Just because I love me some Toronto.
(Stolen from Tumblr)
On the cancellation of CSI:Miami
EXTERIOR: A Miami street.
Standing beside a dead body on the ground, but facing ninety degree away from it, is HORATIO CAINE. His cop buddy FRANK approaches.
HORATIO: What have we here, Frank?
FRANK: Single victim. White male. Gun shot wound to the chest.
HORATIO: We need to investigate this, Frank.
FRANK: We can’t, Horatio. It seems that we’ve been put to pasture. They’ve cancelled us, Horatio.
HORATIO: Oh, that’s all right, Frank. Because we…[puts on sunglasses]…are gonna cancel them.
SMASH CUT to THE WHO, with Daltrey screaming YEEAAAAHHHHHWWWW!
I’m really going to miss CSI:Miami. It’s not a good show at all, but it’s so gloriously fun in its campiness, it’s so insistent on putting its goofy heart on its sleeve, that I can’t help but love it. It’s been a truly unique show to have around, and my Sunday nights will be a bit emptier without David Caruso, Emily Procter, and the rest of the gang. Thanks for the fun, Horatio Caine! May your Hummer speed around the highways of Miami forevermore!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: An acquaintance from the Twitterverse alerted me to the existence of this:
Wow.
:: This map shows what the wind is doing. All over the continental United States. And it’s zoomable!
:: For lack of a proper third thing, here’s a sad looking dog.
More next week!
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Saturday Centus
Wow, I haven’t done one of these in what feels like forever. I’ve missed the little community over there! The last six weeks or so have been really busy, though, between work, Easter, a vacation, finishing a draft of a novel, and starting a new one. Busy, busy, busy. Only the A-to-Z Challenge kept me producing new material for most of last month. But now, here we are. Hopefully I can keep this up now! This week’s prompt is pretty simple.
“Cream together butter and sugar. What’s that mean?”
“I dunno. Cream’s not even in the ingredients.”
“We don’t have cream…should we use milk?”
“Beats me. Whaddabout that other stuff? ‘Oleo’?”
“Nah. I went through that whole store and didn’t see any ‘Oleo’. I think they made it up, man.”
“Well, we can’t just leave out ingredients, dude!”
“This was a dumb idea. Let’s just go buy some Mallomars. Mallomars rule.”
“But they won’t be special cookies, dude.”
Silence….
“You think this Betty Crocker’s got a phone number we could call her at? ‘Cause I got some questions, man.”
“Me too, man.”
Did a scene like this ever take place in a Cheech and Chong movie?
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Something for Thursday
Here’s a jaunty march that I got to perform one year at the Bristol Hills Music Camp. Marches don’t always have to be bombastic things; this one is more charming than anything else. It’s the March of the Belgian Paratroopers by Pierre Leemans.
I think we would all benefit greatly from an increase in the jauntiness of our daily lives!
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This blog needs more cute animals.
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
I have a sneaking feeling that I’ve asked this one before, but…remember that episode of Seinfeld, when Elaine is dating that guy who goes off into a trance whenever he hears the song “Desperado” by the Eagles? Or that episode of South Park when it’s revealed that Cartman must sing “Come Sail Away” by Styx all the way through if he hears even the tiniest part of it? What song or songs have a similar effect on you?
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Sentential Links
Links.
That’s why astronomy is cool.
:: Nothing makes me happier than having something to be pissed off at. I think that’s why I continue to enjoy sports so much. Now, I can’t complain too much, as being a Pittsburgh fan of a certain advanced age has allowed me to experience an unfair amount of sports euphoria in my life. (Yeah. I’m from Buffalo. So shut it.)
:: Joel had such an impact on my listening enjoyment particularly within the science fiction genre. His scoring of all three Stargate series left such a mark on me over the years. His music was majestic and beautiful and simply a thrill a minute to enjoy. (I honestly know nothing about Joel Goldsmith’s music. I should explore it one of these days, I suppose. He was the son of Jerry Goldsmith, and he died of cancer last week while in his 50s. Very sad.)
:: Okay, so before the nerd hordes charge with their bat’leths held high (or Mjolnir replicas, or whatever), I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy watching The Avengers. Indeed, I came out of it feeling truly entertained. (So there’s a mildly negative review of The Avengers out there. Oh well, to each his own. But what a poopyhead.)
:: Sex is just a distraction from what was really going on, from what he was really about. (I am in awe of this post.)
More next week!
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Avengers assemble!!! (no spoilers)
Heavens, what a movie.
I mean, really. Heavens, what a movie.
The Avengers doesn’t quite take the top prize as my favorite superhero movie of all time, but at this point, I just don’t think that Superman is likely to be dislodged from that spot in my heart, ever. But the spot for number two? I think that Spiderman 2 is in that spot…but I’m not sure if The Avengers didn’t just take it over. Or at least tied it.
I loved this movie. It’s thrilling and exciting. Its story is epic in scale, but fairly simple in its particulars. Its characters are all well-drawn and sharply written. Its dialogue crackles. Its action sequences are full of effects that look amazing even in this day and age, and the sequences are not impossible to follow. The Avengers is pretty much a joy from start to finish.
I’m a fan of Joss Whedon’s, although I’m not an obsessive one (I have yet to watch much of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at all), nor one who believes he is infallible (I watched four or five episodes of Dollhouse before I gave up). I do rank Whedon above the other great God Emperor of Geekstuff, JJ Abrams, though; Abrams is a fine director, but his writing just leaves me wanting. I was never a big fan of the Avengers during my own comics reading days, but when I learned that Whedon was writing and directing the film toward which all the Marvel superhero movies of recent years had been building toward, I was terribly excited. And I’m glad to report that this excitement has paid off.
The films leading up to this have, admittedly, been a mixed bag…but a generally likable mixed bag. Iron Man was a lot of fun; Iron Man 2 a bit less fun, but enjoyable. Thor was a blast, although its blend of New Mexico desert and an Asgard that looked made of freshly-painted plastic felt odd. Captain America was probably the best of all these; I enjoyed the hell out of that one. (Did I ever blog about it? Oh noes, I didn’t! Especially since I didn’t see it until just a month or so ago.)
So, along comes The Avengers. This movie has to reintroduce all these heroes, and do it in such a way that it reminds those of us who saw their individual movies what went on, but doesn’t bog down in reminders for people who didn’t see them. It also has to set up the villain (Loki) and explain what he’s up to. Whedon gets all these various pots boiling, and he does it with flair and confidence. Where lots of superhero movies falter is in their various first acts, but Whedon is able to keep all this pretty interesting. He doesn’t spend too much time in explanations, and gives pretty much exactly as much information as you need to make sense of what’s going on. (And, frankly, he honors the longstanding tradition of superhero comics that everything makes sense as long as you don’t really think about it too closely.)
This isn’t a perfect movie. The pacing is pretty relaxed in the first act, but each act picks up steam, until by the end of the movie, I was left pretty breathless. Whedon is able to make the film large in scale; this feels like a genuine epic, and it doesn’t feel artificially inflated. Here are some great things that Whedon does along the way:
- He raises the stakes a little at a time. Early on, in the first skirmishes, a given fight might need one hero, maybe two. This changes as the nature of the threats becomes greater and greater.
- He establishes that in any battle worth fighting, a price will be paid. Anyone familiar with Whedon’s work over the years will know that he definitely likes to do this, and there are moments in this film where I found myself wondering if the price had just been paid, because I know Whedon and his lack of fear when it comes to putting his characters through hell.
- The battles take their toll on our heroes. Whedon makes them work for it. This is a hallmark of all the great Marvel Comics team battles over the years. Sometimes the team — any team, whether it’s the Avengers, the X-Men, whomever — even loses. And the battles themselves have acts! It’s just classic Marvel Comics storytelling that our heroes have to work to exhaustion just to beat the first wave of attackers, and just as you’re wondering how they can ever defeat what’s next…what’s next comes upon the scene.
- Whedon gets that superhero teams are not inherently given to teamwork. He knows that there are egos at work, and he shows this. Best of all, he’s able to show all these clashing egos without making us think that any one of them is a complete jerk. I loved that.
I love the acting in the film, as well. All the leads are superb, just as they were in their respective films before. Chris Evans is still able to portray Captain America’s earnest goodness without making him an insufferable boor to be around; Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man gets all manner of great lines. The best part of the cast may be Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner, who also has to turn into the Hulk on occasion. He’s able to portray Banner as brilliant and cursed, a man who is wounded by his inabilities to always control who he is.
As I mention above, the action sequences are filmed perfectly. Despite the fact that New York City is exploding left and right, Whedon establishes what’s going on and shows it without filling his frame with so much mayhem as to make the shots impossible to follow. And I liked that he engages in minimal cross-cutting, so that when he takes us to see what, say, Black Widow is up to, he stays with her long enough that we know what’s happening.
No, The Avengers is not perfect. It does have moments of slowness, and the motivations of the villains aren’t always obvious. And as much as I’ve enjoyed Alan Silvestri’s music in the past, I don’t think he turned in the best score here; I’d hoped for one big, memorable theme for this film, but it just wasn’t there. In a very real way, if forced to choose one factor that keeps this film (and Spiderman 2) behind Superman in my heart is that Superman boasts a score by John Williams at the height of his powers. But to my mind, there is no flaw in The Avengers that keeps it from being what it is: one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen in years.
A couple of random notes:
:: Yes, Stan Lee has a cameo. But my favorite cameo was from character actor Kenneth Tigar as the “German Old Man”, who talks back to Loki. I’ve always liked Tigar (he was the bomb squad guy in the Lethal Weapon movies, and he was one of the more notable killers against whom Thomas Magnum matched wits on Magnum PI) , and I’m glad to see that he’s still active and acting!
:: Reportedly, Joss Whedon wanted Cobie Smulders as Wonder Woman, back when he was attached to whatever Wonder Woman movie was in development. I’m glad that he managed to get her into the superhero movie world here, as a SHIELD agent.
:: A lot of reviews I’ve seen accuse Samuel L. Jackson of just doing his standard glower through the movie. It’s not like his role didn’t really call for him to do much else, but he did allow his Nick Fury to show what little vulnerability he would.
:: There’s an airplane in this movie that bears a small design similarity to the Serenity. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of thing, but I sure saw it.
:: If you see it, stay for the very, very end. All the way to the end of the credits. Trust me.
:: Bring on The Avengers II! (And while we’re at it, let’s get the Serenity out of mothballs, shall we?)
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!!!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Dungeons and Dragons was created almost 40 years ago by Gary Gygax and David Arneson. Both men have passed on, but Arneson’s personal collection of materials comprising his creative work on the game was recently found in, of all places, an abandoned storage locker. Now it’s all going to be auctioned. Wow! I’m glad that the new owner of the locker wasn’t a putz like that guy on Storage Wars who is always searching for ‘collectibles’, and just tosses stuff aside if he has no idea what it is.
:: How in God’s name have I gone this long without learning about Blue Milk Special? This is a webcomic that is retelling the Original Trilogy of Star Wars, as a parody. And it is awesome. I spent some time this morning reading it, getting up to the Millennium Falcon blasting its way out of Mos Eisley. I think that this one is my favorite thus far…but it’s got some competition.
:: Some recent stuff pertaining to that goofball fascination of mine, the pie in the face:
I saw this on Tumblr. I guess I’d agree on the first two, but I’m befuddled that a chicken pot pie has a ‘positive’ rating as a potential pie for someone’s face. I don’t think I’d like that at all. Especially if it’s still fairly fresh from the oven.
A reader e-mailed me this helpful bit of advice:
See? Pot pie is not recommended. (I wouldn’t recommend shaving cream either, because it tastes like, well, shaving cream. And meringue doesn’t stick, at all.) As for the delivery techniques, I have zero experience in this regard myself, but I recall from gym classes in school that throwing things isn’t my wheelhouse, as it were. Best stick with the push, I suppose.
Comics readers from the 1970s (on which I was a young one) may recall a DC Comics superheroine named The Mighty Isis, whose powers and mythology was derived from Ancient Egyptian mythology. (Hmmm…I wonder if her creation was inspired by things like the tour of King Tut’s treasures around the US….) She had a teevee show that was paired with the Shazam! show, along with her short-lived comic. In one of the issues of the comic, one of Isis’s fellow Egyptian gods, Set, shows up to try to force humans to worship him, and he works all manner of mischief, which Isis can’t stop because she’s not as powerful as he is. So she hatches a plan to show Set that he doesn’t really want to rule humans anyway, because they’re not sufficiently reverent of the gods. How does Isis demonstrate this? By letting some kid (from her schoolteacher alter-ego’s class) throw a pie in her face.
It’s a weird story (I posted the whole thing on my Tumblr), but kind of funny and even ‘wholesome’ in that “Hey, I can triumph over my foes without resorting to violence!’ way. And as comic-book pies in the face go, this one’s fairly nicely drawn. (Not that I have a huge sample size of such things to meditate upon…I remembered this one from when I was a kid, and I spotted the issue in an ‘Old Comics for Ten Cents Each’ box at a local comics store, and the cover jogged my memory.)
:: Finally, I note the passing last week of Adam Yauch, one of the founding members of the Beastie Boys. In truth, I wasn’t a fan, but that’s more because I just don’t grok rap in general. Not my cup of tea, although I do grant the artistry involved. The Beastie Boys’ popularity and influence can’t be ignored, but for me, their best thing was their famous video that included a pretty spiffy pie fight.
OK, that’s it. More Weirdness and Awesome next week!
