You might say that Futurama is the American Dad to the Simpsons’Family Guy.
By that I mean a show that was created by someone (Groening, Macfarlane) who had a mega hit, and eventually the second show become more creatively interesting and innovative than said mega hit…but never really got the respect it deserved.
(Plus American Dad‘s Roger and Futurama‘s Bender are two sides of the same coin)
Although Futurama had been on for only a few seasons and was then canceled, a successful run of four movie length episodes (Bender’s Big Score, The Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender’s Game, and Into the Wild Green Yonder) on DVD brought the show back on Comedy Central, where it has been since 2008.
While the Simpsons has all the marketing and merchandising glory, Futurama has been quietly churning out funnier and more touching episodes than the Simpsons had done in years. Case in point: even I, who will never ever own a pet, was touched by Fry’s loyal dog Seymour and the end of “Jurassic Bark.”
The world Futurama created is just as rich as Springfield, but being in the future – and with the added ability to be outer space – Futurama‘s world is that much crazier and more interesting. With secondary characters like soap opera star Calculon, Lrrr ruler of Omicron Persei 8, Hedonismbot, Dr. Wernstrom (WERNSTROM!!), Nibbler, Richard Nixon’s Head, and evil tycoon Mom, the opportunity for humor without sliding into plain slapstick or retreading too-worn stories (Simpsons I’m look at you here).
Plus Zapp Brannigan and Kif. So much Zapp Brannigan and Kif. Who doesn’t love velour?
(audio, not visual…but it still works)
And the main cast of characters is still rich with possibility. Bender, Zoidberg, Professor Farnsworth, and even Amy and Hermes still have stories left to tell.
Of course there’s Fry and Leela. Theirs is an on-again-off-again that I hope is resolved for a while. But it’s always touching to see Leela discover that Fry isn’t as dumb as she thinks. (See last seasons’s The Late Philip J. Fry for proof and an amazing time travel episode)
Season 7 begins tonight, to celebrate here’s a live action version of the opening credits. In the season opener, apparently Bender will have a child with a soda machine. Bender as a caring father to another robot, teaching him how to drink and smoke and get with the robot ladies? I’m all in.
As excited as I’ve been for the The Dark Knight Rises aka the most anticipated movie in the history of movies, it seemed just really really dark – both visually and in terms of mood.
This new trailer lightens the mood a bit giving us a few of the quippy Alfred we all know and love, but visually we’re still in a bat cave. The trailer is also much more Bane-centric, with more of a concentration on what seems to be the haves vs the have-nots.
Sometimes you need the show a little leg* to generate buzz… Showtime and Episodes knows this and apparently so does FX and Wilfred.
(*And by leg I mean previewing an entire episode online before said episode will actually air on television)
The US version of the Aussie show about a dog and his man had a somewhat uneven first season, though I could watch Wilfred (Jason Gann) and his relationship with his teddy bear for many episodes. Elijah Wood’s totally depressed Ryan has served as a nice way for Mr. Wood to escape always being known as Frodo.
Gann and Wood (right to left)
The gist: Ryan has quit his job as a lawyer and is trying to figure out new ways to kill himself when he befriends his new (and attractive) female neighbor and her dog, who Ryan sees as a giant person in a dog suit. Everyone else sees Wilfred as a dog, of course, which makes Ryan question whether he’s nuts. But mostly Ryan just enjoys smoking up with his new buddy. His new buddy, however, is not as good natured and well intentioned as he might seem…
Of all the comedies on FX, Wilfred seems to be lagging behind shows like Louie, The League,Archer, and the brilliant It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is a degree of suspension of disbelief required for Wilfred that isn’t there for the other shows and the humor in Wilfred is just downright weird at times – but a really good weird.
Conceptually not so strange. Visually, another story
I’m such a sucker for britcoms even when they aren’t wholly britcoms.
To that end, I highly recommend Showtime’s non-brit britcom, Episodes. And not only because Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Grieg are from one of my all time favorite britcoms, Green Wing (on Hulu and Netflix). Matt LeBlanc goes a long way towards making you see him beyond Friends‘ Joey Tribbiani.
Mangan and Grieg plays a married writing couple, Sean and Beverly Lincoln, who have a hit erudite TV show in the UK that follows the headmaster of a prestigious boys school. He is played by Richard Griffiths (Harry Potter’s uncle and more interestingly from The History Boys). When the show is picked up by a US network, the Lincolns have to make many many concessions – the show is now about a hockey coach, played by Matt LeBlanc, and called “Pucks”. Nothing erudite about this one.
Griffiths doesn’t automatically bring Joey to mind
LeBlanc plays “LeBlanc”
Going into how your favorite British show (the UK’s Coupling) becomes the hackneyed US show you hate (the US’s Coupling), Episodes manages to poke fun at the Hollywood machine without totally destroying it and allows LeBlanc the freedom to do some great acting. He is playing himself, but the Matt LeBlanc that people assume he is. More crafty and wily than Joey, he uses the assumed idiocy to his benefit, and even wrings a slight bit of pathos out of this incarnation of himself.
The first episode of season 2 is now online – and I have to admit, I have not yet watched it. But I’m very excited to see how this show will do during its sophomore outing.
I’ve been pretty proud that I’ve been keeping this blog up and running since February.
(I’m kind of lazy)
So, bolstered by my ability to occasionally come up with an idea or two in several paragraphs, I am now challenging myself to attempt wit in 140 characters or less.
Interested in seeing if I succeed? Follow me @ilmozart.
I say…lower your expectations.
Why does everyone have to like the outdoors? When did that become a "thing"?
AND, they’ve halted production on the DVDs that feature the showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ commentary that brought the whole issue to light in the first place.
AND HBO issued another even more contrite apology:
“We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste…We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this careless mistake. We condemn it in the strongest possible terms and have halted all future shipments of the DVDs, removed it from our digital platforms and will edit the scene for all future airings on any distribution domestic or international.”
This seems to be getting a wee bit out of hand. I mean, had it not been pointed out, who would have known about the mask? You get the sense that Weiss’s and Benioff’s commentary was more of a “hey, here’s a random fact about this show you love that will give you an inside scoop into how it gets made” rather than “let us be seditious and bring up political wounds that are no longer getting any play in today’s media circus.” I get that HBO doesn’t want to offend, but perhaps it’s time to let the issue die and move on to more important things, like re-dredging up the controversy over the lack of diversity in the cast of their show Girls.
Back in September 2010, I was listening to the Nerdist podcast live from Bumbershoot and heard this insanely funny Irish comedian, David O’Doherty. He had funny songs, he made funny quips…just all around funny.
But later when I tried to look up more of his material, I had forgotten his name. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it nor could I remember exactly what those really funny songs were.
(Yes, I realize now that is what Google is for. It just took me almost 2 years to come to that realization, no need to point it out internet.)
Last night, however, during Comedy Central’s Friday night stand up fest, I caught Mr. O’Doherty’s half hour special and realized that THIS was the guy I’d been trying to remember for almost 2 years. And thankfully, he was just as hilarious as I’d remembered.
Here’s a taste of comedy stylings…
The FAQ of the DOD:
The dangers of texting:
I live in constant fear of doing that. Same with emails…stupid technology.
He has also been doing this great song series “My Beefs of [insert year here]”
Julie Delpy from Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset made a wonderful little film a few years ago called 2 Days in Paris starring herself, Adam Goldberg (Eddie from Friends) and several members of her own family.
This summer we get a follow up to that movie, 2 Days in New York. Delpy reprises her role as photographer Marion but she has replaced the neurotic and funny Jewish guy with the anxious and funny black guy, played by Chris Rock, but I think it will work just as well.
I for one am delighted to see that her father is still keying cars. (I’ve also thought about smuggling sausages and cheese into the country…but have never gone that far)
I’ve been struggling with my review of Prometheus ever since I saw it on Saturday.
Not because there isn’t a lot to discuss…this is a movie that whether or not you like it, there is a lot to think about and a lot to talk about.
Partially I think I’ve been held back because I am not 100% how much I liked this movie. There are moments when I think about all the plot holes, jumps in logic, idiotic character decisions, and I think “Wow, that really wasn’t very good.” But then I’ll think about watching it, being caught up in the story and visuals, the questions the movie posed and mostly never answered, the handful of wonderful performances, and I’ll think “Wow, that was really very good.”
See the problem?
Add to this the issue of talking about the movie, the heart of the movie without spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it.
So I had written about 2/3 of a regular review and stopped because it working. And since then I’ve just been thinking and reading a lot about Prometheus, and then doing some more thinking.
I will do a spoiler warning now because I will have talk about particular plot points. Sorry.
Prometheus is essentially a movie about the search for meaning. Yes, that is a grand statement and yes, it’s fairly reductive, but that’s at the core of what happens. Humanity has always looked to understand the “why”, not just the “how”and that is what moves everything. To know the why you have to ask someone, your creator; you have to meet your creator to find out. If one exists, that is.
Thing is – what if your creator doesn’t want to meet you. What if your creator made you just because they could, not because of any grand plan or moral purpose. Just because. How utterly demoralizing would that be. An answer like that would make so many lose whatever hold they have on their place in the universe and become completely untethered. And how much worse would it be to know that your creator looked up on you and didn’t see that it was good…
With that we think about the opening of the movie. On a green and vibrant planet, a giant, pale humanoid watches as a spaceship leaves him behind. He purposefully opens a small container, whose dark contents seem almost alive. He drinks. Almost immediately he starts to come apart – his skin becomes flakes in the wind, his connective tissues dissolve. He falls off the cliff and into the waters below, all the while breaking down into the barest of components. We end with his very DNA strands becoming infected and disintegrate. But before we leave this, we see the strands reform, creating the proteins for something new. And life is born.
A god? Ridley Scott has dubbed him “the farmer”
Is this our creation? Is the above our creator? Within the confines of this movie, probably.
And these creators or “Engineers” leave star maps in caves and stone walls all across the globe for two intrepid scientists to discover. These scientists – Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) believe that these maps exist across civilizations and across centuries because the Engineers want us to come find them. An act of faith and hubris if there ever was one.
So they go looking and find this moon, LV 223 (not, LV426 the moon where the original Alien took place). This is a desolate moon, that clearly housed some sort of alien structure (nature doesn’t do straight lines). Once on the moon, the crew heads for this structure and explores where perhaps they shouldn’t and things start to fall apart. Personal and secret agendas change the course of basic scientific exploration. Human make human decisions and err the way humans do; endangering the lives of all, the way humans do. And theories are proven oh so very wrong.
Poor decision – seeing this in your eye and going back out to explore
Even though this is at its core a movie about ideas, there are characters and performances that are just as essential. Michael Fassbender’s synthetic human David is the most remarkable of all. Before the ship Prometheus lands on the moon, we are treated to several minutes of David awake and roaming the ship, as his human counterparts are in hypersleep. These are some of the most fascinating scenes in the movie.
From the moment I saw the viral video about David, I knew that this was going to be the character that I would want to follow most. Being the only conscious creature on board, he has to find ways to keep himself occupied. David watches over his fellow shipmates as they slumber, peering into their dreams, learning about them in a manner that is most unfair. David rides a bicycle in a cavernous room, shooting hoops as he circles around. He studies ancient languages. David watches Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia, and adopts O’Toole’s mannerisms and carriage, and dyes his hair to match. You get the sense that there is a lot going on beneath the surface while that surface remains calm and collected.
Curiosity killed the synthetic human
His motives aren’t always clear, though. It’s more than just working Weyland. The moment David dips his fingertip into that glass, that moment that changes the rest of the film, does not seem to come from an order. Like Ash and Bishop after him, David has his very own agenda. And I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a little bit of revenge in that flick of a finger.
Another character who was interesting, but didn’t work quite as well for me was Elizabeth Shaw. Noomi Rapace captures Shaw’s fervent belief and the brief glimpses we see into her past explain her ability to have faith when it would be so easy to dismiss it. But by the time she has had to perform a self surgery (easily the most difficult scene to watch) and been chased down narrow corridors and across the moon’s surface by a creature that would rather see her dead than give any explanations, you have to wonder why she is so eager to continue to follow her research at the end. Her faith propels her forward when all rational minds would stop dead in their tacks. Perhaps that is just the way of blind faith. It struck me, however, as foolish.
Theron’s second act this summer as an ice queen of sorts
There is a nice dynamic between Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers, the corporate member of the delegation with an icy demeanor and calculating stare, and Idris Elba’s Janek, captain of the ship. Their little chat about whether Vickers was a robot herself gave the movie a much needed moment of levity, and cracked the surface just a bit on both their characters who weren’t otherwise wholly fleshed out.
And I had a personal soft spot of Fifield, the geologist played by Sean Harris. His attitude was the most pragmatic, his desire to leave early logical, and his end was the most bizarre.
Fifield proves apparently that tattoos = sassy attitude
These characters aside, this is a movie about the why of it all. There is an obvious parallel between the situation of humanity and the Engineers with that of David and humanity. Holloway is almost combative when he questions David about his lack of curiosity about his own creators. When Holloway answers that David was probably created because “we could”, he fails to see the danger in that answer. Since David is without real human emotions and is only a simulacrum of a real person, the answer doesn’t bother him. But perhaps this is where David’s thoughts of quiet revenge began?
Holloway and Shaw and the rest are not as lucky when they get their answer to the same question. The utter indifference that the Engineer shows Shaw and her fellow humans is shocking. Our very existence was spawned by the self sacrifice of one of their own, but the Engineers seemed so hell bent on destroying us nonetheless. Ships full of the mysterious black goo that mutates DNA and creates monsters with the slightest contact were headed for Earth before the Engineers were downed by their own folly (and a few xenomorphs). This discovery is just as devastating as hearing that you came into being “just because”; created on a whim, destroyed on a whim. Nothing like apathy about your very survival from your creator to make you feel completely insignificant and random in a universe that already makes you feel insignificant and random.
Creator. Destroyer. Mutation. Take your pick
While the plot may be a bit overworked and spotty, that doesn’t translate to what you see on screen – everything visual is beautifully realized. The opening scene, filmed in Iceland, is a vision of paradise. LV 223 is desolate and harsh. The alien structure is dark and scary and just alien enough to make you feel ill at ease. Filming in 3D makes a huge difference to the quality of the 3D effects – you feel immersed, rather than poked at. And Scott’s decision to use CGI only when reality couldn’t work is visible in every shot.
So I still struggle. Is this a great movie that will stand the test of time as Alien and Aliens have? No. Does it try to tackle the great mysteries of the universal truth and fall short? Yes. But is this a movie that has stuck in my head and I continue to mentally chew days after seeing it?
Movies, TV, and all things Pop Culture 