Category: TV

  • Adaptation Consideration

    I had time to kill last night, between finishing “game night” (came in a strong second at “London” and kicked Mike’s ass at “Stone Age”, hah!) and starting on some client work, and didn’t feel like being On The Computer. So I put in the first disc of my recently-acquired set of the BBC/A&E “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.

    Now, I’d last watched the show when it first aired back in the late 1990s and remembered (vaguely) that it was a cheesy, breezy little adventure yarn. You know what? It still is, and it hasn’t aged as poorly as I might have expected. Richard E. Grant is still a brilliant lead, playing the Bruce Wayne / Batman dichotomy as well as anyone could ask. Elizabeth McGovern is still pretty, somewhere under all that pancake makeup and somewhat-ratty wig. Buckles are swashed, entendres are doubled, and so forth.

    The Internet, of course, begs to differ. Apparently what I watched last night is “atrocious.” You see, liberties were taken with the source material. Heaven forfend! So-and-so wouldn’t behave like that! They killed whats-his-name! After all, the only good translation of novel to film is a completely and totally literal one, right? I mean, really now. Those “Lord of the Rings” movies clearly suffered from the loss of all that dratted Bombadil-ish and elvish and hobbitish poetry & song every dozen pages, right? Right.

    Now I’ve made the Tolkien nuts mad at me. I can live with that.

    There are some gripes with “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” but they’re mostly just quibbles, regardless of how you rate Liz McGovern’s acting talents. (Seriously: The vitriolic posts I’ve seen online almost all mention one or more failings on her part. Does she have a history of drowning kittens and kicking puppies that I didn’t know about? Because, sheesh.) One scene comes to mind involving the sharpening of a guillotine, which is supposed to sound ominous (scrape, scrape) except the stone’s being dragged across the broad side of the blade instead of anywhere near the edge. Weird details like that, where someone just wasn’t paying attention, jar you from time to time.

    But, you know what? The good guys won, the hero rescued the girl, love triumphed over evil, yadda yadda. Some days, that’s all I really want.

    (Yes, there’s a rant coming later about the current state of modern high fantasy novels. Hint: I AM SICK AND TIRED OF GRIMDARK. STOP IT.)

    So I’ll be watching the other discs in my boxed set, even if I have to do it alone. I’m okay with that.

  • James Burke on YouTube

    Recently I Twittered (tweeted, whatever) about the sudden disappearance of the JamesBurkeFan collection of videos on YouTube containing the entirety of “Connections” (1, 2 and 3) as well as “The Day The Universe Changed,” my favorite educational series of all time. Turned out that YouTube pulled the videos at the request of the publisher of the upcoming new boxed set of “Universe Changed.”

    Oh, by the way? My birthday is coming up

    Alan Carre, the man behind the JamesBurkeFan collection, stopped by a couple of days ago to let me know that he’s back on YouTube. Awfully nice for a guy to follow me back here from Twitter, I think! Check out his page, say something nice, and patronize the folks offering the boxed sets if you can. I particularly recommend the original “Connections” and, of course, “The Day The Universe Changed.”

  • Touched By An Atheist

    Taking up a worthy challenge, I present George Carlin on Mad TV in, “Touched By An Atheist.”

    (The Python-esque disclaimers are just icing on the cake.)

  • 1st 13th Annual Fancy Anvil Award Show Program

    It’s the two-hour extravaganza with the silly title! So what is it, really? As far as I can tell, it’s an excuse to showcase Cartoon Network original programming.

    Hosted by Johnny Bravo, the Fancy Anvil Show makes a good attempt to spoof all those other self-important award shows that air at this time of year. At the same time it gives CN a chance to run a few choice episodes of their core properties, namely Dexter’s Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls and Ed Edd and Eddy.

    Some of the presenter bits were clever, the human host segments weren’t too painful, and the production quality was surprisingly good. On the flipside, the continual appearance of Goober and the Ghost Chasers as an award nominee was moderately absurd. I mean, who the hell cares about a Scooby Doo knockoff? I don’t like Scooby Doo in the first place, let alone cheap imitations.

    As an obligatory beef, I’d like to point out that there was absolutely no anime representation on the show. None. No Tenchi Muyo, no Cowboy Bebop, not even any DBZ… and with the amount of Dragonball aired on that channel, you’d think they’d leverage that somehow. Ah well.

    Overall, it’s cute enough to watch but not so great that you’re going to want to tape it for posterity.

  • Firestarter: Rekindled

    Please note that I’ve only seen the first installment of the miniseries, but since I’m not terribly interested in seeing the rest I suppose now’s as good a time as any to post my review.

    I’m not what you would call a huge Steven King fan. I admire his abilities, and I like some of his stories, but that’s about as far as it goes.

    The above statement has almost nothing to do with Firestarter: Rekindled, largely because King doesn’t appear to have been involved with the project. Good for him, I say. One his stories I do like is the original Firestarter novel; this miniseries appears to be an attempt to tell the rest of the story, as if the novel was somehow incomplete.

    Who is Charlie McGee, circa 2000-something? Apparently she’s an indecisive, absentminded loner who likes to go out and dance, get hot-and-heavy with strange men and then leave them hanging (as it were) before she burns them to a crisp. You’d think she would learn after a while, but oh well. She must have animal instincts or some nonsense.

    The erstwhile hero of the tale is a feeble loser who only clues in fairly late in the first installment that he works for EvilCorp. *sigh*

    Oh yes, and Malcolm McDowell seems to enjoy his role as the dastardly John Rainbird. It’s a little like having Dennis Hopper as the Raving Lunatic in any given movie… it’s not like we’re going to expect anything new and interesting, are we?

    I forgot, Hopper’s in this miniseries too, but he didn’t show up the first night so I can’t comment on his role. Sorry.

    I think I’ll stop picking nits here, and just say it flat-out: I’m not impressed. The characters are either underplayed to the point of flaccidity or overplayed to the point of absurdity. Things happen that don’t make sense logically or motivationally. Just about the only interesting parts are some of the flashback sequences, which is kind of sad when you sit around and think about it.

    Firestarter: Rekindled earns a couple of points for neat pyrotechnic effects, a few details that seem to have been properly thought through, and a cute rant about the state of the library arts in America. And that’s about it, folks.

    Firestarter: Rekindled site