Caprica Recap - Midseason Finale

This episode was aptly titled 'End of the Line' as it was the end of a few story lines. We're left not quite knowing which ones, though. And now begins the long wait until the rest of the season airs in the fall. I kind of hate how shows do that instead of just having to wait a year for the next season. Sure the wait is shorter, but there are fewer episodes to watch at once, and the midseason finales generally leave more loose ends. So then once the show does return I have more remembering to do. I admittedly haven't kept up with television marketing techniques, so I don't know how long this sort of thing has been happening or how effective it is. I suppose it's just a pet peeve of mine I've developed since watching new shows. The episode jumped around quite a bit as the various story lines came together, so I didn't bother separating them out. I just wrote a jumbled recap for the jumbled episode. It starts out with a high speed chase involving a rogue robot, then flashes back  fifteen hours to the television in the lab going on about Greystone stock losing value, which gets switched to a nature show about the Caprican raptor. The lab guys are working kind of. The one that isn't Philomon, Nestor (Scott Porter), lights a cigarette and Zoe-in-robot makes to attack. The glitch doesn't go unnoticed, and Philomon gets all weird and protective over the robot again. The other guy's facial expression is super awesome.

Suggestion Box #2: How to Train Your Dragon

Again, don't forget to click on the picture to view it in full size!

Hot Tub Time Machine

Last year as I sat in the theater watching The Hangover, a sobering and frightening thought occurred to me. Considering how wildly popular and successful that movie was, how soon would it be before movie studios saw the R-rated male buddy-movie as a money-making machine and started throwing out lazy, stupid comedies every couple of months or so? I mean, it's because of the success of Scary Movie that we later would up with Meet the Spartans. That's almost enough to make me hate the mere existence of Scary Movie, even though I enjoyed the movie. The trailers for Hot Tub Time Machine looked amusing enough, but that doubt crept right back into my mind. "This is it... the first rip-off of The Hangover," I thought. Then I saw that the movie was directed by Steve Pink, the director of Accepted, and I cringed. Would John Cusack, who has saved many a bad movie in his day, be able to save this?

How to Train Your Dragon

    I like Vikings. I know that in real life they probably weren't a whole lot of fun, but the Viking myth itself is so larger than life that it seems made for an fun, animated kid film. And who doesn't love dragons? Someone probably said, "Hey! Vikings are awesome and dragons are awesome so if we put them together we can make an awesome kid's movie!" That person wasn't wrong to do so. Sure, we don't have ground breaking film making here; what we do have is a fun, fairly basic, animated kid's film. How to Train Your Dragon is a not unintelligent film that's fun to watch

Nurse Jackie

Last season I was just interested enough in this show to keep watching. At least I think I watched every episode. Which is saying a lot because I don’t really like shows set in hospitals. Actually, I loathe them, like most crime shows. I don’t know why; it’s not like I’m squeamish. I suppose I just don’t think of them as entertaining. But there are always a few exceptions to the rule, and Nurse Jackie is almost one of them. If there’s nothing on and I want to watch television and not think about life, I will watch this show. Maybe it’s because there’s a bit of an Intervention style boost to my self esteem that keeps me watching.

Suggestion Box #1

We're going to be adding a weekly web comic to the site, featuring the artwork of Page Branson, in a strip called Suggestion Box. Because hey, there's plenty of ways that these films can be spiffed up and fixed a little!

Here's edition #1 in response to the movie Cop Out. Just click on the picture to view it in its originally intended size!

Caprica Recap - Episode 8

In this episode, so close to the finale, things are coming together more and more. This one was fairly simple compared to the last, focusing heavily on Joe and Daniel who are both trying to find their somewhat deceased daughters. Their approaches are quite different, and a lot is revealed character-wise by this juxtaposition. Their daughters are also missing in different ways, and both are working on their own way out of their respective situations. The relationship between each of these characters and the virtual world is pretty interesting, because they're all very different but I have a feeling they'll all collide in the last episode.

Caprica Recap - Episode 7

This episode jumps around a lot with nearly all of the characters having at least a small part. Most of the episode seemed to be about Amanda, but there were a lot of other things happening too. By the end of the episode, several plot lines had merged or intersected. Hopefully, they're starting to consolidate things for the finale. It starts out with Amanda waking up from dreams about chasing someone through some hallways. While laying in bed she pulls out an envelope from some sort of convalescent care center. Who sleeps with envelopes? Crazy people, that's who. Clarice is also being awakened by one of her spouses, who's got news of their finding the avatar on the chip she used in Graystone's lab. He says that they know it was there at one point, but that it was transferred to another device. Clarice decides to get closer to Amanda to find out where it went.

Repo Men

Repo Men began with Remy (Jude Law) narrating a not-so-correct explanation of Schrodinger's thought experiment concerning the cat that is both dead and alive. The idea of quantum superpositions was lost on our narrator, but he does come up with a cute little metaphor for the experiment near the end of the film. I got a little worried that the faulty science lesson would reflect the intelligence of the film. It doesn't, but it does reflect the intelligence of our "hero," Remy. No, Remy is not bright, but he's fairly cheerful and ridiculously optimistic.

The Bounty Hunter

The Bounty Hunter introduces us to our main characters pretty quickly, not bothering to leave any question as to what the movie is about or what direction it's going to travel. In fact, if you've seen the trailer at all, you have a pretty good idea walking into the theater of exactly what you're in for. Milo (Gerard Butler) is a bounty hunter ex-cop who eagerly takes the open bounty for his ex-wife Nicole (Jennifer Aniston), who is a reporter for a New York City newspaper. Why does she have a bounty on her? She skipped her court date to follow a hot lead on a suicide case that is more than it appears to be. Following that lead, of course, gets her into hot water with a thug and drug dealer named Mahler (Peter Greene). Meanwhile, Milo's being chased down by two thugs (Joel Garland and Ritchie Coster) because Milo has a pretty large gambling debt. I'll spare you the rest. You know how this ends.

Cop Out

Because I have nothing but admiration and respect for Kevin Smith, I really wanted to like Cop Out. As a critic, I'm not supposed to admit those things, but when it's regarding someone I'm as big of a fan boy over as I am over Smith and his movies, I might as well be up front about it. There aren't many directors that did more to push independent film back towards mainstream public consciousness as Smith did in the early 1990's. Films like The Hurt Locker can owe a lot of their success to guys like Smith and Quentin Tarantino paving the way. So while I wanted to like Cop Out, I had a bad feeling about it from the start. This isn't an independent film. This is a Warner Bros. backed project, meaning there's going to be more of a mainstream sheen to it right from the start. And this isn't a script that Smith himself wrote. If you're a fan of Smith's work, it's likely due much more to his writing style than his cinematography. Take out what makes a Kevin Smith film successful? Well, at the very least, it's uncharted territory. This is the first film he's directed that he didn't also write. Hopefully, it's his last as well.

Caprica Recap - Episode 6

This episode opens in a surprisingly cool looking Tauron City. With all the Tauron 'dirt-eater' insults I had taken it to be a largely agrarian planet colony. Anyway, it seems Tomas Vergis (John Pyper-Ferguson), Graystones' Tauron counterpart and main competition, is about to stumble upon a crime scene. This is a flashback to the then glossed over theft of the chip Daniel used to put his daughter's avatar into the robot body. This, in turn, helped him keep his job after the talk show freebie mishap. A month later, after he's gotten the board votes to keep his job, Vergis comes back and in a vaguely threatening way tells Daniel that they should have lunch to discuss their 'situation'. That being the fact that Daniel got a Tauron mob member to kill a couple of his guys to steal from him. Later, Daniel's assistant Cyrus (Hiro Kanagawa) freaks out about the implications of Daniel going to the Tauron mob to steal from a prominent Tauron. Daniel is haunted by his thoughts of getting guys killed in order to get the chip he can't even figure out how to use. This seems to be getting good.

Caprica Recap - Episode 5

Originally I planned on combining these two episodes into one recap, but more and more is happening. So instead they'll be separate, but both will be posted before the new episode. I watched them back to back and was a bit overwhelmed with how much was happening. It makes me super happy that the pace is picking up. Even the recap opening is really growing on me. At first it was overkill because not much was happening yet, but now it's a nice efficient refresher. This episode alternates primarily between Tamara and Joseph Adama. Tamara is still trying to get out of v-world and Joseph is still apparently crippled by the loss of his wife and daughter.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

About three years ago, I bought Moral Disorder because the cover art creeped me out, and I loved it. I couldn't even figure out why, honestly there didn't seem to be much substance the first time I read it. But I just enjoyed reading it and thought it was put together really gracefully. Since then I've been reading other books by Margaret Atwood, and admire her versatility. I read The Handmaid's Tale while at the beach. Not exactly the typical beach book, I realized, but I was drawn into the craziness. Plus it gave me something to concentrate on after I was stung by a jellyfish and had quite enough of the ocean and it's nonsense. I think I like Atwood's speculative fiction novels the best. I really like historical fiction as well, and believe the future is also history so I like reading about futures that could happen in extreme circumstances. This book was a lot like The Handmaid's Tale, but instead of dealing with out of control Theocracy, there is a marked lack of religion. Science is penultimate and everything else is just a means to a scientific end.