Alright time for a post.
but rather than talking about san francisco or our appartment or the interminable search for work or something interesting I’m going to talk about heros. *shrugs* it’s what I feel like talking about.
Movies. Seen two since we got here: stardust and transofrmers.
Stardust tried but we both thought it fell short. Sometimes way short. A lack of interesting characters and awfull awfull abuse of music. Plus we recently saw Pan’s Labarynth which had the same feel but was fucking awesome.
And why didn’t I see transforners when it came out? I didn’t know until we got here. The IMAX version is playing in town! w00t w00t! Except that the movie sucked. Sucked hard. That was really really bad. Stock characters picked right off the shelf. A rediculous plot. Full of holes. Uninspired fight scenes.
I read the leaked script way before it came out so I knew what I was in for. Although man was the script I read a high-water mark. Just real quick here’s the hole I hated the most:
The movie is laboured with obnoxious hacker people. All the hacker people actually DO is call in the air force to the final battle (with a comodore 64 and a ww2 radio). So the jets show up and they’re going to use marine sighted lasers to drop a bomb on a disepticon. But the disepticon freaks out and the marines fuck up their sighting and a main charater does something rediculous on a motorbike to kill the disepticon instead. Then starscream kills all the jets. That’s it. Jets gone. Net gain: zero. So the hackers are given 30 minutes of cumulitive screen time and all they do is call in some jets that might as well have not been called in! How do those characters survive editing?
So the movie was too suck to be good on its own merits and too different from the cartoon to be nostalgic.
In less suck news: Battlestar Gallactica. Missed almost the whole 3rd season in Thailand so we (Sarah’s started watching it!) got to catch the whole thing up, with directors commentary, in just a week or so. These guys know what they’re doing. Strong plots, great characters, looks amazing. overall great. We aren’t watching the last two eps because it’s going to be an end of season cliff hanger. Forget that, we’ll watch them when the new season starts in jan.
We are finally watching heros. Which everyone and their dog recomends. We’ve got the whole first season and are watching it straight through. Which should be the optimal way to watch a contiguous serial like this. It’s ok but not nearly as good as I thought it was going to be. They expected alot of investment in the characters right away. Here are a two people you know nothing about, their mairrage is in trouble! Frett! Which isn’t really a problem past the first few episodes. Except that alot of them never really get interesting ever. I blame the writing. A few people, like the cop, Hiro, Ando, and to a lesser extent the cheerleader and her dad are interesting. But I think that’s because they have strong actors who save otherwise bland characterisation.
Being able to paint the future only when you’re injecting heroin _should_ be cool. But somehow they just don’t make me care. And alot of the other story lines are the same way. Mabey they just have so many story lines they can’t flesh any out to the point where they’re interesting.
We’re halfway through the season so they’ve abandoned Syler the mystery villain and Evil Government Agency the mystery villain. Which were so 5th season buffy lame. Now that both are proper characters mabey we can get a little nuaunce in there.
We have said goodbye to the indian guy. We gave him 12 episodes to start acting better and for writers to stop making him spout awfull awfull awfull awfull evolutionary psudo-science. But eventually we couldn’t put up with him any more. We fast-foreward through his plot arc. God help us when he gets back with the group. Even now we have to put up with his InsufferablE narration.
Plus I don’t know how you people watched it from week to week. They’re an hour long but nothing happens! It took them half the season to do nothing but save a cheerleader! I get antsy waiting through a whole episode let alone a week.
So yeah, there are some OK plot threads but really not enough to keep us watching. So why are we going to finish the season?
Hiro Protagonist… er.. I mean Hiro Nakamura. Oh man. Diamond in the rough. This rules. From the first line of the first shot of his subplot it was like a different show. Awesomness abounds. I care about the two characters they seem to be going somewhere, there’s humor and pathos. Wicked. Also I guess powers have to get pretty overwhelming to be interesing now. Alot of writers have asked “wow what would it be like if you could FLY!?”. Not as many have asked what would happen if you could pause and rewind time. And I think Hiro is approaching this question in a realistic, intersting, and human way.
When someone re-edits the show to remove all the non-Hiro plots; that will be a good show.
Although… I think at some point I heard someone say he dies? Ah well if it does it better be a fakeout or watch those ratings slide baby.
So I want to see more movies but no tv = no previews = I have no idea whats going on. I need recomendations people!
aha, our couch just arrived. Gotta jet!
