Super Bad

Like most red-blooded Chicagoans, I opted to watch the Bears stun Indianapolis (if not the world) last night instead of the 2008 MTV VMAs. From the looks of it, Superbad is the greatest movie of all time and what tha kidz are still txting about constantly, as two "highlights" of the show were a sketch starring Jonah Hill and a surprise appearance by McLovin. Unfortunately, "super bad" is a more apt description of the show overall... however, I did fast-forward thru it this morning for your reviewing pleasure, so here are some random reactions from when I shifted from FF to Play on my remote:

The much-ballyhooed opening by Britney Spears consisted of a staggeringly unfunny bit where the star from Superbad purported to be calming her nerves, but was instead trying to kiss her. Several times. Yes, she's gotten herself back into shape and looks great. Move on. And then we tracked her from the dressing room to the stage, where she kicked off the show by saying (I'm paraphrasing here) "Welcome to the show – it starts now." Uh, thanks.

Russell Brand is, well, not funny. It's kind of typical of these "rock & roll" comedians like him, Andrew Dice Clay, etc... despite all the leather and hairspray, it's still a guy with a mic telling hideous dick jokes.

Demi Moore forgot her microphone and I've forgotten why she's even here.

Michael Phelps is really really gonna bomb when he hosts SNL. The Greatest Swimmer Ever looks uncomfortable doing, well, anything else.

Katy Perry's overhyped performance of "Like a Virgin" turns out to be a 30-second bumper to a commercial. Huh.

Staging the show in the Paramount lot does provide from some cinematic entrances but mostly feels like a cost-cutting measure by MTV/Paramount corporate overlord Viacom.

Looks like Pink's nipples are, in fact, pink.

I guess Christina Aguilera really really wants to be Catwoman in the next Dark Knight movie. Or at least Black Cat in the next Spider-Man.

Britney Spears wins everything – either she had an incredibly great year that I completely missed, or MTV just really really needs her not to be a joke anymore. Unlike, you know, this show.

Peach Pit After Dark

Not only was the premiere of the new 90210 delayed until "a special time" because of a ballgame, the Cubs waited until the 11th to lose. So given that the show didn't start until after midnight, I'm gonna blog during the ad breaks in an effort to stay awake. SPOILERS ahoy!

Initial thoughts based on the pre-credits intro:

• The Brandon and Brenda characters are really annoying. One's over-the-top surly and one's over-the-top peppy. I mean, really annoying.
  
• I'd heard they'd be trying to out-Gossip the Girls from the East Coast, but I didn't quite expect it to feature a 9021-0ral scene before the credits rolled.

After the "rockin" update to the classic song:

• Hey look – It's the mom from Arrested Development! And she's drunk! Could be fun.
  
• Hey look – Andrea and Jesse's kid is the broadcaster for the campus news station! Decent joke about her looking 30.
• Hey look – apparently Kelly and the guy who showed up on Melrose Place eventually dated! When she was 10 or something? Huh? And now Kelly's little sister is back at West Bev, and she's cool because she likes some local band and that's how she bonds with the Brenda girl, whose name I can't remember yet.
• Hey look – Nat still works at the Peach Pit, but he can't work an espresso machine! Even tho he's had over a decade to learn!

Back from the break:

• Kelly's sister, who's known as "Silver," runs a bitchy blog and attacks the Brenda girl with it. OMFG she got so Facebooked!
  
• Lots of talk about lacrosse – along the "hey, the adopted black kid from Wichita's got some moves" and "hey, let's start a fight with the black kid so he gets kicked off the team because, you know, he's black!" lines.
• Arrested Development Mom again – still drunk! Making jokes about cracking eggs on her ass!
  
• Side note: so far, all the girls are perilously close to exhibiting Tori Spelling disease, where they're so thin that they look like unbalanced lollipops.
• The Brenda girl, who's been overacting her way thru the show, has now been cast in the school play, so she can really start chewing some scenery. Which she does by the mouthful. Huge, shouty mouthfuls. Oh dear.
  

Getting a little tired:

• Boy, couldn't see this plagarism plot coming... particularly with the "I wrote a paper just like the one that you're blowing off to go party at clubs like so many fifteen year-olds do" foreshadowing. More like fiveshadowing.
• Just realized that Silver is the girl who played the Daughter of Darkness on Reaper. Was better as the Spawn of Satan.

So where the hell is Brenda?:

• The omnipresent ads for the show "Privileged" look better than this one.
  
• Apparently the Brenda girl is named "Annie." Still can't remember the brother's name.
• Oh, and the girl that she outsung in the play is a druggie. How LA!
• And she broke up with her boyfriend from back in Wichita. I guess his name was Jason. She's sad, altho I can't imagine why, since... we never met him and only just learned his name.

On to Part II of the pilot:

• Full House girl is taking the news that Silk Stalkings guy husband fathered a son with his high school girlfriend pretty well – wonder how she'll hold up when she finds out that (I think) Kelly adopted him. Stay tuned for sweeps!
• Annie hasn't stopped overacting from the pilot. Warning signs that she may not be able to stop for the whole season.
• The rival lacrosse team has trashed the hallowed halls of West Beverly! Are our boyz gonna get them back? Tough to care because, well, it's about lacrosse.

During the break:

• The "live" check-ins from the launch party don't do viewers any favors. It's like walking a red carpet with an EPK.

These breaks are getting harder to sit thru, particularly when you come back to this:

• While the show hasn't shied away from branded integration (I think I need some Aquacurrent science – it's putting moisture where I need it!), they clearly couldn't land a videogame partner, as they just showed the worst fake on-screen gaming action in the history of fake on-screen gaming action.

Ok, maybe the breaks aren't so bad:

• As the extended trailer for Confessions of a Shopaholic looks pretty good for the Devil Wears Prada crowd.
• Oooh, we're back. And the scruffy cool teacher just botched his chance at asking out Kelly by referring to her son as "baggage." Oh, and the baggage is four and a half, so I guess he can't be Melrose Place's kid.
• It's Brenda! The actual Brenda! Who updates us on Brandon – apparently he's in Belize, still loves Megaburgers... and Kelly. Whuh? At this point, I'm really just wishing that they made a show about the original 90210 kids all growns up as opposed to this Superman Returnsish reboot/remake. The only plot point I gave half a damn about was Scruffy McTeachy giving Kelly flowers and a cap at the end of the show.
  

And I think that's the problem. Right now the cameos from fan faves are sorta fun and the rest of it's sorta... not. It may get better – the Gossip Girl pilot was pretty damn bad, and that's turned out to be tons of fun. It passed the Pilot Test in the sense that I stuck with the second episode since it was attached to the first. And I was invested enough in the original show to give this one a bit of a go, but right now it's a little bit of 9021uh-0.

Shark Tale

It's prolly too early to tell for sure, but Prison Break may just have jumped back on the proverbial mammal and ridden it to respectability. A quick recap – the first season was terrific, the second was surprisingly fun, and the third was a complete mess. Instead of smart spins on classics like Shawkshank or the Fugitive, a handful of the escapees got sent to some bizarro world version of a Panamanian prison called Sona and they rutted around in the mud trying to cobble together a plot amidst the writer's strike. About as entertaining as it sounds.

But it looks like Michael Scofield and the boys are back on track, as the show has been retrofitted into a "Prison's Seven" of sorts, as the characters you care about are sent on a videogame fetch quest to find the pieces of The Company's little black book in order to take them down. Speaking of characters you care about, Sara Tancredi is back from the dead (and a contract dispute) and Whistler, a con from Season 3 whose motivation, backstory or, you know, point, was never explained took a bullet pretty quickly after the credits rolled. And the entire Sona section of the saga was dismissed by mentioning that "it burned to the ground" during a phone call. Works for me.

Now, let me be clear about some stuff – the show strains credibility constantly... and that's being kind. The Feds turning to "Scofield's Seven" as their last best hope is (phrased kindly) unlikley. Watching T-Bag trek his way across the border, turning to cannibalism in the process, was a bit bizarre. The shadowy Company's goals are, well, absent, aside from "being evil." All that said, they've culled the cast to the main players and seem to be showing the ingenuity that made the show a hit in the first place. I'm in.

Not Much of America's Got Talent

"The biggest talent show in the world" is into the live performance shows, which is both good and bad. Fortunately, the producers have scaled up people's acts to fit a Vegas-type stage... unfortunately, many of them don't deserve to be there. Like, say, the first five acts that got cut tonight.

To recap, the first act cut was Ronnie B, who demonstrated a minor bit of weird "wacky foreigner" charm in the auditions, but showed his true colors as a sub-William Hung embarrassment last night. Next to pack his bags was a magician named Shimshi, who chose, strangely, to downgrade his act from sawing a woman into several parts to a card trick-slash-backflip. And toodle-oo to the DC Cowboys, an posse of middle-aged gay cowboy dancers. America then opted for brilliant tenor Neal E. Boyd as opposed to a Derrick Barry, a cross-dressing Britney Spears impersonator. And then host Jerry Springer manufactured some faux tension by having each judge name who they wanted to go on: The James Gang, an interesting if occasionally underwhelming blend of hip-hop and vaudeville or Elite, a little girl who dresses her dad and his friends up as pirates and pretends to beat them up. Tough call, huh?

Surviving until next week (in addition to Boyd and the James Gang) were Jessica Price, a sweet countryish girl who'd prolly be a better fit for American Idol, Extreme Dance FX, an unfortunately titled troupe who perform about as poorly as their name, and The Cadence, a Blue Man-type drum act that isn't, well, blue.

Now, to break down the rest of the "talent:"

• Beyond Belief proved that being the twenty-one best dancers in Mesquite, TX doesn't amount to much in, you know, the real world
• Paul Solas knocked out his version of "My Way," which was tremendously endearing and won over the judges, altho I think he's a better raconteur than singer
• Brutally bad Kazual demonstrated why no one's particularly interested Boyz II Men type groups anymore
• Next was Zooperstars!, a bizarre band of inflatable mascots that have a strangely engaging charm, if not a ton of actual talent
  
• Mini-von Trapp family castoffs The Wright Kids abandoned their bluegrass roots to cute their way through a nightmarishly psychedelic rendition of Daydream Believer
• One-joke loser Jonathon Arons performed his "I'm a dork with a trombone that tries to drop some sexy dance moves on ya'll" act, much to the delight (inexplicably) of the judges
• Iraq War veteran Daniel Jens soldiered on (sorry, couldn't resist) put away his uniform to bring out his version of "Every Breathe You Take," which proved that without the war story, he's unfortunately an ok bar singer... at best
• The Slippery Kittens performed a Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B burlesque, apparently in an effort to officially retire the term "milf"
• George the Giant, who had primarily carved out a niche as a seven-foot version of Jackass, bored the judges (and I'd wager the national audience) with schtick about escaping from a straight jacket while being mistaken for a pinata by a bunch of annoying kids and their schoolmarm
• Queen Emily closed the show by rearing back and belting an Aretha Franklin-style inspirational; good stuff, altho I'm less impressed than the judges

So. After the first half of the top forty have taken the stage, nothing's changed since the first time I've watched the show – at this point, it's Boyd's competition to lose. Stay tuned to see if anyone can topple this tenor. Or, you know – don't... I'll take care of it for you ;)

Best. Ads. Ever?

OMFG! I spose the VWs, Nikes and Absoluts of the world might say otherwise, but I'll give the CW this: they know what to do when reviewers give them lemons. Make lemonade... sweet, hot, sexy lemonade. And pour it all over some nearly naked twentysomethings.

Season 1's out on DVD and Season 2 starts next week. Tune in and turn on.

xoxo,
geo

Yes. Yes, I do.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

iTunes users, apparently. The landmark comic series has debuted as what Warner Bros. calls a "Motion Comic," meaning they've brought the story to life with animated art and voiceover narration. Is it worth a read... er, watch?

Contrary to popular opinion, I'm gonna say yes. In short, Watchmen is a superhero deconstruction set in an alternate 1985 where costumed crimefighters have been outlawed... and potentially targeted for murder. Oh, and it's also a staggering piece of visionary brilliance.

The motion comic's animation isn't extravagant – don't expect The Incredibles here – but for a generation comfortable with blurry YouTube clips and Flash webcomics, it makes the material fairly approachable. More is accomplished playing with pans and different depths of field than I imagined. The narration is a little less successful – I didn't realize it was a single actor until I heard him read as the first female character... or attempt to. And at some point, all these characters will be burned into our brain with the faces and voices of the upcoming film.

But until then, watching it chapter-by-chapter on your iPod isn't a bad way to go. Purists will claim that the only way to experience Watchmen is to turn the printed pages, but for those unlikely to venture into the corner comic shop, this makes for a decent download. Overall, it's nice to see the medium treated with respect, and frankly, if well-intentioned efforts turn new audiences on to comic classics, I'm all for it.