Master of Champions

Grade: D

If it weren’t for America’s Got Talent, this would be the worst show of the summer.

If America’s Got Talent wasn’t enough of a disappointment, here we have another show trying to collect a wide variety of abilities under the guise of talent and cram them into some television. Here, it fails again. At least some of the activities are mildly interesting, but this show fails for completely different reasons.

Biggest complaint: there’s not enough action. During the inaugural hour they did maybe 4 activities. More than half of their time was spent with filler pieces about the backgrounds of the competitors. Who cares? If you want to show me two people who race around a wheel of cheese with graters attached to their car to see who can shred the most cheddar, fine–but I don’t give one iota about the racer’s personal lives, their favorite colors, or how they really want to make car-cheese-grating into an Olympic sport or whatever. Just show me a car spinning around a big wheel of cheese, then cut to the next insane activity.

Next biggest complaint: the judges. I guess the three most talented people were picked up by America’s Got Talent, which left this show with Steve Garvey (whatever, he played baseball), Oksana “I Don’t Get Drunk and Drive Anymore But You Still Can’t Understand A Word I’m Saying Because Of My Thick, Raspy, Yet Decidedly Un-Sexy Russian Accent” Baiul, and Jonny “I’m The Biggest Tool On The Planet” Moseley. I have no idea why they’re on this show. But they do pick a winner from the various competitions or exhibitions. So when the winner of the cheese grating race went up against the winner from the extreme unicycling competition (which was, surprisingly, even more stupid than it sounds), they both lost to the contortionist who shot an arrow from a bow that popped a balloon while blindfolder–using her feet. Seems a bit unfair since she didn’t have to compete first. Couldn’t they have found a bear with a bladder infection that hadn’t eaten in a week and then put a raw steak in the balloon and hold it between Anna Nicole Smith’s knees? Come on, ABC, get with the program!

So besides the lame concept with not enough action, the horrible judges, and the stupid activities, what are you left with? About 25 minutes of commercials.

At least we have The Closer.

America’s Got Talent

Grade: F

Apparently, America’s Got Talent. We just don’t know where to find it.

Poor Simon Cowell. He has a hit television show and millions of dollars, but apparently that isn’t enough for him. So he’s driven to keep applying the American Idol formula to different genres. He tried romance (Cupid), innovation (American Inventor) and now a general talent show in America’s Got Talent. While the formula bombed horribly in Cupid, worked slightly in American Inventor, it fails completely here.

The show is a cross between American Idol and the Gong Show. An audience filled with allegedly talented people are called up in groups to perform for the judges. If the judges hate the performance they can ring a buzzer which lights up a giant X. If all three X’s light up, the audition stops.

But no matter what, the judges vote to see if the person continues or not. So the buzzer really doesn’t mean anything except the act stops. But then it sometimes starts back up. And sometimes a horrible act is allowed to continue. Oh, and did I mention there’s no theme–that you have jugglers competing against ventriloquists competing against dancers competing against singers?

It goes without saying that the judges are horrible as well. The requisite bitter Brit seat is filled by an English reporter. Apparently, interviewing the royal family qualifies him to find talent. Because, you know, the English monarchy was determined by talent and abilities, not who your parents were. Oh, wait…

Filling in for the shiny, happy, must-be-on-something Paula Abdul is Moesha. Or Brandy. Whatever. She loves everybody, everybody is talented, she’s a fan of everyone. She’s also as fake as a three-dollar bill.

Rounding out the crew is David Hasselhoff. An American so talented that he has 6 platinum CDs. In Germany. Yes, these 3 will surely find talented people in America.

Unfortunately, the lack of theme is second to the lack of standards. Case in point a 9-year old stand-up comic is sent to the next round and the judges love her, but she isn’t funny. A man who honks horns strapped to his chest is also sent on. I could go on, but what’s the point.

The concept doesn’t make sense. The competition doesn’t make sense. Simon already has enough money. Please let this show die quickly. Or at least make it go head-to-head with ABC’s Master of Champions (premiering tonight) which looks promising.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand

Grade: B+

Logic is so homo sapien.

*** WARNING MINOR SPOILERS WITHIN BUT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS ALREADY THEN WHAT DO YOU CARE? ***

So Mrs Hose surprised me this weekend by getting a babysitter and taking me to the best movie theater in the country (aka the Alamo Drafthouse) to see X-Men 3. This was beyond cool, as it has been nearly 7 months since we’ve seen a movie (King Kong…also at the Drafthouse). Plus it was a surprise, plus she saw the movie with me. Too many cool items to mention. But enough of that, on to the movie.

This was perfect summer fare movie that I only ding because I’m left scratching my head afterwards. First, the good: lots and lots of explosions; lots and lots of mutants; lots and lots of Wolverine and almost no Cyclops. True to comic book form, dead people return, powers are taken away and ultimately return and giant symbols are destroyed.

I liked that there was some actual issue and character development from the prior movies. We don’t see the development take place–they leave that for the hidden moments between movies–like how Beast was apparently an X-Men team member in the few months between X-Men 2 and X-Men 3, then got appointed to a newly created Executive Department. Now that’s climbing the ladder! But we did have plastic armor and guns to take on Magneto–which all came just one scene too late to prevent Magento’s main squeeze from being freed. I guess they forgot all about that plastic prison they had for him earlier.

But on the Magneto front came the biggest head-scratcher of the movie. The climactic battle takes place on Alcatraz. Magneto, who has a whole mutant army to take out Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery, walks onto the Golden Gate bridge and uses his powers to rip the bridge up into the sky and plop it down so now it connects Alcatraz to San Francisco. Then his mutants just run/leap/fly onto the island for the big fight.

Now, Magneto is a chess player. We know this from X-Men 2 and the scene at the end brings that home (he’s playing chess in a park). He even makes several mentions of how the mutant army are pawns to test the regular army and X-Men. Fine, understood. What doesn’t make sense is why you would connect Alcatraz to San Francisco with a bridge when all of your forces are this one army. Alcatraz is isolated, so the regular army can’t get reinforcements through simple means–but with a bridge you just gave them one (not that they had time to use it, but still). Why couldn’t he have loaded the army into some buses and flown the buses to Alcatraz instead? Just doesn’t make sense.

On the X-Men side, they fly to Alcatraz to supposedly save the kid being guarded there because Magneto wants to kill him. Okay, but then why not make that your goal instead of just defending the entire island with the regular army? Sure, it sets up a much bigger battle, but it’s wasted efforts.

Still, the last battle had some great moments. Pyro was used well, even though the fight with Iceman was fairly lame. Seeing a lot of different mutants all together was cool too, even though you had one of the lamest guys ever. The Human Porcupine who can only kill you if he can hug you really, really tight and then spring out his little needles. Yawn. What’s next, the Human Gerbil (one guess how he kills you)?

But it was fun, it was loud, and best of all it was a movie in an actual movie theater. Turns out they’re as cool as I remember.

Hell’s Kitchen: Season 2

Grade: A

He wants four…more…BEAUTIFUL RISOTTOS!!

Gordon Ramsey is back with season 2 of Hell’s Kitchen. And although my favorite catchphrase from season 1 has yet to surface, the show is off to a successful start. The first two episodes were helped by some hospital visits–one for a faker who couldn’t cut it and one from an early frontrunner that may now not go as far as they should. But we have the exact same elements as before.

Pitting men against women this year was a lame change. Maybe it will turn into more conflict later, but they work the candidates hard enough and deprive them of enough sleep that the team mechanics really didn’t need changing. But so be it.

So far, top candidate for this season’s catchphrase is “Move your ass, you donkey!” Poetic, to the point, but loses points for not including a creamy, delicious rice dish.

2006 Tony Awards

Grade: B

Another year, another Tony awards. Although this year watching the show was a bittersweet moment since we’d seen so few of the nominees. I think Sweeney Todd is the only one we saw, probably our lowest total in a decade.

The show itself was a bit bland. Not having a host didn’t help the show, but it also didn’t hurt the show either. Also had quite a few disappointments–not in terms of people who should have won the award but in terms of what winners did afterwards. Like Leading Actor in Musical winner John Lloyd Young who gave possibly the worst speech of the evening. It sounded completely rehearsed and fake and is the only blemish against me wanting to see the show. Still, not enough to trump the good points including the great performance they did.

Speaking of performances, Harry Connick, Jr. was a bundle or nerves. Which really doesn’t make much sense unless he thought he was going to win (see Idina Menzel’s Tony performance when she won for Wicked). So I’m not sure if it was something else or if he actually was cocky enough to think he had a shot over this crowd (a very competitive crowd).

Other disappointing speech: LaChanze. Not entirely unexpected, since anyone who uses only one name is really full of themselves to begin with, but her speech utterly reeked of ego. The only time she mentioned her family was to point out that her girls didn’t know what being nominated meant–but now she could show them it meant that she won! Ugh.

The performances were all fairly good. Even Threepenny Opera looked interesting. Given the horrible reviews it’s received that means either they picked a good number to stage or I’m just really in theater-withdrawal. Connick was bad, but his co-star was very impressive and almost brought him back into the song. Almost. The worst performance part was when they presented two or three lines from each nominated play, set against some strange diarama of the stage. They spent more time showing the stage models than the actual show. Maybe there were some licensing issues, but if musicals can get 3 minutes for a song, you can at least give a play 1 minute to show a few good parts. They’ve done it before, hopefully they’ll bring it back.

Favorite TiVo moment, as pointed out by Mrs Hose: seeing the reactions on the losing nominees’ faces for Leading Actress in a Musical when the winner was announced. Best reaction: Sutton Foster, who immediately looked over with a mock “Oh, good for her, look” that probably looked a lot better in the mirror back home. No worries, Sutton, everyone in the room knows you can sing and dance circles around the other nominees–this just wasn’t your show to win again.

Biggest rob of the evening: Sweeney Todd not winning for revival. Yes, I haven’t seen The Pajama Game and it may be the bestest musical ever-ever! But Sweeney Todd completely reinvented the show using the same book and score. That takes something extra and it should have been recognized. The director and score won, which was perhaps their nod to the show, but that kind of innovation needs to be rewarded with the big revival prize, not the smaller ones.

Dead Lines

Grade: C

Good SF does not translate to good horror.

I like Greg Bear as a science fiction writer. One of my top 10 SF books would easily be The Forge of God. Amazing work. So when I saw a copy of this book at a charity sale, I picked it up thinking a horror based on a bit of science fiction could be interesting.

Here, a new company invents a new type of cell phone that uses a previously undiscovered frequency to transmit crystal-clear signals anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, it turns out they were broadcasting on the channel that ghosts live, so all these new cell phones start clogging the ghost-channels, forcing them back into our world. Add to that a ghostly serial killer with a connection to a poor schlubnik of a leading character, and a good concept quickly becomes a mediocre novel.

The sad thing is that this book recycles a concept that Bear has used before. In Anvil of Stars, the sequel to The Forge of God, there’s a good amount of talk about information channels that exist between particles–the same core concept that becomes the ghost channel in this book. Unfortunately, the conversion to horror just doesn’t work as well.

But if I start getting possessed by ghosts after using my cell phone, I’m really going to be angry.

Irony is just so…well, you know…

Didn’t strike me until I was back to my desk, but today’s flavored coffee at the coffee store in my building was Kahlua. I ordered it and was sipping away before I realized the irony.

Munich

Grade: B

A compelling story is unnecessarily slowed down with a shallow question.

Spielberg’s story of the assassination plot Israel enacted for revenge against the planners of the 1972 Munich Olympics incident is a great story filled with a number of intellectual musings designed to make the movie appear deep. But the conflict here isn’t deep at all, and the musings are shallow at best. Ultimately, it brings the movie down and that’s a shame.

First, the actual incident here is incredibly fascinating. But to really get a flavor of it you have to see One Day In September, the riveting documentary that covers the incident and the aftermath. Where it stops, Munich picks up in Israel’s plot to go after those responsible for the terrorist attack. That’s a good story, no matter how you cut it.

But you can certainly try and bring it down, and Speilberg does in two important ways. First, he spaces out the telling of Munich in various Spielberg-esque flashbacks/dream sequences. If you’ve seen any 2 of Spielberg’s movies in the past 10 years you know exactly what I’m talking about: scenes shot in a mix of slow-motion and real-time action without any dialogue but an incredibly loud John Williams score and perhaps the occasional sound effect for emphasis. Very dramatic. Or at least the first 10 times we see it. But the problem here is that he uses these sequences to tell the story of the 72 Olympics–the incident the rest of the movie is focusing on seeking revenge for. So if you don’t know the incident itself, you just know it’s really bad until the end of the movie when you see how the incident finished. Not necessary. And actually bad storytelling, since these flashbacks all come through the main hero’s memory, yet by the end of the movie he’s supposed to have changed into a paranoid skeptic–certainly his new perception would have clouded those memories.

The second thing that slowed the movie down is the shallow question Spielberg inserts into the movie–and hammers home with a narrative opening on the DVD. The issue he sees is that nations must think prior to taking action because there will be ramifications. The implication in the movie is that as these Munich plotters were killed they were replaced by more violent terrorists. But that is the wrong question. The correct question is how would killing the Munich plotters have made this different?

It’s the central point of Freakonomics: just because two things appear correlated doesn’t mean one caused the other. I have been buying Diet Coke for over 10 years. And over those 10 years, the price has slowly gone up. But it would be a mistake for me to say that my buying Diet Coke caused this price increase. Now, if that’s the case, I would like to apologize to everyone else out there who buys Diet Coke.

But that’s not the case. And although Diet Coke isn’t often compared with terrorists, the comparison fits here. Terrorists work by inspiring terror, not by winning actual battles or defeating armies. Terror must be unexpected, unanticipated. The first airport bombing was a big shock. The second one showed a pattern. The third one was more the fault of bad security. Terrorists must come up with more violent and increasingly shocking actions–but Munich doesn’t address that point. It may be that killing the Munich plotters brought these more violent people into power sooner, or maybe it didn’t. Thinking that acting or not-acting will really impact the internal politics of terrorist networks is ludicrous: terrorists operate on a different mindset than rational nations. Not to say this isn’t a consideration, but it also shouldn’t be the only discussion point.

Spielberg falls all over himself trying to make this point, but he ultimately lands face-first in the mud and grins because that’s where he thought he wanted to be. The point he tries to make isn’t as important as he thinks it is, but the story itself is an amazing one. So he ends up making a good movie, despite all attempts otherwise.

Rumor Has It…

Grade: B-

One thing saves this movie from being a disaster: Shirley MacLaine.

I’m not a Shirley MacLaine fan. Normally I could take her or leave her. And she’s certainly done her fair share of horrible movies (Guarding Tess, anyone?). But if she wasn’t in this movie it would have been absolutely horrible. Jennifer Aniston plays Rachel, I mean Sarah, who in a moment of profound crisis discovers her family was the real life inspiration behind The Graduate. Meaning her mom slept with a guy before she got married, and so did her grandma.

The concept is interesting for exactly one nano-second. Then you realize that they’re not just recycling an old movie story–they’re ADMITTING they don’t have an original story and dare you to have a problem with it. The spin being “Oh, this was real, so now we have to deal with it!” is boring. Aniston plays the same character she portrayed in Friends (she can act, everyone keeps saying…I have yet to see proof of this). Kevin Costner plays the guy two women up the family tree hung from the branches with, and Mark Ruffalo plays the perpetually hanging-on boyfriend/fiance to Aniston. You know this tired movie character–the guy who gets a real backbone when he needs to drive the plot but then abruptly caves in order to provide a happy ending.

The trailers and commercials all revealed that Aniston sleeps with Costner, so I’m not giving anything away. How it happens is ludicrous, the consequences are all cartoon-ish and fake, and the most important issue (like why would Aniston sleep with this guy when ten seconds before she kisses him she thought he might have been her father) are completely ignored.

But MacLaine makes it worthwhile. The character is great, her performance is fantastic, and the only way I’d recommend watching this movie is to watch the into, then fast forward through every scene that doesn’t involve MacLaine.

Last Holiday

Grade: F

I want my time back!

The making of featurette for this movie tells about how it took 23 years for the film to be made. Yes, 23 years. After watching it, I was very curious. Not why it took 23 years, but why somebody actually caved after 23 years and greenlit the project. Clearly this movie was in development hell, where it should have lingered, burning and festering with oozing, infected sores covering its entire hole-ridden plot and pitiful excuses for character development.

Sadly, I will never get any answers. The closest I can come is this: in the brilliant comedy Three Amigos, the three stars insist on doing a movie in Hawaii because they’re tired of working in the desert. So they get fired. This is funny because that’s not how it works–if the star is big enough, they get to make a movie wherever they want. Which must be how this was made–Queen Latifah must have said she wanted to spend a few weeks in the Czech Republic, so Last Holiday was greenlit.

Yes, it’s a bad theory. But it’s actually more consistent than the movie’s story. Otherwise, are we really supposed to believe a woman convinced she’s dying decides to spend her last few weeks in Prague? Seriously, Prague. Oh, did I mention that she is a gourmet chef? Yes, she is. So she doesn’t go to Paris. Nope–Prague. Because, you know, all good food comes from Prague. So she leaves the ghetto and checks into the Presidential Suite at a five-star luxury resort.

But, Hose, you say, how can she afford to go to Prague and check into a $5,000 a night suite if she lives in the ghetto? That’s easy–she cashed in her savings and the bonds her mom left her. Duh! So the $100,000 or so she spends was clearly just being saved for a rainy day. Or, you know, when you get a horrible brain disease that you don’t get a second opinion to see if it’s true or not that you’ll die in 3 weeks. Because, you know, second opinions are expensive! Why, so is the surgery to save your life! Better to just take that small fortune and blow it all on the bestest vacation ever for a ghetto-living gourmet chef: Prague. In winter.

Seriously, I hope everyone who made this movie looks back in a few years and is shamed.