Category: TV

Direct Beam Comms #73

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Powerless – First, and apparently only, season Grade B-

The NBC comedy series Powerless unexpectedly ended its run a few weeks back. “Unexpectedly” since the series was pulled from the schedule before the last two episodes could air which effectively marks the end of Powerless.

Taking place in the DC universe, Powerless was about workers at Wayne Enterprises headed by Bruce’s Cousin Van (Alan Tudyk). Wayne Enterprises invents things to keep people safe from the superhero battles that are constantly going on all around them. In a clever twist, it turns out that some of their inventions turn up as gadgets used by Batman to fight the bad-guys, but most of Powerless was centered on the employees including Emily (Vanessa Hudgens) as a new girl in town enamored with all the goings-on of superheroes, Teddy (Danny Pudi) and Ron (Ron Funches) two engineers and Jackie (Christina Kirk) Van’s assistant.

Powerless was an enjoyable show and an interesting, comedic look at life of people living alongside superheroes and villains who see them mostly as an annoyance like traffic or bad weather than something to aspire to. I’m not sure why Powerless didn’t click with the general public? My guess would be that since it was half-comedy and half-superhero show, it didn’t really appeal to the people who might have tuned in for just a comedy OR a superhero show.

Regardless, I enjoyed Powerless and felt that the show was finding it’s legs as it were and was interested to see how the first season was going to wrap up.

Movies

The Lost Boys

When I first caught The Lost Boys on cable probably sometime in 1988 I was immediately hooked. This story about a family that moves to Santa Carla, California and finds that it’s infested with vampires was always one of my favorite movies as a teen. But I have to say watching the movie today 30 years after its release was a bit of a letdown.

I remember when The Lost Boys came out the big draw to it at my middle school was that it starred “The Corey’s” of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. If either of those two actors are remembered at all today it’s because of their substance abuse problems in the 1990s which would lead to the untimely death of Haim in 2010. But in 1987 those two were the biggest teen heart-throbs on the planet with Feldman having just come off of movies like The Goonies and Stand By Me and Haim Lucas.

I remember Haim being the guy most girls at my school wanted to be their boyfriend and Feldman being the guy most dudes at my school wished was their best friend. In The Lost Boys, Haim plays Sam, younger brother to Michael and I so wanted to be Sam with his cool quips, driving cars without licenses and killer of vampires. A year later and both Haim and Feldman would star in the movie License to Drive which was a big hit in its day but now is mostly an unknown movie to anyone under the age of 35.

The Lost Boys also starred a few actors who would go onto have big careers including Jason Patric as Michael in an early role who would go onto films like Rush and Narc and Kiefer Sutherland who then was just entering the big movie-stardom phase of his career which would lead to roles like Young Guns and Flatliners and is a TV star these days. The Lost Boys also co-stars Jami Gertz as the one lost girl of the bunch who’s had a long career on film and TV and Alex Winter too who would go onto co-star in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989.

If anything, The Lost Boys has loads of style. It’s a movie that college professors today could use as an example of how films from the late 1980s looked with costumes, set designs and colors. And that’s one of the reasons I think that the The Lost Boys hasn’t aged that well the last 30 years. It’s a fantastic movie to look at and is very fun to watch but is lacking in the story department. It’s one of those movies that works the first time through when the viewer doesn’t know the trick/twist of the film coming, but after that future viewings are mostly style over substance.

So much style that the design of the vampires from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series owe a great deal to the heavy forehead and freaky eyes vampires of The Lost Boys.

The Lost Boys is a pretty spectacular film in the gore and gross-out department, though. When the vampires kill, they bite into the heads of the unlucky ones which causes a gush of blood almost like they’re popping the top of a frosty beer. And when the vampires start meeting their ends, it’s pretty gruesome as well with them bursting into flames, receiving horrific burn wounds via holy water and even dissolving into green blobs of skeletal puss when immersed in the stuff.

In fact, The Lost Boys is rated “R” which I couldn’t ever see happening today. If it were released in 2017 instead of 1987 The Lost Boys would be rated “PG–13,” would feature a lot less gore and would be more focused on the action. I guess even if The Lost Boys isn’t a great movie it’s still great that it was released in 1987 instead of 2017 since I can only imagine it would be more Twilight than Evil Dead.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1937: George Takei, Sulu of Star Trek is born
  • 1940: Lance Henriksen of Terminator, Aliens and Near Dark
  • 1984: The TV mini-series V: The Final Battle premiers
  • 2008: Iron Man opens in theaters
  • 2013: Iron Man 3 premieres in theaters

Bored with TV

CategoriesFeature, TVPosted on

Lately, I’ve been growing bored with TV series way too early. It’s like we live in this golden time of TV when there are all these crazy and amazing things to see nearly every night of the week … and all I can do is to watch a few episodes, at most, of a show that a few years ago I would have been hooked on and been a loyal viewer. But nowadays, if I get a bit bored with a show or it fails to connect directly to me within the first episode or two I’m as likely as not to give up on it as to stick with it a little while and see where it goes.

seaQuest DSV
seaQuest DSV

I didn’t used to be that way. I remember decades ago watching loads and loads and loads of bad TV since that was all that was on. Great series were the rarity and there might only be a few of them to air each year. I remember watching things like Evening Shade and seaQuest DSV, not because they were amazing, but because they were on. And I’m sure I could list dozens of similar shows like those that I watched each and every episode of because there weren’t many other options.

Back then I watched a lot TV series in syndication from past decades too. I ended up watching entire runs of shows like The Brady Bunch and Qunicy M.E. decades after they originally aired. Heck, I can remember a few summers where each morning my brother and myself would watch The Facts of Life then Quantum Leap each and every weekday as we worked through those shows.

Nowadays I don’t think I could do that. There are a lot of series that I’ve never seen like The Rockford Files or Baretta that are easy enough to watch on various streaming services. I’ve tried watching them but I just can’t get past the idea that each episode of dramas pre (say) 1993 are essentially the same episode over and over again where the characters never change throughout the run of the show that tell mostly the same story with subtle variations.

Quincy, M.E.
Quincy, M.E.

But I bet that if those two series had been in syndication the summers when I was a teen I would have watched every episode with great glee. It makes me wonder, have my tastes changed in the last 20 years so that now I’m a better connoisseur of dramas and comedies, or was I simply more adventurous and accepting of series than I am now?

It concerns me too just how fast I’ll lose interest on a show. It seems like I’ll give a show two or three seasons before I start getting bored by it and start looking for other new and exciting things. The Americans and Halt and Catch Fire are two shows that were some of my favorite things on TV the last few years, but for whatever reason I failed to connect with during their most recent seasons. I don’t think those series have started producing bad episodes or have started to go downhill, I suspect the problem lies with me and my attention span.

I wonder too what would happen today if a show like ER on NBC debuted today? Would I even watch it? ER was a influential show for me in that I started to see just how TV series could be something more than it had been. But today I think I’d take one look at something like ER and probably dismiss it out of hand without watching it.

The Facts of Life
The Facts of Life

It might be true that I have become less adventurous in what I chose to watch but it’s also true that with the current state of TV where literally new series are debuted on a weekly basis, many of which are quite good, I can afford to be this way. Does something like Six, The Mick or Channel Zero not immediately connect with me? Well, give up on it and move onto something else since there’ll be something new along next week.

And I suspect if any of those shows had premiered 10 years ago I’d have been hooked and they would have been some of my favorites.

I don’t necessarily think this is a completely terrible way to be since, let’s face it, while there might be lots of great series most TV produced today isn’t very good. But I do wonder whatever happened to the person I used to be that would take a chance on just about anything and see if it was any good or not?