Tag: TV

The Quest For Monday! Introduction

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Lest you think I’ve never had a silly blog idea before the time I thought “You know, I need a much broader platform to address my ongoing concerns about Highlander,” permit me to introduce my long-abandoned Tumblr project: The Benton Quest Field Guide to the world of Jonny Quest. Do Tumblr and WordPress cross-post well? I imagine not! But let’s not let that stop us. From here on out the posts will be new, but this first one is from 2011.

Well, I did say abandoned, didn’t I?

 

INTRODUCTION: THE BENTON QUEST FIELD GUIDE

I recently got the opportunity to rewatch the original Jonny Quest cartoon series, with…interesting results.

As a child, I freely envied Jonny: his father was a marine biologist [more or less], and he got to travel the world with his best friend, his dog, and an ex-Special Ops guy as a babysitter. (In contrast, my father was a CPA, my dog and friends thoroughly uninterested in adventure, and while Mom really liked Chuck Norris movies, that does not a Navy SEAL make.) I was a big fan of nature magazines at the time, and the exotic locales and carefully rendered animals* captured my imagination completely.

It would be unfair to say that the show hasn’t withstood the test of time: more accurately, when confronted by the test of time, Race Bannon wrestled it to the ground while the rest of the show skipped gleefully toward Weirdsville. My goal is to watch the DVDs in order and chronicle, as best I can, the important tips and wisdom of the peripatetic Dr. Benton Quest (and his associates—please don’t hurt me, Mr. Bannon).

As for the opening credits above, what more clearly says “scientist” like furtively glancing around while you’re being piloted in an untenably huge jet? Dr. Quest should probably also concern himself with his son’s amazing disappearing chin.

*With one exception, which will be discussed later. I suspect it’s a hitherto-unremarked species!

You can also find this at The Benton Quest Field Guide!

 

Found-Again Friday: Bram Stoker’s Dracula—The Coppola Film

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Why Found-Again? When I said a few weeks ago I was adding the 2013 Dracula TV series to my Netflix queue, I didn’t wait around. (Capsule review: it’s not perfect, but I never in my life thought I’d sincerely utter the words “I want a Renfield,” either. Wow. Mad Science! Steampunk! Impalers and Van Helsings colluding together! Mass hysteria!)

That said, the show seems to owe a great debt to the 1992 film adaptation, especially in the turning of subtext into opulent text.

The Premise: You’re kidding, right? No? Okay: Slightly dim but decent Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves, hitting the first part of that description rather hard) unwittingly brokers one hell of a real estate deal when he sells an English abbey to Count Dracula (Gary Oldman), who in no time goes from elderly nobleman to hot young technophile thanks to the fine English climate and a constant supply of human blood. Sadly for Dracula but fortunately for Britain, he is eventually thwarted by Professor Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins)—though not before the Count and Mrs. Harker (Winona Ryder) have fallen in love.

If you enjoy the kind of excess this adaptation revels in, it’s quite good. That sounds pejorative, I suppose, but I don’t mean it that way: as a viewer of Dracula movies, there are times when I like to watch a rich, Victorian-Decadent riff on the legend of Vlad Tepes and Stoker’s book, and there are times when I’d just like to see a guy in a cape who owns a spooky castle. (There are also times I’d just like to see George Hamilton and Arte Johnson spoofing the whole enterprise, for that matter; I’m kind of omni-Dracula that way.) The beautiful visuals in Coppola’s film mitigate its cheese factor—the old Count’s double-bun hairdo, slutty Lucy, Van Helsing chewing more scenery than his nemesis ever did necks—and so does its all-star cast.

The Verdict: I was a purist teenager when I saw this in the theater, but I think the Dracula story may be one I’ve grown less cynical about as time goes by. As I said, it’s not always my cup of tea when I need a Count fix, but it’s a very worthy entry among its peers. And Tom Waits as Renfield is not to be missed.

Might go well with: Steak; wine; the Frank Langella Dracula movie from the ’70s. Oh, and garlic bread!

 

 

Next time: Mondays are going to be no less weird on this site. They might be a little less pretty, though.

 

There Can (Still!) Be Only Monday! Talking About Highlander…A Lot, Part 41

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Last time: Duncan MacLeod made new friends…at about a tenth of the rate at which he makes enemies. But one of them is Dawson, so how bad can it be?

41. A Methos to the madness.

This will probably be a short one, since I talked about the series formula last week and a few of the overarching conflicts (the research monkey in me notes with regret that every time there is an erudite secret society calling themselves The Watchers, large numbers of them turn out to be evil. Where are my people?).

While still keeping the formula alive, the show in its later seasons suffers from the same problems afflicting a lot of supernatural-inflected television series, with new rules and new evil creatures popping up everywhere as the stakes are constantly raised. (Spoiler alert! There’s even a plot arc in which, thanks to the machinations of a demon, Richie Ryan is finally sent to the Great Scrappy-Doo Kennel In The Sky.)

And then there’s Methos (portrayed by the awesome Peter Wingfield), a name you probably know if you’ve ever looked for Highlander fan fiction—or possibly any fanfic that could cross over with the world of immortals. An ancient immortal who was undercover for years as a Watcher, Methos is kind of a uniting figure, and not just across the two groups that make up the world of Highlander: the Series. As we eventually learn, he used to ride with a band of barbarians called The Four Horsemen before settling down to a quiet life.

Yep, that’s right: Methos is what you get when the Kurgan decides he wants to be Connor MacLeod when he grows up. He is pretty much the Highlander universe incarnate (only likable! I kid, mostly), which presumably explains his popularity. And it doesn’t hurt that his one impersonator, in the inevitable episode where such a thing happens, is played by Ron Perlman. That’s a mark of quality if I ever saw one.

You can probably tell from this that I’m not altogether fond of the series as a whole, even if Duncan is an engaging protagonist and many of the supporting characters are great. For all I whined about not being able to gauge how things worked for immortals during the original film, learning more about them in the series is a bit like finding out how a magician does his tricks: some of the gloss is gone.

Not that this will stop me from linking to my favorite episode, which is highly entertaining in the vein I described in my Lois & Clark post last week:

 

Next time: I reread a childhood classic…well, my kind of childhood classic… for the first time in decades. I am terrified.

Next time on TCBOM!: The last Highlander movie I’ll be writing about, i.e., the one I tend to call Highlander: the MacLeod Popularity Referendum.

 

 

Found-Again Friday: Lois & Clark

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It appears to be my month for sitting down with things I remember as being feather-light entertainment.

Why Found-Again? I didn’t catch much of this show during its original run in the 1990s, and it’s been about 7 years since my last viewing—during which I horrified a friend by vocally cheering for one of the show’s recurring villains, to the surprise of no one who reads this site. (This is one of those actors-I-will-follow-to-the-gates-of-hell things: I’m pretty sure I will never not root for Lane Davies, who played Tempus on L&C and whom astute readers will note was Mason Capwell in that Santa Barbara video I linked for a Highlander post a while back.)

The Premise: Clark Kent/Superman gets a job as a reporter, falls for Lois Lane, pals around with Jimmy Olson, fights Lex Luthor and others—you know, the standard Superstuff.

Two things distinguish Lois & Clark from other takes on Superman, though, and the first is that this isn’t a take on Superman so much as on Clark Kent, that nice guy with the glasses who will get you the best Chinese takeout because he can secretly fly to China. These incidental uses of Clark’s powers form my favorite parts of the show: one episode’s opening sequence has him playing baseball by himself. Part of Clark’s charm may well stem from the second change: in this version, his adoptive parents are still alive and very much in evidence.

One thing I always forget about Lois & Clark is how gorgeous it is. Perhaps to offset the guy in the bright red-and-blue suit, the sets are saturated with color, and the offices of The Daily Planet are a mix of the stately old and—for the ’90s—shiny new. Pure dumb luck placed the show a a time, technologically, when every gadget shown would seem hopelessly outdated in a few years; by now, the effect is almost like steampunk (what would you call that: faxpunk? beeperpunk?). Rewatching offers a timely reminder that superheroes, even those who are a current focus of the dreaded gritty reboot, can work as fun.

The Verdict: I am baffled by how little nostalgia there seems to be for Lois & Clark. While it didn’t exactly break new ground and could be contrived from time to time, the show on the whole is as handsome and charming as its main character. It may have been cheese, but if so, it was the TV equivalent of Barely Buzzed.

Might go well with: Junk food—and now that I mention it, that’s some good cheese up there in the link.

…Oh, what the heck: Tempus!

 

Next time: I finish my overview of Highlander: the Series, with mention of Methos and a few other things.

 

 

There Can (Still) Be Only Monday! Talking about Highlander…A Lot, Part 39

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Today will be the first part of my discussion about the Highlander TV series. First, a confession that will probably inform everything I write about this show:

I HATE RICHIE RYAN.

Sorry.
I do, though.

In theory, the series solves one of the problems with the Highlander franchise by removing Connor. Instead it focuses on his younger cousin Duncan, who has charm and killer abs and a visible will to live. Duncan MacLeod is played by Adrian Paul, and though I didn’t remember it when Highlander: The Series first appeared, I’d seen him before both as a dancer on The Colbys and in the early-’90s Dark Shadows revival as Barnabas Collins’s ill-fated brother. (I’ll bet you always wondered who watched that show.)

Connor does show up in the first episode to pass the torch, as it were–and since I’d never seen it before, I decided to give this one its own TCBOM! entry.

When the show begins, Duncan is living in “retirement” from the whole beheading thing with his mortal girlfriend, industrial sculptor Tessa. They are—surprise!—running an antique store, a fact that makes me begin to wonder if the next town over from mine is merely quaint or secretly infested with immortals.

Richie, a “streetwise” thief who exudes all the menace and worldly experience of the bad kid in an after-school special, is caught trying to rob the store. It’s what must, to someone else, be the beginning of a beautiful friendship (especially since Richie is a not-yet-“killed” immortal); Duncan bails him out of jail and eventually takes him as a sort of sidekick.

The episode itself is a crash course in the Highlanderverse, with the music and a discussion about the perils of mortal/immortal relationships, with flashbacks and a treasure cave of sorts (Duncan’s is less blatant and has a lovely fireplace) and the “villains should drive like madmen” rule firmly in place.

And just like the first movie, a lot of the energy in the episode comes from the bad guy. This is the last time I’ll say “and so-and-so as the Kurgan, kind of,” but Richard Moll (Bull the bailiff from Night Court, for those of us who watched too much TV in the ’80s) is not only a wild-eyed, leather-clad, articulate barbarian, he’s GREAT at it.

In fact, there are only two things I dislike about this episode, other than Richie and my old nemesis “Who Wants To Live Forever?”:

  1. The villain’s name is Slan, which you’d think could be said in a sinister tone, but apparently can’t;
  2. Connor is still wearing those goddamn sneakers.

I’m resisting the temptation to say this opening sequence “turns the Freudian symbolism up to eleven,” but darn it, you know what I mean. They’re missing a comma, too.

 

Next time: An even bigger fairy tale.

Next time on TCBOM!: Going to spend two more weeks on the series, then move on to Endgame. (Those of you familiar with Highlander movie-naming conventions will correctly deduce that’s not the last movie, either.)

Found-Again Friday: My Own Worst Enemy, Season the Only

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Why Found-Again? Years ago, I had a bad habit of watching whatever came on TV after Heroes. This sometimes had unexpected results: I expected to like Journeyman and hated it with a burning loathing, but enjoyed My Own Worst Enemy even though star Christian Slater was never my cup of tea. A few weeks ago, I set out to discover whether that was just the rosy glow of being better than the Heroes seasons I would later refer to as Thomas Hardy’s Matt of the Parkmanvilles, or if the series had genuine merit.

The Premise: Generic businessman Henry suffers a neurological glitch that reveals his alter ego, superspy Edward, who has apparently been James Bonding all over the world for democracy for quite some time. The split personality, deliberately induced by the agency Henry/Edward works for (Henry works for the “legitimate” business upstairs, Edward gets his orders from the basement levels), is suddenly malfunctioning. With the help of a few trusted associates, Henry and Edward have to figure out how to coexist without endangering the world, their own survival, or Henry’s personal life.

I’d forgotten in the years since it went off the air that My Own Worst Enemy was the creation of Daniel “Carnivàle” Knauf. Given that the latter is one of my favorite TV shows, I hope that someday I’ll be able to say the phrase “…that Knauf series that was allowed to finish its complete run unhindered.” (A look at his IMDb entry doesn’t inspire hope, but did inspire me to add last year’s Dracula series to my Netflix queue. If all goes well, I’ll soon have three shows to whine and quote Macbeth’s “untimely ripp’d” line about.)

One impressive facet of the show was its star: Christian Slater, an actor to whom my lifelong response had been along the lines of “…Yep, that’s Christian Slater, all right,” did a great job playing two very different characters who didn’t like each other much. It’s clear for most of the series whether you’re looking at Edward or Henry at any given moment, and it gave me new respect for the actor, especially since he’s playing opposite Alfre Woodard, Madchen Amick, and James “The Reason I Watch Part Of LA Confidential Peeking Through My Fingers And Whimpering” Cromwell.

At the same time, the premise was showing definite signs of fatigue by the end of the series’ eight-episode run, even with the complications of finding out what happened to Edward’s parents and the vagaries of the disparate personalities’ love lives. The last episode did end on a heck of a cliffhanger, though, and with Cromwell as a possible villain, My Own Worst Enemy could still have been going places.

The Verdict: I’ve said before that my goodwill can be bought with spy crap, and My Own Worst Enemy is a fun take on the genre. I’m not sure the main idea could have been taken much farther, but it would have been nice to see the show get a chance to try.

The entire series is available on DVD quite cheaply from Amazon. These promos are kind of bad, though.

 

Might go well with: Burn Notice; Carnivàle; a home-cooked meal.

 

Next time: The other white meat MacLeod.

 

Found-Again Friday: The Original Beauty & The Beast TV Show

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An article on io9 about the rebooted Beauty and the Beast series inspired me to give the original another look.

Why Found-Again? I was 13 when the series began and immediately fell in love with the entire idea; I’ve never had many nightmares about things I watch on TV, but I can still remember a very detailed, happy dream about spending time in Beauty & The Beast‘s subterranean tunnels. I even had a poster of Vincent on my closet, next to INXS and Morrissey and REM and the rest of my musical interests. But the series eventually got…not great (I was about to write “strange.” Hah!) and like a lot of viewers, I drifted away. Now that it’s on Netflix, I took a peek at season 1.

The Premise: (Don’t laugh.) When a case of mistaken identity ends with lawyer Katherine Chandler left for dead, she’s taken in by a secret quasi-medieval society of people who live beneath New York City. Most are the ordinary lost souls of any large city, but one—lion-faced Vincent (Ron Perlman)—becomes her true love and her protector. In between times when Vincent is shredding bad guys by tooth and claw (offscreen), they read and quote a lot of poetry.

Given that I’ve been writing about Highlander for months now, I’m surprised it took me so long to realize this was another supernaturally inflected “gritty New York” show, and years before urban fantasy became popular as a book genre. But this is one of the few series in which, for me, the crime-show aspects take a distinct back seat to the romance. I gravitate to art whose central theme is “the weird are deserving of love,” I suppose, and Beauty and the Beast is certainly not the least of these.

The Verdict: This is the part where I would ordinarily say my opinion is mixed; it’s not. Instead I find myself having two divergent opinions at the same time, able to see the flaws in the story and the cheesiness of the characters even as my inner teenager revels in the poetry-reciting, face-ripping hero who lives in a modern-day fairy fortress.  The result, honestly, is that I feel a little weird rewatching it: I like it but don’t feel entirely comfortable liking it.

Hey, I said don’t laugh.

Might go well with: Champagne, sonnets, the Cocteau movie based on the original tale…and I only just realized this is the second Friday in a row in which Gummi rats wouldn’t be out of place.

 

Next time: What’s it all about, Highlander?

Found-Again Friday: Masters of Horror— Cigarette Burns

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“Some films are meant to be seen…”

Today I return to the Showtime anthology series that gave us Valerie On The Stairs for another episode.

Why Found-Again? I’m not sure why, but when I first delved into the Masters of Horror series, I saw that Cigarette Burns was about the search for a lost, possibly cursed old movie and immediately thought that meant a very old movie. My attention to the story never quite recovered from the fact that I’d been thinking Häxan or Nosferatu when I should’ve been thinking Rosemary’s Baby, and I wondered whether my opinion would be improved by actually, you know, knowing what it’s about this time around.

The Premise: Having a captive angel in your mansion is possibly the worst of all conceivable bad ideas. (A rich man also hires a film buff to track down an evil movie that caused its first and only audience to go mad and kill each other, but if you have to have a single takeaway, à la the end of the old He-Man cartoons, it’s up there in the first sentence.)

The chances of me ever watching The Walking Dead are nil, but even I shouted “Daryl!” when I saw that Norman Reedus plays our ill-fated protagonist, Kirby Sweetman, who is despairing over his wife’s suicide and the imminent failure of his business even before getting sent on a wild angel goose chase. Add in Udo Kier as the rich man and a small role played by Christopher “Vince from Eureka’s Café Diem” Gauthier, and things are set to get interesting.

There’s always something seductive, I think, about movies/TV that explore the power (in this case quite literally) of movies/TV; bit by bit, we are drawn with Kirby into a dark chain of mystery and the unspeakable, all centered around what watching movies can do to people. And in the world of this movie, it can do quite a lot.

The problem—I’m sure none of you saw this coming—is that this one is waaaaaaay too gory for me, even by the standards of other Masters of Horror installments and even though I’ve been around the deserted, spooky block enough times to know what “John Carpenter’s” means in front of a title.

The Verdict: This really did repay rewatching: it’s an interesting and atmospheric story that never lets up on the creeping dread except when it’s time to let the dread stop creeping and run. For people with stronger stomachs than mine, which is nearly everyone, I recommend it. (So. Much. Eyeball violence…)

Might go well with: Nothing. Definitely not popcorn. Or sausage.

Trailer is here.

 

Next time: The beginning of the end of Highlander, and yet another of my enduring film fascinations.

Apropos of Nothing: A Non-Exhaustive List of Things That Will Buy My Goodwill in Movies/TV/Books

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  • The dog doesn’t die. It barely matters what dog or why; I just assume that any canine on my screen or in the pages of the book I’m reading has a large target on its back, and I enjoy being wrong about this.
  • Mummies (animate, French-speaking mummies a plus, as I mentioned last Halloween).
  • The Loch Ness Monster. I have watched some incredible crap just to see a few seconds of CGI Nessie. The same could be said for dragons.
  • A small, informal list of actors I would follow to cinematic hell and back (in some cases literally: are we ever going to get a third Hellboy movie?). When I say informal, I mean even to me: until quite recently I thought Tim Curry was on it, yet my Wiseguy DVDs go unwatched.
  • Spy crap. Any spy crap, really.
  • Architecture. I didn’t like Numb3rs much at all, but stuck around far longer than I should have just to see the house.
  • “They’re romantically involved, and they solve crimes!”
  • Owls. There’s no good reason. I just like owls.
  • Homages to film noir. Oddly, I often enjoy these more than the bona fide noirs themselves.
  • Mythology/folklore: I was going to narrow this down to actual mythology/folklore, but the first season of Sleepy Hollow was so gut-bustingly funny in its zeal to make things up that I’m going to leave this a broad category.
  • Any included reference to 1) Sherlock Holmes, 2) The Pirates of Penzance, 3) poetry, preferably Victorian, or 4) art.

So there you have it, just as I realize this list could in most respects be retitled “My Love For Castle Explained, Plus Owls.”

Found-Again Friday: Masters of Horror—Valerie On The Stairs

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So I watched neither the classic nor the classically goofy prospect for this week’s F-AF. It seems Netflix has started this proactive “Shipping Today!” feature, which I’m finding very satisfactory—not least because I now have two DVDs more than my plan requires. And so I took another peek at another Tony Todd villain a week earlier than I’d planned.

Why Found-Again? At no time is my “attracted, yet repulsed”  feeling toward horror fare more pronounced than when I watch Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. I’ve seen four of them so far, and these are the only DVDs where I avidly watch the previews, all of which are for other MoH episodes and all of which look fascinating.

Despite all this, I can barely make it through the opening-credits sequence for the show, with its decomposing rat and evilly smiling doll, among other dreadful things. Add a Clive Barker story to the mix, and we’re probably all lucky I watched this the first time.

The Premise: You know that guy in your English class who really wanted to be Raymond Carver, who wouldn’t shut up about it, and by the end of the course you wanted to kick him right in the inspiration? In Valerie on the Stairs, that man is our protagonist.

Rob, an aspiring writer with the requisite drinking and relationship problems, manages to get a rent-free spot at a house full of unpublished authors. No sooner does he sit down to write his first (pretentious) sentence than weird things start happening: there’s a beautiful girl in the walls, and a monster (Tony Todd, the only actor in the world who could have pulled off those demon ears his character has) who relentlessly pursues her. Rob has to turn to his fellow failed authors to find out what the hell—maybe literally—is going on.

Also, someone gets their spine ripped out through their mouth. I mention this because I wish someone had reminded me. Yuck.

The Verdict: This is what Found-Again Friday is all about: the first time I watched this, I found the movie’s end so insufferably twee that I almost couldn’t believe Clive Barker wrote it. And I was wrong: on this second viewing, it’s much easier to see the edge of despair in the ending, even if it does have a wry little twist in it, too. Better than I remembered.

 

Next time: TCBOM! When villains make me giggle… part 21,396.