Second Breakfast

I feel slightly guilty for “owning up” to the fact that we watched yet another series in toto via Netflix.  I think “I can’t believe I spent so much time in front of the TV.  I should do something with my life!”

But Buffy was so cool.  It was imaginative television, Whedon and his crew took the audience seriously, took great risks in killing off important characters, weren’t afraid to blow up central ideas of the story, and went to some pretty dark places with the characters and the series.  There were some truly wonderful and scary moments (”the Gentlemen” from “Hush” scared the pants off of me…I still have nightmares).  And as my husband points out, even when it was sometimes a little bad, it was still pretty good.  I guess Buffy was like pizza and sex, as the only saw goes.

Mostly what these TV series watching projects are good for is to expand the repertoire of references by which the husband and I communicate.  We’re basically like Dennis Miller without the paranoia and with better shoes.  Not surprisingly, one of our favorite ST:TNG episodes is Darmok.  We basically sit around and quote stuff at each other.  It is often annoying, at best, for outsiders who don’t share our collective intertextual context.  But fun for us, so deal.  We may both be really big geeks, but at least our geekiness is compatible.

Boy I liked the most recent installment of the Harry Potter movie franchise.

This is really “The Two Towers” of the Harry Potter story arc.  We’re in the middle here, as Voldemort has finally “come back” after a couple of foiled attempts.  We’re no longer establishing characters or themes, and at this point if you’re still paying attention you’re probably pretty invested in these characters.  Heck, we’ve watched these kids grow up, literally.

I’d say this film is in some ways unburdened with exposition — it doesn’t have to set anything up.  It just moves things along, and we learn more about people’s pasts and some of their motivations.  Alan says this is all exposition in a way.
Of the films thus far I found this to be the most emotionally compelling — one does care about these characters after all this time.  Harry and Sirius establish a family connection, albeit a brief one, and Harry’s loss at the end is one we can understand.  There’s a strong set of themes about self-sacrifice, friendship, and choice that are well played out without being moralizing.

The star of the film is of course Dolores Umbridge, the “pink side of goth” uber-bitch who comes in to “set things right” at Hogwarts.  She’s brilliantly played by Imelda Staunton, a BBC mainstay who received critical acclaim with her compelling portrayal of abortionist Very Drake.  Umbridge emits this wonderful sort of motherly menace, who seems content to torture teenage children in the name or order, decency, and respect for one’s elders.  Staunton plays her with the right combination of haughty snobbery, comic relief, and a bit of fear that gives some real dimension to what otherwise might just be a convenient foil for Harry.  Actually that’s one of the parts of the film that works the best for me:  the central tension in the film is the state of denial that pervades Harry’s world about Voldemort’s return, and both Umbridge and Crouch are played with enough real sense of fear that you know that their denials and obstructions are nothing but whistling in the dark.

The visuals are excellent, with great continuity from the previous films.  The best moments are the final set-piece conflicts with the Death Eaters and between Voldemort and Dumbledore.  The black-tile Ministry of Magic sets are quite cool, and its great to finally see the gloves come off with some real magical combat between two powerful and expert opponents.

The music is somewhat forgettable.  We still have Williams’ theme of course, but most of the incidentals are forgettable, and as Alan said to me “kind of wierd or inappropriate at times”.

Despite that, a good installment.  I’m excited to read the final book when it comes out later this month.

Yes, I watch a lot of television. But hey, at least I don’t watch a lot of commercials.

We finished Netflixing our way through Farscape, the sci-fi/fantasy series that the Jim Henson Company produced for the Sci-Fi Channel a few years back. Four seasons of great characters, sometimes really creative writing and plotting, a lot of humour, action, great sets and Ben Browser running around in black leather pants. Who could want more?

Its impressive I think when puppetry is done so well you forget that the characters aren’t actually real.

Great fun.

Now what? I’m thinking Buffy, but I could be convinced to put something else in my Netflix queue.

We rented “An Inconvenient Truth” from Blockbuster and watched it Thursday night. As I was paying, the girl at the register says:

Girl: I hear that’s really interesting. Isn’t it about Bob Dole?
Me: Its narrated by Al Gore, not Bob Dole. They’re very different.

Girl: So its about Al Gore?

Me: No, its about how global warming is going to destroy the planet.

Girl: That sounds scary. I don’t think I’d like to see something like that.

Me: Maybe that’s why they titled it “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Girl: Yeah, maybe.

When I relay the conversation to my husband, he comments that 1) people never talk to him like they do to me in public and 2) I should blog about these amusing exchanges. So viola.

The film itself was pretty good. I had visions of a two hour slide show narrated in Al Gore’s Tennessee monotone. Actually it was quite engaging, and Gore is a passionate and effective advocate for the perspective he’s devoting his life these days to sharing with the world. He makes the case pretty well that we’re on the brink of something pretty bad, and what I found particularly compelling are the bits of research results he presents that are “being presented for the first time”.

Last month I flew to Los Angeles for work, and on the way back I picked up Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” at the airport bookstore. The flight was 4 1/2 hours long, and I had finished all 624 pages by the time we landed. The book is a typical science-techno-thriller-adventure yarn, not incredibly well written, but the plotting is fast and its easy to breeze through books like this quickly. The basic premise is essentially the opposite of “An Inconvenient Truth”, and suggests that the fears and anxieties over global warming are actually being invented by the environmental lobby to sustain funding for the environmental movement. Crichton uses real scientific data (presented by his uber-scientific-adventurer-hero characters) to prove that the global warming myth is just that, and in fact in many places around the world it is getting cooler, not warmer. Of course Crichton is writing fiction, but the science he uses to back his writing is real, and in this case he references real data sets.

I walked away from the read with a tiny bit of nagging doubt about global warming (Crichton’s intent I think) or at least the idea that the real truth is probably a lot more complex even than what I get in the media sources I trust. But then I see Gore’s movie and I am compelled to pick up compact fluorescent bulbs next time I’m at the grocery store hoping my little act of ecological stewardship will prevent Greenland from sloughing off its ice pack for another month.

I don’t know what the hell to believe these days.

My husband and I have taken to watching series TV (mostly Sci-Fi) on DVD in fairly concentrated batches (2-3 episodes/night). We started with Babylon 5, then Star Trek: Deep Space 9, then Sex in the City. All were quite good and fairly engrossing (well, SitC isn’t exactly engrossing, as its kind of repetitve, but I cried a little at the end when we finally learned “Big’s” name). Series that tend to be written towards a larger plot arc, versus purely episodic writing, are often really good if you can see the plot develop over time. Babylon 5 was particularly effective and enjoyable, as the writing was so original (for television), and the characters so compelling.

As my husband has also noted, we’re often late to the game when it comes to cool stuff, so we missed Firefly when it first aired, and were clueless when all of the fanboys started yelling bloody murder when the show was cancelled. However we rented Serenity and found it to be a really compelling and convincingly-drawn future, and a great story. So when we got our new Netflix account, we put the four Firefly discs at the top of our queue. We were not disappointed.

The fifteen episodes that were filmed are quite good. The characters are interesting and multi-dimensional. The world that the show is drawn in is nuanced and believeable (I particularly like the way language, both a slightly “backcountry”-sounding English and a hybird Chinese, is used). And the storytelling is good — each episode carries the larger plot arc, while also telling a number of smaller stories, a familiar mode, but well-done.

I’m sad that no more were filmed, and the “Serenity” movie leaves no room for sequels, as (spoiler alert) too many of the important characters do not survive. Whedon (of Buffy fame) is a great creative talent, and I’ll be excited to see what he does with Wonder Woman later this year.