Thursday, October 23, 2008

Return of the Awkward Comedy

Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld, and all around walking tub of neuroses, has crawled out of his groundhog hole long enough to not see his shadow, thus guaranteeing us an early spring of his genius awkward comedy sensation, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, we're going to have to wait until next year before we start to see any more of Larry David traipsing around as Larry David, but after last season's therapeutic season, where the recent (real) divorce of Larry and his wife was worked out on the show with the separation (fictional) of Larry and his wife, I can't wait to see what misadventures he embarks on this season.

Last season was also notable for having Larry and Cheryl "adopt" a black family displaced from Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina. I pray to sweet baby RoboJesus that they'll be back.



Prime your DVRs, readers, for the Larry shall returneth.


-RoboNixon

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

W: The Great Cop Out

Opening two weeks before the election, W. came in fourth at the box office, making about 11 million dollars. An inglorious bow, it was beat out by a movie based on a video game, a CGI chihuahua and a porno about the illicit sex lives of bees.

This should surprise no one.

Conventional wisdom over the last couple of years has been that any movie attempting to deal with current events (cough cough IRAQ) is going to fail. But compared to a film like Stop Loss, W. can be considered something of a minor success, although I'm curious to know how much of a drop off in ticket sales we'll see by next weekend.

Now, this chihuahua... It talks?

Oh. Looks like High School Musical 3
comes out next weekend... So uh... Yeah... W. is fucked.

There's a horrible irony to be had here: It was easier to
sell the Iraq war than it has been to sell the movies about the war. Are we feeling guilty for launching a pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation? Or do these movies suck? When it comes to W., the answer is probably both.

In terms of cinema it can't hold a candle to the exhilarating (though factually challenged)
JFK. Hell even Nixon, with Anthony Hopkins' troll like embodiment of the impeached president is better than Josh Brolin's over-confident performance of Bushie. This is a confused muddled film that oscillates between extended SNL sketch and faux Shakespearean drama. It's not particularly funny, moving or even entertaining. As much as I wanted to like this film, and oh boy did I want to like it, the truth is, as my friend Sam said: "It's kind of a mess."

This is as funny as it gets.

As I try to recall the film, it's difficult to think of one instance of dramatic tension. No,
W. is one of those films where the plot progresses so mechanically that it feels less like a life unraveling on the screen than Bullet Points: The Movie. If this film was a Word document, I would break my computer.

We first find Bush alone in an empty Rangers stadium. We listen as cheering fills the soundtrack. The scene sets up Bush's deep psychological desired to be liked and admired. The rest of the film attempts to answer the question, what makes George Bush the man he is? The answer, and not a terribly original one, is that Bush has forever lived in the shadow of his father H.W. From a young man up till the present Bush has always yearned for his father's approval. It is this patriarchal discord that eventually pushes him to start the war in Iraq as a kind of giant "Fuck you, Dad!"

But it's just so damned boring. Even the infamous "
pretzel incident" plays out with a stunning lack of excitement. We watch as Bush swallows the pretzel, starts to choke, and begins to forcibly slam his stomach against the back of a chair. Finally, he passes out, and face plants onto the floor which dislodges the pretzel and in slow motion, sends it flying out of his mouth. It's supposed to be funny, and it kind of is, but the joke is thin and wears off quickly.

“Huh huh, look how dramatic we made it seem when he was choking on that pretzel. GET IT, SLOW MOTION?” Yes Oliver, now stop rubbing our faces in your poor man's irony.

Furthermore, why was this scene even included? It's never referenced again, nor does it seem to have any kind of effect on Bush (the character). This is bad film making. This scene only exists because it happened.
W. seems to be in love with facts, nary a second goes by when some fact isn't being shoved down our throat. So when Bush makes fun of Jimmy Carter's solar panels on the White House that's how we know it's 1976.

GET IT?!

JIMMY CARTER WAS THE PRESIDENT AND HE PUT SOLAR PANELS ON THE WHITE HOUSE ROOF!

OMG, CHECK WIKIPEDIA CAUSE
THAT TOTALLY FUCKING HAPPENED.

There are some bright spots to the film, namely moments in the cabinet meetings where we watch the key players prepare for the war in Iraq. Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney is at times terrifying in his unyielding certainty of the existence of WMDs in Iraq. He has an engrossing monologue where he carefully lays out the Neo-Conservative ideology towards remaking the entire Mid-East. It is a moment where you begin to grasp just how much of our recent foreign policy has been based solely on the schemes and machinations of hard liners who have spent more time in
think tanks than in real tanks.

But as we wade through the cultural muck we find that the burden of something being "intelligent," "entertaining" or even "reasonably competent" is no impediment when trying to understand what it means. This is surprisingly fitting when trying to understand a film that deals with one of the most
willfully ignorant presidents since Grant tried to replace his blood with Scotch.

Prep the IV, I'm gettin' fucked upppppp

I can't imagine
W. will have any real political impact. Nor do I imagine the movie will be remembered as a film that tapped into the zeitgeist. So what is W. when considered as an artifact of the Bush regime? For lack of a better word, it's a cowed piece of faux-political filmmaking that lacks the courage to say anything real or significant. You make a movie about George Bush and all you can say is he started the Iraq War to... one up his dad? Really? That's all you got?

Stone has defended his approach
thus:
The movie's not a smear job. I wouldn't want to spend a year of my life making something that is demeaning to somebody, being malicious. That's the wrong approach to art. It's not a political film, but a Shakespearean one.
Fair enough. But it's one thing to get your facts straight (and believe me W. is obsessed with facts) and another thing to sacrifice your fucking voice. And this films lacks a voice. It's understandable that Stone just wants to put the Bush story on screen and then “let people decide.” I get that, but in a sense that's also a cop out. Stone is holding back and the film suffers because of it.

I'm going to make a leap here and propose an idea that I'll hopefully deal with more in depth later. In 2008, we're still dealing with the political cowardice (and fear) that dominated the national discourse from 9/11 until about two years ago, when Americans began to sour on the war in Iraq. Those were trying times to be anyone who thought that 9/11 didn't give Bush a free pass to turn our country into
Super Jail. I'm thinking of the Clear Channel Iraq rallies, the railroading of the Dixie Chicks and the conservative backlash against Michael Moore.

In 2008 I think the discourse has changed quite a bit. But that mentality is still there, especially when dealing with the President. I mean even if Stone had made a balls to the wall Fush Buck movie, he'd still only be pissing off less than a
third of the country. It's as if Stone was afraid that if he took a firmer more direct stance he would risk being aligned with Michael Moore and immediately written off. It could be that we're still too caught in the thick of things to be able to understand fully the man that Bush is. But I also wonder how much fear we still retain when we publicly go after Bush, could it be that even though he's lost all of our good will, we still feel unable to face up to our own complicity in aiding and abetting this monstrosity of a President?

- JDA / Post originally published in "
Found Artifacts of the Bush Regime"

Dexter = Greatest Serial Killer Ever?

Dexter, Showtime's totally awesome serialized serial-killer drama, was just renewed for a fourth and fifth season.


Dexter stars Michael C. Hall, he of Six Feet Under fame, as a sociopathic serial killer with a dry wit, a sassy and ambitious police officer for a sister, a pregnant and emotionally damaged single-mom as a girlfriend, and the job of a forensic blood expert for the Miami Metro PD.

The first two seasons of Dexter are prime-o TV, and worth your time on DVD. Use caution, however: Dexter's MO is bloody dismemberment, so if spurts, puddles, or rivers of blood aren't your thing, you may want to give it a looksy before hooking yourself up with a season-pass on TiVo.


But you better catch up -- with two more guaranteed seasons, there's gonna be a lot of Dexter. And, I'm sure, a lot of body parts in black plastic trash bags.


Thanks to this place for the awesome Dexter-propaganda poster.

-RoboNixon

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Bow down before NOVEMBER

A lot of Very Important Games are coming out in the next one and one half months. Every damn person is going to buy these games, myself included. And for good reason! These games all come from--in different ways--amazing pedigree. At the end of the day they are all well understood genre pieces, but they promise to make you poop against your inseam nonetheless.

Behold: the buy-a-console-just-to-play-it
LittleBigPlanet, the credit-crisis-resolving Wrath of the Lich King, the no-snappy-prefix-inspiring Mirror’s Edge, the you-get-a-puppy! Fable 2, and the zomg-inducing Fallout 3. It promises to be a sexless month, but who really even does that anymore. Gross.

I should not have to explain why
Wrath of the Lich King is an important release, except to say C.R.E.A.M. Blizzard Entertainment, now Activision Blizzard, has a Swiss watch’s reliability when it comes to doing everything perfectly and making mad dollar bills because of it.

Speaking of
Switzerland, Mirror’s Edge comes to us from the land of hot chocolate and mafia banking, from the people who brought you the Battlefield franchise. Again, reliability in doing what they do is Digital Illusions’ claim to fame. They don’t quite reinvent the wheel a la Blizzard, but the have consistently produced polished titles that people buy and play.

Fable 2 is the latest brainchild of the perpetually overreaching Peter Molyneux. Say what you will about Black & White and the first Fable, Molyneux is always pushing games and gamers in a way that is both historically important and personally satisfying.

Fallout 3 is not being helmed by the same development studio that brought us the first two installments. Not a biggie, as Bethesda Softworks has their own track record to speak for them. What really matters is that all the PR points to Fallout 3 being, besides incredibly polished and handled with care, very true to the first two in the series.

LittleBigPlanet, a plucky indie title, made Sony look silly when it overshadowed the designed-by-committee PlayStation Home. The pedigree for LittleBigPlanet is not that of its producers or designers. What LittleBigPlanet offers is a pedigree of game mechanic of a type that no publisher or development studio was giving any attention. As original as LittleBigPlanet is, the Rube Goldberg-inspired game has existed for a long time (though please do give it significant props for being Turing complete).

So, why all the fuss? Well,
LittleBigPlanet IS pretty original. You can definitely trace its historical precedent, but so can you in the case of most great works of culture; this does not keep it out of the culture club.

On the flip side you have
Wrath of the Lich King, which is merely the second expansion of a four year old game that was itself a well polished retread of worn gameplay clichés and SHOULD suffer from XKCD’s Fiction Rule of Thumb. Expect it to break sales records. Lord knows I’m buying it.

Somewhere in the middle you have
Fable 2, Fallout 3, and Mirror’s Edge. The two F’s will be coasting a bit on brand recognition; Peter Molyneux and Fallout 1 & 2, respectively. Mirror’s Edge will be an exciting title because Parkour is awesome. And all three are bringing something new to the table. They have to. They are not fucking Bejeweled.

Fable 2 has that dog, which will represent love, or something, along with a whole slew of secondary mechanics that may or may not meaningfully impact the gameplay. Fallout 3 has the “Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System” which is the in-game fictional wrapper for the semi-real-time combat. Mirror’s Edge apparently nailed the feeling of free running in a game.

They will all be great and worth your time, but it is important to be aware of the place of these games in the general canon and to be able to say why you care. You care because these games will be fun. They will be pretty, they will be the cream of the crop, they will have plenty of “holy shit” moments, and I’m putting my money on
LittleBigPlanet for instant classic status.

What they suffer from is an abundance of precedent. None of these games will add a new brush to designers’ palettes. I gotta restate this, because if I don’t the fanboy masses will smother me in “yoar gay” comments: All of these games will be great. And, for the record, having a scarcity of precedent does
not a great game make.

But, those games that, for better or worse, try something completely new are the ones that expand gaming permanently for everybody.
Katamari Damacy made I don’t even know what hip and cool, as well as front new and addictive gameplay. Thief brought us the stealth genre. Robonixon wouldn’t have his beloved Rockband were it not for PaRappa the Rappa. Every designer and avid gamer, as well as many movie producers, novelists, and computer manufacturers owe Gary Gygax and Shigeru Miyamoto a tender reach around.

But listen, not every game that expands the medium is art, and not making a bold new statement with the mechanics and style prevents a game from exalted status. Just know what you are playing.

Peace in my butt crease,
-Ben

Nick & Norah's Infinite Review


Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a strange little piece that has, simultaneously, both a whole lot and a whole lot of nothing going for it. Important filmic elements - plot, believability, any sort of depth to any of the characters not named Nick or Norah -- are thrown to the side in favor of less weighty things, like tone and mood. And in all these respects, it manages to fail and succeed simultaneously.

What
Nick & Norah has going for it is a feeling. Even if you don’t like the music, even if you’re not from the East Coast, even if you never spent all night looking for a band named Where’s Fluffy, you’ll understand where in their lives these characters are: that space in high school where nothing matters, but everything carries such weight; where the future is so far away but closing in fast; where you can spend a night bouncing around with your friends, driving from place to place with only the loosest sense of a plan, and it somehow manages to become the greatest time in the world.

Because that’s what this movie is about. Nick (
Michael Cera) is the emo-boy from high school, just out of a relationship, in a band, and trying to win back the emotionally manipulative ex-girlfriend. Norah (Kat Dennings) is the counterpoint to said ex-girlfriend, a down-on-herself beauty who hasn’t figured out that attitude, not presentation, is 50% of the battle. Before they meet the two are connected through Nick’s sad-sack mixed-CDs for the ex that Norah rescues from the garbage (the one we see her snag at the beginning is titled “ROAD TO CLOSURE, VOL. 12”). It’s only in New York City at a club that the two fall in together and spend the rest of the movie being all teen-angsty. Over the course of the night we follow them through their trials and tribulations to find the secret show of THE GREATEST BAND IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, Where’s Fluffy.

And that’s it. That’s the story. Oh, of course, there are side-journeys, like any high school adventure worth its weight. The two meet up with Tal (
Jay Baruchel, pretty much completely wasted), Norah’s on-again-off-again older boyfriend with benefits. He’s a one note bad-guy who doesn’t really pose any threat to Nick because we’ve seen the trailers and we know who’s getting together in the end. What did strike a chord was Norah’s quiet desperation, her willingness to throw herself back on this totally lame-ass dude simply because she doesn’t know any better -- she’s at that age where she hasn’t quite put all the pieces together and realized that, contrary to popular belief, sometimes no attention is better than bad attention. I knew a lot of girls like Norah in high school, and a lot of them did exactly the same thing.

Nick too, reminded me a lot of guys I knew back in the day, though his continued refusal to try and woo Norah through out the film in the hopes of reuniting with his (pathetic and annoying) ex struck me as a little dumb. Lord knows that any teenage guy I knew who was no longer in a relationship would have leapt at the chance to get cozy with a chick as funny, pretty, and
stacked (pardon my wordage) as Norah.

Of course, though, he comes around, and after more adventures trying to find Norah’s totally-wasted friend, a trip to a gay-Christmas gala, a recording studio, car wrecks, dirty dancing, and the weird tension with Nick’s gay band mates, the titular duo get together and live happily ever after. Or, you know, go to college an hour from each other.

Despite the weaknesses, Kat Dennings and Michael Cera hold the film together with their charm, and the piece as a whole displays the kind of whimsical carelessness that epitomizes the upper/middle class high school experience. This movie is nostalgia for the Millennial generation that’s left high school... a reminder of what our youth was, and the whimsical fairy tale we’d like our lives to be.

-RoboNixon

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Nerd Alert!

If you were one of the everyone who saw Iron Man this summer, you probably enjoyed the performance of one Terrence Howard, he of Hustle & Flow fame. You also might have gotten the idea that we'd soon see Mr. Howard as the character of Rhodes in an Iron Man suit in one of the sequels.

You were wrong.

CHUD has the scoop that, due to bad contract negotiations ($$ v. $$$), Howard has dropped out of Iron Man 2 to be replaced by...

Don Cheadle? Really? Wow. I mean, score one for Iron Man 2. That means they managed to swap out one Oscar-nominated actor for another in a supporting role in a super hero movie. Bad-ass move, Marvel. Bad-ass.

This makes me marginally more interested in Iron Man 2, because while I think Howard is a terrific actor (see: Hustle & Flow), I think Cheadle is a slightly better actor, and more willing to take risks on screen. Not that it matters, since he'll be wearing ridiculous armor and flying around all CGI-like. But hey -- that voice-over? OSCAR caliber.


-RoboNixon

ps. I'm going to pretend that neither of them was in CRASH so that, in some small way, I can like both of them better.

EDIT: The Hollywood Reporter just posted a piece online to the same effect, meaning that Disappear Here officially (um, thanks to CHUD, as I did no actual reporting of my own) beat THR to a scoop. 

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Because "Army Wives" is Too Exciting

Let me start by saying I have not seen USA Network's "The Starter Wife" starring Debra Messing of "Will & Grace" fame. And, to be fair, I probably never will.


But for all of you who DID watch the miniseries (can I see a show of hands?), there's some good news: It has returned -- and as a real series! -- though whether or not you watch it depends on your reaction to the following:
“From the mini-series to the series, we really go into what it’s like to be a divorced woman and navigating with your ex-husband, what it’s like to have that relationship, how to raise a child in those conditions, how to date in those conditions,” said Josann McGibbon, who, with Sara Parriott (with whom she wrote “Runaway Bride”), is an executive producer and writer for the series.
If any of those buzzwords hit you in a special place (your face), then maybe this show is for you. Me? On Fridays? At 9? Drunk. So no Starter Wife for me.

Like a zombie, "The Starter Wife" miniseries has been picked up for a ten episode season on USA, airing Fridays at 9pm.


Picture stolen from here.

-RoboNixon

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Meet (some) of the Gang

As you may have noticed, it looked for a while like Disappear Here was going the way of the mammal. Strangely, I have things in my life other than sitting in front of a beat up MacBook Pro and writing about the latest book/movie/tv show/album/etc I've read/watched/listened to/etc.

But a few of you, dear readers, wrote in, whining about how you missed my amazing prose and life-affirming personality. You wanted more RoboNixon. You wanted more Disappear Here.

The Panda was sad there weren't more posts.

But the problem still remained:  How could I provide enough content to make visiting regularly worthwhile, but also get my real shit done?

The answer? Get a writing staff.

So as you may have noticed here and here, we have a handful of new writers joining the fray. Frankie is an accomplished blogger in her own right, Hobbes is in a field far far removed from entertainment, with good taste and a huge brain, and Ben is a technological wizard (and will be busting his Disappear Here cherry within the next week). 

And this is only the beginning. In the next few months we'll be joined by a few more writers, which bodes well for you, reader. It means I will not longer be able to force my singular opinion down your collective throats. Nay. Now I must shove a collective opinion down your singular throat. Progress progress progress.

Stay tuned.

-RoboNixon

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Most. Boring. Movie. Ever.

There's not a whole lot of positive things I can say about the Natalee Holloway case other than that I think the way it was treated by the media was completely, totally, and infinitely ridiculous.

So before I say anything incendiary, let me state that I think Lifetime* doing a made-for-TV movie about the young woman's disappearance from Aruba** was inevitable, yet ultimately boring. They never found her body, and nobody was ever "officially" taken in for any crime. Thus removing all conflict from the story except "People try to find her. They reach a dead end in the case. They continue trying to find her. They do not find her."

What makes it even better is that
The network will be "working closely" with Holloway’s mother, Beth Twitty, said LMN senior veep in charge of original movies, Tanya Lopez, "to raise awareness of how to keep our children safe at all times."
I imagine this involves chains, cattle-prods, and razor-wire fences. I'm not sure these people are aware, but children seek out unsafe things. It has to due with an incomplete development in the prefrontal cortex of their brain. And also them being dumb.

So let me summarize the message of the film: No matter where you are, don't get drunk and wander off alone with strangers. The End.

Most. Boring. Movie. Ever.


Photo from NY Times.

-RoboNixon

*DUH.
**One of the SAFEST islands you can vacation to

Pre-Debate Homework

Before the big debate tonight, I think it's important that we all acknowledge something truly great about this RoboCountry of ours:


The gist of it seems to be that while an interesting and strangely fair look at a man who put his shitty life together to get to a place that he really, really, really should not have gotten to, it kind of falls apart and is kind of confused about its identity.

Right. Like anyone was pretending it was going to be anything other than an "Oliver Stone" film. References to the flawed (and fucking-terrible) Nixon is as big a turn-off as I can get. So rather than being a film on the "must-see" list it is now, regrettably, on the "must-netflix" list.

But make up your own mind.

And watch the Presidential Debate tonight. Because it's fun to watch humans run for my Infinite RoboPresidential Office.

-President RoboNixon

Burn After Reading - Retrospective

I may have never actually understood a Coen Brothers film.


True, I wrote a ten page essay on why The Big Lebowski considered the Gulf War to be social pornography. Being a giant English nerd, I adored the cheerful manipulation of Homer in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I left No Country for Old Men satisfied with its conflicted and open-ended style.


But…what on Earth do you make of Burn After Reading? And—once you make something out of it—how do you link that with their oeuvre.


Can we all just move past Brad Pitt’s performance in this film? He’s the funniest character, and—frankly—this shouldn’t be a surprise. Reviewers constantly underestimate Brad Pitt for the same reason they underestimate many talented actresses: he’s pretty. He’s a talented, hilarious actor, and we shouldn’t really expect any less.


Pretty things can be funny. Let’s move on to the plot and themes.


The movie is typical Coen Bros. humor: take relentlessly stupid people and allow them to crash into one another in blissfully silly conflicts for approximately two hours. But there’s a slight change here. Whereas films like Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski cherished these characters and promised us, the viewers, that nothing too terrible would befall these characters, Burn After Reading makes no such promises.


These are incredibly stupid people playing in a surprisingly real world. It’s almost as if the Coens took characters from previous films and thought, “What if someone actually did this shit in the real world?” People die, lives are broken, and—in the end—we find that it’s all been for nothing.


Well, not exactly for nothing. There are two main themes played with in Burn: physical beauty and the power of knowledge. We can separate these into a simplistic dichotomy of the physical versus the intellect. (Look out, Platonic thought follows!) Our Western society tells us that the intellect reigns above and controls the physical, as the intellect is superior to the physical.


This…is not the case in Burn.


The characters have no actual knowledge with which to work. George Clooney’s secret device is a sex-toy; Frances McDormand has an atrociously dull memoir rather than international secrets. The characters inflate these useless, impotent bits of information with intellectual power.


In many ways, the people of Burn have committed the essential sin of rational creatures; they’ve used reason to create falsehoods rather than perceive the truth. In a comedy, this is rarely punished. The Coen Bros. typically delight in the round-about way that fiction (or delusion) can eventually lead the misinformed to the truth (or at least back to where they innocently began).


Such is not the case here. Here, the physical world reacts violently to the derangement imposed upon it by intellectualism.


Everyone in Burn is obsessed with exercise and physical beauty. Frances McDormand wants plastic surgery (which is another form of imposing reason to reinterpret physical reality into something it is not), Clooney needs to run after sex (sex itself being a physical obsession with beauty), and half the movie takes place at a gym. Why the preoccupation?


These characters have no intellectual merit. They are purely physical beings—animals puffed up with undeserved, intellectual pride. Chad (Pitt) playing with information is like a child playing with a handgun. It should come as no surprise that with Chad’s death the film barrels ahead to a bloody and dark end in which the physical world punishes these ignorant characters for trying to redefine it and themselves. They aren’t meant to wield intellectual power.


They’re meant to exercise and fuck.


Dark? Yes. Darker than usual? Perhaps.


My main problem, however, lies with the final bits of the film. The ending joke—and JK Simmons’s role as the viewer-surrogate—is so funny that the movie almost feels like two hours of set-up for one punch line. And the punch line is vicious, inhumane, and superior.


The Coens don’t normally cruelly mock their comic characters or allow us to feel better than them. They’re silly. We enjoy how silly they are. But in Burn we know that their idiocy has extended beyond silliness and merits harsh punishment.


At the close of the film McDormand gets her surgery, but nothing is learned. When we’re told not to do it again, what do they mean? Watch the movie? Assault reality by crafting it into what we want it to be? Elect ignorant people into places of political power? Is this all just a Bush metaphor?


In place of the Coen Bros. usual chaotic glee, I felt cynically satisfied. Did they twist after No Country, or was this tone always underneath their films?


Again, I may have never actually understood a Coen Brothers film.


+Hobbes


(Image from www.collider.com)

Friday, October 3, 2008

Life on Mars Maybe Not as Terrible As Life on Earth

Every year ABC rolls the dice on one truly first-rate pilot that breaks (or at least bends) the usual mold. "Life on Mars" is the latest gamble -- albeit one predicated on an existing template, that being a BBC drama. 
Splendidly cast, handsomely produced and conceptually intriguing...
Life on Mars is a show I have strangely been looking forward to for two years, since back when I heard David E. Kelly was adapting a British cop show involving time-travel

SOLD!

After reshooting and recasting nearly all of the pilot (and booting Mr. Michelle Pfieffer from the proceedings) we are left with a high cost, super cast, and potentially exciting series. 

Old Cast...

...New Cast

Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli, and Gretchen Mol in a 70's TV show?  Hot.

And Variety says it doesn't suck.

Count me in.  I'll see you there. ABC. Thursdays. 10pm. October 9.

-RoboNixon

EDIT: The Hollywood Reporter also has a particularly nice review up, saying 
If it holds its own against the final season of NBC's "ER," "Mars" might be orbiting the schedule for years
Count me in.

Yeah, FUCK YOU WRITERS!*

The Writers Guild of America West is taking on Tyler Perry.
The guild on Thursday filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board against House of Payne LLC, the production shingle for the Perry-owned syndie/TBS comedy "House of Payne" and the upcoming TBS spinoff "Meet the Browns."

Of course.  Fuck you, writers. What the hell do you know? Trying to get all "fair contracts" so you can be "unionized" so you can steal from the system with your "benefits." I mean, I'm a robot, I don't need healthcare or retirement, so why should writers? Hell, as a robot, I do WAAAAY more work than a "writer" does -- I don't fart around all day, I fuckin' bend girders and shit and fuckin' put this world together. So a writer wipes their ass with a piece of paper and then hands it off to REAL professionals like actors and directors and let's not forget the most IMPORTANT part of the equation -- the PRODUCERS -- who are responsible for everything good ever and nothing that's ever been bad. That's a FACT. It's in WIKIPEDIA.

...

For the record, I'm super interested to see how this plays out. Writers get screwed all over Hollywood, and TV is supposed to be one of the few "safe" places for them to work -- where, yeah, they have to turn out a bajillion pages a year, and, yeah, they have to kowtow to the desires of the network, but beyond that their vision is in their hands to put on the screen. 

If it turns out that these four writers were, in fact, fired because they were trying to get a new Guild contract (one of the writers was not in union) and not due to shitty work, which is what Tyler Perry and co. is saying, then I will have to wish terrible terrible things upon him and his shows and movies for ever.

I have no issue with Tyler Perry. I think he's a really smart dude who found a niche and wisely exploited it to his benefit (like in evolution!), and I can't comment on the quality of his work because I haven't seen any of it. But if he starts fucking with the rights of writers to organize, I'm gonna have to do a whole 'lotta RoboHatin'.


-RoboNixon

*sorry writers, RoboNixon luvs u.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Because Fox Misses the X-Files That Much

So "Fringe," the FOX paranormal/investigative TV show I reviewed a while back, just got a full-season pick up from FOX.  What does this mean for you? Well, if you watch it, more episodes! Hurray! And if you don't watch it... More episodes for you not to watch! Hurray...?

The whole piece is here at Variety. 

I have to admit, I haven't watched any episodes of "Fringe" since the (awful) pilot. I have no interest in watching any more episodes after the (awful) pilot. And so I will continue not watching any episodes, thanks to the (awful) pilot.

But there's no accounting for taste.

-RoboNixon

Frankie's First Post Here

Last night I saw Equus and, by extension, Daniel Radcliffe's penis. It was slightly stiff, and so was he.

It's Been a Long Time...

Hello, Dear Readers.  RoboNixon here, to let you know that contrary to popular belief, I have not died. This is due, primarily, to me being a robot, as opposed to having not died. I die a little inside every day.

Disappear Here is alive, with some new changes on the way. So fear not, stay tuned, and prepare yourself. 

-RoboNixon