I Couldn't Finish Watching Amusement

Or even start watching it, really. I'm wondering if this is something that happens to a lot of people, or if it's just me. Ever get ten minutes into the movie, realize exactly where it's going, and become so dispirited by the prospect of watching it take another eighty minutes to get there that you're compelled to call it quits?

It occurs to me that this is something I could have learned about other people simply by checking other film blogs, but it seems my pathological narcissism and self-obsession keeps me from caring about other people's life experiences, except when I Idly wondering about them here in blog posts.

Okay, so, where was I? Oh, right - Amusement.

Criminal Minds 518: The Fight

There's a body in a park in San Francisco. How does one dead homeless man let the police know that they've got to call in the FBI? Got me, but I'm sure it'll be explained! I'm also certain it will have something to do with the overprotective father and his 14-year-old daughter who are mysteriously abducted by a psychopath that same night.

No, not him. But hey, is everyone ready for a pointless downer? Yup, that's right - it's time to cover the backdoor pilot for Suspect Behaviour! Oh, Forest, this was never going to go well for you, was it?

Greg goes to meet Forest at the FUNCTIONING GYM THAT HE RUNS AN FBI OFFICE OUT OF (really, Count, you were surprised this show was canceled?) to hear Forest's theory about his latest case: the San Francisco case! Forest lays it out - men were found badly beaten and then left in a park, shot in the back of the head:

Now, it's possible that you've noticed that those men was clearly shot in the forehead. The show sincerely wishes you hadn't, so can we move on?

Forest gives Greg a little background on the case, which you'd think Greg would already have, since his team is the one that's been assigned it, but then Forest also offers some new information - after a few days of homeless people turning up badly beaten and shot in the head, a kidnapped father/daughter team shows up, also shot in the head, with the father having been badly beaten. Only Forrest has noticed the connection - and he wants his team to look for the kidnappees while Greg works the park victims. They've only got two days before the 'cycle' ends, so how can Greg say no?

Okay, normally I save this kind of thing for the end of the review, but I'm going to mention it here, because what the hell, Criminal Minds: how could SFPD not have made this connection already? A father and daughter missing during the exact times that homeless people being killed may not ring any alarm bells, but if they're all being shot with the same gun, how could it possibly go unnoticed? And don't think that I'm seeing connections where there aren't any-

That's the badly-beaten face of the dead father with a bullet in his forehead, exactly like the homeless guys. You'd have to be blind to miss this connection.

So that's the rule - unless they somehow explain why the killer would use a different gun for the family executions than he would for the homeless ones, this is a terribly written episode. Which would be entirely appropriate for the Suspect Behaviour backdoor pilot, come to think of it.

Oh, and we learn the villain's scheme. He wants the father to turn the daughter over to him. If he does, they both live, if he doesn't - they both die! Will he make the deal? Let's find out after the opening credits!

Yet another question about the Simpsons

In the episode 'King Sized Homer' there's a series of events I don't quite understand. After Homer has spent a few days as a fat guy on disability, doing his job by hitting a Y key over and over again on a remote terminal, everyone has become fed up with his girth.

Bart and Lisa come home from school to find Homer skipping work to catch a movie. After his negligence seems as if it's going to lead to a catastrophe, he has to rush back to work - hijacking an ice cream truck along the way. While driving the truck, he passes this school bus-

Which for some reason contains Lisa and Ralph-

Despite a scene set more than an hour previous taking place after school that day.

TheAvod Enters the Squared Circle!

Or at least talks about it, as The Divemistress and myself discuss Real Steel, as well as a couple of other bizarre fantasy boxing movies! Check it out by right-clicking here to download the episode!

The Seventy-Third-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

So... that happened.

Tales From the Darkside 303: The Bitterest Pill

Terrible Moments in Taglining: Orca

“The Killer whale, is one of the most intelligent creatures in the universe.”


Universe? You're going with universe? Setting aside the comma, explain to me how you could  make that kind of a claim. And then go on for another paragraph!


“across seas, across time, across all obstacles”


Oddly, I completely would have watched a movie about a superintelligent Orca traveling through time to battle aliens.

Just Another Reason Why Breaking Bad is the Best Show on Television

Normally when you're watching a movie and a character looks through a pair of binoculars, you see this:

Because the filmmakers don't trust you to understand why the camera is suddenly zoomed in and part of the screen masked. On Breaking Bad, when characters look through binoculars, it looks like this:

Because (other than cropping for 16:9) that's what it actually looks like when you put binoculars up to your eyes.

Criminal Minds 517: Solitary Man

This week opens with a creepy man watching a house where a little girl is being put to bed - in Voice Over he tells a fake fairy-tale about a lonely King looking for a Queen. It's a misdirect, though - the little girl is the creepy guy's daughter, and she's in foster care. The Queen he's looking for? A new mother for the little girl! Sadly for the Truck Stop Waitresses of America, his method of finding that mother is to abduct and murder them. Although it sounds better in the stories he tells, of course.

So last week was an allegorical story about an evil which who burned children in an over, and this week is about a killer who frames his murders as fairy tales. I don't mind them going back to the well, of course, but it's weird doing it two weeks in a row, isn't it?

The team is on top of the case, to the point where Reid has already used Geographical Profiling to decide on a city where the killer lives. Except his basis for this is almost complete nonsense, and the Prentiss Award-Winning line of the night:



So he's only committing crimes along these two interstates, and that's the town the interstates meet at, but why would he necessarily live there? If there are no other interstates around, couldn't he simply live in a town off an exit anywhere within fifty miles of that intersection? Or is it inconceivable to the team that a serial killer would be able to drive an extra hour to find a victim?

Here's a little map I've made up - those are the five sites of the murders. All you can say for sure is that he likely lives somewhere between all of those dots. Obviously you'd want to guess that he most likely lives relatively close to where his first victim was found - but that wasn't one of the criteria offered by Reid when describing his calculations, so I don't know what they're basing this idea on. The highways he kills on converge at Albequerqe, NM - so why would they assume he was based not there, but in an exurb some 20 miles away?

So let's guess that they're completely right, and that's where the killer lives - will they get there in time to save his latest victim, who he's just picked up in a diner? Probably not, but let's find out together after the opening credits!

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Melissa McCarthy Edition!

Man, SNL has really cleaned up its act, hasn't it?

While this week's SNL wasn't high-quality by any means - basically every sketch revolved around Melissa McCarthy, as a consequence of being overweight, being physically repulsive. Kind of bleak and unpleasant, but avoiding the rape and homophobia-themed humour I find so profoundly unpleasant.

With no scores this week, let's just call it a day before I start talking about sexism!

Next week? Ben Stiller!

TheAvod's brave story of survival!

In a frustrating experience, DM and the myself accidentally deleted this week's Avod - that'll teach us to record in person. Also, there's the echo factor.

Luckily we had no planes (or lives), so it was a simple matter to re-record a second, better version just moments later! And that's the one you can enjoy downloading by using a simple right-click method just here.

Enjoy!

The Seventy-Second-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

This is the power of the perfect quip - the man knows exactly what to say even though his setup line was spoken while he was plummeting through the air fifty feet away. Also outside the closed building it was said within.

Tales From the Darkside 302: I Can't Help Saying Goodbye

Terrible Moments in Taglining: An American Werewolf in London: The Monster Movie

“From the director of Animal House... A different kind of animal.”


I can't even make a joke here. This is just depressing. You might has wall have taglined it: “We have no idea how to market a movie.”

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Dead Space: Aftermath Edition

I don't know why I'm surprised that two films in the same series would use the same terrible device, but here we are, ruining things again. At first, I thought the film was going to be clever, and show the actual 'Aftermath' of a Dead Space incident, seeing as things open with characters gathered in the heart of a spaceship, having recently resolved whatever it is their problem was.

At fist it seems like the movie is going to be about what happens next to all of these people - but that quickly gets tossed aside in favor of a structure where an interrogator asks them what happened in the plot of the film, and each one tells their own part of the story (each rendered in a different art style).

Which wouldn't be terrible except for two things:

1: We already know what happened in the story - everyone on the ship except for the four of them were killed, but they managed to destroy a thing that saved the day. This means that everything they do feels a little pointless, and every death a fait accomplit.

2: The 'everyone has a part of the story' thing is completely misused, and has no real value. The main action of the film features all four characters running around as a group, trying to accomplish goals. As a result, all four of them know everything that happened on the ship. They don't have their own 'parts' of the story, and there's no reason each one can't tell the whole thing, yet the movie is parceled out into four sections in chronological order for no good reason. Well, other than to have the framing device eat up running time.

That's the real kicker which makes the whole film so frustrating. The 'after the end' framing device removes all drama and surprise from the film, and replaces it with absolutely nothing. It's not like we need to be told that a 'rescue' from a situation like this isn't going to turn out well - all you have to do is watch Alien 3 - the guys from the corporation are never there to help. What makes the whole thing worse is that at the end of the very first flashback the villains lay it all out on the line - all they need are people who have touched the marker, everyone else is expendable. Since either fate is essentially death, just twenty minutes into the movie the last surprise has been sprung, and we can commence ignoring the thing.

Look, I know Palmiotti and Grey are overly fond of this device. To a fault. To like, seven faults. That doesn't mean that people working on the sequel to something they wrote have to use that same device. It didn't work there, why did you think it was going to work here?