What I'm Watching: Late September, 2011
Hello once again! The summer time is drawing to a close, fall is creeping in, the leaves are changing, the temperature is dropping, and the harvest comes for us all. And if you think that sounds ominous, just wait 'til October, my friends...
Just a really short WIW post this time around, since most everything was covered in the first half of the month, and I've mostly just been watching Fringe DVDs, and waiting for the new fall season to start. I'll get to that later.
Also on the DVD front is the ever-present MST3K. Got the new set, all the Gamera movies they mocked. That was a really fun ride, and I love making it a theme like that. I'd love to see more sets like that, although I am not sure what they'd do. Very classic MST3K though, and some of their better early episodes, as the show was beginning to hit its stride.
Over the summer, I did stumble across one cool show a little late in the game, but I caught up quickly thanks to reruns, and it was a nice little guilty pleasure over the warm months. That show was Cinemax's Femme Fatales. I love me some anthology shows. Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt...all some of my fave stuff from the past. FF is very much in the same vein, although probably closest to Crypt, since it has a host, although Tanit Phoenix is Lilith is much easier on the eyes than the Cryptkeeper. But then again, so is a pile of roadkill. Anyways, the show is about various noirish style stories about women gone bad, or just taking things into their own hands. There is a big revenge theme running through things, and being on Cinemax, you can assume the adult nature of the show, and that is very present. But the show is very well written, the twists are actually very clever most of the time, and the show does not take itself TOO seriously, which is always a plus. The thing that sets this show apart from other anthologies is that all the stories happen in the same town, and in the same time period, more or less, and they are slowly building a mythology in the background. These stories are all interconnected in small ways, and even Lilith becomes part of the story. It seemed like just a little easter egg each episode, but by the time the first season ends, you realise there is a much bigger plan in place, and Lilith has a much more active role. I highly recommend the series if you enjoy well told stories, don't mind a little sex, and want to see men getting what's coming to them. I loved having this show to watch over the summer, and hate that it took me so long to bring it up.
Finally, I escaped briefly to the theatres and saw Apollo 18, the latest in the recent glut of found footage movies. I'm a little in between on the movie. I thought the story was solid and well told, but I don't think it was a good found footage movie. There's a huge problem with who found said footage and put it together for us, but I can almost let that slide, even if it is a bit of a bug in my brain. But the biggest thing about these movies is the sense of reality. You need that sense to really buy into things, and this movie just did not hit that out of the park for me. Not once did I believe these people were real. Not once did this feel like it was really the 70s. The claustrophobia you would expect from being in a space capsule on the moon never quite comes through, and that could have been the highlight of this movie. But the acting isn't half bad, which is good, since there really are only three people in the entire movie. The creatures are creative, and the idea is good. I just think it would have been a better regular movie, rather than trying to force it into a found footage style. Not bad, but needed some work. Which is a shame. I mostly enjoyed it, but the bad things just did more harm. Sigh.
And that is it for now. Swing by in a few days for our next full review, and WIW will be back in October with our breakdown of the new fall shows!
J
