Best Potter Movie Yet?

Yup, I am a dorky-ass Harry Potter Fanatic. Last night we went to see the Half Blood Prince and we arrived a half hour early thinking it was pretty early. Not so much. The line to get into the theater was out the door and beginning to round the block when we arrived. By the time we got in the best seats we could find were in the fourth row. But we did not care (hell it was like a bootleg IMAX). The whole audience was ravenous for some Potter!!!

The movie, in my opinion, is the best Potter movie yet. Adaptation-wise, there were definite ommisions (some good, some bad) and additions (most of which were good), but for three distinct reasons the movie worked:

CAST/ACTING: The three leads (Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson) have all grown leaps and bounds as actors. They are so much more natural and you can see their natural comraderie that only comes from working with one another for years. The supporting cast is amazing as always. The new addition of Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn was perfection.

HUMOR: This is by far the funniest of the Potter flicks. If I am not mistaken, some of the cheeky lines that got the biggest laughs were not even from the books. The screenwriters should be commended. Slughorn and Luna have some of the juciest comic bits, but teenagers in love/lust are funny enough on their own.

MATERIAL: After rereading the last couple books, although I have strong feelings for Goblet of Fire, Half Blood Prince is the best of the series. It strikes a wonderful balance of mystery, humor, dread, hormones and sadness.

If you aren't a dorky-ass Potter fan I really think you will still enjoy this movie. I think I will be giving it a repeat viewing in the theater myself. If anything, this movie has gotten me out of my Twilight stupor. Go Potter!!

Watchmen: Alan Moore speaks!

Alan Moore is a legend. He is also reclusive, antisocial and batshit insane. So when he concedes a long, long interview to Wired, you all must read it, and worship the master.

This dude wrote V for Vendetta, Watchmen, the Swamp Thing, From Hell and a ton of cool stuff. He is not just a nerd-god, he is a hell of a writer. No one yet* has been able to translate his work into film well, so do yourself a favor and grab one of his books and enjoy it.

*No, I haven't seen Watchmen yet. Should I go to a midnight showing? Dilemma. In any case, I still believe it is an impossible film; the only way to do it justice (and I am not sure it would work either) would be a 12-episode, 12-hour miniseries.

"I am become death, the destroyer of shows"

I am Shiva, destroyer of shows. I am become death. As soon as writing a post on the criminally underrated "Life on Mars" (US version) crossed my mind, ABC immediately nuked it. Obliterated it. Vaporized it. Eviscerated it. Crunched it. Blasted it to the proverbial smithereens. Canceled it for ever and ever.

A damn shame, I might add. "Life on Mars" was a very good show on the path of becoming truly excellent; a wonderful take on a -supposedly awesome; I haven't seen it- BBC series of the same name. The premise was really clever (a 2008 cop gets transported to the 1970s) and the show was using it well; it was funny, interesting and as the characters were allowed to develop, more and more revealing and layered.

I guess it was not doing well in the ratings. Actually, it was doing fairly well (not stellar, but decent) up to late November, when ABC put the show on hiatus and left it of the air for a cool two and a half months; then the ratings sucked. Playing it on Wednesdays at 10 pm was sorta dumb as well; "Lost" hasn't been the best lead in show for ABC (fans are too busy hitting the interwebs after an episode to pay attention). Of course, it was specially dumb to change the show's slot on the first place, but that's besides the point.

So ABC has a procedural with a clever twist, killer cast, amazing visuals, fun concept and good writing and -my guess- high budget, and they manage to kill it. Congratulations. That's the second show that I like that you guys fuck up before it goes anywhere; "Pushing Daisies" broke my heart. Don't expect me to trust you with another series for awhile.

God loves Nick Fury

For those that watch comic book movies with the right level of nerd adoration, the Samuel L. Jackson cameo in Ironman playing Nick Fury was like a gift from the gods of Valhalla. Marvel comics retconned and redraw Fury to look like Sam L. Jackson. For some reason, Samuel L. Jackson was chickening out on playing him on new movies, to the dismay of the fans.

Until now, that is. He is in. He is going to be Nick Fury. All is right in the world.

Workship primer: Watchmen

Just a quick note: get ready for some messy drooling coming this way in the upcoming weeks. Watchmen, the Hamlet, Citizen Kane and Don Quixote of comic books all rolled into one, is finally getting its movie adaptation, and I can´t fucking wait to watch it.

Not that I expect it to be a great film, mind you. Even with a running time of 2h 40 minutes, Watchmen is dense the same way a season of Lost is dense; it has a ton of background, flashbacks, details and minimalistic clues in every page. After all, Lost owes its structure to Watchmen a great deal. To make things worse, the dialogue is much more elaborate and literary than any TV show out there, so I don´t really know how they will get the whole thing to squeeze in a single movie.

I will write more on Watchmen in the coming weeks; it is, after all, one of my favorite books of all time. It is not just a graphic novel, that´s for sure; its influence goes well beyond the geek ghetto of comics. One could write books just about Rorschach, after all. More soon.

That was not funny

That was not a funny movie at all, really. The tittle is really misleading. "Funny Games", though, the Michael Haneke remake of the really disturbing Michael Haneke movie of the same name (yup, odd) is one of the most disturbing, wacked out, crazy, opressive scary slasher movies I´ve seen in ages.

Many ridiculously awesome thinks going on in this movie. First, despite being an oppressive psychological slasher, it is really not too violent -or at least, does not display any of the violence on camera. That old adage that it is most disturbing to force the viewer to imagine what is going on instead of showing the blood and guts is completely true here.

Second, Michael Pitt. The highest level of praise for this guy; it made me think that if some hopeless individual is to play the Joker after Heath Ledger, he is probably one of the very actors that could pull of that level of creepy in a convincing fashion. He is smooth, polite, uppity and just terrifying.

Third, something that is a bit odd, but I think it works well. The movie (Pitt´s character, actually) breaks the fourth wall a few times during the movie, looking to the camera and making snarky coments to you, the viewer. The breaks are always very short, but masterfuly placed; they basically get inserted in really tense, really dramatic, really uncorfortable moments, and -for me at least- they only make the scene even more painful.

Is it better than the original? To tell the truth, I don´t know. I haven´t seen it. I have seen many Haneke movies (a director that has a penchant for inflicting painful amounts of suffering and distress to characters and spectators alike), but I missed Funny Games. For what I´ve read, the remake is pretty damn close to the original, and after all the "fun" I had watching this one (tremors, uncontrolable shaking, crazy panic attacks) I will pass. At least for awhile.

"He is one lab accident away from becoming a supervillain"

The above quote comes to one of the most tragically underrated sitcoms in TV, the nerdtastic (and really, really, really, really funny) Big Bang Theory. The set up is quite conventional, with four hopeless nerds playing the crazy role with a slightly dumb blonde as straight woman, but the execution is pretty much flawless.

For starters, the nerds are strangely realistic. Although they are a hard-science, physics and stuff brand of nerds and thus come from a different origin than a social science, statistics and game theory nerd like myself, they definetely speak the language of geekdom fluently. The writers are definetely members of the tribe that understand that playing Rock Band is simply awesome, speaking Klingon is fun (although in my nerd-clan we only had two Sindarin speakers -yup, LOTR elvish) and robots -speacially killer robots- are just cool.

What really makes the show, however, is Sheldon. Sheldon is the father of all nerds; the one nerd to rule them all. Socially akward, incredibly intelligent, ridicolously petty and able to break down in tears at the sight of the napkin of Leonard Nimoy, Jim Parsons makes his character one of my most beloved TV heroes; the nerd that I always aspired to be but never had the balls (or the insanity) to become.

To top that, so far the creators have been really good at keeping history archs tight (they avoided turning the show to one of those endless on and off romances) and they have kept the screen time for each character well balanced, without anyone really hogging the spotlight too much.

This is coming from someone that really though that multiple camera sitcoms were dead to me, by the way. Big Bang Theory and the (even better) How I Met Your Mother proved me wrong.

The best show in TV: Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica is the best show in TV right now. Period.

Wait a second. Sit down. It is not my geek side taking over the good taste and snobbery circuits of my brain, clouding my good judgment at the sight of awesome spaceships and Tricia Helfer. When I say that a show is really that good I mean it; spaceships and murderous sexy robots that like to have hot robot sex with humans aside, Galactica (2K version) it is a fantastic show.

The show shares basically two things with its 1970s predecessor: the premise (last vestiges of the human race on the run after almost completely annihilated by Cylons) and some of the character names. Besides that, it is a completely different show; dark, brooding, gritty, intense and just plain awesome.

It is one of those rare cases that you see a show begin with a good idea and push it way beyond you could ever imagine; Galactica has seen episodes dealing with patriotism, balancing freedom and security, faith, torture, treason, politics, duty, trade unions, trust, friendship, love and pretty much anything you can imagine. The characters in Galactica are not "good" or "bad" they are real, frail, weak human beings / awesomely hot robots trying to cope with unthinkable horrors and very hard choices, and trying to do their best when dealing with them. Treason, failure, fear, heroism, fanaticism, anger, faith is not just a matter of doing the right thing or failing; what is a right and what is wrong is sometimes very hard to say.

I don't want to spoil any plotlines (see bellow), but when a trial against a major character had me seriously having doubts and making me reconsider what treason is and what it means you know a show is into something.

It is actually pretty unbelievable that a show this good has been so ignored come award season. As usual, pointy headed critics are too serious and deep to even come to consider a SciFi / genre show for anything besides visual effects (see also: The Dark Knight Returns, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), something that seriously drives me nuts.

Believe me, I know a good show when I see it. I workship all the right altars. I am one of the cool kids. And Galactica is up there with the Sopranos, the Wire, Mad Men, the West Wing and whatever high brown show of your choice in terms of sheer awesome.

Deep, brief thought

Kristen Wiig is the best thing that has happened to Saturday Night Live since... well, in a long time.

I have a bit of a crush on her.

A little bit.