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Between renting DVDs and the internet, I’ve been able to get caught up on Burn Notice, Leverage and Chuck.
All told, that’s a lot of time spent watching characters that do a lot of lying.
( Burn Notice: Fun, facts, Bruce Campbell and an anorexic actress. )
Yeah, seems like they knew they'd shot themselves in the foot.
And the thing of it is, it's not like Chuck doesn't still have a lot to learn. Sure he knows kung fu and all this other stuff. Does he know common spy tactics? Game theory? Psychology? Social manipulation? How to spot a tail? Being a spy is less about the fighting and more about the mind games.
Personally, I can handwave all the ill-equipped muscle business. It's the male equivalent of the more-annoying (to me) waif fu. (I can go on long rants about female characters with absolutely no reason to be badass fighters who simply ARE because the writers wanted a cute chick you could "fight." How about making a woman who is badass for something other than her fake magical muscles?)
Well, muscle size isn't the same thing as muscle strength or capability. Bruce Lee, for instance, was a very small man but an incredibly strong one. And what a body builder does to make his muscles look impressive is nothing like what a weightlifter does to make them perform impressively.
But you're not wrong that we could use a lot more female action stars who are built more like athletes and less like models. Ones that look like they got their figure by swimming or running rather than by starving themselves would retain that aesthetic that's oh-so-important to Hollywood while seeming much more believable as fighters.
I wouldn't have all that much problem with Chuck being able to fight with his current physique if he had come by it honestly, learning how to fight with his own body, instead of suddenly being able to perform incredible feats of raw physicality just by gaining the knowledge of someone who was totally physically different than him. My "pulled groin" point still stands.
I always want to like Chuck more than I do. Sometimes it's genuinely fun, sometimes it's just dulllll. And it'a always been a really crappy romance, IMO.
Yeah, it's always just kind of been mindless, escapist fun, for all that it bills itself as being for geeks. Not a lot of substance.
You could try my current t.v. love, (the guilty pleasure Spartacus), which is truly terrible until about 4 or 5 episodes in, when it's somehow better?
Heh. I think I might wait and see what people are saying about it after it's done its first season. I've actually got a bunch of stuff on my "I really should see that someday" list right now, and I should really start to work through some of that.
Of course, I say that with with Noir still sitting on my bedside shelf.
Well, you'll get to it when you get to it.
(It really is quite good, tho. Takes a little while to get going, but gets totally awesome by the end. And there's nothing hardly anything "guilty" about the pleasure: I still haven't been able to find a single plot hole....)
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