Archive: Posts from July, 2009
July 21st, 2009, 19 Comments »
The other day, I watched two-part finale to season eight of Scrubs, cleverly entitled “My Finale, Part 1 and 2″. I assumed–and the episodes did nothing to dissuade me–that these were also the series finale. The final show was packed with the usual goodbyes and sentimentality that you expect from such last episodes. You can watch the last few minutes on YouTube.
As it turns out, there will apparently be another season of the quirky medical show. Wikipedia offers this explanation:
On June 19, 2009, it was announced that the reformatted ninth season of Scrubs would “shift from the hospital to the classroom and make med-school professors of John C. McGinley’s Dr. Cox and Donald Faison’s Turk.” According to Lawrence, the ninth season will “be a lot like Paper Chase as a comedy,” with Cox’s and Turk’s students occasionally rotating through the halls of Sacred Heart and encountering former series regulars.
The other leads, Zack Braff and Sarah Chalke, have apparently signed on for guest appearances in six episodes each.
Regardless, Scrubs got me thinking about other final episodes that I remember. There actually aren’t that many:
- I remember the final episode of M*A*S*H as a particular sobfest. “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”, as it happens, is still the most watched American television broadcast in history.
- Cheers had a really classy ending, with Sam adjusting a photo of Geronimo near the piano, which has been on the set since Coach’s (Nicholas Colasanto) death.
- I only vaguely recall the final episode of Buffy, which, in truth, felt a little rushed and (typically, I’d say) quite unsentimental.
- In talking about TV finales with others, I remembered that the cast of Family Ties took a curtain call at the end of their final episode, which was a nice touch.
Like everything else on the planet (and beyond), there’s a website dedicated to TV finales.
What are your favourite (or least favourite) last episodes?
19 Comments »
July 21st, 2009, 12 Comments »
District 9 is a star-free, rather original looking science fiction movie being released (ominously) in August, 2009. While watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yesterday, I visited the washroom. Here’s what I saw on the door:
I haven’t gotten around to calling the number listed at the bottom of the sign, but I’ll do so and report back on what I hear.
What’s ingenious is the poster’s location. It’s the rare bit of unused real estate at the cinema. The only downside is that if you’re like me, and going to the bathroom during a film, you’re unlikely to stop and read the poster.
Wikipedia shows a similar billboard version of this poster in Toronto. The associated article has a write-up on other aspects of the film’s marketing campaign.
12 Comments »
July 20th, 2009, 5 Comments »
Yesterday I saw the sixth film in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the The Half-Blood Prince. It’s the first of the movies that I’d call “quite good”. We’re watching the cast mature on-screen, and the audience is getting older too. As a result, movies seem to be getting more interesting.
The young leads are much better actors than they were eight years ago. They’ve earned some confidence and chemistry onscreen that makes them much more watchable. Given the series’ success, the producers took a huge casting gamble. Any three actors would be a gamble, it just happened that these turned out without:
- Looking hideous
- Engaging in a crippling public scandal (drug addiction, sex change operation and so forth)
- Quitting acting for a quieter life
As a producer, the only casting decision I’d regret is Bonnie Wright as Ginny Weasley. She’s pretty plain, in both performance and appearance. In light of the international cadre of Hogwarts honeys giving him the doe eyes, one finds oneself asking what Harry sees in Ginny. The producers might be forgiven, as they probably cast her in 1999 or 2000. According to Wikipedia, only three or four books had been published, so they may not have had much insight into Ginny’s importance to the later films.
The addition of the superb Jim Broadbent is also a treat. I was recently remarking on how difficult it is to convincingly act drunk, and he does an exquisite job in one scene.
Which reminds me of the underlying drugs-and-alcohol motif of this movie. Everybody seems to be constantly high on this potion or drunk on that brew–it’s like Dazed and Confused with wands and robes. Harry Pothead, indeed.
The Half-Blood Prince manages to avoid a lot of the irksome ruts of the earlier movies. They were often a combination of Choose Your Own Adventure and a Cast of Wand-Wielding Thousands, neither of which made for natural pacing or easy watching for those who haven’t read the books. The film’s opening moments really grab you in a very unexpected way. Plus, this movie is less married to the standard year-at-Hogwarts structure–the action goes off the reservation in a satisfying way. For a change, the special effects feel streamlined and underplayed. I even found the Quidditch scene to be happily brief and kind percussive.
I even enjoyed the teen romance. It’s refreshing, in light of how chaste the previous movies were. After all, these are a bunch of teenagers living away from home.
The movie isn’t without its flaws. No director has worked out how to really sell the wand-to-wand combat scenes, which always come off as goofy Latin shouting matches. Plus, at 153 minutes, it’s pretty long and drags here and there.
Director David Yates is apparently signed on for the remaining two films, and the franchise feels like it’s in sound hands. I was listening to the Slate Spoiler Special podcast (I tried finding a home page for that badboy, but no joy) for his film, and guest Dan Kois aptly refers to the next film as “Harry, Hermione and Ron Go Camping Forever”, so Yates will have those hands full.
Ranking The Latest Movie
I have a poor memory of the Harry Potter movies, but I feel like this is the best of them. I thought I’d hit up a couple of review aggregation sites, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, to see how they thought this movie stood up. In both cases, the films are rated out of 100.
| Movie |
MC |
RT |
| Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) |
64 |
78 |
| Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) |
63 |
82 |
| Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) |
81 |
89 |
| Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) |
81 |
88 |
| Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) |
71 |
77 |
| Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) |
78 |
84 |
Like I said, I can’t remember them well enough to assign more than a vague order. I’d say the first movie was definitely the worst, but after that I’m a bit lost.
Speaking of teen romance, I saw the trailer for the second Twilight movie. I don’t know about the movie, but the trailer is an incomprehensible hack job. I’ve seen the first movie, and I was still kind of lost. And, surprise, surprise, there’s a werewolf.
5 Comments »
July 19th, 2009, 1 Comment »
Just a mini link round-up, as there’s a few items I’ve been meaning to mention:
- Rebecca, along with about 25 other local bloggers, is participating in a Blogathon on July 25. It’s “24 hours of blogging every 30 minutes for a cause”. An excellent idea, and had I a more formidable constitution (and time to recover), I’d do it too. I’ll just have to satisfy myself with donating to the cause. You should, too.
- The Canada West Coast chapter of the Society for Technical Communication–I used to be a member–its annual Technical Publications Competition. I wonder what I have that I could submit in the ‘Technical Art’ category?
- Capulet is currently a cog in the giant advocacy machine that is TckTckTck. More on that later, but in the meantime, they’re hiring for a blogger/online campaigner role. It would be a kick-ass job for the next six months.
1 Comment »
July 16th, 2009, No Comments »
We’re doing some work with Porto Cupecoy, a luxury ‘marina village’ resort on St. Martin in the Caribbean. Well, technically it’s on Sint Maarten, the Dutch half of the island.
At the moment, they’re running a fairly awesome contest, and it’s dead simple to enter:
In 140 characters or less on Twitter tell us why you really need a week in the lap of luxury at the Porto Cupecoy luxury resort and marina village on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean. Be sure to start your tweet with ” Dear @pcupecoy” so we can find it.
Don’t tweet? If you tell us on your blog why you need a Porto Cupecoy vacation (just include a link to http://www.portocupecoy.com and we’ll find you) you’ll be entered into the draw too. You can both blog and tweet for two chances to win!
Prize
The prize includes:
- Round trip airfare for two from US, Canada, or Caribbean (up to $2000)
- One week accommodation for two at Porto Cupecoy during 2010
- One water sports activity to be coordinated through Porto Cupecoy (up to $250)
Porto Cupecoy is on Facebook and Twitter, if you’re so inclined.
No Comments »
July 16th, 2009, 5 Comments »
Yesterday I posted a link to an NPR segment on MetaFilter. It’s some kind of quiz shtick called “Not My Job” and features, hilariously, Neko Case talking about Necco wafers. I read about it on Kennedy’s blog. I figured that Ms. Case was, as one commenter put it, “precisely calibrated for the MetaFilter demographics.”
I learned that this “Not My Job” segment, on a show called “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, is quite popular, and has featured all sorts of celebrities. Another MetaFilter commenter remarked on a previous piece with sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, where she remarked that, in her youth, she’d been a sniper in the Israeli army. Could that be true? Apparently.
“When I was in my routine training for the Israeli army as a teenager, they discovered completely by chance that I was a lethal sniper. I could hit the target smack in the center further away than anyone could believe. Not just that, even though I was tiny and not even much of an athlete, I was incredibly accurate throwing hand grenades too. Even today I can load a Sten automatic rifle in a single minute, blindfolded.”
I’d like to see her load that rifle.
5 Comments »
July 15th, 2009, 2 Comments »
In the June 22 issue of The New Yorker, there’s a terrific profile of the romance (and futuristic science fiction police procedurals) novelist Nora Roberts. I knew she was a big deal in the publishing industry, but I had no idea how big. She’s truly a force to be reckoned with.
Unfortunately the article isn’t available online (but here’s an interview with Lauren Collins, who wrote it), but here are a few facts that illustrate her industry oomph:
- She’s written 182 books.
- In a typical year, she writes eight books.
- There are allegedly enough Nora Roberts books in print to fill Giants Stadium 4000 times.
- She estimates that the average book takes her 45 working days to write. She writes six to eight hours a day.
- Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books are sold every minute.
- She wrote three of the top ten best-selling mass-market books of 2008.
- In 2008, she sold 18 million books.
- Forbes estimated that, in 2004, she grossed $60 million, more than John Grisham or Stephen King.
The article also has some unsurprising facts about the romance novel genre. It generated $1.4 billion in sales in 2007, more than any other genre (and more than science fiction and fantasy combined).
2 Comments »
July 14th, 2009, 2 Comments »
More movie reviews to add to my big list of every movie I see in 2009:
The Hangover – 6/10 – A goofball comedy that’s part “Dude, Where’s Your Car?” and part “Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle”. It’s reasonably funny, and Zach Galifianakis feels kind of original, but that’s all it really is. Don’t miss Galifianakis’s utterly weird web videos Between Two Ferns.
Year One – 4/10 – I expected a little more from Harold Ramis, but this is a banal movie trading on a bunch of Old Testament stories. Jack Black and Michael Cera are watchable, but they essentially shuffle from one unoriginal set piece to another. Watching the movie, I felt like I’d seen all the schtick before.
Easy Virtue – 5.5/10 – A glowing example, I think, of a poorly-directed film. There’s the nut of a lovely period film here, but the script (co-written by director Stephan Elliot) really needed some more help and a different director at the helm. Jessica Biel is incredibly easy on the eyes, but she’s only an average actor, and wasn’t quite right for the lead role. Neither was Ben Barnes who played opposite her. Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth were, of course, superb, but the movie was poorly paced, laughably predictable and ultimately disappointing.
Public Enemies – 7/10 – I was recently listening to a Slate Cultural Gabfest in which they discussed this movie. Slate film critic Dana Stevens pointed out that the various component parts of the film were enjoyable, but it was lacking the ‘mortar of goodness’ that would make it a better film. I’d definitely agree–I found it enjoyable but a little soulless. I really don’t care for Michael Mann’s murky, naturalistic visual and audio aesthetic. I find it distracting, particularly in a period piece.
2 Comments »
