journey to babble

Gotta love late-night Star Trek reruns. Specifically, "Journey to Babel," one of my favorite episodes. It's got everything: action, intrigue, wit, love, logic, gratuitous shirtless Kirk — and Ambassador Sarek repelling Gav the Tellarite with what looks to me like Upward Split & Push, a T'ai Chi technique I was practicing myself earlier this wee. And let's not forget Jane Wyatt swanning about beneath an Anne Boleyn hair sculpture.

Call me crazy, but I like this ep even better than the much-lauded "City on the Edge of Forever." Sarek is crazy hot. Kirk's laughable martial arts skills nearly get him killed. McCoy is extra doctory, Checkov extra Russian. ("Keptin! Eet's en ellien wessel!") Spock carries the show, and he was always my favorite.

Next time you see "Babel," watch the bandage around Kirk's torso creep steadily northward. He gets stabbed in the lower back, yet the wrap starts around mid-chest and ends up as a tube top. Then toward the end, Kirk is clutching himself in pain, but he's clutching his left upper arm, while he was stabbed above his right hip. And then he marches into the turbolift and keeps on going, apparently right off the set, even though he should have stopped in the small elevator space.

God, I love this show. And did you know it's now available on iTunes?

Super Bowl ads

I spent a productive morning lounging in bed, a cat in my lap, watching this year's Super Bowl ads online. Click here to see them for yourself.

There are a couple good ads in the bunch, one great one, and several that make you wonder what the heck their creators were thinking — par for the course, I guess. All 60 ads are available on that site, in alphabetical order by brand name, so pace yourself. And be forewarned: there's a three-second Bud Light mini-commercial before each of the regular ones. Too bad, Bud Light; no amount of repetition is going to make your swill palatable.

First, the great ad: the Emerald Nuts spot featuring Robert Goulet. This is unquestionably one of the strangest, and one of the funniest, ads I've ever watched. Must be seen to be believed. I may actually buy the product just for the giggles I'd get remembering this ad.

Second, the good ones: those featuring animals. Blockbuster, Bud Light, and Yum Brands (Taco Bell) all have some entertaining animal ads. My favorites in order: mouse, lions, crabs, apes.

Third, the celebrity ads. The only celebrity I recognized out of the many featured this year was Charles Barkley, who is not exactly au currant. (I also figured out Sheryl Crow, but only because her name was both spoken aloud and written across the screen.) I blame my out-of-touchness on the fact that many of the faces in these ads belong to hip-hop and country "artists," and those are genres I'll avoid if I can.

Fourth, the violent ads. This category comprises quite a few of them, actually, which is really sad. Can we see a little creativity, please? As Emerald Nuts proves, you don't have to be cruel to be hilarious.

• Of Budweiser and Bud Light's nine ads, two feature explicit violence — face slapping and pegging someone in the face with a rock — and a third mocks serial killer/dangerous hitchhiker stereotypes.
  
  
• CareerBuilders' three spots all show hapless office workers getting the crap beat out of them in Lost/Survivor-style jungle scenarios.
  
  
• Disney animated movie: various slappings, and a T-Rex tries to chomp a child.
  
  
• Doritos: couple meets via car crash and other slapstick mishaps.
  
  
• E-Trade: bank robbery.
  
  
• FedEx: the "office on the moon" scene is funny until someone gets lasered out of existence for no reason whatsoever.
  
  
• Garmin: Power Ranger-like hero vanquishes Godzilla-like map monster.
  
  
• GM: fired factory robot dreams of committing suicide. Not. Funny. At. All. I sympathized with the surprisingly likeable robot until it stepped off a bridge. That's just unnecessary.
  
  
• King Pharmaceuticals: characters labeled as diabetes, high blood pressure and other diseases beat the crap out of an old man in an heart costume.
  
  
• Sierra Mist: self-absorbed hospital workers deprive an immobilized patient of fluids.
  
  
• Weinstein: trailer for Hannibal Rising, the new movie featuring uber-murderer Hannibal Lecter, who is violence personified.
  
  Aside: February is Black History Month, and this year's big game is historic for seeing a black coach win a Super Bowl for the first time. Many of the ads explicitly or implicitly play up the black angle by featuring black celebrities and characters in positive roles. In the Sierra Mist ad, however, the hospital workers are black and the helpless patient white. Does that mean anything? Or did I only notice the contrast with all those other positive black characters?
  
  That is a shamefully long list.
  

Fifth: the sexy ads. Or not. Apparently, ad makers have finally caught on to the backlash against the old "sex sells" mentality. None of this year's ads relies solely on sex to get its message across. Instead, they lampoon the T&A commercials that have been Super Bowl staples for so long. Good on ya, fellas. If ever an industry needed to laugh at itself, it's advertising. The rest of us have been doing so for years.

Examples: There's one ad where a checkout clerk gets hot and bothered over a customer's many flavors of Doritos, which I guess is supposed to be extra funny because neither character is what you'd call a hot, sexy model. GoDaddy goes the other direction with a hot chick/wet t-shirt moment. Chevrolet turns the tables with a bunch of average Joes ripping their shirts off in a sudsy frenzy as they try to work the girls in the cool Chevy into a lather. And Sprint pokes fun at erectile dysfunction ads with its "connectile dysfunction" remedy of better broadband coverage.

Kudos to Coke, Doritos, FedEx, Flomax, and others for putting some normal-looking people on screen, including active, attractive seniors. It's nice to see the small screen finally start to look more like the larger world outside.

Sixth: the shockers. None! Nothing stands out as titillating or boundary-pushing. The closest anything comes is E-Trade's "one finger" ad, where it's implied that you can use a single finger to click on E-Trade's great online services, then show a different finger to the stockbroker you no longer need.

That's it. The only other references to naughtiness or private parts are the mocking of the erectile dysfunction ads — not of ED itself — and a straight-up ad by Flomax that addresses urinary problems in older men. Oh, and one guy stranded on CareerBuilders Island gets a wedgie.

Seventh: the homophobic ads. Another mercifully small category. Hooray! Snickers is the only offender this year. Two car mechanics feel compelled to "Quick! Do something manly!" after their lips meet over a shared candy bar. So they yank out tufts of chest hair. May the same fate befall the benighted fools who still think gay-bashing is funny.

Eighth: the computer generation. As usual, this year's Super Bowl ads feature superior animation and special effects. Blockbuster, Budweiser, Coke, Disney, FedEx, Garmin, GM, HP, Izod, Van Heusen, and Yum Brands (Taco Bell) all impress with digital wizardry. It's hard to pick a favorite, although Coke's "give a little love" and "inside the drink machine" pieces, and Bud Select's holographic football game, come to mind.

Ninth: an honorable mention. My honorable mention award goes to Sierra Mist for the guy with the beard comb-over. Whoever thought that one up deserves a raise.

Tenth, last, and least: the rest of the car ads. Bor-ring. Change the channel.

OK, that's it. I was surprised by how generally banal this year's ads were. Then again, Super Bowl advertisers are paying outrageous amounts of money to try and appeal to the widest possible audience in the smallest amount of time, so I can see why they play it pretty safe.

By the way, who won the game?

media rant du jour

Today I yap on about Lost and Heroes. And there will be spoilers. Oh yes. There will be spoilers.




Are you ready?





Last night’s Lost mini-finale, not to put too fine a point on it (say I’m the only bee in your bonnet), bit the wax tadpole. Chomped down hard. Backed up and started to sprint, in fact, in preparation for jumping a Dharma-tattooed shark. Here’s how:

• Kate, in her flashback, loved and left a guy. Um, DUH? That fact that she ditched Nathan Fillion, aka Captain Tightpants, just confirms my suspicion that for a smart girl, she’s a flaming idiot.
  
• Just in case you didn’t catch on to the fact that Action Kate is a fish out of water in a wifely role, she was WEARING AN APRON, which as everyone knows is a sure sign of domestication. It could only be a matter of time before she cast off that bond of servitude to return to her carefree, liberated life . . . of running from a federal marshal whose scrutiny influenced her every move. Ooh, the irony, right?
  
• Kate used Sawyer for some hot, grimy, closed-circuit-videoed jungle lovin’. Again, um, DUH? That’s been coming since the first time he called her Freckles. And she wouldn’t say she loved him? Once more with the DUH. Sawyer always wants what he doesn’t or can’t have. By implying that he doesn’t have her completely, she’s manipulated him the rest of the way into her back pocket. She thinks.
  
• Sawyer, after one night with Super Kate, appeared ready to kneel and be killed, suggesting that his spirit has, at long last, after weeks of gratuitous beatings, been broken. His defeat got Kate all riled, so now she’s the rest of the way in his thrall, right? Please tell me he doesn’t truly believe it, that wily James Ford has one more trick up his tattered sleeve.
  
• Jack pulled a House and decided to pervert his Hippocratic oath for personal gain. Did anybody NOT see him being a selfish enough asshole to do this? Or at least to manipulate people into believing he did this?
  
• Just before the operation, Benry casually revealed a connection to the elusive Alex. Hint: We’re supposed to be curious enough about that to tune back in come February.
  
• As they scrubbed up for surgery, Juliet murmured something about being very good at following orders. Dude, you know she’s just trying to lure Jack into some hot, grimy, closed-circuit-vidoed lovin' in the fish tank. The Other side of the island(s) is really just one big porn studio.
  

Enough soap opera consummation and conflict already! I’m much more curious about what the rest of the crew is up to — solving the mystery of the island and all that. There is some real live supernatural stuff going down over there. The interesting people are over there: Hurley, Desmond, Locke, Rose and Bernard, Sun and Jin, Claire and Aaron. Time to turn our attention back to them.

---

I also watched episode 2 of Heroes last night. It was intriguing enough to make me want more. The story is shaping up nicely, what with the paranormal abilities and time travel and shadowy conspirators and looming nuclear disaster and all. And I really like a couple of the characters already, most notably Hiro.

I will say this, though: The casting director for this show clearly has a cast-one-get-one-free coupon at the Heroin Chic Boutique. I’m not shocked that the actual heroin addict character looks like a heroin addict, but must his girlfriend also look like she’s been strung out for years? Or the blonde femme fatale? Or the politician’s sad-eyed brother? I’m OK with the Indian geneticist; I think he’s just a slim guy who grew up on a non-American diet.

But the girl who lives next door? OH MY GOD, she looks like an ALIEN with a HUGE, BULBOUS, WALLEYED HEAD perched on the BODY OF A MALNOURISHED CHILD. Seriously, that ain’t right. Her appearance goes way beyond “gamine” into “grotesque.” Disturbing. Distracting.

To be fair, though, there are plenty of healthy-looking women and men in the show as well — including the cheerleader, who looks buff rather than Buffy. There’s a strong female cop, plus a beefy (but not sitcom fat/dumb) male cop, the totally ripped politician, and pudgy Hiro. Lots to like. Lots to like.

Summary: More Heroes, less Sexual Fantasy Island.

The Prestige is the shiznit

The Prestige is the shiznit. How intricate and mind-blowing is it? Hugh Jackman’s bare torso is the least of the things that will make you go, “Ooh!” This movie has it all: twists, layers, deceptions, obsessions, and David freakin’ Bowie as Nikola Tesla. There are easily half a dozen mad geniuses in this story, and the ending — the ending! — well, it’s magic, and to give it away would be a crime.

The magic is almost incidental to this story; character is the heart of it. In fact, the secrets behind the key illusions are given away freely, carelessly, onscreen. They’re trifles dwarfed by the secrets of human hearts and minds.

I knew and worked with a magician at one time, and while he was quite the crowd pleaser, he was also as full of emotional sleights and disappearances as the magicians in the movie. That’s one of many things this film gets spot-on.

truth, justice, and the American way

Superman Returns. I caught the matinee yesterday. Overall I enjoyed it. However, it left me bemused on a few counts, not least of which were:

What could Supe possibly see in Lois Lane? She is 100% personality-free, literally nothing but a stick figure in this chapter of the story. I don't know if that's Kate Bosworth's fault or the screenwriters'. But she's definitely lacking the compelling depth of, say, Spiderman's Mary Jane.

Also, her little boy's hair? Needs a wash and a cut, stat! You can't tell me a prig like Lois Lane would not have her darling boy barbered every two weeks come rain or shine. Seriously. The sooner Hollywood gets over this "exceptionally bad hair = adorable child" fetish, the better. Gag me.

And wasn't Lois's boyfriend Richard played by Cyclops from X-men? And did anyone besides me read actor James Marsden's name in print and, wishfully, see James Marsters instead?

And why didn't any of Lex Luthor's henchmen speak a word, especially the very interesting Kal Penn? It's not like there was no budget here to pay actors. They got Kevin frickin' Spacey, for heck's sake. They could have slipped Kal a few bucks to be as slyly funny as he was when he starred in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

And Supe stalking Lois home and using his x-ray vision to spy on her family? Just plain creepy, and out of step with the Man of Steel's moral code.

Anyway. Brandon Routh, as the new Superman, delivers exactly what's needed here, which is a damn good Christopher Reeve impersonation. He does a fine job and looks swell doing it. Routh should have a lock on the role for as long as he can fill out those tights.

Visually, this movie has it all: a handsome hero, excellent production design and top-notch special effects. The action sequences are also good, if a little too choppily edited for my taste. Music: grand, and the "Chopsticks" scene is unsettling.

Story-wise, it's also pretty rich, with plenty of juicy Supe-as-Jesus imagery to chew on. Don't worry, you won't exactly have to dig for it. Just picture Superman, spent with the effort of hoisting an enormous chunk of rock into space to save humanity, falling back toward Earth, feet together, arms spread. And don't forget the blood on his hands and the stab wound in his side.

But the tone? The tone is off. The Supe/Lois scenes are all about twice as long as they need to be. He's believable as a brooding, multidimensional hero, while she's just . . . flat. I'm not buying the relationship between them, so it's a yawn to watch them on the screen together. And that's too bad, since their relationship is the foundation of the entire movie.

Anyway. Overall grade: 1.5 thumbs up. Good matinee fare. It's nearly a full 2 hours long, so plan your soda consumption accordingly.