Haibane.info

Category: Movies and Television

  • Microsoft realizes Family Guy is controversial!

    well, looks like that whole thing has been called off. Wise move, but also disappointing; I was kind of looking forward to the train wreck.

  • Windows 7 Guy

    Does Microsoft really want Peter to be the face of Windows 7?

    Microsoft and FOX One have announced a marketing collaboration that will see Windows 7 in a new special with the working title “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show” airing Sunday, November 8, at 8:30pm EST and PST. It will star Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show as well as his Family Guy co-star Alex Borstein (voice of the series’ Lois character).

    Well, Stewie is probably more appealing (and remains the only reason I ever watch the show. There, I said it. I watch the show. Want to make something of it? Because I’m not ashamed. I’m not. Maybe you watch it and you’re ashamed. Maybe you’re projecting your shame on me. How do you like that? Turnaround is fair play, right? Doesn’t feel so good, does it? Are you feeling a little embarrassed right now? A little red in the face? Tight in the knickers? How do you like them apples? Are you sick of this paragraph yet? Isn’t this exactly how the monologues on Family Guy go? On and on forever? With no end? Long past the point where the joke was even remotely funny? Firmly into tedious territory? Now that I’ve made my point, don’t you wish I would drop it? I mean, is it really necessary to keep flogging this? Oh wait, you get it, that’s exactly the point, right? By making my point, about how unfunny Family Guy’s taking-the-joke-too-far shtick is, and then continuing to make the point after I’ve already explained once what I’m doing, is really making the point, right? Isn’t that clever? You don’t think so? Could that be because you’re a nekulturny philistine oaf? I mean, isn’t that more likely than The Family Guy not being the most hilarious show on television ever? Did you like how I dolloped in some Russian in there? Do I have the patience or the willpower to comtinue this interminable exercize? No.)

    AT ANY RATE – Family Guy is one of those shows that has it’s flaws, to say the least. Stewie and Brian, when they are together, are the only thing watchable about it. I find the reaction by some that this amounts to “selling out” by McFarlane to be hilarious – as if the show had any artistic integrity to preserve. It’s a blunt instrument (and for those who failed to understand this, McFarlane created American Dad to really hammer the point home. Apparently even this was too subtle for some people, so he followed up with Cleveland.

  • Azeroth and Anathem

    Now that Ramadan has ended, I’m taking up my geeky pursuits again. I’ve got a copy of Anathem from the library and added some game time back to my Warcraft account. I have to confess that it’s a hard choice 🙂

    Just saw the movie 17 Again starring teen heartthrob Zac Ephron and former teen hearthrob Matthew Perry. I was delighted to note the supporting “best friend” character was a geek otaku of the highest caliber, who also managed to score an otaku dreamgirl. You can always tell when writers are genuine geeks – it shows, unlike gross and absurd representations like Revenge of the Nerds and Urkel and whatnot.

  • Godspeed, Hank Hill

    Hank Hill King of the Hill ended its 12-year run this past weekend.

    I always found it remarkable that Mike Judge had such depth to him. I mean, this is the guy who created Beavis and Butthead; how then did he create such a masterpiece as King of the Hill? KotH was always a smart show, superior in my mind to even the Simpsons at its heyday. Hank was someone you could disagree with and yet still respect; one of the signature moments for me was the voting episode, where the liberal writers concocted a crisis for Hank in terms of President Bush’s handshake, and yet at the end it was clear that Hank was still going to do the right thing. The idea that Hank would ever vote for Gore was obviously not worth more than a throwaway question by Bill, “so, are you going to vote for the other guy?” For Hank, it was support Bush, or don’t vote, and even for a liberal viewer like me, that dilemma seemed genuine and completely understandable. Hank had a way of personifying conservatism at its best and most honorable – he was a saint, if flawed and unwilling, the last bastion of values in a world gone insane. I will really miss him, and am grateful he lives on in syndication on Cartoon Network and Hulu.

    My friend Robert Mentzer has a fantastic tribute post to Hank Hill that is really worth a read.

    And for the record, Mike Judge’s new project The Goode Family, which is essentially an attempt at portraying and satirizing liberals the way that King of the Hill did conservatives, seems devoid of a soul. It’s not that liberals can’t laugh at themselves, but something more basic about storytelling. Without a character like Hank to anchor it in humanity, it will never transcend politics. Mike Judge created Hank out of love, and Hank is someone we respected, and understood. He was never a caricature of conservatism, but perhaps its best advocate.

  • “looks like we entered the Hoth system”

    A new trailer for Stargate: Universe, which has me way more excited than anything I’ve seen regarding Caprica.

  • a Galactica movie? no thanks

    I have absolutely zero interest in this. Zero:

    Bryan Singer, director of the first two “X-Men” movies, “Superman Returns” and “Valkyrie,” is “nearing a deal” to produce and perhaps direct a new big-screen “Battlestar Galactica” movie.

    […] By all accounts, any new feature would take place outside the alien-free “Galactica” universe created by Moore, and be based instead on the original 1978 Glen Larson series.

    There’s just no way I am going to poison the memory of Galactica with something almost guaranteed to suck – especially when you take an idea meant for televisioin and run it through the Hollywood plot-liquefaction wringer. They pulled it off with Star Trek as a reboot, but that had the benefit of 1. four decades and 2. writers and a director who actually had interesting ideas. From what Bryan Singer did with the Superman reboot, it is clear he has absolutely zero imagination. Even Singer’s work on the X-Men movies was really pretty dull.

    More details at AICN and HitFlix (the latter including absolutely atrocious Cylon concept art that sucks whatever residual interest I may theoretically have had for such a project completely down the drain).

  • World of Warcraft: The Movie

    Sam Raimi – Sam “demoncam” Raimi – will be directing the World of Warcraft movie. In other news, there’s going to be a World of Warcraft movie.

    The last major update that we had on AICN on the WORLD OF WARCRAFT came from Moriarty here, back in 2007. The last major bit I heard was a rumor that Uwe Boll was offering Blizzard untold tonnages of gold left crowns of undetermined origin to direct – and that allegedly BLIZZARD laughed his ass out of the place. In Mori’s piece we were supposed to get this movie in 2009 with a $100 million budget. With LEGENDARY’s main man telling BLIZZCON that it’d be over that figure. And there was some concept art.

    Well, I don’t have concept art. I don’t have the firm release date, but I do know who is directing the WORLD OF WARCRAFT film and that is Sam Raimi. It will come out in trades later this week or next. But you can take this one to the bank. Sam is going to make a huge budget fantasy bit of unf&^kingimaginable coolness – and it will be yanked from the WORLD OF WARCRAFT.

    From that previous AICN story two years ago:

    The plot for the film will take place approximately a year before the start of World of Warcraft, including races you have played and lands you have wandered in, where lots of plot arcs are melded into a two and a half hour story. The film itself will revolve around a ‘badass’ new hero, with a theme towards conflict and culture – being a War Movie rather than a quest movie, from an Alliance’s perspective.

    OK this has the potential to be all kinds of awesome.To be honest I dont care if they screw it up completekly, anyway – the licensing profit for Blizzard alone will mean more money for the game development, so we fans of WoW win either way 🙂 But just imagine seeing Ironforge on film? Or Booty Bay? In fact, there’s already concept art for Teldrassil: (click to enlarge to insane resolution to see all the detail)

    WarCraftArtSmall.jpg

    Wow. Just… WoW, literally.

  • anime Iron Man and Wolverine

    Following the path blazed by the Animatrix and the anime prequel to the Batman movies, comes word that Marrvel will be commissioning two anime-style series, for Iron Man and Wolverine. Here’s the press release via AICN:

    Marvel Entertainment Inc., has partnered with renowned Japanese animation studio Madhouse (Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers) to create four all new anime versions of classic Marvel Super Heroes. Get an exciting first glimpse of two of the planned four series at this year’s Comic-Con International, the country’s leading comics and popular arts convention. The Marvel Animation Panel will be held on Friday, July 24, and will include an exclusive first look at official teaser trailers for two of these new series, hosted by writer and multiple-Eagle Award winner Warren Ellis, who will appear to discuss writing the all new adventures of these re-imagined Super Heroes.

    These Marvel Anime TV series are being created as a way of merging the beloved Marvel Super Heroes of western culture with the bold animation tradition of Japan. The resulting product will be four visually groundbreaking anime series featuring popular Super Heroes redesigned and repurposed as emerging from the fabric of Japanese culture. The series is expected to begin appearing on the Animax channel in Japan in spring of 2010.

    These are being released for Japanese TV, but I’m sure we can get subbed versions off the torrents. I was disappointed by the Batmanime series, and I’m not that enthusiastic about the anime style of Paprika or Tekkon Kincrete, though – I hate the stylized misshapen proportions technique. I’m more of a classical anime style fan, but still style is secondary to plot as far as I am concerned.

  • the infinite Khan

    This is amazing.

    People always discount William Shatner as an over-actor, but this mesmerizing loop of his most famous syllable really highlights the incredible range of nonverbal emotion he is managing to convey with just a clenching of his jaw and a tic of his eye. This is only a few minutes long but apparently the full version is 15 minutes. This needs to be made into a screensaver or something.

    Somehow I think Chris Pine has a long way to go before he can deliver something similar. It should be noted that even in the alternate timeline of the movie, Khan is out there, waiting to be discovered.

    UPDATE – ah, Youtube! Here’s the complete Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in ten minutes.

    UPDATE 2 – and who can resist Wrath of Khan as a literal space opera, courtesy of Robot Chicken?

  • Sublime Star Trek episodes: “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “The Offspring”

    Yesterday on sci-fi’s TNG block I caught the ending of Yesterday’s Enterprise, which was then followed by The Offspring. These are two of the best TNG episodes ever. It struck me that TNG as a series remains unmatched even by DS9 in terms of how many truly great episodes there were that really explored the human condition in such powerful ways.

    Yesterday’s Enterprise handled Trek nostalgia brilliantly though subtly – the uniforms worn by the Enterprise-C crew were directly taken from the Trek movies from Khan onwards, for example, and the shape of the Enterprise-C was far more evocative of the iconic Enterprise from TOS than the Enterprise-D (I always felt that the Enterprise-D was flat and curvy in exactly the wrong places). But the way the story retconned Tasha Yar’s character was the real lodestone – and the scene with Picard where she argues to be transferred to the doomed ship was perfection, especially Picard’s final almost-refusal resigned-approval. Plus Castillo’s simple statement, “I don’t want you here.” – superb.

    The Offspring, meanwhile, is remarkable for how it explores father and daughter love, using emotionless androids, and manages to convey the essence of that relationship in a simple scene where Data and Lal hold hands. This is the fundamental purpose of science fiction – to explore the human condition by using non-humans, and Data is the personification of science fiction itself, making the literary genre a character in its own right. The final scene with Lal and Data, where she tells him she will feel for the both of them, is one that moves me every time. And the scene with Riker in Ten-Forward never fails to make me laugh out loud.

    There’s no way around it – I need to get myself a full set of these as soon as possible. Even Firefly can’t match TNG as far as its literary science fiction credentials go – and while I wish the new Trek movie franchise all the best, the Star Wars-ification of Star Trek is not science fiction anymore, but just space opera.

    If anyone has a favorite episode of TNG to share, please comment! lets get sentimental.