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

I don’t mind Dave Foley and I guess his portrayal, trying to be that of an “average” ant, is in line with the story but I just wasn’t inspired to really care about his character that much based on the voice acting. OTOH I loved Kevin Spacey’s voice acting. Heck I even like Hayden Panetiere as Dot more than Foley and I think she wasn’t even 10.

I enjoyed the movie immensely, but agree it did drag in places. It more than made up for the tedium with some truly engaging scenes and excellent performances. While I normally cannot stand Brad Pitt, I liked his acting in this, and, yes, Christoph Waltz stole the movie.

I didn't realize that was her. I think I remember Bonnie Hunt being my favorite voice, but I don't remember why.

I have to throw in my agreement about Christoph Waltz. He deserved the accolades. Brad Pitt I didn't find all that impressive for the most part, but I did like his negotiation with the Nazi in the bar.

I agree about Pitt of whom I’m not a big fan but he was good for this role. Actually, all the characters were well cast I just felt Tarantino was a bit to self indulgent with his own direction. A little channeling of George Lucas “Faster, more intense” might not have been a bad thing here in places.

In many ways Waltz’s scenes are somewhat reminiscent of “Death Note” but with the actors facial expressions conveying extra meaning rather than a voiceover personal monologue to clue you in on what the characters are thinking.

I just watched Lovely Bones and really enjoyed it, despite the fact that it really stressed me out during a few scenes. It was directed by Peter Jackson and had a talented young actress in the lead role. Highly recommended if you like the edge of your seat.

I got my mom hooked on the current season of Friday Night Lights. She might like it enough to watch the previous seasons.

I like the show a lot, but it also kind of makes me sad. I still find it very engaging, but it's going to be hard for it to ever match its first season simply because they have to get it all done with a lot fewer episodes. The first season had 22 episodes to tell its story. The second season got cut short by the writers strike, so it stopped at 15. The third season was scaled back to 13 episodes, and same thing with the fourth season. That's still a lot more time than a movie has to tell its story, but I still liked the pacing of the first season. It didn't get bogged down by having more episodes. It simply fleshed things out more. Still, I think they're doing some remarkable writing with only 13 episodes in a season.

Anyway, now I'll stop plugging the show for a while. I still have more Buffy to watch. I haven't been as impressed with the sixth season, so I'm hoping it picks up the pieces a bit.

I just watched the first half of the first season of Melrose Place meets Lost meets BSG meets . . . meets . . . meets . . . , but I swore the mailers said “Stargate Universe.” A better title might have been “Plagiarized Universe” or PU.

I’m not sure what the target audience is for this show but I get the feeling they went to the mall and set up a marketing research booth outside of Hot Topic and ended up with a show geared toward something akin to an emo. Don’t get me wrong I like a little drama with my scifi, a big reason I’ve been switching to anime, but they’ve left a couple important parts of the genre out. Most notably the “sci” and the “fi” bits which when present seem to just be vehicles for the wait for it. . . drama.

First off this does not deserve to have the name Stargate in it’s title. Atlantis IMO barely did but not this one. SG1 worked for me more than anything because of the chemistry between the characters which seemed to be present from the first episode. So far about 10 or so episodes in, including the pilot, and there are no characters to speak of save the Dr. Smith (I mean Rush) who can have any chemistry together.

Don’t get me wrong and assume that there is not character building. Quite the opposite, the viewer is beaten in the face with it in several overly contrived ways. Unfortunately like most things that beat us in the face we just don’t appreciate them so much.

Also, where Caprica and to some extent BSG pissed me off by having to many separate story arcs this one has none yet except for the voyger-lost-in-space-1999-time-tunnel one. Oh there are hints but nothing so far to indicate anything interesting coming up.

Where in SG1 the sexual tension between Carter and O’Neill could always provide something to a story here it’s more about not having any unrelieved “tension.” I guess having everyone sleeping around provides for more drama. Might be a nice change if we actually got to see anything but I saw as much skin in the original BSG.

We’ve also been entertained by a couple of musical interludes. The music sucked!

The worst thing about this whole enterprise is that it could have had a lot of promise but just seems to want to get everything possible wrong. I haven’t seen all of the newer shows on the SciFi channel and of those I have seen the only one I really liked was the first season of “Eureka,” but SGU has made me curious enough to try to get a hold of some of the other shows like “Warehouse 13” to see if everything being made by the Scifi channel is now mindless crap.

Now I need to find something good to watch like a rerun of “Wormhole Extreme.”

Hope you like the latter half more than I did. Buffy went steadily down hill for me after the 4th season.

My nephew likes Eureka, but I don't know anything about it. My sister said I probably wouldn't like it, and she can usually anticipate that sort of thing.

I know one of my coworkers mentioned liking Stargate Universe. I don't think I'm really down with his tastes, though. Science fiction shows haven't done a lot for me, historically, excepting Red Dwarf. Considering I couldn't really get into the first season of Battlestar Galactica, it may be a while before I dip my toes into those waters again, even with my sister urging me to give Doctor Who a chance. We'll see.