Lugal

Simon Pegg's Scotty MVP?? Um, no. The MVP of the reboot movies was Karl Urban's McCoy.

I don't mind a prequel, although I think this would have been more interesting if they set it between The TOS movies and TNG. There is a lot of stories they could tell to fill in that era. But we have already seen a prequel with Enterprise and they didn't do a great job. Enterprise was a prequel because Berman and Braga's excuse was the canon had become too restrictive they felt too confined to tell stories in the 24th century world, although Star Trek was hardly Pre-Crisis DC comics. A prequel could have been fascinating (and Enterprise did have good episodes), the problem was B&B were in 'cash the check' mode and stories contradicted what we saw on earlier series. Then the Reboot movies were helmed by JJ Abrams and his acolytes, never ones for internal consistency. If a writer can't tell a story in the confines they (or the franchise they work in) set up, they're not that great a writer. Personally, I think Star Trek has been "contracting" (for lack of a better word) since DS9. DS9 expanded the Trek universe to see what was happening beyond just the starships, in other parts of the Federation. Voyager and Enterprise were made to try and recapture the old feeling of the original series. Then they rebooted the movies with the original TOS characters. Now we have this show set in that same era, just before TOS, like Star Trek is trying to recapture old glory rather than try something new.

And the lethal ones always cause foaming at the mouth. It's funny, I was watching a show the other week when the hero was fighting the villains and they shot him with a tranquilizer dart. He was able to get away and passed out but when he woke up his friend was actually saying they could have killed him with the imprecise dosage.

Been on a nonfiction kick lately, right now I'm working on White Trash: the 400-year untold story of class in America. It's kind of dense, but fascinating.

Faina was definitely the right choice for the win and it was smart to have someone step back and make sure the paintwork matches on all three. Al was the right choice to go and I noticed the judges really didn't have much to say to him when he left. Both teams work looked unfinished, which I would blame the foremen for with the lack of time management. The queens did look like guys in drag. They tried to have it both ways where the queen was feminine and they used the biggest male model to make them larger. If they used the male model they should have dropped the feminine touches, they are aliens after all, and you could have a non-mammalian species female without breasts. Or they could have used a female model and made her feminine. Instead they got the worst of both worlds. So Twisted Six Minus Two is down again. When do they declare Ethereal the winner and go to individual challenges? Also curious: What movie is Ve working on?

My appreciation for Firefly is because it was kind of trapped in amber. We got this fun space-western before Whedon could really ruin it. I would have had no interest seeing the show go in the direction Serenity would have taken it, since it was essentially 3 or 4 seasons of Firefly crammed into a two hour movie.

The Salkinds were notorious for not being clear on how many movies they were making at the time. Actors now have a "Salkind Clause" in their contracts stating how many movies they are shooting. They explain a lot of this on the Richard Donner cut of Superman II.

From what I understand of their tactics, they try to bury someone under paperwork and intimidate them, rather than actually go to trial, where it looks like they could lose, or have anything about the CO$ entered into public record.

I haven't read the final book yet, but the last few it felt like she was stretching. It was a very well developed world, I think a good TV series could have overcome some of the flaws of the books. Still would have liked to have seen Peter Jackson's take on it though.

Gibson and Sterling's steampunk classic The Difference Engine would be awesome as a series. They could go full out with the period costumes, and go nuts with the steampunk design. Speaking of large scale historical fantasy, I've heard rumors for a while that Peter Jackson is considering a TV series from Naomi Novik's Temeraire books. Napoleonic Wars with dragons. And I've also been hearing about a Snow Crash movie for years, but I almost wonder if it wouldn't work better as a TV show. This could really delve into Stephen's world (cyberpunk, swordfights and Sumerian mythology) and do it justice. The Bas-Lag books of China Miéville would be awesome, but given all the different races and settings, would still probably be undoable.

They're doing a split season on a streaming show?

Exactly. Rough draft aside, it still has a lot of Whedon's touches that show up in his other projects (his foot fetish is well known). Personally, I think the real test will be Justice League. That will prove if the DCEU is really back on track or if WW was just a fluke.

I would agree. It didn't help that a lot of early Enterprise episodes were derivative (like where they find a ship full of holograms, which unfortunately had Rene Auberjonois as a guest star, which only served to remind the audience of the DS9 episode where Odo discovered a village of hologram people) and threw out a lot of the continuity (like in "Broken Bow" when they showed that the Klingon homeworld was only a few days away at warp 1). I think that by the time Manny Coto had taken over and the show started to improve, most of the audience had given up on it.

"Never Put Salt in Your Eyes"

They were thrown into the deep end with a werewolf challenge on day one. Like someone said, the wolf face is one of the hardest to do because of how different human and wolf faces are. Unfortunately the results were mediocre at best. None of them were really good, although I will admit that the omega (it feels like they used the PUA terms) on Team Ethereal looked the best. Team Ethereal had a better time of it, and Andrew did a better job as foreman. The alpha was too mask-like, with the bared teeth it looked like a Halloween mask. The beta looked like a rat or maybe a hyena. As for foreman six boobs, he should have gone home. You put the girl who never made a chest piece on that job, and didn't bother to check up on her. All the while he spends all his time making the six boobs chest piece (a look that does not work on human females). Then with the clothes she was wearing, it just made her look paunchy. I really hope they don't go the drama route, but I wonder if they can vote the same person in as foreman multiples times.

I like Vikings, a show set in a violent era and I think only four of the characters the show started with are still standing. I think they handled the deaths well.Ragnar had visions of his daughter for some time after she died and Ragnar's death set the whole last few episodes in motion. Lost failed because they never really seemed to make it count. They teased up the death of a character in the first season, which many guessed would be Boone, and it was and it gave a great chance to develop his sister Sharon, which they started to do until she was killed a few episodes later, and then both were promptly forgotten. The way it was handled on Lost brings up another problem I have is when writers try to prove they're smarter than the audience (where they admitted they would change things if the audience guessed right). In the age of the internet, that isn't possible, since the audience is collective, and they'll always be someone out there who knows something the writers don't.

Lucifer might not necessarily play into it at all. The note on that organ can scare a bird or something that could set a whole other chain of events in motion that Lucifer plays no part in, a For want of a nail situation. Remember when we first met Uriel, he almost took out Chloe just by moving a skateboard two feet away.

Most of that was practical.

I've been annoyed with the "Anyone can die" trend that's been going on for about a decade now. Character deaths have to be earned. The character arc either has to be finished or unfinished in a way that gives weight to the death. I've seen shows where they kill off characters for shock value, and it ends up leaving a hole on the show. Lost was one of the worst. Given the dynamics it was pretty easy to guess which character they were going to kill at any given time. I remember the producers once said, don't get attached to anyone. Which made me wonder, then why am I watching?

Yes, Margaret Atwood, 3000 years ago the Israelites did much worse things than the Scientologists are doing now. I got the impression that everyone is pressured to make donations, but for a movie star to give a five figure donation is much different than the common parishioner trying to give a five figure donation and keep the bills paid. Although it is why I heard Tom Cruise accepts every offer that comes his way to support the CO$.

I think Orlando Bloom would be better as a character actor. After watching the first Pirates of the Caribbean I remember thinking that Orlando Bloom is not a strong leading man, given how many scenes Depp stole.

I don't think the failures of Elektra and Catwoman were totally responsible for the lack of female superhero movies. It didn't help, especially once it became part of the "conventional wisdom" that female superheros can't carry a film. But I remember a few years back reading that the main reason it took so long to get a WW movie was toy sales, since merchandising is more profitable than movies themselves. Boys, being the main buyers of superhero toys, the "conventional wisdom" again was they could not sell enough Wonder Woman (and probably Black Widow) toys to be make enough money. Spiderman is kind of a special case. Spiderman 3 did do very well at the box office, however horrible it may have been as a movie. Thanks to modern marketing, studios can dump out a movie and make millions before people realize that it sucks. But there was all kinds of things tied up with rights and commitments to multiple movies which died when Amazing Spiderman 2 flopped, so Sony made a deal with Marvel.

The whole thing does not feel very well thought out other than Universal going, "Marvel's making a shit-ton of money doing these interconnected movies. We should do that and make a shit-ton of money. What can we do it with?" So they go through their catalog and find the old monster movies from the 30's and voila. The problem is that most of those properties were in the public domain and have been done before. Disney's done the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the Phantom of the Opera has been turned into a musical. We've seen Dracula in the year 3000 and Frankenstein fighting demons (not all these takes on the characters were good). What can they do with this that we haven't already seen? Then they set them all in the present, which doesn't work for half their characters (Hunchback, Phantom). Personally, it should have been set in the 30's, with some of the movies set earlier, and go full out dieselpunk/movie serial adventure. But what are the odds of a movie featuring a character that's been popular for decades set in another time period before ours being a massive hit?

Lex Luthor had records of her from WWI (that old photograph) so she wasn't completely forgotten. She was an anomaly that faded from living memory and then was either filed away and forgotten or became distorted and hazy.

Can't remember if Leslie-Ann Brandt or one of the producers said it, but I seem to recall hearing that they will not because a pregnant sex demon just doesn't work.