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I admit it, I didn’t like Glee when I first saw it. While there was a brief few weeks toward the end of Season 1 and the “Rocky Horror” episode where I experienced a brief thaw in relations, but now it’s back to full on dislike.

Your cover of “Science Fiction Double Feature” won my heart…

In the first season plot served as a vehicle to provide experiences that created emotional tension that, when acted out, could be embellished or advanced by means of singing. The second season lost all interest in this and has focused on creating song set-pieces which the characters are carried into by means of a gruel-thin plot.

For example, in the first season, after a particularly rough bit of romantic let-down, Mercedes gets rather angry and vandalizes the offender’s vehicle to the tune of “Bust Your Windows.” See, reality and frustration and dialog (in short, plot and characterization) before a song.

It is now clear that artistic direction on the show has done a 180. The plots to set up the songs are absurdly stupid (cf. Bieber episode, Britney Spears¹ episode). Basically, pick 12 minutes of video-karaoke you want to do and string it together with a storyline bearing the plot rigor of a “Thundercats” episode.

What I liked, and didn’t realize until the last few episodes of the first season, is that what this show was saying was: “Life in high school is hard ( no news ) and sometimes you don’t know how you’re going to make it through; but sometimes with a few friends, drug use, and a positive attitude about something that gives your life passionate fire (like show choir), you can make it through.”

In the first season there was life and it was prior to singing. You’ll recall that the blonde girl was a teen mother in the first season, the adult character was having some fidelity / marriage issues, one character was dealing with homosexual identity in a place unwelcoming thereunto and another was a “jock” who was penned in by his rôle within the social hierarchy, etc. Those plot points have been simply ignored — effectively there was a reboot and most of the plot’s forward urgency was simply discarded.

As such, it has made the show, as Ryan said: “a karaoke-a-thon” that has no interest for me. Too bad. It should have been more than a fap-fest or political soap-box for the show’s direction.

1. I still love the “Brittany S. Peirce” character whose zingers and ditzy one-liners are the best part of the show. And that girl can dance.

In Pixar’s “Wall-E,” we encounter an adorable robot who is left to clean up the mounds of trash associated with the global spread of the consumerist lifestyle across the planet. Ancillary thereunto with the disregard for the natural world is the disregard of one’s own body and one’s own wellness. Pixar seems to be sugesting: “Hey, stop buying stuff and eating neon-colored food, get back to the basics and enjoy living as an able bodied human.”

In Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” heart strings are tugged as toys are left behind, subject to jeopardy, or wage petty internecine battles. All of this tugs at our emotional response as they toys seem to say “Remember to play, and play with us, don’t get rid of us — don’t throw away your sense of childlike wonder by scrapping us.”

And so I am confused, Pixar, what am I to think about the acquisition of gizmos and geegaws of plastic and metal?

Diabolical Plan

1. The greatest “Tonight Show” presenter ever was Johnny Carson
2. Conan gets the axe because NBC sucks and he will go somewhere else
3. Jay has ruined audience goodwill and “The Tonight Show” will fail spectacularly
4. Jimmy Fallon will have a “tragic accident”
5. Carson Daly will be left the lone man standing

Check and Mate, sir

Proof

They’re both named “Carson” for a reason.

Steven: “Hey is that Leonard Nimoy?”
Lauren: “Mayyy…”

Imagines pointed ears and eyebrow makeup

Leonard Nimoy playing Bernabe Zamora on “Wagon Train.”

Recent film adaptations have not given me opportunity to say this at an earlier date, but The Hulk is most definitely my favorite Marvel character.

I wasn’t much into the comic books, but I very much liked the television drama. I first felt my true love for the minor key when I heard the Hulk theme “Lonely Man.”

Thanks to the recent addition of rabbit-ears, we get RTN, the “Retro Television Network” which shows “The Incredible Hulk” TV show weekday evenings.

While I’m no Hulk-ologist, I always liked the subconscious and everyman elements of the Banner / Hulk dichotomy. Even as a young kid I “got” that there is, in every man, a powerful force that he, betimes, may not be in control of.

So there you go. You can have your Spidey, or your Bats, but for me, it’s Hulk.

If you’ve seen Schindler’s List, you can’ help recalling Ralph Fiennes’ masterful performance as the sadistic, truculent, SS-camp administrator, Amon Goeth.

But what if you found out, one day, that the father you had never known was indeed that man who delighted in brutality? And what would you make of your mother, who had worked on her tan within screaming distance to a Polish concentration camp?

And what if your only key for making sense of this was via a woman whose family had been exterminated, a woman who was brutalized and ridiculed in the ornate villa ruled by Goeth? What if you had to encounter the most damaged by that man in order to know that man in order to know yourself?

It’s a story of atonement that not even Philip Roth could have conceived, and it’s entirely true.

“Inheratance” - POV :: PBS

Patrick McGoohan, actor, director, producer and man with the most stunning elocution of the English language has crossed over.

“Her breasts would topple empires before they withered…she was the most sullen, uncommunicative and beautiful woman I had ever seen”

—Richard Burton in 1953 on his first look at Elizabeth Taylor

She loves me…

She loves me not…

Today it dawned on me that our generation will never have a leading man like Paul Newman. No my friends, the best we get is Ashton Kutcher.

We saw “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” last weekend. I disliked it. It is for movies such as this that the 2.5 star rating was invented. There were some good ideas, in spots, but never that unified, compelling vision thing ( apologies Poppy Bush ) just never really materialized ( like Jr. Bush ).

So here’s the gig. Humans are greedy and destroy the earth’s natural sylvan beauty. Elves and goblins, understandably tired of this, put together an unstoppable army that numbers, in the Lovecraft ordinal series, “seventy by seventy” unstoppable soldiers. After these clockwork and aurium terminators lay waste to such a degree that the beloved elven woods are actually damaged by the excess of blood, the Good King, his Moody Son, and his Good Daughter ( the twin of Moody Son ) decide to split up the crown which entitles the wearer to command the horde and put the army into a slumber.

Moody Son is not too happy about this but Good Sister agrees with Wise Father-King and thus began a truce lasting unto the present day.

Guess which unspeakable crime Moody Son must inflict? Guess who he must hunt to get that elusive missing piece? The movie telegraphs its arc in the first 8 minutes. But they don’t call hero stories archætypal for no reason, so I don’t bear this as a mark against the film.

The movie’s art direction is excellent.

The entire backstory I recounted above is told in a “reading of a story come alive” with a stripped–down animation that looks like ornate chess pieces acting out this tableaux from the forgotten pre-pagan yesteryear. It was a great start. It was a compelling, and eerily child–like setting of the story’s parameters.

Now, in time I believe that director Guillermo del Toro’s notebooks will be revered like so many sticky-pages of “Heavy Metal” magazine. His eye for creatures presents a large section action set in “The Troll Market”, a cross between the Mos Eisley cantina and Diagon Alley.

Stunning art direction is also seen in the unbelievable “Angel of Death” who recalls some of the more disturbing elements of “Pan’s Labyrinth”:

Finally I loved the soldiers of the Golden Army as steampunk Terminators. The meticulous attention to the gearwork appearance worthy of Gabriel “Sylar” Grey was something not required but which really showed that del Toro loves the material and great art design.

On these levels, the movie is a stunning success and I would love to see a fan edit that turns this into 5 minutes of a deliciously beautiful visual nightmare.

Ron Perlman also deserves some kudos for playing the working class Apocolypse-bringer Big Red himself in a realistic way.

But here’s the counterpoint, and I think I could do no better to quote Dustin Rowles at Pajiba

Guillermo del Toro throws a ton of eye candy at you, and it’s difficult to digest the true mediocrity of a film when the director keeps plinking you in the forehead with shiny pennies. But more than that, del Toro makes the shiniest pennies in Hollywood—golden pennies that reflect sunlight like a funhouse mirror in Alice’s Wonderland.

Well said, the visuals aside, the story, quite honestly, is entirely lame…and I liked the first one!

First, important questions are brought up, and never answered. Red and Liz’s relationship is explored and some fairly significant issues ( at least to the mind of anyone who’s been in a real grown-up relationship ) surfaced that require some delicate and sensitive discussion or couples therapy.

Some things like “Why am I the only one who cleans up the dishes” cannot be replaced by “whew, we narrowly avoided death there, I love you!”

Further, mentors give advice that is supposed to come in as important at a tell-tale moment, when the character chooses to evolve, you know, “use the force” style, to stop being so immature and be a better man / woman / demon–but. Those moments never surface. Instead we have these sagacious chestnuts that never get converted into kinetic utility.

The dialog is also jarringly inconsistent. Seth MacFarlane (over-)plays a Stewie goes to Salzburg voice as ectoplasmic doctor Krauss. Krauss is a by-the-numbers paranormal investigator who inspires a major intellectual man-er,fish-crush in æsthete and polymapth Abe Sapien. Krauss has great learning, great technology, and a rigid adherence to “Just Following Orders”.

Now why, in Anung An-Rama’s good name would such a character ever have conceivable reason to utter: “Suck my ectoplasmic schwanstuker”. Verily, the studio was assured this would get those 12-year-olds in the aisle rolling. For the 30+ set it merely set the eyes a’so.

My biggest complaint is a lack of connection to the Hellboy mythos. I love the Hellboy mythos. Black cult Nazi’s are manipulated by dæmonic elements into opening the gateway to Hell. They think they’ll get demons to defeat the Allies, but the demons plan no such thing, but rather to let their reign on Earth begin. The Nazi’s black ritual is interrupted and the plan is thwarted. By accident a single demon does come through, but it turns out it’s a young, naive, demon who incidentally happens to be the one who’s supposed to open Hell’s gate. Thwarting his destiny is the fact that he’s raised by loving and kind humans and thus is set up all sort of angst around Destiny, Duty, Fate, and to what degree a man can beat his fate ( probably explains my like of God of War, as well ).

Is that not some compelling mythos or what?

I can parallel this to the “X-Files” back in the day. You’d tune in for the show, but the ones that were like crack were the ones that advanced the mythos that covered the Scully abduction or featured The Smoking Man ( there was even a song about it ).

In “Golden Army” we get only but brief reminders that this red-chested Hudson Hawk is something of a Biblical–scale bad–ass but only once or twice ( Abe sees his flaming crown through special glasses, the Angel of Death calls him by his demon name, and Good Princes asserts his royal blood by naming him as a demon and heir to the Fallen One). These unique elements of his background never played into his motivation or into how he handled situations ( except for the Right Hand of Doom occasionally illustrating its superior ability as a bludgeon ). It was like watching an entire X-Files season and not seeing Mulder…who would want to watch that?

Lastly there’s a really irritating battle between the forces of myth here. So much of the movie hinges on just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Hellboy, a demon, with an indestructible stone hand is beating a Middle Earth-worthy troll. In some ways it makes me think about debating who would win in a fight Terminator or Neo. Or would the Easter Bunny beat Santa Claus’ ass if he knew ninjitsu. It makes the audience’s appreciation and ability to scale threats accordingly difficult and, as a result, a lot of dramatic tension goes down the crapper.

Two-point-five stars.