Closet Sci-Fi Geek

I Put More Ads Up

They aren’t too intrusive, but I put another set of Google ads along the left and some referral boxes on the lower right. The sad thing is, even though this site seems to get some decent traffic, I am lucky to make $3/month off of it. Woo hoo! I’m rich!

Stargate SG-1 Ends Tonight…So Where Does That Leave SciFi?

I’m about nine seasons behind with Stargate SG-1 so I won’t be watching the series finale that’s airing tonight. (Not to mention, I’ll be out performing comedy improv in West Los Angeles!) So now SG-1 is dead, and BSG is dying soon. Whither SciFi? We have Painkiller Jane (I’m not even sure what that concept is all about), Stargate Atlantis, Eureka (which has grown on me), The Dresden Files (perching precariously on a precipice), and…WRESTLING.

The Friday night line-up is screwed, and Saturday nights have become lame-ass TV movie from hell night. Suggestion: Move Dresden and Doctor Who to Friday nights, put Painkiller Whats-her-face on Saturday nights with Eureka, bring back some good old sci-fi shows for reruns, and drop the wrestling.

I could be wrong. Not that it matters much to me anymore anyway, since I’m now becoming a big fan of the “wait ’til it’s on DVD” method of watching shows.

The Dresden Files, Paul Blackthorne and the Suspension of Disbelief

Today I had a chance to interview Paul Blackthorne, star of The Dresden Files. I’ll be posting the interview here in the next week or two when I get a moment to transcribe it.

The funny story with this is that I ran into Paul Blackthorne a few weeks ago at an event in Santa Monica, and I had no clue who he was. I figured he was just another wanna-be actor. (You just assume that, when you live in Los Angeles and run into an actor you don’t recognize.) Now, considering The Dresden Files is somewhat niche-oriented, my Paul-ignorance would perhaps have been fine for any normal person, but I happen to be running a sci-fi blog here. For me to not recognize the star of The Dresden Files is downright embarrassing! But…alas, I had just not seen the show yet. Obviously, I hadn’t paid too much attention to the previews either. (And, here’s my third excuse: Paul does not look a thing like the drawing on the promo materials!)

The strangest part of this story is that the day before I met Mr. Blackthorne, I had a dream I was talking to a tall guy with black hair and a British accent. I don’t know anyone who fits that description, so, when I was at this event, and a tall guy with black hair and a British accent raised his hand to ask a question (the guy in question being Paul Blackthorne), I knew I had to talk to him afterwards…how bizarre is that? What can I tell you…I’m a closet sci-fi geek who happens to be an energy healer…so I must be psychically attuned to science fiction opportunities or something. Either that, or the character Harry Dresden somehow exists for real in the ether somewhere, and he was charming up some grass-roots media attention for his show.

I’m actually the kind of person who doesn’t really want to meet the stars of the shows that I watch regularly. For me, it blows the suspension of disbelief that I develop for the show. Actors are, after all, just real people, and once you know them…well, you know them. I have met quite a few people from the new Star Trek shows just by accident in social (not convention) situations, and so now when I see these people on TV, I think of the actor behind the character. (NAME DROPPING ALERT!!) I briefly hung out with Wil Wheaton, for example, because he was good friends with a guy I was dating some years back. So now he’s Wil, not Wesley, that guy who used to go to Canter’s with us on Saturday Nights. (Wil is one fantastically funny guy, by the way. I am so sorry he got such a bad rap for his role on that show.)

I really don’t get fans who go to sci-fi conventions and get excited about meeting the stars of their favorite shows. I really do not want to meet the stars of Lost. I saw Dean Cain once at a party during the height of Lois and Clark, and I ran the other way - I’d rather think of him as Superman. And thank goodness I never met any Star Trek stars from the original series…Voyager and The Next Generation are totally blown for me, but at least I can still watch the original Star Trek and imagine that Captain Kirk really exists somewhere out there in the universe. (William Shatner’s Priceline ads notwithstanding.)

This applies to every show I like, sci-fi or not. I don’t want to get to be buddy-buddy with Hugh Laurie - I want to think of him as House. House is one of my favorite shows and that’s precisely because his character is so strong.

Perhaps you are a fan just dying at the thought of meeting your favorite star and can’t possibly understand why I would not want to meet them. Well, I guess that’s how it is in Los Angeles. We are surrounded by stars here. We Angelenos live with them, date them, hang out with them, go shave our heads at tattoo parlors with them. Not that I’ve got a celebrity roster of gal pals but you just run into people here. So you can get kind of blase about the whole thing. (Either that, or you turn into an annoying name-dropping kiss-ass celebrity-hanger-on-er, which is totally not my style.)

Such as it is, it took a chance meeting with Paul Blackthorne to get me to finally watch The Dresden Files, but now when I watch the show I see Paul Blackthorne and not Harry Dresden. Thankfully, I was not a fan of the show, so no “Dresden File” world has been blown for me.

When I did finally watch The Dresden Files, much of what I was considering - especially since I knew I had an interview coming up with Paul - was Paul’s performance as an actor. How was he? Well, Paul is thankfully a good actor (because it’d suck to have to put on a smile and interview him if he were god awful). Harry Dresden’s accent kind of threw me - in real life Paul has a fantastic British accent - what a shame to cover that up for that old school American dialect they have him doing. As for the show itself - I enjoyed it. It was pleasant mind candy - a lighter version of Supernatural, from my first viewing.

And finally, after watching show for a little bit, I was able to relax and forget I was watching Paul - some actor dude I met at an event who happened to have a British accent - and start to feel like Harry Dresden was alive and breathing (even with said American accent). I liked his character, and I liked the warmth Paul brought to the screen. It’s a nice show.

Alas, I hope I did not wait too long to start watching, since the show is on the bubble. Fans are anxiously awaiting to hear its fate, but if SciFi is as stupid as I think they are, they’ll probably cancel this one as well, if just because they can’t sit and wait for people like me to catch up and start watching during season two.

Oh well. Regardless, please stay tuned for my official Paul Blackthorne interview. He is one cool cat, so you’ll want to hear what he has to say. Stay tuned.

Battlestar Galactica’s Brief Journey: How Long Should Sci-Fi Shows Last?

With the recent news about the impending end of Battlestar Galactica after only four seasons, I have to ask the following question:

How many seasons is the right amount of seasons for a good, serialized science fiction show?

The new Star Treks were supposed to last around seven seasons (many did not make it that far). Farscape was pulled after four seasons, although the arc was planned for five. Babylon 5 made it to a full five seasons, but it lasted two seasons too long, in my opinion. Meanwhile, Stargate (and its spin-offs) is quickly becoming the Bonanza of the sci-fi world.

So it is with some hesitancy that I proclaim my disappointment at BSG ending so soon. (Although, it is not one of my all-time favorite shows, and I have yet to get caught up with season three.) Maybe it’s a good idea to plan for serialized science fiction shows to have a short shelf life. I know I’m not the only person who wishes Lost were simply going to be wrapped up sooner than later…not because we dislike it, but because the suspense is killing us.

The great thing about the planned axing of BSG (and a few years from now, Lost) is that writers and producers can plan out the show so it can maintain a strong integrity and focus throughout its run. One only needs to look at how Babylon 5 wore out its welcome once the main battle was done and over with. The X-Files stupidly continued on without Mulder - WHY?

When we think about the science fiction worlds we love the most, many of them are short-lived and compact in nature. Movies, for example, run only a few hours. The Matrix would have been better as a standalone. The original Star Wars captured our hearts with the first three installments; there was no need to go back and add the backstory.

There’s a tendency to want to milk a franchise for all its worth, the way Paramount did with Star Trek. Did that make Star Trek better, however? When I think about Star Trek, I still think about Captain Kirk. That’s the Trek I love the most, to this day. If Captain Janeway had never existed, I would not have missed her one bit.

That’s not to say that shows can’t be good if they continue for a long time. But I prefer those to be mindless candy throwaway shows. Remember Friday the 13th, The Series? Did we need to follow that in order? Did we care? It’s something that, if it’s on, you go, “oh, hey, Friday the 13th, I’ll watch this.” And so it’s nice to have a bunch of episodes hanging around for all those reruns. The one exception to this is Doctor Who, but, well, they’re British so no wonder they manage to do it smartly. But otherwise, do the good shows need to last longer? I say no.

Maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?

A Scanner Darkly

Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly highlights a world “seven years in the future” where a highly addictive and lethal drug has taken a hold of 20% of the population.

The gimmick of this film is the computerized animation called “rotoscoping,” which is the film equivalent of running an expensive Photoshop filter over a picture. Because of this effect, it is obvious that “real actors” are guiding the movements of the so-called “animated” characters, giving the film a somewhat surreal effect. Some fans of the film loved this effect. Personally, I thought it was not only unnecessary, but implemented poorly. (At times, the “real world” surroundings underneath the animation were all too real, thus popping you out of the animated world.)

I’m a fan of animation but it must be done well. Poorly done animation is worse than poor cinematography. And while this wasn’t so bad as to be painful to watch, the animation was distracting and not captivating to me personally. If the film had been shot straight with top-notch cinematography, I feel that it would have enhanced the film greatly. I’ll hazard a guess that it would have made a huge difference in the success of the film, making it much more appealing to mainstream audiences, and giving it much more stature as a long-lasting cult sci-fi film.

So thus the film already has a strike against it (in my book) with the cheap, gimmicky animation effect. From there, director Richard Linklater’s screen adaptation is simply not as strong as it could be. Not having read the original book, I could still get a glimpse of probably what was originally a much better story. Linklater seems to be confused himself as to whether he’s directing a futuristic thriller, an underground humorous drug flick filled with meaningless clever banter meant to appeal to the hipster crowd, or a purposefully confusing arthouse piece meant to “make you think.”

The beginning, in particular, is a confused mish-mash as we begin with not the main character, but a secondary character who barely plays a role as the film goes on. He’s having an obviously bad drug trip and imagining bugs crawling all over his skin. We creep slowly from there to meet our hero/anti-hero played by Keanu Reeves, who is apparently some sort of undercover cop out to bust a drug ring.

Meandering to start and sometimes painful in dialogue and delivery, the film finally picks up a bit in the middle. Things get more entertaining, at least, with the introduction of Woody Harrelson’s character, who breaks up some of the confusion and monotony by being quite funny at times. He plays well off of Robert Downey, Jr. (Alas, it’s hard not to think Downey probably referred to his own coke-induced stupors as his inspiration in playing a druggie).

Fortunately, the momentum picks up and the film does have a satisfying ending. Still, I think this could have been much, much better. It’s a great concept and an important topic, so I hope another director will someday take a shot at Dick’s novel.

I give this a B-.