Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler So what are you watching tonight?

Me Too!!! I have enough pain in my own life without living it in a movie. Stay away from 7 pounds. My wife rented that - I knew I was going too hate it about 15 minutes in.....

Has anyone been watching “Stargate Universe?” I just now found out the show was on when I was checking to make sure my DVR was set to record “Caprica” today. That’s what I get for not watching any TV for almost a year, I have no idea what’s going on.

Also anyone been watching “Warehouse 13?” Looks like it might be interesting.

I tried watching the first episode and found it interesting, but hard to get into. Perhaps I will try it again. One of my favorite authors (John Scalzi) is the creative consultant.

Well Netflix has the first 10 episodes on 3 disks so I put them at the top of my queue. Should get here Saturday so I’ll give it a try. Might even watch the two episodes on tonight.

Watched “Caprica.” IMO it was one of the better episodes so far. If they were all as focused on moving the story forward like this one I would really be liking the show. Though they are adding in more plot threads so it’s still got a lot of potential to bog down if they don’t have some of them start converging.

Now you have me tempted to watch it, too, instead of waiting until next weekend so I can watch two in a row again.

It’s a good stand alone episode but it certainly does set things up for the next one if the keep the ball moving forward.

Just watched “Burn Up Scramble.” It’s 12 episodes on 3 disks of bouncy special taskforce police woman boobs (translation: it‘s an action comedy). The show is pretty typical for the genre save a couple things. Although there is the requisite twist near the ending it was rather lame compared to the conspiracies of most of these shows. The main characters are pretty standard except for one who has psychic powers but she is mostly marginalized compared to the other two.

The audio quality is sub par while the video is about average. There is plenty of fanservice often used for comedic effect but sometimes just gratuitous. There’s no common thread to really tie the episodes together so marathoning them was sort of pointless.

This is the most recent in the “Burn Up” series (all stand alone) which also include “Burn Up,” “Burn Up W,” and “Burn Up Excess.” From the reviews I’ve read this was the worst of the series so far so I went ahead and watched it first. I’m trying to break up watching all the top rated anime with some of the lesser ones so I don’t end up blowing through all the good stuff to quickly.

Cant’ really recommend this one unless you just want some light entertainment and fanservice.

I decided to start watching the “Babylon 5” series again since I’ve only seen the whole thing through the 3rd season and occasional episodes after that.

So I just watched “Babylon 5: The Gathering,” pilot movie for the series and the first few episodes.

First the pilot, which I hadn’t realized I’d never seen before. The format was standard 4x3 TV and only 2.0 audio which was kind of disappointing. The picture quality overall didn’t scale up to the 134” screen very well. The CGI shots looked great but the regular shots were very graining and not in the sometimes good vintage movie way. More like a smoothed out YouTube video way. The audio wasn’t bad for 2.0 but clearly nothing to get excited about.

Sure was interesting to see how much of the show was set up right from the start, especially the relationships between the characters, and also to see how much they changed from the pilot to the series. I didn’t like the original makeup for Delenn, in the show she looks good but in the pilot not so much. I liked the character of First Officer Takahima, would have been interesting to see her in the series. I didn’t, however, like the original doctor, so I’m glad they dumped him.

The series itself is formatted for DVD (AFAIR the original was 4x3) in 16x9 and 5.1 audio (AFAIR originally Dolby Surround). The CGI effects appear for now to be lesser quality than the pilot OTOH most of the regular shots look much better, however there is occasionally a shot with that YouTube video look to it. One nice thing about the video are the colours and black level. The audio is a step up from the pilots 2.0 but not a big one. Not feeling any of the .1 at all. As for the 5 regular channels most of the audio action is up front with the occasional panning effect but nothing amazing. Most of the surround effects are just ambient station noise which does enhance the overall effect making the series feel more immersive than the pilot.

Although I liked the Takahima and would like to have seen more of her the character who replaced her, Susan Ivanova, rocks. The new doctor, Franklin, is so much better than the original. Besides Ivanova, Delenn and Lando were my other favorites. Overall the show had some bad acting but I like the way the above three were played. The writing seems better in the first few episodes than in the pilot but what I like most about this show was it’s epic scope. In many ways this series seems refreshing compared to the way-to-many-simultaneous-story-threads of the Galactica franchise.

Just watching the first few episodes I’m already hooked again. And it’s been long enough since I last saw any of it that it’s almost like watching it again for the first time.

The pilot is really quite bad. Season 5 also seems to stink on ice. Never managed to finish it. But the rest of the seasons are really good, at least if you can ignore Bruce Boxleiter's overacting.