BIG SCREEN
Star Trek (2 Spuds)
Wolverine-Origins (2 Spuds0
DVDs
Caprica (2 spuds)
TV SHOWS
A SHOUT OUT FOR SOUTHLAND
BOOKS…YEAH BOOKS
STUART WOODS
KNOW YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks
Well it looks like we’re quickly moving into the balmier days of spring. It’s supposed to go up to the low twenties today. Good days to get on the old Spudcycle and head downtown for whatever trumped up reason I can think of. Steaks at the St Lawrence Market. Paperbacks at ABC or the big Goodwill Store in Greenwin Place on Bloor. Hooking up with my friend Alex Stirling to talk about the web site he needs to do and some reference I have to give him so he can raise his ranking in the world of academia. Or you don’t really have to have any reason at all. Just get on and go.
What I like about where I live, on the east side, is that it’s real easy to get almost anywhere I’d want to go on a bike. I can get up to the good cheap fruit stores on the Danforth, by going up Greenwood (the shortest hill). I can get anywhere downtown along Gerrard, Dundas or Queen. I can get way downtown on the Lakeshore bike trail. And once I’m on the bike path I can go just about anywhere I like, as long as I am prepared for a hefty climb at the end.
This city is good for bike traveling. What really surprises me the most is that there are so few people on bikes. Maybe it’s because there are so many fashion victims here who just don’t want to ruin their designer togs by riding in to work. No they’d rather putter around wasting gas and spending a fortune on parking. I think North America, and maybe just the eastern part, is the last holdout of the dress for successors. Power ties. Designer suits…it’s all pretty sad for the most part. Especially when these people could be out enjoying the great weather (which we get so little of ). Oh well, it’s their loss.
I’m heading out this morning to take the Wife’s computer into the show for a diagnostic. It’s been acting very badly since she installed a program called Parallels, which allows her to run Windows on her Mac. Since then the computer has been crashing all the time and doing all kinds of other strange stuff. Usually I can figure out what’s wrong and fix it. But this time I’m stumped.
AT THE MOVIES (UH HUH)
With a top notch home theatre system and a basic adversity to being in dark rooms with large crowds of humans, it takes a lot of get me down to the cinema. But by the same tokenthe summer blockbuster season has started and no self-respecting spud would go through it without at least checking out a couple of the must-see-on-the-big-screens.
STAR TREK (2 XL SPUDS)
Over the years, I have been a highly devoted fan of Star Stek. From Sunday mornings with my pal Keith Butler at the first apartment the Wife and I lived in at Avenue Road & 401, till last Sunday at the Beaches Cinema, Star Trek, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and all the movies were something I never missed.
So when I heard, early last year, that JJ Abrams (the new Steve Spielberg) was taking a crack at it, I thought, OK…this should be something to see up big and bold. And I’ll tell you right now, I was not disappointed.
This Star Trek concerns itself mainly with the first voyage of the Enterprise, with James Kirk and the crew all fresh out of Star Fleet Academy and loaded for bear. It also reveals a few things that weren’t previously known, which I found fascinating literary license on the part of JJ.
Now besides having a great story to tell, and the introduction of the characters for the first time, this movie is a lot less stylized and iconoclastic that any of the other Star Trek movies which preceded it. This movie is much more a a fly by the seat of your pants adventure. It’s much more visceral and lively. The characters are in much more danger most of the time and there is a real ruthlessness to the way the characters approach their roles. This of course is mainly the result of brilliant direction by a guy who knows how to tell a story, how to choreograph action and best of all, how to keep everything from becoming too serious. I mean, hey…it’s a movie after all.
I saw half hour doc on the making of this movie on the Space Channel. I guess they were playing to the ST Nerds out there, by trying to explain that they worked very hard to maintain the historical accuracy, which is completely absurd when you think about it. I mean…it’s a fictional world already, you can get over all that…or maybe not because the Nerds write the blogs and the blogs influence the wanna be nerds and that could add up to a lot of box office revenue. Kinda sucks but that’s the way it is.
For the rest of us, Star Trek is just a cracking good adventure story with characters we remember fondly, well represented by a new generation of actors who are not trying to parody those character, but actually be younger versions of them. It’s also, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of another great movie franchise, as well as another gaudy peacock feather in the cap of the prodigious Mr JJ Abrams, as he moves steadily to the top of the movie maker food chain. I will go see anything this dude has anything to do with.
DVDs
X MEN ORIGINS – WOLVERINE
It’s 4:30 on a Friday. The Wife and I are sharing the theatre with 4 other people but they are way behind us, so it feels like an absolutely private screening, complete with an annoying series of crappy commercials (whatever happened to creative cinema advertising?) and about half a dozen previews, mostly for animated flicks, the movie mercifully appeared.
This movie, like Star Trek starts at the very beginning of the Wolverine’s life, which was way back in the mid 1800. I can’t tell you too much more than that about the story without being a pain in the ass spoiler, so I won’t.
What I will tell you is that this movie is a lot more rough and tumble and grittier than the three X-Men movies which preceded it. And that makes sense, because Wolverine’s (long) life has mainly been about violence and killing in one way or another.
Hugh Jackman, currently the world sexiest man (duh, I thought that was me), is his usual snarling self, Up for any kind of battle, also way more than happy to rip your guts out if you’re a bad guy Yadda Yadda.
This movie, like Star Trek, just rattles along at a pretty breakneck pace. There’s a hell of a lot of good pyrotechnics and mutant characters who are really interesting. If you have watched any of the X-Men movies, you probably already know who the enemy is, and of course, it’s delightfully set up for a sequel at the end, and I mean, the very end after all the credits have rolled. So stick around already.
I like the X-Men. I like anything that takes me out of the reality of life, and this movie certainly does its bit to achieve that end. Good stuff. Not as good as Star Trek, which is great stuff. But two spuds all the same.
TV
CAPRICA (2 SPUDS)
The Boy is a big fan of Battlestar Gallactica. Myself, I’m more an admirer. I was into the first series back in the 90s, but the latest run (03 to 08) not so much. There’s no denying it’s power, however, and the loyalty of its audience. If you don’t know the core story, it’s really about a race of robots that were created by men. They were called Cylons, and as robots often do in sci-fi, they kept getting smarter and more uppity until they finally ended up declaring war on mankind. So basically Battlestar Gallactica, at least in its most recent iteration, is really all about fighting the Cylons.
Caprica is a two hour TV movie created by the Battlestar Gallactica people to shed a little light on just where the dreaded Cylons came from. It’s actually an early release pilot episode for a series that will be starting in the fall, that will chronicle the rise of the Cylons from their inception, which took place on a planet called, you guessed it, Caprica.
In Caprica, trusty Bruce Greenwood, TVs fair haired mad scientist, plays a robotics mogul who inadvertently invents the Cylons as part of a government funded project to develop smart robotic soldiers. I won’t tell you how he does it, because it’s insanely clever sci-fi. But the BG people are all about the sci-fi and this movie nabbed me right from the get go.
One of the interesting things about word in which this show takes place is that it is divided along theistic lines, much like out world is now. But it’s not so much about specific religions, but specific belief systems.
Caprica is well funded, very slick sci-fi entertainment that will undoubtedly capture a solid audience, which includes me. The Wife, not so much. But hey, differences of opinion are what make horse races.
SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE (2 XL SPUDS)
This is, bar none, the most entertaining show on TV at this time of year. It’s going into its fifth season and it has probably done more for the world of dance than A Chrous Line’s hundred year run on Broadway.
This show epitomizes everything that great TV should be. Great to look at, fun, interesting, emotional and powerful. This is absolutely must see TV around Spud Central right up to September when the winner is decided. But unlike most of these elimination contest shows, this show isn’t really about the winners at all. It’s about the tryers. Getting there really is all the fun on this show. The kinds who make it through the auditions, which have just wrapped up, go to Las Vegas where they compete for 20 places on the show. But at that point, everybody, no matter what, is a winner. They are going to get to work with the best choreographers in the business, get a crash course in just about every style of dance, and get to push themselves way beyond any limits they may have thought they had.
The net effect for them is amazing, just as it is for all of us watching.
I don’t care about the mechanics of the show, I don’t care who wins or loses, or who gets eliminated, although the wife and I have loads of fun speculating, or even who is left standing at the end. Nope…all we care about it the journey. In a weird way, it kind of bolsters your faith in human nature and makes you feel good about the generation of people coming up in the art. The people who make it through to the contest are not just amazingly talented, they are also fanatically dedicated and extremely strong. Because this show pushes its contestants to the limits. And unlike the nasty crap that goes on with evil shit like Survivor and Big Brother et al, this show is all about supporting your fellow competitors.
Like I said, perfect TV. If you’re not watching this all summer, you are really missing something special.
A SHOUT OUT FOR SOUTHLAND
I wasn’t really sure about this series when it first hit the air. Thought it was a little to broadly based. I guess maybe I had forgotten just how much I liked Hill Street Blues. This series is getting better and better.
BOOKS…YEAH BOOKS
STUART WOODS
I’ve probably been reading Stuart Woods for as long as I have been reading any author outside of Elmore Leonard. I like his work because it is deceptively simple. And he always tends to write from the point of view of the character, which is something I have personally always preferred. Stuart wrote a bunch of books early on that were about a bunch of different characters. Then he started writing a bunch of books about a few character and then started tying them all together. It’s pretty cool the way that works.
I personally prefer the Stone Barrington series, which also involves Holly Barker and tend to be more about espionage than everyday crime.
The best thing about Stuart Woods is how amazingly readable his books are and how ingenious he can actually be without really jumping through a lot of literary hoops to do it.
Stuart Woods Bookography
Chiefs (1981)
Run Before the Wind (1983)
Deep Lie (1986)
Under the Lake (1987)
White Cargo (1988)
Grass Roots (1989)
Palindrome (1990)
New York Dead (1991)
Santa Fe Rules (1992)
L.A. Times (1993)
Dead Eyes (1994)
Heat (1994)
Imperfect Strangers (1995)
Choke (1995)
Dirt (1996)
Dead in the Water (1997)
Orchid Beach (1998)
Swimming to Catalina (1998)
Worst Fears Realized (1999)
The Run (2000)
L.A. Dead (2000)
Cold Paradise (2001)
Orchid Blues (2001)
Short Forever, the (2001)
Blood Orchid (2002)
Dirty Work (2003)
Capital Crimes (2003)
Reckless Abandon (2004)
Prince of Beverly Hills, the (2004)
Two-Dollar Bill (2005)
Dark Harbor (2006)
Short Straw (2006)
Fresh Disasters (2007)
Shoot Him If He Runs (2007)
Santa Fe Dead (2008)
Hot Mahogany (2008)
SPORTSPUDITORIAL
RIP Denver Nuggets. Nobody would have believed you would have gone this far, cause nobody really took you seriously. Guess you showed them. And hey, there’s always next year.
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http://twitter.com/jimbobmur
