[TV] Lost: Season 2

When a show really hits it big on its debut season, you can imagine all the pressure that goes along with the production of the second season. How do you follow-up a smash TV hit? We see movies fall into the same trap over and over again and naturally TV productions aren't immune from this kind of a scenario either.

Given how shaky I was when I first started watching Lost, it was very important for the second season of the show to somehow make more sense and do a better job of hooking me. The first season was relatively able to attract my interest but I wasn't quite sold on the show just yet.

So let's just say that the first time I tried my luck with the second season of Lost, I gave up on the show. A few years later and with a lot of prodding by my partner, I finally gave in and decided to give Lost another chance.

[Books] Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I was never really into the whole zombie pop culture thing. I have nothing against zombies - I just don't necessarily feel a particular interest towards the movies and computer games related to them. Maybe I think they're creepier than they should be. Perhaps I just hate how slow they are as units in games like Heroes of Might and Magic II.

Yeah, I don't think I'll ever get myself out of that particular installment of the series. So sue me.

Anyway, we were talking about zombies. There's certainly an inherent element of morbid fun to the zombie genre when you get down to it and more creative artists have managed to have some real fun with the concept, especially with comedy movies like Fido and of course Shaun of the Dead. But that's movies and zombies have lived in Hollywood for some time now. It's also nice to see the zombie culture trying to break into books in highly creative ways.

[Movies] The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

It's one thing to think of the sadness of certain actors and actresses no longer being amongst the living and watching their movies still. Sure, we miss them and we feel bad about them never making another movie, but as long as they had full lives or rich careers, the pain isn't as bad.

But there are those special cases of actors who died in what many people perceive to be a time that is "too soon", like for young actors with significant promise. One such passing that strikes a chord in a lot of people's minds is the death of the highly-talented Heath Ledger. His career was a short yet interesting one with many unique twists and turns and truly stellar moments. He was definitely going big places with his performance in The Dark Knight but of course things ended much too soon.

And so it became even more difficult to watch his last work, the movie that he died making. This is that movie.

[Movies] Time Bandits (1981)

The mind of Terry Gilliam is probably a very scary place to be. From his popular beginnings as a member of Monty Python to his very diverse variety of movies, his creativity certainly takes him to very strange places. It seems like across this films, he's almost struggling to try and get things out of his head and onto the page or the screen. The results are mixed and not necessarily easy to get into, but then there's no questioning that there's a lot more to his creative vision than most realize.

There seem to be recurring themes across many of his movies beyond the often dark tone or feel to things. Some things that come to mind is his love of explosions, naturally the need for humor and other things like cannon balls, sets made to appear like a stage or the French. This is just my opinion mind you and perhaps you might feel that my observations are totally off the mark.

Regardless, a Terry Gilliam movie is something to be enjoyed with a very open mind or perhaps even certainly hallucinogenic drugs. Regardless of how hard such movies are to understand at times, you can expect an entertaining ride.

[TV] Lost: Season 1

It's practically unavoidable that we judge things based on other people who like them or talk about them in such high regard, especially with TV and movies. While intellectually we know the merits of a show or film should stand on their own but naturally we also weigh in with the power of opinion and the kind of people who share a passion for said show.

You get what I mean, right?

As much as I try to keep an open mind about things, I'm sure that I also fall into the trap of not liking something because the person who introduced it to me is someone I don't entirely like or when I know a person I don't think highly of also likes it. It's a bad behavior when you get down to it and it's something well all need to get past.

I may have judged this particular show prematurely based on similar grounds.

[Books] God Emperor of Dune

In my continuing series of reviews of my moved favorite series of all time, we're at the halfway mark when things get a little weird and some fans found themselves to continue easily if at all. There are many different opinions of the last three Dune books written by Frank Herbert himself with a larger part of the differences in opinion centering around this one book.

The first three books remained pretty much centered around the core family unit of Paul Muab'Dib. Children of Dune pretty much settled that and marked a shift in the story to the new generation of Atreides.

What a lot of people weren't expecting was that this next generation would last for thousands of years and we'd find ourselves in the far, far future with a radically different Atreides bloodline to follow around.

[Movies] Daybreakers (2009)

The vampire movie concept has been getting really stretched thin in recent years with the increasing number of strange movie plot twists studios try to come up with. We've seen vampires that can live in the day or vampires that even sparkle in the day. We've seen vampires that can shapeshift into various animals and we've seen vampires that need to use guns to fight. There are vampires that have been warring with werewolves for centuries and there are vampires with Southern accents who like to sleep around.

Just when you think you've seen all possible vampire variants and mutations, Hollywood manages to come up with something new again, but new isn't always good.

It's interesting to note that we seem to go into cycles of horror / thriller movies. There are the vampire years and there are the zombie years. I wonder if this movie heralds the start another another vampire period or maybe I'm completely wrong and Candyman is going to make a mega comeback soon. You can never really tell where Hollywood is going to go.

[Movies] Blood: The Last Vampire (2009)

With all the adaptations popping up everywhere, there are various camps forming in terms of how to evaluate such films. Naturally there are a lot of folks who feel that the adaptation should be as close to the original as possible, thus making a faithful remake or perhaps just making sure one remains true to the original story. Then of course there are others who want the adaptation to take the older story into a newer, more dynamic direction.

Naturally the two schools of thought don't quite get along all the time.

In time I think many learn what I've come to realize in recent years - it's not about accuracy or radical creativity. At the end of the day, it's really about how the director brings all the elements together. Whether the goal is to be faithful to the original or to be radically different doesn't guarantee it'll be a good movie. It's something else entirely.

[TV] Alice (2009)

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland remains to be one of the most quoted / referenced / adopted stories in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, in my opinion. Let's face it - Carroll was a mad genius who wrote one of the craziest and yet most brilliant stories ever told and writers can't help but seek some degree of inspiration from the tale at least once in their lives. This is especially true for all those who really get into fantasy given how diverse and compelling his characters and concepts were.

There have been many actual adaptations of this story ranging from the clean and sparkly Disney cartoon to the grim and gory American McGee's Alice which had her running around Wonderland with a wicked looking knife. To attempt an Alice story of your own is to risk the audience having very particular expectations of how the characters behave and how the story should go, even for a land as mad as Wonderland.

SyFy decided to support its own bid for a unique twisting of the Alice tale with very mixed results.

[Google] Giving China The Finger

Image via Wikipedia

Google's policy of supporting the Chinese government's ultra-strict internet censorship policy has been a long-standing pain for human rights advocates and free speech defenders around the world. For a company with an informal motto of "Don't be evil", its continued support of Chinese policy has always been seen as an inconsistency in their actions and their supposed support of internet liberty and freedom of information.

So finally they're doing something about it.

In an official blog post, Google announced a sudden shift in Google policy in terms of how it intends to operate its Google.cn domain. Whereas before they fully supported China's censorship rules on Google.cn while keeping Google.com uncensored, they have now decided that they will no longer censor its Google.cn result. They intend to consult with the Chinese government regarding how they can continue to operate within Chinese law without censoring its results at the risk of being forced to shut down Google.cn and perhaps its entire Chinese operations in general.

The reason for this appears to be a series of attacks on the Google network recently targeting the Gmail accounts of several known human rights activists in China. While Google claims that the hacking attempt generally failed in the sense that no sensitive information was acquired in the attack, they still feel it was some sort of an affront on their continued operations in China and a sign of the prevailing political culture that won't allow for freedom of speech in any regard.

It took you long enough, Google. Seriously.

But still, better late than never and the Geeky Guide for one fully supports this long overdue shift in Google policy. Take that Chinese censors! And a double dumb ass on you!

[Books] Children of Dune

Each book in the Dune series could have been many books given their length. Heck, the main book really was supposed to be several books but they opted to put them together as one. It's not just about length either - it's also about the complexity of the story lines and how much gets resolved within each title.

So it becomes even harder to try and compartmentalize the books into segments that people are most used to like duologies or trilogies or whatever. There's just so much ground that gets covered within Frank Herbert's pages that quite literally entire generations of time pass. But still, the forms must be obeyed.

Traditionally this title is known as the climax of the "original" trilogy and it does present an interesting "end" to things. And yet it's also a very grand beginning.

[Movies] Sherlock Holmes (2009)

When you think of Sherlock Holmes, an image is bound to appear in your head of a tall lanky man with a pipe accompanied by a somewhat rounder, shorter fellow with a thick mustache. You know what I mean right - can you see it in your mind now? Yes, that's the classic Sherlock Holmes concept we've been indoctrinated with ever since we were young whether this be in the form of illustrations in books or depictions in cartoons and TV movies.

It's both refreshing and risky to try and change the image of such cultural icons, especially for the shallow purposes of a Hollywood movie, and yet it happens time and time again. Results are quite mixed and one can only hope to get something really good out of it. This doesn't mean all is lost given the circumstances - there are some novel re-imaginings and re-interpretations of classic stories that have been rather entertaining, to say the least.

At first I wasn't looking forward to this movie and was quite skeptical about it being any good. It was quite nice to be surprised and proven rather wrong.

[Philippines] The Value of the MMFF?

Normally Mondays are reserved for reviews of new movies, but the MMFF is still on-going, so I don't have anything for you.

I admit that I'm really not big on local movies. Call me a bastard or whatever, but I've yet to really encounter a Filipino movie that really got me excited to watch it. Our stories tend to be highly predictable or seem to be following a classic story template that has been re-hashed with different actors over and over again. Our comedy is slapstick. Our dramas involve over-acting and over-used plot twists. The list goes on and on.

Then we come to the curse of the local film industry - the Metro Manila Film Festival. While during its conception it was meant to be a showcase of the creativity of local filmmakers, something that we hoped could one day be compared to the likes of Sundance or Cannes, but instead it feels more like a blight upon the local movie world. The "problem" is that only MMFF movies are showing during these few weeks starting on Christmas day and thus we end up getting delayed releases for popular foreign movies that debut around Christmas, plus we have no other recourse but to watch local movies.

Many would chastise me for saying something like this and would argue that I should do more to support local movies, but frankly what is there for us to support anymore?