Relationship status (in television)

I have noticed a pattern with relationships among main characters of television shows. The pattern is this: opposite sex partners and friends who care about each other, but can not actually be a couple for any number of reasons. I noticed this while watching Castle, one of my favorite shows. I enjoy this show mostly because of Nathan Fillion who plays Richard Castle and his relationship with his female counterpart (Kate Beckett, played by Stana Katic).They are in Season 3 now, and seems to be following a similar path of many shows. The main characters both love each other, but they cannot be together. Their reason seems to be they are afraid of being together. But this writing ploy, that is, the characters who work together that are in love but for whatever reason are not together, why is this used so much?

For example, Fox Mulder and Diana Scully, from The X-files. Will they get together? They almost kissed in the first X-files film. Never quite get together. Apollo and Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica; they consummate their love, in the middle of season 3, only to not be together for whatever reason. Dr. Temperance Brennan and Agent Seeley Booth, from Bones (This is an example of one that I lost interest in). I think for these shows to work, you must do something withe the sexual tension that you have built up, otherwise the audience will lose interest. This is the proverbial “shit or get off the pot moment”. But as soon as these characters get together, the show seems to get stale. Fringe started down that path in Season 3.Peter and Olivia getting together, only to be ripped apart by time altering mumbo-jumbo. Can you only build this tension for 3 seasons before you have to do something about it? What about season 3 is the magic number?

If Starbuck and Apollo had stayed together, would Battlestar have been as good as it was? Do these characters have to never be together until the end? It seems they need these tensions as part of the show. They can never quite be together otherwise the shows fire is gone. Ross and Rachel from Friends get together to early. In my opinion, the season that they are together is some of the worst Friends moments. Their relationship ends, and for the remainder of the seasons, they build that tension back up. Why? We finally got what we wanted. The main characters got together, and everything is happy. But with the characters happy, we lose interesting story arcs of secret, unrequited love. It’s sad to say, but these characters will always be apart until the show ends, as with the last episode of Friends.

With this knowledge, you can arm yourself against the show runners who want the characters to get together. But the show will suffer if they ever do. No one wants to see a happy couple in a show. It’s like seeing the end of a movie, and then actually seeing what the characters are like: Living together, paying bills, planning their lives, real-life stuff. Not as interesting as the love that we can never be together, because I don’t go old, and it would make me to sad to watch you die (Doctor Who).

Now I watch Castle and think, I am happy they are not together. Sure I want them to be together, but I know it creates so many more interesting aspects of Television, if they do not. These shows all worked, because of the building of the relationship. It’s just as uncomfortable when you keep waiting and waiting and nothing happens. Will they get together this episode? Will they kiss finally? This keeps you coming back.

Sequels and remakes: Comic book movies

When I heard they were making a new Spiderman, restarting the series with new actors, and a new director, my first thoughts were not “joy!” but, “Man, they are really running out of ideas.” And when I say “they,” I mean Hollywood in general. In the amount of movies that have come out in the past years, there has been a steady increase in sequels of movies that worked or didn’t work, remakes, reboots, and movie-do-overs.

Spiderman is the most recent idea of, “hey, this idea can still make us money.” This happens a lot. Or, “let’s just restart or change the actors, maybe that will fix mistakes made before.” I do not particularly like the first few Spiderman movies, but combined, they made almost 3 billion dollars world wide. Maybe it’s just that I do not like Sam Raimi’s directing style, or Toby Maguire, or, Kirsten Dunst. Even the last iteration, Spiderman 3, was meet with terrible reviews from critics and fans. Yet it grossed 900 million dollars. (boxofficemojo.com) So who cares if it’s really bad, and they ruin the character for fans, “they” are going to make tons of money.

I am not saying that I won’t go see The new movie, “The Amazing Spiderman”, but I feel like it’s just a little to soon. I mean, the idea is still fresh in everyone minds. They will have to be very careful to not be redundant and bore the audience, with a retelling of his “origin” story. Having said that, I will probably go see the new film, but if it sucks I am done. Saying this now, as a comic book movie fan, I will never see a Spiderman film again, if they ruin this for me. I just can’t handle another disappointment.
Marvel studios has tried this before, back in 2008 with The Incredible Hulk. They attempted series reboot, from the 2003 utter disappointment. It was not exactly a series reset, as it did not retell the origin story. They simply replaced all the actors and added a new director, and we got a far better film than 2003’s Hulk. God, Ang Lee, what were you thinking? Giant Hulk dogs?

The best series reboot by far is the Batman series. It’s fantastic. The the reboot shows you how bad the original Batman films really were, and stepped up comic book movies to another level. The difference between Batman & Robin and Batman Begins was 8 years, and since Batman was watch-able, since Batman returns, it’s been 13 years. So at that point we were happy to see a restart. But after The Dark knight Rises, where will we go from here? I think it will be Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel, another comic book reboot. It seems they won’t stop rehashing these characters. As a comic book fan, I just hope these people show some respect to the characters that I know so well.

I guess it’s going to be never ending, as long as people will go see these movies. I mean they make a crap movie and how does it effect “them” well they are out a bunch of money, but we, the comic book fans are they ones that are hurt. You can’t put a price on a fan’s love of an Iconic character. Even if they are crap, they will keep trying over and over, until they have sucked the ideas dry and no one cares about them anymore.There I’ll be, reading comics, content.

Skyrim review volume 1: Bethesda hates magic

Skyrim is probably the best video game I have ever played. It’s incredibly immersive and just down right beautiful. All I hear about online is how much everyone likes it and thinks it’s amazing, which is true; it is amazing. I think, however, there are still some things that don’t quite fit right or that there are mechanics of the game that don’t work for me.

Now, I should start by saying I have logged 100 hours into this game since it came out. I have a level 64 character, I have beat the main quest, and have I completed the big side quests, including: the College of Windhelm, the Thieves Guild quest, The Companions, and the Stormcloak side of the rebellion quests. So, I feel I have a pretty firm knowledge of the game. The character I created was Imperial. I picked an imperial because it had the nice mix of magic/melee that I was going to make (leaning more towards the magic side). I always seem to want to make a jack-of-all-trades when I play these games, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas; maybe that is my downfall. I start out doing fine, with a little fireball, a little alteration spell for armor, a little hitting you with the sword, etc. Around level eight is where I started to have trouble.

From the get-go I could tell that Skyrim was not built for the magic user. Like most RPG’s, it made for the “tough guy melee type,” the run-into-the-middle type and kill-everything-and-survive type. Not much love for us, who want to stand back and shoot you with a fire ball, types. My hope was that in later levels the magic would pay off. I was sorrily disappointed that the game seems to focus more on melee and weapon damage heavily, and magic seems like an after thought. For example, leveling smithing is the easiest thing in the game to do. I was about level 20 smithing when I figured out that you could take one ore bar and one leather strip, the easiest, cheapest things in the game, and make iron daggers over and over until you get to 100, which doesn’t take very long. As apposed to enchanting and alchemy, which get progressively harder to level. It’s like the game wants you to wear heavy armor and use a weapon. With your smithing you can improve your armor; exceeding higher than any alteration spell, and improve your weapons to do more damage than any destruction spell. So, just some reflection, you have an easier time leveling, and surviving, when using heavy armor and weapons, and in later levels can do more damage than a magic user can ever do. Yep.
I could spend some time talking about the many glitches in the game. Namely, dragons flying backwards for no apparent reason. Or the quests that you can’t complete even though you did them before you had the quest. And the ill-timed freeze up, that always seems to happen at the exactly the worst time. But every game has bugs, so I wont nit pick that to much. Just commenting on the fact that they exist.
Like smithing, I got my enchanting skill to 100, begrudgingly. I began to make sets of Dragon armor, with varying enhancements to play styles. I had made a character that I would allow me to do whatever I wanted. One set had enhancements to armor, weapons, health, and weapon damage. The second set was an utter disappointment; the only magic skill you can add to armor reduces the cost of a particular school of magic. You can put enough enchantments for a particular school, reducing any spell, to nothing. Sounds cool right? But then you start to think about it. Why did I put so many points into magic when I leveled, yet my spells cost nothing? What’s the point of having 500 magic when it never goes down? I would have liked to know that before I put so many points into it; maybe those points would have been better for health and I would have survived a little more. To be continued!

Perspectives on terrorism (in film)

Imagine that you hear a story on the news: we catch a known terrorist, the police and FBI are integrating him. His known associates break into a building, kill 50 police, and blow up the bottom floor of the building. They steal a helicopter and break out their friend, killing anyone who gets in their way. They then proceed to crash the helicopter into a building, possibly killing hundreds. In the end, they get away. Sound familiar?

Flash forward to the future. London. A rogue solo bomber blows up the Old Bailey, (google it). Are there people inside? Unknown, we are still sifting through the rubble. This rogue terrorist then breaks into a news station, and proceeds to kill Innocent police. Guys that are probably just doing their job, and like the good benefits that a government job gives them. Instead, their kids will grow up with out a father. This bomber then gets on the television, and rants about some tyrannical government. Whether he is right or not, he is still a criminal who blows up buildings and kills government workers. How well are you going to listen to him?
Going back to the first group of terrorists, you are in The Matrix. You are not some holy warrior, working with the human resistance, doing crazy flips and shooting guns. You are just a father of three working at subway, trying to make ends meet. Little do you know, that you are just a battery in some machine’s power source somewhere. But you don’t know that, you are just living your life and wanting some one to do something about people getting killed. You don’t really understand why these people in black trench coats keep killing people. When they kill an agent, a person dies. All that is left of them is the person the agent downloaded into.
You live in London, and the government sucks. They kill people and arrest people for no reason. How did it get to this point? Oh, that’s right, you were scared about some virus killing everyone, so you gave government tons of power to sort it out. But wait! You’re still a democracy, right? You elected a dictator? That doesn’t make much sense. Your country has been a democracy for a long time. How did it get to this point? By not going to protest or give a crap that your vote got taken away. In that case, you deserve to be ruled. Sounds harsh, but in the movie V for Vendetta, that’s what it has come to.

When V blows up the building, you do not know whether there are people inside. That detail is just glossed over. It’s at night, granted, but are there security guards or janitors in there? These are the same people He is trying to free from the evil government.

These movies are both great, but in the end, I am thinking how other people who live in these universes would view what’s happening. Remember, you are not Natalie Portman, you don’t have V explaining everything to you. You’re just some random person. Now, this begs the question, “do the Wachoski brothers like terrorists?” They wrote the screen plays for both these movies. The “V for Vendetta” graphic novel was written by Allen Moore. He is a great writer, but that dude is nuts. He seems to have it in for governments and corporations. The Wachoski’s still choose to bring these movies to the masses. Seems like kind of a strong message when you look at it like that. Maybe they do not even know they are doing it, or I could be blowing this out of proportion, but I think it’s fun to think about.