Shows we hope to love:  FlashForward gets reduced to Hollywood's lowest common denominator
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

 
I dread the premiere of this show (relax, no spoilers here: you can learn this much just by watching the ABC trailers). Yet I was prepared to love it, based on my reaction to the book. The show hasn't even debuted yet, and already people are wondering: can this show be saved from its developers' mistakes? Disclosure: I am an aficionada of sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer's work and have just recently reread the novel on which this new TV series is presumably based (except that it isn't, really). Given how much I liked the book, I was looking forward to the show's premiere, until I actually learned something about the show. Talk about disappointing.

It's not new for Hollywood to botch something from the get-go, but I keep hoping at least a few people in the TV and film business will learn from Hollywood's mistakes. That hope isn't usually rewarded, but I comment here just in case there's still time to influence the show's developers. To that end, I left a lengthy comment on one of the industry sites earlier today, then decided I should at least post that much on my own blog; therefore, I'm going to repeat here most of what I've already posted there. When you're the author, you get to do this. But back to Sawyer and FlashForward.

I hesitate to say that I'm a Sawyer fan because fan is short for 'fanatic,' and I'm not a fanatic about anything (except, possibly, the correct use of the English language, which is an occupational hazard for all good writers and editors anyway). But I've enjoyed and been challenged by Sawyer's novel and his books Calculating God and Factoring Humanity. The Neanderthal series, not so much: I've never liked alternative histories and am much more interested in speculations about the present and future. Earlier this summer, I read Sawyer's latest, WWW.Wake, and loved that. So when I heard about the spin-off show, I reread (and again enjoyed) FlashForward.

Shows we love:  exit Kings? Not necessarily
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

 
Kings is the kind of program that NBC hasn’t had in years, at least not since The West Wing ended: a pure, grown-up drama that isn’t in the cops-and-doctors genre. Inspired by the biblical chapters about David and Goliath, King Saul, and Saul’s son Jonathan, the show draws parallels with those parables while going well beyond the original tales to examine timeless issues of ethics, war, politics, and human character. In that respect, it is very like The West Wing and the marvelously reinvented Battlestar Galactica as well as the best episodes of the Star Trek franchise. It's also marvelously well cast

What’s most remarkable is that despite everything it had going for it, Kings got canceled after 12 episodes that almost nobody knew about. If more people had known, they’d have seen it and been glad. Splendidly reimagined in modern terms, Kings is set in the ersatz contemporary coastal kingdom of Gilboa, for which you can substitute New York, Washington, London, Beijing, several central African regimes, or pretty much any modern capital located in an industrialized nation.

Gilboa is led by King Silas Benjamin, a former general who dethroned and imprisoned his former monarch and dragged his nation into the 21st century, both modernizing it drastically and enmeshing it in costly warfare with less than impressed neighbors. The young David in this case is Captain David Shepherd, who serves his king and country loyally despite grave misgivings and in the process becomes a hero uncomfortable in the limelight, providing a very public contrast to the less than scrupulous monarch. And from there, the conflicts and combatants multiply, even (most pointedly) within the royal family. Nearly everyone but David is ambitious and maneuvering for something.

Movies we love:  the new Star Trek film —
He said, she said, but nobody said the right things
posted 5-9-2009 - 1:23 am

 
This isn't a review of the film: I'll get to that in another post. Rather, this is more of an observation regarding other reviews of the film. Other than Roger Ebert's, of course; I always like his comments, whether or not I agree with them.

Now that the new Star Trek has previewed here this weekend, I’ve been perusing some of the reviews here and there. Accordingly, I ran across the He Said, She Said commentary in The Scorecard Review online ... and after reading it and others on the Web, I began to wonder just exactly how many of the younger film critics are familiar enough with the Star Trek universe. If they’ve seen the films but never watched the original series, they’re really not qualified to say much of consequence about the new film.

As expected, He (Nick Allen) and She (Morrow McLaughlin) did their thing, parsing the movie’s action and wow factor, comparing it to the less favorably received X-Men outing, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Yet I found their comments off target, surprisingly. Not that I expected them to be anywhere near as lucid as Roger Ebert, but hey, somebody’s gonna have to pick up his baton and run with it one of these days. It would help if that person or persons were good at being on point.

Well, at least they like the best of us ...
posted 3-3-2008 - 3:05 am

Not everybody hates print journalism or considers it obsolete yet. Or at least, not everyone in business hates newspapers and magazines.

Fortune's annual series of articles on the World's Most Admired Companies is just out. The Top 50 list frankly gives me pause. After all, it has Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America on it — and I can't see why any company that's received or is asking for a bailout should be on that list. Then again, this survey must have been taken before the bailouts really began; it's the only thing I can think of that would make sense of those rankings.

Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica season 5, so far
posted 1-31-2009 - 4:37 pm

So: Felix Gaeda has deteriorated into a bad guy. He's not the fifth Cylon, Ellen Tigh is; but he is a mutineer and a traitor, demoralized by having come this far for nothing and blaming everything on the Cylons, including rebel Cylons. And this requires a lot of rationalization, but there's a lot of that going around now in the fleet as morale descends into near nothing and order into chaos.

I'm wondering, on this morning after the third episode, why neither Tigh nor Adama anticipates the rebels tossing in a grenade once they crack the door and isn't in place to immediately toss it right back, where it could explode on the other side. I was thinking about that even as it happened. They did have just enough time to prepare, after all. But I digress.

Shows I love: awaiting Battlestar Galactica
posted 1-16-2009 - 7:27 pm

In less than an hour, Battlestar Galactica returns after months of absence. Its fans have been alternately hopeful, pissed, confused, exasperated, and excited. Same here, but I've been mostly pissed -- at the lousy ending of the last episode that aired, at the fact that the timeline was so drastically condensed in the last 15 minutes of that episode, and that it was done in such a not-at-all credible, nonsensical fashion.

I'll get to more about that later, perhaps after I've seen the new episode of this final half-season. For now, let me indulge in what has preoccupied most fans for months: the identity of the final secret Cylon. That will be revealed in tonight's episode anyway, so the wait is nearly ended by now.

Much ado about the swan that didn't die
posted 1-15-2009 - 6:30 am

I hate artistic revisionism. At least in ballet. And I blame the post-Walt-Disney Disney Company for it.

What started this rant, you ask? I attended a performance last Sunday of the Russian National Ballet Theater, and they performed Swan Lake. Theirs is a relatively new company, having been founded during the late 1980s, and, by the caliber of dancing that I saw, clearly second tier: fine, but certainly no threat to either the Bolshoi or the Kirov. I wouldn't put them on the same level as the New York City Ballet or the American Ballet Theater, either, but those two are also world class, so no surprise there. But I love Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky's score, so I really didn't mind.

Despite some lack of precision now and then among the corps de ballet, I was enjoying the production, for the most part. Particularly the performance of the prima ballerina portraying Odette/Odile, whose performance was clearly on a higher level than the rest of the company but whose name I don't know because the program listed four names for that role (this is a traveling company, and this role is obviously rotated, as are several others). In fact, I eagerly anticipated watching that particular Odette do the dying swan scene.

Ranting for academics
posted 1-10-2009 - 2:56 am

 
I have friends whose kids are visiting high schools and colleges now, in anticipation of attending those same come autumn, and I've noticed something: they're increasingly feeling a very specific kind of rage, one fed by the harsh realities of ever higher tuition rates and a snotty streak of anti-intellectualism in this country that glorifies sport at the expense of academics.

It is a very normal and rational reaction to an absurd status quo, one that has to change, though you know the sports fans will go down fighting. Well, on second thought, perhaps that gets more complicated if the sports fans in question are also parents whose happily geeky kids turn out to be more interested in field theory than field goals. I hope so.

The backdrop for this, of course, is the worst economic recession since the Great Depression and the worst unemployment statistics in the last 16 years, courtesy of the December 2008 numbers released earlier today. These campus-visiting parents are bloody well pissed off, and justifiably so: not just about tuition costs in this economy, but about the indefensible favoritism shown to boys' athletic programs while math, science and engineering students (not to mention girls' athletics) go begging for scholarships and loans. Just who do the sports nuts think is going to pull us out of this economic disaster — football players?? Of course not!

Shedding light on dark matters
posted 1-9-2009 - 7:33 am

 
I started my day yesterday by reading through my usual selection of news sources, then skipped over to check my e-mail, where I was presented with yet more headlines, and ran across a science story in Time magazine that piqued my interest. I ended up pissed off at the reporter, the Nobel prize committee, and academia in general. And thus, a rant developed, but not without cause.

Let me back up a bit here and give you the name of the article first:

The Milky Way: Bigger, Faster, Better Understood
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1870049,00.html

The first thing that struck me was the rather middling handling the reporter gave the story; nothing grossly wrong, just not much in the way of putting this item in perspective so that I know why it's important for me to know any of this. Besides, I've read far better science reporting than this mediocre little bit. The second thing that struck me was that Mark Reid, the Harvard astronomer she interviewed, is really just tweaking the kind of work Vera Rubin has been doing for more than 40 years — and without half as much fanfare and very little public credit.

Who's Vera Rubin, you ask? Ahhhhhhhhhh, here we come to it.