Wednesday, October 24, 2007 Rant Archive
Part Stephen King's "The Stand", part 28 DAYS LATER, part TWELVE MONKEYS, and part Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", Will Smith's upcoming film I AM LEGEND has all the earmarks of a great science fiction movie. Some sort of virus has desolated the population of the Earth, and Smith is left alive, and alone, in New York City.
The trailer is long and does a great job of showing how utterly isolated Smith is in the city, and how he tries to recreate the human experience in a myriad of ways. Think about it. Everyone on the planet is suddenly gone. How do you cope with it? Would you go insane? Would you run around like crazy, having a great time? Would you be sad? Ecstatic? What would you do?
I for one would be sure to stock up on books, movies, and albums. Work my way through the classics, because it seems like I'd have a good amount of time to try and get through all the books I should have read. Plus, imagine how good the traffic would be in the Los Angeles area. Of course, gas might be hard to come by, but at least I'd be able to hit more than 100 on the 405. That'd be a first.
I've really been looking forward to this movie, and this trailer makes me wish it would just come out already. What do you think? Check the trailer out inside and Rant Back to us, we'd love to know if you think this will be legendary, or forgettable.
Remember FIRST BLOOD? No? What?! You never saw it? Well, you've got some time to get out there and rent the DVDs of FIRST BLOOD (which is RAMBO I) and then check out parts II and III before JOHN RAMBO, the fourth installment, hits the screens. It's been a long time coming, but if Stallone can do as good a job in this as he did in the latest Rocky, then we'll be sold on it.
Hopefully there will be at least one scene featuring Rambo holding an M-60 with one hand and feeding the ammo with the other, while screaming and blowing away enemies. It's become as iconic an image for Rambo as that huge knife he always carries with him, so you can be sure it'll probably be in here. As will most likely be tons of explosions, flying bullets, blood, gore, and expletives.
Vegas should try putting bets out on what Rambo's one-liners will be. He needs something that'll close this series out with a bang, and something people will be saying to each other like "Yippy kay ay, mother ..." and so on. Maybe along the lines of "I'll be back ... maybe" to steal from his buddy Arnold.
Now all they need to do his give him back his bow and arrow and drop him on some unsuspecting enemy ... like North Korea. Check out the trailer inside and let us know what you think about it.
Please join me in the zone of truth because this week, Brennan (Emily Deshanel) and Booth (David Boreanaz) are starting therapy.
But before their 12-year-old psychotherapist can get very far with them, the two find themselves knee-deep in a new case. This week, it’s a body cooked by a composting heap. Yeah, that’s nasty (and is a really weak punch line to my knee-deep joke).
Our cooked man is one Frank Curtis, the owner of a nationwide organic supermarket chain. With a dead environmentalist on their hands, the entire team finds themselves in conversations about the environment. Thankfully, this didn’t become a message episode. Instead, it became a don’t-blame-the-traditional-farmers episode.
After questioning Mrs. Curtis (played by Tasha Yar, I mean Denis Crosby) and her daughter Kat (Erin Chambers), Booth and Brennan discover that Mr. Curtis wasn’t too popular with all the other farmers. Not because he liked organic farming, but mostly because he would buy out anyone who didn’t like organic farming. I don’t care how environmentally friendly you are, kicking people off their land and taking their business is not the best way to make friends.
Snot creatures from the sewer. That sounds like a Roger Corman film title to me, but it’s actually just what poor Sam Oliver (Bret Harrison) goes up against this week on orders from the Devil (Ray Wise). When Sam starts slippin’ and slidin’ on everything in sight, he knows something’s up, but he’s having a hard time focusing lately. Seems that his constant errands for Old Scratch are causing him to make up lamer and lamer excuses to miss out on hanging with Andi (Missy Peregrym), and she’s getting tired of it. Now she’s hanging with college student Greg, and Sam’s left at home with his thoughts and the long-awaited copy of his contract, delivered with three hours of paperwork from a grumpy courier demon (Aaron Douglas, filling his days until he gets back onboard BATTLESTAR GALACTICA).
Still, Sam’s travails are not being ignored by everyone. Sure, he can’t tell Andi, but his loyal buds Ben (Rick Gonzalez) and Sock (Tyler Labine) are keeping the faith with him, suiting up to do battle with escaped souls and Gladys at the DMV. Even Sam’s dad (Andrew Airlie) is getting into the act, asking Sam to set up a meeting with the Prince of Lies and, when that falls through, volunteering to go through Sam’s contract for him. Pretty generous, considering he’s the reason Sam’s an indentured bounty hunter in the first place. However, the course of true love or homicidal slime never did run smooth, and Sam’s got lots of tough duty ahead with this soul, a crooked businessman bent on killing whoever it takes to kill a lawsuit that threatens to derail his son’s political ambitions. Not to mention the fact that Sam’s dad has more than just a passing interest in the contract, or keeping some of it hidden from Sam.
The search for the new team continues as Doctor Forman (Omar Epps) orbits in unemployment, waiting to get pulled back into House’s (Hugh Laurie) world by the sheer gravity of the diagnostic Sherlock Holmes’ ego.
This week a funeral home cosmetologist imagines she is raped and strangled by a corpse. Now if this were VIVA LAUGHLIN this scene would have had all that only done in a song and dance number. So much for the visionaries at FOX. Hugh Jackman’s swiveling hips and Melanie Griffith’s over-inflated lips mock your conventional pedantry.
The corpse primper, Irene (Azura Skye), get a battery of tests before the seven remaining candidates for House’s team figure out she is still having delusions. Well, she was having hallucinations but now she sees her dead mother and that is technically a delusion. See? This exactly what I tell my eleven month old daughter: TV is educational. I wouldn’t have made that distinction before tonight.
Dr. Cameron places a side bet with House that Dr. Cole (Edi Gathegi), affectionately nicknamed “Big Love” and “Dark Fanatic” for being an African American Mormon, can stand up to House’s abuse. When it’s revealed Cole is also a single father, you hope the bet will get fun. It doesn’t really, but House loses and that can be satisfying, if not fun.
All right, boys and girls, after three months of high-tension, plot-twisting drama, it’s the end of the line for DAMAGES … except it looks a whole lot like the beginning. Ellen (Rose Byrne) gets attacked by a mysterious henchman in Patty Hewes’ (Glenn Close) apartment, and accidentally kills him in the struggle. You would think that would be the murder she’s arrested for, but no; nobody’s found that body yet, thanks to the other henchmen apparently working for Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), who now has lots more to worry about than the stock fraud lawsuit that started this whole mess.
But, there’s more than one group of henchmen running around, and one of those groups works with Hollis Nye (Philip Bosco), the avuncular attorney Ellen almost took a job with when the whole thing started. He’s helping Patty, who Ellen has, well, blackmailed into being her defense attorney, using a videotape made by Gregory Malina (Peter Facinelli) as leverage. Meanwhile, the lead henchman who was in on David’s (Noah Bean) murder turns out to be a NYPD detective who is moonlighting.
But wait, what’s this? Last episode or so, Patty vamoosed out of sight to her beach house, then to a graveyard, but who she was visiting wasn’t clear. Now, a brief flashback to the 1970s indicates that the plot belongs to Patty’s first child, a stillborn daughter. Hold onto your seats, because we now fast-forward 30 years to a different flashback, where it appears that Frobisher and the now-deceased George Moore (Peter Riegert), a former SEC investigator, have known each other for 40 years. Jump forward again: Patty manages to get the charges dropped against Ellen, and Ellen tells Patty where Malina’s tape is. Irony of ironies, it was hidden in the bookend that was used to kill David, so Tom (Tate Donovan) retrieves it from evidence. At this point, we’re only 29 minutes into a 68 minute show. Good God, I’m tired already.
Last week I was promised “THE MOST SHOCKING WEIGH-IN IN BIGGEST LOSER HISTORY!” by that gravely voiced siren that cuts the promos and bumpers for the show.
I hate that guy.
This episode started with the teams getting blown up. With twelve remaining potential losers, there would now be four teams of three and the power to pick teams was up to a poker game where the wagering was in calories. They played with chips…chocolate chips, wafers, cheese in red wax, crackers and peanut butter cups. The catch was that what was bet had to be eaten by the bettor and there would be only one winner. It meant a lot of consumed, vacant calories.
I mean if NBC is going to all the trouble of making these people lose the weight, I think they have every right to break their spirit once in a while. “I was prepared to eat everything on that table,” said Hollie of the challenge. We know that Hollie. Everybody knows that.
When it came time to ante up Kae was the only one who wouldn’t play. She knew better than to engage in this foolishness. And I’m saying it right now, she has a legitimate shot as being the first woman to win this thing despite being so (relatively) tiny.
Leeann Wellings disappeared four weeks ago and the cops are no further along in their investigation than they were on day one. There’s no body or ransom note. There’s no forensic evidence. All they know is what we know, that Leeann suddenly disappeared and that she left her two children in her car.
Det. Supt. Barclay (Hugh Bonneville), who heads the investigation, is convinced it has something to do with the Eastern European peddler who sold flowers from his van on a busy highway service road. That’s where she was when she mysteriously disappeared. He’s already calling it a murder.
But his associate, Det. Sgt. Foster (Janet McTeer) believes the investigative team ought to be paying more attention to Leeann’s husband Matt (David Oyelowo). She believes that he is being ignored out of political correctness – i.e. that he is a black man married to a white woman and the powers that be don’t want to make the investigation seem racial in its overtones.
Monday, October 23, 2007, will forever mark the day that broadcast programming started down the slippery slopes to hell, as social networking site MySpace.com premiered its first original scripted production.
Entitled ROOMATES, the faux reality show will follow the exploits of a group of college roommates post-graduation,
airing three-minute webisodes exclusively on MySpace, from now until December 21st. The series will be sponsored exclusively by the Ford Motor Company, as a promotion for the 2008 Ford Focus.
The launch of ROOMATES comes on the heels of MySpace’s success premiering another scripted show, Michael Eisner’s PROM QUEEN, which debuted on the site but was broadcast all over the net. MySpaceTV will co-produce ROOMATES and the show will offer the unique opportunity for creative interactivity: MySpace users will be able to direct their suggestions for the series directly to producers, who will retain the creative control to mold the show according to viewer recommendation.
“Users can suggest storylines, and we will take input from viewers from Seattle to Stuttgart who will have say on where the show should go,” said MySpaceTV G.M. Jeff Berman.
What makes FIVE DAYS so fascinating and a cut above typical American mysteries is its leisurely pace. FIVE DAYS is a BBC production, and unlike here in the colonies, the Brits don’t seem to be in a Slam Bam, Arrest You Ma’am rush. So while there is certainly a high level of tension throughout, it is very much character driven, as the show examines the impact of the crime on the people around it, the family of the victim, the police and the hangers on who somehow expect to profit from the events.
The show concentrates of five days of a two-and-a-half-month investigation, hence its name. On day one, an attractive woman, Leanne Wellings, disappears. Her two children, a boy 7, his younger sister and their dog wander off in search of her and are picked up apparently by a pedophile, Kyle Betts (Rory Kinnear), a loner who lives with his mother. When the first episode ends, a young woman Sarah Wheeler (Sarah Smart) opens her garage and finds the boy.
By day three, the media has labeled her a hero, although frankly I’m not sure how lifting a garage door qualifies someone as heroic. But just a taste of media attention goes to Sarah’s head. She tries to insinuate herself in the investigation and into the Wellings’ lives, invading their home and offering unasked for advice. Kind of a white Al Sharpton, if you know what I mean.