January 2009 Archives

Having been a comic book fan for a long time, I’ve become accustomed to the concept of the crossover. It became commonplace to see characters appear in other characters’ books, even cross-company. When I watch certain TV shows, they almost seem constrained by the lack of characters showing up from a competing show resulting in an initial knock-down drag-out fight before the parties mutually agree to band together to defeat two common enemies, one from each universe.

If I were Tsar of TV, here are the Top 5 crossovers I’d like to see:

5. Grey’s Anatomy and Medicine Ball

Both are set in Seattle, the latter one of a million ER clones from 1995 and that neither I nor anyone else watched, but I would be curious to see how much ass Dr. Donal Logue would kick when confronted with the flighty, always-having-sex (including, apparently, -with-ghosts?) crew of doctors at Grey’s Seattle Grace.

(A link to Medicine Ball's opening theme.)

4. Heroes and Misfits of Science

There’s no way this one would happen, and neither show, truthfully, is really that interesting. But I can’t help but harbor love for the awful Misfits, which had a short run on NBC Friday nights getting clobbered by Dallas on a weekly basis. Plus, this one seems somewhat plausible because the shows actually share the same creator, Tim Kring.
On the other hand, I cancelled Heroes (from my DVR) after it got bogged down in a boring Season 2, and its pretentiousness got to be a little too much. Maybe a guest shot from telekinetic Courteney Cox (who is possibly the only surviving cast member, unless ALF’s dad is still with us) would provide a shot in the arm.

3. Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me
This is another one where the two shows share a creator, and in fact Bryan Fuller said in an interview that the idea of a character who can revive the dead was originally meant for a subplot on quickly cancelled Dead Like Me, where he could wreak havoc with the reapers’ job of collecting souls. Instead, Pushing Daisies became a great, quickly cancelled show of its own.

To be fair, Daisies did feature a crossover with Bryan Fuller's quickly cancelled Wonderfalls, but the character featured on that episode was so obscure that I didn't realize it was a crossover until I looked it up, despite having watched Wonderfalls in its entirety. (Was the Wax Lion booked that day?)

2. Lost and Land of the Lost
I really have been disappointed that the answer to what happened to the survivors of Oceanic Air flight #whatever was not that they actually crash landed in the same mysterious, nebulous island as the folks from Land of the Lost did when they took that fateful boat trip in somebody’s bathtub.

It makes perfect sense. The giant scary invisible monster chasing them is Bill Laimbeer as a Sleestack. Why haven’t Jack, the hot chick, and Sawyer run into Will and Holly (now in their 40s) yet? Instead, the producers are apparently keeping on with whatever plot twists they can pull out of a hat and call it a story. I think my idea wraps it all up with a nice bow.

Make it happen, J.J.

If you haven't yet been exposed to the wonder of television that is The Doctors, now's your big chance. Every weekday afternoon, a panel of "doctors" attempts to turn the human body and its potential ailments and inadequacies into an hour-long fart joke, all while trying to convince you that your breast implants should be at least one size larger than what you think they should be. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...the Vagina Show.

Yes, The Vagina Show, complete with Margaret Cho and a vagina hand puppet. If I needed proof that The Doctors was the tackiest show on television, there it is...Margaret Cho. (See what I did there?)

Slate presents someone who hates Billy Joel more than James. Impossible, you say?

He can't even celebrate his "New York State of Mind" without displaying his oh-so-rebellious contempt for "the movie stars in their fancy cars and their limousines." You think Billy Joel has really never ridden in a limo?

Wow, guy. Calm the hell down.

I counter with this much more relaxed article (also from Slate) that argues that "the essence of [Joel's] badness lies in his squandered excellence."

Personally I think the fact that the extremely-obscure "Rosalinda's Eyes" was used so effectively in Freaks and Geeks (episode "Carded and Discarded") proves that Billy Joel's music can at least be worth something.

"Look and Read" is a series of British educational shows meant to teach reading in primary schools. Each show has a book that goes with it, so you watch the show, read the book, and listen to Wordy the Horrible Orange Thing and his librarian friend as they go over the fundamentals of learning with you.

The only one I ever saw when I was a kid was "Dark Towers", a 10-part story made in 1981 that they were still using when I saw it seven or eight years later. After years of searching, I've found it. I've removed most of the boring educational bits. For the nostalgic amongst you, here's the whole playlist of 10 episodes:

Anyway this is the first time that one of my YouTube postings has resulted in a Video Response, which is pretty hilarious:

This is going to be a slightly different edition of FCCT, with a modified format. The film in question is a very well-made, straight-up modern horror film, and almost anyone who's ever seen a scary movie knows what's going to happen -- some people are going to go someplace they shouldn't, and those people are going to die horribly. Since this movie is all about the voyage rather than the destination, I'm going to eschew the usual plot synopsis and character descriptions.

The Film: La Noche del terror ciego (1971), literally The Night of the Blind Terror -- but in America we call it Tombs of the Blind Dead.

Planet of the Apes connection: Apparently because some of the baddies' beards make them look moderately simian, and because of the timeless popularity of movies about intelligent apes, American drive-in distributers changed the title to Revenge from Planet Ape and added a poorly-narrated prologue explaining that humans destroyed ape civilization centuries ago, and that the apes vowed to one day rise again. (Bonus promotional tidbit: some theaters required both a ticket and a free, Blind Dead-branded barf bag for entrance. Adorable.)

Background: Tombs is the first of a series of four films by Spanish writer/director Amando de Ossorio. I stumbled upon it recently, while thumbing through Jamie Russell's very informative Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, and as a fairly knowledgeable fan of living dead movies I was surprised to find a cult-favorite series I'd never heard of. Even more shocking, this first installment at least is very, very good. (I haven't gotten around to the other three yet, but I'll see them soon -- I got the DVD collection, which comes in its own coffin.)

The badness: Another team picked by many to win its division instead finished 4-12 on the season. The entire wide receiver corps was decimated by injuries and the defense often was disappointing. An injured Matt Hasselbeck and his replacement Seneca Wallace combined to throw one million interceptions in the final two minutes of close games.

The James angle: Within one week of moving to Seattle in early 2006, the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl, and many fans blamed the referees. During the off-season, the team failed to re-sign Pro Bowl left tackle Steve Hutchinson, who is now opening huge holes for Adrian Peterson in Minnesota.

Before the 2006 season I purchased a Shaun Alexander jersey on eBay; Alexander, the reigning Most Valuable Player of the league and popular with the locals, broke his foot in Week 3 and subsequently turned into a gelatinous running-back-like substance. Soon thereafter he was criticized for lack of toughness and nicknamed "Shauna" by disgruntled fans.

The silver lining: The team's probably will improve somewhat next year, if it can shore up the receiving corps and stay healthy. Their poor record and a sinking economy probably improves my chances of bubbling to the top of the season ticket waiting list that much more quickly.

Meanwhile...

I don't even have the fortitude to talk about the Huskies football team going winless for the first time ever (in over 100 years of history), and the death of local stadium icon Tuba Man. Read this great ESPN article by Jim Caple if you want the gory details on our lost year in sports.

That's right, this article about Amanda Knox will focus entirely on her innocence, and not on the fact that I'm completely hot for her, because that's the right thing to do.

For those of you who don't know, Amanda Knox is a local student, abroad in Italy last year when her also-quite-lovely-but-that's-neither-here-nor-there flatmate Meredith Kercher was murdered in a particularly slow, painful, bloody way -- her throat was slashed, but her carotid artery was intact. Italian prosecutors came to the amazing conclusion that two men held Meredith down while Amanda did the cutting, either because Meredith refused to participate in or because Meredith was actively participating in some kind of really messed up sex act.

American student in Italy? Excessively bloody murder? Cops way out of their league? That's right, giallo fans: Amanda is actually living in a Sergio Martino film. That is not a place anyone wants to live, my friend.

OK, so, unless you actually watch a lot of giallo movies -- which, by the way, you totally should -- it's hard for me to explain just how perfectly Amanda Knox embodies the giallo protagonist. The connection occurred to me immediately when I saw the first video of her, when she kissed her Harry Potter lookalike boyfriend and then looked off in the distance apprehensively, as if she was thinking, "wait, didn't they say the killer owns a yellow scarf?"

See what I mean? She actually looks like an inexpensive Italian actress in the 1970s. How is that even possible?

The case against Amanda (and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, Gryffindor House) is, in a word, bonkers. For a while, the evidence was reinterpreted on a weekly basis, and some of it is circumstantial enough to be laughable. My god, Amanda's fingerprints were found on a knife! A kitchen knife! In her home! Of course, the actual murder weapon is still missing. But wait: Amanda did laundry at some point! CASE CLOSED.

The international press really, REALLY wants Amanda to have done it, and they've jumped on every sleazy item they could. My favorite example: Amanda was told by a prison doctor (falsely, as it turns out) that she was HIV positive. Shocked and terrified, Amanda listed in her diary all the men she'd ever had sexual contact with, in an attempt to figure out how this could have happened. Somehow the tabloids not only got a hold of this information, but even distorted the facts, claiming she had sex with seven men in two months in Italy. Wow, international press. Nice one.

And all of this overseas anti-Amanda fervor of course makes for a fair trial in Italy, where apparently it's totally okay to detain a suspect for up to one year before even bringing them to trial. Un, fucking, believable.

Now, I'm kind of a true crime fan. I've read up a bit on the subject. Outside of Charles Manson's followers, I can't think of any scenario where three people would get together and decide to murder a girl for not having weird sex with them. Really, I'm trying to make that work in my head right now, and I just don't see it. Because these would have to be three completely ruthlessly evil bastards, if they were willing to hold Meredith down, cut her, and watch her slowly bleed to death. You're lucky to find one bastard that ruthlessly evil, but three in the same place? Preposterous.

What really happened? Hopefully, the third suspect -- one Rudy Hermann Guede, convicted of the murder in October and sentenced to thirty years -- actually did commit the crime, maybe while robbing Meredith. (His story -- that he was in the bathroom listening to his iPod when the murderer, an unidentified Italian man, entered and killed Meredith, prompting Guede to flee to Germany for some reason -- is almost as far-fetched as the prosecution's.) Unfortunately, with the state of Italian detective work as it is, there's absolutely no way to be sure.

Amanda, Furdell.com officially hopes that you're aquitted in a speedy trial and that you get back to Seattle safely, and not just because you are smoking hot.

My god, how her eyes pierce my soul. And say what you will about the Italian justice system, but installing a wind machine for more attractive defendants was a good call.

Oh, and lest you think my belief in Foxy Knoxy's innocence is in some way connected to her extreme hotness, consider this: it has long been the position of Furdell.com that the only thing sexier than a blood orgy, is a blood orgy that goes way too far. If anything, by finding her innocent, I'm condemning Ms. Knox to be not quite as hot as she otherwise would have been.

I just have to share this obituary from the AV Club. If you're a fan of McGoohan's work (and the Prisoner in particular), you'll know exactly what this guy is talking about.

I know he lived to be 80, and that's all well and good, but couldn't we have kept this one guy? Just this one? I mean really. The Prisoner. My god.

In our grief over Patrick McGoohan, we didn't even notice that Ricardo Montalban died. I'll always remember him as Armando from "Escape from the Planet of the Apes."

You're asking me to risk imprisonment for the sake of two fugitive apes? The answer is a thousand times yes.

This guy is distraught.

FOX and Kiefer Sutherland -- noted long-time Furdell.com readers -- have taken my advice from not two years ago and brought onto the show Kurtwood Smith, aka Clarence "Bitches Leave" Boddicker from RoboCop and its famous TV prequel sitcom That 70's Show.

Hopefully also appearing this season: Nancy Allen, Miguel Ferrer, Ronny Cox, and somehow the late Dan O'Herlihy.

It's a new year, and I'm still hung up on my same old boring political issue: equal rights for everybody. Well, it's on my mind, and I have a blog, so I guess I may as well write it down.

I've been thinking back to the Vice Presidential Debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin last year, and the weird vibes I got from both candidates on the subject of gay marriage. Specifically there was Palin, who, with a confused tone, said: "...no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties."

As I see it, this statement showed that Palin -- and, perhaps by extension, some portion of the GOP's voter base -- doesn't really understand what marriage legally entails. If a dying spouse's family objects to their unholy gay union in the first place, you can bet that spouse won't get to say goodbye, which is pretty heartbreaking; and even in the best circumstances, gay partners sometimes have to depend on empathetic hospital employees who are willing to break the rules at their own risk.

Meanwhile Biden said: "[neither] Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it."

Note that Biden did not say that this is a decision best left to the individual states; he said it's best left to the churches! Isn't there something a bit off about that? I mean, sure, I've been spouting off that marriage is an intrinsically religious institution for years, but I'm a fringe whackjob with a website. Joe Biden essentially said to all my married atheist friends, "you're affiliated with a church."

The problem with both of these views is that they fail to boil the debate down to its practical application. Palin, Biden, Republicans in general and Democrats in general get all hung up on semantics, as if it's more important how we define a word than how we apply the law. This is America, dammit, we're all supposed to be treated equally by our government -- at least in theory, if never in practice.