Idol Starts Season 12

I debated holding off talking about American Idol until all of TV was back, so I could do another roundup.  But I had a few friends ask me my thoughts, so, here they are.

 

To recap:

 

I started watching the show two years back only because my wife’s coworker was on the show.  Or rather, the coworker auditioned, and got in front of the judges, then didn’t go to Hollywood and wasn’t good or bad enough to go on the air.

 

I was ready to be done by the end of that episode.  The person lost, so, I had no horse in the race.  But my wife insisted that we trudge on.  So trudge we did.

 

Interestingly, I pegged the actual winner as flaming out in the middle twice over the last two years.  I’m not sure if it says more about me or America.

 

Over the years, of course, there have been 11 winners, and a variety of also-rans who have gone on to a measure of fame and fortune.  Interestingly, just making it into that upper echelon seems to be enough to launch a career.  Which I guess is nice.  But I had no real interest in any of the winners or losers.  Even the most popular of them all, Kelly, only had a couple of singles that really interested me.

 

Buuuuuuuuut…

 

Along came Phillip.  Well, kind of.  Along came Phillip, and someone had the bright idea to stick a bunch of excerpts from his album online, and I listened to them and kind of dug it.  Plus I had a long road trip coming up and needed something to listen to.  So I bought it.

 

What to say?

 

Well, I guess we can start with the title: The World From The Side Of The Moon. That’s a mouthful, and I can never remember it.  Also mostly a blank are the song titles, with the exception of Home.

 

Having read a dozen critical takes on it before picking it up, I have to agree with the general assessment.  It sounds a lot like Dave Matthews, which isn’t a bad thing.  And aside from Home, there are a few song which are almost painfully catchy, and there’s no harm there, either.  In particular, I enjoy Gone, Gone, Gone, Get Up Get Down, and Where We Came From.  And the rest of the CD is inoffensive, though kind of forgettable.  Even now, I couldn’t sing any of the other tunes for you.

 

Oh.  And if you buy it at Target, he’s got a version of Thriller on there, which ain’t bad.  I kind of liked his live, one-man-and-a-guitar take from his audition more, but it’s got a fun country-rock vibe. 

 

Ultimately, I give him credit, as he wrote a bunch of the songs on the album, and none of them are terrible.  My real curiosity, I suppose is how well he’ll sell and what he’ll do on the second go-around.  Like most artists who get their first album out, he has now run through all of his A songs and will have to either start from scratch or bring out the B team.  And judging from this release, I have a hard time imagining that the B team is where all the really brilliant songs are tucked away.

 

But I was talking about the new season of Idol.

 

Two judges dropped out.  Jennifer managed to give her career a nice later-period revival, I think.  At the very least, she sold some records, did some dancing, and got another TV show out of it.  So I’d argue it was a win for her.

 

Steven, on the other hand, confessed that he took the job for the money, and then got his band back together.  His album kind of flopped, but I’m guessing the concert tour probably did well and some monetary coffers were filled.  Plus he had that terrible memoir, which sold well. 

 

Randy was supposed to be out of the show, but then wasn’t.  I’m not sure why.  I guess the producers thought they don’t want to lose the Randy fans?  Assuming there are Randy fans?

 

I’m not knocking the dude.  I just don’t know.  Nobody ever seems to come on the show just to tell Randy that he’s been an inspiration to them.  Or maybe we just don’t see those guys.

 

But anyway, he’s back on this year.  And we’ve also got Keith Urban.  For whatever reason.  You can tell he’s Australian, because he comes off as the nicest man on the planet.  I’ve been to Australia, and I can honestly say I never met anyone who wasn’t incredibly nice.  Almost eerily so.  And that about sums up Keith.

 

Randy is Randy, I guess.  He seems to have gotten more bitter over the last couple of years. Maybe having Simon gone forced him into the bad cop role.  Or perhaps it’s the show.  Because they seem to be sending more terrible singers down to the judges, as if there weren’t another hundred very good singers they couldn’t send down.

 

Which I guess brings us to the big stars.

 

Mariah Carey in, much to my surprise, coming up on her silver anniversary of fame.  Vision of Love, her first big hit, came out in 1990, which means that one year from now she’ll have racked up 25 years of hitmaking.

 

Which explain why every woman through the door gets to say, “I grew up with you.”  They did.  Even at the oldest age you can hit and be on Idol, you were maybe three when Mariah hit the scene.

 

And… what to say about her?  Well, outside of her so-called feud with Nicki Minaj, she’s a bit of a tough nut to crack.  They threw a lot of money her way to be here, and I suspect that a big part of the reason she took it is because the albums are finally starting to peter out.  Her last couple of releases barely scraped platinum, which isn’t really acceptable when you’re supposed to be a huge star.  And while I hate to say it, the stiffness in her face and her lineless forehead seem to indicate that she’s been getting at least Botox, if not more work done.

 

And that makes me sad.  It’s clear she’s an influence, it’s clear that she’s an important part of music history, but that doesn’t seem to be enough for her.  She’s also trying to maintain herself as a picture of youth, even though she’s in her forties and a mom now. 

 

It’s sad, because she seems to have a sweetness about her when it comes to certain contestants.  I can tell she wants to be kinder, but she’s prevented from doing so.

 

Mostly by Nicki Minaj.

 

Oy.

 

What to say?  Nicki was clearly brought on to bring in the kids.  She’s had the biggest hits of the last five years or so, and she is, yes, part of the now.  She also raps, but that’s neither here nor there, seeing as how Simon didn’t sing and Ellen didn’t do anything musical at all.

 

With all that said, in the promos, she was walking off the stage and saying she was done as of next week, and you know what?  That’d be AWESOME.

 

Nicki might be a great human being in real life, but on the show she’s combative and not at all fun.  Is it for the cameras?  Is it to bring in ratings?  Is it because she has a massive ego?

 

I just don’t care.

 

Fights about talent I can handle.  Fights about contestants, and who should be on?  Okay.  At least it would indicate that Nicki wants the show to be better, or that she favors a certain kind of music.

 

What I’m getting from the show is that she’s an unpleasant person, and that isn’t fun to watch. 

 

The problem is, I don’t see the problem correcting itself.  Nicki is clearly in for the long haul, and that’s kind of a shame.  Because right now she’s adding nothing to the show, and I sort of wish I could just abandon it.  And I may yet do so.

A Cappella Gives Me the Blues

It’s weird.

 

Folks my age (36) get stuck in ruts.  That’s just kind of a fact.  We’ve heard the music we like, we know “our” kinds of movies, and, you know, we pretty much want more of the same.

 

Much the way people the generation above me go out and buy new Paul Simon albums, I go out and get the new Ben Folds.

 

And there are things that are even more distressing than realizing you’ve only discovered, say, two new musical artists you like over the last year.  Like when I sat down last night at the piano, and I was playing a song I really love, and then I realized the song is 21 years old.

 

The song is old enough to drink.

 

It is, in fact, probably old enough to be on the “Classic” rock stations.  Much the way the music of my very young childhood is slowly creeping onto the local oldies station.

 

Yeah.

 

So of course there’s something to seeking out the pleasures of your younger life.  You get to pretend that song you like isn’t 21 years old.

 

Lately, though, one of the things I kind of dug 21 years ago is now slowly creeping back into my life by no fault of my own.  A Cappella music.  Or, perhaps more specifically, Rock-Appella music.

 

(MS Word is puking on itself over that one.  I’ll try to avoid using it again.)

 

What I’m getting at here, kinda, is the idea of hipsterism, wherein the thing that you liked that no one else had heard of suddenly becomes a THING, and you find yourself going, “Wait, since when do OTHER people know about this?”

 

So let’s go back to not-quite-20-years-ago.  I was in college, and the one thing you should know about college is that your college is constantly throwing free stuff at you.  This is because they have the justify how much it costs you to go to college for four years, despite the fact that you could probably pack the same information into one or two years of schooling if they didn’t make you take a bunch of credits outside your major.

 

But that’s my advice to you, if you’re in college.  Go see everything.  If it’s cheap or free, go.  If it sucks, leave.  You’ll be out, like, two dollars.

 

So one of the free things I saw was a little A Cappella group that called itself Blind Man’s Bluff.  It was four guys and a drum machine, and they prided themselves on the fact that they did something unusual: Pop songs.

 

I’m not talking about, say, 1950s doo-wop, or quiet ballads, or whatever.  They worked up an arrangement of Under the Bridge by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, for example.

 

And this is the thing: at the time that was kind of a big deal.

 

I’ll grant you, they weren’t the only guys doing it (I’ll come back to that in a bit) but they were certainly early adopters.  The guys who started buying Blu Ray discs when everyone else was still sticking to DVDs.

 

More to the point, they captured that sound on a disc.  They released their first CD when I was in college, and in fact our college was the first place that you could buy one of them.  Remember, this is more than a decade before iTunes would mean that you could buy their music WHILE watching their show.

 

I still have that CD.  I pull it out once in a while.  Overall, there’s a lot to like about it.  Five guys can be a little thing on the ground, performance-wise, and the drum machine sounds fakey.  But their version of the Indigo Girls song Galileo is probably my favorite.

 

They even have a solid original song on there, called Chase the Dream.  I once wrote a movie with that title, and I thought it would be awesome to have that song under the end credits.

 

Of course, by the time I wrote it, the band was mostly dead.

 

Google was still a pretty primitive thing back then, but I got an email from a friend the year after I graduated.  The band had already lost two members, gained a new one, and the show wasn’t quite as good.  I hunted for them online at the time and couldn’t find any other information.  Today, a search shows that they made four CDs before disbanding forever.

 

The second time I saw them in concert, an on-campus A Cappella group had sprung up, and opened for them.  That was my first real taste of collegiate A Cappella.

 

It wasn’t bad.  But it wasn’t one that had experienced the A Cappella revolution.

 

Hold that word in your brain as we zip forward in time.  Somewhere in the middle of the fast-forward, there’s a short pause for The Gilmore Girls, which made a joke about collegiate A Cappella.  And a slightly longer pause for Scrubs, which had an A Cappella band.

 

Which was, and is, kind of a real band.  They’re called The Blanks.  They made me happy every time I saw them, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain.  Though I figured it out.

 

Glee added an A Cappella band to their roster: The Warblers, who became so strangely popular, they’re the only Glee band to get their own release.  Think about it.  There’s no “Best of Rachel,” but there’s a whole CD of Pop-Appella.  (Once again, I’m sorry.)

 

I loved that CD.  Loved it.

 

Then we bump up against last year.  The Sing Off. 

 

I don’t know that there’s much to say about it that I haven’t already said elsewhere and at length.  It was the third season, and as it turns out, it was also the final season.

 

Bands came out and performed, and while none of them were bad, it was a truly mixed bag.  The prize was, supposedly, a bunch of money and a recording deal, but I could see that the real prize was being on TV, starting with the first episode.

 

How could I tell?  A lot of the groups were people returning for a second shot, often with a new band.  Some bands were newly formed, a few weeks or months old.  Several of the groups were collegiate A Cappella bands… groups with rotating casts, at best.

 

And there were a few bands who… how to describe it?  They were professional A Cappella groups.  It’s what they DID.  It was like having Justin Bieber audition for American Idol.  It just didn’t make any sense.

 

Which I guess tells you how desperate they were for contestants.

 

The thing of it was, I could tell out of the gate who deserved to win.  Pentatonix. They came out and performed ET, which was an actual on-the-charts song.  And they didn’t make it all A Cappella-y.  They did not adapt it for five voices.  They adapted their voices to perform the song the way it sounded on the radio.

 

I spent weeks listening to it, tearing it apart in my head, trying to work out how they did it.

 

When they won, it wasn’t  a shock. The top two was them, and a collegiate group.  And the head of that group said, out loud, on TV, “I never really thought about a career in music.”

 

Well then, my friend, why in the world are you missing school to be on a musical TV show? 

 

Therein lay the charm of Pentatonix.  They were an actual band, and they were trying to perform actual music they way music is played today.  Remxied.  Mashed up.  With the bass and drums cranked up to the point where you can barely hear the melody.

 

Even more interesting, to me, was the fact that they won a record deal, which they then turned down to release their own EP.

 

Yes.  They actively ran away from a major label.  And now they’re on tour, and it seems like they’re doing pretty well. 

 

Their releases were probably my biggest happy of last year, five voices doing super-fun acrobatics, and to be honest there’s a certain “Best of” quality to their releases.

 

It was when their EP was released that I realized for the first time what makes A Cappella so fun.  It’s stuff you ALREADY LIKE.  And then you add in SOMETHING I LIKE DOING.

 

I liked being in college, and hanging out with people, and then with just the parts of our body that God gave us, we’d make really fun music.  Often arranged on the fly.  With harmonies and solos and just plain fun.

 

I heard there was a movie called Pitch Perfect coming out, and that it was about collegiate A Cappella.  It made sense.  I figured it was probably greenlit during the seven seconds it looked like A Cappella might become a thing.

 

And then… then I found out it was based on a book.

 

The book is a bit like Moby Dick, in that half of it is story.  It follows three college groups doing… stuff.  One is trying to recover from losing a bunch of members.  One is trying to make a new CD.  And one… I don’t even remember.  That’s how low-stakes it is.

 

The other parts talk about the history of A Cappella music in colleges.  Some of the details are great, like the story of the first guy to go, “We should sing the GUITAR part.”  Which is obvious, but someone had to be that guy.

 

Often, however, it’s depressing, because you realize these people are busting tail trying to put on these great performances… for no one.

 

The bestselling A Cappella CDs sell, no lie, a thousand copies.  Which is what makes the book funny, or horribly depressing.  These people are killing themselves to be the best at something that no one cares about, to be the top of the pile that no one remembers.

 

The movie, of course, doesn’t mention that.  It pulls the idea of a female group trying to recover after losing a bunch of members, and made a pretty standard, though very funny movie out of it.

 

People wondered why the judges in the movie were making fun of the singers as they performed, and I think that’s your answer: to keep the audience from doing it.

 

Because who cares?

 

Because who, besides me, still owns a Blind Man’s Bluff CD 15 years later?

 

I bought the Pitch Perfect soundtrack, and it is both glorious and sad.  The movie is nearly 1 hour and 50 minutes long, and the movie has about 30 minutes of music in it. 

 

And I sit, and I wonder how much longer this happy little bubble can survive.

 

The movie was a hit, and the soundtrack is selling well, and that’s nice, I guess.  But the happy of A Cappella is, I think, built on top of the happy of hit songs performed in a fun way.  It isn’t original.  It doesn’t change the world.

 

It is, mostly, about being a great wedding band: able to perform the hits.

 

I have seen the enemy nostalgia, and it is reminding me that I am older now, and my brief little happy flickers and feels the cold hand of despair.

 

Feh.

 

Guess I’ll go listen to No Diggity again.  There are probably a couple solid hits of happy in there somewhere.

Stuff I Liked in 2012

I’ve been feeling a little down, lately.

 

I could talk about what’s going on, but to summarize it all life has been busy lately, the holidays have sapped some of my emotional energy, and I’m having some other issues I don’t feel entirely comfortable dealing with in the blog format.

 

Subsequently, I’ve barely written anything over the last few months.  I’ve managed to power through some editing to get my work ready for Red Iris Books, but otherwise, creating actual new words has eluded me.

 

A lot of times, diving into other people’s stories through the world of TV, movies, and/or books can help me to recharge.  For that matter, as I’ve constantly babbled about, the Blood Calling books were written mostly based on the frisson that came from listening to Cobra Starship CDs.

 

But lately, I haven’t found a whole lot to love.  And with the new year suddenly popping up, I found myself looking back over the year and having to work incredibly hard to remember if there was anything I had just flat-out loved this last year, with no qualifications.

 

And for like a week, I couldn’t think of anything.

 

And I do mean anything.  My mind was a complete blank.  I even started writing a blog post about the TV I’ve been watching, except that turned into another rant about how Glee still can’t seem to get it together, and how I think the New York storylines are yet another excuse to talk about how Rachel is so great, and how the cast who graduated should really just go ahead and look for work on other TV shows now, because it’s time.

 

There was a whole thing about how Revolution just keeps failing to get great, keeps giving us just-okay episodes that end with amazing twists… so I keep coming back, even though I’m not in love with it. 

 

I tried to write a review of The Dresden Files: Cold Days, talking about how it was okay, but Jim Butcher keeps taking more time to write longer books that aren’t as good as the previous entries in the series, and how that tires me and disappoints me.

 

And I finally managed to finish This Book is Full of Spiders, the sequel to John Dies at the End.  That took me eight weeks, and I only managed it because it was overdue at the library and I wanted to minimize the fine.

 

You have to understand, I didn’t/don’t really hate any of the things I’m whining about here.  If I were in a better mood, I probably would have enjoyed them a bit more than I did.

 

Or maybe not.

 

And really, that’s the issue right there.  I’m looking for a serious happy, and I’m not getting one.

 

So I went back again and tried to remember what brought me joy. 

 

So here’s that list:

 

TV

 

Spartacus:

 

At this point, very few shows I watch are a must-see as soon as I have them in my hands, but this is one of them.  If there’s an Emmy for most improved show EVER, the folks behind this show deserve it.  Epic drama, freaky action, and lots and lots and lots of fun surprises.  I’m just sad this next season will be the last.

 

Game of Thrones:

 

Y’know, this one comes up against its budget every once in a while, and it’s got a huge one.  Of course, they’re shooting 10 hour movies for half the price of a 3 hour Lord of the Rings flick, ten years down the road, so that’s understandable.

 

But every week that hour goes by in a blink.  My wife’s most frequent exclamation at the end of an episode is, “What do you mean, that’s it?”

 

I will say that George RR Martin needs to get a move on and get the novels done.  That needs to happen, like, right now. 

 

But otherwise, I take a lot of joy out of this one.

 

Warehouse 13

 

Man, I remember when this one as just a pleasant diversion.  Now it’s a must-watch-NOW, and every week delivers.

 

I suspect that time will eventually erode Warehouse, and I can’t see myself ever going back to it once it’s over, as I probably will with, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But man, what a pleasure, and I’m dying to see how they’re going to bring it back and wrap up the season.

 

Parks and Recreation:

 

The thing of it is, this show is on Thursday, and I just don’t have the time to watch it.  So my wife and I shove it off to the summer, and then DEVOUR it in June.  Which is why I forget about it.

 

And yet, for those two weeks we’re catching up, I laugh so very much.  Absolute gem of a show. 

 

Degrassi:

 

This one I remembered because they now release the half seasons around my birthday, and then around Christmas.  So I buy them, and we save them for those special occasions… and then we BURN through them.

 

I’ve said before that the show keeps getting more soapy, but I honestly don’t care.  The show is soapy, yes but it’s soapy in a way that involves research, and hard answers to real questions (at least most of the time).

 

And unlike Glee, when a cast member leaves they generally stay gone.

 

Being Human (UK)

 

I had heard that the newest season (four) was pretty rough, especially with the loss of three major cast members.  And when my wife and I finally saw the first episode, my fears were confirmed.  Literally months went by while we watched other things.

 

But when we went back to it, the show smoothed itself out.  Ultimately, I think the problem was that the show had to almost completely reboot itself, while feeding off the end of the third season, and it couldn’t do it without a massive amount of storytelling.

 

Here in the US, where they’d get 13 or 22 episodes, they could have spread it out and made it work. But with only eight episodes to use, I think the job just got too big, and they figured they’d shove all the awkward into the first episode in order to make the other ones more polished.

 

Or maybe I’m wrong.  Either way, that’s how it worked.  And once it got going, it was just fine, had a killer (literally) final rug pull, and I’ve found that I really adore the new cast members.  Here’s hoping the next season is as good…

 

 

 

Music

 

Ben Folds Five

 

Ben Folds put out a retrospective last year, and his band tossed a new album at us this year.  The retrospective mostly reminded me how much I’ve always liked Ben.  I think the problem is that if you don’t hear something for a long time you forget how good it is.  As it was, I ran across a half-dozen songs I already owned and had forgotten how much I loved.

 

And the new disc reminded me of something else entirely: Ben Folds Five was a real band, with its own sound, one that Ben himself never quite replicated.  So if the songs never quite crested the heights of the early records, there was wonder in there if you really looked for it.

 

Plus they did a video with the Fraggles.  A little happy right there.

 

Pentatonix:

 

This year we got two EPs from Pentatonix, and I loved them both.  The original songs aren’t as wonderful as the covers, maybe, but the sheer beauty of the vocal gymnastics on display gives me goose bumps. 

 

My favorite tracks, interestingly enough, came from their Christmas album, which had a version of O Come O Come Emmanuel that was beautiful and kind of terrifying.  And then there was The Christmas Song, with a “trumpet” solo by the beatboxer.

 

So good.

 

Movies:

 

The Avengers/Cabin in the Woods

 

Five years ago, if you had told me Joss Whedon would have not just one, but TWO movies in theaters in the same year, I would have said you were crazy.

 

And if you had told me that they would both be great, and that one of them would be the biggest moneymaker of the summer?  And the third-highest-grossing movie in history?

 

As I told my friend: So, are we finally able to stop calling Whedon a cult phenomenon?  Because his movie made over a billion dollars…

 

And Cabin in the Woods?  The horror movies that mocks horror movie conventions, while still using them?  The movie that has the most insane final 20 minutes I’ve seen in a theater possibly ever?  (Oh.  Outside of Crank 2.  Which was CRAZY.)

 

It was a movie made for people like me.  It’s not often that I get one of those in theaters, as opposed on video when no one is looking…

 

Pitch Perfect:

 

When I was trying to compile a list o’ things I loved this year, this was, for a while, the only movie I could think of.  It’s a little overlong, but the script is covered in memorable one-liners, the actresses are all on their absolute A game, and watching a bunch of college kids making music just for the love of making music?

 

This one was made for me, too.

 

Also: Anna Kendrick.  Can we just put her in everything?  Such a good actress, such a great voice.

 

Books:

 

John Green: The Collected Works

 

A student of mine took to her blog to talk about how she was a huge fan of John Green, and in particular his newest book The Fault in Our Stars.

 

I picked up Fault, read it, and dug it enough to backfill all of John’s other novels.

 

John seems like a fine fellow, and he works hard to make his YA novels bounce past the clichés of YA.  The only problem is that they tend to land in the clichés of indie film because of that.

 

No matter.  The guy clearly loves language, loves his characters, and loves putting his stories into oddball but still mostly believable situations.

 

And I must go back to the fact that I chewed through all of his books in about two months, which I haven’t done since I discovered Rob Thomas. 

 

While I love Rob Thomas, he never managed to write a scene where someone takes a knee to the groin in a way I would describe as “poetic.”

 

Brendan Halpin: Tessa Masterson Will Go To Prom

 

Yeah, he wrote it with someone else, but my only real complaint about this book is that I can never remember the title.  (I keep calling her Tess.)

 

Look, it’s a book about a lesbian that wants to go to prom in a town that hates the idea of it happening.  If you’re not into the idea, it won’t work for you.

 

But looking back on reading it, I think this is the John Hughes movie that John never lived to write and direct.  And unlike John Green’s books, which seem to go out of their way to have more ambiguous endings, this one ties up pretty neatly.

 

I am, quite frankly, shocked that someone hasn’t kicked 5 million into it and turned it into an indie flick starring a couple of former Disney channel stars looking to branch out.

 

Or maybe I’m cynical.

 

Which, hey, loops me right around.

 

There was other stuff I dug, too.  But I’m at 1900 words.  1900 words of happy.  Well, probably more like 400 of whining and 1500 of happy, but that’s pretty good, right?  More than 75%!

Breaking Dawn, Part II

Unless I miss my guess, I have at least one reader/friend who’s gonna want to know how I feel about Breaking Dawn, Part II.

 

I feel like I need to back up and talk about my feelings about Twilight in general, so here goes.  I had a friend who really loved the first three books, told me to read them, and then read book four.  She hated it so much that she INSISTED that I read all four books, just to see what happens when a series goes completely wrong.

 

I eventually audio-read the series, because that’s what I do with books I care about only marginally. The time in the car must pass regardless, and this way I can at least get in on the pop culture conversation.

 

My review was, in general, that the books were, and are, boring.  They are easy to read, and the pages mostly fly by (except during long, seemingly unedited dialogue sections) but that nothing happens.  Girl meets vampire, boy and girl fall in love, vampire baseball, girl is taken away from anything that might be interesting, girl goes to save mom, girl is saved by vampires.

 

The end.  At least for book one.

 

The bigger problem I had with the books as I was reading them were the sheer number of love story riffs that basically said that if your boyfriend breaks up with you, you’re better off dead.  Ick.  Just ick.

 

Oh, and the dude falling in love with a baby.  That was touchy too. 

 

Anyway.

 

So.  I read the books, and wrote up reviews for the blog I used to post to, Fox Valley Geeks.  That’s been shut down now, though you can locate it if you really want to.

 

Then I was forced to get into a relationship with the movies, because my wife wanted to see what the fuss was all about.

 

I was sorta-kinda okay with this, mostly because I figured the movies would take out most of the dull stuff and leave only the interesting bits.  I was more or less right about this.  Frankly, the movies didn’t deviate much from the books.  They weren’t allowed to.  And it worked out well for them, as they spent a few hundred million dollars and will probably pull in over four billion dollars by the time they’re done.

 

Pretty great investment, really.

 

The joke was, they had to keep taking out boring conversations to insert action sequences that weren’t in the actual text of the books, because it was the only way to keep the audience awake.  Heck, in order to keep the third movie interesting, Stephenie Meyer had to write a whole new book about a new vampire, so they could cram scenes from it into the movie so people wouldn’t go into a coma waiting for something to happen.

 

And here is where my story takes a bit of a turn.

 

For a long time, I had a no money clause with the series.  I got the books from the library, and borrowed copies of the movies so I didn’t have to actually lose any money in the process.  In the end, my wife insisted on buying the books, but I would only do so during the holidays, when the price would drop to four bucks for the paperback.

 

But then it all fell apart.

 

Kara’s friend was going to be around for the holidays, and she wanted to see Breaking Dawn in a theater.

 

Ugh.

 

It’s a little more insulting to pay for something you don’t care about, and now I was paying good money to watch mediocre actors say not-very-entertaining lines.  What’s more, it was only the first part of the story, which meant I would have to go back and see the second part in a theater as well.

 

And see it I did.

 

Hoo, mama.

 

The joke here is that the movies should have been exceptionally long.  The final Twilight book is a massive doorstopper of a thing, somewhere north of 700 pages.  But much like the previous books, nothing actually happens.

 

There are probably close to 100 pages that involve a wedding.  There’s a massive section devoted to the honeymoon.  And then finally, Bella gets pregnant and the plot tries desperately to kick in.

 

The problem is, the book is hamstrung by the fact that Bella is the hero, and the book is told in the first person.

 

Now, the story tries to skirt that by moving the perspective to another character for a while, but, blah.  At that point Meyer had already demonstrated that she didn’t have the guts to hurt a character in an important way, much less kill them. 

 

So, the baby is born, Bella becomes a vampire, Jacob falls in love with the baby.  The vampire police show up to kill the baby, because baby vampires are bad, mmm-kay?  And then… they talk it out.

 

Oh, there’s some bits where other vampires show up to act as witnesses or whatever, and Bella learns she’s even MORE special than everyone already thought she was.  But those are subplots that, in the end, have little or nothing to do with the actual story.

 

The book, and the series, was a complete failure at that point.  But the fans, who mostly hated the ending, still loved the characters.  I guess they just tried not to think about how it ended, or something.  And then they all went to see the movies of the book they hated.

 

Why talk about all of this?  Because I still, at this point, have no idea why they broke the movie into two parts.  I mean, except for the part where they get the money.

 

The thing is, Part II first offers the audience a really, really long credits sequence.  It looks pretty terrible, as though it was cobbled together from stock footage by an intern whose only job was to make it last as long as possible.

 

Then the movie jumps right into Bella waking up, and then there’s a feeding sequence.  The joke is that it’s supposed to be hard for her not to eat a human, only they don’t bother showing just how hard it is.  So it doesn’t matter.

 

Then she meets her creepy CGI baby.  The baby grows up.  Despite the fact that Bella had to give her up family to become a vampire, she doesn’t give up her family.  The decision is, of course, made for her, as are all her decisions.

 

She gets a house.  She beats a guy at arm wrestling.  Her toddler gets spotted by another vampire who turns her in because there aren’t supposed to be vampire babies.

 

Then we meet a bunch of vampires who, ultimately, won’t matter to the plot at all.  As a bonus, the movie totally strands Lee Pace, a really brilliant actor, by giving him terrible dialogue and almost no personality.

 

Everyone gets ready for the Volturi to show up.  They show up.

 

And here’s the big twist, so don’t read this, if you don’t want it spoiled.

 

In the books, they talk it out.

 

In the movie… there’s a giant action sequence with lots of fighting, and I gotta say, it’s actually pretty great.  It is, in fact, hands down the best sequence in all five movies, and I really enjoyed it.  Important people died.  Fates were changed. 

 

And then, in my favorite moment in a movie theater this year, it was revealed to be a dream sequence.

 

And a woman two rows down from me yelled out, “Seriously!?”

 

It was the best thing ever.

 

Of course, this was supposed to be “the future,” as shown by Alice.  Except, if you’re paying attention, you know Alice can’t see the future when werewolves are involved.

 

So either she made it up, and the dude who checked her head was an idiot, or the movies managed to do something interesting by violating their own internal rules.

 

And so it goes.

 

The movie comes to an end, and then we got ANOTHER really long credits sequence, for every single character in all five movies, followed by even more credits.  Long story short, they padded the heck out of this flick in hopes that you wouldn’t notice that if they stuck the two movies together, and cut out the dream sequences and credits, they could have cranked these things out in a not-as-moneymaking three hours.  Probably less.

 

Word has come down from on high that Meyer is now saying “Never say never” to future vampire stories.  I don’t really know what they’d be about, since all the characters involved seem to be set up for eternal youth and beauty.

 

Eh.

 

I think I’ll go back to watching The Vampire Diaries, thankyewverymuch.

What I'm Watching: November Already?

It’s times like this I realize I’m a terrible blogger.  If John Scalzi gets emailed a question, he runs to his blog and answers it.  A friend of mine sent me a kindly email saying he read my blog and asked me about Revolution, and silly me, I sent an email back to him.

 

This is why I’m not famous.  I’m sure there are other reasons.

 

So, what I’m watching and mostly caught up on…

 

Revolution:

 

As my friend pointed out to me, it’s a flawed show.  The one geek character is fat and has glasses, both of which make little to no sense 15 years after the power goes out.  Resorting to hard labor alone should have made him a bit more fit and trim, and his prescription has probably changed six times.

 

But, look, this is not a science show.  They are not consulting the Sagans and asking how this kind of thing works.  It’s an action/adventure show, and glasses are a synonym for smart on TV.  We should probably count ourselves lucky that he’s not carrying a D and D manual around.

 

Ultimately, I’m neither in love with the show nor bored with it.  It’s fun, it has some solid moments of humor, and they’re working overtime to keep surprises coming at the audience every week.  They’ve even managed some nice emotional moments, which can be hard to do this early on in the run of a series.

 

I’m good with it, and will watch it to the end of the season. 

 

Warehouse 13:

 

Did I do a wrap-up on this?  I don’t recall doing one.  They upped the episode count to 20 and broke the season in half, and while I know there’s going to be a reset button at the end of the season, I kind of don’t care.  The show has been almost impossibly brutal and well-done this year.  And while they haven’t gotten quite at deep emotionally as they have in the past, I do not care.  This might be my favorite show right now.

 

I just wanna see how they’re going to get out of this little mess they’ve been making.

 

Modern Family:

 

People get mad because the show wins awards, even though it’s “not as good” as it used to be.  To which I say, feh.  The show’s writing and performances were new and fresh a few years ago, and while every episode is no longer solid gold, it’s still filled with great writing and excellent performances.

 

Crawl off this show’s back, critics of America.  Be nice.  If this was a new show, starting today, you’d claim it was the best sitcom running.

 

Supernatural:

 

In emailing a different friend, I observed that when your big guest star that you bring back during sweeps is the nearly forgotten guy from Road Trip, you clearly didn’t plan to run for eight seasons.

 

But at this point, Supernatural is the third-highest rated show on the CW.  And while every season shakes off a few more superfans, the ratings drops are incremental compared to younger and more famous shows (Remember when Gossip Girl was A Big Deal?  It’s blowing out a 13 episode season to wrap things up, and the audience ain’t coming back for a visit.). 

 

Every year I wonder out loud if the CW itself is doomed, and every year it manages to hang around.  At this point, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Supernatural didn’t run for ten years.  Or until the CW goes off the air.  Could go either way, really.

 

As for the show itself, it’s shaking up its format and trying to rework the relationships of the characters a bit.  I appreciate the effort, to be sure, but it isn’t quite there yet.  They have a great overarching plot (find a prophet and the word of God and send all the demons away forever) and they haven’t enlisted EVERYONE THEY KNOW to help.  That’s nonsensical.

 

And Sam and Dean are arguing, because it makes with the drama, but even that feels a little off.

 

It’s a new showrunner issue, and I’m sure it’ll get better.  And I’m loving the show as I watch it.  It’s just later that I go, “Well, some of this logic doesn’t quite track.”

 

South Park:

 

Not a banner back half to the season, but funny in spots, and tying the sale of Star Wars to the Presidential election got pretty danged brilliant.

 

The Vampire Diaries:

 

They’ve been forced to resort to a 60 second explanation of what’s going on every week.  Not even a “Previously on…”  It’s literally, “There are vampires.  And original vampires.  And witches.  And werewolves.  And hybrids.  And…”

 

They should probably just put someone at the front of the show helpfully holding up the DVD box sets of the first three seasons and saying:  “Go watch these, then come back.  Or you’ll be hopelessly lost.”

 

This year, so far, they’ve added Hunters, and because of the fact that the show churns at warp speed, we’re down to exactly one person on the show who is human, with no supernatural abilities at all.

 

And credit where credit is due: There’s only one character on the show I’m kind of sick of.  Unfortunately, it’s Elena, the leading lady.  They’ve given her this death wish that she’s now forced to bring up at least six times and episode, and if the show could get rid of her, I think I’d be okay with it.

 

Heck, they’ve already set up the same actress as another character, so they could just bring her back, change the focus of the show, and carry on. Right now, something needs to change.

 

But maybe I shouldn’t whine so much.  The fact that the show can go at Mach nine and still have tricks up its sleeve is a minor miracle. 

 

The Big Bang Theory:

 

They’re still shaking up the cast, slapping characters together and trying to squeeze the funny out, and for the most part, they do all right.  I have noticed that over the last couple of years they’ve started shoving more and more characters in, which generally indicates a problem.

 

It’s their version of Cousin Oliver syndrome, only no one on the show is having a baby (well, actually, now that they’ve married off two characters, I can see the baby thing coming, because they’ve gotta do SOMETHING for season six, right?) so they add a couple new people to the cast just to keep things clicking along.

 

You know what?  The show works, and I laugh sometimes.  Good enough.

 

Glee:

 

I’m not terribly enamored with New York, mostly because I’m not all that sure what to make of it.  Rachel spent a bunch of years being the big star at home, and now the premise is supposed to be the big fish in the big pond, but I’m not feeling it.  The dance instructor thing feels like Sue 2.0 (or rather, 3.0, since that had that other women taking Sue on back in Ohio) and I have no idea what to make of the Kurt thing.

 

They broke up the various relationships (even though one was technically already broken…) so maybe the New York stuff will start to work better, but, eh.

 

Meanwhile, back home, they’re already recycling plots from the first season of Glee.  Of course, now Mr. Shu is headed off somewhere (I can’t say I care all that much) and Finn is now taking over Shu’s season one issues, where his personal life is a wreck and the only thing that ever mattered to him was Glee, so now he’s going to lead that…

 

Meanwhile, we’ve got Rachel 2.0 going through the same love quadrangle with the new Finn (he was the Glee Project winner in case you didn’t know) and the new Puck (Puck’s half-brother) and the new Quinn/Santana crossbreed, Kitty.

 

Really, all we need at this point is for Finn to start an affair with Shu’s lady, and we’re pretty much back to season 1 in toto. 

 

Am I hating it?  No.  I’m still enjoying the musical numbers, which is just about the only thing that ever made sense on the show anyway.  I’m neutral on Grease, though recognize it’s a much-beloved musical.  Which means this week is gonna be extra-iffy for me, I suspect.

 

I always go back to Degrassi with this show, because Degrassi is now 12 seasons into its latest incarnation, with 17 seasons in total, and it still manages to bump along well, even though they’ve traded out every cast member.  They’ve created new people with mostly new problems, and the number of times a plot has repeated pretty much completely I can count on one hand.

 

Come to think of it, I’m even more disappointed that we didn’t get the show we were promised, where Tina steps up and learns how hard it is to be the star.  And Blaine actually has to fit in now that Kurt’s gone, instead of just moping.  They’ve got a new and interesting story idea to approach with Unique, but they’re sort of cramming it in the corners so all the 2.0s can get more screen time.  Eh.

 

Like I said.  The performances are still fun.

 

The Walking Dead:

 

Much has been made at how the show has been invigorated this season, and I have to confess I’m impressed so far.  They managed a handful of action-packed episodes, they’ve dragged the characters through some vicious but fun-to-watch storylines, and they did a nice job setting up the Governor.

 

They’re clearly looking to shake things up this season, and while it hasn’t quite made it to Vampire Diaries levels of speed, they’ve got a nice head of steam going.

 

Can they maintain?  That’s a tough question, as the comic got way, way bogged down in the prison section of the story.  But they’ve wandered off the comic storyline quite a ways at this point, and I think that’s given them the kind of freedom they need to keep going big.

 

This might be the season that finally works out all the kinks.  Here’s hoping.

 

(An aside: I’m using the phrase “Shake things up” too often.  I’d apologize, but, hey, it’s not like it’s costing you anything…)

 

Community – Seasons 1 – 3:

 

My wife and I finally got around and through the whole show, catching up just in time for the new season to show up, only that didn’t happen.

 

Look, it’s critically acclaimed, and I get why everyone loves and I get why it doesn’t do better.  It’s a show about TV and movie tropes, and they regularly acknowledge them and try to turn them on their head.  If you grew up spending too much time watching a flickering screen, it’s the greatest thing ever.

 

But if you don’t get the joke (my wife didn’t watch nearly as much TV as I did, and some of the episodes are a complete mystery to her) some of the episodes just ain’t that fun.  And if a new viewer tunes in, catches the episode where they make fun of Westerns, and goes, “I hate Westerns, I’m never watching this show again,” well, that’s one more viewer they didn’t get.

 

Right now, they’re set to show back up at the start of next year, covering for all the shows that are coming to an end either on purpose or through the failure to find viewers.  If they stuck Community into the Scrubs rotation, and tossed it 18 episodes a year to fill in for failure shows, the audience will follow it.

 

Could happen.

 

As for what I think of the show?  I dig it.  I think it drags itself a little too far into unreality sometimes, but I’m good with that.  It’s the show that’s not afraid to try everything. 

 

And unlike Glee, which is equally as random, this show actually has fairly consistent characters.  Who saw THAT coming?

 

And that’s where I’m at now.  I’m way looking forward to the coming new year, wherein I’ll finally be able to dive into the latest in Degrassi episodes, catch up with Being Human, and watch Warehouse 13, Spartcus (Final season! Nooooooooooo!) and Game of Thrones.