Last night I went to my parents' house where my sister and I watched Shaun of the Dead and part of Swing Time before she got too sleepy. Not a bad pairing of movies--I guess the only thing they really have in common, though, is guys who work harder than they're given credit for and their loveable slacker friends.
I was led to think once again about how we really don't have Fred Astaires and Ginger Rogerses anymore. Just look at Hugh Jackman's dispiriting Oscar performance. Can anyone sing, act interestingly, and dance inhumanly well anymore? Standards have fallen like Wile E. Coyote.*
I see Mike Nelson's held a press conference regarding his month of consuming bacon to the exclusion of all else and a possible compromise to that mission. All of our heroes are flawed now. Time was a young bacon eater'd have someone to look up to, and now there's this. I still have faith in him, though. In my mind, there's still an affable, apple cheeked Mike Nelson and his awe-shucks bacon eating grin, the grin of a man who eats bacon because that's what he said he'd do and, heck, the boy doesn't know anything else.
I forgot to mention watching Friday's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles yesterday with breakfast. It was a good episode--it featured two alternate realities posed for you to guess which was the real one, and neither was irrelevant by the end of the episode. To one reality, the other was an unavoidable and terrible dream, and to that reality, the other was a mix of Sarah's uncertainty and buried desire for a world where she was crazy. My only quibble with the episode was that I felt the latter reality shouldn't have deviated from Sarah's POV.
I watched Friday's Dollhouse to-day. I still think the show has potential, and the attempt to discuss the idea of alternate interpretations of subliminal directives was nice, but the show still feels a bit jittery somehow. Friday's episode also featured a pretty big, gaping, continuity error, and a Britney Spears style pop star. The Spears ilk is pretty annoying in themselves, only slightly less annoying than their seepage of acceptance into all levels of culture, but this was awkward imitation mixed with uninspired parody. I think I did a much better job with Quelti Ripieli in Boschen and Nesuko if I do say so myself.
And I watched the eighteenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. I quite liked it--it introduces a new character, a Mr. Lampkin, acting as Baltar's attorney, and I liked his mission to explore darker human and Cylon nature without bias. Though the episode highlighted again a major problem with the series--that we still don't have a clear idea of how civilians are living on the other ships. Lampkin seems to have materialised out of a grey void--he seems like he lives relatively comfortably, and like he comes from a world where publicity for lawyers is useful, a world very different from the refugee camps on Galactica. So it seems there must be a sort of middle class somewhere, but we have only very fleeting, seemingly accidental glimpses of what these people are like. It feels very much like lazy writing. But I did enjoy the episode.
*Why the fuck does Wile E. Coyote not have his own Wikipedia entry?
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