If they mated...

So, Cloverfield.

A giant monster eats pretty, young, rich people. A+

But the monster reminded me of a cross between an elephant seal (huge but cute!) and a mantis (small but evil!):


Now an action figure by Hasbro. You know, for kids!

I'm not surprised it's come to this...

Barenaked Ladies |MTV Music

Well, kids, it's time to pour out a 40 of Molson or Labatt's or whathaveyou to the end of Barenaked Ladies as we knew it: Steven Page, after arrest on drug charges, getting divorced, and acquiring a 20-something girlfriend (not necessarily in the that order) has left the band he founded 20 years ago.

Was it the drugs? Was it the pixie-coiffed Yoko? Was it because Steve's always been an independent little cuss? Apparently, he's already got projects out the ying yang...

Ed and the rest of band will still be going on as BNL. And while Jim, Tyler, and Kevin are all capable singers and partners to Ed on stage, nothing beats the StEd harmonies and chemistry.




"Call and Answer," "What a Good Boy," "Break My Heart," "War on Drugs"? All gone from the set lists. No one can belt like Steve. On the other hand, almost all their recent singles have Ed on lead, so clearly someone doesn't see him as marketable, or something.

Oh yeah, I'm uncool like that - I dig BNL. True their last sorta double album thing wasn't quite up to snuff, but it still had some gems. And in the seven (7 - true)* times I've seen them it's always been a good show. And it's sad to see this band of sardonic, personable, regular-looking guys become Behind the Music fodder. **

And let me say, that my disappointment (rather than despondency - they're just a pop band, folks) shouldn't imply that I dislike Ed's voice or songs. On the contrary, "Light Up My Room" and "If I Fall" are incredibly beautiful and in my BNL top five for all time.

Good news? It looks like there's gonna be a 20th anniversary box set and the release of Jason Priestly's doc Barenaked in America on DVD, finally.***

Ah, well. They'll always have Scarborough...

(Okay, Warner pulled the original video that showed the bleak fall of suburban Toronto set to a Bruce Cockburn soundtrack ... at least Steve has a beard!)



*I actually pulled out the ye ol' ticket jar and counted just to make sure.****
**Actually, they've already got a Behind the Music ep but the most dramatic aspect was Kev's cancer. No drugs, no girls, no break-ups.
***(Yes, I do own an official VHS copy.)
****Yes, I keep my concert tickets, my theater tickets, and a few special movie tickets. The oldest? Lollapalooza, July 6, 1996, Deer Creek Music Center, Noblesville, Ind., featuring the headlining duo of Metallica AND Soundgarden (just a few months before they broke up and Chris Cornell ceased to sing anything interesting). It was awesome.

An iTunes inventory.

Number of Songs: 1891
Number of Albums: 576
Most Recently Played Song: "What are you going to do with me" by Paper Moon
Most Played Song: "Night" by Jeff Hanson
Most Recently Added Album: "Dark Was the Night" Red Hot compilation

First Song Alphabetically: "About a Song" by Nancy Sinatra
Last Song Alphabetically: "Zombie Stomp" by Ozzy Osborne
First Song Numerically: "100 yard dash" by Raphael Saadiq
Last Song Numerically: "9 to 5" by Alison Krauss
Shortest Song: "Here come the 123s" by They Might Be Giants
Longest Song: "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly

First Album Alphabetically: Abbey Road, the Beatles
Last Album Alphabetically: Zen Arcade, Hüsker Dü
First Album Numerically: 3 Rounds and a Sound, Blind Pilot
Last Album Numerically: 808s and Heartbreak, Kanye West

First Five Songs That Pop Up On Shuffle:
"All Love Gone" Charlie Pickett
"Some Small History" Portastatic
"Super Trouper" ABBA
"Morning tide" The Little Ones
"She's Got My Number" Semisonic

You spinnin' yet?

Dollhouse Week 2

And this wasn't the pilot episode because? ...ah. It was supposed to be episode 8. Which explains why we already know Echo's real name, saw how Alpha went homicidal, and how Boyd bonded Echo. This is stuff you usually hold onto until sweeps week or end of the season. Poor Joss has been forced by the FuxHeads to blow the whole kit & kaboodle early in the game. At this point, I'm not sure if Joss has enough story to get through 13 episodes, much less the five years he says he has supposedly planned out.

This week revealed something more than just how Boyd became protective of Echo: Joss and his Mutant Enemy stable of writers (including this eps' scribe Steven Deknight, of Angel and Buffy, and Tim Minear, of Angel, Firefly, and Wonderfalls) can't write cops for crap. The scenes with Ballard sparring with Agent Mark Romo Badger Sheppard were so...awful, like that's how the writers thought cops/feds talk to each other because that's how dull and unimaginative they are on other cop shows? On CBS?

What I wouldn't give for Bunk and McNutty to come in show 'em how cops can be funny, flawed, serious, and good at their jobs all at the same time.


The poor writing for cops is indicative of one of Joss' major flaws: he has a tendency have all these great ideas, but seems to do little to no research to back them up and/or flesh them out. Two bloggers have taken on Firefly in the last week, discussing Whedon's notions of sex work and Orientalism (minus the actual Asians). The articles and the comments (particularly for the Racialicious piece) smart and insightful, articulating some problems I had with the show in a way I never could. And now, it seems I'll only be popping in my Firefly DVDs for the Fillion/Baldwin/Tudyk funny and eye-candy....

You can all go fuck yourselves.

This goes out to:

• The seven people who pulled out in front of me today.
• The asshole in the silver corvette who diagonally parks across two handicapped spaces.
• The health insurance industry.
• Whoever is taking the MST3K videos off YouTube.
• Congressional Republicans.
  

Does someone take care of you?

The pilot of Dollhouse did not blow me away. BUT as a stand alone episode, it had enough character and suspense to bring me into next week.

Of notice...

Cast
Did you know that Eliza Dushku was kinda hot? I wonder if there is any possible way to show as much of her body as network TV will allow from as many angles as possible to get that across.... Oh she acts too? Yeah, she was pretty good with that. But the 'hot' thing. Someone should try to capitalize on that.

(Also, she is ridiculously tiny. That little girl she was carrying out of the pedo-kidnappers' hideout was as big as she was! Kind blew the seriousness of the scene watching this incredibly petite woman trying to struggle to carry a 10 year old who is already five feet tall.)

Thank you, Joss, for a little parity with the nice long scenes of sweaty, shirtless Tahmoh. Let's keep that up, 'kay? Thx.

Harry Lennix, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz, Amy Acker, and Olivia Williams* are all those HITGs you wish were in more, and/or wish would be given more in the parts they're in.

Interestingly, these are the adults in this piece (er - maybe not techie Fran/Topher). The 'dolls' - both male and female, apparently - appear to all be relatively young and attractive, and are made child-like by the mind wipes so the actors still seem ... too young? Like they're all at a super high-tech boarding school or something? Or they're sexy 20-somethings that share one of those unrealistically posh beach-front houses you see on the teevee. Speaking of....

The Set reminds me of the House of Blue Leaves from Kill Bill:


Intentional? Think there will be swords? Joss, you should totally have swords.

The Promos
Those Summer/Eliza Terminator/Dollhouse bumpers were excruciating. The tank tops, the leather, the overly glossed lips and come-hither dialog.... Jesus. Using sex as a selling point is fine, but let's try to be a bit more subtle about it. Is imagination that dead in Hollywood?

Oh my. That was a silly question...

The Plot
I'll wait till the season's over to make a proper assessment of the series. A pilot is such a strange animal storytelling-wise: so much info to present in so little time. Right now it just seems like a decent weekly psychothriller, but I think it can and will be more.



*see Williams in Miss Austen Regrets. It's surprisingly good.

I can feel you thinking.

Next in the series of movie reviews of films past well past their sell date: The X-Files : I Want to Believe (extended vers., to be specific)….

On the positive

• This was, at heart, good thriller that wove together some tried-and-true genre story lines (mad doctors, organ theft, creepy monster trucks, women as victims...) and created something genuinely creepy. Also: two-headed dogs.

• The show theme popping up as Scully and Mulder viewed portraits of G.W. Bush and J. E. Hoover had me laughing for a good five minutes.

• Scully, Scully, Scully – Sue me, but this whole franchise would be nothing without Gillian Anderson and Dana Scully. From her astounding beauty to her totally enthralling performance, she holds this whole cabal together. The same can’t be said for Duchovny/Mulder; he is the impetus, but she is the motor that moves the stories along. She is the soul. She is also the baddest of bad-asses. I love love LOVE that she is the one who saves Mulder and the victim, with a block of wood and a scalpel, respectively. Do not fuck with Dana Scully. Woman is STEELY. See her BISH PLEEZE glare at the young Fed who puts the flirt on Fox:
  

• ‘Shipper fodder – No cock-blocking bees in this one! They’re living together and smooching just like normal people! And they even kill the absurdly-named youngin* who ever-so-slightly puts the moves on Mulder! They even give the slash-fic writers a bone showing Skinner warming up Mulder in his arms! Ah, sweet, sweet bureaucratic tenderness…. On a more serious note, I think what we see here is that Mulder and Scully are, in fact, quite alike, albeit with different obsessions. Both are tenacious, intelligent, passionate, and so full of integrity you think their hearts will explode from their righteousness. And these similarities are what pull them apart so often, and then inevitably together. Duchovny and Anderson still have wonderful chemistry, and bring out the realities of a long, loving, but frustrating relationship.

• Billy Connolly is always a treat.

• Nicki Aycox looks much better without the bleach-blonde crop. And gives a much better performance without the trite villain dialogue.

• Callum Keith Rennie is the Canadian Dean Winters. Ruggedly handsome and versatile. Can fall into any sort of role, big or small, good or evil. His only misstep was that awful, awful Chicago accent he put on in Due South. Leoben totally makes up for it.

On the nitpicky

• Where did Sculder live? Virginia? And if so, why would it be so hard for the FBI to find Fox if he’s living so close to DC?

• And why did they give place/timestamps for the casework but not the personal?

• When did Scully become a surgeon? Autopsy is one thing, surgery very much another.

• And Frankenstein’s Altar Boy – they were giving him a woman’s body? He couldn’t have gotten a regular sex change operation? What the hell else was wrong with him?

• And does Google really need product placement at this point?

Overall, quite enjoyable and I would not frown upon a third movie...



* Dakota Whitley, WTF? And her fall was quite Hitchcockian.