Almost 2 weeks ago I did something that I’m pretty sure none of you, nor most people in America, were willing to do. I watched the premier of Harper’s Island on CBS. I’ll pause for a moment to allow for groans, mocking laughter and/or puzzled looks…

Then last week, I did what was most certainly not repeated by anyone else on the planet. I watched the second episode! And in the interest of full disclosure, I fully intend to watch episode 3 this Thursday as well. In fact, I have no intention of ceasing my viewership nor canceling my series recording. Why? Because taken at face value, the show is actually pretty fun to watch. And I mean that in the most Sci-Fi Original Pictures sense of the term.

The following is a rundown of the show’s most redeeming qualities:

• Archetypes Abound: Pretty much every character is taken from that virtual script in the sky for cheesy, overblown, melodramatic, shallow soon-to-be-redshirts. This is one area where the SFOP formula really shines through. We have the stuffy foreigner, the jaded local redneck, the star-crossed lovers, the brooding teen (2 of them), the soothsaying child, the frat boy buddies, the disapproving wealthy father-in-law, the square-jawed ex-boyfriend looking to spoil the wedding, etc, etc. They even managed to get an aging, has-been celebrity in Harry Hamlin to fill a cameo role, or what you might call a cameo if he wasn’t obviously so desperate for the work. Oddly enough, there’s no butler.
• Formulaic Plot Points: The show is literally a carbon copy of dozens of other murder mysteries done throughout the years.  That’s really what makes it work. You know what to expect, and you get it. It’s not an attempt to put a new spin on an old favorite. It IS the old favorite. A wedding that reunites a group of people on the site of a mass-murder spree by which they were all affected in some way? Classic.
• Gratuitous Jump Scenes: These are a given. Otherwise we would never be able to ask the question “why do people in tense movie moments always grab you on the shoulder or slap their hand over your mouth?” The best thing about these is how the writers try to justify them by having the characters say things like “I called your name but I guess you didn’t hear me”. Yeah right.
• Gratuitous Gore: In the first episode we had one person dismembered by a boat prop and one person chopped in half at the waist (that one was particularly gratifying, considering who the character was. SPOILER: It was Harry Hamlin aka Uncle Marty!) Bonus points are awarded here for brutality tempered with creativity.
• Gratuitous (Almost) Hanky-Panky: OK, I’m not really looking for this, but of course there couldn’t be a murder if somebody didn’t decide to go skinny-dipping or get busy in the woods.
• Unlikely Setting: Speaking of woods, how about an Island with an old Inn, a picturesque lighthouse, few residents, and acres and acres of unexplored deep woods that apparently must be crossed for any character to reach any other destination.
• Quality Acting: OK, this is tongue in cheek, but the acting is not so bad (save for a few characters) that you can’t stand to watch. It’s just bad enough. Couple this with the next point, and you’re playing with house money.
• Ridiculous Dialogue: How else can you highlight the bad acting?
• Even More Ridicuous Accents: There’s really only one of these, but it’s a doozy.
• A Director Who Can Somehow Pull It All Together: Jon Turteltaub. Unfortunately, he’s only onboard for a couple of episodes as director, but at least he’ll still be around as Exec. Producer.
• BONUS – Webisodes: I haven’t watched these but they’re on harpersglobe.com.

Ultimately, I think what works for this show is the fact that it doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. As Simon Cowell would say, it knows what it is. It’s campy. It’s ridiculous. It’s awesome! The only thing the CBS executives missed is putting CSI: in front of the title. That might just prove to be it’s ratings downfall. And if it gets canceled and I never find out whodunit, I’ll be ticked. So start watching!

And for what it’s worth, my money is on the sheriff.

Giant snapping turtles violently attacking college kids on spring break at Lake Powell.  Oooh…the menace!  The role of Dr. Boobs hasn’t been cast yet, but we’re pretty sure we can get former Miss Hawaiian Tropic Scarlett Chorvat.

We’re not officially in negotions with the Sci Fi Channel yet, but we think we’re on the right track with our pitch.  Thanks to Mrs. MightyThor for the story concept.

Among the myriad questions I have about this cartoon is this:  Does Spiderman, being a super-hero, have the same reaction to tailbone strikes that the rest of us do?  That Lecter-esque teeth-sucking sound?

If so, this must have been a LOUD one.

I’m on a tear on this blog lately, and if I keep it up, I may actually meet my New Year’s resolution to blog more, maybe even a post a day, if you can believe it.

In that vein, I’ve been meaning to start posting my “now on video” reviews ever since I subscribed to Netflix and started catching up on all the movies I haven’t seen in the theater since we had a kid and stopped going to the movies.  So here we go, short and sweet, one review per post, starting with my most recently viewed and going backwards.

Review: Australia

MightyThor’s Rating: 3 / 5 Didgeridoos

We watched Australia just a few nights ago, and it was pretty good.  It wasn’t anything earth-shattering for good or ill, but I enjoyed it all right.  Hugh Jackman was good, as was Nicole Kidman, especially once her character evolved past the stereotypical headstrong, obnoxious noble-born Brit.  The Aboriginal kid Nullah really stole the show, but that was cool; the writers did right by him with his unique manner of speech, so he was fun to watch.  I thought they played his part up just right, without overplaying it in a movie that would be classified as a saga, where everything is meant to be very Gone With the Wind-esque in its emotional impact.

I thought the film was pretty visually interesting too, fitting a certain style that seemed appropriate to the era depicted and the vision Baz Luhrmann was shooting for.  It did have its own sense of high-mindedness about the treatment of the Aboriginal people, which was pretty much a backdrop to the story, but I didn’t feel so hit over the head with it as I might have, which was good.  So all in all, I’d say I liked it. I wouldn’t run out and buy it, but I wouldn’t recommend against watching it either.

Movie Review: Knowing

MightyThor’s Rating: 2 / 5 Shiny Black Stones

Recently, Donjuanica and I started engaging in the age-old manly tradition of a Boys’ Night Out (and no, you may not call it a man-date, because we always make sure to bring one or more additional manly persons along).  Really, the whole thing is an elaborate excuse to let us go see movies that our wives wouldn’t be interested in.

Well a week or so ago, we went and saw the only film that was currently showing that seemed in any way interesting, the latest Nicholas Cage supernatural thriller “Knowing.”  Let me prefece this review also by saying that the film was recommended to us by a friend of Donjuanica, whose opinions are forever suspect now.

If you’re planning to see “Knowing” for yourself, just know that I give it a “Wait until it comes to TV” rating, and do not read on because of the dreaded advent of SPOILERS AHEAD (I don’t know why I have to type that in all caps, but it seems the thing to do.) For you intrepid readers who want the skinny, read on.

I’ll freely admit that I was actually enjoying “Knowing” until about the last twenty minutes.  At that point, the film turned so ridiculous as to actually turn back time and punch me in the groin at the beginning.  It was all very strange.  If you don’t know the story, Nicholas Cage is a professor of astro-physics or something, whose son participates in the opening of a time capsule at school.  The capsule contains drawings by the school’s original students of what they think the world would look like 50 years in the future.  Cage’s son gets one of the drawings, which is just a page full of random-seeming numbers, which turn out to be dates of global catastrophes and the number of people killed, separated by another set of numbers that they can’t figure out without what Atticusser and I would call an “extraordinary coincidence,” in the vein of all great SFOP’s.  That extraordinary coincidence is when Cage ends up at the exact spot where a jetliner crashes across a freeway, which was predicted by the magic number sheet, and thanks to his car’s GPS, he realizes that the unexplained sets of numbers are the GPS coordinates of each catastrophe.

So, blah blah blah, the numbers predict the end of the world, blah blah blah, Cage has just happened to have formerly published a paper on super solar flares, blah blah blah, he figures out that a super flare is about to roast the earth and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

Enter the “whisper people.”

Throughout the film there are these semi-creepy Val Kilmer look-alike guys dressed all in black who are kinda stalking Cage’s kid, and they keep giving him these smooth black rocks that are supposed to be significant.  And they whisper to the kid, indicating that he is somehow special, just like the little girl who first wrote the page of magic numbers, except she went insane and killed herself, but not before having a daughter who had another daughter, who also can hear the whispers that only certain people can hear.

Enter the love interest.

The love interest freaks out when the whisper men kidnap her and Cage’s kids while they’re all running away to hide in some caves that have no hope of saving them from the super solar flare.  She runs a red light, gets hit by a semi.

Exit the love interest.

This was about the point at which I realized that this movie had lost its way a little.

To make a long review slightly less long, Cage finds the kids at the dry riverbed where the smooth black stones are found (so much for significant).  The whisper men, as anticipated, reveal themselves to be aliens.  But they’re benevolent aliens, who want to help humanity start over.  So they offer to take the children with them, and Cage thinks, “Great, we’re saved!”  But wait!  No, Cage, you can’t come.  You didn’t “hear the call.”  Meaning he was for some reason immune to the insanity-inducing whispers of random numbers that tell the future, unlike his kid.  So in a desperate bid to save his son’s life, he tells him he has to go with the aliens, and they take off with the kids, leaving him crying on the smooth black stones.

Uh…right.  I know it’s the end of the world and all, but you put your kid on a ship full of creepy aliens and sent him off into space.  Riiiiight.

I wasn’t sure quite how they were going to wrap the movie up from there, but it involved classical music, scenes of looting amid the growing heat, an ever-so-touching reunion between Cage and his estranged parents, who all share a hug, followed by a visually spectacular scene of the earth being swallowed up by fire and burnt to a crisp.

But don’t fret!  The benevolent aliens (did I mention they were glowing featureless humanoids who had wing shapes appear behind them when they took the kids up to their ship?), well they drop the kids off on a planet flowing with golden wheat fields, and in the background you see other ships leaving too, having dropped off other children, we assume.  And the two main kids are all dressed in white linen as they run happily through the tall grass in slow motion toward a great glowing white tree.

The End.

No, I’m not kidding.  That was how it ended.

Donjuanica and I left the theater, and I said, “Oh, I get it.  It wasn’t God, it was kindly aliens!”  And then I went home to put some ice on my reverse-time-impacted manuals.

So my thoughts in retrospect are these:

• “Knowing” was really a bad rip-off of “Signs,” only not nearly as good and like 10 years late.
• Hollywood production studios have to release something to fill the gap between Christmas and Memorial Day, and they don’t much care what they put out there.
• If kindly aliens decide to help us in real life, I hope they can come up with a better way to do so than by whispering encoded messages into the ears of children who have no hope of understanding them so they can only go insane.
• If said kindly aliens want to take away your children, I wouldn’t think twice before agreeing.
• If said kindly aliens decide to start beating you over the head with religious symbology turned into science fiction, get on a bus or something.
• If said kindly aliens drop your stolen children off on a strange planet with no food or water and no adult supervision and leave them in the care of a glowing white tree in a very over-the-top Adam and Eve metaphor, feel free to scoff loudly so other people in the theater can hear you.
• Signs was cool, Knowing was lame.

The End.

In spite of the stubborn persistence of cold weather around here, the sun broke through today and at my wife’s suggestion (ain’t she the greatest?), I loaded my golf clubs back into my car.  How soon I’ll actually get to use them is still in question, but having them on hand again is a good sign.

So next year, you can take your shadow and shove it, groundhog.

When it comes to the DVR, I use the fast forward a lot, probably to a degree that makes my wife a little uncomfortable, if I’m being honest.  I consider it a challenge to try to blow through the commercial breaks without stopping and to land on the moment the show resumes.  And some shows I zip through as well, such as the results show of American Idol.  Thanks to the handy DVR, you can turn Fox’s hour of useless drivel into maybe 15 minutes of actual viewing, of which only about 30 seconds are of interest, when you find out who gets booted off the show this week.

One of the pieces of weekly Idol drivel we usually skip is the group performance, featuring all the remaining contestants.  It’s perpetually so corny as to almost undo any interest I have in the show at all, and the corn factor went way up last week, when it became painfully obvious that the contestants aren’t even singing…they’re lip syncing.  The advanced choreography is too much to handle when you have to sing as well, I guess.

I hadn’t ever really thought about the fact that they would lip sync those numbers before last week, but know it’s all I see when I watch them, and it makes the performances all the more hilarious because of how hard they’re trying to look like they’re actually singing.  It was totally cracking me up last night watching them pull their best “singing with fervor” faces along with the pre-recorded track.

But the gem of the evening came when Scott MacIntyre (the blind one), who I’m really, really bored with by now and ready to dismiss, had a vocal solo at the piano and, just as he had been instructed I’m sure, put on his intense emotional vocalist face and sang his heart out…while the microphone on its stand was about a foot to the left of his mouth.

Call me cruel, if you will, but I laughed and laughed; not at Scott, but at the whole ridiculous performance being unraveled right there. My wife made the golden comment then: “Wow, it’s kinda hard to lip sync if you’re blind.”

Nice try, Fox.