Here’s why it sucked:

Throughout the entire season Alpha is billed as their resident boogeyman – he’s brilliant, he’s deadly, and he’s out there somewhere plotting his revenge.  And then he appears and in the climatic episode…does nothing.  How is he a bad-ass? How is he a genius? How is he evil?  His ultimate plan basically boils down to making Echo love him.  He doesn’t try to destroy the Dollhouse, he doesn’t kill anyone (ok, he shoots a shackled waitress in the neck, but who hasn’t done that?), he doesn’t give any particularly inspiring evil speeches, and his fight with Echo is substantially shittier than her fight with Ballard a few episodes prior.  He’s a lovestruck, neurotic pussy.  Even his outro sucks: we don’t see how he gets away, and am I the only one tired of people running up fire-escape-style staircases while gunshots (that always miss) clang off the metal around them?

They make him into the passive villain, the one waiting in a lair for his plan to succeed – whether it be a mindwipe or a nuclear countdown – while our heroes race against the clock to stop him.  He just rambles and messes with his homemade chair.  Not to mention the fact that his big plan is somehow a colossal failure.  Not only did giving Echo forty something personalities not make her the least bit crazy or scatter-brained (somehow she became more lucid), but it also made her immediately aware of how crazy Alpha was.

Also, as a side note, I hate when things go crazy for no reason and then people explain exactly why they went crazy.  I like the unexplained.  2001 works when HAL becomes nuts for no reason at all, and then they fuck it up in 2010 by explaining how it was a programming error.  The Force works in Star Wars when it’s this intangible energy of the universe, and then they fuck it up in The Phantom Menace by explaining how it’s controlled by these little Medichlorian creatures or whatever.  Likewise, I prefer Alpha going nuts for no reason.  But instead they show us in painstaking detail how the circuitry got messed up and the chair accidentally imprinted him with all those personalities at once.  Why can’t things just go wrong?  Am I incorrect in thinking that’s more scary?

There were other shitty things about the episode – the lackluster shock of Whiskey’s reveal, Agent Ballard’s ridiculous compromise, the abundance of hill-billy accents – but I think the total failure to give us the villain we wanted in Alpha is what really tanked the episode.

Jumping on the back of the soon to come ironic t-shirt website (@ ironictshirtcomedy.com) I’m moving the blog over to a new server so thewedge.wordpress.com won’t be active anymore, instead use simpletool.net.  Update your RSS feeds and bookmarks accordingly.

I’m still ironing out some stuff with the new design, so comments over at the new site are welcome.

Another thought I had that was just a little too long for Twitter.

We seem to like our sports to be episodic (for lack of a better word). Think about basketball, baseball, and football, all have easily definable segments (possession, at bat, play) that either end with success (a basket, a hit, or a first down) or failure (turnover, out, or failing to convert/turnover). So if someone does something awesome, it 99% of the time leads to some sort of success. So, Americans are very used to episodic-type sports.

Soccer, on the other hand, doesn’t have these chunks, coupled with the lack of scoring, you’ve got this situation where a guy makes an awesome move at midfield and it essentially leads to nothing.   So they moved the ball 10 feet further down the field and then someone just took the ball away or the dude kicked it out of bounds. Soccer is, essentially, a single big episode, which requires a whole different kind of watching. Americans are so conditioned to viewing sports episodically that I doubt they’ll ever be able to appreciate soccer, in the same way that I doubt many people overseas will learn to appreciate American football because it’s so choppy to them.

Essentially, my argument is that it’s all baseball’s fault.  Baseball established the episodic-kinda format and basketball and football (boxing/mma too for that matter) reinforced it.

Oh and why didn’t I mention hockey, which is seemingly an exception to this episodic theme?  Well, 1.) because it doesn’t support my argument and 2.) I’d argue that hockey has never actually been a truly popular sport in the same way that basketball, baseball, and football (and even boxing back in the day) are.

If I could get footnotes to work, I’d insert this note here in support of the second argument: How many non-hockey fans can name who won the Stanley Cup last year?  I can’t, and I even watched a good chunk of the playoffs (go Flyers).  On the other hand, I imagine most people (or at least significantly more) could name who won the Super Bowl or the World Series.  So bam! take that hockey, in your face!

*Late Edit* Someone I was talking to brought up NASCAR.  True NASCAR doesn’t really fit the paradigm, but I also have a completely unscientific argument about how NASCAR is really fake-popular, so I think my point still stands.

End Soccer Talk, Begin Movie Talk

Got a chance to see Adventureland yesterday, it was good little movie.  One which is profoundly different from what the trailers would lead you to expect.  Instead of a raunchy sex comedy ala Superbad, it’s a really well done love story, which is really held together by Kristen Stewart’s(!) acting.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s still funny, but it’s also got all this very real (and quite good) romantic stuff in it. Heartily recommended.

The greatest downside of my movie-watching experience was the audience who, during the trailers, laughed uproariously at the jokes in the sure-to-be comic masterpieces of Dance Flick and The Proposal (the Ryan Reynolds-Sandra Bullock vehicle, not the sweet Australian western by the guy who’s directing The Road).  It wasn’t a bad audience otherwise, but come on, Dance Flick?

By the way, I’ve gone back through some old posts and noticed some really irritating typos (really self? fucking up their vs. there?).  Just wanted to apologize, I don’t really proofread these things, feel free to point out errors you find so I can fix them.

Remember how I sorta mini-ranted about how I’m entirely over the whole “suburbs suck” genre during my review of Little Children? No?  Well, you suck.  Anyway, I’m entirely over the genre.  Seriously, we fucking get it, beneath the bright facade of American suburban life lies a dark and depressing underbelly.  It’s just dreary bullshit at this point.

Revolutionary Road is directed by the guy who popularized the whole genre way back when with American Beauty, Sam Mendes.  I’m generally a fan of Mendes. He’s fantastic at crafting beautiful shots although sometimes his stories seem to lack, something, it’s hard to quantify (see: Jarhead).  Revolutionary Road, while well-made/shot/acted, has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the penis.  For realsies, it takes all the suburban angst bullshit from American Beauty (which, by the way, I didn’t really like all that much) and ratchets it up to 11.  I’m baffled by the fact that this movie is getting Oscar buzz (I believe Winslett won a Golden Glove for her performance, as if the Golden Globes meant shit), there isn’t a glimmer of fun in this movie.  I feel that a lot of the time critics confuse “sad as all hell” with “good” (see: 21 Grams, Babel).  So yeah, I didn’t really like this movie at all.  It’s beautifully shot, well acted, thoroughly well made, and devoid of anything that would incite me to recommend it to anyone.  If you want to watch a depressing movie, go watch Requiem for a Dream.  If you want to watch something about how the suburbs suck watch American Beauty, or, better yet, Mad Men (it even takes place in roughly the same time period as Revolutionary Road).  Avoid.

Stats don’t include today

Of course, Favre somehow made the Pro Bowl (which is ridiculous considering that Philip Rivers didn’t).  At least we don’t have to deal with 10,000 stories a day about how awesome he is until after the playoffs when the whole retirement drama starts again.  Hey, maybe he can fuck over another team then call their opponents and give them scouting tips!  But he’s just having fun out there, like a kid.

Yay! Halfway!

So, Ryan Reynolds is funny, Justin Long is funny, the guy who plays Todd Packer on The Office is funny (sometimes), the guy from Pushing Daisies and Boston Public is good (Chi something?  Chi McBride? looking stuff up is for losers) and a lot of people seem to think Anna Farris is funny (I don’t necessarily see what the big deal is).  The material in this movie, however, isn’t all that funny.  Basically, we have a bunch of talented, funny people in a movie that’s just not well written, like at all.  The result?  A really uneven and utterly forgettable movie.  One of the biggest problems is that a number of the recurring jokes are just awful, such as the angry girl who curses a lot, wow how edgy….seriously, great humor.

The sad thing is that this movie could have been better.  I mean dumb humor can be a lot of fun.  I freaking love Out Cold for reasons I can’t actually discern (I blame Theo, that scuzzy fuck).  But when dumb humor goes wrong, it’s just goddamn boring.  (Sidenote: Old Cold to the top of the queue) This movie doesn’t even really have much of a plot, it’s basically badly written joke only redeemable because the cast is good, badly written joke only redeemable because the cast is good, badly written joke only redeemable because the cast is good, big climatic scene, end.  Color me profoundly underwhelmed.  Skip it.

Since I’m perpetually lame, I spent my Halloween sitting in my apartment alone and watching scary movies, rather then attending one of the roughly 50 billion parties going on in Hyde Park.  While watching Aliens for roughly the millionth time, I realized that there has not been a single female action star worth discussing since Sigourney Weaver in the Alien series and Linda Hamilton in Terminator (that I can remember…I could be wrong).  This is, of course, not to say that there haven’t been female action heroes (that’s an awkward phrase but the best I can come up with right now) since those movies, just that they suck.  So why haven’t there been any iconic female action stars since James Cameron went off to make documentaries about the Titanic?

I think the key is realism.  Above all else, Weaver and Hamilton’s characters were REAL.  It’s the same reason the Die Hard is still the greatest action movie of all time, realism realism realism (compare to the newest Die Hard (which sucked) with super-McClane). Today we get 90 pound super model looking women (Milla Jovovich comes to mind) beating up 250 pound men who are supposedly bad-ass types.  This is utterly ridiculous.  Just because someone can do some sort of fancy spinning round kick doesn’t mean that they can take down 13 dudes who are all double their size.  Even with the best of these stars (Jovovich, Garner in Alias, etc.) look utterly fake.  Compare these to the two Cameron stars, I’ll speak mostly to Aliens because its the most recent I’ve seen.  Ripley is explicitly NOT some sort of uber bad ass grrrrrl.  She’s a civilian, initially lost among the military types that surround her.  At the same time, she’s competent and cool, a natural leader.  Therefore, it’s not weird that she’s able to quickly pick up on how to use a pulse rifle or that, thanks to her keeping a cool head, the soldiers (who have just been decimated) look to her for leadership.  Still, she’s never portrayed as more competent then the trained soldiers, it would make no sense for her to be more adept with machine guns and whatnot, so she’s not.  Neither Ripley nor Sarah Connor are presented as being able to decimate squads of baddies all by themselves with flashy (read: fake looking) martial arts moves.  Instead, they scrap.  You get the impression that, yeah, they might be able to beat up a huge dude in a fight, because they’d hit him in the face with a fucking chair and that is substantially more badass then a spinning heal kick.  Finally, there’s the looks thing.  Jennifer Garner manages to kick the shit out of 10 super spies without having a hair out of place, where Ripley it disheveled and dirt after about 5 minutes on the abandoned planet.  Plus, Hamilton and Weaver, while attractive, aren’t super models which helps as well.  They look like real people, real people who just happen to kick ass.  Special note also needs to be given to the character of Vasquez in Aliens. On the surface, she’s simply a tough grrrl stereotype.  However, if you actually look at her character, she’s damn realistic.  Of course she’s all machismo toughness, she has to be.  She’s the girl among men, she has to be tougher/better then them, that’s how you gain respect (see: Starbuck in BSG).  More proof that James Cameron kicks ass.

So, should this be a concern?  I mean Aliens and the Terminator movies (especially T2) are some of the greatest action movies of all time (Alien is, of course, one of the greatest horror movies of all time.  Then again, strong female leads are common in horror.  So that’s a different story altogether).  I think that it is a problem, and an alarming one.  Almost 20 years ago, the leads of the two biggest action movies were women.  Today, there’s been a regression.  Instead of competent, capable, and realistic women stars, we’re supposed to believe the Drew Barrymore is somehow badass.  These modern female characters aren’t real people, they’re just stereotypes…hot chicks who can beat people up.  I have no solutions to offer (aside from the fact that James Cameron needs to make more movies) but I think it’s an alarming trend to note.

An interesting sub-plot to the whole Sarah Connor/Ripley thing is the fact that both are inherently motivated by maternal instincts (Connor to her own son, Ripley to Newt).  I don’t really feel qualified/inclined (after all this is just a blog post not a freaking essay) to speak to that really, but it is interesting.

Shit, I just came up with a good modern action heroine….Uma Thurman as the Bride in Kill Bill, still I think she’s closer to the Cameron realistic heroine mold then the Charlie’s Angel sort, plus Tarrantino is a great filmmaker.  So, my point stands.

Good horror movies are few and far between.  It’s much easier to crank out a 10 million dollar shit PG-13 slasher movie that will make 50 million because idiot teenagers will watch anything, then it is to spend the same amount of money on something unique and challenging that may make very little, or in the case of this movie get utterly shafted (because it was too gory? I forget the story behind the whole deal) and barely get released in theaters.  And it’s a shame really, because this movie is pretty darn good, and not even just on the sliding scale of genre movies  (mild digression: good horror movies of the last couple years: The Descent (which is freaking excellent) 1408, The Mist, and I can’t think of any other, feel free to put some in the comments).

Based on a Clive Barker story from the Book of Blood collection, Midnight Meat Train is the story of a photographer who discovers some shenanigans going on in the subway, shenanigans which mostly involve Vinnie Jones (digression: check out the /filmcast after dark episode with Paul Scheer for some awesome Vinnie Jones anecdotes) killing the everliving shit out of people (seriously he knocks a dudes eyeballs out with a hammer).  (Digression: does anyone know how to do footnotes in wordpress? is that even possible?  I mean not to totally rip off the late-great by some accounts (although I have mixed feelings) David Foster Wallace but footnotes are cool.)  Anyway, while this movie isn’t exactly scary on the same level as The Descent (seriously, watch the fucking Descent), it’s more gory scary, there are some pretty freaky parts, including some jump scares which actually work (as opposed to the cat jumps out at you every ten seconds scares of some movies, such as every J-horror remake since The Ring)  There was also some attempted psychological horror, with the protagonist sort of losing it as he pursues the mystery deeper, but it was short-circuited a bit by the weakest part of the film, the quick breakdown of his relationship with his fiance/girlfriend.  It really feels like 1-3 scenes between them were cut out of the movie, which didn’t really seem necessary because the film doesn’t exactly drag at 90ish minutes.  Holy shit, I just looked at the wikipedia page for this movie and realized that it’s directed by the guy that did Versus.  I will now reprint my review of Versus, which was btw my second ever blog post:

It kicks ass on every level imaginable but don’t take it from me, take it from this brief plot summary:

Two guys escape from prison. One is a Yakuza badass the other is simply an uber badass. They meet up with Yakuza-badasses Badass Yakuza friends and non-Yakuza badass gets into a kung fu fight with them. Then zombies show up, zombies with machine guns, violence ensues. Soon afterwards, two crazy cops with more machine guns and an evil 500 year old wizard/demon/badass guy also show up and everybody start machine gunning, kung fu fighting, and occasionally whipping out samurai swords and stabbing each other. This goes on for about two hours.

If that description didn’t make you want to see the movie then I hope you die. In a fire.

no wonder Midnight Meat Train is good.  Yeah, so this movie has a lot of gore and scary bits.  That should pretty much tell you if it’s worth renting or not.  If you’re a Meredith-level wimp, then don’t, if you’re a fan of horror, rent this movie

During this election season, which is alternately boring and depressing the hell out of me, one thought keeps bubbling into my head.  Here it is:

All right, at this point most people agree that George W. Bush has been a pretty terrible president right? And that the Iraq war has been pretty much a quagmire that was poorly planned and run from the start? So, if this is true then surely you have to give some credit to the people who predicted this 8 and 5 years ago right? The people who said, “Bush will be a terrible president” and “The Iraq was is a really bad idea”. So now, when those same people are saying “Voting for John McCain is a really bad idea, Sarah Palin is a terrible choice for vp, etc. etc.” wouldn’t it be a good idea to listen to them? I mean they’ve got a good track record on the whole “being right” thing.  Certainly better then the “Iraq war will pay for itself”, “greeted as liberators”, “Thank god Bush is our president not Gore” crowd.  Maybe, just maybe, this time we should give them the benefit of the doubt?

Just something to think about.

Yeah, I realize I haven’t written anything since the 1st of June.  I suck.  Basically twitter and tumblr have sapped all my desire to write, not that the things I wrote were particularly interesting.  I’ll try to do better in the near future.  For serious.