…

I’m gonna refrain from saying much about it, it had some good points but was overall pretty disappointing. Especially that 150,000 years later bit with Head Six and Head Baltar which was so goddamn cheesy and heavy handed it would have been too much even for a crappy children’s movie. 

Also, wow, they answered none of the burning questions/plot holes (io9’s list is better than anything I could have come up with since they actually like the show). 

I think I’m gonna go rewatch Babylon 5 for the 4th time now…

[EDIT] In other news, this week’s Dollhouse was pretty fucking awesome. Though I’m kind of dissaponted that the Echo-tampering thing appears to be legitimate tampering and not a massive keikaku (would have made perfect sense to pull that on FBI boy who’s name I still don’t remember to manipulate him). Anyway, sleeper Active was cool, but I called it early in the episode (plus, her getting killed like that would have been way too depressing for a mid-season episode on a mainstream primetime show) not that it makes it less interesting as a plot point. And the Active-rape sub plot was actually pretty interesting (it seems like one of those things that someone might bring up as a “hurr durr that’s unrealistic because someone would totally take advantage of that” kind of  thing and they just went for it

The only other thing I can think to whine about with this episode (which again was awesome because it wasn’t fucking filler shit) is FBI guy’s reaction to seeing Echo in the cult. Given how similar the ideas of someone kidnapped and brainwashed in a cult and in the Dollhouse are, I was kind of surprised that it led him to the conclusion that it did–because honestly I was expecting that to totally throw him off the trail for at least an episode or two–Oh… She was brainwashed by a cult, that explains it. Maybe this Dollhouse thing really just is an urban legend…<–this sort of line of thinking, before seeing her somewhere else or something and coming back to it (really it’s less to do with the way this particular episode was structured and more the way it fits into everything else so far, should have shuffled the cult episode an episode or two earlier into the schedule maybe).

Bored and I’ve been wanting to talk about some of the stuff I’ve seen lately but none of it really deserved it’s own post. Anyhow.

Watchmen: Talked about this a bit in my spring break post. Still don’t know what to think about the movie really. I think I need to reread the GN and rewatch the movie again…

DMC: The movie was pretty disappointing. Might have been more fun if I hadn’t already seen the anime, but it feels like they gutted the story to make it more mainstream. The whole band-becoming-legend, which was easily the bulk of what was covered in the anime and where most of the funny came from, was glossed over. It really bothered me because it got into a telling-not-showing thing there since the movie decided to focus on Negishi coming to terms with his double life than really expanding on the band or developing his Krauser persona. So on some level it ended up just feeling like the whole metal/band thing was just an extraneous gimmick in the movie. On it’s own the movie’s pretty cute an quirky, but ultimately it’s pretty standard story and loses all the charm and character of the anime (and presumably the manga, I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet so I can’t comment). It’s also decidedly less funny than the anime. It’s supposed to be a comedy, not a romantic comedy! :(

Kings: I liked the pilot. The premise of the show’s pretty interesting and it’s nice to see a POLITICS show that’s not dependent on a strictly real-world setting. I don’t have much to say about it yet really, but I’ve got high hopes for it, especially after reading that the first season is–get this–already planned out. Shocking, I know! Also, I don’t see why people are throwing such a fit about the butterfly crown scene at the end of the pilot. I think it fit with the tone of the show just fine (without having to read too much into the scene like I’ve seen some people doing to have it imply that God is meant to be a “real” presence in this universe either). It’s got an epic tone (and that’s “epic” as in the Illiad not “epic lulz”) and that sort of “heavy-handed” symbolic foreshadowing is to be expected. I dunno… Is there something wrong with me if I didn’t think it was stupid and cheesy? It kind of reminds me of space opera, only not in space. Pretty sure that’s why I like it so much already. 

BSG: Last episode’s got me really :\ The pacing’s gotten especially retarded and I don’t see how they could possibly resolve everything satisfactorily in just one episode even if it’s 2x as long. I mean, I enjoyed a good bit of the content in the episode, particularly the flashbacks (except the Rosalin stuff because it feels like we’ve seen her do the same bullshit so many fucking times we really did not need an that painfully long scene of her freaking out in the fountain, it was just a waste of time given that it’s the penultimate episode and added nothing to her character that we haven’t already seen), but the flashbacks were just so… inappropriate given what was going on. I’m not even going to comment on how absurd the concept of the suicide mission seems (okay, I lied, here’s my whine: we already dismantled half the ship, which is all of a sudden falling apart due to stress from jumping which we’ve never seen or heard of before, but we’re going to take it on a suicide mission to the Cylon base taking all our Vipers and most skilled pilots with us to certain doom to save a little girl not even considering that undertaking this mission will likely piss off the “rebel” Cylon faction, which seems to be a whole hell of a lot bigger and more powerful than the “proper” one and probably result in them resuming their extermination efforts–which will probably be a lot easier for them after we’ve thrown all our defenses at them except for the one rebel baseship AND THIS MAKES PERFECT SENSE). 

Dollhouse: This week’s episode looks interesting. I’ve started getting bored with it after episode 3 because it started getting really formulaic. I dunno. I like science boy and I like the theme song and atmosphere of the show, but other than that I’m pretty :| about it right now. 

Also, in my shitty Japanese Film class we started watching The Realm of the Senses in class on Tuesday. Really, it’s just a pretentious artsy porno so far (the dialogue’s like, all generic porn dialogue, but the subtitles keep rendering lines a lot less explicit/cheesy/trashy than they actually are which is really lol, like “Put it in!” becomes “Please take me now!” I know, I know there’s something to be said for proper translation not being super literal, but the thing is it’s generic porn dialogue for the most part, it’s not elegant and people don’t say things “Please take me now!” in porn… usually). Naturally because its’ got fancy camera angles and a stupid pretense of a plot (Ooh, the female lead is hypersensitive to sex! Where have I heard that before? Seriously, there’s a line she has that goes something like “The doctor said I was especially sensitive to sex.”) it’s not “porn” it’s “art.” Of course, the wiki page will lead you to believe this is some whirlwind romance story or something, but there’s about as much of that as you’d see in your average porn-pretending-to-have-a-plot. Anyhow, for our final paper one of our  topic options is to talk about genre, so I think I’m gonna write about Japanese porn because that’s amusing and will probably make my idiot teacher really uncomfortable (or she’ll think it’s brilliant and edgy :D).

So, started watching Dollhouse lately given all the hype and that it’s a new SF series. It’s pretty interesting so far. I’m liking the structure so far–it’s pretty early to say, I’ll admit, but only 3 episodes in and it seems to have struck a pretty good balance between episodic and arc plot (A-story: episodic; B-story: arc) which should work in its favor in the long run. Also, while having a semblance of an arc plot it seems pretty open-ended and for a show with high cancelation prospects that’s probably a good thing. 

Anyway, right now my only whine is that the main chick, Echo, is kinda meh (guess it makes sense given the situation) and I’d kind of been hoping they’d exploit the premise and episodic structure to have multiple leads (like, you know, cycling through a small group of actives as leads rather than it always being Echo). But again, we’re only 3 episodes in and anything can happen. 

I was kind of hesitant about the show because it’s Joss Whedon. I can’t say I’ve disliked his more recent stuff (Firefly was pretty good, and so was Dr. Horrible), but his obnoxious fanbase and what I’ve seen of Buffy still put me off a bit. 

Anyhow, I’d recommend giving it a look if you’re bored (first three eps are on Hulu if you’re in the US). So far it’s better than the other shit that’s being passed off as SF right now (LOST/Heroes/BSG, I’m looking at you).