I’ll admit that I’ve never been drawn to 70s British police dramas. Then again, I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen a full episode of any of them. But Life on Mars is just fantastic. This and Doctor Who have renewed my faith in BBC drama.
When I’m about to head off to bed after a hard day’s TV watching, I tend to go for one last flick through the channels. I remember crying whenever I’d stumble across CSI at midnight because it meant I was stuck for another hour without any way of wrenching myself away from the telly. Televisual crack. I was addicted.
I get the same thing with Prison Break, the TV show with the most idiotic setup I’ve ever seen. It makes me think of that episode of the X-Files where Mulder discovers the TV networks are putting subliminal messages between the frames of TV shows. I don’t know why else I can’t pull myself away from these breathtakingly stupid shows.
Actually, I don’t love Lost any more. I watched the entire first season over the course of a weekend and was completely hooked but since then, I think I mostly watch it out of some hope that they’ll finally start dishing out some answers. So far, they haven’t. And now there’s talk of dragging this into four seasons, with a feature film finale. I think it’s time I cut myself free.
Yes, they might be lowest-common-denominator TV, but these shows have saved my life on more than one occasion. However, this does not extend to anything presented by Gillian McKeith. She is the devil. A bitter, hump-backed devil
This has been mentioned before, but I still can’t get enough of it. I love everything about it, from the creepy Harry Potter-esque theme music to Kevin McCloud’s shameless baiting of the absolute cocks he’s showcasing. I wish it had its own channel.
Apparently, this isn’t being as well received as I would have expected, which is a shame because I think it’s one of the best-written, best-acted comedies on TV today (or at least since Black Books went shit). The fact that it’s about a bunch of socially inept geeks - thus mirroring my own existence - only makes me love it more.
TV Shows I just can’t get into
Battlestar Galactica
I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I just can’t get into this show. I think this means I have to hand in my nerd badge or something.
Veronica Mars
It’s nice to have a female-led teen-oriented drama show that doesn’t involve someone being a superhero or a total fucking flake. But I just couldn’t care less about this show.
ER
I used to love this show, but I’ve come to realise this was mostly down to my hetero boner for Noah Wyle. Now, not even John Leguizamo can save it.
As a film, Jarhead was as schizophrenic as the marine mentality it tried to convey. It swung wildly between occasional bursts of brilliant writing into lazy references to other war movies (oh yes, Apocolypse Now and the Deer Hunter, we get it). Sometime beautiful cinematography gave way to murky, uninspired, cliched imagery. Following the same template as countless movies before it, yet structurally, it was a complete mess.
But perhaps this is part of the point it’s trying to make and it’s done so subtlely as to be barely noticable. I’d like to think so, really I would. But the clunky, heavy-handed way in which it tried to make its other points leads me to believe that the word “subtle” does not exist for these filmmakers.
Okay, so I should be getting ready for Paris right now, but this is pretty big. After weeks of denying it, Nintendo finally announced that they will be launching a revamped version of the DS in late March. This new version will be two-thirds the size/80% of the weight of the original and the ability to set the LCD to four different levels of brightness (including the option to set it brighter than the original DS.)
My poor little Nintendo DS. We’ve been together a long time. You’ve seen me through some tough times, some God-awful transatlantic flights, and I’ve even grown to love your beauty-spot of a dead pixel. But I don’t know how much longer you have left.
Continuing this jet-setting lifestyle that I’m becoming so accustomed to, herself indoors and I are heading off to Paris tomorrow for a few days. This is mainly a way of making up for the fact that I was 5,000 miles away for her birthday earlier in the month, but also as a way of recharging our collective batteries (and it means I’m finally, FINALLY going to Disneyland, having been itching to go since it first opened).
If all goes according to plan, I won’t be anywhere near a computer until I come back. So things will be even quieter than usual around here. And it’s a shame, because I had so much to talk about. Like my favourite ascerbic journalist, Charlie Brooker, describing Adrien Brody as “a cross between Ross from Friends and a disappointed sundial.” Or the new trailer for the Silent Hill movie.
But all these will have to wait. I’ve got french people queueing up to be rude to me.
For a little while now, I’ve noticed that my netsource connection only sucks during the evening, when people are home from work, during which time it’s barely better than dialup. In the very late night and early in the morning, the connection is spectacular and actually comes close to approaching the “2MB DSL” it’s advertised as.
So, to put my theory to the test, I set up a cron job to wget a 1MB file from ftp.heanet.ie twice every hour. I calculated the average of the two hourly downloads and used that for my result.
And, well, the graph speaks for itself. The connection is best at 7AM, and worst at 6PM. At least this gives me some demonstratable proof of what I’m saying when I speak to Netsource about my connection.
A few months ago, I wrote about Snakes On A Plane, the high-concept thriller about uh… snakes. On a plane. The IMDB has recently updated its information about Sheldon Turner, the writer of SoaP. One of his upcoming projects is called The Breathtaker and its IMDB plot summary runs like this:
A small-town police chief pursues a serial killer who strikes only during tornadoes, brutally killing his victims in the eye of the storm.
Jesus. This guy is really working hard to redefine the term “High Concept”, bringing us into “Huge Concept”.
Also: I’ve started visiting Script Sales almost daily now. It always cheers me up to read about scripts whose log-lines describe them as “A monkey spy adventure in the vein of ‘The Bourne Identity.’”
johnke.me
