I feel like I've died and gone to indie

[alexsarll]

If you like Seth Rogen films, Will Ferrell films, basically any of the good comedies that have been coming out of America lately, you must see The Hangover. Went into it somewhat uncertain - against all those interlocking sets of funny guys, I didn't really recognise anyone in this except the dad from Arrested Development. But it is hilarious. There's little I can say without spoiling it, and you probably know whether you'll like it from the set-up; four guys go for a stag night in Vegas. They wake the next morning to find the room trashed, a tiger in the bathroom, and the groom missing. They have no idea what happened in between.

Raced through the last season of Battlestar Galactica this week and can't help but feel disappointed. So it turns out that everything since finding the first 'Earth' was a fake-out; combine that with the sudden, pointless set of Caprica flashbacks and it's like they were trying to take tricks from Lost, and that's not a good school.
It's not that I minded the show moving away from War on Terror analogies into a more spiritual enterprise; after New Caprica, the former strand had probably been taken as far as it could go. But does that mean we have to end with a shaggy god story and a bunch of back to nature bollocks? Back to nature bollocks which we know, and the postscript at least acknowledges, was totally pointless, because we are the human race which resulted, and are we any better than them? No, we are not, a point hammered home with that really naff 'advances in robotics' newsreel - DO YOU SEE? Personally, I think a more interesting final note would have been Doc Cottle's face the first time he had to watch a child die because he'd bought into this hippy crap. Like everyone else on the fleet did - which is interesting given I don't remember a single decision in the rest of the show in which there wasn't some genuinely uneasy and compelling debate on a policy matter, normally brilliantly realised (the abortion episode, for instance, was a masterpiece, exactly the sort of thing I expected from The West Wing but never found).
As for Admiral Hoshi...when there was the lead-in with 'someone the whole fleet can respect', and then we get him, it just emphasised the artifice of every surviving character we actually cared about going on the final assault. Like how in crappy old Star Trek every character of any rank would go on the landing party and leave the Second Engineer in charge of the ship - such professionalism! At least your man the dodgy lawyer made for a worthy President.
Fundamentally, like so many shows (except the ones prematurely cancelled), it was too long. Too many betrayals and reversals, too much manufactured tension, too much running around corridors. It never entirely lost it, of course; Adama "saying goodbye to both your women at once" was heartbreaking, Lee never lost my sympathy and never stopped winding me up, and the last battle was glorious. Nor did any single episode ever feel as spectacularly pointless as eg Season 3's 'Harold Shipman In Space!' - but I'm still left looking at this and the last season of The Shield and feeling that US network TV will never be able to produce a masterpiece.

Finally succeeded in seeing the Wellcome Collection yesterday. I had expected something more thoroughly medical in theme, but between the sex toys and torture implements and pictures of Wellcome himself in fancy dress with the 'tache to end all 'taches, I conclude that it's not that far from Sir John Soane's, just with a little more pretence towards being something other than one rich bloke's collection of crazy stuff.

Comments

[renegadechic.livejournal.com]

i must say i did feel the ending to be rather... "well we all know what should happen, but this is what the networks want and i suppose it gives us scope for some kind of shitty spin off somehow rather than some definitive finality". it was a cop out. it miss out soo many opportunities for explaining things, the flashback episode was utterly tedious, by the very end all the characters with any substance had been castrated and if they weren't they just fell off the planet with little to no explanation. the final five ended up building up to essentially nothing. what cavil did at the end was hilariously pointless and somehow they seemed to have little to no story to tell for most of the season yet somehow managed to neglect going into any details about ANY of the important things we could have learned about i.e. all the starbuck stuff. it managed to avoid telling us anything really which really frustrates me. having said that though, it is not like i was dissatisfied with the series. i enjoyed it a lot... i guess in hindsight i do just feel very dissatisfied with the ending.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Starbuck was another 'angel', clearly. Which is fine, but yes, it does leave a lot of unanswered questions (why did she appear to everyone, as against the Baltar and Six angels?). I don't think everyone was sold out - the Old Man was still very much himself right to the 'cottage' scene, for one.
The one question that still bugged me and got no resolution - what was the story with 'All Along The Watchtower'? Is Dylan actually the Cylon God?

[exliontamer.livejournal.com]

See, I thought The Hangover was a bit flat really; it kind of had loads of set-ups that I thought should have been funny, but it never really hit the mark for me. I have no idea how it came to be described as "THE FUNNIEST COMEDY OF THE YEAR" or similar on the poster! I did like the relationship development with the dentist dude and his partner though.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

And apparently he really has no tooth there! But yeah, that was probably the strongest emotional arc, and a nice corrective to all the vaguely right-wing and pro-family stuff that can creep through under the guise of comedy lately.
I know comedy is very much a personal and idiosyncratic thing - nobody's ever going to convince anyone else that a scene is or isn't funny - but Aug and I both started out somewhat sceptical, because there's not a laugh for the first, what, five or ten minutes? But then the dad tips the groom a wink about Vegas and from then on, we were just creasing up more and more.

Oh, on an entirely unrelated note, we could do with some more milk.

[exliontamer.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I did find it funny in places, just not as hilarious as everyone else did. Maybe I was in a particularly grumpy mood..

I shall see to the milk problem forthwith!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Whereas I clearly reserved that mood for BSG.
Thinking about it, I'm not sure if I've wanted to see any other comedies so far this year, so it might have won by default.

[catsgomiaow.livejournal.com]

Haha I am NOT READING yr post or comments bcs apparently I have about 4 episodes of BSG to go and am still OMG WTF GAETA!!??! at the moment. I thought I had another whole lovely season to go (season 5) but it turns out that season 4 is two seasons, even though they're both called season 4, only sometimes they're called season 4 and season 5, or something. Anyway. I'll be back in about 3 days!

You're allowed to spoil me on this tho: does Apollo get any less boooooooooooooring in the last few eps? Because seriously GO AND DO SOME MORE FANCY FLYING. All this doing politics in a cheap suit is rly getting on my wick. I suspect the answer is no though :(

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Sometimes Season 4 and The Final Season, but yes, it was a bit silly to do a Complete Season 4 box-set which blatantly wasn't.
I like Lee! Though if you liked him getting a bit more active during the whole Gaeta fiasco (notice how he became devious and evil at almost exactly the point we learned he was bi? I could so get annoyed about that if I were the sort who gets offended by such things), you might also enjoy some of what's coming.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It was rather cheeky of them, as was including Razor after having sold it separately. And does the final one include the 'Face of the Enemy' webisodes? Because s3 definitely didn't have 'The Resistance'.

[catsgomiaow.livejournal.com]

As long as there's a nice big whizz-bang bit with lots of spaceships zooming about and some big explosions I'll be happy. I am a woman of sophisticated tastes ;)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I like BSG (at its best) for the nuanced exploration of political and moral issues, which it handled far more deftly than supposedly smart mainstream shows operating in the same area. But the explosions and space dogfights and fancy people definitely helped.

[stephens.livejournal.com]

I must admit I thought the hangover was a bit rub really, was hoping for better. It had the odd good joke but I thought it was very predictable and not that entertaining. Role Models was x10 better.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Aug tells me that was good, but I just found the trailers really offputting - and that they couldn't find a better poster quote than 'like watching monkeys fling poo at each other on Youtube' really didn't bode well.

[stephens.livejournal.com]

Both the trailer and the posters put me off seeing it, but the fact that it has Paul Rudd in it and the empire review swayed me, and I'm v glad I did see it. That said the empire review of the hangover swayed me to see it and I hated it. Ho hum.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Magazine reviews - and I'm thinking SFX here as well as Empire - always seem to err on the side of kindness. I find it very suspicious, and it's one of the reasons I don't generally read magazines.

[moleintheground.livejournal.com]

Cinema reviews are bullshit. For me with flims and records you need to identify people involved in it you like, and follow the trail.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

This is my general policy - but every so often you find a new trail. I mean, what made me check out Zoolander? But most US comedies I've liked this century somehow follow from there.

[moleintheground.livejournal.com]

Still, good when he does himself in though.

The end did leave a sour taste, but then the whole thing, to me, was a bible story, written by bible heads. Frequently amazing, sometimes meandering, but philosophically and morally full of shit.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't intrinsically mind Bible-derived stories, so long as they're handled well - I'm not the sort of Dawkinist nutjob who's sworn off CS Lewis for lying to the kids. I just thought that the conclusion here was clumsily christian, and hippyish with it.
(Though I was intrigued by the line about how 'it' doesn't like being called 'god')

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

One of the ultimates in "Rich bloke's collection of crazy stuff" is Charles Paget Wade's extremely eclectic collection of stuff at Snowshill Manor.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Should I ever be in the area, I will definitely check that out.