Being Human: Episode 2×2 Were-cap

Ahhhh OMG you guys this show is getting so gooooooood! Click for spoilers!

Moneyball

Okay well I  don’t really know what to say about this movie because I know just enough about baseball to know that I don’t know anything about baseball, and I haven’t read the book that it’s based on so I can’t compare it to that; I guess the only thing I can say is that I really liked it even though I feel like on paper there’s no way Moneyball should be entertaining.

First of all, pretty much the whole movie is guys sitting around talking about baseball. Like, that’s literally all they do. Which was cool with me, because I love baseball, but I don’t really have any way to gauge how much a non-fan would enjoy it.

Glee Crap Recap: Yes/No

SPOILERS.

Ahh Glee I hate you so much right now but I can’t stop watching because Darren Criss looks so freaking good in a bow tie and next time they’re singing Michael Jackson songs whyyyy are you doing this to me please just stop.

Being Human: Episode 2×1 Were-cap

Last night’s season two opener, “Turn This Mother Out,” definitely did not disappoint, and set Being Human up for what looks to be an interesting year. Spoilers ahead…

Being Human: Season 1 Were-cap

Being Human is one of those shows that I always meant to check out but never actually took the time to, so yesterday’s all-day season one marathon on SyFy, leading up to the season two premiere last night, gave me the perfect opportunity. (N.B. I am aware of the existence of the UK version, but haven’t seen it, so I’ll just be talking about the US one.) And once I started watching it I literally couldn’t stop. The show’s set-up sounds like the start of a bad joke: There’s a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost, and they’re roommates. The seemingly simple formula is, of course, quickly complicated by the activities of the vampire mafia, the werewolf’s family problems, and the ghost’s unresolved issues with her (living) former fiance, among other things; I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to go into season two without catching up with the first one. 

Blueprints of the Afterlife

All I really want to say is everyone go read Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot. Yeah, it’s that good. I got turned on to the novel when I came across a lengthy excerpt on io9 back in December and couldn’t get the weird post-apocalyptic images (a mass exodus of RVs from Phoenix, Arizona when it becomes too hot for habitation four months out of the year; memory cards to store recollections of unpleasant events that you don’t want to carry around in your head anymore; people who become puppet-like “embodiments” of others via hackable biological implants) out of my mind for weeks. But seriously, I suggest skipping the excerpt and getting your hands on a copy if you can; it’s such a great and weird and creepy story, I definitely recommend it for fans of sci-fi in general and the post-apocalyptic in particular.

War Horse

Okay well I don’t have much to say about this movie other than I had zero interest in seeing it after watching the trailer and I liked it way more than I thought I would. It was actually engaging the entire time even though it was more than two hours long, and yeah, I cried.

People‘s review said that the horse gave a very emotional performance, which sounds weird but actually is probably the best sentence to sum up War Horse. Like, obviously any movie where an animal is the main focus is going to be emotional, because you would be a heartless jerk to not root for an animal, and probably at some point in the movie that animal is going to get hurt even though it never did anything to deserve it, and it will be the saddest thing ever. Afterwards I could only think of this quote from the tv show Party Down, when cynical writer Roman offers his perspective on whether stories should strive to be “moving”:  ”You know what would be moving? If there were a kitty and a panda on the Titanic. And they had cancer. And fell in love.”

World War Z

Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is definitely unlike any other zombie story out there; thought-provoking and scary in an insidious, gnawing way that definitely makes it worth the read. As the subtitle suggests, the book is set up as a compilation of eyewitness interviews conducted with people from around the world and from all walks of life. The result is a truly global picture of life during and after a full-scale zombie apocalypse, a remarkable feat of world-building.

To be honest, when I was about three-quarters of the way through the book, I was sure I was going to end up not liking it. The anecdotes were starting to feel a little gimmicky, with one too many twist endings, and although Brooks packs in a lot of clever ideas I was worried about the lack of a main protagonist to identify with and a resulting inability to emotionally connect to the events being portrayed. But the last chapter packed the emotional punch I was missing, allowing several of the most memorable characters to share their final thoughts on how the zombie attacks had affected their lives, and the world at large. Beyond that, the last chapter also left me as a reader with the uneasy feeling that “World War Z” might not actually be over but only temporarily suspended, the undead biding their time, waiting in the dark to catch humanity off guard again.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

Oh my gosh you guys I loved this movie so much I started blogging again just so I could blog about how much I loved this movie. I pretty much figured going in that it would be action-packed, but I didn’t realize how tense it would be–there were like four times during the course of the movie when I was sure Ethan Hunt was not gonna make it–or how funny. So yeah, there were lots of explosions and guns and stuff, like any action movie, but the fact that Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was both tension-filled and hilarious was what made it the most entertaining thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Skins, Glee

Just watched the series premiere of MTV’s Skins remake. I’ve been suspicious since I found out about it, since the original version is killer, but the commercials were intriguing so I decided to give it a shot.

It was effing terrible.

Like, why wouldn’t MTV just try to get the rights to air the British version instead of going to all the trouble of a sub-par remake?

I mean, I’m super into the concept, with all the suburban discontent and disaffected youth and all, but it just seems fake. Like, really, you’re gonna censor it every time someone says “fuck”? Really? And you’re tryin to be all edgy and everything, but bro, srsly. You’re on MTV. Right after “Jersey Shore.” I could go to mtv.com right now and watch a  ”bonus webisode.” Mmm, commercialization.

So edgy.

It also seemed like too much of a direct translation, which didn’t really work, because I feel like high school is a pretty culturally idiosyncratic experience. In contrast to the relative universality of being an office drone, which maybe helped “The Office” remake not feel so forced. But IDK how much people will relate to the new “Skins”; I know I personally could map my own high school experiences onto the original version, because I could recognize and acknowledge the cultural differences and move past them to the more universal aspects of feeling bored, restless, outcast, etc., instead of trying to deal with a totally unrealistic depiction of American high school life.