Stuff That Sucks: TV

I love TV. I spend way too much potentially productive time absorbed in entertainment, accomplishing nothing, letting my brain rot and allowing the corporate sponsored stimuli to work it's subliminal crimes on me day in and day out. And it rocks.

TV totally kicks ass. Or, at least, it did... until I discovered the absolute face on fire, edge of your seat insanity that is: 24. 24 is without a doubt the best fucking show in the history of TV. It's the pinnacle of mind smashing entertainment, requiring next to no thought but also moving so fast with so many twists and turn that it grips your attention like grim death and holds on until there just simply is no more. In short, it rocks your pants off.

The problem is, after 24, everything else pretty much blows nuts. I mean, normally I would love the continuation of old favorites like "Heroes" and "Smallville", and I might have enjoyed some newcomers... say "Chuck" maybe, or "The Bionic Woman"... who knows? But now, after having watched three consecutive seasons of 24, my entertainment standards are so high and attention span so low that I almost can't be bothered with regular TV. I need the non-stop, pulse pounding, ball splitting action/adventure/awesomeness of 24 all the time. If it's not 24, I don't want to watch it.

I watched the premiere of Heroes... yawn. I was dosing off during half of it, wondering when it was gonna start getting good. The same with Smallville... I can barely make through the tedious exchanges between the lifeless characters in between the one or two sweet shots per episode where Clark finally does something super. Clark needs to be freaking out way more, ala Jack Bauer, instead of weeping over his annoying dead girlfriend, who was, lets face it, total shit from day one. I mean I know he's super and all, but if you pit him against the iron will of Bauer, I just don't know who to bet on. My gut tells me, Jack would find a way. And he'll do whatever it takes, all whilst blowing up everything he possibly can, and somehow finding time to torture people. Which, by the way, rules.

It's not that other shows are bad... in fact everyone is pretty much still raving about Heroes, and how great it is, and I'm sure that's relatively accurate, except I've been watching back to back episodes of collected seasons of pure TV domination. After three episodes of 24, Heroes is like watching paint dry. And so is, you know, anything that's not 24.

So I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm compelled to encourage you to watch 24, and watch it religiously, and write to your congressman about how great it is, so that they can continue making new episodes until Kiefer Sutherland is 80. (BTW, what the hell kind of hippie name is Kiefer? How do normal-named people like Donald and Shirley go and give their kid a kool-aid name like Kiefer?). On the other hand though, I'm compelled to recommend that you not watch 24, and thus retain the ability to watch other, non-24 TV shows. Ultimately, the decision is yours, but I will say this:






Sorry, gotta go. There's a torture scene.

Stuff That Sucks: Death Proof

Ok, just calm down. I wanted to like this movie. Really, I did. I was totally psyched to like it. I went in expecting to love it. Tarantino, car chases, gruesome gory awesomeness all in a convenient homage to the grindhouse movie watching experience. And I get that it's supposed to be bad. I get that it's made to be a "B" movie. But here's the thing about "B" movies: They suck ass. They're "B" movies, because if they were any good, they'd be "A" movies, or "independent" movies, or some other such nonsense. But Death Proof is a "B" movie in it's truest sense. In fact, were I rating it on an alphabetic scale, I'd probably put it in the low M's.

It sucked. Granted, there were a few decent parts... the car chase at the end, the amazingly and repeatedly bloody accident scene shown from different perspectives, and maybe a tenth of the dialogue were all entertaining. But the lasting overall impression that I got from the film was: "Wha?" The plot was barely there, and arguably missing altogether, and the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying. I didn't hate the antagonist, if you could call him that, I actually kind of liked him, and by the end of the movie, I kind of wanted all those stupid wannabe badass bitches to eat asphalt. Maybe it's because the second group of girls was so fucking annoying, or maybe it's because the token black chick was such a painfully stereotypical cartoon of herself, or maybe it was that they were all just so goddamned annoying, but I just couldn't get attached to them. no character development, no plot evolution, no story, very low entertainment value altogether.

And I know...it's supposed to be that way, but, I don't know, I just thought it would be that way, except in an edgy, different, entertaining sort of way, that kind of redefined the long dead genre and breathed some life into it. But this movie could easily fit on a shelf with every other god awful piece of shit "B" movie no one's ever heard of but that your hippie, alternative friend with the dreadlocks told you was "totally mind-opening, man."

The worst part is that the companion movie, Planet Terror, composed by the familiar Tarantino counterpart Robert Rodriguez, actually looks pretty awesome, just like Death Proof looked awesome when i saw its trailer. And when I see it, and it inevitably sucks monkey balls, it will be nobody's fault but mine. And Robert Rodriguez's. I predict I'll put most of the blame on him.

To sum up, Death Proof is less fun then a car crash, and takes a whole lot longer.