12 posts tagged “heroes”

If you are a superhero who can FLY, and you are in a giant cathedral while federal agents are searching the pews for you, what do you do?  Bear in mind that you can FLY.

A) You hide in the rafters.
B) You fly to the ceiling and crash out through a window.
C) You fly up, land behind the agents, walk out the damn door, and then fly off again.
D) You hide in a goddamned motherfucking confession booth from which there is no escape, hoping maybe that the person who discovers you has his own agenda and lets you go, which let's face it, would be luck of the dumbest kind.

If you chose D), you are Peter Petrelli, the stupidest character in prime time.

While watching Heroes.

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Jill:  Claire's head looks really round.

Me:  She's not as hot as she used to be this season.

Jill:  No, she isn't.

Me:  And I'm not just saying that because I'm a pedophile and she's 18 but used to be 17.

Jill:  They're doing her hair differently, and it's all poofy and makes her head look like an alien head.

Me:  Yeah.

Jill:  But it's also because of that other reason you mentioned.

The Heroes mini-premier was pretty intriguing.  The fun part now is watching as the creators, as usual, piss away the potential of this promising start with a series of baffling storytelling decisions and insane character development.

After we finished watching last night's episode of Heroes, Jill interrupted my usual post-episode rant with the question, "If you don't like it, why do you watch it?"

It's true that I'm highly critical of Heroes, but I think that's because the show has so much potential which it fails to live up to time and time again.  For the record, here's what I don't like about Heroes:

• Mohinder
• Peter
  
• Parkman
• Claire's whininess
• Ali Larter, no matter what character she's playing
• Constant jumping around in time.  Next week, they're jumping back several years.  WHO GIVES A SHIT WHAT ANYBODY WAS DOING FIVE YEARS AGO?  This kills forward momentum and is bad storytelling.
• Over-reliance on seers who paint the future, prophetic dreams, omens, "destinies", all of those much-maligned writers' crutches that take away characters' autonomy and make for boring stories.
• Hiro fucking up all the time.  Eventually, he has to stop being a constant idiot about this stuff.  It's been over two years, for chrissake.

There are some things that I like, among them:

• Sylar.  The redemption storyline is the most arresting plot thread this season, and practically my only reason to keep watching.
• Adrian Pasdar as Nathan.  One of the most overqualified actors on the show.
  
• Noah Bennett, most of the time.
• The show's excellent habit of casting older character and genre actors.  Malcolm MacDowell, Robert Forster, George Takei, Richard Roundtree and Eric Roberts have all been familiar and welcome additions to the program.  Especially Robert Forster.
  
• Kristin Bell is agonizingly cute.

Everything wrong with this series is an easy fix.  It just requires writers with more imagination.

Anyway, as you can see, I don't totally hate this show.  It just frustrates the fuck out of me.  But still, I keep watching, hoping things will get better.  I call series like this "wifebeaters", because you just can't quit them no matter how bad they treat you.

The two-hour pilot of Heroes was pretty tasty.

You may recall that I gave up on this show halfway through last season because it was aggressively sucking.  Stories were spinning wheels and treading over old ground.  Still, I gave it a second chance last night, and I'm glad I did, since there were many interesting little surprises and revelations.  I can't talk specifics, because Jill hasn't watched it yet, but I will say that I'm getting tired of this plot point: "Oh, no!  The future's all fucked up!  We've got to go fix it!"  Minutes later: "Oh, no!  Our fix fucked it up in a totally different way!"  With two characters who can travel through time, and two who have precognitive dreams (the lazy screenwriter's favorite crutch: why is something happening?  Why, because it was in a dream!), way too much time is spent farting around in the future.  Plus, they appear to have introduced a new character who can paint the future, which begs the question of why they bothered to kill off Isaac.  I think they should stop worrying about the future and instead have some non-time-traveling adventures right here in the present.

Still, for all its many, many flaws, Heroes is still an exciting piece of genre TV when it gets its shit together.  Here's hoping this season doesn't turn out to be another stroke-tease.  I'm still holding a grudge!

• Finally tracked down Fido on dvd (I had to check several stores).  It's a pleasant little twist on the Lassie formula, but it never really pushes things to truly sick levels.  Despite the violence and intimations of zombie sex, it remains resolutely tasteful throughout, which is a bit of a disappointment.  Regardless, I liked it, and will watch it again, if only for the obvious Homeland Security satire.
• Also borrowed 28 Weeks Later.  One of the worst-directed films I've ever seen.  Everything is just shouting and running and shaky-cam and quick edits with no sense of geography.  I turned it off about forty minutes in.  Terrible.
• Bought the new album by Spoon the other day.  It's very good, if too slight and easy forgettable.
• Formula for an episode of Chuck:  Chuck has a real-life responsibility that his secret spy life interferes with, causing him grief with his sister/best friend/boss.  Chuck is presented with a reason to distrust Sarah.  This distrust causes him to disobey her orders and fuck up the mission.  Chuck apologizes.  Later, he disobeys her again, but this time saves her life/catches the bad guy/diffuses the bomb.  Chuck makes things up to the person he disappointed earlier.  Chuck and Sarah have a tender moment at the end of the show.  Six episodes in, the same story every time.  The show's cruising on charm, but I'm about to dump it like Heroes.  Adam Baldwin's badassness is not enough for me to tune in week after week for more of the same.  I'm remembering why I don't watch television; are all shows like this?
• If the idea of a cowboy using Sherlock Holmes's deductive methods to solve mysteries sounds like a good deal for you, I highly reccommend Holmes on the Range by Steve Hockensmith.  The title is an almost unforgiveably cheesy pun, but Hockensmith knows his Holmes, and the story is a consistently funny and entertaining read.

Halfway through tonight's episode of Heroes, they used Claire's idiotic revenge on a bitchy cheerleader as a commercial-break cliffhanger.  I turned the television off.  I have kicked the Heroes habit.  This is going nowhere.  I don't care about Isaac's missing paintings, I don't care about Peter's amnesia or Irish girlfriend, I don't care about the two illegals Syler ran into, I don't care about Parkman's father, I don't care about Hiro's hokey feudal Japan adventure, I don't care about Micah's cousin's power, and I especially don't care about Claire's flying boyfriend or whether she gets delicious revenge on a bitchy cheerleader.

I'm out.

I'm not going to punish myself with this lazy, creatively bankrupt crapfest any longer.  They had a golden opportunity to raise the stakes at the end of last season; instead, they decided to push a massive reset button.

Thanks for the wasted time, Heroes writers.  You had a lot of goodwill left over from last year, and you have squandered every fucking bit of it.

The moment of truth for Heroes.  Two episodes in, the most exciting thing that has happened is Claire's father intimidating his manager at CopyCo-whatever into letting him take a break whenever he wants.  Hardly the stuff of high adventure.

If you guys don't pick up the storytelling a little bit, I'm going to tune out.

Something better hook me.  You have a lot of good faith built up (even after last season's pitiful finale), but you're squandering it faster than the President's post-9/11 approval ratings.

• The Death Proof DVD is awesome.  If you liked the movie in the theater (if you're one of the 20 people who bothered seeing the best bargain of the year), you're going to love this DVD set: extended movie, the full lapdance, a bunch of behind the scenes featurettes.  Unfortunately, no amount of special features can improve that awful scene where the second set of girls sits around a table talking forfuckingever, but still...it's a good time.  Car crashes are groovy.  Kurt Russell is a god amongst men.  Rosario Dawson is so cute it should be a crime.  Pick it up if you want to hang with the cool kids.
• The series premier of Chuck was light, pleasant entertainment.  The leads are all appealing, the supporting cast not so much (that guy who plays Chuck's insensitive, bearded friend/coworker...I'm not liking him).  I don't know how long this premise can play out (isn't all of this data in Chuck's head eventually going to be too old to be of any use?), but I'll give it five or so episodes.  Gotta do something while waiting for Heroes to come on, anyway.
• Speaking of Heroes, it looks like the writers are still basically talentless at story pacing.  For instance, the episode is called "Four Months Later", but we pick up with Hiro at the precise second that we left him last season.  I get that he's in another time, and maybe the "Four Months Later" thing doesn't really apply to him, but it would have been nice to have some consistency.  Claire got to do nothing of note, Nathan's a drunk, Peter has amnesia, Parkman is dealing with the brat Molly (she has at least improved as an actor since last year), Mohinder's doing whatever the hell his boring ass does, the Nikka/Jessica-Micah-D.L. troika of terrible actors is nowhere to be seen (and not missed), and they appear to have killed off George Takei.  Hippity fucking hooray.  A pretty lame way to start the season.  As usual, Hiro is the only member of the cast who seems to be having an interesting adventure.  Oh, we also meet a kid who's interested in Claire and can also fly.  Season 2, and they're already running out of superpowers.  Egad.  This better get a whole lot more interesting a whole lot faster.
• 94.7 KNRK's (my local "alternative" station) stated goal: "To be the number one station in your cubicle."  In other words: "To be safe, familiar, and nonthreatening but still just barely edgy enough for you to listen to at work so that you can feel like the cool person on your floor without actually running any risk of offending anybody."  Hey, guys, congratulations!  GOAL ACHIEVED, FUCKERS.
• Eastern Promises was a lackluster, formula script elevated by David Cronenberg's steady, audacious hand and Viggo Mortensen's already legendary performance.  Highly recommended for the sheer craftsmanship on display.  The story, however, is pure TV movie, so don't expect too much from it.

Has there ever been an organized letter-writing campaign to rid a television program of an utterly useless character?  We should really start one to pop a cap in this Mohinder Suresh fellow.  Rarely before has there been such a perfect marriage of dull character and terrible actor.  He is the Geordi LaForge of Heroes [I know Wesley is the dude everybody hated from ST:TNG, but rewatch some old episodes sometime and revel in the utter black hole of onscreen charism that is Levar Burton as Geordi LaForge, the only Trek character, to my knowledge, who has never gotten laid (even Wesley got some action--from Ashley Fucking Judd)].

Every second that Mohinder Suresh is onscreen is a second that I'd rather be watching a commercial.  Dull, useless, non-super-powered and pointless, Mohinder Suresh exists only to deliver exposition about his father's Great Fucking Project (by the way, is it ever explained how the hell Daddy Suresh got access to the genetic information of, presumably, millions of people to compile his nifty list?) and be a prick to every other character on the show at some point.

I am aware that this show is filled with terrible actors.  The Nikki/Jessica/D.L./Micah storyline, for instance, was the most consistently poorly-performed arc of the entire season.  Not one of those thesps deserves to be in a cat food commercial, let alone the breakout geek/cult TV sensation of 2006-07.

But Mohinder?  Mohinder?  Not only is this character badly played, he is UTTERLY WITHOUT PURPOSE.  Oh, whoop-de-do, the antibodies in his blood are helping to cure the little girl of her unspecified mystery disease.  GREAT.  GREAT, MOHINDER.  HATS OFF TO YOU, MOHINDER.  That was totally worth dealing with your bitchy ass all season long.