What I’ve been up to (hint: all I do is consume media)
May 28, 2007
So I exhausted my netflix discs right before the holiday weekend, and I finished my book (“Kitchen Confidential” is sort of poorly written, but the content is so good that it hardly matters—it’s an interesting complement to Ruhlman’s corpus), and I’m all caught up on rss/livejournal stuff. And there has been almost no news (not even SPORTS news) in the last few days. So yesterday I went to Best Buy to buy a season of some TV show on DVD. I was planning on going for a comedy but they had the first two seasons of Veronica Mars on sale ($20 each) and certain internet pals of mine have been extolling the virtues of this show for years, so I decided to take a plunge and go for it.
And guess what—it is really pretty good. It has its cheesy moments, and it is a little too excited to reference the obvious cultural influences (Nancy Drew, Raymond Chandler—and I assume Buffy will get referenced at some point), but for the most part the acting is good and the writing is deft, both in terms of scenes/dialogue and in terms of multiple episode plot arcs). I’ve watched the first 8 episodes and I like where it’s going so far. Also, I’m very impressed with the music, which is low-key (i.e. it’s not like the OC, where every episode was a launching pad for some indie band) but very good.
Naturally it was cancelled (I think—although I guess there’s some small chance that it will be uncancelled), but I’ve still got quite a few hours of it left to watch and enjoy.
And while we’re here, I might as well tell you: the new Pirates of the Caribbean was thoroughly mediocre. Depp was funny, as always, but between Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley there’s all the personality of a manilla envelope filled with tax forms. The plot was somewhere between “wacky” and “incoherent,” trending towards the latter. The special effects were pretty neat (it’s worth seeing on a big screen, probably, just for some of the sea battle effects). Overall, I give it 4 out of 7 sins. On the plus side, the ending indicated that if they decide to cash in with yet another sequel, Orlando and Keira will not be central characters.
Also, I’m pretty confident that Transformers will be the mindless spectacle of the season!
Posted in Movies, Television, Writing
Creative Commons
May 28th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
You are a Jacob-come-lately on Veronica Mars. The first season may be the most well-made season of TV ever (and I mean that in the literary sense). Stop there if you want a perfect memory of it all. The second season has all the trappings of a very good sequel without ever quite giving you the sense that any of it was planned from the beginning. The third season rivals The Matrix Revolutions in its calamity, and the cancellation was well deserved in light of it.
Welcome back to DC. We shall convene at some point.
June 2nd, 2007 at 6:55 pm
i was just a bar with two prep cooks last night and referred to the bit in kitchen confidential when he talks about brunch. It ain’t literature, but it is a wonderful read.