Short Reviews:

Simpsons. The new season is thoroughly meh, but it’s about the same level as last year and still much better than the couple of truly awful years we had a few years back. Biggest problem right now seems to be the failure to stick to one decent plotline for an entire episode.

Family Guy. Ugggg. You know, when people told me they hated the show or that it wouldn’t hold up, I agreed in principle, but I had no idea it would fall apart so quickly. Almost every ounce of charm seems to have been sucked dry. The fundamental flaws in the show that were apparent but easy to forgive in seasons 1 through 3 have gotten worse and worse. The biggest is that Peter is not an actual character. He’s just an idiot. He’s all the worst parts of Homer Simpson (the pointless idiocy and selfishness that characterizes late seasons of the simpsons) without any of the redeeming values or personality structure. In fact, almost no character on the show has any depth, and most will do or say whatever is appropriate for the particular scene.

American Dad. You know, I actually have been really enjoying this show. It’s way above Family Guy at this point. Sure, there’s still a lack of heart, a few awful characters, and some repetitive joke structures, but it’s doing a lot of things Family Guy never tried. It doesn’t cut away constantly, and more importantly, its plots are actually pretty impressive. Episodes have solid themes and ideas and in the recent season, even fun plot twists. Probably the show I most look forward to on Sunday night.

Studio 60. I like it, but not as much as the West Wing, and the comedy sketches are awful. Every fake sketch is pretty clearly a smart person’s out of touch conception of middle-brow/low-brow humor. Also one of the main characters doesn’t work well and blah blah blah. Still, it’s fun to watch, though I’m absolutely convinced it will be cancelled because the cast must be obscenely expensive and no one except people who watched Aaron Sorkin’s other shows will ever watch it. In fact, thanks to google I now know the ratings are already bad.

Venture Brothers. After a really strong start to the season, this has tapered off into sort of disconnected zaniness. It’s still got enough laughs to justify watching, but many of them are dependent on little moments and the big payoffs are getting smaller and smaller. Still, based on the first season, it’s still possible this season could finish strong.

That’s all for now because I haven’t watched Heroes yet and the new season of Lost hasn’t started yet. 

One of my favorite Slate.com features is Ad Report. It’s basically just a guy reviewing TV ads. Anyway, the latest one is really, really weird (there’s a link to the video on the page).

The article covers it pretty well, so I’ll just summarize the ad for you so you can see if you want to watch it: It’s a typical Ford car commercial. A family on a lovely road trip. Two little girls having fun with their dad and mom, buying trinkets and driving the free and easy roads while an announcer intones about how the car’s great gas mileage lets them make the trip on one tank. Then at the end, the music cuts as the dad takes his overnight bag out of the car. He kisses the girls goodbye and thanks his ex-wife for letting him come along and tells them he’ll see them next weekend. The commercial then awkwardly ends with the husband’s quiet, sad stare at the car as it drives off and a voice intones about how "Bold changes happen everyday."

Very, very strange.

As you might expect from a group of people that have to hang out in a tiny office together for long periods of time, The Squelch staff tends to go through a lot of music. One could even say that the Squelch has its own music history. Former editors like to recall how wherever they went and whatever they were doing, somehow the topic of Belle & Sebastian would come up. Bad 80’s pop has also long been a favorite (when I took over the office there were more copies of Duran Duran in there than there were backup discs).

This is all a very roundabout way of saying I’ve become obsessed with something. Get Away from Me, the 2004 debut album from Nellie McKay.

Let’s recap the reasons to dislike Nellie McKay since you probably don’t know them. She’s 24 yet constantly lies about her age, she was born in England, stayed there for only one year, grew up in New York, and moved to Washington, yet she switches between English and German accents in many of her songs. She’s written songs in support of PETA protests and a love song to Ralph Nader. She’s friends with KD Lang. Her music videos are pretentious camera shots of her drinking tea in fast motion, and she titled her debut album around an uninteresting joke making fun of a Macy Gray album. Also, she switches between rap and jazz with piano played underneath both. She once demanded an album be released on two CDs because she wanted people to have to change discs ala a record player.

Despite all this, she’s insanely fantastic. Her album is wonderful. It’s got 18 fucking songs on it. Many of them are great, all of them are listenable, and some are actually genuinely funny. I could definitely imagine someone finding it all very pretentious and over-produced. In fact, most reviews I’ve read seem to fall into the category of "Blah blah she’s cute but blah blah where’s the depth and blah blah this is nice but…" Really though, the album is just good fun. It’s got songs for every mood, and several of the goofy rap songs create an excellent environment for fast-paced comedy writing.

Apparently she does have a follow-up album but it’s been delayed for two years because she refused to release it with anything short of 23(!!) tracks and the record label refused to budge from 16. A girl to watch, most certainly. 

"Forwards, not backward! Backward, not forwards! And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"

Well the Scifi channel cancelled Stargate.

Stargate is not a good TV show, but it was once a good TV show. Logically this could mean that cancellation is the right move, but since this is the scifi channel we’re talking about and the ratings are still okay, the question becomes, what exactly is the scifi channel’s plan for itself?

They produce 500 god awful movies a week and will run almost any piece of crap, but for MST3K, Farscape, and Stargate, each produced steady but not spectacular ratings and each was been cancelled with the basic explanation of "Well ratings are okay but not improving."

Not improving? You’re the scifi channel! Having something that briefly peaks then has steady ratings for 10 years is the best you can do!

It’s already a niche channel, but it’s definitely never going to grow into whatever they think it will if everytime they have a dependable success, they cancel it for not growing more and more successful. It’s just demented network executive logic (in fact, Bonnie Hammer the network execuive seems to have made a career of this). "We’ve gotta grow baby! Grow! Grow Grow!"

They have maybe one successful new series every two years (several of which have been shows bought from other networks and not home-grown), then they inevitably sabotage their own shows in the hopes of breaking into the big time. They’re like that pathetic schemer who has plenty of little successes, but is always going after that next big score. What’s their next big venture? Showing ECW wrestling matches.

Look, if they want to be Spike TV so bad, why don’t you just change their name and get it done with?

I’ve started watching Monk again. For those not in the know, Monk is one of the USA Channel’s 5 or 7 mystery series about a gifted Columbo-esque main character.

Monk has always been an inconsistent show. Like many mystery series, each episode is generally only as good as its mystery. The show started out with mediocre mysteries but a very entertaining main character, and over time, it sort of went downhill. This last year, however, has seen the show oddly rejuvenated. The key, in my mind, is that the show has become funnier. They’ve upped the ante; they now give Tony Shaloub’s character at least one big comic scene an episode, and along with a few truly goofy premises and mysteries, they’ve ensured that even if the mystery is stupid, it’s still entertaining to watch.

Anyway, back to my main topic. The character of Monk, it has many times been said, went to college at UC Berkeley. The show itself, in fact, is set in San Francisco. So when I saw that an episode was going to be completely about Monk’s college reunion and take place in Berkeley, I was quite interested.

Unfortunately, thanks to Hollywood magic, the episode takes place, umm, I have no idea where, but definitely not Berkeley. Still though, it’s worth noting that this ficticious version of Berkeley may in fact superior to the real thing.

The campus in the episode was really quite nice, with many old Ivy-esque buildings and fresh, perfect grass. Parking was clearly ample according to one scene, and the dorms were spacious and amazing. Beautiful oak wood doors with two people to a room, long spacious hallways, nothing more than one story high, and rec rooms that looked to be 50 years old. The cafeterias had lovely wood tables and extensive salad bars, not to mention nice plates and a very large staff. What’s more, the library had amazing marble floors that shone with the brilliance of diamonds. Also, despite the fact that the real Berkeley is a huge university with thousands of freshmen each year, the reunion easily fit in a small dining hall and everyone knew everyone else’s name. Every picture that appeared on the screen for the reunion slideshow was met with sounds of recognition and happiness. Also apparently no one at this fictional university has health problems because the fictional version of the Tang center had only one small window and one friendly doctor working at it.

Clearly this fictional Berkeley is a paradise and much better than the original. One odd note, apparently the Berkeley police do not exist and the school is policed by the SFPD and Berkeley is also apparently part of San Francisco, but honestly, I think that’s a small price to pay for a school this nice.

I’ve been very excited to watch USA’s new show Psych. Why, you ask?

Well this is the first time since I decided to pursue a career in writing that I’ve had a "Holy crap I had that idea moment!" I really want to see how this works out. Please note, I’m not saying I had this idea first. Clearly because the TV show is out now and I had the idea last summer, someone else beat me to the punch.

The concept of the show is a man who is a fantastic, brilliant detective along the likes of Columbo and Monk, but who for silly reasons, uses his powers of perception to pretend to be a psychic. My own premise was pretty different, but the central idea of a brilliant detective pretending to be a psychic is the same, plus they put it in a much more commercial format (weekly detective show) than my own nonsense (hard-boiled scifi). Commence Stream of Consciousness Review:

Starts out fine, but for a pilot episode with a very simple concept (the police think he committed the crimes he keeps solving), they don’t do a very good job of it. Especially since the information he provides is along the lines of "That guy did it!" It just doesn’t make great sense why they think he did the crimes right away. All he ever does is say "That guy on TV did it!" He doesn’t provide any actual evidence. Anyway, he pretends to be a psychic to get them off his back, but they end up asking him to help them out on a tough case.

The show gets rolling very fast, but the set-up is clumsy and awkward. Having said that, it’s a pilot and I’m totally willing to accept rough steps at the start. Things I won’t accept: Creating an idiot police detective whose sole job is to always be wrong and to be humiliated by the lead. This guy is the Major Frank Burns of police detectives. In fact, he even has the uptight hot female co-worker ala Hot Lips Houlihan.

Though Monk is most certainly not a perfect show, they learned long ago that having the main character always be right and then having people disagree with him over and over again reads false and stupid. Confusion, sure. Disbelief, okay. But constant outright hostility to the lead is dumb.

Other problems. Completely ignoring the mystery at some points and claiming major parts of it were revealed during commercial break. [gets out rolled up newspaper] No. Bad detective show! You don’t ever claim the mystery was solved during commercial break. God that’s lazy. And if you’re gonna do something like that, it better be because the mystery is not the real plot and we’re actually interested in the characters. But these characters aren’t sharp enough yet. Especially the sidekick played by Dule Hill who basically has no character at this point.

They’re good enough for a pilot. They could definitely be elaborated on, but again, if we look at USA’s other detective shows (Monk and to a certain extent The Dead Zone) the lead characters had a lot more depth to them from the very start. This guy is just kind of wacky and annoyed with his police detective dad. The dad angle is decent, but most of the conflict comes from people’s irrational hatred of the main character (read: Super Nintendo Syndrome).

Super Nintendo syndrome is when, without explanation, everything in the world is out to get you. It’s a term I came up with based on the way old 16 bit videogames involved fighting literally everything that appeared on screen, including fish, bumbleebees, birds, flowers, and caterpillars. This isn’t that bad, but 90% of the characters on screen are out to get him for almost no reason.

Okay, enough bitching. To sum up, this was an okay pilot but the characters could use a lot of polish. The mystery plot was weak but not disastrously so. It ignored that simple forensics could’ve solved the case (which involved a faked suicide that an easy ballistics test would’ve disproved). I’ll keep watching because I know plenty of shows started out with the characters on the wrong note and then gradually course-corrected over the first season.

So I went to see Superman Returns with my girlfriend Anna’s family (see, Anna, I mentioned you on the blog).

I’ll try to keep this review both brief and as spoiler-free as possible (edit: Totally failed on the "brief" element). Cutting to the chase, I thought it wasn’t good and wasn’t bad. It was just there. Let us engage in bullet points!

• The movie was HEAVILY influenced by other superhero movies. Mainly Spiderman, but even though the film is supposedly set after the original Superman movie, the plot is so similar to the original movie as to be distracting at some points


• Brandon Routh was okay. I don’t know why people are picking on him so much. I agree he’s just doing a Christopher Reeves impression, but it was a decent enough impression and I thought he nailed the Superman voice quite well.


• Kate Bosworth’s impression of Natalie Portman in Star Wars was spot on. That is to say, she either can’t act or may be deaf and did not hear the director shout "Action!" at the start of each scene. Add to this the fact that she’s basically 14 years old and weighs under 100 pounds and is playing a 30 year old with a kid and this becomes one of the all-time "blah" casting choices.

A Brief Interlude:

Bryan Singer: Okay, Kate, in this scene, you’re upset. Superman is in trouble, and you’re unsure of both your and his feelings towards each other. And, ACTION!
Bryan Singer: CUT! Okay, Kate, see, what I wanted you to do, was pretend, or "act" as they say, like you were sad. What you did was remain completely motionless without changing your expression. Let’s try that again with some movement. ACTION! No, no, Kate, I don’t think a fake British accent will class this scene up. Yes, I loved Renee Zellwegger in that too, but let’s stick with this for now. Don’t worry about doing an accent or using human inflections or anything. People will love your flat line readings of every moment in the film.
Bryan Singer: (to stage hand) Maybe we could computer animate most of her scenes…

•  The film was not nearly fun enough. Now I’ll say this right now, I’m not a big Superman fan. I think he’s a really goofy superhero along the lines of the ones you make up when you’re 7 in the schoolyard. "Well my superhero is super strong and he shoots lasers and he jump really high and fly!" But the reason the Spiderman movies at least sort of work is that we not only like Spiderman as a character, but he always seems to come up short. It’s just like Indiana Jones. We love him because he does all this stuff just to make it through somewhere and then the idol gets stolen from him. And Spiderman gets the shit knocked out of him over and over again during every scene. But Superman is too strong for that, so all the action scenes in the middle of the film are just boring. He’s not in danger. They don’t really involve the plot, and they’re all CG. Many of the shots were slow and paired with big rising music, as if to shout to you "This is a big deal! This is Superman! This is a big deal!" It felt a lot like the modern Star Wars films in the way they were filled with self-important "look at me, I’m an important franchise!" moments.


• The action scenes were scarred by a fundamental problem: Seeing Superman push really hard while flying is meaningless. He’s not pushing off anything, and we have no visible indication of how he can fly harder, so it always seems like he just struggles for a while and then somehow flies harder and succeeds. They use this effect over and over and over again, and it’s just not that interesting.


• There were plenty of plotholes, but I don’t care a ton about that. I care that the movie felt slow and plodding at many points and that the ending dragged and felt unsatisfying. Even with the big soaring end, it felt like Superman was never tested and didn’t grow in the film. He acts like things have changed a lot at the end, but it feels somewhat false and hollow.


• The obsession with making this a franchise demanded an ending that wasn’t really an ending. The film is long but refuses to seriously change any of the main characters because all of them are under contract for a sequel.

Final Grade: 6.5 / 10

Certainly not awful, but not really good either. I could definitely understand someone really liking it, if they really liked the character, but for me it was just an adequate film that desperately wanted to be so much more than that. 

So the new season of Venture Brothers started. It’s very much the same as before. I still enjoy it. It’s still boring sometimes. For those not in the know, Venture Brothers is basically an elaborate Johnny Quest spoof. The show is at its best during scenes of extreme cartoon violence, which are frequently done in clever ways like pole-vaulting using a man’s esophagus.

The show has a bad habit of being intolerably slow and obsessed with its own plot. However, that’s not such a bad thing when you consider that most other Adult Swim shows are completely devoid of plot. I enjoy Aqua Teen as much as the next guy, but eventually shows like Brak and Sealab and Aqua Teen all start to seem too lazy. As an aspiring writer, watching those shows periodically hits me with a moment of "God, I can’t believe the writers don’t care enough to construct even a loose plot for their 12 minute long show."

Venture Brothers is quite the opposite, usually trying to cram a movie-length plot into a 22 minute episode.

To balance out my intense hatred of the GIMP’s god awful interface, here’s a little review of Inkscape, the open source, multi-platform, vector graphics program.

The question a graphics professional would probably ask (read: not me) is Does this do everything Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand do? The answer is a complete and obvious no. There are a many basic features missing (for instance, being able to make strokes inside and outside of a path rather than directly on it), and effects and blends are not ready in this version. Most of these features are missing not because the developers are uninterested but because the program is based on the open SVG standard, which I believe was originally developed for web graphics and has failed to keep up with developer’s needs. They stick by it because it’s an open xml standard, which means you can do cool things like literally changing or tweaking an image just by opening it in a text editor, but on the whole the SVG standard isn’t quite robust enough for real professional work.

However, that doesn’t mean this isn’t a really impressive and cool piece of software. The interface is definitely not perfect (it’s obsessed with dialog boxes), but this is nothing like the GIMP. This is an interface that makes basic sense, and all that’s required is putting in the small amount of time needed to get acclimated. In fact, because it lacks the 8 billion features of Illustrator, I actually find it easier to do basic things in Inkscape simply because I’m not lost staring at Illustrator’s 500 different tools and options. There are a few simple tutorials included, and while they’re nothing to set the world on fire, the program easily passed the "oooh" test. In other words, you can start playing with the shape tools after reading one tutorial and achieve something cool enough that you go "ooooh, that’s cool!"

The export options are overly limited, but they’re improving with each version. That’s another thing. This is version 0.44. Now I’m not one who puts too much stock in terms like beta (afterall, Firefox and most google programs claim to be in beta or in versions below 1.0 for years). But the developers are really putting a lot of work into this program and every version contains clear and obvious improvements in performance and features. If the difference between version 0.43 and 0.44 is indicative of anything, this could be a really impressive and polished program by the time it reaches 1.0.

Summary: 

This is really cool little program and it’s available for pretty much every major operating system. I don’t have a ton of use for it because I’m artistically inept, but it was good enough for me to make the goofy little masthead at the top of this site, so if you have some free time, perhaps download a copy for your OS of choice and give it a try. I recommend the shapes tutorial because the stuff with Stars and Spirals is really fun.

I’ve been using linux a lot lately. My old windows laptop got a horrible virus and it so disgusted me that I ended up installing Ubuntu on it, which is easily the best linux I’ve ever used.

I intend to recap my experiences on the blog a little bit, but I just wanted to mention that the GIMP, the free open source alternative to photoshop, is a real piece of crap. Usually I’m pleasantly surprised by open source software. Usually there are rough edges and ways in which it all sucks, but then there’s also cool new innovative features or the program will at least do 50% of what I need it to (see OpenOffice, which basically does everything Word 97 does, which is more than most people need).

But I think the Gimp is really amazingly awful. I’d heard so much about it, how it was such an impressive feat, but it has the worst interface I’ve ever encountered. Absolutely nothing works the way you expect it to. It’s awkward and confusing and contradicts itself in every way possible. There’s not a single task, not one solitary task, that isn’t a complete bitch and a struggle. Every single menu and window does something or has some option that makes no sense and does the complete opposite of what you want. It’s almost like the program reads your mind and then automatically reshuffles all the menus to make sure you can’t get anything done.

The awful interface would be bad enough, but I expected it to at least have basic features. You can’t change brush sizes. Seriously. Every brush is only its own size, you can’t change it. You have to make a new brush that’s the correct size whenever you want to do something like that. There are a million other features missing (I’m talking major stuff like decent selection tools, not tiny photoshop-specific luxuries).

I just wanted to get this bitching out of the way since other than this and one or two other things, my experience with Ubuntu/Linux has been very positive and I’ve found a lot of really cool, really neat free programs. Gimp, however, is not one of those programs, and Adobe certainly has nothing to fear from it.