A Collection of Media-Related Things (But Mostly TV)
Reduced Information Intake
I'm greatly reducing the things I read. I pruned my friends list, stopped reading fueledbygossip and Bandom TFLN (to the extent that I deleted them from my history so they wouldn't show up and tempt me when I start typing into the location bar), and stopped following Nathan Fillion and the majority of TAI's hangers-on and ex-bandmembers on Twitter. I was annoyed with Facebook's declining usefulness, but I guess it'll keep me from spending too much time there. Delicious has been similarly helpful. I'm only reading Sociological Images sporadically (I think I'm going to try once a week). I'm not clicking on every link that appears in my Twitter feed or email. (This is hard for me. I never want to miss anything, but I just need to remind myself that it's okay. I don't have to read/watch/listen to everything.) I'm trying to step away from the internet and go read a paper book when I'm feeling overwhelmed. This all sounds more dramatic than it actually is. I go through this kind of media pruning every once in a while when I'm either feeling like the internet is too much (which I have been for most of this month) or when I'm trying to cut out things that aren't my core priorities (which I'm starting to do since it's starting to be fall, which is when I have a lot more energy).
Movies
The last two movies I saw in theaters (unless there was something else in there I'm forgetting) were Colombiana, which I wanted to like more than I did, and Attack The Block, which I very much liked. Attack The Block was fun and funny, and the experience had the bonus points of (a) introducing norwich36 to our local art house theater and (b) running into a friend I'd just been thinking about but hadn't seen in years. A win all around!
I've had my Netflix account on hold for a while (and will probably keep it that way into the foreseeable future - again with technology helping me stay productive by being less and less useful), so I've been checking out DVDs from the library. I've seen some very bad movies. Two of those are Diane Keaton movies. I was looking to see what else Gabriel Macht had been in, and one of the things is Because I Said So, which was already on my Netflix queue (because Piper Perabo is in it; she's beautiful as always but the movie gives her nothing to do), and which my library owns. It's not a good movie, and yet I still cried. I'm so easily emotionally manipulated. But because the movie is all about a mother-daughter relationship (Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore), it reminded me of another movie that also has an interesting mother-daughter relationship: The Family Stone. It's possible that The Family Stone is even worse than Because I Said So, and I'd seen it before so I really should have known better. It does have one absolutely lovely moment between the mother and one of her daughters (Diane Keaton and Rachel McAdams) when they open presents.
I also watched The Edge of Love. Wikipedia quotes a review that says, "tonally it's all over the map," and isn't that the truth. I mean, I knew it wasn't going to be good when it was a Keira Knightley movie I'd never even heard of, but I didn't quite expect the part where it didn't know what kind of movie it was trying to be. Fun fact: my library actually owns two copies. According the catalog, there's a third one at another branch. Now I'm very curious about who makes DVD purchasing decisions for the system.
YA Unrec
I read Jennifer Hubbard's The Secret Year last week. It's not horrible, but it's very flat and it doesn't seem to have much purpose. It also has a surprising amount of talk about sex and people having sex (off screen) without ever actually being sexy. The best parts are the family parts. She should have stuck to that story.
Music
I heard Patrick Stump's "This City" (featuring Lupe Fiasco) on the radio yesterday. The radio! I had no idea it had made it off the internet.
New TV Shows I Have Watched One or More Episodes Of
It's not a coincidence that all of these have female protagonists.
Revenge: Ohhhh, I like this one. Soapy but not in a particularly ridiculous way, more in a way that draws you in. This is the new show I'm most impatient to watch the next episode of.
Ringer: This is not a great show, but it gets a few more episodes. If I decide I'm watching too much TV, this will probably be on the chopping block. I do appreciate that Sarah Michelle Gellar is managing to make Bridget, Siobhan, and Bridget-as-Siobhan three separate characters. I do wish we got more than about five minutes of Siobhan per episode. I think I'm more interested in her than I am in Bridget.
Charlie's Angels: Do not watch this show. It's terrible in nearly every way. You know how the Drew Barrymore-Lucy Liu-Cameron Diaz movies were fun? This is not. It's also not really a drama. They seem to be stuck somewhere in a middle ground where they don't know what tone to take, so it all falls a little flat. They don't even manage to make the fight scenes look good. Charlie being a voice on a speaker phone is creepy instead of the joke it probably should be. And then there's the race fail. I was going to leave the entirety of this warning outside of a cut, but once I wrote it all out, I realized how terrible and offensive it really is, so the description is behind the cut in case you'd rather not deal with it. I was very confused by the opening because it showed us three women: a Black woman, a blonde white woman, and a Hispanic woman. None of them are Minka Kelly, and she's a big part of why I was watching the show. Their first case is to rescue Sara, a white girl, from the evil human traffickers who have kidnapped her. She's being held in a giant hotel, so they have to figure out which room she's in and then go save her. The Hispanic woman waylays the buyer's agent. The blonde white woman was previously a cat burglar, so she rappels down to the room. The Black woman gets in by going undercover as a maid. Yes, someone thought that was a good idea. There's about ten seconds worth watching after they finish the job where the blonde white woman and the Hispanic woman have a really nice moment and I thought, "I would totally read fic about them." Then they kill off the Hispanic woman. Why? So they can go find the brunette white woman (Minka Kelly). The Hispanic woman and the brunette white woman were in the same orphanage in Central America (El Salvador, I think, but I'm not going to rewatch it to get the details right), where the brunette white woman's parents were aid workers. When the villain came to steal the girls to sell them into prostitution, the brunette white girl and the Hispanic girl hid in the chapel and used a wooden angel statue to attack the villain and get away. He still keeps the statue in his home office. Really, I couldn't make up anything this (a) ridiculous or (b) offensive. At the end of the episode, they rescue a string of nameless brown girls who we see only as victims chained together in a locked room. This is one of those things that makes you wonder, did anyone who read this script have even the slightest understanding of why it might be a problem?
Prime Suspect: I wasn't necessarily going to watch this, but then norwich36 said I should let her know if I made it past the first fifteen minutes, so I watched it so I could talk to her about it. The sexism is pretty outrageous, and neither one of us or my mother (who I also talked to about it) believed the blatant nature of it. I'm hoping that was just a setup and that now that they have the attitude established, it can be more realistic and subtle. What's most interesting about the show, and what I didn't know from the one ad I kept seeing at the movie theater, is that she's partnered. (It's probably not a good thing that I can't remember the names of either Maria Bello's character or the partner.) Before you get too excited by my choice of terminology, the partner is male. Their relationship is very interesting, and it's what's going to make me watch at least one more episode. What I really want is for someone on YouTube to cut together reels of just those interactions for each episode. I would watch all of those. As it is, this is likely to be one of those shows where I watch an episode here and there when I'm in the mood for a cop show.
The Secret Circle: I wasn't sure about this show. siryn99 suggested it, and eleanor_lavish didn't think much of it. I gave it two episodes because the first one was painfully establishing, but two episodes is all it's getting. I might remember to read some brief recaps in a couple of months to see what happens, but it's not worth watching. A few miscellaneous thoughts: Never before have I so clearly seen the use of magic as a metaphor for sex. It's suffering in the transition from page to screen, particularly in the pilot where I could practically see the inner monologue. Somewhere there is a problem in the logic of there being six people to complete the circle when all twelve of the current six's parents seem to have been in the previous one. I would much rather watch a whole show about Faye than Cassie. It really makes me want to watch The Craft, which is an urge I get often enough that I might just buy it.
Returning and Ongoing Shows I'm Watching
In addition to the things below, I'll also be watching Leverage and Rizzoli & Isles when we get to the second half of their split seasons.
Haven: I was looking for things to watch, and norwich36 sent me a link to a thread of shows to catch up on over the summer that have strong female characters. This was on it, so I watched my way through the first season. What surprised me most were how many people I know replied to me when I tweeted about watching it. Who else is watching this show I'd never even heard of but love? (I have more to say about Haven, but it's going in a separate entry.)
Hawaii Five-0: This show continues to be absolutely ridiculous, and yet fun. The very best thing so far was the moment with Steve and Danny looking at each other in the rearview mirror in the first ep. I'm not sure I liked Lori coming right out and asking how long they'd been married. It kind of ruins the fun when the characters are aware of that. (Unless, you know, it's fan fic and it leads to them actually being together.) I'm not sure I like Lori at all. This is completely shallow of me, but I don't like that her look is very Hollywood typical, blonde hair and all. She looks out of place in a cast full of people who, while still very much hitting many of the aspects of a specific mold, don't look like your usual TV show cast.
Nikita: I love this show. I'm completely captivated by the story and the relationships. They got Alberta Watson to join the cast in a recurring role as one of the members of Oversight, which is great. I really love that Michael and Nikita are together and working together now. It makes my college-age self who reveled in Michael and Nikita's sexual tension in La Femme Nikita so happy. I also love everything about both Alex and Birkoff.
I'm greatly reducing the things I read. I pruned my friends list, stopped reading fueledbygossip and Bandom TFLN (to the extent that I deleted them from my history so they wouldn't show up and tempt me when I start typing into the location bar), and stopped following Nathan Fillion and the majority of TAI's hangers-on and ex-bandmembers on Twitter. I was annoyed with Facebook's declining usefulness, but I guess it'll keep me from spending too much time there. Delicious has been similarly helpful. I'm only reading Sociological Images sporadically (I think I'm going to try once a week). I'm not clicking on every link that appears in my Twitter feed or email. (This is hard for me. I never want to miss anything, but I just need to remind myself that it's okay. I don't have to read/watch/listen to everything.) I'm trying to step away from the internet and go read a paper book when I'm feeling overwhelmed. This all sounds more dramatic than it actually is. I go through this kind of media pruning every once in a while when I'm either feeling like the internet is too much (which I have been for most of this month) or when I'm trying to cut out things that aren't my core priorities (which I'm starting to do since it's starting to be fall, which is when I have a lot more energy).
Movies
The last two movies I saw in theaters (unless there was something else in there I'm forgetting) were Colombiana, which I wanted to like more than I did, and Attack The Block, which I very much liked. Attack The Block was fun and funny, and the experience had the bonus points of (a) introducing norwich36 to our local art house theater and (b) running into a friend I'd just been thinking about but hadn't seen in years. A win all around!
I've had my Netflix account on hold for a while (and will probably keep it that way into the foreseeable future - again with technology helping me stay productive by being less and less useful), so I've been checking out DVDs from the library. I've seen some very bad movies. Two of those are Diane Keaton movies. I was looking to see what else Gabriel Macht had been in, and one of the things is Because I Said So, which was already on my Netflix queue (because Piper Perabo is in it; she's beautiful as always but the movie gives her nothing to do), and which my library owns. It's not a good movie, and yet I still cried. I'm so easily emotionally manipulated. But because the movie is all about a mother-daughter relationship (Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore), it reminded me of another movie that also has an interesting mother-daughter relationship: The Family Stone. It's possible that The Family Stone is even worse than Because I Said So, and I'd seen it before so I really should have known better. It does have one absolutely lovely moment between the mother and one of her daughters (Diane Keaton and Rachel McAdams) when they open presents.
I also watched The Edge of Love. Wikipedia quotes a review that says, "tonally it's all over the map," and isn't that the truth. I mean, I knew it wasn't going to be good when it was a Keira Knightley movie I'd never even heard of, but I didn't quite expect the part where it didn't know what kind of movie it was trying to be. Fun fact: my library actually owns two copies. According the catalog, there's a third one at another branch. Now I'm very curious about who makes DVD purchasing decisions for the system.
YA Unrec
I read Jennifer Hubbard's The Secret Year last week. It's not horrible, but it's very flat and it doesn't seem to have much purpose. It also has a surprising amount of talk about sex and people having sex (off screen) without ever actually being sexy. The best parts are the family parts. She should have stuck to that story.
Music
I heard Patrick Stump's "This City" (featuring Lupe Fiasco) on the radio yesterday. The radio! I had no idea it had made it off the internet.
New TV Shows I Have Watched One or More Episodes Of
It's not a coincidence that all of these have female protagonists.
Revenge: Ohhhh, I like this one. Soapy but not in a particularly ridiculous way, more in a way that draws you in. This is the new show I'm most impatient to watch the next episode of.
Ringer: This is not a great show, but it gets a few more episodes. If I decide I'm watching too much TV, this will probably be on the chopping block. I do appreciate that Sarah Michelle Gellar is managing to make Bridget, Siobhan, and Bridget-as-Siobhan three separate characters. I do wish we got more than about five minutes of Siobhan per episode. I think I'm more interested in her than I am in Bridget.
Charlie's Angels: Do not watch this show. It's terrible in nearly every way. You know how the Drew Barrymore-Lucy Liu-Cameron Diaz movies were fun? This is not. It's also not really a drama. They seem to be stuck somewhere in a middle ground where they don't know what tone to take, so it all falls a little flat. They don't even manage to make the fight scenes look good. Charlie being a voice on a speaker phone is creepy instead of the joke it probably should be. And then there's the race fail. I was going to leave the entirety of this warning outside of a cut, but once I wrote it all out, I realized how terrible and offensive it really is, so the description is behind the cut in case you'd rather not deal with it. I was very confused by the opening because it showed us three women: a Black woman, a blonde white woman, and a Hispanic woman. None of them are Minka Kelly, and she's a big part of why I was watching the show. Their first case is to rescue Sara, a white girl, from the evil human traffickers who have kidnapped her. She's being held in a giant hotel, so they have to figure out which room she's in and then go save her. The Hispanic woman waylays the buyer's agent. The blonde white woman was previously a cat burglar, so she rappels down to the room. The Black woman gets in by going undercover as a maid. Yes, someone thought that was a good idea. There's about ten seconds worth watching after they finish the job where the blonde white woman and the Hispanic woman have a really nice moment and I thought, "I would totally read fic about them." Then they kill off the Hispanic woman. Why? So they can go find the brunette white woman (Minka Kelly). The Hispanic woman and the brunette white woman were in the same orphanage in Central America (El Salvador, I think, but I'm not going to rewatch it to get the details right), where the brunette white woman's parents were aid workers. When the villain came to steal the girls to sell them into prostitution, the brunette white girl and the Hispanic girl hid in the chapel and used a wooden angel statue to attack the villain and get away. He still keeps the statue in his home office. Really, I couldn't make up anything this (a) ridiculous or (b) offensive. At the end of the episode, they rescue a string of nameless brown girls who we see only as victims chained together in a locked room. This is one of those things that makes you wonder, did anyone who read this script have even the slightest understanding of why it might be a problem?
Prime Suspect: I wasn't necessarily going to watch this, but then norwich36 said I should let her know if I made it past the first fifteen minutes, so I watched it so I could talk to her about it. The sexism is pretty outrageous, and neither one of us or my mother (who I also talked to about it) believed the blatant nature of it. I'm hoping that was just a setup and that now that they have the attitude established, it can be more realistic and subtle. What's most interesting about the show, and what I didn't know from the one ad I kept seeing at the movie theater, is that she's partnered. (It's probably not a good thing that I can't remember the names of either Maria Bello's character or the partner.) Before you get too excited by my choice of terminology, the partner is male. Their relationship is very interesting, and it's what's going to make me watch at least one more episode. What I really want is for someone on YouTube to cut together reels of just those interactions for each episode. I would watch all of those. As it is, this is likely to be one of those shows where I watch an episode here and there when I'm in the mood for a cop show.
The Secret Circle: I wasn't sure about this show. siryn99 suggested it, and eleanor_lavish didn't think much of it. I gave it two episodes because the first one was painfully establishing, but two episodes is all it's getting. I might remember to read some brief recaps in a couple of months to see what happens, but it's not worth watching. A few miscellaneous thoughts: Never before have I so clearly seen the use of magic as a metaphor for sex. It's suffering in the transition from page to screen, particularly in the pilot where I could practically see the inner monologue. Somewhere there is a problem in the logic of there being six people to complete the circle when all twelve of the current six's parents seem to have been in the previous one. I would much rather watch a whole show about Faye than Cassie. It really makes me want to watch The Craft, which is an urge I get often enough that I might just buy it.
Returning and Ongoing Shows I'm Watching
In addition to the things below, I'll also be watching Leverage and Rizzoli & Isles when we get to the second half of their split seasons.
Haven: I was looking for things to watch, and norwich36 sent me a link to a thread of shows to catch up on over the summer that have strong female characters. This was on it, so I watched my way through the first season. What surprised me most were how many people I know replied to me when I tweeted about watching it. Who else is watching this show I'd never even heard of but love? (I have more to say about Haven, but it's going in a separate entry.)
Hawaii Five-0: This show continues to be absolutely ridiculous, and yet fun. The very best thing so far was the moment with Steve and Danny looking at each other in the rearview mirror in the first ep. I'm not sure I liked Lori coming right out and asking how long they'd been married. It kind of ruins the fun when the characters are aware of that. (Unless, you know, it's fan fic and it leads to them actually being together.) I'm not sure I like Lori at all. This is completely shallow of me, but I don't like that her look is very Hollywood typical, blonde hair and all. She looks out of place in a cast full of people who, while still very much hitting many of the aspects of a specific mold, don't look like your usual TV show cast.
Nikita: I love this show. I'm completely captivated by the story and the relationships. They got Alberta Watson to join the cast in a recurring role as one of the members of Oversight, which is great. I really love that Michael and Nikita are together and working together now. It makes my college-age self who reveled in Michael and Nikita's sexual tension in La Femme Nikita so happy. I also love everything about both Alex and Birkoff.