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.

Alias Series Finale

** POTENTIAL SERIES ENDING SPOILERS CONTAINED INSIDE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. **

Grade: C

A finale I really wanted to like ended up having way too many plot holes. Lost fans now have no excuse.

The first two seasons of Alias still stand as some of the most brilliant, innovative television ever done (hence the link to season 2, which rocked). Unfortunately, you had to watch it from the beginning to really get into the intricate stories and characters. So when the network realized it had a hit on its hands, it instructed the show to dumb it down–make it easier to catch up for new viewers, make the episodes stand by themselves a bit more. So you had the first wipe, when the super-secret SD-6 was wiped out leaving just the core characters. But that wasn’t interesting, so a new super-SUPER-secret organization was revealed, which wasn’t as cool as SD-6 but plugged along until it too was demolished in a fit of appeasing the lowest common denominator watching ABC. Then their star got pregnant, and in a fit of desperation to keep the hard-core fans wanting more, they created a super-SUPER-SUPERDUPER-secret organization that, in reality, was the first super-secret organization but, you know, with a really bold descriptor before secret. And they killed the male lead because the star broke up with him and had a daughter with Ben Affleck. And they introduced a host of new characters that nobody cared about to take away from the fact that the star could no longer run or jump or do anything spy-ish because she was pregnant.

In other words, Alias sucked.

So it was no surprise that they decided to end the show. So I watched, wondering how they’d end the series, especially given the creator’s current endeavour Lost. Alias had some mysteries that needed wrapping up too, so this might be an interesting omen.

While the last few episodes leading up to the finale were interesting, the finale ultimately failed to deliver. Giant plot holes attempting to cover up for earlier changes were glaring and unbelievable. They brought Vaughn back from the dead (see, he never died, we tricked you) without acknowledging all those scenes where Sydney was, you know, devastated by his death. If she knew he was dead all along, sure she’d be sad that he had to go into hiding, but certainly not to the extent they showed her. I mean, she’s a spy. Suck it up if he’s alive. No, he was dead and they took too much stuff from fans to not cave in and bring him back. Huge plot hole. Another big plot hole: in an attempt to wipe out the super-SUPER-SUPERDUPER-secret organization they send all their agents to, get this, take pictures of the 12 leaders. Then, having the pictures firmly posted to a wall, they now pronounce they know who they are dealing with and they can take them all out. Um, last I checked, if you could take a picture of someone, you could, you know, shoot them. And if they didn’t know who the people were to shoot, how did they know to take pictures of them? And why the heck was Marshall, a computer guy, sent to take a picture when they had another field agent (Rachel) who did nothing? Note to any actual spy agencies out there–if you know about a 12-member group trying to destroy the world: take the gun, leave the Polaroid.

There were other plot holes, mostly smaller, then you get the whammy near the end. Jack and Syndey are in Mongolia and Jack’s taken three bullets to the chest. The medical chopper is coming in, but it’s 30 minutes away. Jack bravely tells Sydney to go, since she has to make it to Hong Kong to stop her mother and save the world. So he has Vaughn go get the truck.

Um, what? Hong Kong is not, I repeat, not within driving distance of Mongolia. If he was sacrificing himself, how about having her wait for the helicopter and taking that to, you know, an airport? But no, the script called for him to stay behind and blow himself up so that the really bad guy who comes back from the dead could be pinned under a massive stone column. (Incidentally, how is that bad? Since he keeps getting healed, couldn’t he eventually chip away at the column with his fingernails and get out? Might take a while, but he’s got eternal life.)

Oh, and the final fight over the ultimate Rimbaldi artifact (a glass globe, because all the hip 15th century prophets love them some glass globes) takes place and, here’s the kicker, we never find out what it does. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, five years of mystery and you get no answers. How’s Lost looking now, people?

Given what the creative team had to work with, namely the last 2 seasons, they did the best they could to wrap up the series with a little bit of dignity. But too many plot holes from trying to cover too much ground made the end result a mixed bag. Could it have been worse? Sure. But it could have been so much better.