the merits of the film, and would probably watch again at normal speed some day. I had never read any of the comic it was based on—she’s kind of a Wolverine-esque regenetive hot chick ass-kicker—but I may have to pick up a trade, because I really enjoyed the movie despite my “this is really going to suck” predisposition. Particularly enjoyable were the thief with a heart of gold, the hard-ass commanding officer with a heart of gold, the young mute boy with a heart of gold and the archetypical comic book villain who—you guessed it—had a heart of gold. Well, kind of.
At this point we had exhausted most of the History Channel’s ‘Armageddon Week’ (more on this at some point in the future. In a word, “awesome.”) and were kind of scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel, so we set MythTV to record bad movies off HBO. Here’s a little recap of the most memorable.
Racing Stripes might have been a decent little movie, save for the talking animals with big paycheck famous voices. If they had taken all the money they spent on a) getting Dustin Hoffman and Wookiee Goldberg to emotionlessly read their dialog and b) greenscreening all the animal shots to animate their mouths and spent it on a more polished script, they might have had something. Something other than too many poop jokes. Seabiscuit and Dreambiscuit it was not.
Let me tell you, even speeding Son of the Mask up to 1.4x didn’t help that turd to get squeezed out quickly enough. All I can say for that film is that the cartoony battles between the CG baby and the CG dog were mildly entertaining. Oh and also that Alan Cumming was as hot as ever. Seriously. If both of us weren’t straight… rowr. Ha ha, I’m just joking about him being straight. Why must he make such shitty movies? This one was particularly shitty, and seriously sloooow. I kept checking to see if I had sped it up or not, and I truly feel for anyone who didn’t have the luxury of watching it this way. How slow was it? Both Ben Stein and Steven Wright had speaking parts in it.
One that really surprised me was The Perfect Man. I actually enjoyed the over-cliched The Parent Trap aspects of it way more than I expected to, and overall I’d only make a couple changes. First off, I would have swapped Heather Locklear and Caroline Rhea’s characters. I mean seriously, who makes a more believable single mother of Hillary Duff than Caroline Rhea. The other change I would make is getting rid of the Queer Eye For the Straight Guy dude as the lovable gay guy. For goodness sake, it is/was 2005, do we really need to continue portraying gay men as wacky crazy guys who we can’t help but love? None of the gay people I know behave like that.. I mean come on. I bet they could have gotten Alan Cumming for less than that Queer Eye guy and then people actually would find him lovable. Well, at least I would.
I’ve now reached the point where I’m tired of talking about what I watched on television, so I’m going to shut up now.
