New TheAvod!

That's right! It's really, really late Wednesday/Really, really early Thursday, which means it's time for a new episode of TheAvod! This week, it's time for more intrusions, Coen brothers reviews, and a brief discussion of truly bad review bais.

Here's a link to the episode!

Also, check out this, a five-minute tribute to the best line reading of David Duchovny's career!

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to react to Californication

I tuned into this show a little while after it started, as I was curious to see what Mulder was up to these days. I was bored and more than a little annoyed by the show’s overwhelming tone of undeserved smugness and superiority. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good intellectual victory lap as much as the next guy, and have always appreciated scenes where a boor is put down with the absolute perfect rejoinder – but that’s not what Californication is. It’s a cut-rate version thereof. It’s a show about a smart person written by profoundly stupid people.

Okay, to be fair, they might not be idiotic, they might just be assuming that their audience is. How can I tell? Here’s a screenshot from the opening credits montage.

You see, they needed an image to establish that the main character, one ‘Hank Moody’ (Get it? His name describes what he is! It’s clever!) is a novelist. How can this be accomplished? By having him read a bizarre bigger-than-a-magazine-yet-smaller-than-a-newspaper thing with the words ‘Book Critic’ on it! Of course! Although he’s not actually reading it, he’s just holding it up in front of his face. Which is an appropriate message, because this really isn’t a show for ‘readers’.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: The X-Files: I Want to Believe Edition

Yes, I'm a fan of the X-Files. Right from the start I never missed an episode, even as I winced each time they offered their cute twist on some popular horror or sci-fi film. I laughed along with everyone else whenever Darren Morgan wrote an episode, I covered my eyes along with everyone else during the one about the inbred hillbillies who loved bludgeoning people to death, and, like everyone else, I felt pity for Stephen King when he turned in perhaps the worst script of his career, "Chinga". And that's in a career marked prominently by the utter awfulness of his original screen- and teleplays.

That being said, I was never a big fan of the show's 'mythology'. By the time the movie came around it was pretty clear they had no idea where they were going and that everything was being made up as they went along, and I noticed just how much, on average, the 'monster of the week' episodes were superior to the ongoing alien mystery episodes.

So when I heard the X-Files movie was going to be an entertaining one-off thriller, I was excited.