I was already thinking I didn't want to look at that dead mammoth all weekend, and then I happened across the What Are You Watching? Horrorthon pre-game post. It's been a six months and I wonder what new entertainment you people have been sucking into your eyebones.
How about it? What's been hogging your screens, clogging your speakers or keeping your page-turning fingers busy? Speak up!
25 comments:
First, I want to say I've been digging how much chatter about The Walking Dead has been cooking, but I've stayed out of it until I catch up. Read 20-odd issues of the comic a while ago but I haven't seen the show.
Julie and I have been chugging Mad Men for months and caught up just a few weeks before season five started (two episodes so far). LOVE it. A great combo of smarts and drama and fun.
At the same time we started MM we also started Breaking Bad, but just like the BSG vs. Arrested Development face-off, one show won out.
We're in season 2 of Breaking Bad now and it's good stuff, but Julie likes it better. It's rewarding, but you have to go through some tension.
We also watch a lot of whatever channel has all those shows about owning and renovating houses. Income Property, Holmes on Homes, and the like. It's Julie watching them of course buy I can sit at my desk as they play behind me, and I find them pretty engaging.
I finished the Millenium Trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc.) early this year and tore through them all. It's really two stories (the second one two books long), and while I like them I thought they both upped the silly a bit far at the end.
I've been re-reading the comic book The Boys, one of my favorites of the last few years (65 issues so far). It's about a world in which corporate-sponsored superheroes party like rock stars and get away with anything, and The Boys are a small team of CIA-backed tough guys who get to covertly scare them into behaving. The title is six issues away from wrapping up and it kicks all kinds of ass.
I watched Red the other night, the one with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren playing retired CIA spooks. It was pretty cute. I recommend it but it won't change your life. It's also got Mary Louise Parker and Karl Urban, aka the new Dr. McCoy and Eomer from the Rings movies.
I've got John Woo's Face/Off from Netflix and the American Girl With The Dragon Tattoo coming tomorrow.
The last season of Archer was hilarious, but in the same way you want Charlie Brown to catch a break sometimes I started to feel bad for the team at ISIS.
I've gotten back into Aqua Teen Hunger Force repeats, of which there are many (and it's on at least six times a week).
Picked up Bob's Burgers when it came back, that's been fun, too.
I watched 29 episodes of Mad Men over the past 2 weeks. This is great stuff and all of you guys should be watching it. I'm in the middle of season 3 and I hope that the quality is maintained. I've also been working through all the Alfred Hitchcock Presents, love it! I love Bobs Burgers!
I just read the complete The Walking Dead and am, God help me, reading all 95 issues again. This followed on the heels of my reading the entire first ten years of The Amazing Spider-Man, from the explosive debut in 1963 all the way to the death of Gwen Stacy (regarded by many to be the official end of comics' "Silver Age"). I've also been reading Max Hasting's Inferno, a history of World War II. I continue to struggle with my chronic allergy to contemporary novels; I want to read them but I feel so out of sync with their methodology.
I've been watching Mad Men and Walking Dead (although my enthusiasm for TWD has paled significantly after I read the vastly-superior comics series. I chugged the previous season of Mad Men in order to prepare for the new (so far very intriguing) season.
I've caught up with last year's Oscar bait movies, having just watched Tinker Tailor about three times (the most recent with my parents, with whom I also watched the 1981 Alec Guinness television series). I also just saw Moneyball and Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, both of which were "very good" but not quite "great" (but both of which were evidence of just how good mainstream movies have gotten, intellectually, aesthetically and creatively; I can't believe we had to live through the Out of Africa/Moonstruck/Chariots of Fire/Fatal Attraction period). I was absolutely astounded by Rooney Mara's performance; I didn't see The Iron Lady but I absolutely refuse to believe that Meryl Streep did anything nearly as mind-blowing as Mara's spellbinding turn in Dragon Tattoo (her tiny role in The Social Network didn't come close to preparing me for her setting the screen on fire in her second Fincher-directed movie).
K and I are also doing the Breaking Bad/Mad Men thing right now. MM mostly. We're near the end of the 1st season, I think.
For comedies, The New Girl and Up All Night have been pretty decent. I've lost interest in 30 Rock, and gave up on Community a while ago, and Parks/Rec seems to be losing steam too. The Office, however, is kind of coming back around after some weak seasons (all that Jim/Pam boring shit).
We also got out to see The Hunger Games last night. I started reading the 2nd book late last night--Collins is a pretty mediocre stylist, but she knows pacing. (Kind of like Stieg Larsson, actually).
I also recently tore through the old BBC miniseries The Forsyte Saga. Let's blame Downton Abbey withdrawl. K had watched it during the original run, so I was able to crank through the 6 eps in a few nights.
Jordan, I added a question a bit late to the last thread in which you mentioned that Spider Man read-through, so I'll re-ask it here: Where'd you get your hands on Spidey 1-93?
Also, I meant to add that I just finished teaching Gore Vidal's novel "Creation" about a traveling courtier in the 5th century BC who meets and discusses the cosmos with Confucious, the Buddha, Socrates, and Zoroaster.
Comic books are routinely traded online in .cbr and .cbz formats. (I apologize if I'm insulting your intelligence by telling you stuff you already know.) These files are very easy to create because it's simply a question of 1) scanning the pages of a comic book (or anything else) into a bunch of numbered jpegs of each of the pages; 2) compressing those jpegs into a .zip or .rar archive; 3) renaming the file extensions from .zip to .cbz ("comic book .zip archive) or from .rar to .cbr ("comic book .rar archive) That's all there is to it. Then all you have to do is feed the resulting files into any of dozens of free "comic book reader" apps for Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android etc. It's great because all the clever coding is in the "reader" apps; the archives themselves are just routine, vanilla double-compressed .jpegs as I've described. Anyone can make them and they're all the same.
So, if you don't have compunctions about file-sharing, you can go look on bittorrent tracker sites and find thousands and thousands of comics to download in these universally-traded formats. It's routine for collectors to put together staggeringly-long runs of individual titles (like, all of "Daredevil" Vol. 1 when all you're looking for is Frank Miller's four dozen issues), or all of "Crisis on Infinite Earths" or what have you. Comic book collectors (unlike, say, people doing the same thing with music) are by their nature archival and detailed in their geek thinking and love to get these things right.
Another advantage of this kind of gray-market trading is that, unlike music .mp3s or rips of DVDs or HD movies, comic books in these formats (as opposed to, say, PDFs) are small (usually less than ten megabytes per individual issue). Sometimes you get everything including the ads and lettercol; sometimes you just get the 22 (or so) story pages. But it's just a 7 mb file; so you can load a thousand comic books onto your iPad and settle into an easy chair for an afternoon and go nuts. I can't even imagine what the stuff can look like on those new retina-screen iPads (since the scans people make are pretty high-res to begin with).
Excellent info. Thanks.
As a side point, it's better when you get all the ad pages ancillary material: not only do you get Stan Lee's ridiculous boasting every month about what "the mighty bullpen" is up to; you get all those incredible classic comic book ads that will drown you in nostalgia. All those Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs and "guy on the beach kicking sand" and the Joker stealing the Hostess Fruit Pies and balsa-wood planes and "sell GRIT" (to get the transistor radio or the baseball glove) and "have a career in electronics" and all that, and then (later) the Atari cartridges and "Bubblicious" pop-art panels and Mattel Electronics games. Just great, great stuff.
When the cops (after Batman's intervention) retrieve the Hostess™ Fruit Pies which the Joker has stolen, they ask the Joker why he didn't eat the pies himself. "Because I don't like them," the Joker replies, "proving" to the police that he "really is crazy!"
Ah yes, among all the alternate Earths in the DC Universe, "Earth Twinkie" is probably the most fun.
They got rid of all the "silly Earths" in the crisis, didn't they?
I don't think Earth Twinkie was ever canon, but they collapsed all the "real" multiple Earths into one during the events of Crisis. Then recently, they did it again, somehow having generated a bunch more Earths.
I just learned last night that DC rebooted everything about eight months ago, starting every single title over at #1, including the ancient Action Comics which was nearing the 1,000 issue mark. Apparently the reboots have been quite successful.
I should add that I've been enjoying the DC animated TV show Young Justice. The animated DC Universe somehow hits the awesome marks the live-action movies can't.
By which I mean Green Lantern and Superman Returns. Batman continues to wow.
Wow, I'm surprised you hadn't heard about the "new 52 Octo." I think they rebooted one book per week for the whole year, or something like that.
I picked up the new Batman #1 a few weeks back and thought it was pretty good.
You know, I was aware they were up to something, but I've been out of the DC loop for so long I didn't feel like paying attention.
I've become completely inured to all contemporary superhero comics. I can't even look at them. I can't stand the overprocessed art with all the gradients and effects -- I can't believe that such a ridiculously ornate and gimmicky style has become the standard appearance for all comic book art. At least the Image stuff from 20 years ago (the beginning of this disquieting trend) was at least recognizably still pen-and-ink art in the comic-book tradition. The new stuff is just awful-looking to me.
I got out a bunch of the various Crisis books from the library last year and tried to make sense of it. Gave up after not very long.
Landshark, it's completely insane. (Even by comic book standards, it's insane.)
They should have just done the Doonesbury/Grindhouse/Mad Men "Missing Reel" technique: just skip forward into whatever they wanted to end up with.
There is a kind of bizarre brilliance to it, though; the idea of retconning your entire fictional universe into something else, and doing it within the story. The closest example I can think of is the J. J. Abrams Star Trek movie (which was considerably more successful at the task).
I'm reading "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void" by Mary Roach, which I'm enjoying a lot. I'm too lazy to write a description but here's one from Amazon,
"Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? have sex? smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible for the human body to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles per hour? To answer these questions, space agencies set up all manner of quizzical and startlingly bizarre space simulations. As Mary Roach discovers, it’s possible to preview space without ever leaving Earth. From the space shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA’s new space capsule (cadaver filling in for astronaut), Roach takes us on a surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth."
odds that anyone is still reading this thread = 0
my tv isn't wired to get even basic network television, so the only show i'm watching night-of-release is Archer. i thought highly enough of the first two seasons to buy season 3 on iTunes. it's as strong as it ever was. quite possibly the most culturally savvy comedy ever written for television. there's not a single joke that doesn't pay off like crazy. the characters are all good ones, and there's a paradoxical camaraderie and chemistry between the characters, despite just about everyone suffering from a massive personality disorder of some kind.
never seen a funnier show.
me late to party 2.
still watching archer, 30 rock, life's too short, and season 4 of battlestar gallactica. will need a new, all-consuming tv addiction once done with bsg.
oh yeah and portlandia, it's uneven but fun.
Watch Mad Men!
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