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I just found out that Sarah Palin attends an Assembly of God church. I am now more terrified of the McCain-Palin ticket than ever.

( If you find my frank horror at some church offensive, skip this bit. )

Yeah, okay, no thanks. I already know how crazy Alaskans are. Look, no offense, it's a frequently lovable sort of crazy, but people who get days off school because of sun and who don't see said sun for six or more months in a year ARE FRIGGIN NUTS. I've been there, I met some Alaskans, they seemed plenty nice, but even they admit that they're batshit. One of them a heart attack away from the presidency? No thank you.

And now a post with even LESS substance!

ivy03 loaned me (ages and ages and ages and ages and ages ago) the second season of The Pretender on DVD. I used to watch this show with my parents on Saturday nights over dinner or just before/after. I seemed to remember liking it and borrowed it to complete the "mythology" of the show.

I'm thoroughly convinced that they were less plotted out than the worse seasons of Battlestar Galactica, LOST, and The X-FIles combined. This is the still the "oooh, look, we have plooooot" stage of shooting television. It's still an essentially episodic show with the ongoing "plot" hanging on the ends. The episodic stuff is ridiculously bad--the new version of The Outer Limits bad, Tales From The Crypt-but-taking-itself-seriously bad, bad-guys-always-confessing-on-CSI bad.

The frame story, though, is really fun. The shadowy Center group trying to reclaim their lost prize project, said prize project fucking around and making them crazy, politics at the Center changing the game a little. Mostly, I love Ms. Parker. She's a stone-cold bitch, and I love her. They keep trying to humanize her with the murder of her mother, her dependence on Daddy, that sort of thing, but where she really shines is in being a cold-hearted psycho cunt. I mean that in a good way, I actually do.

Some kids thump into her while tearing wild. Ms. Parker: "Where's Planned Parenthood when you need them?" Yes, she made a birth control/abortion joke. I LOVE HER. A bunch of the Center people are being grilled about who shot the head dude; everyone vacillates, but Ms. Parker goes, "Oh yeah, I would have shot him, sure. But I wouldn't have missed." Naturally, she is so intimidating, just about everyone believes her.

Psycho cunts for the win!!!

Hadn't heard this before

I did know about the lawsuit that might hold up The Watchmen movie, but I hadn't heard one little hitch in that until this NYT article:
In a summary of its position in Friday’s report, Warner said Fox “sat silently” as one of the producers of “Watchmen,” Lawrence Gordon, took the project “to studio after studio with Fox’s express knowledge.”

The basic story is that Fox bought the rights to the graphic novel, sat on it forever because it seemed an impossible movie to make, then let it go. It found a production company and money and director and writer over at Warner Brothers. They've all but made the movie (pricinple photography is done), and now Fox is screaming about the movie being stolen from them. Specifically, that some part of how they let their ownership of the property slip wasn't a total release and therefore they needed to be a) entirely bought off or b) involved in any production.

What's notable for me about that quote is that it seems very improbable, near impossible that Fox would have gone even as long as San Diego Comic Con 2008, where The Watchmen trailer and panels debuted without knowing that Warner was making a film based on this property. There's just no way. If the internet knew since way back when Zack Snyder was doing 300, Fox had to have known.

The fact that they let Warner sink a bajillion dollar into the thing and then went about legal action is incredibly bad form. It basically looks like Fox studio execs thought "Wow, this is going to be way too expensive to make, but it could be a really big hit if it gets made. Let's let some other studio make it and absorb the costs and then we'll sue them! We spend nothing, we get free money!" That's incredibly shit behavior. Of course, legally speaking, they're probably within their rights to do so. (I doubt they have to prove that they didn't know someone else was making a movie with their licensed property until now to win their case.) And Warner Bros. execs are fools for not being 100% certain they had all the legal ownership of this potential cash-cow nailed down. Still, shitty form, Fox. (I know, same old, same old, right?)