Alone and Unobserved

I know you all have been really, really worried about my social life, and/or the lack thereof, and/or that all I seem to do lately is hole up in my basement apartment with my Netflix Streaming account and watch Futurama and drink gin and/or bourbon.

What can I say? Bender understands me, man, he GETS me.

On the other hand, I swear I’m not (yet) an alcoholic. Um. Probably.

Which is why I’m so excited to go hang out at my friend Nick’s house tonight and get drunk! Because I definitely don’t do that often enough!

(I may have started on the gin a bit early today. Like, say, at 3:30 pm. But not continuously!)

What were we talking about? Oh, right. Futurama. So it has always been in the back of my mind that I love Futurama, BUT I’ve hardly ever seen any of it. A crime, right? Prosecutable, even. Yes. So I’ve always intended to do a marathon. I figured it would be easy: there are only four seasons and four films.

So then Comedy Central has to pick the series back up again and here I am, caught with my pants down, a virtual Futurama novice, and I’ve got to get caught up so I can enjoy the full, subtle brilliance of the new episodes.

And then the Netflix app for iPhone came out! And I could watch Futurama WHEREVER I HAPPENED TO BE STANDING OR SITTING OR RECLINING.

So that’s what I’m doing. Getting caught up on Futurama. And drinking delicious gin and/or bourbon mixed with various delectable mixers. As one does.

What were we talking about? Oh, right. My social life. So yeah, I’ll be out of the house tonight—well, out of my house, at least—singing along amateurishly to amateurish YouTube karaoke videos, and getting smashed. Um, smashed-er.

There may be pictures.

There may be video.

Stay tuned.

I finished Season Two of your show last night. Well, early this morning. And now I am a bitter, broken shell of a man, capable only of sobbing and rocking back and forth in a fetal position. That’s right, the finale was that good! Kudos. Except now I’m cursing myself for not saving the last episodes until September, when the next season is set to air.

A couple things I can’t wait to find out:

Will Agent Olivia Dunham keep that horrific new cut and color or will she come to her senses? (Just say NO to those bangs, honey. They don’t suit you.)

Yes:

No:

Will Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) continue to be brooding and hot?

Will the sight of him in jeans continue to mesmerize me? (It’s especially nice from, er, behind, but I couldn’t find a suitable picture.)

Will the black characters on the show continue to be allowed to have personalities, or will they be shoved into the background again?

Will Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) take off his shirt again??? (Couldn’t find a pic of that, either, but here he is anyway.)

UPDATED: Thanks to Craig, here’s a shirtless pic!

Will September (Michael Cerveris) continue to be the best and awesomest of the Observers? (He’s second from the left. Of course, because he’s visibly better and awesomer than the others.)

Producers and writers of Fringe: I know you’ll make the right decisions. (And if you can’t figure out what the right decisions are, contact me. I’ll set you straight.)

Not that James Cameron “Avatar: 3-D Smurf-Cats in Space” crap or that M. Night Shyamalan “The Last Airbender: I’m going to take something whimsical and funny and inventive and methodically turn it into overblown 3-D shit” shit.

I mean the *real* Avatar. The three awesome seasons of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender series.

Which I am watching right now, instead of doing my cleaning.

Why don’t you join me?

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender. I own all three seasons and rewatch them frequently. The words “PREE-viously, on AVATAH” make me quiver and thrill. I have thought long and hard about which element I wish I could bend, and doggone it if I haven’t had to wuss out and just decide to be the Avatar (who can bend all four) because I can’t decide.

This is the long way of saying that I am what is known as an “Avatard.” (And no, those obsessed with James Cameron’s epic special-effects extravaganza are more properly known as “morons.” We had the name first.)

So naturally I was wary when I heard M. Night Shyamalan was going to adapt the cartoons as a feature film trilogy, given that the last movie of his that I’d watched and liked was Unbreakable in 2000. I winced through Signs and rolled my eyes through The Village, and didn’t even bother to see The Lady in the Water or The Happening. He had descended to hackery; he had lost me.

I gave him my guarded approval, however, once I’d seen the interviews he did for the series DVD extras, where he talks about his deep love for the original series in almost fanboyish tones. After all, how could someone do wrong by something they love so much?

Well! Well. It turns out he was either lying about his love for Avatar or he has a completely different take on “love” than I do. Just take a look at Roger Ebert’s review, which begins with the paragraph,

“The Last Airbender” is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here.

Or the Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer,” where The Last Airbender is currently hovering at an “8% fresh” rating—i.e., 7 non-panning reviews out of 89.

Note that most of the negative reviews I read mention the original TV series favorably or at least neutrally, and compare the film to it in extremely negative terms, so it wasn’t the premise or the underlying story that was the problem. The film was just shitty from start to finish.

So M. Night! This is my message to you: Thanks for taking one of my favorite things, killing it, reanimating it as one of the vile undead, dismembering it, and then shitting on its twitching corpse. Curse you!

P.S. I’m still undecided as to whether I’ll watch the movie. Probably not is where I currently stand. The sliver of me who still wants to see it is a masochist who is looking forward to the suffering and subsequent Twitter and blog posts it would generate. I shall do my best to squelch that pain-seeking/exhibitionist part of myself, but I make no promises as to the outcome.

I have a tradition of watching Fox’s summer reality show So You Think You Can Dance and blogging breathlessly about how hot the contestants are. Unfortunately for you, my avid readers, Twitter has taken over a great deal of that role in my life (which is one reason for the sparse updates here), which means that maybe, just maybe, you aren’t aware of my SYTYCD crush, Summer 2009 Version: Evan Kasprzak.

Here’s Evan and his brother Ryan’s audition video:

Here’s a jazz routine, choreographed by Tasty Oreo:

Here’s a contemporary routine choreographed by Mia Michaels, in which Evan is sadly fixated on his partner’s butt:

And here is the samba Evan danced last night with partner Randi.

SO HOT. Now, his samba’s not great, and in a lot of ways it’s not even good. But… somehow I don’t care.

Anyway. There you go! That’s my current crush.

Oh, and here’s the Mia Michaels routine that blew everyone’s minds on Twitter last night, and which looked like it was really going to suck in rehearsal and then turned out to be very powerful in the actual performance:

Here’s the routine were Jason danced with his shirt off the whole time (rowr):

And here’s the Wade Robson routine that closed out the night last night and made me really glad that Wade Robson is back as a choreographer on the show, and why the hell don’t they have him every week:

And oh my gosh I can’t post all the dance routines. The above videos are via Rickey.org—go watch the rest there, too. TTFN!

Craig‘s birthday was yesterday, so Sunday we went out and go our eyebrows pierced.

Sunday night we had a Wonderfalls marathon. I love Wonderfalls. I think that has been firmly established on this blog. And now Craig loves it, too! I love infecting others with my media addictions. That is why I am a librarian.

The Wonderfalls Cast

Yesterday, Craig and I went to The Happy Sumo for sushi, and I had a delicious—to die for—veggie tempura roll with avocado, sriracha sauce and fresh mayonnaise. OMG so delicious.

Then we went back to my place and finished watching Wonderfalls (see above), drank a bottle of dry Riesling and downed several cups of sambuca. Liquorice-flavored magic!

Happy birthday yesterday, Craig! I hope you had as good a time as I did. (I also hope you aren’t suffering from a sambuca-induced hangover the way I am.)

The news is out, and what we’ve all secretly or not-so-secretly feared has come to pass: another Doctor is deserting us. David Tennant, who has played The Doctor on BBC’s phenomenal Doctor Who for the past three seasons is leaving the show at the end of next year.

Remember: this is a personal betrayal of each and every one of us, but it’s especially a personal betrayal of me. Fortunately, we have a year to write angst-ridden emo blogs about how Tennant hates us and how life has no meaning anymore. We could even start an internet petition or a Facebook group imploring him to change his mind! Because that kind of thing is so effective.

My online friend Misty (Hi, Misty!) introduced me to DailyLit a week or so ago, and since then I’ve been soaking up Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, delivered via RSS feed in easily digestible chunks to my Google Reader inbox every morning. This is obviously a sign of things to come: books will soon go the way of the dodo and everyone will read only ebooks or e-audiobooks. Libraries will be a thing of the past, but I won’t mind, or even notice, because I will be in my living room, taking in information through a cannula wired into my skull. NO ONE WILL EVER LEAVE THEIR HOUSE AGAIN.

Well, I don’t really believe that. But DailyLit is still a nice way to fit classic, open-domain literature into my day. I can even read it on my phone, on the go. (Maybe that cannula really isn’t that far off after all.) Thanks, Misty!

I just watched the best Doctor Who ever, where the Doctor inadvertently becomes Madame de Pompadour’s lifelong protector, secret friend and secret love, all over the course of a single episode. It was fantastic. I think David Tennant is a fine Doctor after all, despite my initial nostalgia for Christopher Eccleston, and the second series is actually better than the first. I know, it sounds impossible! But it’s true.

Despite the fact that I am perishing daily, hourly, minutely from the heat and from dehydration, I’ve had the time to take in several movies and a great deal of television over the past few days.

Friday I watched WALL-E, Pixar’s newest computer-animated tour-de-force, a hilarious and amazing film, right up there with Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. WALL-E is the name of a tiny, mobile trash compactor/robot, left behind on a deserted Earth to clean up the mountains and avalanches of garbage humanity left behind. He spends his days creating neat skyscrapers out of trash cubes, and, in his free time, he collects interesting items (bras, sporks, lighters) and learns about love and dancing from an old, ailing videocassette tape of Hello, Dolly. When a sleek, white, ovoid probe named EVE shows up on a secret mission, he instantly falls in love with her, and ends up following her back to one of the massive spaceships mankind is now living on. There, he inadvertently uncovers a seven-hundred-year-old plot, becomes the leader of a rebellion of broken robots, wins EVE’s heart and saves humanity from itself.

Friday evening I went out on the town with my friend Craig, listened to live music at a dueling piano bar, sang along to ’80s music, ogled hot guys and got drunk. That was the first time I ever had to spend the night on a friend’s couch because I was too inebriated to get myself home. The next morning, which saw me shambling through downtown Salt Lake with greasy hair and sweaty, slept-in clothes, was also a first.

Saturday afternoon I went with Craig to see Wanted, a film about an ancient fraternity of assassins, starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie . . . and Angelina Jolie’s Scary Scowl of Death. (Watch for it 24 seconds into the trailer.) The movie got mixed reviews, which is easy to understand in retrospect: the premise is interesting, and the effects are mind-blowing, stunning, unreal. On the other hand, the story lies somewhere between “Huh?” and “Meh,” which is a really good way to piss off the critics, who are forced to watch movies even if they don’t want to.

Saturday night I had my own little Doctor Who marathon, with the first of the “new” series—the season with Christopher Eccleston and a blonde I keep thinking I’ve seen somewhere else but don’t think I really have. I don’t like it as much as its spin-off Torchwood, mainly because there’s no sex or swearing [too wholesome!], but apparently I like it well enough to watch several episodes end-to-end.

This morning, while I was stumbling around getting my morning coffee, I dropped a mostly empty glass container of coffee granules on my left foot. It hurt a lot, but I didn’t really pay attention to it. After I was done swimming with QUAC, I noticed that I had a nice lump and a livid bruise on the top of my foot. So now I’m at work, hobbling around with my left shoe untied, trying not to bang the lump into anything. In my T-shirt, cargo shorts and untied Skechers, I make such a dignified librarian.

Tonight: more Doctor Who?

This is Battlestar Galactica’s last season, which is already a crime. And now it’s official: after tonight’s mid-season finale (reported to contain a jaw-dropping cliffhanger) the Sci Fi Channel will be holding the second half of Season Four until at least 2009. On the plus side, BSG producers claim that tonight’s episode is going to be amazing. Hopefully it will have enough amazing to make up for waiting until January for resolution.