Monday 23 March 2009

Battlestar Galactica says goodbye and thanks for all the fish...suckers

The Recapper is not a Battlestar Galactica fan. While The Recapper can appreciate the show on technical grounds, The Recapper likes her shows with a sense of humour and BSG is the ultimate "serious, this is very very serious, look at my serious face" show. That's the technical description.

But the series finale of the show has caused such a furore on the forums and blogs of the world's geeks that it deserves comment, even from such a determined non-fan as myself. After giving most episodes a rating in the vicinity of an A for the past four years, Jacob the TWOP recapper has given the finale an F, describing it as a "silly, bloated, preachy, half-assed mess", an opinion expressed to me far more forcefully by a member of my family who finally managed to raise me this morning after leaving 18 messages on my mobile while I was sick yesterday. In his opinion, the finale was so awful it has destroyed the show he loved completely and that constituted an emergency worthy of being communicated.

Any finale to a show as popular as BSG is going to be controversial and not all fans are going to be happy. However, in this case, the consensus seems to be that BSG completely screwed up. What a disappointing end for fans of the show.

Friday 20 March 2009

Twilight: The Beautiful Undead

Jenny Turner has written a piece about Twilight in the London Review of Books and has expressed everything I wanted to much more accurately and in much more poetic prose. I highly recommend it.

"It’s not that the books read like Mormon propaganda exactly...(but) religion bulges out in unacknowledged places – in the interest in immortality and eternal bonding, sects, and the very odd and uninformed fascination with ‘addiction’ and ‘obsession’, among other forbidden things – and, above all, in the centrality of ‘abstaining’, which is one word Edward’s sect uses for its refusal to feed on humans and, of course, the description for what Bella and Edward are doing when they renounce sex. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, teen chastity was fit only for the bluntest satire; and yet, here it is, a decade later, stronger than ever, the most moral and the most erotic position to take, the practice that brings the human closest to the god."

"Bella’s character, in accordance with the conventions of the most finely mashed romantic fiction, has no features at all, apart from a mild emo-ish dysthymia...as Helen Fielding did with Bridget Jones, Meyer has hitched a ride on the Mr Darcy plotline, but without bothering to give her heroine any of Elizabeth Bennet’s spirit – raising a reprise of the Bridget question, why would a man of any style or substance fall for a lummox like her?"

And most importantly, and probably a view I didn't stress enough in my review since I was concentrating on the subtext rather than the cinematography, casting, special effects and acting of the film itself:

"In accordance with the adage about the rubbishy book making for the better movie, Twilight the film is great."

Thursday 19 March 2009

Worst show ever: eliciting discussion and comment

With only two weeks left in the poll on worst show, we have a total of 4 votes for 4 different shows! And not a single vote for Crusade, which I find bizarre. That show was terrible.

I had 111 visits to this blog in the last month from 5 different countries. I'm still trying to come to terms with why people choose to comment on posts (or in my case, don't) particularly when some of these people spent more than 20 minutes on the site. I've also had phone calls and emails from friends and family commenting in a highly-positive or negative way on blog posts (my rant on Twilight produced a particularly mixed response, which was actually the point of being so forceful). When asked they outright refuse to comment on the blog itself. It's an interesting phenomenon I'm still trying to get my head around.

I have a pretty thick skin and consider a comment such as, "I competely disagree with you" to be refreshing and welcome, particularly if it's backed up with an interesting argument. If you have something to say, let it rip. And if you want to suggest a terrible show I've missed in my poll or to argue forcefully why a show shouldn't be included, go for it.

And if you have any explanation as to why you don't want to comment on posts, I'd be very interested in that too.