Good News and...Bad News?

My blogging hiatus is almost over, I think. At the very least, I should be able to put up a couple posts a week. That's the good news. The..bad news? No, the other news is I'll be pulling up stakes here and moving this operation over to Tumblr. Mainly, they have some features I like plus Blogger has been down the last two times I tried to log into it and Tumblr hasn't. The new address is http://michaelclear.tumblr.com or, if that's too much to remember, try http://www.michaelclear.com. I'm still working on some other projects so I guarantee nothing when it comes to supplying free entertainment. Fortunately for you, I rather enjoy doing it. See you there.

Nothing To Braga About

Who has two thumbs, some blog space and predicted a science fiction show created by former Star Trek writer Brannon Braga would suck? This guy did, that's who. One thing I can say about Terra Nova is that it actually exceeded my expectations. Yes, it was actually worse than I thought it would be. Somehow, Braga and his crew managed to fail on every level. It was so bad that it actually drew me out of my blogging hiatus. I was going to do a review but no, it deserves a full on Liveblog. Normally, I only do these if I haven't already seen it but the hell with that. Please enjoy my epic takedown of Terra Nova, the new Fox show that can only be ironically described as science fiction.

0:00:30 --  Yes, you're reading the time correctly. Only 30 seconds went by before I felt compelled to comment. The show opens on the Moon or, rather, on a cheesy looking CGI representation of the Moon. Narrative text starts running to explain the state of the world. This is a violation of the famous "Show, don't tell" rule of storytelling and I always consider this or a narrator to be the last refuge of incompetent screenwriters. The beauty of this, though, is that this is only one way in which I was annoyed by the opening. Another is that it's white text on a light background, something you would normally only see on old Geocities pages in 1999. The third is this:

The story is set in the year 2149 WHICH IS NOT THE "DAWN" OF THE FUCKING CENTURY, IT'S THE HALFWAY POINT. Oh, there was a fourth way I was annoyed. I'm watching this on Hulu and the streaming video froze up on me 10 seconds in which meant I had to hit the REFRESH button and watch a damn Geico commercial before it would start for me again. This is going to be fun fun fun.

0:17:38 -- Commercial break. Time to pee, grab some chips and write snarky comments. The basic, stupid premise of Terra Nova is that, in the year 2149, Earth is now an environmental hellhole with an atmosphere so polluted that you never fully see the Sun  and need to wear a filter whenever you go outside. Another reason you pretty much want to avoid the "dawn" of the 22nd century is that there is also an overpopulation problem so severe that America has adopted Chinese style limits of two children per family and has pretty much done away with civil liberties in order to enforce this law. The question for me is: how the hell do you have both a poisonous atmosphere AND a population problem? The first thing should pretty much take care of the second. To top this off, the solution to society's problems is Terra Nova, a colony set up 85 million years in the past that you get to by going through a one way fissure in the time/space continuum. So, they can't clean up pollution, something well within the realm of technological possibility, but they CAN travel through time, something that is, for all practical purposes, impossible. Anyway, let's meet the Shannon family. Dad Jim comes home to wife Elisabeth, teenage kids Josh and Maddy and adorable toddler Zoe. Suddenly, their home is visited by ruthless agents from population control. As I mentioned, you can only have two kids and Zoe makes three. Jim handles this the right way, by blindly lashing out at three armed men. He spends two years in prison for this before Elisabeth tells him she and the two older kids have been approved to settle in Terra Nova. They have to leave Zoe behind because, after all, society certainly wouldn't want you to take away the illegal kid it didn't want you to have in the first place. Elisabeth slips Jim a laser past the ever-so-smart prison guards and he breaks out of prison so he can join his family. The prison officials did think to implant a GPS device on him in case he escaped and they naturally figured the best place to put this would be just under the skin of an easy-to-reach spot on his arm so he could effortlessly cut it out and leave it behind. He manages to sneak past dozens of armed guards to meet up with his family at the time portal but the crack security there finally realizes they're supposed to keep out intruders and pull him out of line. Elisabeth assures the kids they can go ahead through the portal because, "Your father will find a way, he always does." This is the guy who decided to pointlessly start a fight with law enforcement so his plan is something along the lines of yelling "RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY" while entering the portal. The guards seem perplexed that he ignored their commands to stop so they could separate him from his family forever but it's too late. He's now in Terra Nova and they even had Zoe in a backpack so it's a happy ending except that this is not the end. Damn it.

Not at all ripped off from Blade Runner and I don't know why you would think that a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies.

0:30:12 -- Another commercial. This one is something about how malaria is bad so keep that in mind. The Shannons, along with  the rest of the new colonists, are being escorted single file from the entry point to the fenced in settlement of Terra Nova. Why aren't they being transported in armored vehicles to keep them safe from the carnosaurs (large T-Rex type carnivores) that are running around? Shut up, that's why. Jim and Elisabeth are taken to Commander Nathaniel Taylor who is played by Stephen Lang, the same guy who played the evil Colonel in Avatar, fitting since Avatar is one of the movies that this show is ripping off. Even though Jim has just broken a fresh set of laws, he seems surprised that the gruff, non nonsense Taylor won't let him join the compound's security detail (he was a cop before he went to prison though, considering his behavior and temperament, he must have been one of those "let's pepper spray the peaceful protesters" type of cops). Taylor puts him on the agricultural detail and they're escorted to their new luxury Terra Nova condo. The Shannon son, Josh, shows that pretty much the only thing he brought with him from 2149 was teenage moodiness as he lays into his father for being in prison because he selfishly tried to protect his family. They are literally in their new place for 2 minutes before losing track of Zoe who, it turns out, has gone out to play with the dinosaurs. Parenting tip: if you should ever see your child playing with wild animals, even if they're not dinosaurs the size of buildings, freak the hell out and get them to safety. Don't stare in fascination and start playing with them yourself. Yes, they were brachiosaurs (I think) and thus herbivores but they were also large, incredibly strong and rendered the protective fence useless by sticking their long necks over it.

Really?

 

1:02:00-- I've skipped the last few commercials so, to sum up, Snickers are yummy, rainforests are good and you should be driving a Kia. All caught up? Cool. If you follow me on Twitter or read my Tumblr page, you know that I've said before that the heart of Terra Nova's problems is a staggering lack of imagination. People were paid millions to create something that the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction wouldn't have paid a nickel a word for. It's supposed to be 2149 yet technology has barely advanced. There are no robots or advanced machinery to assist with the back breaking labor required to maintain what is basically a frontier colony. The computer technology of 2149 is pretty much what it is today except that the tablet computers are now see-through and, well, that's it for iPad advancement in the next 140 years. I guess Apple should have tried harder to hold on to Steve Jobs. The vehicles are basically Jeeps and they still don't fly which means we have to still hear those damn "Why no flying cars?" jokes between now and 2149. There are weapons that exist today you could mount onto a Jeep that could take down a carnosaur in one shot but, for some reason, they stopped making those in the future so that they're pretty much defenseless when carnosaurs attack their vehicles. Oh, one of them did trip once, so that's something, I guess. Clothing and hairstyles are the same. I can understand not wanting to go too far with those as anything too radical becomes a distraction but they are EXACTLY the same. Science fiction is a challenge because creating a future world that is believable and entertaining to modern audiences and the makers of Terra Nova are not up to the challenge. It doesn't help that they have apparently picked the stupidest people to populate this colony. Son Josh takes a break from being belligerent to his dad to follow a group of his fellow teenagers on a trip outside the gate to see the moonshine still they have set up. Even though the rest of the group has been there for quite some time, they see no reason to bring along any weapons in case they met, say, a 20 foot carnivore. A pretty girl named Skye manages to convince Josh to cliff dive with her, mainly by stripping down to her bikini and saying, "Follow me." This is the most believable thing in the whole show. Meanwhile, a thief trying to steal power is captured while another man tries to assassinate Taylor. Jim foils that and gains enough of Taylor's trust to be appointed to a job in security. We discover that these people are called Sixers, a breakaway group who seem to have their own agenda. Some other Sixers, including Mira, their leader, simply drive right into Terra Nova without getting shot even though one of their comrades tried to kill the Commander. I wonder if al Qaeda ever tried just driving into Guantanamo to retrieve their people. It may be worth a shot.

Terra Nova, filmed entirely inside some guy's Macintosh.

1:26:00 --On their way out of Terra Nova, the Sixers find the vehicle the kids used to drive to their still and stop to strip its power cells but they get attacked by an unseen foe and one of them dies. In a turn of events no one could possibly have foreseen, we find out that traipsing around unarmed in a prehistoric jungle loaded with dangerous and powerful animals is a really bad idea as the kids get attacked by slashers (basically, velociraptors with barbed tails). They take refuge in one of the vehicles which turns out to be woefully inadequate as shelter from dinosaurs, something I think I mentioned earlier but hey, what the hell do I know, right? Things look bleak until Jim, Taylor and a team of soldiers show up and scare off the slashers. Josh decides that his dad saving him was grounds for taking a break from being a dick and they head back to Terra Nova for a big, squishy reunion with Mom. Meanwhile, having learned nothing from the fact that one of their comrades was just killed by slashers, Mira and another Sixer go back to stare at some geographic drawings the kids found earlier. Mira says they were drawn by Taylor's son who went missing years earlier and that they represent the true purpose of Terra Nova, that, "He who controls the past, controls the future," which makes no sense since it was established early on in one of the show's few nods to scientific thought that this is a timeline separate from the one they came from. This means they can't do anything that would change their own past and can't change the time from which they came in any way. Was I the only one listening to that? Oh well, the hell with it. At least there was no human/lizard hybrid sex like some other shows I could mention so I'll consider that progress.

On the bright side, he'll be the first human in history to die because he was a reckless dumbass who didn't think to stay out of a dinosaur filled jungle.

Still Busy

I'll probably be off for another week. My spare time is being eaten up by work, other writing projects and wanting to take advantage of the Summer. It's times like this I'm happy I don't have loads of regular readers to lose.

Gross Encounters

I missed this movie last November when it came out. I was all set to see it then heard it sucked, calculated the odds of whether I would agree with the reviews and skipped it. Rotten Tomatoes rates is at 16% positive among critics but what do those elitists know? After all, the audience rated it at 19% so I'm sure I'll have too much fun as I do another Liveblog for the science fiction masterpiece Skyline.

0:10:00 -- We're off to a rousing, imaginative start as the movie opens with title card sequences that basically look like someone sneezed on the camera. I see this was directed by Colin and Greg Strause, the guys who gave us Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem. If you've never seen it, it is the worst movie ever in the history of anything. I'm talking "should be encased in cement and dropped to the bottom of the Merianas Trench where it can never hurt anyone again" level of bad. Showgirls and Transformers wish they are as bad as AVP:R. I'm sure the Strause family has learned from the mistakes made in that debacle and are now ready to entertain us with some science fiction that is as thrilling as it is thought provoking. Where were we? Oh, yeah, everything looks like someone sneezed on the camera. We then see the city of Los Angeles, also known as the Big Apple or...something. Actually, it's known as the go-to first stop in any decent alien invasion and the aliens in this movie are no exception as lights drop from the sky. This wakes up two characters named Jarrod and Elaine played by two actors who are sort of/kind of vaguely recognizable television actors named Eric Balfour and Scottie Thompson. I know their names because IMDB exists as they are in shows I don't watch. The producers have obviously bought into the myth that movie stars no longer matter and you can see by the movie's stellar $21 million domestic gross how well that idea worked out. Jarrod looks out at the lights and turns all white eyed and veiny but, suddenly, he and Elaine are on a plane and it says "15 hours earlier". I'm not sure what will happen in the next 15 hours that will top "alien invasion" but I trust the Family Strause completely to keep me entertained. They are in L.A. to visit Jarrod's old pal Terry played by another television guy. At least I know this is Donald Faison (Turk from Scrubs). Terry has made it in the music business and I guess he and Jarrod used to be in a band or something but I can't believe any of this will matter once the aliens land so let's move on.

"Who are we? I can't quite place us," they're thinking.

0:30:00 -- Terry wants Jarrod to quit his crap job, whatever the hell it is, and work for him in Los Angeles. From the way he describes his life, Jarrod and Elaine aren't living too far above the poverty line and it turns out they have a baby on the way so, naturally, they're resistant to the idea of moving from whatever shithole, rock-eater infested town they live in to L.A. where they would lead exciting lives on an exorbitant salary. None of this matters, though, because we have reached the 15 hour mark and once again lights are falling from the sky turning people who look at them into white eyed and vein covered zombies who walk into them and disappear. Jarrod and Terry decide to leave the womenfolk behind and go to the roof to investigate. Jarrod brings a camera and Terry brings a gun so decide who you want at your side during the Apocalypse. Jarrod fails to keep the door to the roof open and it locks behind them but, luckily, he brought the camera which is of no use whatsoever in this situation. The gun, however, comes in handy when more lights fall from the sky and we see that they're dropping from alien spaceships. Terry manages to shoot the lock off the door which is great because pregnant Elaine was right on the other side of it but she's fine. Well, except for when she looks into the light and goes all zombie on them.

This and the other picture show Eric Balfour's single, all purpose expression. He has it down though.

0:50:00 -- There's no television or radio and news websites haven't been updated for hours so I must reluctantly applaud the efficiency and competence of the alien invaders. They want people for something or other as they are slurping boatloads of them into their ships but I'm sure they just want to bring us all back to a planet called Happy Funtime Place. Terry has the genius idea that they will be safe on his boat and Jarrod agrees. The women think that's stupid but they have lady parts and icky menstrual cycles so Jarrod and Terry wisely ignore them. Candice (Brittany Daniel), Terry's bitch girlfriend (she gets away with that by looking like this), insists on riding in a separate car because she just found out Terry has been nailing her pretty assistant so Terry and the assistant drive out together and, in an event no one could have foreseen, immediately get attacked by some giant alien robot thing. Terry gets out of the car and back to Jarrod but he gets snatched by an alien tentacle. If only Jarrod had thought to bring his camera, he may have saved Terry but he didn't so Terry got sucked into what looks like a big alien vagina. In fact, all the alien vehicles have a "giant vagina" theme going so I'm guessing the Strause brothers didn't date much during high school. They are saved by Oliver, the building manager (David Zayas, and again, I must thank IMDB for giving me his name though I could have probably just said he plays the detective sergeant in Dexter). They go back to Terry's penthouse none the worse for where save for the fact that two of their friends are now dead.

This should work. Be sure to throw the gun itself when you run out of ammo.

1:12:00 -- For the last 20 minutes, our four survivors have spent the bulk of their time sitting around Terry's luxury apartment and looking bored over the fact that the world was ending. If the goal of the filmmakers was to get me to feel was the characters are feeling, congratulations, you did it. There was a scene where the military nuked one of the ships but it turns out that the aliens were only MOSTLY dead. Meanwhile, Jarrod has this spider web looking pattern growing all over his chest and even manifests super strength when Oliver tries to foil yet another of his genius plans to leave the relative safety of the apartment building and try to gain the attention of some Army snipers stationed on the roof next door. Meanwhile, Candice starts doing the white eyed zombie thing and steps out onto the balcony to be slurped by a pissed off looking alien vagina. Jarrod and Elaine did manage to get the Army guys to call for a rescue chopper but SURPRISE the aliens are knocking it out of the sky. At this point, I'm wondering what sort of lame ass weakness the invaders will turn out to have. Like, maybe they're allergic to zinc so we start throwing bottles of zinc supplements at them. Or maybe Jarrod will be running along, trip over their world wide master control center and hit the OFF switch. The good news is the movie only has 20 minutes left to go so I won't have to wait long.

Blowed it up real good.

1:33:00 -- OK, I was wrong. No zinc allergies. Earth was conquered and everyone died. It turned out the reason they wanted us was to rip the brains out of our heads, inject them with some sort of glowy shit and eat them. Now, Jarrod never struck me as any sort of an Einstein what with just having the one expression which could be described as "always looking like he has to fart" but he was apparently such a brainiac that he took over the alien who ate his brain. He then rescued Elaine and defended her from the alien hordes and, we assume, sent them packing and made the world safe for white, wealthy Christian Americans once again. IMDB tells me there will be a Skyline 2 next year. yay. Will the Krausi learn from their mistakes? Sadly, I fear the place you will find out will be another Liveblog.

Jarrod is finding out that, at some point, every man is brought down by vaginas.

Fuck Yeah!

That's the title I wasn't allowed to use over at Examiner.com. I half expected them to censor the one I did use but, so far, no one has even noticed it's a reference to the F-word.

A Good Man Goes To War

I loved the new Harry Potter film. Find out how much at Examiner.com.

You're Not The Boss Of Me

It's always surprising when a so called "comedy" like Horrible Bosses actually turns out to be funny. Still, I wish it had been about farting penguins but those can't be in every movie.