Tag: Reviews

Like others in this thread, I didn’t care for the camera shake. It wasn’t bad enough to make me leave the theater but it definitely made me queasy. As for the storyline to the movie…. meh. While most of the characters had a good line or two; I didn’t them. Any of them. In fact, I would go so far as to say my main complaint with the movie is one of them might have survived. I would have preferred a clean sweep of character deaths.

In response to the Cloverfield thread on the Whateveresque forums.

Without question, Me and My Shadow the best episode of Escape Pod I’ve listened to in quite some time. It’s got just the perfect amount of creepiness to suck me into the story, rather than sending me running for cover. Additionally the level of tech seems entirely believable in that we could theoretically be doing this to criminals in the real world within a generation of now1. Those two factors are blended together into a tasty treat2 by the writing of Mike Resnick and Stephen Eley’s reading of the work.

1 As rule I prefer my Sci-Fi to be extrapolated from existing science to have believable future tech rather than wildly unlikely technology. Though if something with wildly unlikely tech has an interesting story or characters that can be fun too (e.g. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi).
2 I’m glad lunch is coming up soon, I’m starting to get pretty hungery. *smile*

Like most Americans I’ve been a bit more glued to my TV this week than usual due to the return of fresh programming for the fall. Here are a few quick impressions of the shows I watched this week.

Monday

  • Chuck: The producers/advertisers of this show are obviously targeting something very close to my demographic with this show. The first episode was nothing special, butit did amuse me. I suppose if this show is playing while I want to watch TV, I’ll watch it but it is nothing I would go out of my way to see.
  • Heroes: What a disappointment. I really enjoyed last season, but bringing back both of the Petrelli brothers in the season premier when last season’s finale showed them getting nuked cheapened the show immensely. I had been looking forward to this, but now I doubt I’ll be watching it.
  • Journeyman: Meh, this looks like a weak remake of Quantum Leap only significantly less interesting. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood, but I gave up watching it 10 minutes in. It was just putting me to sleep.

Tuesday

  • NCIS: Yup, I’ll be watching this one all season long again. The season premier didn’t pull off any astounding changes to the show but did show off the writers’ ability to keep giving us what we want. Explosions, murder, mystery and action.
  • The Unit: First off whoever came up with the new intro clip to this show should be fired. It’s utterly horrible. That being said, like NCIS this show delivered. While the show is going a lot darker than before and looks like it will be spending this season mostly inside US borders; it looks good and was a solid hour of entertainment this event.

Wednesday

  • Bionic Woman: Surprisingly, I was impressed. I expected it to be considerably cheesier and crappier than it turned out to be. I didn’t much care for the main character but it was nice to see some actors from other shows I’ve liked.
  • Life: Heh, this was quite a bit of fun to watch this evening. Though the main character was excessively flakey for my taste and I’m not sure I’ll keep watching it given that it’s got the same timeslot as CSI: NY.

Thursday

  • Ugly Betty: This show is really more one I watch because my wife likes it and I fiddled around on my computer while it was on. What I caught of it was funny, but not enough to draw me back to the couch to watch it.
  • CSI: I had been looking forward to seeing this right up until it was on TV. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood, but I just didn’t care if the CSI member was going to live through the episode or not. Perhaps I’m getting a bit burned out on all these CSI shows.

Friday

  • Moonlight: Cheesy, vampire, detective show. A bit funny, a bit dark and worth watching if you happen to be home on a Friday night.

So there’s my quick thoughts on the premieres I’ve seen so far. Did I miss anything good?

As a general rule, I love Escape Pod. The stories (and readers!) tend to be excellent, however this week must be the exception which proves the rule. Maybe it’s because I never got into the whole MMORPG thing but I found this week’s story to be a bad rewrite/adaption of Groundhog Day. The movie wasn’t all that great and Save Me Plz is even worse. At least in Groundhog Day Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, had to do all the work himself; in Save Me Plz, Devon forces Meg into doing all the work for him. Even worse she liked the world the way it was!

So I say shame on you Mr. Eley for bringing us this tripe and implore you to look for more stories like:

Notes…

  • Why no, this post is not a blatant attempt at being named BofW and getting a free book from Escape Pod. What would ever give you that idea. *grin*
  • Ok, I could be fibbing when I made the above comment.
  • Alright I was fibbing and it is a blatant attempt at just that.
  • However I also wrote up this post to draw attention to what I feel are the very, very best of Escape Pod. Any sci-fi and/or fantasy fans not listening to Escape Pod should start and they should definitely start with the stories on this list!

WTF?!?!?  I’ve watched all 22 prior episodes for that <abbr title=”Piece Of Shit”>POS</abbr>?  Seriously, NBC what were you thinking?  You spent 22 episodes building up the confrontation between Peter and Sylar into a doomsday battle royale where the fate of the world or more acturately, the fate of the poor saps living in New York City lie in the balance.  And the best you can do is some minor telekinetics followed by a fist fight?  What a load of crap.

Oh and if Molly telling us about a man scarier than the Boogeyman (aka Sylar) was your idea of foreshadowing, then your idea of a pitching machine must be a M1 Abrams battle tank.  I know you want to build up some suspense to get people to come back for the next season, but this was entirely too heavy handed.

On the other hand, dropping Hiro into the past and that scene with Peter talking with his old (and let’s not forget dead patient) were good, interesting hooks.  Just having those bits and not the scary man would have been enough to draw people back.  I just don’t know if those 2 scenes were enough to draw me back next season after the craptacular ending you gave us for this season.

I just don’t know.