I’ll try to keep the internal narrative to a minimum…

As the presumed recipient of a little recent advice about some unlooked for free time, I am trying to push forward and find some lemonade or maybe even a decent margarita.

Slightly related sidebar: There are a surprising number of categories on this blog about my somewhat erratic posting schedule

In my initial attempt to use up some of this free time, and the completion of the annual WRN never-in-one-place rendezvous — details as they are scrubbed free of any information that might out anyone’s jealously guarded cover IDs and memories float up from the blur of activity, allow me to describe the preview screening I saw last night.

A friend managed to get tickets to a preview screening of Monsters vs. Aliens (MvA) last night and agreed to share them with me if I would go sit in line so we could get decent seats. First off, I have to say the new polarized 3D glasses strike me as much better than the older options. Secondly, it’s been a long time since I have seen another 3D movie so the only thing I remember about them (and this may be wrong) was that the 3D experience was much more specific. Namely, that only certain items at certain times were really presented in 3D. With those caveats in place, I have to say that the 3D in this movie really impressed me. It was much more pervasive than I expected and it was done quite well.

Unrelated sidebar: I just watched the “Ultimate Game” episode of Dollhouse while procrastinating during the writing of this post and I was scared to realize that we already have a “Joss Whedon” tag and “Hunting the Ultimate Game”

Overall, I liked this movie. I am pretty much the target audience for the film. It has an inordinate amount of San Francisco scenes and includes voice acting from Will Arnett and Stephen Colbert, two of my favorite actors/comedians. I will admit that the film may be a little to California-centric. Set in Modesto and San Francisco with prominent mentions of the new Peoria, a.k.a Fresno, it really plays to those roots. It does feature a line that I think may well replace “by Grabthar’s Hammer” in my personal lexicon for at least the next six months but I am trying my hardest to refrain from uttering it for at least another week.

My largest annoyance stemmed from the fact that this is a family movie. A four-year-old kid behind spent about fifteen minutes of the movie throwing popcorn at me. That hindered my enjoyment and replaced the fact that it was pretty fun to sit through the first few minutes of the movie where they show-off the 3D magic and the kids gasp as asteroids and comets come ever closer.

The movie doesn’t quite approach the Pixar magic where every scene has some little hidden jewel but instead it feels like the dialogue tries to fill that role and almost every line is a reference to some other cultural moment — E.T., Godzilla, Arrested Development, possibly Peter Gunn — and the possibility for dissecting the dialogue and looking for other little buried treasure references to places in the Bay Area makes me far more likely to go see this movie again than I might expect.

To summarize, go see this movie if you want to see the sci-fi, kid-friendly version of Superbad. In fact, that is a good relation to my feelings for this movie. It has flaws; I wouldn’t give it more than 3 out of 5 stars but yet I will end up seeing it again because there are some superb moments that let the rest of the movie float by on the overall sense of fun and mischief. Also, I am still dying a little bit on the inside from trying not to ruin all of the one-liners while I still can.

On May 3rd, I gathered a stalwart crew and blazed a trail over to the Black Cat for the Onion’s DC Launch Party. The bill originally included Zach Galifianikis, (The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope, Georgie James and Neil Hamburger. Well, Zach cancelled and Aziz Ansari was brought in for our funny time.

The evening started at the Brickskeller where I ate a fine sandwich, a Lindemans Framboise and three Leinenkugels Berry Weiss and was thoroughly ready to enjoy a fine blend of comedy and music. We few, we happy few, marched over and got in line. The line moved relatively quickly and the weather was grand.

The Black Cat does not have a lot of chairs and standing for a four to five hour show sucks, so we grabbed a table at the back. The Onion staff had tossed swag around the tables, buttons, bracelets and copies of that week’s Onion. We all grabbed some buttons and a bracelet or two and read the fake news while we waited for (The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope to start the show.

The first sign of trouble was the Onion editor, Whatsisface, who came out to announce the band and the say hello. He was either terrified or bored out of his skull. He announced the band and shuffled off the stage. (The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope were a band that I think fulsome would label a wall-of-sound band. It might be their thing, but I would have preferred a band that mixed their sound to the point that it wasn’t all a barely coherent mashing of noise with some added yelling. If this was their ideal sound, then I have to say they kick ass at it. If not, then they should beat the sound guy.* They played for a while and we continued to read the Onion and look around at the crowd of people that all seemed intent on not paying attention to the band.

After a twenty minute or so intermission, Aziz Ansari came strolling out onto the stage and immediately started talking about how the drinks were a lot stronger than he expected. This was not a good sign. Neither was the fact that the crowd refused to shut up and pay attention to him. The crowd noise kept getting louder and eventually Aziz was shouting into his microphone to hear himself. Aziz’s jokes were clearly suffering from the drink and the crowd, so it was hard to judge his set on its humor quotient. The jokes fell into three categories: I’m famous now, I have a TV show on MTV, I hate MTV. He had three bits that really could have been funny if his timing hadn’t been ruined by the unexpectedly strong drink and the fucking annoying crowd. His first bit railed against the MTV reality shows and what we could hear of it was pretty funny. His bit about being recognized on the street thanks to his new show and then realizing that half of the people were trying to tell him his fly was open might have been funny. He had a rambling screed against censorship because he wasn’t allowed to make a joke about a dinosaur rapist, but this was really hard to hear and was followed by a series of jokes about some kid on his show, but I have no idea what the point was. The crowd acted like he was an inconvenience in their overly-cool lives. “Hey, it’s only six dollars to go drink upstairs at the Black Cat and look cool while I text my friends about how cool I am!” Fucking yipsters.

Aziz then played a couple of clips from Human Giant, but I couldn’t hear any of the audio and there were some problems with the projector. I admit that by this time I had given up on him which isn’t exactly fair, but it is what it is. Some of my crew had ventured forward to get close enough to hear him, but they reported that it was worse up front because the yelled conversations were much louder closer to the stage.

After a forty minute intermission, Georgie James finally came on to lead us to aural salvation. I first heard of them when they opened for Camera Obscura in July 2006. I liked them and thought that the singer looked remarkably similar to Anna Faris. While, after the sucky experience with Aziz Ansari, I still liked GJ and she still looked like Anna Faris. I got closer and the crowd finally shut up. I was still annoyed about the last three hours of let downs, but stayed long enough to hear four or five of Georgie James songs. It was now after midnight and Neil Hamburger had been scheduled to come on at 11:15. I knew I was going to cab it back home but wasn’t thrilled with the idea of staying for the entire show. A friend offered me a ride home and I accepted.

The music was fine and at least the tickets were only six bucks. If I were Aziz, I doubt I would be willing to do another show at the Black Cat, or even the rest of DC.

(The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope’s myspace page

Georgie James’ myspace page

All of the photos used in this post belong to Liz Gorman, as far as I know.   If she or the Wonkette people don’t like this, I’ll take them off.

*Actually, just have some words with the sound guy/gal, they have enough to worry about without adding the threat of physical violence to their list of anxieties.

Unfortunately this post isn’t about a show about zombies (which would probably be awesome for at least the first season), it is actually about the television show Day Break that premiered on ABC Fall of last year.

After a few episodes, ABC took the show off due to its surprisingly low ratings. I say surprisingly low because the show was great. You’d think with its Groundhog Day-esque premise that it would be hard to have interesting mysteries and story arcs in each episode but the show and its writers did an excellent job. Each episode would expand as well as clarify some points from the previous ones and get you closer to the concluding 13th episode.

However, ABC promised to start showing new episodes on their website and finally they’ve made good on it. January 29, ABC put 3 new episodes up and has been adding new episodes as the weeks go on. I think they’re up to the 6th new episode now.

Of course they did this with no fanfare. How do you advertise for a show that you’ve already canceled (but still have to finish making because you’ve already sold the international distribution rights)? Still, it wasn’t until last night that I realized the new episodes were up.

I am sad that I never got to catch any of the episodes in HD. All I can hope is that it’ll eventually come out on Blu-ray and that I can see it in that way.

So yeah, if you never watched the show, I believe they have all the episodes so far online. The pilot and the second episode are a great two hours of television that I strongly recommend. Consider it a free movie rental with another 5 free rentals following it. You just have to watch it on your PC.

If they would just support streaming to my TiVo, I’d already be watching this. Maybe then more shows could keep shambling on even when they’ve been deemed not successful enough for main broadcast slots.