Oh Glee I knew you’d make last week up to me I just didn’t know that it would be everything I ever wanted in a Glee episode! And even stuff I didn’t even know I wanted until I saw it! Like this! 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So basically, “Michael” was like, “Okay now we whetted everyone’s appetite for MJ with that sectionals episode, so let’s do a tribute but be careful not to use all the good songs just in case this show lasts for another season or two.” Which is cool because it started out with Darren Criss taking the lead on “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” and then I was too happy to care about anything else for the rest of the episode.

GOSH.

But then it turns out that the Warblers are gonna be doing Michael Jackson at regionals too! All because Blaine accidentally spilled the beans to Sebastian. And Kurt’s like, “Hang on a second, how often do you guys talk?!” and Blaine doesn’t really answer but yeah that’s kind of shady! And I like it!

But all of my hopes for a Blaine/Sebastian hookup are (temporarily) shattered when, at the end of a fantastic New Directions vs. Warblers parking garage sing-off/choreographed fight sequence of “Bad,” Sebastian slushies Blaine! In the face! And at first it’s hilarious because he’s lying there writhing in pain and you’re like, “Dude, Artie’s taken like fifty slushies at a time before and barely even batted an eye. Suck it up.”

But then after the commercial break you find out that there were like razor blades or something in the slushie and now Blaine has to have eye surgery! So he gets the most adorable eye patch ever and an excuse for Darren Criss to not be in the next two episodes while he’s a busy little beaver on Broadway.

So now all the gleeks are suuuuuuuper pissed at Sebastian, especially Artie, who gets so mad that his legs start working! And he and Mike Chang do “Scream” and it’s a little underwhelming, I gotta say. Like, poor Kevin McHale gets out of his wheelchair like once a season; he should be bustin’ moves like cuh-raaaazy but there’s mostly just lots of mugging for the camera.

Not to be outdone is Santana, who wants to go all Lima Heights on Sebastian’s ass but Kurt persuades her to take the high(ish) road so instead she just goes to Dalton and accuses Sebastian of putting something in the slushie and says Blaine might lose an eye so he challenges her to a sing-off and then they do “Smooth Criminal” with some seriously hardcore cello backup and it is magnificent. So Sebastian admits that he put rock salt in the slushie and says that it was actually meant for Kurt, not Blaine, and then he slushies Santana and it’s all so extremely entertaining I cannot even tell you.

I am so glad Sebastian seems to be taking Sue’s place as the glee club’s arch-nemesis because I seriously cannot get enough of him! Not to mention that this gives Sue’s character the opportunity to develop into something other than “I hate the glee club,” which I feel like has really played out by this point.

Speaking of character development, Quinn got accepted to Yale! The writers are pretty tongue-in-cheeky about her admissions essay so I’m willing to suspend my disbelief on this one. She also gives some super-solid advice to Rachel by telling her that marrying Finn is the very definition of settling, so DON’T DO IT WOMAN. And then she sings “Never Can Say Goodbye” and it is prolly decent enough but I was too distracted because Dianna Agron is sooooooo prettyyyyyyy omg.

But I don’t even know why Rachel asked Quinn for advice; aside from the awkwardness of being a former rival for Finn’s affection, she seems to already have made up her mind. Which is confirmed later in the episode when Finn re-proposes to Rachel in song, knowing that she’ll be unable to resist the theatricality of it. So they do “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” and then she accepts and I guess maybe I’m not giving Finn enough credit because that was a seriously smooth move.

Or maybe Rachel just accepted because she was bummed out that Kurt got a letter from NYADA about being a finalist for acceptance and she got nada. Oh yeah and there is a magnificent scene of Kurt opening his letter in the choir room with his dad, who is the best, and I almost cried. Chris Colfer and Mike O’Malley deserve all the awards, for real.

And then Rachel and Finn go to visit Blaine while he’s waiting for his surgery and he’s kind of a dick about the whole NYADA thing to be honest, making a toast to Kurt’s finalist status while Rachel is sitting there like a total loser. And then they sing “Ben” to make Blaine feel better and it is too adorable for words.

So it turns out that Santana managed to record Sebastian admitting to tampering with the slushie. She wants to turn the tape over to the authorities, which really is prolly the right thing to do because then Sebastian will finally be able to get the psychiatric help he so obviously needs; seriously this kid is disturbed. But this is Glee so Kurt is like, “No, I have a better idea!” and they go to the auditorium where all the Warblers are waiting to be serenaded with “Black or White” and they all end up singing along except for Sebastian.

O yeah and then it turns out that Rachel is a NYADA finalist too! Hooray! Oh crap except she already accepted Finn’s proposal uh-oh WHAT IS SHE GONNA DO???

So yeah, this was a desperately needed fantastic episode after last time’s hot mess. I think season four of Glee should just be Darren Criss solos cut in with scenes of Kurt and/or Santana trading one-liners with Sebastian at the Lima Bean, because those are really the only things that still give me pleasure on this show. That, and Burt Hummel. Always Burt Hummel.

But anyway. Tune in next time for Ricky Martin! And Schuester sings something racist, prolly! And Darren Criss is gone and everything is awful again. But oh well, c’est la Glee, I guess!

(Screen caps via Caps Anyone?)

So was it worth it? Ummmm… maybe. There were only prolly like five covers where I was like, “Ohhhhh goshhhhh yes this is totally necessary and cool and does justice to the original while also doing something completely different!” The rest of the collection sounded like what would happen if a bunch of famous musicians showed up at karaoke night at your local bar: Pleasant enough at first, but it gets old pretty fast.

I think the main problem is that I’m just too attached to the original versions (like, more attached to them than Bob Dylan is, judging by the practically unrecognizable renditions of old classics he plays at shows nowadays), and my gut reaction to anything different is “Eww gross no I hate this ugh go away.” So that was what happened when I listened to Ziggy Marley’s “Blowin’ In the Wind,” Lenny Kravitz’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” Michael Franti’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and Taj Mahal & The Phantom Blues Band’s “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” to name the worst offenders. (“I think I’ll call it ‘mericuh” is a lyric that will probably haunt my nightmares for years to come.) I don’t know what would possess any band to try to cover “All Along the Watchtower” and set themselves up for comparison with not only Dylan’s original but also Jimi Hendrix’s equally-if-not-more famous cover, but screw you, Dave Matthews Band. Seriously, why would you do that?

But once in a while my initial knee-jerk reaction passed and I realized “O hey, this is actually awesome.” The best track in the collection is without question “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” as covered by Cage the Elephant; it’s so creepy and cool and spacey and perfect, really. They just took a killer tune and like took it to the next level, and I was like, “OMG I didn’t even know that this is what has been missing from my life but know I don’t know how I ever lived without it.”

The whole internet was buzzing about Ke$ha’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” when that track came out, and I was pretty into it, but I gotta say I like it a lot more in theory than in practice. I think it’s super cool that she just totally screws with people’s expectations (which is really what Dylan is all about, after all), but ultimately it’s just too freaking slow and depressing for me. (Plus my heart already belongs to John Mayer’s cover, but that’s beside the point.)

Speaking of screwing with people’s expectations, I was actually super impressed with Miley Cyrus’ “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” Like, for real. I had no idea what girlfriend could do with a song that a.) falls in the higher, less obnoxious part of her range, and b.) has lyrics that don’t make you want to shoot yourself in the face. So that was pretty cool.

Other keepers include Jack’s Mannequin’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Bad Religion’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Kris Kristofferson’s “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn),” Flogging Molly’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Queens of the Stone Age’s “Outlaw Blues”…. Okay well actually there are a lot of pretty good tracks in this collection; I could keep going but I feel like this list is getting too long to be meaningful.

My wildly out-of-control crush on Darren Criss obligates me to mention his cover of “New Morning,” which he performs with backup from his brother’s band Freelance Whales (which is actually a super-legit band and awww brothers oh my gosh how is everything he does so freaking adorable?) and probably should fall under the “pleasant enough” category but it really is just lovely and perfect and oh my gosh he just said “groundhog” and my birthday is on Groundhog’s Day it’s like he’s singing right to meeeeeee oh Darren let’s run away and be adorable together forever.

Okay so anyway, yeah. Check out Chimes of Freedom if Dylan’s your thing, and definitely get your hands on that “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” cover. I guess if nothing else, this collection reminded me just how unique and unequaled a talent Dylan is, and made me appreciate him that much more.

First off, yes, the title of the book is actually REAMDE; as the cover art makes obvious, it’s a play on that README file name that often comes with like, software downloads and stuff.  You find out pretty early on what the title refers to, which is nice because if someone comes up to you and is like, “Uh, wtf are you reading?” you’ll at least be able to explain that part.

REAMDE tells the story of internet millionaire Richard Forthrast and the World of Warcraft-esque online RPG he created. Like Stephenson’s last book, Anathem, the plot starts out almost mundanely simple but quickly escalates to insanely convoluted levels that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would seriously stretch the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. But Stephenson is so sneaky about it that by the time you realize that none of this should make any sense at all (probably by trying to explain it to someone else), you’re in way too deep to care anymore. The best metaphor I can think of is the frog in the boiling pot story, where you raise the temperature of the water so gradually that the frog doesn’t even try to escape, and by the time it’s boiling the frog is just totally screwed.

So REAMDE is sort of like that, but in a good way, if you’re willing to embrace the ridiculousness of the whole thing and enjoy the ride. There’s a funny sort of meta moment when one of the characters tries to use Occam’s razor to figure out what’s going on, but realizes almost immediately that it’s just not going to work.

For me, one of the interesting themes in this book is the interplay between the virtual world of the RPG and the actual physical world. Actions taken online have serious real-life consequences, whether users realize it or think they are simply playing a game. There are several situations in REAMDE where online activities have practical real-world value (every gamer’s dream) and some where they definitely do not. It definitely made me think about what sort of skills are necessary to survive in an increasingly–but not entirely–technological world. Also, like most of Stephenson’s work, it made me feel incredibly ignorant when it comes to computers.

The only other thing I want to note is that this book has not one, but three insanely kick-ass female protagonists who are total stereotype-busters. Actually Stephenson is pretty awesome in general when it comes to strong women in his books; I can think of at least one chick in Anathem, Snow Crash, and The Diamond Age who could eat Katniss Everdeen and her cute little hunting boots for breakfast.

So yeah, I think that’s about it. I really liked this book; it was engaging the whole way through and always felt fast-paced, even when the plot wasn’t moving forward all that quickly. I think you’ll probably like it to, especially if you are interested in any of the following:

• online role-playing games
• computer security/hackers
• complicated spy thrillers
• gunfights/explosions

Good stuff! But, in the immortal words of LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it.

(Image via Neal Stephenson)

So the second episode of Being Human‘s second season, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” picks up right where last week’s cliffhanger left off, with Josh getting shot in the arm by one of those Dutch vampire guys whose names I can never remember. To be honest it wasn’t really that suspenseful of a cliffhanger; obviously they’re not gonna kill one of the    series’ main characters. So this werewolf-hunting vamp is getting ready to finish Josh off, but then werewolf Nora leaps out from the underbrush and totally kills him! And then runs back into the woods. Ohhhhh goshhhhhhhh.

The next day Josh and Nora have to deal with the aftermath, and it was super interesting and a little darkly humorous to see Josh try to reassure her and try to teach her to cope with being a werewolf when he still can’t really cope himself. He doesn’t tell her that she killed a guy when she was in wolf form, which is obviously gonna come back to bite him in the ass later.

Meanwhile, Sally makes ghost friends! Suicide Stevie from last episode’s reunion and a couple of his teenage boy ghost pals come hang out at the house, which mainly serves to distract Josh and Aidan from Sally’s big reveal that she might have accidentally released a terrifying dark spirit into the world.

Even without the extra house guests, they’d probably be too wrapped up in their own immediate problems to care a whole lot about the vague, abstract threat she describes: Josh is trying to motivate Nora to retain some semblance of normalcy by accompanying him to the new med student mixer that night, while Aidan has his hands full with babysitting the new Head Vamp In Charge of Boston, and oh man you can tell right away that this chick is gonna be trouble. A couple of ambiguous flashbacks show that she and Aidan have a history, but the main point of them seems to be showing Aidan looking very Clark Gable-esque in his period garb, yum.

Anyway, HVIC thinks it’s hilarious that Aidan doesn’t “drink live” anymore, and takes it upon herself to try to get him to break his commitment to vegetarianism ASAP. She brings him this cop lady to turn, ostensibly to give the vamps an in on the police force, but really to test Aidan’s boundaries and see how far he’s willing to bend for her. Things get interesting fast when Aidan refuses to turn the cop lady and HVIC threatens to investigate the Dutch vampire’s mysterious disappearance in the woods, implying that she not only knows about Aidan’s werewolf friendship connection, but thoroughly disapproves.

All this leaves Aidan feeling even more broody than usual, so he goes to the bar to drown his sorrows and just so happens to run into a pretty lady he saw earlier at the hospital when she was on her way to interview for an internship. It seems pretty suspicious to me, mainly because of her “someone’s thirsty” comment when she catches Aidan raiding the blood bank, and even more so when she initiates a hook-up almost immediately at the bar. Yeah, this lady is definitely shady.

Sally’s new ghost friends–with the exception of Suicide Stevie–turn out to be equally shady, taking her to a college “raver” and teaching her the new trick of inhabiting the bodies of the living. Her exuberance at her success is a little bit much for me; fortunately it’s cut short when horny teenage ghost boy tries to have his way with her while they’re both possessing other people’s bodies. Suicide Stevie intervenes and pulls her out, then gets into a huge fight about the incident with horny teenage ghost boy and ends up like, liquidating him with his supernatural ghost power or something, which really freaks Sally out.

Sally and the ghosts aren’t the only ones spending the night getting driz-unk; at the med student mixer, Nora partakes of the wine pretty liberally and Josh starts freaking out that she’s gonna spill their werewolf secret, but instead she just starts talking about her lost pregnancy, which is enough to make the other med students super uncomfortable. So the next day Josh is like, “I’m not gonna go to med school, I’m gonna find a cure for werewolfism!” and you can tell that Nora is totally not gung-ho about that idea so there are prolly a lot more problems in store for those two.

Basically, everything is awful for everyone and it will probably only get worse. Hooray!

(All images via Syfy)

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.

Second, the main character in the movie, the A’s general manager Billy Beane, comes across as kind of a dick. He seems to spend the whole time being frustrated with his staff for their (understandable, in my opinion) reluctance to go along with his radical vision for building a baseball team, throwing around office furniture, and dealing with the massive chip on his shoulder for missing his own big shot at being a major league player.

Fortunately Moneyball manages to negate both of these potentially serious shortcomings with some seriously great casting. Brad Pitt’s charisma and universal likeability make the moody Beane a hero worth rooting for, making you feel sympathy rather than annoyance at his numerous superstitious behaviors, neurotic quirks, and unpredictable emotional displays.  When I first saw the trailers for this movie featuring Jonah Hill as baseball savant whiz kid Peter Brand I was like, WTF is he doing here, this is not a stoner comedy, but he actually manages to convey the nervousness and awkwardness of a guy who is more comfortable with computers than with people really convincingly.

So those two were definitely the stars of the film, but I was more excited to see Chris Pratt, a.k.a. one half of the most adorable couple on the best show on tv (Parks & Recreation‘s April and Andy), in a small but fantastic role as an injured player who thinks his career is over but is given a second chance at the majors.  The one cast member who I felt like was seriously underutilized was Philip Seymour Hoffman; as A’s manager Art Howe his main job is to pout and be mad at Billy Beane for giving him a crummy team. Which he definitely commits to, but I feel like you gotta give the guy a little more to do.

The one line about Moneyball that I keep hearing is that it’s a baseball movie that’s not about baseball (this review at Awards Daily is the only source I could find that contained that actual phrase), but I’m not sure how true that is. Toward the end there’s an attempt at connecting Beane’s efforts in Oakland with the universal struggle of innovators and early adaptors, but that didn’t really feel like the point of the movie to me. It mostly just made me curious about the state of the moneyball philosophy in baseball today, because it does seem like a tough pill to swallow.

“It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball” is the line Beane repeats a couple of times and one that stuck with me, because even as the movie tries to demonstrate the superiority of cold, hard statistical analysis over those elusive “intangibles,” it can’t help but succumb to the romanticism of the classic sports movie moment. Which is actually okay by me, since it kind of shows that while stats and logic certainly have their place, that magical moment is what keeps sports fans coming back for more.

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.

Ryan Murphy & Co. seem to have based this entire episode on the tragically misguided notion that anyone actually cares about developments in Will and Emma’s relationship, or Will and Emma in general for that matter.  WE DO NOT. AT ALL. ONE SINGLE BIT. Their mutual crush might have been cute for like an episode but then Will was cheating on his wife and it was eww gross but then they got divorced but Emma was married to John Stamos and oh man she shoulda stuck with him but they split up cuz the Glee writers are creepily obsessed with virginity and now the only thing this episode did was remind people of the eww gross origins of Will and Emma thanks to the awful and boring rendition of “The Worst First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” and the first time Will ever saw Emma’s face was when he was still married to Terri, god Will you are such a douchebag. You would propose in the douchiest way possible, why am I even surprised?

Also this happened.

So obviously Will asks Emma to marry him, but not before reminding her that her OCD makes her like the world’s biggest freak and she is lucky to have found a man who can put up with that shit. And then he proposes after a synchronized swimming routine to “We Found Love,” and you can tell the whole cast is miserable the entire time they’re in the pool, god it’s freezing in here, this is so not what I signed up for and what do you mean I have to stick around for season four???

Pictured: contractual obligation

I guess the theme of this episode was Will being a douchey creep because he also breaks Finn’s trust (after creepily asking him to be his best man, seriously Will, don’t you have any adult friends?) and tells Burt and Carol that Finn is thinking about joining the Army, which I thought was actually pretty cool on Finn’s part but then in a horrible and unnecessary plot twist his mom is like noooooo don’t do it I know you are trying to follow in your dead father’s footsteps and all but he wasn’t really a war hero he was actually a deserter and a druggie! IS NOTHING SACRED TO YOU ANYMORE GLEE???

And just in case that scene didn’t make you uncomfortable enough there is also the awful and equally pointless subplot of Becky pursuing a relationship with Artie because they are both “handicapable” and Artie agrees to go on a date with her, resulting in “Becky-ventions” from both the entire glee club and the alarmingly rational-seeming Sue Sylvester, who rightly tells Artie that he’s being a dick and nips the whole thing in the bud. But oh man you know you’ve got a problem with your show when the one character who is known for being bat-shit insane suddenly seems like the sole voice of reason in this entire horrible mess.

And then just when you think it can’t get any worse, and maybe Lea Michele is about to save the day by wrapping up the episode with a face-melting divalicious solo and everything might be alright after all, Finn proposes to Rachel instead. DON’T DO IT RACHEL YOU’LL REGRET IT I’M TELLIN YA. LET QUINN HAVE HIM FOR ALL I CARE. JUST. DO. NOT. MARRY. FINN. GRRL YOU KNOW YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT.

Anyway it’s all good because the next episode is Michael! But seriously Rachel better not say yes because then it will ruin my mood for the whole thing and I won’t be able to enjoy the triumphant return of the yummy Dalton Academy Warblers and the deliciously evil Sebastian, oh man I have pretty much given up all the original characters as lost causes but if these writers screw up my new gay boyfriend I might actually lose it for real.

Heyyyyyy therrrrre sexy

The opening voice-over honors went to Aidan, who used the opportunity to ruminate on freedom, or, in the case of him and his roommates, the lack thereof: After killing Bishop, Aidan finds himself unwillingly thrust into the position of head of the whole Boston vamp clan; Josh struggles to act as the provider for his girlfriend Nora; and Sally is still stuck haunting the house after missing her opportunity to cross over last season. It seemed to me like “freedom” was really just code for normalcy, the quest for which remains one of the central themes of the show, and as elusive as ever.

It’s obvious from the get-go that Aidan is not cut out to be the Head Vamp In Charge; he lacks his predecessor’s ambition, political savvy, and organizational skills, not to mention his taste for live human blood. Aidan as leader of the Boston vampires means hoards of desperate vamps hanging around outside the house waiting for blood handouts, instructions, or simple reassurance that they won’t be victims of the rumored culling of the ranks when a mysterious “she” comes to town. When Aidan proves either incapable of or, more likely, unwilling to provide the necessary leadership, disaster strikes as a panicked new vampire murders a patient at the hospital.

When Aidan asks Josh for help with disposing of the body, Josh uncharacteristically refuses, pointing out that he has a lot more to lose now that he’s in a serious committed relationship with Nora, whose presence in the house makes Josh a lot more concerned about keeping up appearances of normalcy. Josh’s concerns about freaking out Nora seem unfounded, since she appears to be taking all the new supernatural stuff in stride, even making an amusing attempt to strike up a conversation with Sally despite the fact that she can’t see her.

If Nora seems to accept her ghostly roommate with a preternatural calm, it’s because she’s got bigger things on her mind: Tonight is the first full moon since Josh scratched her, so if she’s going to turn into a werewolf, she’ll find out now. Her anxiety results in her pestering Josh with a lot of specific questions about the symptoms of werewolfism and the details of transformation that should seem suspicious to him but don’t, probably because he’s too busy worrying about his own imminent transformation.

Sally goes to her high school reunion and finds out that popular girls are still bitchy even when they’re ghosts. Whatever. I pretty much zone out during her storylines to be honest. Sorry.

Anyway so Aidan goes to meet with the vampire council and Mother, who is like the queen of the vampires and is expected to officially give Aidan the city of Boston. But she doesn’t, surprise surprise, instead making him the steward (which, the way she described it sounded pretty much like a babysitter) for the new leader, Mother’s daughter. This announcement caused some degree of alarm among the council members, who more or less implied that this chick is totally insane. So that should be fun.

Then came my favorite scene of the episode, where Aidan comes back to the house to fill Josh in on what went down at the meeting and basically asks him to be his accountability buddy. It seemed very self-aware and forward-thinking of Aidan to not only realize that getting mixed up with the vamp gang (which he only agrees to because they promise to let him out of it when he’s done) might lead him down a dark path, but also that Josh is the only one who will be able to bring him back. Aww, best bros forever.

Against his better judgment, Josh lets Nora drive him out to the woods so he can change into a werewolf, but then makes her promise to get as far away from him as possible. She of course doesn’t, instead waiting in the car until she hears him start to change, momentarily relieved when she doesn’t. Except then she does! Ohhhhhh snap! Josh hears her and tries to get back to her, but gets shot down by some vamps that Mother sent out werewolf hunting. Uh-oh!

Meanwhile, Sally gets back home and decides to try her ghostly classmate’s suggestion of sleeping, which according to him helped pass the time and resulted in some great dreams. She dreams about her door to the great beyond reappearing, except that when she opens it  there’s a silent, ominous-looking dark figure moving toward her instead of a soft white light. Uh-oh again!

So I think this episode set up a lot of good stuff; it will be interesting to see whether Aidan can balance his involvement in the vamp clan with his moral code, and how Josh deals with his new werewolf girlfriend, and what effect this mysterious dark force has on Sally. Can’t wait for next week!

(screencaps via Caps Anyone?)

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. 

So I think what makes Being Human such compelling viewing is how Aidan (the vampire) and Josh (the werewolf) struggle so hard to achieve the appearance of normalcy, trying to figure out how to cope with the biological aspects of themselves that are impossible to change. Sam Witwer, who plays Aidan, does a fantastic job portraying the tortured soul that is the reformed vampire without overselling it. His struggle against his blood-sucking instincts is constant and not always successful, which definitely makes for more interesting tv because you never know when he is going to relapse. Aidan’s main burden is that people keep dying despite his best efforts and intentions, and Witwer makes his grief seem real and haunting. (A great example of this is episode 1×8, “Children Shouldn’t Play with Undead Things,” which has a fairly predictable plot but remains a moving story in large part because of the emotions Witwer is able to evoke as Aidan grieves over a series of needless deaths for which he feels responsible.)

Sam Huntington’s Josh is just as tortured despite being the most “normal” of the three roommates: He’s the only one who actually eats food (for nourishment, at least), and his werewolfism only presents one night a month. Josh thinks of his condition as a disease and copes with it the way many people with long-term medical issues do, by refusing to acknowledge it whenever possible.

Maybe not what J.D. from Scrubs had in mind when he wrote his screenplay for "Dr. Acula."

Not only is Josh unwilling to let his condition define him (which, as Aidan points out, it ends up doing anyway since Josh spends all his time worrying about keeping it a secret), he attempts to alienate it from himself completely, constantly referring to “the wolf” as if it was an entirely separate entity. He hates it when other people watch his transformation; he tries to refuse to allow Sally the ghost to witness the event even though he is incapable of causing her physical harm, so the issue is as much a psychological one as it is a safety one. For me, Josh is by far the most relatable of the three main characters. Huntington is instantly likeable, not to mention responsible for most of the humor that keeps the show from becoming too depressingly hopeless.

The one character I was unable to connect with was Meahgan Rath’s ghostly Sally. Whereas Aidan and Josh’s problems have easily accessible real-world counterparts (addiction, disease), Sally’s inability to “move on” is a much tougher metaphor to swallow. I did enjoy her brief afterlife romance with a former college flame, and I am intrigued to see where her story goes in season two: Her season one arc seems to be more or less resolved, and preview clips showing Sally possessing people’s bodies in attempts to reconnect with the human world look promising.

Overall I really like the show; I think it definitely adds something different and cool to the whole vampire/werewolf/supernatural genre, and even though some of the plot points seemed a little confusing (still trying to figure out the leadership and power dynamics of the Boston vampire mafia) or obvious from a mile away, the emotional connection you form with the characters will keep you watching. You care about them, and they care about each other, and maybe that’s what being human is really all about.

PS-If you’re feeling up to it, you can read my were-cap of the season two premiere here

Blueprints of the Afterlife chronicles the stories of five survivors from “the Age of the Fucked Up Shit” (the official name for the unspecified events leading up to and causing the end of civilization as we know it; called FUS for short): Woo-jin Kan, the world’s best restaurant dishwasher; Luke Piper, a dot-com millionaire with a heckuva backstory and an equally impressive conspiracy theory; a late-20th-century history buff/archivist named Abby Fogg; crotchety FUS combat veteran Al Skinner; and devilishly handsome television actor Neethan Fucking Jordan (actual middle name). Their journeys start out separately but interweave in subtle ways, and the picture that emerges is a not entirely pessimistic vision of human life after a set of cataclysmic world-changing events.

This is not to say that the picture is comprehensive by any means; Boudinot’s world-building techniques stand in sharp contrast to the ones used by, for example, Max Brooks in World War Z or Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games. Whereas Brooks and Collins both tend to spell out the unique or complex aspects of their dystopian futures for the reader, Boudinot falls more in line with writers like Neal Stephenson and China Miéville who employ a kind of immersion method, plunging readers headfirst into an unfamiliar world and giving us enough credit to assume we’ll figure it out as we go along.

It’s probably obvious which technique I prefer; while I can understand how the lack of exposition could be frustrating for some readers, I think the way Boudinot simply glosses over evocative elements of his post-apocalyptic world–a mentioned-in-passing vampire-werewolf conflict, the commonplace nature of human cloning, a self-aware robotic race of “newmen” that may or may not be bent on destroying humanity–makes it seem like a fully realized universe teeming with life, and allows the plot to carry on at an engaging pace. For example, a plot line involving Woo-jin finding a book he had apparently written in the future and then instructed to write that very book takes up only a few pages, while a similar device used by Charles Yu in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comprises at least the entire second half of that novel.

Blueprints of the Afterlife is full of memorable moments, and one of my favorites is when Skinner, while leaving the uninhabitable Phoenix in his RV, spots a father and son trudging along with their belongings in a shopping cart. The scene evokes Cormac McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic novel The Road, while simultaneously making a statement about how many more possibilities the post-apocalyptic future can contain. There are tons of uncanny, creepy, and just plain bizarre happenings, and suspension of disbelief is definitely required, but overall I’d say this is one of the most creative and original takes on the end of the world as we know it that I’ve come across.

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.”

So yeah, War Horse really tugs at the heart strings. But so what? The whole story is: A boy and his horse get separated. And then (spoiler alert!) they get reunited. There’s no real change in any of the characters, and no real stakes; even obstacles that should seem insurmountable don’t, because you can tell going in that it’s not that kind of movie. Everyone is fundamentally decent even though they’re on opposite sides of the war, because they all love horses. And who doesn’t?

That seems to be the fact Steven Spielberg was banking on when he made the film, and even though it was so obviously emotionally manipulative, I couldn’t help but like it. My favorite scene was actually the one where an English and a German soldier team up to free the horse when it gets tangled up in barbed wire in the middle of no man’s land, and in the process learn that they’re not so different after all. Aww.

The other thing I really enjoyed was seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in a small role as an order-bellowing British major, a complete 180 from his Sherlock character. Or maybe I was just proud of myself for recognizing him in spite of his extreme mustache situation. At any rate Cumberbatch was just cast as the villain in the next Star Trek movie, so even if you’re not a fan of the British tv show Sherlock, you’ll want to take note of the actor.

Hot.

And yeah, all of the scenery and cinematography and everything was absolutely lovely, and John Williams’ score was predictably beautiful, and the whole thing was just about as nice as a war movie could be. I guess I just feel like if you’re gonna be put through the emotional wringer like that, you should get a little more out of it at the end.