Heroes Season 2, Episodes 1-4

Tim Kring’s serial superhero drama made a triumphant return to television a little over a month ago, and it’s so far been a rough four weeks for our intrepid band of evolutionaries.

Peter is, of course, alive and well, and not surprisingly, so is Sylar. Claire and her family are in hiding, as are the 3M’s (Matt, Mohinder and Molly). Hiro is off adventuring in medieval Japan, and we spend a lot of screen time tracking the progress of Maya and Alejandro – the life & death twins – as they attempt to cross the border to the States, and leaving a rather blatant trail of hemorrhaged corpses in their wake. (God forbid these two twins ever learn how to use a phone to at least figure out if Dr. Suresh even wants to see them first.)

What surprises me most about Season 2 is how similar the general plot is to Season 1. Peter is once again exhibiting powers that he doesn’t fully understand (owing to some convenient memory loss), Claire is once again smirking her way through high school, Matt is back on the force, and in episode 4, we are introduced to yet another pancake waitress with an exceptional learning ability. I swear to God, it’s 2006 all over again, with a bigger budget.

A couple of things are of course significantly different as well: Claire no longer being a cheerleader is the biggest surprise, although in exchange we are made to suffer through the most stomach-churning high school romance subplot I’ve ever seen on mainstream TV. More than Hayden Panettiere’s celebutante-esque acting style, is the fact that the dude they chose to play flyboy West looks and acts like a third-rate Zac Efron. As before, Claire’s high-school scenes are enough to drive viewers to mass suicides—one would think that Kring and company had learned to avoid that by now.

On a more positive note, the embittered Nathan is a pleasure to watch, and the unfolding mystery behind Molly-the-human-Google’s nightmares is certainly interesting. I guess what I find most surprising is how much time it’s taken Season 2 to really get rolling—only Episode 4 has so far shown any real life post-explosion, and even then we have to sit through almost 15 minutes of a thoroughly sickening romance between flyboy and indestructigirl. (Almost makes me wish we had more scenes of Niki and Micah, however inconsequential those usually end up being.)

All-Star Superman, Issues 1-8

This Eisner-Award-winning new series has restored my interest in Superman, although I’ll admit that it had a lot to do with the creative team of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, who I believe are two of the very best currently working in the industry. “All-Star” is both an homage and an innovation of classic Superman, a truly creative cross between the groundbreaking revisionism of Alan Moore’s legendary run on Supreme, and the sci-fi-driven insanity of Ellis and Millar’s work on The Authority. Because it’s a bi-monthly series, it’s still only at issue #8, although it debuted back in November of 2005. Sadly, both Morrison and Quitely have stated that they’ll be leaving after issue #12, but that just means I’ve got 4 issues of wonderfully entertaining Superman comics to go.

Dexter Season 2, Episodes 1-3

Unlike Heroes, HBO’s fantastically clever serial-killer drama starts off with multiple bangs. Dexter’s positively Biblical murder of his brother in Season 1 has left our hero in a bit of a funk; he hasn’t had a successful kill in over a month. As if that weren’t enough, his underwater dumping grounds for his past victims has just been uncovered by the Miami police. Now there’s a superstar FBI agent in town and a task force looking for the “Bay Harbor Butcher,” and just to add a little extra salt on the wound, Rita has finally figured out the “truth” behind Paul’s missing shoe. Michael C. Hall’s stoic delivery is great fun as always, and the fact that everybody around him is kooky with a passion makes this show wonderfully entertaining to watch.

I was musing today, about how quickly Shelfari has caught on with my bookworm friends. This little network launched in October 2006 and is a product of Taste Makers, Inc., a company that I’m assuming will quite soon be targeting areas like movies, music, food, and any other consumer products that people can be enthusiastic about. The shopping giant Amazon allegedly invested about a million into Shelfari earlier this year, and that’s a fairly good indication of how you would possibly make money from an idea like this.

It’s interesting because this was roughly the idea I was operating under with gibbity, filmcrowd, and a third booklovers’ community site that I never got to properly sink my teeth into, back in 2005. The social media space is exquisitely deep if you know where to look and there’s so much online activity surrounding the Harry Potters and Da Vinci Codes of the world that it’s impossible to ignore. Of course, I had no idea how to properly make something like this work back then, so both attempts eventually just faded. That’s fine though, at least I know now that the idea itself was sound.

My original strategy was to hit gamers (http://gibbity.com), movie lovers (http://filmcrowd.com) and then bookworms (never settled on a name, but was leaning towards http://bookcrowd.com), in that order. Gamers came first because there was only one other social-review competitor in the game space back then, and I was an ex-gamer who was seeing his game-time slowly being eroded by his work-hours. Movie lovers came next because I personally loved writing short reviews of films and comparing them against other people’s. At the time, Rotten Tomatoes was the only other place online where average people could do something like that in a structured fashion (of course there were movie blogs and forums, but there was no real way to see users’ contributions side-by-side).

And I wanted to target the booklovers last because I felt that it was going to be very challenging, and here’s why:

The problem with any social-media site is that you operate on the assumption that you always have something to review. Take movies, for example. On the average, the US sees over 350 minor/major releases every year, about 7 new movies per week. The average person will probably see a new movie once a month, but the enthusiast will be spoilt for choice all year round, and that’s not even counting the foreign-film crowd. From a social-media perspective, this means that a loyal user will have a reason to come back to the site all the time, because they will constantly have new content to contribute.

Games are similar, in that there are over 500 game releases in various formats (PC, console, portables) every year. You would technically never run out of stuff to write about. Here’s the difference between movies and games though. It takes you two hours to appreciate a movie in its entirety. It takes days, with most PC or console games. The duration of consumption is vastly different between the two industries, which is why I saw very slow turnovers with gibbity relative to filmcrowd.

Let’s take that distinction one step further: consider that it only takes about 4 minutes to appreciate a song in its entirety. Is it any wonder that your average Last.fm user has over 5,000 tracks scrobbled, which is probably more movies than the average human will watch in their entire lifetime?

Now let’s take the reasoning in the opposite direction, with books. Where it takes the average human 2 hours to appreciate a movie and a couple days to appreciate a game, it takes over a week to appreciate a full-length book (Harry Potter fanatics notwithstanding). Most booklovers will take their time, reading several books at once. I’ve personally always got about 5 or 6 different things I read simultaneously, and the whole exercise takes me over a month to finish. What does this mean for the ye olde booklover site? Well, possibly that there will be a very marked slowdown in user-contributed content, once your users have gotten over the initial hump of building their personal bookshelf.

Also, consider the relatively miniscule size of the collections: very few people on Shelfari will have more than a thousand books in their shelf, and those are the hardest of the hardcore. I could trounce any of these people with the number of songs in my 16gb iPod, never mind the 15,000 or so songs in my whole collection. (And I’ll bet anything that the real average site-wide would be about 3 dozen books or less, per user.)

And that right there is the other important difference between booklovers and musiclovers. Virtual bookshelf management is friggin’ hard work. You have to type in the book title yourself, decide which of the search-results matches the item you mean, then you have to rate the book manually (and never mind writing a review for it; that’s a different level of commitment all together). In Last.fm (or I should say, AudioScrobbler), all of that is done for you; all I have to do is login and take credit. The scrobbler watches your iTunes/WMP 24/7, as you use it, automatically updating your Last.fm profile in real-time. My handful of Last.fm friends know that I’m a renewed Radiohead fanboy before I do.

Where am I going with this meandering analysis? Nowhere, really. Just pointing out the various pitfalls that each social-review community will eventually have to face and figure out a way around. I love looking at these applications and thinking about how they work, not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the perspective of the content itself. I have no doubt in my mind that Shelfari will continue to grow its userbase over time, but I do think that the level of activity will be very challenging to keep up.

There’s certainly something to be said for simply getting more and more new users to join up, but that results in width, not depth. You need to motivate the users in the middle — not the hardcore loyalists and not the newbs — to be constantly discussing stuff that they have a personal interest in, otherwise there’s a definite danger that the whole thing will degenerate into a glorified NYTimes Top 10 list. Case in point: can you make a guess what the most talked-about books on Shelfari are? I’ll give you a clue: 7 of them start with the initials H and P.

So I’ve finally finished off the final book in JK Rowling’s absurdly popular Harry Potter series, after nipping away at it for the past 8 or 9 days. I’m not a hardcore fan by any definition, but I have to admit, I got a warm, fuzzy feeling towards the end as I came to reflect on just how much time had passed for the various characters in these books. Harry Potter, as I’ve mentioned before, is a textbook example of the Hero’s Journey story template, and for Potter and his millions of readers, it’s been one helluva journey.

** Warning: lots of spoilers after the jump. **

[ Read the rest of this entry … ]

Transformers
After a string of summer movie disappointments (Spider-man 3, Pirates 3 and Shrek 3), I went into Transformers on the morning of June 28th with more than a little anxiety. This was the cartoon of my childhood, after all, and all of the pre-release hype had really started to worry me. (Optimus Prime with lips? Bumblebee as a Camaro? Megatron isn’t a gun? No friggin’ way!) That, and the fact that Michael Bay — whose recent films had left a really bad taste in my mouth — had been tapped to helm the project.

Of course, this was all reduced to a quibble as soon as Peter Cullen’s voice began to rumble onscreen. About 20 minutes into the movie, when Prime first appears in his truck form, the audience began to cheer hysterically, and I think I cried a little. 

When I say that this movie features some of the best visual effects ever committed to celluloid, I’m not exaggerating: the robots are so intricately rendered that it’s hard to visually process all of the various parts when they’re moving about onscreen. (Scott Farrar of ILM mentioned in an interview that the Optimus Prime model had 10,108 moving parts, all chained together and operating in unison.)

Another surprise was that the parts of the story involving the humans generally worked well. Shia Labeouf is as fantastic in this movie as Megan Fox is hot, and the bits involving Shia’s family are the funniest sequences in the film. The squad of military goons led by Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson are also pretty decent throughout, as are the top-secret government sector reps headed by John Turturro. The only non-robot characters in this movie that I felt were unnecessary were the hackers (Rachael Taylor and Anthony Anderson). Neither of them did a particularly bad job, but both characters I felt should have been jettisonned from the early drafts.

One other thing I didn’t like was how the final battle gets wrapped up, but I suppose this is arguable. I felt that it was a copout and should’ve been a lot more intense than it was. (It doesn’t hold a candle to say, the final struggle in Terminator 2, which is still the greatest robot fight ever choreographed.)

Overall though, this is the most fun movie to come out this summer so far, and will be for quite sometime. There’s a very delicate balance between modernizing a classic concept while still treating the source material with the respect that it deserves, and this movie walks that line with impressive aplomb. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

1408

1408 is an interesting Stephen King story about a writer played by John Cusack who goes around visiting various haunted locales and compiling his experiences into moderate-selling paperbacks. From his ambivalent, nigh bored, expression, we gather that he hasn’t really seen anything particularly scary in all his travels. That is, until he learns about the Dolphin Hotel’s room 1408, whose numbers rather ominously add up to "13." Cusack decides to use this room as the final chapter in his new book and goes about making the necessary arrangements. Of course, when he arrives, the hotel management vehemently discourages him from checking in. "56 people have died in that room since the hotel’s inception," says an uncharacteristically reserved Samuel L. Jackson. For the most part, Cusack scoffs at Jackson’s pleading, but in the back of his mind, he’s thinking, "Have I finally found the real thing?"

It’s the unsettling atmosphere that is slowly built up over the movie’s first half that I really, really enjoyed about 1408. Cusack pretty much propels this movie forward through sheer force of will — once the door closes behind him, the movie’s concept is essentially reduced to "a guy in a room." Nothing happens at first, then slowly, he begins to believe that 1408 truly might be — as Jackson describes it early on — "an evil fucking room." Director Mikael Hafstrom does a great job of turning up the heat until you’re about ready to explode; not bad for his first Hollywood feature. Honestly I thought it was extremely refreshing. The past years have brought us such juvenile gore flicks as Saw, Hostel and Turistas, and I honestly thought that filmmakers had forgotten that you could scare audiences without grossing them out.

I suppose my biggest issue with 1408 is that the second half doesn’t quite match up to the anticipation built up by the first (although, honestly, I can’t imagine what possibly could), and once the movie begins to resort to special effects for its thrills, the experience began to go downhill for me. Still, this was an exceedingly enjoyable little horror film, and very well-worth the time it takes you to view it. 4 out of 5 stars.

Next

Based on Philip K. Dick’s The Golden Man, Next stars Nicolas Cage as a man who can see two minutes into the future. It’s a cute concept, and there are some very novel ways that this movie goes about exploiting his ability. Lee Tamahori, who directed my favorite Pierce Brosnan 007 movie, does a good job keeping things moving, and there is nary a dull moment throughout Next’s 90-minute running time. Jessica Biel is Cage’s love interest, and Julianne Moore is the self-serving FBI agent who is convinced that Cage’s ability can help them prevent a nuclear attack. There are a bunch of largely interchangeable European terrorists that the movie attempts to introduce us to, but they’re all reduced to the level of lackeys towards the end of the movie, so there’s not much point.

Entertaining movie with some interesting conversation topics for post-movie analysis. 3 out of 5 stars.

Thought it’d be interesting to do a quick visual comparison of the Fantastic Four’s Fantasticar in both its current comics and upcoming movie incarnations. Like the ubiquitous Batmobile, the Fantasticar went through a rather rigorous makeover (courtesy of Dodge motors) to get a Hollywood-friendly face on what was essentially a flying bathtub. It’ll be interesting to see exactly what they use this vehicle for in the movie, as it’s certainly not going to be capable to chasing down the Silver Surfer. (Accoding to the Dodge TV spot, the car can only do about 500mph.)

And RottenTomatoes’ penchant for countdowns asserts itself yet again, this time with a genre that’s near and dear to me — ye olde comic movie. Unlike the previous RT list I linked to though, this one just ranks all of the comic movies on the site, in order of the ratings they received. (So yes, Catwoman and Elektra are right at the bottom of the barrel.)

My own list (obviously shorter and with less critical verve) would be something like this:

10. Ghost World. Because it’s a genuinely good movie, even without the comic origins. (It’s also the only non-Addams Family Christina Ricci movie I will admit to having seen and enjoyed.)

9. Ichi the Killer. Utterly insane gorefest from Japanese auteur Takashi Miike. The cinematic equivalent of standing in the middle of a freeway and dodging traffic for 2 hours.

8. The Rocketeer. I was in the sixth grade when I saw this movie, and I still get a really stupid smile on my face every time I think about that beautiful, beautiful rocket pack.

7. Men in Black. Will Smith at his best. The sequel was unable to capture most of raucuous brilliance of the original though.

6. The Crow. Hey, it proved that Goth is cool. (Oh, and RIP Brandon Lee.)

5. Superman II. Any responsible comic fan would say that Superman: The Movie put comic-movies on the map, but II was just better all-around.

4. Batman Returns. The better of the two Tim Burton Batmans. This is an example of how really good casting can turn things around for an otherwise by-the-numbers storyline.

3. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. If Tim Burton had this script with Batman Returns, it would have been the best comic movie of all-time, hands down.

2. Spider-man II. It’s ironic that the Spidey movie with the most annoying villain would be the best of the three installments, but hey, what can I say. The only thing that Spidey II was missing was Bruce Campbell sporting a French accent.

1. Batman Begins. Chris Nolan, I salute you.

I won’t ruin the faux excitement by saying which movie is at the #1 spot (hell, I had to click fifty times to see it, and so should you). Start the countdown here.

Saw Spidey 3 today, after waiting for months and months to see the alien costume on celluloid. It’s kind of hard to say which of the three installments I enjoyed the least at this point, but the first one is still easily the most engaging, if only for the fact that the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end the first time Peter climbs up a wall. (I had been waiting all my life to see a really good wall-crawling sequence, and the look of awe on Tobey Maguire’s face when he realizes that he’s got these crazy new abilities was a fan boy’s dream come true.)

III is an interesting animal though. There are sequences here that’ll make your jaw drop — good and bad in equal proportions. The Sandman’s birth is certainly a sight to behold, as is the very interesting use of pipes in the final battle between Spidey and Venom. (In the comics, Spidey uses a sonic gun borrowed from the Fantastic Four to subdue the symbiote.) Unlike the first movie, the fight sequences in III are all very well-executed,  superior even to the already superb Octopus matchup in II. The sheer number of villains in this movie guarantee that there’s a big fight every half-hour or so, nestled in between a cringe-inducing teen drama that feels more like Dawson’s Creek than The Amazing Spider-man. (On the other hand, if it works for Smallville …)

Indeed, it’s the constant attempts at character-development that really bring this feature down. Sam Raimi somehow manages to pack the story arc of your average chinovela’s full season — complete with subplots and supporting characters — into a running time of about 80 minutes (the Spidey sequences account for the remaining 40 minutes or so). As you can imagine, this results in some seriously fragmented pacing and some strange dead-ends: we never see the results of Eddie Brock’s Photoshoppery (we only know he was humiliated because he said so), or the fate of Flint Marko’s daughter, or the state of Peter’s relationship with Gwen Stacy.

And don’t even get me started on the dancing. The emo hairdo and eyeliner was bad enough, but to have Peter strutting about like a freakish, non-mutant John Travolta? (I silently thanked God that he didn’t do the oft-parodied Pulp Fiction dance move; I would have walked out of the theater right there.) I thought it unbelievable that test audiences did not universally pan that entire sequence, to be honest. Wouldn’t some scenes with Spidey seriously maiming some random criminals have been a more effective — not to mention far less revolting — way to show his increased aggression? This isn’t exactly Stomp the Yard, you know what I mean?

But whatever. Spider-man III is the first of the big summer movies, so we still have a long way to go in terms of over-the-top marketing hype and the inevitable disappointments. I suppose you just have to learn to treasure the small moments of brilliance instead of dwelling on the overwhelming ludicrity. It’s actually kinda fitting that my favorite scene in the entire movie was the Bruce Campbell cameo at the French restaurant. Pass me my boomstick, s’il vous plait?

I absolutely love the Warner Brothers/DC Comics animated series: they collectively represent some of the best-written superhero cartoons ever aired. Recently, producer Bruce Timm mentioned an upcoming full-length animated adaptation of the Death of Superman story arc from way back in 1993 (man, can you believe that that was all of 14 years ago?). The epic slugfest between Supes and Doomsday was a milestone in comics — it represented just how far a comics publisher was willing to go to push sales :)

Even cooler — or maybe not cooler, I haven’t really made up my mind about it yet — Adam Baldwin (of Serenity/Firefly) is voicing Superman. Jayne-boy voiced Green Lantern in the JLA animated series, so I guess he’s not really a stranger to comics, but I sure hope he don’t tawk laik this gawddemmit.

Like most of the WB/DC movies, this is a direct-to-video release (scheduled for release on Sept 18), which simply means I’ll be able to grab it off of BitTorrent before it even arrives in Manila.

(Newsbite from Cinematical.)

I’ve been looking forward to Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain ever since I saw the trailers late last year and spotted the gorgeous art book at A Different Bookstore (there’s also a graphic novel illustrated by Kent Williams). Aronofsky has been quietly making small art films since the late 90’s and his two previous movies (Pi, and Requiem for a Dream) both received great reviews and — as if often the case with these types of movies — floundered at the box office.

The Fountain is Aronofsky’s third feature, stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz and talks about big, sweaty topics like life, death, love and immortality. Mostly it depicts Jackman’s quest to save Weisz, in an adventure that spans two millenia. (Check out the trailer here).

I was looking at The Fountain as being similar to Tim Burton’s Big Fish, or Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth — a visually lavish masterpiece from a visionary filmmaker. For the most part, it does fulfill those expectations, although I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so … insubstantial. The Fountain is wildly ambitious and reaches out in at least three different directions without really capturing anything, and I left the theater wondering what it was that it was really trying to say. (Was it to accept death as inevitable? That love conquers all? That life and death are cyclical? That not all dreams are achievable without compromise? All of the above?)

Still, this is easily the most visually arresting film I’ve seen over the past 12 months (although I should probably qualify that by saying I haven’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth), and you should check it out if only to see how far Aronofsky has taken the art-form with this one feature.

I’ve been breezing through the very excellent iWoz recently. For those of you who aren’t geeky enough to know who he is, Steve Wozniak is considered by many to be one of the true geniuses of the past 50 years. When people think of Apple Computer, it’s hard to see anyone else working in that company apart from Steve Jobs; he’s such a dominating presence that I’ll betcha there are a lot of people out there that believe he actually had a hand in designing any of their products. (Try Jonathan Ive, down the hall. Or any number of brilliant engineers and designers that we’ll never know the names of.)

In the early days of Apple though, the whole outfit could very easily be summed up as just two guys: Woz building ‘em, and Jobs selling ‘em. Specifically, Woz was the one who created the desktop form factor that we all know and love today (i.e., monitor, keyboard and cpu). Prior to that, computers were little more than rows of flashing lights with slots for punch-cards, which made them impossibly difficult for average (or even above average) humans to fathom. After Woz released his first machine though (the seminal Apple I), everybody started implementing the monitor/keyboard/cpu triage, and the world was forever changed.

I guess the most impressive thing about this guy’s story is that the majority of his innovations were created while working alone, without the benefit of the large-scale engineering teams and support staff of the modern computer industry. It’s very sobering, especially for people like me who are busy trying to delegate as much as work as they possibly can, because it highlights the importance of the individual revolutionary over the throngs of passive followers.

Anyway, fascinating read. Check it out.