And so, with the success of various sci-fi-laced serial dramas over the past 3 years (and the relative failure of a sequel in the original medium), the producers behind my favorite action sci-fi flick of all-time have brought the Terminator franchise to the small screen, with the mildly-anticipated Sarah Connor Chronicles. The show itself isn’t scheduled to start airing on Fox until mid-January 2008, but I saw the pilot episode this evening and thought I’d write down some thoughts.

As you can guess from the title, the story is set somewhere between "Judgment Day" and "Rise of the Machines," as Sarah and John Connor continue their lives as wanted criminals on the run from the FBI. The cast has some potential: Lena Headey (300) plays Sarah, Thomas Dekker (Heroes) plays John, and Summer Glau (Serenity) plays a high-school girl that turns out to be John’s robot protector. The usual hallmarks of the franchise are all there: two Terminators slug it out in an effort to change the future, while Sarah and John have mother/son pep talks and run from various exploding vehicles.

The particular choice for Evil-Terminator was not quite as good as any of the regular cast unfortunately: Owain Yeoman does his best to create a facsimile of Robert Patrick’s stellar performance in Judgement Day, and he busts through walls and tears apart school buses with a casually blank "robot" look. I have to say that nobody has ever really managed to pull off the "Terminator stare" quite like Patrick did over 15 years ago. (Even Arnold himself was never quite as menacing.) The difference, you see, is that Patrick always looked like he was sizing you up, calculating the most efficient way to break you in half; other actors have simply kept their faces neutral, and imho it just lacks the gravitas of a real killing machine.

The story itself is a tricky thing to review this early on. The Terminator mythology is relatively thin, when compared with the labyrinthine foundations of shows like Heroes or Lost. Everyone knows that John Connor is eventually going to lead the resistance against the machines in the early 21st century, and has been dodging time-traveling robots for most of his life. Apart from that, there’s precious little else that matters. (In fact, one could argue that the essence of the Terminator movies  lies in how the screenplay was a near-perfect distillation of the killer-robot-from-the-future concept. With no unnecessary details to worry about, all that was left was an astounding juggernaut of an action movie.)

Another issue I had was that the SCC cast is tiny, so aside from waiting for the next big machine-on-machine slugfest, it’s difficult to see how this show could actually work from week to week. The Terminator movies, I think, were never written to be drawn-out in this manner. What made them so great was the fact that the pacing and story were as merciless and to-the-point as its characters. Punctuating the action with the usual pep-talk or moment-of-silent-introspection was something they avoided like the plague, but in a TV setting, it’s difficult to imagine how they wouldn’t eventually do this.

Overall, the pilot was mildly entertaining, and Summer Glau is, as always, interesting to watch. It’s not Firefly, but then again, neither is anything else on TV these days.

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.

APPLE STORES around the US are set to begin charging entrance fees of $5 per person "to create less traffic and a more enjoyable environment for its customers." Ordinarily, I’d be pissed off on principle, but as I thought about it more, there’s not much else Apple could’ve done to prevent overcrowding. It’s just like parking in Makati; if it were free, the traffic would be horrendous (or I should say, more horrendous than it currently is). Unfortunately, these kind of limiting techniques do tend to create a very "elitist" kind of atmosphere, where only the people with appropriate means are allowed access. Oh well, I guess that’s what shop windows are for.

PRESENTING: The time-honoured Hollywood tradition of holding flowers over naked breasts.
Currently on exhibit: Britney Spears, Eva Mendes and Marilyn Monroe.
(Original images from UseMyComputer) 

RAY STEVENSON, known mostly for his role as Titus Pullo in my favoritest HBO show, Rome, may have just been chosen to play The Punisher in the upcoming sequel. This is of course, after Thomas Jane (who played the titular role in the first movie) pulled out. Stevenson isn’t a bad choice — the Punisher in the comics is an Italian, and Pullo was from Rome — so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. (Oh, and Chuck "The Iceman" Lidell might have a role here as well.)

DESPITE HAVING produced a fairly mediocre collection of songs this time around, my favorite post-punk band Interpol has risen to the #2 spot on the UK album sales charts. They’re also on Spin.

Imagine the acerbic strangeness of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm combined with the crazy musical parodies from the best of SNL, and you’ve got HBO’s wonderful little mock-reality comedy Flight of the Conchords. Each episode is a fictionalized snippet of the lives of folk duo Bret Mckenzie and Jemaine Clement as they struggle to get their band recognized and score with chicks.

What amazes me the most about Conchords is the quality of the music. Normally I hate musicals, but the songs in Conchords are insane — every number pokes fun at mainstream music while occasionally throwing a sly wink at the hardcore music fan. The pilot episode alone parodies everyone from Akon to Devo to Radiohead — for a bunch of folk singers, these guys have a tremendous musical vocabulary.

Best part? Each episode has a downloadable PDF of that episode’s lyrics.

• Ten Funniest Simpsons episodes ever. The #4 pick is probably my personal favorite, just because I absolutely love all the Sideshow Bob episodes.
• Stunning Iron Man Poster. Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges and the special-effects might of ILM. The story is going to have to totally suck for this movie not to work. (Iron Man at IMDB.)
• JJ Abrams’ Mystery Movie now has an official trailer. More details here. Me, it’s pretty obvious that it’s the black smoke.
• Shatner says Nimoy will be in Star Trek XI, but he won’t. LOL.
• Cool comparison article between the Generation 1 Transfomers toys and their 2007 counterparts.

With Bruce Willis wreaking havoc in the theaters with the triumphant return of John McClane, I am reminded of a time not-so-long-ago when the title of Undisputed Biggest Bad Ass belonged to one Jack Bauer, of CTU Los Angeles. When we say that John and Jack are heroes cut from the same cloth, we are actually understating the situation somewhat. In many ways, both John McClane and Jack Bauer are just modernized versions of the classical cowboy character: a lone gunman with a shitty personal life, faced with ridiculous numbers of enemies, burdened by idiot "allies" and driven by an inexplicable desire to do what’s right, no matter what the cost.

Story Format
Both Die Hard and 24 adventures usually take place over a single day, although obviously because of Die Hard’s medium, it’s impossible to tell the story in "real-time." Like Jack Bauer, McClane finds that he is unable to catch a wink at any moment during this period, and that the fights he gets into become progressively more impressive as the day wears on.

Motivation
Both Jack and John represent the wrath of the working-class moral right, although Jack is a government-subsidized patriot while John is a pension-challenged brawler. Neither of them care much about property damage (hell, it’s all insured, right?)

Personal Lives
Because of their dedication to their careers (and possibly also due to the rather large number of people they have mercilessly shot, stabbed, blown up or bludgeoned to death), neither John nor Jack have very good relationships with their wives, girlfriends or daughters … even considering that they have saved their lives countless times. This is more of an emotional jab at the audience than anything else; nothing makes you feel for a guy more than knowing that he’s unappreciated.

Also, both men have serious addiction problems. John is an ex-alcoholic, while Jack is an ex-heroin addict. Both have quit, it seems, possibly in an attempt to be better role models. (Most professional killers would do the same.)

Civilian Allies
Taking a page from Bauer’s playbook, Die Hard 4.0 actually sees John with a young civilian sidekick in the form of Justin Long. Bauer has, of course, been doing this for ages: every 24 involves Jack trying to protect some stupid kid from being abducted and ransomed. (Interesting note: up until the 3rd Die Hard, John’s sidekicks have all been black. That’s mid-90’s social-stratification for you.)

Situations
Hostage crises are a staple plot device of both Die Hard and 24, mainly because it allows our heroes a chance to crawl around stealthily in air ducts and elevator shafts, unbeknownst to our hapless terrorists. Until Die Hard 3, John’s adventures were mostly confined to single large structures on Christmas eve (the first was a 30-story building, the second was an airport), which allowed him to maximize the use of ventilation shafts for stealthy travel. Obviously, this kind of creative constraint was only going to work for so long, and John’s next two adventures slowly metamorphosed into a more 24-like run-and-gun.

Catchphrases
Jack Bauer: You cannot do this job and have a normal life at the same time.
John McClane: Another basement, another elevator … how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?
Jack Bauer: You are going to tell me what I want to know, it’s just a matter of how much you want it to hurt.
John McClane: Motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna fuckin’ cook you, and I’m gonna fuckin’ eat you!
Jack Bauer: Dammit, I don’t have time for this!!!
John McClane: Yippee-kay-yey, motherfucker.

Killing Techniques
Neither John or Jack employ martial arts in any of their respective fights. Instead they rely on anything they can get their hands on, although obviously something with a trigger and a sight is preferred. As such, both the 24 and Die Hard series feature a vast assortment of handguns, rifles, machineguns and the occasional rocket launcher. Neither use stabbing weapons very often, with the possible exception of the Microtech Halo III or the occasional random icicle.

Memorable Kills
In Die Hard 1, John kills his first thug by dropping him down a flight of stairs. What makes this kill memorable is that John is, strangely, attached to him at the time. This kamikazee fighting style has become a staple in the Die Hard series, which largely explains why John usually looks like shit at the end of each movie.

In 24 Season 1, one of Jack’s first kills is a vicious punch to the heart that sends a minor villain into cardiac arrest.

Die Hard 1: John takes care of another thug by wrapping a chain around his neck, hoisting him ten feet into the air and smashing him against a wall. This kill is echoed by Jack Bauer in 24 Season 6, which is how he gets rid of head terrorist Abu Fayed. Interestingly, Bauer says, "Say hello to your brother," as he does this, which is the exact same line McClane throws Simon Gruber in Die Hard 3.

In 24 Season 2, in what is perhaps the most memorable kill ever depicted on mainstream TV, Jack shoots a federal witness and uses his severed head as a way to infiltrate a terrorist cell.

Die Hard 2: John stumbles on to two terrorists in the baggage section of a major international airport. He disables one of them with a 9-iron, a Samsonite suitcase, a can of hairspray and a kid’s bicycle, and disposes of the other by running him through a conveyor belt.

24 Season 3: Jack empties a full clip into his wife’s killer, Nina Myers, as she’s lying helpless on the ground. This is the only time 24 has ever used slow-motion to emphasize the importance of a scene, which makes it all the more memorable. It’s such a popular sequence that it even spawned the fan-joke: "If Jack was in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Nina Myers, and he had a gun with two bullets, he’d shoot Nina twice."

Die Hard 3: John takes out Gruber’s helicopter with two well-placed shots at a nearby electric pylon, sending a pair of high-voltage cables into the chopper’s propellers. Jack’s version of this kill is a bit less believable: in season 5, he takes care of an enemy helicopter by shooting at the rear propellers with a handgun. For some reason, this works and the chopper is run aground. In Die Hard 4.0, as if responding directly to Bauer, McClane disposes of an enemy chopper by flying a police car into it.

24 Season 6: Jack’s first kill after his return from a Chinese prison occurs as he’s tied to a chair and being interrogated by terrorists. One of the terrorists get too close and Jack bites off a chunk of the dude’s neck, killing him instantly.

Die Hard 4.0: John offs the main baddie by shooting himself through the chest.

Versus.
So who really is the bigger bad ass? In terms of catchphrases, McClane has the advantage of existing in a medium that allows adult language, and "Yippee-kay-yey, motherfucker" trounces any number of Jack’s "Dammit"s, emphatic and forceful as they may be. Meanwhile, Bauer has more memorable kills; the heart-punch, the vampire bite, and Season 3’s infamous wall-run-to-neck-break are just the tip of the iceberg for this guy.

Jack Bauer is easily the more well-trained of the two cowboys; John McClane’s charm is that he’s just an average cop who’s apparently unable to die. I think that a fight between these two would depend greatly on the setting, and their general emotional/physical states at the time. McClane would dominate any encounter set in a vertical structure with places you can fall from (e.g., stairwells, elevator shafts, partially-completed buildings, etc.), while Bauer’s inhuman aim would trounce McClane on the open street. In a bare-knuckle fistfight, meanwhile, it’d be all about who can gain a small advantage first. Neither man has problems fighting as dirty as possible, and although John has never bit into another man’s jugular before, he has chewed a couple of fingers off.

That said, the question of who the bigger bad-ass is doesn’t just boil down to who would win a no-holds-barred confrontation. Anyone who’s watched 24 for awhile will know that deep-down, Jack hates his job and only does it because nobody else is quite as good at it as he is. There are at least 3 separate occasions where he’s broken down and wept like a girl as a direct result of the various crimes he’s perpetrated in preserving the American way of life. (One time, he even pukes into a bush.)

John meanwhile, is forced into these situations by unfortunate circumstances, but proceeds to really revel in them while he’s there. One of the signature McClane flourishes is the little snicker he does after blowing up something suitably large or pummeling someone to death with his fists.

In this sense, John McClane is the bigger bad-ass, because he acknowledges his bad-ass stature. Sure he’s just a cop with some phenomenally bad timing, but throughout much of the Die Hard series, you get the distinct sense that he is thoroughly enjoying himself, every step of the way.

In writing this article, I spent quite a bit of time going over the wonderfully extensive Jack Bauer Kill Count, as well as the 24 Wiki. Unfortunately, there’s comparatively little online about John McClane, so for the Die Hard information, I instead resorted to spending a total of about 12 hours viewing and reviewing all 4 features. Any mistakes or misrepresentations present in the piece above are mine, and are not the responsibility of any of the sites I’ve linked to.

Having had some experience building web-based avatar-generators (in the defunct highfiber v6), I have a pretty good idea how much time and effort has to be put into developing these things. This Simpsons avatar builder is a great example: very nice facial-feature controls and a fairly big library of items to choose from.

My only complaint? No way to get a different set of clothes. I want a Sideshow Bob loincloth! :(

• Speed Racer’s Mach 5
  The Wachowski Brothers’ upcoming racing movie-based-on-a-cartoon is off to a good start, so to speak.
• Hidden Message in Dark Knight-related website
  Here’s a clue: Select-All.
• Zooey Deschanel in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening
  My all-time favorite non-actress is moving up in the world. I am glad.
• Elisha Cuthbert in Captivity
  Reprising the role that made her famous in the hit show 24, former Popular Mechanics for Kids presenter Elisha Cuthbert once again plays an abductee in what can only be described as Saw without the meat chunks.
• UPDATE: Not movie-related, but interesting nonetheless: Tentacle Rape makes its way into Marvel Comics
  Well, sorta. Check out some notes on the resulting uproar here.

Three of the shows I’ve been following very closely all aired their respective season finales this last week, much to my chagrin (… well, I guess there’s always the Bionic Woman remake in a couple of months). I have to say that I’ve been looking forward to this week for awhile now, even though it does mean I’ll be without a decent handful of shows to watch for awhile. Heroes in particular, was a really big deal — it’s the new kid on the block, and has been crazy-ambitious with its storyline and format. 24 and Lost are relative veterans, with Keifer’s signature show being the one with the longest history and (I suppose) most loyal fanbase.

Turns out though that it was the new kid that proved to be the biggest disappointment, with a finale that wasn’t nearly as climactic as the show had been building up to. The long-awaited confrontation between Peter and Sylar was sadly bereft of the kind of fancy superhero-type moves that you’d expect from the “end of volume one.” Now, this show has traditionally been very tight-fisted about bandying around its characters’ power, and that restraint is part of its charm. The grand finale though, just really needed to be more bold, and I couldn’t help coming away from it feeling like I had ended an otherwise fine meal with a thoroughly average dessert. I’d give this a 3 out of 5.

24, meanwhile, was surprising. Season 6 tried very hard to break a lot of the traditions set by the first 5 seasons, going so far as to actually have a nuclear bomb finally go off in a populated area, despite our hero’s best efforts. The introduction of Jack’s father and brother, as well as the political struggle within the White House, were all steps in the right direction, but this season still saw 24 drop below the Top 20 TV series list for the first time ever. The season ender though was unexpectedly introspective, and the final conversation at Senator Raines’ house was a nice bit of drama. I was honestly waiting for Raines to say, “You’re just a gun, Jack” or something equally catchy. Good stuff. This one is at least 3.5 out of 5.

But I guess the biggest surprise of all was the mind-bending Lost, which has been losing its primary audience to Heroes for months now. In 90 minutes of really, really good TV, Damon Lindeloff summoned up the magic that hooked so many people to this show’s first season; the Through the Looking Glass two-parter is the first time since Season 1’s wonderful Walkabout that I was really bowled over by this show. I guess you could say I’ve been waiting a long time for another one of those episodes for awhile now.
Without giving away any spoilers, “Looking Glass” takes one of the fundamental concepts of this show, and really turns it on its head. Brilliant, brilliant work. I honestly cannot wait for season 4. 5 out of 5 stars.

I wanted to write about something appropriate for the Holy Week, and I guess this inflammatory National Geographic special (directed by Simcha Jacobovici and produced by James Cameron) about the discovery of Jesus’ family tomb in Israel seems as good a topic as any.

Quick background: in 1980, a tomb was discovered by construction workers who were laying the foundation for an apartment complex in Talpiot, Israel. Inside the tomb were 10 ossuaries — small limestone boxes that contain the bones of the dead. 6 of them had epigraphs carved into their sides: “Maria”, “Mariamene”, “Jose”, “Judah”, “Matthew” and of course, “Jesus, Son of Joseph.” Interestingly, Judah’s ossuary also contained the additional nugget “Son of Jesus.”

Jacobovici’s documentary goes to great lengths to confirm its various theories, namely that the tomb discovered was that of Jesus of Nazareth, that he was married to Mary Magdalene and that Judah was the name of their son. As I watched the 2-hour special, I could almost hear the torches being lit and the pitchforks being brandished.

National Geographic itself is of course, riding the hype created by the controversy pretty well. (The fact that it chose to release the special a few weeks before Easter was particularly telling.) Scholars, critics and opinionated bloggers have come pouring out of the woodwork to decry the documentary’s various claims. The general secular consensus is that even if the theories put forth in the feature were true, it would not threaten Christianity’s core beliefs in any significant manner. (That to me sounded a little like desperation, but whatever.)

People that have read this blog for awhile know that I’m not a big believer in religion, and that I have a particular dislike for Roman Catholicism. I find it to be a manipulative, power-hungry, profit-driven machine, with little or no real relation to early Christianity other than the fact that it names Jesus as its central figure. That said, I do acknowledge that a change in collective mindset is a long and painful process. I’m hoping that widely-consumed works like The Lost Tomb, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and (God help me for saying this) the Da Vinci Code will open people’s eyes little by little.

More information on The Lost Tomb here.