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labellementeuse) wrote2007-07-27 08:00 pm
labellementeuse) wrote2007-07-27 08:00 pm
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Also, it's illegally leaked pre-air pilot season! This is my first illegally leaked pre-air pilot season and I'm finding it kind of a twin AWESOMENESS - getting my hot little hands on all this stuff, which is also in beautiful quality because the screeners apparently are - and pain because I have to WAIT for the rest of it. Today I watched Bionic Woman, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Pushing Daisies.
Bionic Woman
quick summary: Jaime Sommers dropped out of college to take care of her deaf sister after her mother dies. After a romantic dinner with college prof boyfriend she ends up in a car smash, and wakes up in a Mysterious Lab in some Mysterious Underground Location, Probably Inside A Mountain. Also, she has bionic legs, a bionic arm, eye and ear. Apparently boyfriend is also involved in some experimental (gvt?) medical things. She pitches a fit, not happy to have been rescued from death or at least a significant reduction in quality of life, and storms out. When she returns to her normal life she is contacted by Sarah Corvus (played by KATEE SACKHOFF, hihihihihi) who's like, bitch, I'm the original Bionic Woman, and I am crazeee! Also I wanna kill your boyfriend whose dad was involved with my creation, and everyone who's on the board of governers of that Secret Secret Lab. There is a fight, there is asskicking of the DUDE, KATEE SACKHOFF type, who nevertheless vanishes and leaves Jaime to resumer her normal life, after a brief encounter of mutual menace with Jonas, the Director of the Secret Secret lab.
I really liked it, which I was expecting to. Michelle Ryan, apart from being incredibly hot, was really good, I thought; I particularly love her relationship with her sister. I find SL really cool and exciting on television. However, apparently Becca is being recast as a non-deaf hottie, which, if true, SUCKS BALLS. I'll watch it anyway, though. One moment which did stick with me despite being somewhat anvilicious: Jaime is racing rilly rilly fast through a forest, parallel to a motorway. A little girl in a car sees her and says to her mom, hey, there's a superfast lady out there! When mom (who is obviously BLIND) says, hey, you know what I said about making things up, little girl says, I just thought it was cool a girl could do that, that's all. OK, not very subtle? But still awesome, because it can be read on so many levels - the obvious message of feminist asskickery, and the secondary bit about making things up - this girl is me, the fangirl. I'm a sucker for this shit. Also, there's a lot of asskicking and I thought all the supporting roles were well done.
It's a show that's pretty obviously aware of its gender messages, too; I think it's acutely aware of the fact that both Sommers and Corvus are women who are done to, with and without consent, by what is essentially a group of men (there is token female). Jonas says of Jaime that soon enough she'll realise that no-one can tell her what to do, and that's when she'll become a problem. The gender implications of this are fascinating and I think the show knows that, and wants to excite that kind of conversation and criticism.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
quick summary: Previously, on TSCC: Terminator 2 happened. I had to wiki this, but basically: in the future John Connor, Sarah's son, will save the world from Skynet, an AI in the fashion of HAL which runs a network of evil robots that look like Ah-nuld (gross oversimplification, but anyone who knows that already knows this, so shut up and skip ahead.) Skynet does not like John Connor so it tried to send Terminators back in time, first to prevent John from being born, and then to kill him as a child. In a bid to protect John from the constant risk of assassination, the Connors got to the man who would create Skynet and stopped him. He died (but the Connors didn't kill him.)
Now, on TSCC: arty shots of road and sky with a voiceover from Sarah about dreams and children and blah blah boring blah. Sarah and John (Zach from Heroes, you know, the one who couldn';t decide if he was gay or not?) are back on the run, because the cops want to find them and arrest Sarah for the murder of Skynet creator dude. There's obviously a lot of angst about this: John thinks it's dumb, dumb, dumb, but mom doesn't care because John is too important to her. Their latest stop is a "hick town" where Sarah waitresses and John meets a hot but weird chick called Cameron (SUMMER GLAU hihihihihiiiiii!) The police are closing in (without the Connors' knowledge) but a Terminator (apparently their attempt to stop skynet kinda failed) gets there first: in an actually rather good action sequence he shows up as a chemistry teacher at John's school and attempts to assassinate him with a gun he cuts out of his leg. Cool. Cameron takes a bunch of bullets (only Summer Glau could make this look vaguely realistic but also very beautiful. god I love her so much.) while John - to his credit - completely fails to stand around gaping like a loser and runs for his life. He runs, the Terminator chases, it looks like it's all over, John is staring down the barrel of a gun, when - Cameron shows up and saves his life. What? She's a Terminator sent by John's future self to protect him! This would be 11 thousand times cooler if the reveal hadn't been signalled in all the promo material, by the way: I would have liked to be surprised by this. Anyway, there are big, kinda cool action shenanigans and Cameron and the Connors try to escape the Terminators and the law by traveling through time to 2007, where they plan to try to stop Skynet being built in 2011.
I liked this, too, and again I was expecting to. I really would have liked Cameron to be a surprise and I think Thomas Dekker is kind of... uneven, but I liked Lena Heady and I thought that a lot of the touches of their life on the run were great - they lived in a truly crappy house, they plastered guns into the walls, they changed their car all the time (sort of). I'm not a big fan of the action flick but I'll be giving this a go anyway, although I admit that (unlike BW) I only picked this one up for Summer. I hadn't seen any of the Terminator movies and, while I did stop to wiki, I only did that because I'm compulsive; I probably would hhave been fine without it.
Pushing Daisies
quick summary: when he is young, Ned finds out he has the power to resurrect dead people and things by touching them - but if he keeps them alive longer than one minute, someone else will die to balance it out. also, if he touches them again, they will go back to being dead. As he learns about this he accidentally kills his neighbour, the father of a girl called Chuck who Ned is in love with. Skip twenty years into the future: Ned is a piemaker and hasn't seen Chuck since her father's death. He works with a guy called Emerson (Chi McBride from Boston Public, blast from the past...) to help supplement his meager pie income by collectng rewards for helping to solve murders - which he does by reviving people for less than a minute to ask who killed them. it all goes to pot, though, when he touches Chuck to find out who killed her on a cruise she was taking, leaving the small town where she grew up for the first time. Chuck doesn't know who killed her but Ned can't bring himself to touch her again. They embark on a series of petty crimes and find the killer; Chuck starts working with Emerson and Ned and having a life of her own for the first time. Also, she and Ned are In Love, but can't touch because of the whole dead thing.
OK, I wasn't so much expecting to like this, because I tend to find very surrealistic stuff a bit tiresome. And indeed, some of the things about it I did find tedious, like the voiceover and some of the more bizarre detail work. However, I thought the rapport of the three stars was great and really made up for it. I was super-charmed by the romance, too, which SHOCKED me, because the whole not-touching thing in DA drove me CRAZY, but it's actually ridiculously cute. If it stays this cute it'll probably start to grate, but it's awesome in the screener. I will keep watching this despite the bits that grated because the bits that worked for me really, really worked for me.
Bionic Woman
quick summary: Jaime Sommers dropped out of college to take care of her deaf sister after her mother dies. After a romantic dinner with college prof boyfriend she ends up in a car smash, and wakes up in a Mysterious Lab in some Mysterious Underground Location, Probably Inside A Mountain. Also, she has bionic legs, a bionic arm, eye and ear. Apparently boyfriend is also involved in some experimental (gvt?) medical things. She pitches a fit, not happy to have been rescued from death or at least a significant reduction in quality of life, and storms out. When she returns to her normal life she is contacted by Sarah Corvus (played by KATEE SACKHOFF, hihihihihi) who's like, bitch, I'm the original Bionic Woman, and I am crazeee! Also I wanna kill your boyfriend whose dad was involved with my creation, and everyone who's on the board of governers of that Secret Secret Lab. There is a fight, there is asskicking of the DUDE, KATEE SACKHOFF type, who nevertheless vanishes and leaves Jaime to resumer her normal life, after a brief encounter of mutual menace with Jonas, the Director of the Secret Secret lab.
I really liked it, which I was expecting to. Michelle Ryan, apart from being incredibly hot, was really good, I thought; I particularly love her relationship with her sister. I find SL really cool and exciting on television. However, apparently Becca is being recast as a non-deaf hottie, which, if true, SUCKS BALLS. I'll watch it anyway, though. One moment which did stick with me despite being somewhat anvilicious: Jaime is racing rilly rilly fast through a forest, parallel to a motorway. A little girl in a car sees her and says to her mom, hey, there's a superfast lady out there! When mom (who is obviously BLIND) says, hey, you know what I said about making things up, little girl says, I just thought it was cool a girl could do that, that's all. OK, not very subtle? But still awesome, because it can be read on so many levels - the obvious message of feminist asskickery, and the secondary bit about making things up - this girl is me, the fangirl. I'm a sucker for this shit. Also, there's a lot of asskicking and I thought all the supporting roles were well done.
It's a show that's pretty obviously aware of its gender messages, too; I think it's acutely aware of the fact that both Sommers and Corvus are women who are done to, with and without consent, by what is essentially a group of men (there is token female). Jonas says of Jaime that soon enough she'll realise that no-one can tell her what to do, and that's when she'll become a problem. The gender implications of this are fascinating and I think the show knows that, and wants to excite that kind of conversation and criticism.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
quick summary: Previously, on TSCC: Terminator 2 happened. I had to wiki this, but basically: in the future John Connor, Sarah's son, will save the world from Skynet, an AI in the fashion of HAL which runs a network of evil robots that look like Ah-nuld (gross oversimplification, but anyone who knows that already knows this, so shut up and skip ahead.) Skynet does not like John Connor so it tried to send Terminators back in time, first to prevent John from being born, and then to kill him as a child. In a bid to protect John from the constant risk of assassination, the Connors got to the man who would create Skynet and stopped him. He died (but the Connors didn't kill him.)
Now, on TSCC: arty shots of road and sky with a voiceover from Sarah about dreams and children and blah blah boring blah. Sarah and John (Zach from Heroes, you know, the one who couldn';t decide if he was gay or not?) are back on the run, because the cops want to find them and arrest Sarah for the murder of Skynet creator dude. There's obviously a lot of angst about this: John thinks it's dumb, dumb, dumb, but mom doesn't care because John is too important to her. Their latest stop is a "hick town" where Sarah waitresses and John meets a hot but weird chick called Cameron (SUMMER GLAU hihihihihiiiiii!) The police are closing in (without the Connors' knowledge) but a Terminator (apparently their attempt to stop skynet kinda failed) gets there first: in an actually rather good action sequence he shows up as a chemistry teacher at John's school and attempts to assassinate him with a gun he cuts out of his leg. Cool. Cameron takes a bunch of bullets (only Summer Glau could make this look vaguely realistic but also very beautiful. god I love her so much.) while John - to his credit - completely fails to stand around gaping like a loser and runs for his life. He runs, the Terminator chases, it looks like it's all over, John is staring down the barrel of a gun, when - Cameron shows up and saves his life. What? She's a Terminator sent by John's future self to protect him! This would be 11 thousand times cooler if the reveal hadn't been signalled in all the promo material, by the way: I would have liked to be surprised by this. Anyway, there are big, kinda cool action shenanigans and Cameron and the Connors try to escape the Terminators and the law by traveling through time to 2007, where they plan to try to stop Skynet being built in 2011.
I liked this, too, and again I was expecting to. I really would have liked Cameron to be a surprise and I think Thomas Dekker is kind of... uneven, but I liked Lena Heady and I thought that a lot of the touches of their life on the run were great - they lived in a truly crappy house, they plastered guns into the walls, they changed their car all the time (sort of). I'm not a big fan of the action flick but I'll be giving this a go anyway, although I admit that (unlike BW) I only picked this one up for Summer. I hadn't seen any of the Terminator movies and, while I did stop to wiki, I only did that because I'm compulsive; I probably would hhave been fine without it.
Pushing Daisies
quick summary: when he is young, Ned finds out he has the power to resurrect dead people and things by touching them - but if he keeps them alive longer than one minute, someone else will die to balance it out. also, if he touches them again, they will go back to being dead. As he learns about this he accidentally kills his neighbour, the father of a girl called Chuck who Ned is in love with. Skip twenty years into the future: Ned is a piemaker and hasn't seen Chuck since her father's death. He works with a guy called Emerson (Chi McBride from Boston Public, blast from the past...) to help supplement his meager pie income by collectng rewards for helping to solve murders - which he does by reviving people for less than a minute to ask who killed them. it all goes to pot, though, when he touches Chuck to find out who killed her on a cruise she was taking, leaving the small town where she grew up for the first time. Chuck doesn't know who killed her but Ned can't bring himself to touch her again. They embark on a series of petty crimes and find the killer; Chuck starts working with Emerson and Ned and having a life of her own for the first time. Also, she and Ned are In Love, but can't touch because of the whole dead thing.
OK, I wasn't so much expecting to like this, because I tend to find very surrealistic stuff a bit tiresome. And indeed, some of the things about it I did find tedious, like the voiceover and some of the more bizarre detail work. However, I thought the rapport of the three stars was great and really made up for it. I was super-charmed by the romance, too, which SHOCKED me, because the whole not-touching thing in DA drove me CRAZY, but it's actually ridiculously cute. If it stays this cute it'll probably start to grate, but it's awesome in the screener. I will keep watching this despite the bits that grated because the bits that worked for me really, really worked for me.
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Then the third one if you're really into it. I guess.
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(Also pssst - did you snag these off torrents?)
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