I’m a trailer addict. I frequent traileraddict.com on a daily basis, and I’m angry when they have nothing new to show me.
Although 
my biggest pet peeve is a trailer that gives everything away, I still can’t help but want to know what’s coming out.
When a trailer is good, I want to watch it multiple times, and the best trailers are the ones that use music along with editing to their advantage. Most of the new music I’m introduced to is thanks to googling “____ trailer song”.Trailers brought me David Bowie and ELO.
Here are my Top 10 favourite songs from trailers in recent years, and in no particular order.
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I’ve been feeling lazy lately, and my brain is just way too completely fried from the awesomeness of this episode to bother writing anything coherent, so all I’ll say is:
Holywhatthefuckmygod.
From tgjkennedy:
I totally agree. I just watched this episode and my head hurts. It feels like what normally paced plot twists feel like, but ramped up on energy drinks and pixie sticks. This is what it feels like when a complex plot that should span 5 seasons is stuffed into 8 or so episodes. It hurts, but it’s kind of a good hurt.
*Spoilers ahead*
This year is over again, for the first time, every time. Someone pointed out that there shouldn’t be any decade-end best-of lists yet because the decade isn’t over until next year is over. That person is correct. So we’ve all just been wasting our time. Shame.
Did I encounter anything enormously exciting or relatively ground-breaking this year? Exciting, yes; ground-breaking, don’t think so. The things I did really like were more backwards looking than not, though that seems to actually be a bit of a trend right now (so trendy, I am), and the things that all the ‘experts’ said were the best were things that I usually just found okay.
In reality, there’s really no need to do this post at all, because I have nothing all that interesting to point out, but it’s became a year-end tradition so it’s gotta happen.
And I’ve extended that intro just enough to get me past the bottom of the sexy-legs-walking-into-the-new-year picture so that the post formats itself properly, so I think I’m finally ready to begin.
read more…
Beal earlier brought us the A.V. Club’s list of top TV shows from 2000 – 2009, so I thought I would take a look at the equivalent one for books, and bring them to your attention, seeing as I’m supposed to be bookish and all that. I was quite disappointed to discover that, while I know of many of these and want to read them, out of the thirty listed here I’d only managed to get to two these past ten years. Ouch.
But now fun game — can you guess which ones?!
Fuck me.
Everything I said about this being Dollhouse’s time to go, I take it back. What we’re getting now is worth saving. The problem, of course, is that we’re only getting it now. Maybe if this had of come earlier, then . . . wait, save that discussion for later.
My initial impression of the Attic was that it was a storage place for the bodies of people they’d wiped clean; people who still retained their instincts and motor functions but didn’t have a brain to coordinate them, and so just hung there in a form of semi-conscious suspended animation. To have it actually be a sort of evil Holodeck which keeps their brains full of adrenaline in order to power a sort of ’super-computer,’ or collectively be a super-computer, is taking the basic premise of The Matrix and amping it up a notch. How incredibly disappointing that that notch is going to be so short-lived.
Here we are in what appears to be the actual ‘post-cancellation’ episodes — when things get ramped up and shoved at us faster than originally intended; Victor’s contract was obviously never going to be finished before, and I’m sure that the Attic was being saved for much later on in the series’s run. But we’re getting it all now because what else could they do? The only question is how’s it going to turn out?
So far it seems pretty good; this episode was up and down in terms of what I thought was well done and unique and what was slightly silly — but it ended on a great and unexpected note so ultimately it was good and really builds up anticipation for episode 10 (which I get to watch just as soon as I finish writing this).
.Cbr Is the New .Mp3 — Comic Publishers Should Embrace It Or Beware
We’ve been hearing for years about the eventual dawning of the ‘digital age’ of publishing, where we’d all go paperless and everything would be eReaders and eBooks etc. I think it’s finally safe to say it’s happening, what with eInk technology and the Kindle and the Sony Reader. It’s probably going to take twenty or thirty years, maybe even longer, before everyone’s transitioned, but at least we’re underway now, though for me, it can’t come fast enough.
I’m in a ‘post-stuff’ phase; there’s not only the massive waste that paper publishing produces, but also just the sheer amount of objects that we’re forced to accumulate if we want to fully pursue our entertainment goals. I’ve got twelve boxes of books and comics back at home (not to mention DVDs); obviously I couldn’t bring them all with me when I came to Taipei, and so because of that I have to go without. But if everything was digitized, I’d have my entire library with me on my computer, completely portable. The advantages of this are obvious, and once people fully clue into it, they’ll see how this will utterly change the world.
One major area this shift will affect is comics. In fact, we’re already seeing this with the widespread proliferation of .cbr and .cbz files. And the comic industry would be wise to fully embrace this new format now lest they suffer in the same way the music industry did during the whole .mp3 revolution. They’ve made some steps, but for me, they aren’t moving fast enough.
Finally! I’ve been waiting and searching and waiting and searching for issue 27 for over a month, and today it actually showed up. Better late than never (which should also be the sub-title of this blog).
Anyway, here we go. Brian Lynch riffing on the BtVS: Season 2 episode Halloween (basic plot: imagine everyone at Comic-Con turning into their costumes). Sounds like fun, and it was. And much funny, in an esoteric, nerdy, pop-culture geeky sort of way. In fact, it was quite well-written and entertaining. But . . . it was also derivative, and not just in the sense that everyone turned into their costumes.
How many Angel/Spike identity-crisis/faced-with-yourself-in-the-mirror type stories do we need? I feel like this theme has done to death already in both the show and After the Fall, and it’s getting pretty stale. Can we please just have these two be comfortable with the fact that they’re both vampires with souls and champions etc. and that they actually do like and respect each other in a ‘bro-hug’ sort of way be done with it? Let’s move on.
And we will be, with what looks like a new, full-time writer, Bill Willingham, coming on board to take over the series. I know nothing about this guy but hopefully he’s a lot better than Kelly Armstrong was. And apparently Brian Lynch will be starting up a new Spike series so that’s something to look forward to as well.
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We’re really motoring now. Alpha’s back, everyone knows about Echo except Adele, Ballard ‘dies.’ This was a good episode, exciting and relevant and what the hell was it doing here? See, this should have come at the beginning of the season, like episode 2 or 3; I’ll explain why in more detail in the end-of-series post I’m planning to do. For now, I’ll just stick to this episode.
But you know what? I don’t actually have a lot to say. It was pretty straight-forward: Alpha wants to kill the guys Echo has ‘loved’ out of jealousy, and wants to find out why Echo ‘loves’ Ballard. He breaks into the Dollhouse. He uses remote implanting tech to make the Dolls go nuts. He uploads Ballard into his head and tries to get Echo to kill him, thereby killing Ballard, but she won’t. There aren’t any twists or turns, really, which is what usually accounts for goodness on this show, but it’s such a strong story within the mythology that it just naturally works out really well. And actually showing a guy getting blown up? Brutal.
My only quibble would be bringing Patton Oswald back for no other purpose than to bring him back — that was pretty pointless (unless you like the tiny misdirection they used him for, but I didn’t see it as being that necessary).
And it’s a little annoying how Echo and Alpha keep having these mammoth confrontations, after which Alpha always just dazedly wanders off (this is the second time). I know the writers can’t do any closure yet, but you’d think they could up with a better way of making him disappear. So that’s actually two quibbles then. No more quibbles.
“This must be what old people feel like . . . and Blockbuster.” More classic. There could be a whole book of Topher quotes. Sorry, should be.
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Thank God (not literally — just the vernacular). I was worried the rest of the season was going to be Echo wandering around in her ‘Doll-esque’ state, living and learning and growing blah blah; and who knows, without the cancellation, maybe that is what it was going to be, although I think this one was filmed before the axe fell, which shows the creative team was smart enough to know that would have been really slow. But still, it shows the baffling, paradoxical nature of this show — how it does some things so wrong and some things so right.
Looking at it now, the whole Senator Perrin thing was absolutely pointless and useless, not to mention boring; turns out it had nothing to do with the real meat of this season, which is we start to only get now in Meet Jane Doe. This is the same problem that plagued the first season too, but I think I’ll do a full dissection later, once the whole series has wrapped — right now I’ll focus on where we are . . . now.
