Drunken Mego Iron Man knows how to do Memorial Day RIGHT. Captain America, sadly, does not.
Archive for May, 2010
Great Moments in (Drunken Mego) Iron Mannery part Kablammo!
Posted in Threat Quality with tags Mego Iron Man, Memorial day, Twisted Toyfare Theater on May 31, 2010 by braakGet Out of Cities, Return to the Trees
Posted in Jeff Holland, Threat Quality on May 28, 2010 by braakSo amidst all the complaining about Facebook’s privacy policy and how it gives out your information to advertisers and BLA BLA BLA I uncovered a far more insidious threat.
I am seeing the Twitter feeds of people whose Twitter feeds I DO NOT FOLLOW, EVEN WHEN I AM NOT USING TWITTER.
I pop over to Entertainment Weekly, mostly just force of habit, and I read this, on EW’s scrolling feed of vaguely-famous-people-with-Twitter-accounts:
“SOLEIL MOON FRYE (Moonfrye): Question of the day: What’s your current favorite song?”
I did not seek out the current thoughts of a former child actress. And yet, there it was. My thought process, in three parts:
1) I don’t care about Soleil Moon Frye. I have ZERO attachment to her. I don’t hate her, though I remember not much liking ‘Punky Brewster’ as a kid, and
2) I’m fairly certain that knowing Soleil Moon Frye’s current favorite song – or indeed, any of the responses from her 1.4 MILLION followers – will not noticeably improve my day, and yet
3) I still kind of want to let her know that I’m really enjoying “Southern Pacifica” by Josh Ritter.
And that’s about the time when this weekend’s camping trip was more than a vacation, and it was more than great timing since I seem to have reached my absolute limit of web-based information – it was a NECESSARY REMOVAL of the internet from my system for a couple of blessed days.
I need an internet detox that can only come with sitting by a lake and failing to catch fish.
So, for that, I thank you, Ms. Moon Frye.
‘Lost’ Finale: Lockeless
Posted in Jeff Holland, Threat Quality with tags Jeff Holland, John Locke, Lost finale, Threat Quality on May 28, 2010 by braak(Yes, we’re making this a “Lost”-themed week, because if not now, when?)
For me, the most fascinating part of the final season of Lost is the fact that one of its two central figures was essentially absent for the entirety of it. John Locke was gone.
Sure, Terry O’Quinn got plenty to do this year, and that’s always a good thing, particularly since he managed to bring a lot of previous character traits to an essentially new character (which, given his comments in the retrospective episode and on Jimmy Kimmel – DAMN YOU FOR KEEPING ME AWAKE UNTIL 2AM! – he was unaware of until the finale of season 5) and made it work.
But the actual character of John Locke was gone. And I’m not sure enough fanfare went into that, possibly because a lot of fans were assuming the show would rectify the somewhat undignified ending he was given.That it would stop screwing with them and bring Locke back, because his story hadn’t ended to their satisfaction.
Looking back, though, Locke’s death should have been a big clue to viewers that their expectations were pretty much screwed.
Because so were Locke’s.
Let’s work through the timeline and figure out what happened:
Alice In Wonderland, Redux
Posted in Braak, Threat Quality with tags alice in wonderland, Braak, tim burton on May 28, 2010 by braakThis has been bugging me for a while, and now I just remembered to write it down:
When Alice comes back to Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts has taken over, why THE SHIT aren’t all the fucking flowers painted fucking RED?
Six Ideas From Lost I’m Glad They Didn’t Use
Posted in Braak, Threat Quality with tags Braak, Lost on May 27, 2010 by braakLast Lost post from me, I promise. It’s either this, or I write about BP and the Gulf of Mexico — but only one of these two topics will make me suicidally depressed. I’ve got to pick my battles here.
So, the Lost finale didn’t end up the way that I wanted to, but this is actually potentially good. It’s one of the reasons, in fact, I spend so much time imagining how a show could be, even though that show will never happen:
Every idea I thought of that Lost didn’t use is an idea I get to keep (HAH! SUCKERS!).
Whoops, I just fixed ‘Lost’
Posted in Threat Quality with tags Jeff Holland, Lost finale, Threat Quality on May 25, 2010 by braak
It can be done! In fact, it’s easy. Allow me to demonstrate. I just need you to treat me like the Desmond of Threat Quality, and trust that I know things I shouldn’t know, and may not entirely understand myself. Agreed? Agreed.
Now then: Let’s get to work on those sideways flashes.
The finale asked us to accept them as a kind of pre-afterlife construct*, meant to bring the characters along to a point where they’d be content, having finally fought past the hang-ups that held them back in their lives. As a result, the castaways are finally ready to take the next step – together, as one hard-forged community – into the great unknown.
Which is, yeah, a bit silly. Read more »
Eight More Thoughts On the ‘Lost’ Finale
Posted in Threat Quality with tags Jeff Holland, Lost finale, Threat Quality on May 25, 2010 by braakThe mood in the office, the day after the Lost finale: grim, mixed with betrayal and hints of befuddlement.
On the up side: other peoples’ misery makes me reassess what I really think of things. I now have a slightly better feeling about the finale. Some thoughts, in no order of importance:
That was a long way to go for a “They were all dead” joke
Now, I can’t say this with any certainty until I see a DVD feature, but I’ll bet you $20 that the resolution to the flash-sideways universe started when someone in the writer’s room joked, “And then it turns out they were dead the whole time!” and someone else said, “Man, we 
should just DO that, just to mess with people,” and then somehow the idea snowballed from there until it was too late.
Spin-Offs
I would not mind an Island sitcom starring Rose and Bernard, and their annoying next-door neighbors, Hurley and Ben. I do not believe I am alone in this. Read more »
The Thrust/Three-Quarter Problem
Posted in Braak, Threat Quality with tags Braak, theater, theatre on May 24, 2010 by braakTheater, of course, is not engineering; terminology tends to be a little fuzzy. Sometimes we learn it one way, sometimes we learn it another way. I’m going to lay out my terminology for the difference between a thrust stage and a three-quarter round stage, and we’ll see if it makes sense; if not, maybe we can come up with some better identifiers. This is also maybe of interest to reviewers (like Moff, for instance, who might be less familiar with the particular intricacies of staging), so apologies if its more information than required.
Lost: Wait, what? [Braak's View]
Posted in Braak, Threat Quality with tags Braak, Lost on May 24, 2010 by braak[UPDATED!]
Okay, we all saw it, let’s take a minute to discuss what happened.
They all did NOT die in the plane crash. I think the answer to what happened is actually dumber than that.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Posted in Braak, Threat Quality on May 22, 2010 by braakJeanine and I just watched this, right now, and i have some things to say:
1) Man, that world is basically run on candy, isn’t it?
2) Willy Wonka is probably a great chocolatier, but it can’t be that hard to be the most successful candymaker in the world when your leading competitor’s name is SLUGWORTH.
3) Speaking of: no one names characters in children’s books like Roald Dahl.
4) Here’s what my problem was with Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka. It was a difference, I think, between Depp’s “childish” and Wilder’s “child-like.” While Wilder was weird and creepy and eccentric, he really seemed like an adult that had a child-like sense of wonder; in comparison to Depp, who seemed like a character whose development was somehow arrested in childhood. It is the difference between Depp’s Wonka, who is a kid that has resources, and Wilder’s Wonka, who is a mad candy scientist. It is also the difference between a guy that’s weird (Wilder) and a guy that might try and molest your children (Depp).
5) Man, they just don’t make movies like they did in the fucking 70s, did they?
