(no subject)

Today was a good day to stay in. Pity I didn't. Well, I didn't go far, anyway - just over to the bookstore to have a browse with my coffee. Brrrr. Nice and toasty in here now, though.

chase820 had this up on her LJ, and I wanted to share:



It sounds like it's going to be good. Stephen Fry was just cast as the voice of the Guide. I'm looking forward to this, which is odd for me - I don't go to the theatre all that often. I think the last time I went was to see "Shaun Of The Dead" with Scott. (I really ought to give him a call - he never returned my Christmas greeting voicemail, and his gift is still sitting on my bookcase.)

So far, from my new Twilight Zone box set, I've watched:

1. Shatterday - as good as I remembered it. Bruce Willis used to be able to actually act. According to Harlan Ellison's commentary, he's a New York-trained Method actor. I guess there's not a lot of Method required in the Die Hard films...


2. A Little Peace And Quiet - also as good as I remembered it. This ep suffered a little because of the lack of high-tech filming techniques - I could tell that the "frozen" actors were merely trying to stay as still as they could. The final shot of the nuclear missile also looked kind of hokey by today's special effects standards. But it's still a good ep, and I still wish I could find myself one of those sundial amulets. :)


3. Wordplay - as someone who used to do a fair bit of acting in Trek parodies as O'Brien and heard "how do you memorize all that technobabble?" a lot, this one was fun. It's kind of like DS9's "Babel", in that the people around the main character (Robert Klein) start speaking in what he thinks is gibberish as words shift meaning. At one point he asks his wife why she keeps saying "dinosaur" instead of "lunch", and what does "lunch" mean to her. She replies, "Lunch - it's a colour. Kind of a light red." :)


4. Dreams For Sale - this one suffered by being crammed into ten minutes. It really should have been made as a longer segment.


5. Chameleon - an interesting tale of a shapeshifting alien hitching a ride back to Earth on the space shuttle Challenger, it could also have used an extra ten minutes. Or maybe just a story editor who would have cut out one or two of the unnecessary shifts by the alien. I found it telling that one of the shapes the alien assumed was a nuclear device when it tried to fool the NASA scientist (Terry O'Quinn) into releasing it from the quarantine room. Out of the first five episodes, fear of nuclear destruction figured in two of them. I don't remember the fear of a nuclear war being all that big in 1985; the Soviet Union still existed, but it was pretty well accepted that war wasn't going to break out. At least, that's how I remember it.

More tomorrow...

( Memeage )

I wanted to run the statistical analysis to show who comments on my LJ the most, but I can't seem to get it to work. I keep getting an error message that the page can only be viewed from POST, whatever that means.

Bad Unicode... WTF???

I had just written a long entry, and it got wiped out because of a "bad unicode" error, whatever that is. FUCK! I'll try to remember as much as I can...

I managed to get that LJ stats meme to work, finally:

( Who Comments On Boywhocantsayno's LJ? )

I think I must have laughed out loud at least ten times, once uncontrollably, at tonight's Boston Legal. There's something that's just outrageous about the way James Spader says the word "lesbian", and the scenes where he gets everyone in the office to say the word with him to try to embarrass Brad (Mark Valley, the least expressive leading man since Stephen Collins) was hysterical.

The bit that had me laughing uncontrollably, however, was this scene in the men's room (what is it with David E. Kelley and scenes in bathrooms?), in which Alan Shore (Spader) comes out of the stall to find Shirley Schmidt (Candice Bergen) standing there waiting for him:

Shore: You're in the men's room again.
Schmidt: I need to talk to you.
Shore: Your stall, or mine?
(Enter Denny Crane (William Shatner).)
Crane: What's she doing in here? If she tries to pee standing up, let me know. (Enters stall, locks door.) Lock and load.

Betty White has been appearing as Catherine Piper, Alan's new secretary, a woman who was Alan's neighbour when he was a child and on whose doorstep he once left a flaming bag of dog manure, about which she's been bitter ever since.

Schmidt: Why are you snuggling up to me?
Catherine: You're the boss, dear. I'm sucking up. I'd think you'd like it - you don't look quite so old when you're standing next to me.
Schmidt: I have no idea who you are, but I like you.

The closing scene between Spader and Shatner was touching... and ended with Shatner delivering a great zinger:

Crane: You Democrats.
Shore: You Republicans.
Crane: Does Shirley know I won?
Shore: I told her myself.
Crane: What'd she say?
Shore: She wants to have your children.
Crane: Damn right.

You know, I used to watch "The Practice" every week, but compared to "Boston Legal", I can see why people were wondering if David E. Kelley had lost it... needless to say, he hasn't. He just needs to find a balance between serious legal drama and farce.

Oh, and Rene Auberjonois has finally been added to the opening credits. :)

It seems "Numb3rs" is being repeated Friday night on CH, so I should be able to watch both shows (if I remember). Fortunately it's not on opposite Enterprise - that would be really annoying, for it to be aired opposite both shows that I watch religiously. (There are actually three, but QAF is still on hiatus.)

On to other things... I'm not sure if something's wrong with my eyes, or my TV. For some reason the image seems to be redder than it should be, and my computer monitor seems brighter than normal. It could also be that the halogen bulb in my living room lamp is dying, as they tend to fade rather than just blowing out like normal lightbulbs, so the light gets yellower with time. I don't know if that could affect my vision, but I suppose it's possible, since I didn't notice anything wrong with my vision until after the sun went down.

Watched three more Twilight Zone segments this evening, too: "Healer", "Children's Zoo" and "Kentucky Rye". The first was fairly ho-hum SF drama, without the usual twist that makes TZ so different. "Children's Zoo" followed the usual formula, though the twist became apparent far too early, I felt:

( Spoiler )

I also thought the episode suffered because the little girl didn't have a single line of dialogue.

"Kentucky Rye" hearkened back to the 60s TZ in that the main character has committed an act without fully realizing what it is he's done, but receives his comeuppance in a typical TZ twist:

( Spoiler )

I had to rewind this ep at the end to make sure I wasn't seeing things, but no, that really was a very young Tim Russ as a cop. According to IMDb, it was his first professional credit.

More TZ tomorrow, I think. I'm glad I was able to get my hands on the set, after all that trouble I went to. :)