I feel like I've died and gone to indie
Jun. 18th, 2009 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexsarllIf 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.
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.
