Category Archives: television

Pocket Chewbacca

On Saturday night, things were wild here. Husband had a gig and I read about Godzilla until my brain was full.

Then, it was time for the television.

At MAPACA, one of the my co-panelists presented an interesting paper on the Paranormal Activity movies, so they were on my mind.

I really enjoyed the first 2 movies. (I didn’t hate the 3rd and 4th, I just didn’t like them as much as the first ones). Still, I like the way each film in the franchise plays with narrative tropes and comments on the social and technical aspects of image production. manipulation of the gaze, spaces of resistance, power, and other popular culture studies stuff.

Movies 3 & 4 are available on Netflix and thus were easily and immediately available to me.

Most importantly, movies 3 and 4 are spooky but not super-scary.

Unless you’re home alone.

And by “you,” I mean “me.”

One time I scared myself witless after watching an episode of Supernatural that I’d seen at least half a dozen times.

To be fair, I also scared myself witless once watching the Dick Van Dyke Show.

True story.

But back to Saturday…

I chose Paranormal Activity 4, which was more entertaining than I remembered but, as I also remembered, not particularly scary.

Later that night, just as we were falling asleep, there was a loud, strange sound that seemed to emanate from the living room.

It only happened once, so we’ve decided to believe it was some air in the pipes.

(We aren’t concerned about the sounds on the roof. They aren’t in the attic, and even if they were, we know those are just squirrels. Or demons. Or demon squirrels).

We’d never set up video surveillance a la Paranormal Activity. Not because of the potential for disappearing and leaving behind mysterious footage, but because of the potential for disappearing and leaving behind evidence of early morning conversations like the one that happened this morning when my alarm went off.

Instead of hitting snooze, I yelled at it like a petulant teenager. “Shut UP, Godzilla!”

Disdain dripping from his voice, Husband replied, “It’s NOT Godzilla. It’s CHEWBACCA!”

Then I hit the snooze and we both went back to sleep.

He’s right, of course. It’s Chewbacca. It’s always Chewbacca.

I don’t even have a Godzilla alarm. That would be ridiculous.

While I was finishing this post, Husband and I watched that Dick Van Dyke Show episode, “A Ghost of A. Chantz,” on Netflix.

It’s still creepy and fun.

You know, it’s probably technically the first found-footage type horror movie/tv show. Huh.

Here, I found it for you on YouTube!

The Dick Van Dyke Show: “A Ghost of A. Chantz”

NBC’s Dracula

I haven’t had time to read any reviews for the new Friday night TV show, Dracula, so I kept forgetting to look forward to its debut. I haven’t noticed much publicity for the show and Husband doesn’t think he’d have been aware of it at all if I hadn’t Tivo’d it.

In this respect, and so many more, this show has lived down to our every expectation.

There aren’t any spoilers here, because nothing happened in the pilot episode.

Nothing.

This show makes Dr. Who seem like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

(Husband just pointed out to me that Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is actually known as the Wind in the Willows to people who were not raised by wolves and/or Disney. And also that I must be thinking of the ride, because the movie Wind in the Willows is rather slow moving).

Not the point.

There is no point – not to my story, not to this show.

As soon as you accept that, you will enjoy Dracula. It’ll be on for at least 5 more weeks while they burn off the investment, so go ahead, don’t be afraid to commit to at least a fling.

With its elaborate sets and drawn-out scenes of minimalistic yet overwrought dialogue, punctuated by lengthy, action-less sequences where the actors may actually just be reading a dictionary to one another, Dracula is like a 1960s House of Hammer summer-stock performance of Dark Shadows.

Sample scene:

“Insatiable. I-N-S-A-T-I-A-B-L-E.”

“Unquenchable. U-N-Q-U-E-N-C-H-A-B-L-E.”

Okay. They weren’t really spelling the words after they said them, but it would have livened things up just a scosche if they had.

The original Dark Shadows was a terrible high-camp show that ran from 1966-1971. Each revival since has been met with teeth-gnashing and displays of nostalgia and expressions of a woefully misguided belief that the show was even remotely “good.”

Who knows, perhaps Dracula will be able to leverage its flagrant disdain for quality into an equally long run!

The characters all look alike, which is a problem because we can’t figure out who anyone is or which side they’re on. Maybe there aren’t any sides.

I have no idea.

I’m pretty sure that Dracula, now calling himself Grayson, has been resurrected in 1896 and is pretending to be a rich American inventor.

And he’s out for revenge. Or he’s passionate about patent law. Or his pants are too tight.

I really have no idea.

Husband says Dracula/Grayson is definitely out for revenge. He hopes Dracula/Grayson will attend Revenge Academy, like Emily Thorne apparently did before taking revenge on characters named Grayson on the show Revenge.

Maybe there’ll be a cross-over story arc! Revenge has gotten incredibly tedious, so that would be pretty great.

Dracula and a major character who looks just like many of the other characters who may or may not be main characters are having a dramatic conversation. We can’t remember who this guy is or what his name is, so Husband is referring to him as “Beardy” because he has a beard. We missed most of the scene because we were debating whether he was the character who’d had his throat ripped out in an earlier scene or if he just looked like him.

In closing, this is a bland show. It’s like low-sodium saltines. But with the application of just a tiny bit of emoting and Acting, it could be like low-sodium saltines with Nutella on top.

Maybe. I don’t know. Much like the pilot of Dracula, this post has run out of steam and is just staring longingly into the camera, sighing at irregular intervals.

Bow down to our Kaiju-kid overlords

My trolls are making me tired so I’ve closed comments for now.

I actually did this a week ago, after I deleted most of the brawl on the Tomorrow People post because it was getting into territory that was both morally and legally murky. Plus the pseudoscience was causing me pain.

I left the first few comments, because that’s the kind of quality nonsense that makes life worth living.

Not really, but they weren’t abusive, so I left them.

Plus, when the radioactive children of California rise up and destroy us all, we can look back at that post and those comments with regret and remorse that we didn’t act to save humanity from our Kaiju-kid overlords when we had the chance.

The first time you hear Blitzer refer to these mutant children as “Kaiju-kids” you just remember that you heard it from me first!

The Tomorrow People

250px-The_tomorrow_people I’m amused by all of the reviews of the CW’s reboot of the 1970s ITV series The Tomorrow People that ho-hum the new show for copycatting all the other human-mutant shows of the last decade.

I’m super-excited by this reboot. In the early 80s Nickolodeon ran the original 1973-79 series endlessly. I loved this show in all sort-of-awful glory. Loved.

The new show does, from the previews I’ve seen, appear to rip off the slow-mo bullet-dodging FX of the Matrix and it’s kin.

To be fair, the original show was actually slow-mo, too. The show itself, not the effects. Mostly because there weren’t a whole lot of effects. But the plot, the pacing, and the dialogue? Super-slow-mo, baby.

And yet, I loved it. Have I mentioned that?

Here’s a Tomorrow People wiki that seems to have a fair amount of information.

Holy shit, did you know there were 16 seasons of the original show? Sixteen. 1973-2006, with some gaps, of course. I wonder if anything ever happened, plotwise?

Breaking Bad: A retrospective (no spoilers)

There aren’t any spoilers because we’re about 3 seasons behind on our Breaking Bad viewing.

Nevertheless, I’m posting my show-concluding thoughts and feelings because it’s the law.

Here’s what I thought was the funniest thing about Breaking Bad: we couldn’t get any of our friends to watch it during the first season.

The people we know who are most obsessed with the show now were the ones who were most horrified by it back in 2008.

Wait, that’s not really funny, is it? It just means that we’re terrible failures as influencers.

Great. Now I’m depressed.

Thanks a lot, Vince Gilligan.

We didn’t quit watching because we lost interest, we just didn’t have time. I’m sure there’s a binge in our future.