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Are You Watching Battlestar Galactica?

Because you should be.

Talk about an impressive piece of television.

Galactica is in its final half-season, which started last Friday. Picking up from where the previous half-season's cliffhanger ending left off, the show answered questions by raising new ones.

If you haven't been watching, do yourself a favor and start with the miniseries and just mainline the DVDs until you've caught up. Hulu.com has the most recent episodes available until the end of the month. Just don't start watching the latest episodes, you'll be completely lost and nothing will have resonance. You can't just skip to the end with this thing. Believe me, it's worth it. Seriously. Like any show, it has peaks and valleys, but there are very few throwaway episodes and A LOT of amazing television.

The characters alone are worth watching the show for. Heck, I'd watch every week just for Colonel Tigh. And there is very little connection between this new version and the old version, apart from the basic ideas and some names. For instance, you may have heard that Starbuck is a girl. She is, and she could probably beat Dirk Benedict to a pulp, too. There is no robot teddy bear thing, and Boxy doesn't make it past the miniseries. This is a show with a constantly escalating death toll and a chain-smoking doctor. Guys, sometimes Dean Stockwell even shows up for a guest appearance! It's pretty great.

I've never watched Lost. I'm waiting for the show to end so I can gauge fan reaction to see if the show is worth my time. I've tried to protect myself in this way ever since I got burned by The X-Files and their alien mythology that went absolutely nowhere. Still, I've found myself following shows like Heroes (Season 1 was great, but I lost interest completely about three episodes into Season 2) and 24 (those DVD sets are like crack, but don't even bother with Season 6).

I don't even remember how I got into Galactica, but I'm glad I did. The show's quality is consistently high, especially the acting. I don't even mind the fact that there's still a chance the show can screw up in the final half-season; if the last episode ever aired was last week's (which it could have been if the writer's strike had continued), I would have actually been okay with it. Maybe.

I can't say enough good things about the show so go watch it right now. FOR SERIOUS.

Editor's Note: Death By Pop usually waits until we've watched the entire run of a show before reviewing it; this isn't so much a review as it is fanboy frothing. The editorial staff have discussed it and, agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed, have allowed this rare bit of geek ranting in the hopes that people will check the show out. It really is as good as everyone says.

REVIEW - Man On Wire

Philippe Petit, a French high-wire artist, saw pictures of plans for a proposed building in New York - the World Trade Center - in a magazine. He immediately fell in love with the idea of walking the space between the two towers.

After a lot of planning, practice, and some slightly illegal activities, on August 7, 1974, with the World Trade Center built but some upper floors not completely finished, he did it.

Man On Wire is the story of Petit and his team of friends and assistants as they schemed to do the unimaginable. The film cuts between heist-like sequences of the group infiltrating the WTC and avoiding the various guards, to flashbacks of Petit's training and other achievements in tightrope walking like Paris' Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Petit and his friends give their experiences in their own words; it's difficult not to share Petit's enthusiasm, or agree with the sentiments of some of Petit's friends who, as it became apparent that he was actually going to walk a high wire a quarter of a mile high, decided they didn't want to be involved in what could potentially be the horrific death of their friend.

Of course, Petit lived to tell the tale, and that's what's so great about this film. Petit survived, but as we see grainy 8mm footage and photos of his walks it's difficult not to be extrmely concerned for the man's safety. Also, as a documentary film, it's got a good structure to it that really hooks you in to the story. Don't believe me? It currently stands as the all time #1 film on Rotten Tomatoes. And it's a documentary.

I really enjoyed Man On Wire and highly recommend it! If you're a fan of documentaries, this is required viewing. If not, see it anyway. Seriously.

Wild Things

Spike Jonze owns Girl Skateboards. He is also directing the live-action adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are. Slashfilm has a first look at the upcoming Wild Things skateboards Girl will be making, which have photos of the titular creatures on them. They look amazing. This is the one film this year that I am 100% excited about with no reservations.

Click here to check them out!

VIDEO - Look Around You: Germs

From the BBC series Look Around You.Look Around You will premiere this Sunday/Monday at 1 am on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

Saying Goodbye to Two Legends

I haven't even done my Year In Review: People Who Died article yet, and already 2009 is taking some legendary names.
Ricardo Montalban was known for his many film and television roles, especially as Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island. He will also be remembered for his love of rich Corinthian leather. But mostly, we will all remember Montalban for playing the titular Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But I think my fondest memory of Montalban will be his appearances in Escape From the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. I just really liked that circus guy. Montalban was 88 years old.
Patrick McGoohan was also a veteran of television, starring in Danger Man (aka Secret Agent) in the 1960s. Following that, he produced and starred in The Prisoner, a series that has become a cult classic due to the sheer insanity of being chased down a beach by an evil balloon. Later, McGoohan went on to guest star in a record four episodes of Columbo, and also directed a number of episodes. McGoohan's last prominent role was as Edward Longshanks in Mel Gibson's Braveheart. McGoohan was 80 years old.

TRAILER - Franklyn

I don't know what this film is about, but it's all Dark City-style and Eva Green is in it, so I am somewhat interested.There is no current release date for Franklyn in the U.S., but it hits theaters in the U.K. on February 20. So maybe I'll see it then if I have the time.

REVIEW - Ghost Town

Normally, a film directed by David Koepp (who I'm sure is a very nice person, but I dislike much of his work) and starring Greg Kinnear and Tea Leoni in a paranormal semi-romantic Cyrano-esque comedy film would be the sort of film that I would never voluntarily watch unless I was a captive audience on an airplane or something. However, when the star of the film is Ricky Gervais, I'm willing to give it a shot. Cautiously.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Gervais, he is a former 80s (minor) pop star who later turned to situation comedy at the BBC with The Office, firmly solidifying himself as one of the funnier human beings on the planet.After making inroads in American television with his series Extras, Gervais is now working his way into American films. Ghost Town is his first starring role in such an endeavor.

Gervais plays Bertram Pincus, a dentist who doesn't particularly care for humanity in general. While getting a colonoscopy (from SNL's Kristen Wiig, who is also hilarious in her brief appearances), Pincus is clinically dead on the table for seven minutes. Upon his release from the hospital, he finds that he can see dead people!

Of course, these dead people want something from him, namely to not be wandering around among the living anymore. But the conceit of the film is that the dead will stick around until the living can let them go, so these ghosts need Pincus to communicate stuff to people. Greg Kinnear's character is still around because his widow, played by Tea Leoni, can't quite let him go. The reason for this is almost not even a twist, but I won't mention it here anyway because it doesn't really matter.

Basically, if Ricky Gervais wasn't in this film it wouldn't be worth mentioning. The plot is uninteresting; the characters, Pincus aside, are pretty straightforward. Gervais is the draw here, and I suspect there's a good deal of ad-libbing from him to make scenes more interesting. There is a particular scene where he attempts to explain why he said "How can teeth be self-righteous?" that is in itself worth watching the film for.

Gervais' next film, This Side of the Truth, is coming in March. He is co-directing. I suspect it will be good since apparently Patrick Stewart is going to be in it. YouTube has a series of videos on the making of the film. You think there'd be a trailer available somewhere, but I checked all the usual places. Warner Bros. marketing is probably too busy trying to make sure all those anti-Fox press releases get out to the movie news sites.

Norse God Prevents Home Burglary

Torvald Alexander, a builder from Inverleith, Edinburgh, was on his way home from a New Year's costume party. He was dressed as Thor, the former Norse god of thunder who has enjoyed a degree of popularity in his new job as a Marvel Comics character and member of the Avengers.

Alexander, who is of Norwegian descent, is a pretty big guy and had fashioned his costume from mostly tin foil. As he entered his home he discovered his home was in the process of being robbed. Alexander went into action.

The burglar, who Alexander suspects was inebriated, was so afraid of this six-foot-tall, foil-clad Norse god charging at him that he jumped out the window. The man also left his shoes behind.

The best thing about this story is that it is absolutely true.

Hilarious!

2009 Golden Globes! Wow!

Does anyone watch this stuff anymore? Do the Golden Globes matter except to the people who design DVD covers, and maybe Academy voters looking to see what the trends are? Does Joe Sixpack watch this stuff? I mean, pop culture is my side job, and I don't even watch this stuff. I have a life, you know?

What makes the Globes "special" is that you have film awards and television awards in the same room at the same time. This is great because it legitimizes television and makes it seem as important as film. Also, celebrities get to rub shoulders with each other and all the TV actors get to schmooze with film people and try to get film roles, and film actors get to try to convince some network people that they would be perfect for that new hour of crime drama at 9:00 on Wednesdays. I don't even want to cover this, to be honest, but some interesting things happened and it falls within the scope of the blog I guess. No red carpet fashion reviews, though. IT'S ABOUT THE WORK, YOU JOAN RIVERS TYPES!

The Globes are a bit weird, since they split films up between drama and musical/comedy. Like for instance, Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona won Best Musical or Comedy. Now, I'm pretty sure it's not a musical, but I was unaware that it was a comedy. Whatever. Colin Farrell won Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) for In Bruges, a film I really, really liked, so it's good to see some smaller films get some recognition.

Kate Winslet won two awards, one for Best Actress in Revolutionary Road (which isn't even in wide release yet), one for Supporting Actress in The Reader. Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture, Director (Danny Boyle), Screenplay and Score. Mickey Rourke, this year's Robert Downey Jr., won Best Actor for The Wrestler, which also took home Best Song for some musician guy from Jersey named Bruce Springsteen. Who the heck is that guy?

On the television side, it was the usual suspects (30 Rock, Mad Men); and HBO took home all the rest. John Adams, a miniseries that I was kind of on the fence about, won Best Miniseries or TV Movie and the majority of the acting awards in that category. Paul Giamatti (who I love as an actor but I feel is somehow wrong for period films), Laura Linney, and the great Tom Wilkinson all won for their roles. I would have liked to see Wilkinson win for his role as Jim Baker in Recount, though, but at least Laura Dern won for her portrayal of that attorney general lady from Florida who seemed a little crazy on TV.

Also, Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight, which I heard was a pretty decent film.

Ultimately, though, none of this is really important. The Oscars, coming soon, are more important I GUESS, but seriously, it's all just a bunch of celebrities patting each other on the back. If any civilians have an interest in this stuff, it's probably just to see the films they liked get recognition. Like I was happy to see In Bruges get some love, but so many films and television shows get ignored in these things. It's difficult to really care about this stuff, and that's why this is such a halfhearted posting.

First Look at 2009 Films - Presented by Entertainment Weakly

I am loathe to link to Entertainment Weakly for any reason, but occasionally they get some exclusive content that is of interest. Like, for instance, wouldn't you like to see what's up with some of 2009's upcoming films that aren't called Star Trek? Of couse you would.

Learn more about Michael Mann's Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger; the upcoming-if-Fox-doesn't-block-its-release Watchmen; Christian Bale as John Connor in McG's Terminator: Salvation; Spike Jonze's meticulous vision of the classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are; X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the film fanboys are really hoping doesn't suck but they know it probably will; and many more.

Click here!

REVIEW - Star Wars: The Clone Wars

I'm going to come right out and say it up front - I really didn't think this thing was all that bad.

Now, I know some people's brains just exploded, but seriously, I will explain! Don't take away my geek card yet! I have reasons.

Mistakes were made here, there is absolutely no question. The first mistake was to take the first three episodes of what was supposed to be a TELEVISION SERIES and slap them together and throw it in a MOVIE THEATER. On a television series, you have less time per episode to get inside the characters, but it's okay because you're spending X amount of episodes with them so you can do your character development over that time. By slapping three episodes together haphazardly, it shortchanges the new characters' development and just seems like you're watching a video game you can't play.

Which leads me to my next point, which is that the character design is terrible. Everyone looks like puppets carved out of wood or something. George Lucas had the bright idea to make an homage to Thunderbirds but in this day and age you CANNOT MAKE SOMETHING CRAPPY ON PURPOSE AND EXPECT PEOPLE NOT TO COMPLAIN (see also: The Happening). The characters look dumb, but at least the style works well for the clone troopers, droids, spaceships, etc.The first thing you notice is there's no 20th Century Fox fanfare. It feels weird to have Star Wars without it. The next thing you notice is that the music cheaps out almost immediately. The music's okay once it gets going, but replacing the bombastic opening theme and text crawl was a bad choice, especially when you replace it with a narrator voice who sounds pretty much exactly like the news guy from Buckaroo Banzai. The loss of the traditional opening makes the show kind of loses its momentum from the start and makes it feel like it's not actually Star Wars. I expect this is where many people in the theater got irretrieveably lost.

Plot and storywise, I thought the film actually did a decent job, with the exception of the Hutt angle. I don't even so much mind the Hutts being used in general as I do the way we're forced into the fact that Jabba has a cute baby Huttlet. Using Jabba for this also works at cross-purposes with the goal of the series - it serves to CONTRACT the universe rather than expand it. It's a big galaxy, and at this point it seems like the only two characters who have never met are Chief Chirpa and Lobot.

And Ziro the Hutt is just plain offensive. First of all, he speaks Basic, then they make him sound like Truman Capote, which is a pretty weird choice. The character is very underwritten, so the voice characterization and black-light tattoos are all there is to tell you everything you need to know about the character, and apparently we are meant to understand that Ziro is a vaguely homosexual scumbag, despite the fact that Hutts reproduce asexually. How an asexual species with vaguely defined gender roles can be considered homosexual is...beyond the purview of this blog. Suffice it to say that Ziro the Hutt is, shall we say, ill-conceived and unnecessarily distracting.

The only other complaint I have about this is the same complaint I had with Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars animated series (which is suddenly and mysteriously out of print!): the dude who voices Obi-Wan Kenobi sounds pretty close, but his line readings are terrible. He stresses words oddly; nobody talks like that.Overall, though, the show (I won't refer to it as a film because it most certainly IS NOT) wasn't all that bad. I figured it would be a complete train wreck, but it wasn't far off from the sort of thing Tartakovsky had been doing on the earlier series. A lot of people were complaining about Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker's new Padawan, but aside from her insistence on calling him "Sky-guy" (which was very, very annoying) I thought she was pretty okay. She and Anakin bicker like George Costanza's parents almost immediately, and I think it works, especially since the film series' plot contrivances keep Padme away from much of the action. Ahsoka's not a useless tag-along character like Jar Jar Binks or anything. And between what we know from Episode III and Yoda's rather vague explanation of why Anakin is assigned a Padawan, we can infer her fate and its importance to Anakin's development. There are a lot of character moments throughout the show that will clearly pay off later, and I thought they did a really good job of keeping the characters consistent to their film counterparts.

Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee returned to voice Mace Windu and Count Dooku respectively (they both seem to take any job they're offered), as does Anthony Daniels for C-3P0. The rest of the voices aren't so far from their film counterparts to be distracting, though Lee's voice is just too awesome for the CG Dooku marionette puppet he's saddled with. The dude looks like an Easter Island statue.I've heard complaints about the battle droids. As featured in the films, I found them to be really, really annoying with their asides and non sequitirs, especially the poor timing of the joke where Qui Gon tells that one droid he's taking the Queen to Coruscant and it's like "Uh, Coruscant? That doesn't compute...you're under arrest." That was really, really lame. That said, I think they've finally perfected the comic timing on these guys. It makes absolutely no logical sense that these droids have such defined personalities as to value promotions, have philosophical leanings, or believe in God (yes, God); and I guess that's why I couldn't help finding it funnier than I thought possible when the droids made parting comments like "But I just got promoted!", "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?" and my personal favorite, hitting the ground after falling from an impossible height: "Oh my God!" I don't know why I found this to be both funny and acceptable within the Star Wars universe, but I DID. Maybe I'm just getting old, I don't know.

I've heard good things about the rest of the series that's been broadcast so far. Apparently Paul Dini (Batman: The Animated Series) wrote a three episode arc, and I'm willing to bet that it's awesome. From the clips I've seen of some of the episodes, they look to deal with some mature themes and issues. But there's also a Jar Jar episode in there too, you know, for the kids. There was a particularly interesting episode featuring Kit Fisto and his recently graduated Mon Calamari former Padawan that looked to deal with some really complex sociological issues regarding war and ethics, and another one with Plo Koon and some clones stuck drifting in a lifepod that looked really good as well. Not typical kid's show type stuff.

If I had seen this show in the theater, I would have been very, very upset. As a Star Wars FILM, it is lacking in the scope and characterization of even Attack of the Clones. But when seen in perspective on the small screen, I thought it was actually pretty good and I look forward to the rest of the series.