Open Weekend Open Thread 2/27/12

Updated on February 27, 2012 By Ken Begg 13 Comments

Well, I (I hope you’re sitting down) waited until the last minute to start this month’s roundtable piece, due by Wednesday night at midnight. Should have it done, but it might be a bit rough. So that was my weekend.

Did see the Amazing Race (which I hadn’t even known was starting) and Worst Cooks in America last night. Both were pretty decent. Finished the latest Elvis Cole detective / action novel by Robert Crais, which was pretty good. And that’s pretty much it for me. How about you guys?

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  • The Rev.

    We’ve got The Amazing Race DVR’d as we were out last night.  The girls also DVR’d the Oscars and fast-forwarded through them when we got home.  I was on the computer and didn’t pay attention except to the “In Memoriam.”  I ended up going to the extended listings on the Oscar site, and found out Robert Easton passed on a while back.  I had no idea how much radio and TV he’d done, and quite a few movies as well, on top of being a well-respected diction and accent coach in Hollywood.  And I here I only knew him from Bill Rebane’s stuff.

    I watched a couple of Bigfoot movies this weekend, and both because of one particular actor in each.  Savage had Martin Kove doing some nice, amusing work as the Quint (it’s a pretty straight Jaws-type movie.)  Overall, a fun bit of fluff with a few surprisingly good gore moments, very little CGI (except an exploding house, which they obviously couldn’t afford to really blow up, but really looked bad) in favor of practical effects, a pretty well-designed man-in-a-suit beastie with a couple of fairly decent wirework moments to make it seem superhuman, and a good pace for something like this.  I’ve definitely seen a lot worse in the Bigfoot subcategory…including Clawed:  The Legend of Sasquatch.  This had Miles O’Keeffe as the town sheriff.  I didn’t recognize his face, but his massive torso and arms later gave him away.  He didn’t have much to do, but did a good job with it, at least.  The mayhem was all right, but mostly came in two big spurts, at the very beginning and near the end.  Most of the first half was teens in the woods, and drunken rednecks in the same woods.  This movie also followed the Jaws template, albeit not quite as much as Savage, but wasn’t nearly as fun.  I ended up fast-forwarding and it didn’t really pay off.  Again, almost all practical effects, but the suit just looked like an ugly orange gorilla costume, and the blood and gore was inferior to the prior movie.

    I’d say give Savage a chance, but skip Clawed.

  • GalaxyJane

    I was a complete bum this weekend, hardly left the house, but was very excited to discover that the new digital subchannel my NBC affiliate picked up is out of Chicago and carries Svengoolie on Saturday nights at 10.  Then the other new subchannel our CW affiliate helped launch has started “Brown Sugar Saturday Night” which is Blaxploitation flicks from 8 to Midnight.  It’s an embarrasment of riches, I tell you!  Anyhoo, Saturday I watched “The Human Tornado”, and “The Invisible Woman” which can be charitably described as one of Universal’s lesser efforts, although the cast is top notch, John Barrymore and Margaret Hamilton among others.

    TV-wise, I checked out BBC’s “Misfits” on Hulu, sci-fi about a bunch of juvenile offenders who get powers after being zapped by a wierd thunderstorm and immeditely have to kill their probation officer and hide the corpse after the same storm turns him into a monster on a murderous rampage. Apparently the storm zapped a lot of other folks too.  I’m still on the fence with this one.  The concept’s not bad (Jamie described it as Wild Cards, except everyone’s a deuce, close enough) but I am already sick to death of so-called edgy TV full of fairly graphic soft-core porn inserted into the plot to make the show more appealing to someone who isn’t me. It’s the same reason that, while it may actually be a brilliant show, I’ve never been able to make it through an entire episode of “The Tudors”. Nudity qua nudity doesn’t bother me at all and it can be used to great comic or dramatic effect, but I am one of those (possibly odd) folks that finds pornography a complete turn-off and I’d like my TV better without it. There’s also a LOT of swearing, again, anyone who’s ever heard me talk knows that I’m not bothered by salty language, but it seems foolish to intentionally narrow your audience that much for a show that’s otherwise an appealing, thoughtful, and engaging adventure serial.  I suppose it’s so you know it isn’t a kids show.

    Watched some Adam West Batman with the kids.  And checked out Celebrity Apprentice for no better reason than the fact it’s got Lou Ferrigno and Dee Snider this year. Would have liked to have seen more of the Medieval Times show the guys put on and less of the intergroup bitching.  Don’t think I’ll be adding it to my list of must watches, but it killed a couple of painless hours last night.

  • Ericb

    Watched the old Doctor Who episodes Planet of Evil and The Power of Kroll.  Read “Colonial South Carolina: A History.”  Also watched some Celebrity Apprentice with the sound turned down while I listened to music.

  • Flangepart

    Watched WILD WOMEN OF WONGO riffed by the Film Crew.
    Pretty good riff fest, for a movie that deserved its hydrolic powered wedgee.
    Ate a lot. Burped. repeated both.

  •    Let’s see. I started a rush job for AC Comics (but I snuck in a little bit of work on my own graphic novel project on Sunday).

       Watched COMMUNION, that movie where Christopher Walken gets abducted by Martians, then tracks them down, but doesn’t kill them all with his bare hands as I had hoped. Very anti-climactic (and a little disturbing from a spiritual point of view).

       More satisfying, I finally got to see THE PHANTOM again (the Billy Zane version). Terrific fun, nice recreation of the serial type adventures that spawned THE ROCKETEER and ALLAN QUARTERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD. Great to finally have a copy, even if it is cropped. Treat Williams is a tad over the top as the heavy, but still tons of fun.

        Also using the month of February to go through Love Hina a second time, with an episode squeezed in each night before bed.

       Beyond that, not a lot. Didn’t even get to go to church because I was expecting company (that never arrived).

  • Toby

    Watched a few episodes of Dexter (halfway through season four – gets better every season), and a couple of discs worth of the original Beverly Hills 90210 (I rented it pretty much for snark bait, but it wasn’t that bad once you got past the mid-to-late-20s Juniors).

  • Marsden

    I watched about 7 episodes of season 2 Babylon 5 on my way through again to watch all 5 seasons.

  • Worst Cooks in America is a guilty pleasure of mine.  I laugh entirely too hard at the poor folks on that show.  

  • The Rev.

    Aww, what a lovely picture of KirknPatty!  I’m guessing wedding or anniversary, since I assume you’re like me and it’d take something that important to get you in a tux…not that I wore one on either occasion…

    We got into a recent season of WCiA and rather enjoyed it, but apparently not enough to make a point to catch the new season.  Of course, they’ll probably marathon it in a couple of weeks, like they do.

  • I actually own a tux.  Every gentleman should own a well-fitting tuxedo.  That photo is from 12 years ago.  I need to update with a photo from our last cruise.

  • Helped the Sci-Fi club with its fund-raiser Friday night: they showed “Wall-E”, which I’ve never seen. Why does anybody put a self-destruct mechanism in an escape pod?
    Saturday night chaperoned the Sadie Hawkins dance. The theme was “Shark Week!” (Of course, I thought Sadie Hawkins was already the theme…) Now I have a 6-foot long model of a shark sharing a classroom with me.
    In between grading reams of papers, I was watching “Dollhouse” episodes. I had thought I would skip that one, but I had a few days off with the galloping crud last week and started watching it. I keep trying to find something good about the characters, but there’s such a heavy coating of moral grime that I keep thinking I won’t watch anymore. Now I’m down to the last few episodes, and I know that I’ll be angry and frustrated when the series ends without tying anything up.

  • Chad R.

    Saturday I rewatched A Fistful of Dollars for the first time in about ten years.  I had forgotten how droll the Man With No Name was, not at all the stone-faced enigma I had somehow remembered.

    Sunday I went to the baptism of the baby of some close friends.  Not knowing anything about their church, I erred on the side of caution and put on a suit and tie.  While giving them a ride I noticed the father’s rather casual clothes and made a joke about how I wouldn’t have dressed up if I knew I was going to hipster church.  That turned out to be prophetic.  The church shared a building with a bookstore, an art gallery, and a coffee shop.  That’s pretty much the hipster trifecta, right there.  It got even better though because earlier in the week they had put on an exhibition of devotional tattoos.  And then there was the optional gluten-free host.  Really nice folks, though, despite all the hipness.

    That night I got together with some other friends to watch Episode 2 of Season 2 of the BBC’s Sherlock.  I’ll say slightly more about it in the forum, as well as asking for recommendations for mystery movies that play fair with the audience.        

  • MrTongoRad

    Devotional tattoos? Gluten-free wheat? Are you sure this place was real and not a figment of Mike Judge’s imagination? I’m sure they were really nice people, but there does seem to be more than a whiff of self-parody there (not that people on this website should talk about such things…).
     
    We didn’t watch much, as we spent the wekend visiting my sister’s family for the nephew’s birthday. My #2 son, the 9 y.o., brought an ep of MST3K he was keen on viewing with a crowd but it was too late after all the hoo-haw so we all just watched an ep of Big Bang Theory and went to bed. (There’s your self-parody right there, I guess…)
     
    I’m also a loyal Amazing Race viewer and watched that instead of the obvious choice. It’ll probably get more interesting when I have a favorite team, but it’s allright for now.