It’s time for your apparently semi-regular “Tiny Kung-Fu Women TV” column. This time around: CW’s Nikita pilot. The short version: it was blah, then it was eh, then it was maybe.
And then by the last two minutes it gave me something worth tuning into the next episode for.
But I know what you’re all asking: How does it compare to that milestone of Tiny Kung-Fu Women TV, Alias? Read more »
When talk in the Geekly circles swings around to “who would make a good Doctor?”, inevitably the question of “why not a woman?” comes up.
It’s a good question, and an interesting one. There is nothing in the TV series that specifically precludes it; I know that nerds say stuff like, “The Doctor said he was a father!” or “the Doctor has always been male!” but that’s just dumb old conservative fanboyish misogyny.
Odd that two shows I really enjoyed this past week – one returning, one new – both involve unlicensed detectives. Let’s take them one by one and 
find what makes them worth a watch:
Bored to Death
Bored To Death feels a lot like an idea I might have had when I was 15 – “A novelist becomes a detective using skills gleaned from other detective books” – but even then would’ve dismissed as being a little too masturbatory and painfully meta.
And the pilot was exactly that. Throw in a couple of moments of severely fucked up ethics on the Jonathan Aimes character and I was pretty put off by the whole thing.
I gave it another shot on the urging of FoTQ Tad, and was pleasantly surprised. Because a couple episodes in, it started feeling like a 15-year-old’s concept for a show – in the best way. Read more »
[I keep wanting to write the Corsay novels with a chapter in the beginning that's completely unrelated to the rest of the book, except thematically; like those opening ten or fifteen-minute scenes in the James Bond movies, but Holland keeps telling me I can't. So, for your enjoyment and delectation, I've converted the opening gambit of Mr. Stitch to a short story, and provided it here.]
“How long has she been like this?”
It was very quiet in the Coopers’ front room. Their daughter, young Agnes, was in the tiny bedroom she ordinarily shared with her two brothers. She was alone now, and her mumbling could barely be heard behind the heavy door. Her parents—mother puffy-eyed and red-nosed, haunted by fear for her little girl; father stoic in the way of a working man of Trowth, determined as desperation mounted to be more fiercely unavailable to it—sat on their low, shabby couch, and said nothing. Valentine Vie-Gorgon leaned against the wall, arms crossed, doing his best to look serious, but unable to keep the compassion from his face. Two gendarmes crowded into the room as well. Beckett didn’t know their names, he’d conscripted them on the way to the Coopers’. The new knocker stood just inside the front doorway.
It does feel like nothing works right these days, doesn’t it? The Way Things Should Be isn’t even an option on the table anymore.
Our government doesn’t work right, that one’s pretty obvious.
Special interest groups – which is a casual, non-judgmental way of saying “Large corporations with money and influence that wish to keep doing what they’re doing without interference” – pour funding into a political party in hopes of stymieing regulation that might cost them an extra million or two when things go catastrophically wrong (or, y’know, if it threatens their current business model, even if that model is harmful in the long run).
Not even the start of it, here’s more: Read more »
Back when I checked out G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and found it well, awful – despite the casting of Joseph Gordon Levitt as Cobra Commander and Ray Park as Snake-Eyes, which, in a just 
world, would have made it completely awesome – I also made a point to tracking down the 1986 animated movie.
Being that I was six when I last saw it, I had only vague recollections of it being a) kind of wild, and b) utterly baffling.
Turns out, utter bafflement is the only response to “G.I. Joe: The Movie,” because it decides to take the “highly trained special missions force vs. terrorist organization” premise and chuck it out the window, in favor of, “What if G.I. Joe fought a weird, insect-based secret society?”
This is pretty nuts. “G.I. Joe: The Movie” is like watching a “24” film where Jack Bauer fights werewolves. It makes that amount of sense. (Scratch that: I would watch the crap out of that movie.)
This is what it’s like to sit through a 23-year-old cartoon that makes no sense:
On the Opening Theme Song Sequence:
“Armies of the night/evil taking flight!/Cobraaaaaa (Co-BRAAAA!)/Cobraaaaa (Co-BRAAAA!)” Wait, snakes can’t fly. This movie doesn’t make any sense and we’re only a minute in! Read more »
