Quick Update
I finally watched and re-watched JM's USA movie Cool Money last week, and found that though the first half hour (which was all I'd initially seen before changing channels and leaving the VCR to tape the rest) can seem a bit slow, it's actually a pretty watchable and entertaining little flick. I guess I was expecting (on the basis of the brief promos) something smooth and very stylish and fanciful (on the order of Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million, perhaps). If they'd stuck with the original title, The Pierre Heist, I might have more correctly tuned my expectations to "true crime story," rather than expecting "frothy fantasy about cool-looking crooks in tuxedos" (which this, of course, was not).
My sister said she thought JM's talents are being wasted when he's cast as "just an ordinary guy," since he plays off-the-wall interesting characters (and bouncing-off-the-walls crazy characters) so very well. She preferred his performance as the Shakespeare-quoting, drunken, irresponsible-but-charming dad on that horrible series "The Mountain" last Fall to his toned-down-to-more-normal-levels-of-cuteness-and-charm portrayal of incorrigible thief Bobby Comfort. But "Bobby" kind of grew on me over the course of the two hours, so I can't complain too much.
I'm sure everybody and their aunt has already weighed in on last Friday's SciFi lineup, but I can't resist jotting down my own reaction to the SG1 finale. The fact that --- when all was said and done, and then re-done with the aid of the Ancient time-travel ship --- our beloved foursome winds up in exactly the same place as at the end of the 90-minute episode "Threads" (except that Jack now has fish in his pond) pretty much says it all. No wonder "Threads" felt so much like a season finale, as well as the finale to that three-episode arc; to all intents and purposes, "Threads" was the season finale, at least for me.
"Moebius" seemed to exist primarily to set up the two-part season finale for Atlantis, by explaining how the SGC finally got a ZPM to send reinforcements to the Pegasus galaxy. Secondarily, of course, it gave the actors a chance to have some fun making their alternate characters as goofy as possible, since, hey, no lasting consequences or implications. How Sam's character (in particular) could possibly have turned out like that, even without the burial and eventual discovery of the Stargate to shape her military career, is a question somebody wiser than I am will have to answer. Because I found her alt. timeline character impossible to believe, on the evidence provided. The original SG1 must have stepped on an awful lot of bugs in ancient Egypt, in order for Sam's life to have been redirected in such a way, long before she could have had any contact with or awareness of the SGC. That's an awful lot of butterfly effect to show up in only one character's history.
The other team members' alt. characters were much easier to accept, considering where Jack and Daniel were at the beginning of the film Stargate, and considering where Teal'c was when we first met him in the series pilot. Perhaps if I hadn't felt so annoyed and personally insulted by the way Sam's character was portrayed in part 1, especially (insulted both because I felt they were insulting my intelligence by expecting me to accept this development, given everything that's been established about Sam's life and character over the past 8 years, and because I strongly identify with Sam-as-intellectual, and I resemble -- er...resent, I mean -- that caricature of the super-smart-woman-with-almost-no-social-skills-or-self-confidence), I might have regarded "Moebius" as a nice sort of "Epilogue" to the season, reflecting on how far our heroes have come together and what they've meant to each other and to the universe-at-large by doing yet another variation on the It's a Wonderful Life "see-how-much-worse-the-world-would-be-without-your-contributions" storyline. But since it was, as I've just explained, my ox that was feeling gored in the first two-thirds of the alternate timeline, I'm not feeling too forgiving of this episode, just now.
Perhaps as an afterthought, "Moebius" also provided an AU way for the writers to have their Sam/Jack and eat them too (any allusions to oral sex being completely unintentional on my part, of course). The alt. versions of Sam and Jack -- whose resemblance to their original timeline counterparts is open to debate and endless speculation -- can wind up seriously intertwined and with the potential for spending the rest of Jack's life together in ancient Egypt, without implying anything whatsoever about the restored timeline Sam and Jack. That's what dopplegangers and AU stories are for, after all.
Finally, I see that my earlier prediction was right, about the male critics panning Miss Congeniality 2 (at least if Ebert & Roeper were any indication), but I still predict that this film will do more-than-respectable business. The women and girls who were watching it with me last Thursday were just having way too much fun for it to bomb.
Maybe it's not Shakespeare or Jane Austen, but then it's not trying to be. But what it does aim to do it does very well -- to provide lots of broad comedy and a few telling observations about women and self-confidence (given society's "push-you-pull-you-and-run-you-over-with-a-truck" head games with young girls), in a throw-away wrapper of a reasonably entertaining (if improbable) "solve-the-crime-and-save-the-victims" plotline.
My sister said she thought JM's talents are being wasted when he's cast as "just an ordinary guy," since he plays off-the-wall interesting characters (and bouncing-off-the-walls crazy characters) so very well. She preferred his performance as the Shakespeare-quoting, drunken, irresponsible-but-charming dad on that horrible series "The Mountain" last Fall to his toned-down-to-more-normal-levels-of-cuteness-and-charm portrayal of incorrigible thief Bobby Comfort. But "Bobby" kind of grew on me over the course of the two hours, so I can't complain too much.
I'm sure everybody and their aunt has already weighed in on last Friday's SciFi lineup, but I can't resist jotting down my own reaction to the SG1 finale. The fact that --- when all was said and done, and then re-done with the aid of the Ancient time-travel ship --- our beloved foursome winds up in exactly the same place as at the end of the 90-minute episode "Threads" (except that Jack now has fish in his pond) pretty much says it all. No wonder "Threads" felt so much like a season finale, as well as the finale to that three-episode arc; to all intents and purposes, "Threads" was the season finale, at least for me.
"Moebius" seemed to exist primarily to set up the two-part season finale for Atlantis, by explaining how the SGC finally got a ZPM to send reinforcements to the Pegasus galaxy. Secondarily, of course, it gave the actors a chance to have some fun making their alternate characters as goofy as possible, since, hey, no lasting consequences or implications. How Sam's character (in particular) could possibly have turned out like that, even without the burial and eventual discovery of the Stargate to shape her military career, is a question somebody wiser than I am will have to answer. Because I found her alt. timeline character impossible to believe, on the evidence provided. The original SG1 must have stepped on an awful lot of bugs in ancient Egypt, in order for Sam's life to have been redirected in such a way, long before she could have had any contact with or awareness of the SGC. That's an awful lot of butterfly effect to show up in only one character's history.
The other team members' alt. characters were much easier to accept, considering where Jack and Daniel were at the beginning of the film Stargate, and considering where Teal'c was when we first met him in the series pilot. Perhaps if I hadn't felt so annoyed and personally insulted by the way Sam's character was portrayed in part 1, especially (insulted both because I felt they were insulting my intelligence by expecting me to accept this development, given everything that's been established about Sam's life and character over the past 8 years, and because I strongly identify with Sam-as-intellectual, and I resemble -- er...resent, I mean -- that caricature of the super-smart-woman-with-almost-no-social-skills-or-self-confidence), I might have regarded "Moebius" as a nice sort of "Epilogue" to the season, reflecting on how far our heroes have come together and what they've meant to each other and to the universe-at-large by doing yet another variation on the It's a Wonderful Life "see-how-much-worse-the-world-would-be-without-your-contributions" storyline. But since it was, as I've just explained, my ox that was feeling gored in the first two-thirds of the alternate timeline, I'm not feeling too forgiving of this episode, just now.
Perhaps as an afterthought, "Moebius" also provided an AU way for the writers to have their Sam/Jack and eat them too (any allusions to oral sex being completely unintentional on my part, of course). The alt. versions of Sam and Jack -- whose resemblance to their original timeline counterparts is open to debate and endless speculation -- can wind up seriously intertwined and with the potential for spending the rest of Jack's life together in ancient Egypt, without implying anything whatsoever about the restored timeline Sam and Jack. That's what dopplegangers and AU stories are for, after all.
Finally, I see that my earlier prediction was right, about the male critics panning Miss Congeniality 2 (at least if Ebert & Roeper were any indication), but I still predict that this film will do more-than-respectable business. The women and girls who were watching it with me last Thursday were just having way too much fun for it to bomb.
Maybe it's not Shakespeare or Jane Austen, but then it's not trying to be. But what it does aim to do it does very well -- to provide lots of broad comedy and a few telling observations about women and self-confidence (given society's "push-you-pull-you-and-run-you-over-with-a-truck" head games with young girls), in a throw-away wrapper of a reasonably entertaining (if improbable) "solve-the-crime-and-save-the-victims" plotline.