Sunday!

44 thoughts on “Sunday!”

1. Getting caught up on Revenge. It would mean a lot to me if they let this season be the last, and let Emily’s Ultimate Plan come to fruition. But they probably won’t.Report

   1. Having visited the Cancellation Bear, it appears almost certainly that Revenge will be back next season. Dang.Report

      1. Ah, you ruined it now. The best Revenge is the one they don’t see coming.Report

   2. It would mean a lot to me if 80% of the characters all fell into a massive sinkhole.

      (Sorry. “Revenge” is one of those shows the Better Half insists on my watching with him, and I’ve grown impatient with various aspects of it, particularly the increasingly baroque storyline.)Report

      1. Are there any shows you drag him into watching? I can’t get Clancy to watch anything, though there is a calculation in my mind when I watch shows with her in the room. If she hates the show, or if it has a laugh track, she will leave and I don’t want that. If she loves the show, she will want me to stop watching it until we can watch it together, which we have a queue backed up for years (I finally broke down and watched Homeland late last year). Back in Arapaho, if she liked a show too much but not enough to want to watch it thoroughly, I have to be worried about distracting her from the medical notes she was always working on. So I have to walk a very thin line.

         As far as Revenge goes, it’s a guilty pleasure. I like more than 20% of the characters, but a lot of them are pretty insufferable. Good acting, though, to pull off a plot that walks the border of absurdity.

         I’d be curious for your thoughts on Nolan’s character. I find it to be one of the somewhat rare cases of using his bisexuality in ways that further the plot the same way that heterosexuality is used to forward the plot. Other than Jack, whom we are contractually obliged to like, he is probably my favorite character.Report

      2. Nolan is the only character I like. The only other character I can even tolerate is Victoria Grayson, mainly because she seems as exasperated at all the nitwits surrounding her as I would be.

         On the one hand, they’re managed to make Nolan’s bisexuality a plausible character trait. On the other hand, his whole tortured relationship with Padma (that was her name, right?) was one small part of a storyline that made me want to plunge a knitting needle into my ear. Maybe if the romance had been more fun, I’d have found his bisexuality more compelling. But since he spent most of the episodes I saw moaning about her rather than seeming to enjoy himself, I just found it “blah.”

         I can very occasionally get the Better Half to watch “Antiques Roadshow” with me. We both agree on “Chopped.” I watch “Once Upon a Time” (which [SPOILER] they TOTALLY should have ended with the season finale, which would have been a PERFECT, melancholy ending… BUT NO!!! Argh!) with the stipulation that I am allowed to make fun of it. (I thought what they did with Peter Pan was, at least, interesting.) And he’s managed to get me hooked on “Scandal,” but only because I really like Mellie. (I find Olivia Pope ridiculous and annoying.)Report

      3. Well if you can’t Hadel it, maybe you can hand it Bach.Report

      4. You tell ’em, man.Report

      5. Well if you can’t Hadel it, maybe you can hand it Bach.

         That’s a Paganini right out of Mo’z art book, that is.Report

      6. I watch Emily VanCamp. The rest of that show is the price of admission. I think I remember the first season actually being good, but that might be my memory playing tricks on me.Report

      7. On that topic, I have a question for the lawyers: If a private citizen, acting on his own initiative, gathers evidence illegally and submits it to the police, is the evidence admissible? I do understand that that person could be charged for any crimes committed in the act of gathering the evidence, and that the evidence might not be credible due to chain of custody issues, but would it be legally admissible if it were credible?

         My understanding is that privately-obtained evidence is not generally subject to the exclusionary rule, but does that change at all if the person was specifically seeking evidence of another person’s guilt?Report

2. I’ve been watching Continuum and The Big Bang Theory.

   Readingwise, I’ve been inhaling many many things – right now I’m in the middle of Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Also, I did my annual “here are reviews I wrote months ago of the books that most knocked me on my keister this year” post. So I reread all my own book reviews to write that :D.Report

   1. I should tell you guys that The Boy loves Monster on the Hill.

      Think there’ll be a sequel? There were loose ends!Report

      1. That is delightful to know.

         As for a sequel, this bit from an interview with Amazon seems promising:

         “Can we expect more monsters from you in the future?

         RH: Absolutely. I have folders and sketchbooks full. Scary, goofy, you name it. The hard part will be deciding which ones make the cut!”Report

   2. Just started Greene’s Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art. It’s lovely and funny and deeply deeply geeky. Herpetologists give good memoir.Report

3. Last night, I watched the Friends of Eddie Coyle. The movie stars Robert Mitchum as a low-level gun runner in Boston in the early 1970s. Most interesting about the movie is the social-policy changes. Mitchum’s character is facing a sentence of 2-5 years for driving a truck with stolen goods in New Hampshire. However during the movie he is out and free while awaiting sentencing and able to get his affairs in order, which to him is doing some gun running so his wife and kids don’t have to go on welfare (because that would be a scandal/shame) and considering ratting out his “friends” in order to avoid prison. There is no honor among thieves. Now I imagine a character like Eddie Coyle would be in jail while awaiting sentencing but I am no expert on criminal law, I might be wrong. But it would seem to me “getting your affairs in order” is largely gone.

   I just finished the Rise of Victorian Values. Recent book purchases are Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, Parisians by Grahamm Robb, and Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book by Alessandro Marzo Magno.Report

   1. Friend of Eddie Coyle is a great movie. The end is a real punch in the gut as it should be given all the characters and plot up to that point. Highly recommended.Report

      1. Yeah. I don’t think that kind of stuff would happen today. Largely because the violence would be much more over the top in today’s movie. The deals more glamorous and underworld. They wouldn’t do it at places like a grocery store parking lot or a commuter train parking lot.Report

      2. Largely because the violence would be much more over the top in today’s movie.

         This is something I noticed in the Olympus has Fallen movie. There was blood freakin’ everywhere. Spraying over the walls, jumping out in spurts, escaping in little puffs. It was never enough to shoot someone and then have them fall down. They had to have the bullet go all the way through and exit with a cone that covered the wall 10 feet behind them.

         I’m going back in my head to Total Recall (one of the more violent non-splat titles from my adolescence) and thinking “man, that wasn’t even close to this amount of violence!”

         Not saying that we should go back to the days where you slap your hand over your upper pec and then fall down but… jeez. Violence didn’t used to be this exuberant in non-splat films.Report

      3. The deals more glamorous and underworld.

         Another of my favorite Breaking Bad quotes. Walter White, who only knows about this stuff from movies and TV, sets up a drug deal in a deserted junkyard, and the buyer asks “What, was the mall closed?”Report

4. I have acquired the August and September 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction and am awaiting delivery of the October issue, in order to read the original version of Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A. It was famously crazed, even for Van Vogt, and the he toned it down to only moderately wacko for book publication.Report

   1. Really? I have a ’46 edition of the book, but haven’t gotten to it yet. I would be curious to hear the changes.Report

      1. There’s a guy named Isaac Walwyn who knows more about Van Vogt’s work than anybody, probably including Van Vogt, who answers that question at http://www.icshi.net/sevagram/summaries/world1-preface.php .Report

5. one of the two (how in the heck were there *TWO*?) White House Invasion movies from last year

   Given how Hollywood works these days, you must be asking how there were only two. (Well, there was the one where the Justice League saves the president, and the one where the Avengers save him, and the one with Spiderman, and the one with the other Spiderman, and the sequel to Independence Day, and the sequel to Air Force One, and the sequel to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Killer…)Report

   1. This is, apparently, a thing.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_filmsReport

      1. I’ve been thinking about this. I suppose I can understand how two different studios might come out with a genre movie in the same year. Hey, you find out that Warner Brothers is putting out a vampire movie, you figure you can put out Near Dark the same year, around the same time, and ride on their advertising a little bit. Maybe they can ride on yours. Synergy, baby!

         I’m wondering how in the heck two different studios put out Truman Capote movies in the same year.Report

6. Just started the new Donna Tartt, and as I seem to have a lot of time on my hands, I am thinking of having a miniature HP Lovecraft film fest. There is a silent version of Call of Cthulhu floating around, and then a double feature of Alien and The Thing.Report

   1. The silent version of Call of Cthulu is pretty bad-ass.Report

      1. Agreed.Report

      2. Sweet, thank you!Report

   2. Other possibilities:

      The Hellboy movies
      Re-Animator
      Evil Dead
      Cabin in the Woods
      Prince of DarknessReport

      1. Ooo, I haven’t seen Prince of Darkness in forever… And Cabin looked cool, thank you for reminding me.Report

7. I did a short round of binge-watching of Castle this morning. I still love that show so much. Not much else on the DVR at the moment.Report

8. Watched House of Cards. Found it preposterous but still enormously entertaining. As the main character went over the line from shady to downright illegal as the season progressed, however, I found it increasingly less interesting. We’ll see what happens in season 2.Report

9. So did you end up watching White House Down too? It did slightly better in terms of metascore but I’ve heard Olympus Has Fallen is the more ambitious and kinetic of the two. I’ve been putting off this decision for months, I just can’t bear to watch the wrong White House invasion film.Report

   1. Not yet, but I’ll put it on the list. Checking Netflix now tells me that it’s not available yet…

      But THERE IS A BRADY BUNCH IN THE WHITE HOUSE MOVIE???? WHERE MIKE BRADY BECOMES PRESIDENT???

      WHY IN THE HELL AM I ONLY LEARNING ABOUT THIS NOW????Report

      1. Because only recently has your aesthetic sense matured enough for you to fully appreciate it.Report

10. I just spent a week in Tennessee, where the television only plays football, Monk, NCIS, cooking shows, and the local news. So this week I am watching nothing, and enjoying it.

    I did stop in at the used bookstore while there and got 15 books for $16, so I am going through Kundera’s Slowness, Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, and a couple 5 cent le Carré novels, with Saramago and Naipaul on deck. I love that store.Report

11. I recently read The New Watch, the fifth instalment of Sergei Lukyanko’s Night Watch series.Report

    1. ! *didn’t realize it was out, scuttles off to acquire a copy post-haste*Report

    2. Ah, dang it, it’s not out yet. James K has special powers. *wistful sigh*Report

       1. We usually get books at the same time the UK does. It’s probably regional differences working in my favour for once.Report

12. Watching: NFL playoffs and Downton Abbey. Not sure which leaves me hanging more. Of the 4 playoff games, only the Bengals-Chargers game was a dog. The other 3 were decided by a total of 6 points, all on last minute plays. On the other hand, of course, those darned Crawleys and their servants always seem to have the pot aboil somehow.

    Reading: Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue. Chabon is one of my favorite writers, and in this one he offers a bit of parenting advice that turned my head: “You have to make them do things they don’t want to do, even when you don’t really care if they do them or not.”Report

13. Robot and Frank is a great movie; very creative take on the robot concept that hasn’t really been done before.Report

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