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Oct. 3rd, 2006 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatOkay Heroes is improving, actually I think it's going to be quite good. Really unnerved me in a couple of places tonight. Nice and creepy in just the right spots. Although this does pose a question - why is it that every science fiction/fantasy show that appears on film or tv has to be creepy, violent or have elements of horror? Can anyone out there think of an example, that is not horror on some level? (It's not rhetorical, nor meant as a criticism, just curious.)
Am close to giving up on Brothers and Sisters. Tried The Amazing Race and just don't like the people that much, also, well, watching far too much tv right now. Desperate Housewives may be the only one I watch Sundays, while it wasn't as funny or entertaining as last weekend, it didn't annoy me as much either. Also long-time Kyle McLachlan fan - yes he's on the list of actors I've wasted time watching in horrid movies. I grew up with Kyle - I remember being first in line to see him in David Lynch's Dune way back in Junior High, at least I think it was Junior High.
1. Anthony Stewart Head (started with his performance in England in Chess in 1988.)
2. Anthony Hopkins (performance in King Lear in 1987 on London Stage. )
3. Kevin Spacey (Clarence Darrow on American Playhouse, then of course Mel Profit on WiseGuy)
4. James Spader (a very old Kim Richards film no one but me has probably seen, that aired in the early 80's prior to Pretty in Pink)
5. Kyle McLachlan (Dune, then well, Twin Peaks...and many others.)
6. James Marsters (guess?)
And eventually I give up. I gave up on ASH with Manchild, Hopkins with Meet Joe Black, Spacey with David Gale, Spader with Boston Legal, MacLachlan with Sex in the City, and Marsters with Smallville.
Sooner or later, you realize uhm, okay, maybe we should pay more attention to directors and writers instead of cast?
Then again, you never know they might surprise you.
Regarding Studio 60 it's reminding me more and more of Sports Night and less and less of West Wing, which I'm hoping is a good thing. Not as funny as last weeks. Course I saw last weeks on the internet, so there's that. Also last weeks debate over the show tainted my watching of it. Making me realize something -maybe I don't want to analyze and critique tv shows that much anymore. Nor do I want to worry about seeing every episode. I just want to sit back and enjoy the things when I find the time for them, that's what they're for after all. To distract, entertain, and possibly inform. If I hate it? I'm switching it off and going to bed or writing. One of the nice things about not having a roommate is not having to fight over what to watch on the tv set. Or for that matter defending what you want to watch to another person. There's something oddly freeing about that.
Oh, one more thing - on 60 Minutes Sunday night they had an entry about a new procedure being tried in Canada (I believe) that relieves depression for people who've tried everything under the sun. Apparently electrode are inserted in area 25 of the brain, the frontal lobe, and charged for a couple of seconds - they stimulate the brain. Severe depression apparently causes this area of the brain to slow down or the neurotransmitters not to transmit, so colors are subdued, everything is sort of drab, bit like living in a world with nothing but gray, overcast days. It doesn't last and it isn't a cure, but it can relieve the symptoms for a while and for lengthy periods. Anyone else heard of this? Was sort of interesting. May be worth looking into for the folks out there who can't get relief through any other means.
Am close to giving up on Brothers and Sisters. Tried The Amazing Race and just don't like the people that much, also, well, watching far too much tv right now. Desperate Housewives may be the only one I watch Sundays, while it wasn't as funny or entertaining as last weekend, it didn't annoy me as much either. Also long-time Kyle McLachlan fan - yes he's on the list of actors I've wasted time watching in horrid movies. I grew up with Kyle - I remember being first in line to see him in David Lynch's Dune way back in Junior High, at least I think it was Junior High.
1. Anthony Stewart Head (started with his performance in England in Chess in 1988.)
2. Anthony Hopkins (performance in King Lear in 1987 on London Stage. )
3. Kevin Spacey (Clarence Darrow on American Playhouse, then of course Mel Profit on WiseGuy)
4. James Spader (a very old Kim Richards film no one but me has probably seen, that aired in the early 80's prior to Pretty in Pink)
5. Kyle McLachlan (Dune, then well, Twin Peaks...and many others.)
6. James Marsters (guess?)
And eventually I give up. I gave up on ASH with Manchild, Hopkins with Meet Joe Black, Spacey with David Gale, Spader with Boston Legal, MacLachlan with Sex in the City, and Marsters with Smallville.
Sooner or later, you realize uhm, okay, maybe we should pay more attention to directors and writers instead of cast?
Then again, you never know they might surprise you.
Regarding Studio 60 it's reminding me more and more of Sports Night and less and less of West Wing, which I'm hoping is a good thing. Not as funny as last weeks. Course I saw last weeks on the internet, so there's that. Also last weeks debate over the show tainted my watching of it. Making me realize something -maybe I don't want to analyze and critique tv shows that much anymore. Nor do I want to worry about seeing every episode. I just want to sit back and enjoy the things when I find the time for them, that's what they're for after all. To distract, entertain, and possibly inform. If I hate it? I'm switching it off and going to bed or writing. One of the nice things about not having a roommate is not having to fight over what to watch on the tv set. Or for that matter defending what you want to watch to another person. There's something oddly freeing about that.
Oh, one more thing - on 60 Minutes Sunday night they had an entry about a new procedure being tried in Canada (I believe) that relieves depression for people who've tried everything under the sun. Apparently electrode are inserted in area 25 of the brain, the frontal lobe, and charged for a couple of seconds - they stimulate the brain. Severe depression apparently causes this area of the brain to slow down or the neurotransmitters not to transmit, so colors are subdued, everything is sort of drab, bit like living in a world with nothing but gray, overcast days. It doesn't last and it isn't a cure, but it can relieve the symptoms for a while and for lengthy periods. Anyone else heard of this? Was sort of interesting. May be worth looking into for the folks out there who can't get relief through any other means.
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-03 12:27 pm (UTC)why is it that every science fiction/fantasy show that appears on film or tv has to be creepy, violent or have elements of horror?
Well I think you're right all sci-fi/fantasy does (including comics and novels as well as TV & film): you can't have a small romance (Jane Austen) set in a fantasticaly world filled with magical beings, once you have super powered heroes then you really need a huge threat. And of course building up to the huge threat (so it plays well as an arc) requires that you have the creepy foreboding hints to what that threat will be. I think Joss came pretty close to reducing Buffy to a soap opera in S6, making her problems more and more mundane...but in the end you STILL had to have the apacolypic event to create a suitable climax.
And you didn't like 'Manchild'? I LOVED Manchild! LOL
(but then I love 'Boston Legal')
I like your list of actors to follow, and personally I got discouraged about Kevin Spacey in 'KPAX', 'Pay it Foreward', and 'Beyond the Sea'.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-03 05:02 pm (UTC)I think Joss came pretty close to reducing Buffy to a soap opera in S6, making her problems more and more mundane...
Everytime I see this criticism, the first thing that goes through my head is - when was the last time you actually saw a soap opera? Truth is the only shows on TV that aren't like soap operas are the episodic procedurals - where it is basically, "oh so and so died, we have to figure out how" without talking about what's going on in the people's lives. Even reality shows are soap operas.
Buffy was a huge soap opera in Season 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Less so in Seasons 1 and 7 because the focus was less on the interpersonal relationships and more on the outside big monster of the week. Or resovling something.
Soaps get a bad rap. Truth is they are serials. Charles Dickens and Shakespeare wrote what we call soap operas. They often don't have a precise beginning nor a precise ending. And violent?
Hee. Let me tell you the current plots of at least five tv shows that proudly call themselves soap operas:
1. A major character (T) buried another nasty character (G) alive in order to coaxe the truth out him regarding T's missing daughter. G had apparently given the child away in an illegal adoption. Unfortunately just as G was about to tell T the truth, an earthquake killed him.
2. An ex-husband came back from the dead and kidnapped a woman's children. Set it up so she'd think the child she had with that ex-husband died in a plane crash, so he could kidnap the child.
3. A vampire seduces a woman and she works hard to overcome his seduction and kill him with her friends.
4. Spies chase two lovers across the world.
5. Woman possessed by the devil
6. Guy kept frozen in suspended animation then woken up by his mother to wreck havoc on the world
All of those stories happened on soap operas. Usually soaps are far-fetched tales that require suspension of disbelief. BTVS and Angel were totally soap operas - children dropping in out of nowhere, people coming back from the dead, falling in love with the wrong person, wacky evil doctors, boyfriends being controlled by wacky evil doctors or entities? I've seen all of it in soap operas at least once.
Nah, sci-fi can be do soap opera or rather "space opera" - which is what some people called the original BattleStar Galatica, Star Wars, and Farscape.
If you take the violence away, you don't necessarily reduce it to a soap. And soaps love creepy. Every five years, one soap will do a slasher or serial killer storyline, just to trim it's cast.
No, people seem to think a story has to be a romance or have violence or have both. Yet, I've read things that have neither. I've even written them.