I often dream about TV shows. Sometimes it’s surreal episodes of a favorite show. Sometimes it’s a mash-up of two or three favorite shows. Every once in a while, it’s an original show. Like my dream about Life Without Molly. (more…)
I’ve been rewatching Peter Davison’s first season as the Fifth Doctor on Doctor Who. It’s the season I saw that first got me hooked on the series. It’s always good to revisit your old haunts. Well,maybe not always, but usually. Tonight I watched the two-part story “Black Orchid.” It’s definitely not the best story of the season, but it’s also not the worst (I’m looking at you, “Four to Doomsday” and “Time-Flight”). It gets a lot of negativity because besides the Doctor, the TARDIS, and his companions, there’s no science fiction in it at all; it’s set up to be a classic 1920s mystery story, but the mystery is never much of a mystery; as a rare two-part story, it’s all a bit rushed, but there’s also not enough story to stretch it out to the typical four episodes. But aside from all that, I think it’s a fun one to watch. So here are the good things about the story:
It’s easy to dwell on the negatives of the story (there isn’t much plot and what plot is there is pretty thin, and you can clearly see that the weather was pretty bad when they were shooting and the cast don’t look thrilled about it), but while the story never really amounts to much in the larger context of the season, I’m okay with that. It’s a breather episode, and a pretty fun one at that. Sometimes that’s all I need.
Tell me a movie, book, TV series, or whatever that you think is perfect and I’ll tell you how it isn’t perfect.
When I post online that I liked a certain movie, TV series (or episode of a TV series), a book, etc etc etc, I frequently get at least one response along the lines of “It wasn’t perfect, but it was fun” or “I didn’t love it, but I liked it.” And honestly, I don’t know what to do with statements like that. When I say I like something, even when I say I love something, that doesn’t imply I think it’s perfect. If you say you like or love something, I don’t assume you think it’s the Platonic ideal and love everything single thing about it. You’re allowed to enjoy something without having to qualify it. You’re allowed to like something without having to also disparage it in some way. Own your enjoyment. (more…)
On one hand, with the premise “adventurer can travel anywhere in time and space, in stories that can be pretty much any genre or mashup of genres”, it makes sense to me that Doctor Who would be such an incredibly long-running, popular series. But… (more…)
Besides watching Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets when I was a little kid, I haven’t watched many anime series until recently. Movies, sure. Akira, Metropolis, and a lot of Studio Ghibli, but when anime was shown on TV in the States, I never seemed to catch it. Thanks to Netflix streaming a number of series, I’ve finally been able to start swimming in the anime pool. I haven’t watched a lot, but I’ve watched enough now that I’m figuring out what I like and want to see more of.
The anime I’ve enjoyed the most are Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which is amazing, and Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic and its sequel series (really part of the same series), Magi: The Kingdom of Magic. I watched the last few episodes of Kingdom of Magic last night and it hit me that I liked it for a lot of the same reasons I like Fullmetal Alchemist, which are a lot of the same reasons I like superhero comics.
I love emotional characters making dramatic declarations (bonus points if they start crying, like Alibaba Saluja frequently does in Magi). I love characters in elaborate outfits standing in awkward but cool poses just before or after they unleash their unusual, flashy superpowers. And I particularly love epic conflicts and cosmic mysticism. (Is there an anime adaptation of the Mahabharata? I’ll be first in line to see that!)
Which isn’t to say I don’t also like smaller, quieter stories, because I do. But I really loves me some epic, cosmic melodrama!
