Tuesday, October 16, 2007 Rant Archive
Great Britain has been overrun. Cities that aren’t deserted are full of corpses. In the aftermath of the rage virus as seen in Danny Boyle’s brilliant 28 DAYS LATER, the sun seems to have pretty well set on England. There are a few people still alive; as the scene opens on the sequel, 28 WEEKS LATER, Don Harris (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) are holed up in a little cottage with a few others, hoping to outlast the infected. But, they’re soon discovered, and in the ensuing carnage, Don escapes, leaving Alice behind.
Now, 28 weeks have elapsed since the infection began, and the U.S. Army has come in, leading a NATO mission to reclaim England. Among the refugees returning are Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton; no really, that’s his name), Don’s kids who were trapped in Spain when things went down. Don meets them and breaks the bad news, and they try to get on with life. However, the kids head back to their house in violation of quarantine and find something interesting: their mom, who’s infected but shows no symptoms. She’s a carrier, something nobody gets a chance to tell Don before he gets all smoochy with her. Now, the kids are on the run from a new surge of the infected, and a soldier not too keen on shooting civilians (Jeremy Renner), a compassionate army doc (Rose Byrne) and a helicopter pilot (Harold Perrineau) are the only allies the kids have as they get caught between the infected and the U.S. Army’s kill-‘em-all approach to containing the outbreak.
28 WEEKS LATER had some big shoes to fill, and it doesn’t quite manage to do the job. The characters are more stock than the last bunch, and some of the immediacy and chills are robbed by sticking with film as opposed to the grainy digital video Boyle used to such great effect. Plus, the writing just isn’t as sharp as Alex Garland’s. I was so caught up in the first one that when a soldier pointed out the fact that only England could have been affected by the virus due to its transmission speed, it came as a surprise; there were no such moments in this one.
Let me answer the most obvious questions first: yes WRONG TURN 2 is the sequel to WRONG TURN, a film tragically overlooked by both the Oscars and the Golden Globes. And I know why. Movie buffs sometimes have their noses so far up in the air, they refuse to recognize the educational value of these films.
For example, lesson one: You do not want to travel to Greenbrier Backcountry, W. Va. That is where both films are set, and clearly the people in 2 ignored the learning opportunity offered by the original. They are now mostly dead.
Second, if you must go to Greenbrier Backcountry, W. Va., invest a couple hundred bucks in a global positioning system. Buy a Tom Tom or Garmin, because – and I want you to trust me on this – if you get lost in Greenbrier Backcountry, W. Va., you will die.
Three: Kimberly (Kimberly Caldwell), a young actress without a GPS system, gets lost on the way to a job as a contestant on Welcome to the Apocalypse. She phones her agent but discovers she has no cell phone service. This is what happened at the beginning of the original WRONG TURN, and we all know how that turned out. So, if you are on a back road in Backcountry, and your cell phone does not work, immediately get to an interstate.
Four: If you are driving along and hit someone with your car, it is okay to jump out to try to help. But look at his/her/its faces. If you have hit a mutant, he or she may look unconscious, but they can still spring up, grab an ax and cut you in two – vertically. That means from top to bottom. So leave them on the road, get back in your car and hightail it out of there.
Five: Do not rely on the local constabulary. Apparently people have been disappearing in the area for 30 or 40 years and no one noticed.
Will the real Hank Moody please stand up?
Is Moody (David Duchovny), the hedonistic, sleep-with-anything-with-a-vagina a-hole or is a genuinely nice guy gone astray?
That’s one of the questions at the center of CALIFORNICATION, and in The Devil’s Threesome we see Moody, the good guy.
He’s apparently unconcerned that his brand new Porsche was stolen with what he believes is the one copy of his new novella in it. He has a bigger problem. His agent, Charlie (Evan Handler) is living with him now that he and his wife are splitsville. And Charlie wants Dave to be his wingman on this new road of singlehood.
At the gym that evening, Charlie takes boxing lessons from a female instructor who taunts Hank into the ring, where she promptly kicks his behind. He doesn’t remember, but it turns out they spent a night together once and he never called again. So despite the bruises she inflicts, she agrees to service Charlie if Hank takes part. America is a wonderful country.
Meanwhile, Karen (Natascha McElhone), Hank’s former girlfriend, and Marcy (Pamela Adlon), Charlie’s former wife, have a get together for a girl’s night out. They spend the evening talking about the good old days, when they were couples who hung out together, before Karen and Hank broke up and before Marcy experimented with Charlie’s secretary, Dani (Rachel Miner).
On November 4th, raucous animated comedy FAMILY GUY will air its milestone 100th episode. To help celebrate that victory (and it is a victory, considering the show was canceled twice during its initial seasons, only to be later resurrected,) Fox will air an hour-long block of the show, beginning at 8:30pm with a retrospective episode, recounting some of the best moments from the show’s other 100 episodes. The following episode, scheduled at the regular 9pm time-slot, will feature a story about Stewie setting off on a quest to kill Lois once and for all, after she and Peter leave him behind to go on a cruise. Hilarity and cringe-worthy moments will, of course, ensue.
Normally I’d say something like “Oh these animated shows, they grow up so fast!” but in the case of FAMILY GUY, all I can say is “About dang time!” (“Dang,” you heard it.) Due to the show’s dual cancellations in 2000 and 2002, plus the two-and-a-half-year delay until its resurrection in 2005, getting to this 100th episode has been a seven-year ordeal! (That must be some kind of record.) But I’m a sucker for happy endings and this is definitely a happy ending of sorts, though I’m sure FAMILY GUY has a lot of life in its bones and a lot of
lawsuits yet to incite.
In the opening sequence of this week’s episode of WEEDS, Nancy Botwin’s (Mary-Louis Parker) sales people return from the field with large quantities of cash.
Tara Lindman (Mary Kate Olsen), the Born-Again dealer, brings Nancy a particularly sizable stack of bills received in exchange for grass sold to a Christian youth group. Nancy’s reply: “Holy smokes.”
Born again weedheads? Holy smokes? I have no idea how many people caught that, and I don’t think the folks at WEEDS care. I’m convinced they write the show to amuse themselves, which is a good thing. It means the scripts aren’t dumbed down for the lowest common denominator. It also suggests they trust the viewers’ intelligence. They –we – will get the joke (or the irony) and if not there’s always another one a couple of minutes away.
Nancy takes the cash and returns is to Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon), who “borrowed” it from the Town of Agrestra (now merged with Majestic). Wilson tells her to keep the money and use it to expand the business. Nancy is reluctant – at first: “I might be a drug dealer. I’m no embezzler,” she says. But eventually she invests the cash in additional, uh, merchandise.
Then what seems like disaster strikes. Nancy is she’s called down to the DEA’s office. Is the jig up? Will she go to jail? Actually, no. She’s given a life insurance check for her late (and very brief) husband, Peter – and the rights to his pension. She’s also given consoling hugs on the way out. She and Peter were married in a drunken haze last season, and shortly thereafter her crooked DEA husband was knocked off.
Somedays, it’s like I’d be better off if I lost all coherent memories and had to start from scratch. I guess I’m not the only person dying for a case of amnesia, Samantha (Christina Applegate) stars as a Psychiatrist woken up from a week long coma only to have retrograde amnesia. How much can you really tell about yourself if all your memories have been wiped out? Turns out not much. When Samantha wakes up her selfobsessed mother, Regina (Jean Smart), is hovering over her with a video camera talking to the people from Home Makeover. As Samantha says her first words her mother is asking her to repeat waking up because she missed getting it on camera. Regina, the stereotypical bad mother, how charming.
Slowly Samantha realizes who she is now is not who she was. Once discharged from the hospital she’s faced with having to go live with a boyfriend she doesn’t even know, the idea of living with a strange man versus a strange set of parents seems too much to bare and she decides to go home with her parents. When she arrives at their house her best friend, Amanda (Jennifer Esposito) is waiting for her drinking champagne. She tells Samantha she hates her mother and hasn’t spoken to her in over two years, this shocks Samantha into confronting her mother about their problems. Samantha decides to trust Amanda and the two take off to the apartment she shares with Todd (Barry Watson) her boyfriend.
Just when I was beginning to praise THE BIG BANG THEORY (see last week’s episode review) the show had to go and throw me a curveball this week, breaking from its central premise (nerds meet girl) to deliver a spin-off episode of sorts, mainly focused on Sheldon (Jim Parsons.)
When a new boss took over the physics dept Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon work in, Sheldon made the mistake of telling the new boss that he’s basically an idiot and promptly got fired (I thought these guys were geniuses?) Since he apparently had not had a day off from working since the fifth grade, at first Sheldon was thrilled by the notion of some ample free time. He started off with a little light cooking—using rotten eggs; went grocery shopping with neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco)—only to annoy the hell out of her, questioning her about her menstrual cycles. Boredom soon turned Sheldon into even more of a neurotic shut-in, obsessed with trying one weird endeavor after another, including weaving on a loom, and attempting to genetically engineer a fish that could glow in the dark.
Increasingly worried about his friend’s Howard Hughes syndrome, Leonard decied to take the drastic step of calling Sheldon’s mother (another one of Galecki’s ROSEANNE co-stars, Laurie Metcalf.) However things don’t go quite as Leonard had planned; Sheldon’s mother turned to be more backwater Christian conservative, rather than the cool head needed to prevail over her son’s madness. His mom’s intrusive presence only drove Sheldon further in seclusion, hiding in his room like a scared child. Finally Mom decided enough was enough and dragged Sheldon back to his former job to apologize to his boss, who took was allured by Sheldon’s mom and re-instated Sheldon at his old post as a favor to her.
Talk about your classic Barney. The sleazy former fifth wheel (Neil Patrick Harris) has always been the straw that stirred the HIMYM drink, and he showed it again this week.
After getting into a “Who’s got more game” battle with the newly single Ted (Josh Radnor), Barney concocts a devious scheme where he claims to have already slept with the object of the boys’ desire, convincing Ted how he has already conquered this Mount Everest. When the thought of going where Barney has already gone is too much for Ted to handle, he breaks up with her – allowing the conniving genius to swoop in and look like the nice guy. Brilliant!
Of course, the young lass has the last laugh, as she decides it’s best to take it slow after the bad break-up with Ted, and instead makes him listen to her play bass in a reggae band. Leave it to a chick to screw up a perfectly devious plan.
Speaking of chicks screwing things up, Robin (Cobie Smulders) dates a guy with a kid, but can’t handle the pressure and decides to break up with the kid. But the little 6-year-old Casanova has already found a “new mommy” and breaks it off with her.
Tonight is where the truth comes out, at least as far as Dan’s (Kevin McKidd) rendezvous’ with Livia (Moon Bloodgood) are concerned. Last week Dan’s wife, Katie (Gretchen Egolf) confronted him about the watch she found in his coat pocket, so the cat is out of the bag. As if this woman didn’t have enough to deal with, now she has to compete with a time-traveling ghost. Well, I guess Livia isn’t really a ghost, but up until Dan began whipping through time, everybody thought she had perished in a plane crash. This is just one of the plot twists in JOUNERYMAN. While the writers are definitely keeping us on the edge of our seats wondering how and why this is all happening, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by the amount of bizarre incidents that take place in this family’s life. I’m not saying I don’t appreciate their effort, I just wish they had spaced these shockers out a bit more. That being said, I do enjoy watching Dan bounce back and forth between his time and the past trying to figure out whom he’s supposed to be helping.
But just because he keeps getting plopped in front of the same person, doesn’t mean that they are the intended target. As we’ve seen, sometimes it’s a six degrees of separation situation, where Dan has to help one person in order to save another one. Now that’s interesting without being too complicated. Tonight Dan is thrown back to 1998, where he follows around a woman who co founded a software company. As it turns out, this woman’s fiancé was tweaking the company’s books, so you see, it could be that he is the victim Dan is supposed to save. Either way, since they are tied together in time and circumstances, they both require Dan’s attention. Meanwhile, poor Katie is trying to keep it together for the fund-raiser she is in charge of. But with a husband who keeps mysteriously disappearing, it makes it so much more difficult for her, especially when she has to be concerned with whether or not her husband will even be there to give her his support.
Thundercats, Ho!
With all of the 80’s cartoons my generation knows and loves (and still collects, ebay geeks,) it is no surprise that another iconic animated series from the era of cassette tapes and humongous hair is making its way to the big screen. Comicbookmovie.com recently reported that the THUNDERCATS movie is moving forward and has even found a director in the form of Jerry O’Flaherty.
If you don’t recognize that name, stop tearing through IMDB in hopes of making yourself look informed. THUNDERCATS will be O’Flaherty first turn at the director’s helm, having previously served as an art director in another type of big-budget medium: videogames. His résumé includes such blockbuster game titles as the COMMAND AND CONQUER series, UNREAL TOURNAMENT 3 and last year’s runaway hit GEARS OF WAR, which is
set to become a film itself.
“It feels like a natural thing for me to step into,” [O’Flaherty] said. “Games have come so far now. The last four years of my life have been about bringing the energy of filmmaking into the videogame experience.”
O’Flaherty plans to adhere to the established Thundercats mythology, namely a group of humanoid-felines fleeing their doomed home Thundera, who land on the planet of Third Earth and must do battle with an ancient evil being named Mum-Ra and his horde of human-animal crossbreeds. Familiar icons from the original series such as the sword of omens, the thunder tank and Snarf are all likely to make it to the film. No word yet on whether THUNDERCATS will be live-action, or possibly be done in an animated or CGI format.
This week, we met a new hero—Micah’s (Noah Gray-Cabey) cousin Monica (Dana Davis), who seems to be able to mimic anything she sees on television. For now, we’ll call it a videographic memory. Not sure if that’s even close, but it’s interesting…and a bit related to her little cousin’s ability to communicate with machinery. I could just see a MATRIX type montage of Micah telling the television what to show while Monica learns everything there is to know about fake wrestling moves, fancy things to do with tomatoes, and whatever else would make for a cool moment on television.
While Micah and Monica are absorbing some good TV, Claire is sneaking around with new boyfriend West (Nicholas D'Agosto). I don’t know about West. He’s giving off a very strong Anakin Skywalker vibe. You know, the innocent boy who’s just waiting to fall off into the dark side. More and more of me is starting to think West may be a Company plant. I could be wrong, but this is Claire Bennett, the girl who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Also, didn’t Linderman reveal last season that the Company likes to pair up people with powers in the hopes of creating more people with powers? Something to think about.
South of the border, Maya (Dania Ramirez) and Alejandro (Shalim Ortiz) almost run over Sylar (Zachary Quinto) in the middle of a dirt road. For some reason unbeknownst to me--or her brother--Maya starts joyously telling Sylar that they want to go to New York and find Dr. Suresh. Sylar gets that evil glint in his eye, and soon we have another dead body and the three are off to New York. Will Sylar kill Maya and Alejandro for their powers? Probably not, seeing as how it didn't work the last time, but being in close proximity to such power seems to make Sylar all giddy. Well, as giddy as Sylar can get.
According to MTV news rapper Beanie Sigel recently auditioned for the lead roll in what is sure to be the ‘Big Poppa’ of all biopics, playing the notorious one himself, late rap-legend Biggie Smalls.
“Yeah,” Beanie smiled, while sitting in the Def Jam offices…describing why inspired him to go out for the part. “The fact that I’m a hug Big fan from the gate is why I did it.”
The volatile rap star is no stranger to the silver screen, having starred in the urban crime drama (nicest way I can describe it) STATE PROPERTY in 2002 and its sequel (because we all needed to see one) SATE PROPERTY 2 in 2005. As an ardent fan of the late Big, Sigel hopes to bring authentic street sensibility and the necessary amount of rough edge to the role of Biggie.
“To me, dudes like Big and Pac…are special...” he said. “You don’t f— with [their] legacies. I wouldn’t do [the movie] just to say I played the role. I don’t know nobody else in the rap game who could do it and pull it off, as far as who you believe, who’s lyrical enough and fits that image. If I’m watching that joint, I wouldn’t just want to see an [ordinary] actor. Some people might feel some type of way to see Beanie Sigel [playing] Biggie, I don’t know. But I’d love to have a shot at it.”
This week the team has to help a DEA agent steal a priceless diamond from an Afghani opium cartel. The new kid, red headed vixen Katrina, has a past with Agent Casey and knows about Sarah’s past with Chuck’s nemesis Bryce. She takes the time to insinuate herself into Sarah and Chuck’s “cover” and go on a date with Morgan, Chuck’s geeky best friend. Her presence throws Sarah and Chuck’s fragile, budding, unspoken romance into question and the episode as a whole is starting to make this initial fan of the show reconsider.
Maybe that’s because there was so little of Captain Awesome in this episode. It all starts with a board game that shows that as much as Chuck and Sarah make googly eyes at each other, they really don’t know anything real about each other. Chuck picks up on Sarah not liking olives on her pizza and we do learn that Morgan’s worst nickname was “Organ,” but other wise, nada. Once Sarah puts off Chuck’s clumsy attempt to gauge their real romance, Katrina shows up in full ninja stealth gear and she and Sarah have a quick foxy-boxing match to break up some lamps and have Sarah’s nightie flop upwards.
So far, I’m fine. This is sort of what one is looking for from this show.
Apparently it is true: Goonies never die. At least, according to the Corey Feldman (LOST BOYS) and SEAN ASTIN (LORD OF THE RINGS). The former co-stars of the iconic 80’s flick recently sat down with MTV news to sound off on the progress of the GOONIES sequel:
“Steven [Spielberg] and Dick [Donner] and all the powers that be…they really feel like the thing that made the movie strong was that it was about kids, so they really want to make the next movie about kids. The next generation of Goonies.” [Astin said,] “And they’ve had a hard time tackling that.”
Now to drop the other shoe: all recent discussion has been for an ANIMATED version of GOONIES 2. For myself, that little tidbit of information seems to dredge up horrific memories of all those horrendous straight-to-DVD Disney sequels, (if I could only tell you how long it took me to wash the bitter taste of ‘Return of Jafar’ out of my mouth.) However Astin seems enthusiastic about the project, no matter what form it may take.
“I have three children,” he said, “and Corey’s got a kid now [too]. So we now all have kids who are coming into the age that we were when we made the movie, it’s more likely to me that they’ll figure out how to design a story that will satisfy the older audience in terms of connecting with the original 1985 Goonies, and then [also creating this new thing.]”
Last week, I griped about how the ladies of Wisteria Lane could be fully dressed in expensive clothes and enjoying their morning cups of coffee together on the sidewalk before the morning paper had even arrived. This week, we watch as Susan, Lynette, Gaby and Bree go through their morning rituals - working out, getting dressed, strapping on a fake pregnancy bump - all while speaking on the phone. It's good to have friends, but these women are flatout codependent.
The subject of their morning phone call was Susan's annual cherades party, a get-together so disliked and unwanted that none of the women skip a beat in making up an excuse to miss it. Until Lynette realizes that a group bonding session, complete with free-flowing wine, might be the best way to uncork new neighbor Katherine's dark secrets. That is, why does her daughter remember nothing of her childhood and why did Katherine slap the girl for inquiring?
Meanwhile Susan decided to take a trip to an obstetrician suggested by Bree. Only thing is, Bree's not pregnant so the doctor whose information she gave Susan was one she randomly selected in the phone book. As you can imagine, this resulted in a very uncomfortable visit to the most shady doctor's office ever. It looked like the waiting room to an inner city brothel. Susan stuck it out though because if Bree suggested it, it must be good. Well, it wasn't and she came home highly suspicious that her doctor took camera phone pictures of her... well, lets move on.