The Rabbit Hole

I posted a little while back about my incredulity that people could be kept waiting on movies from Netflix. Today, scanning Hacking Netflix, I see that someone did a side-by-side comparison of their Netflix/Blockbuster Online queues to compare wait times for new releases between the two. And Blockbuster promised shorter wait times overall for all the same titles.

The agitation about new releases in that post left me rather self-satisfied, I must say. It must be very hard to be so goddamned picky about movies. You may mock me for my unquestionably terrible taste in film (and television--have I mentioned I am still watching Heroes?). Heck, I mock me. But I must be doing something right because aside from having to pace back and forth and wiggle about like I'm a three-year-old who has to pee over the delay between sending back a disc and getting the next one of a highly anticipated series...I have it easy when it comes to being satisfied by DVD delivery via Netflix. Hell, Netflix keeps improving without me asking for anything! Can't get a movie on the spot? Have Watch It Now! Watch It Now too limited? We'll add 20,000 titles inside of a year and a half! Don't want to watch on your computer? Have box or an XBOX or a PS3! (Or, as rumor has it, possibly even the Wii.)

How hard it must be to be those people who have to have the movie now now now now. For whom Blu-Ray is such a BURDEN to have to pay extra for. I never have a problem with new releases because by the time they climb their way up the 400+ title list of my queue, they're no longer remotely new. It's easy being me with the way I watch movies. (Speaking of, I have three that need taking care of that I've had for weeks...)

Anyway, the title of my post refers to a trick I learned when I worked at Blockbuster. For those who might NEED movies on the Tuesdays they are released, you can get same-day delivery. Put the new release at the top of your queue, return a disc on Friday/Saturday before, and you should get it Tuesday. At Blockbuster, we got all new releases the Friday before. Employees could take 'em out, and it gave time for them to be wired up for security/scanning purposes. (I think that's why there was a delay. I have no idea, really.) Netflix will send it to you Monday because you won't get it before Tuesday. It works, I've done it. (This is also how Amazon does it with same-day releases.) Just FYI for those who might have the same-day new release fixation as the people at that post.

I found out a while ago who the mystery person being killed off on Heroes would be, but the internet at large has finally, and without spoiler tags, confirmed it all over the place. Just in case, I'll use the spoiler cut...

And the winner is: ( I say 'winner' because, let's face it, any excuse to get off this show is a good one. )

Something I'm generally sensitive to is being patronizing. If I haven't told people before, please, if you catch me being a condescending asshole, don't let me get away with it? I absolutely loathe that behavior and I know I am prone to it. Just tell me if I'm doing it. I won't get offended. I'm grateful for such honesty because I don't want to be That Person.

( Apparently, though, I AM that person. )

I do feel so much better now. Ah, me, away from such silly things. Aren't there some half-naked men I could be ogling? Or a post for Pink Raygun I should be writing? Oops, nope, I already did! It was a Sylar-centric episode, but being sick (and being aware of what depths of suck Sylar-centric episodes had reached before), I didn't leap into this one. John Glover, though--man, can't he just sit there and tell everyone how much they suck forever?

Heroes hasn't been as egregiously bad this "volume" as last. Granted, that's like saying the rotten food they're serving is better than the shit they fed us yesterday, but I thought I'd get that out there.

Because I have another bone to pick with them. I've already gotten myself good and frothed up over sexism once today, but this isn't something as hard to define and defend. Of course it isn't--it would require Heroes to employ any subtlety. Which it absolutely cannot do.

Know what else it can't do? Respect the genre from which it is derived. The writers on this show think all of us comic book nerds are fucking losers. I'm not exaggerating. I got into it a little in my Pink Raygun review of this Monday's episode. Basically, they keep setting up stories in or around comic book shops, in case we, heaven forbid, forgot that this show is a derivative attempt to milk the decades-long success of comics. And every time we end up in a comic book store, it gets ugly. This week, Claire Bennet, human female, goes in to warn Alex, human male working at a comic book store, that the government is after him. But even before she can scare him off with that talk, he's goggling at her for being A! Human! Female! In! A! Comic! Book! Shop!

On behalf of myself and the other two fabulous comic book fan-bitches, may I heartily wish that Heroes would go fuck itself? This is like being back at that elementary panel at Comic Con where they were like "Women in comics! Isn't it amazing?" (Even the women were. Sigh.)

Amazing women on my f'list who read comics, perhaps you can tell me: what the fuck?

Done.

I think constantly swiffering my bedroom floor to get up all the errant dust and hair and cutting my finger on a blender blade was a better use of my time than getting this review done. And I still have Smallville left to do. Ayah.

Oh, and my sister is coming by tonight with a new kitty for us to try and make a home for. YAY!

Two weeks worth of Smallville reviews for folk who are interested: one that got away from me in terms of being overly meta, and the one where I would kill for Lois' hair and wardrobe (and the body to go with both). Seriously, we DVR'd this last episode and came in right at the moment where Lois was FREAKING GORGEOUS, and feiran and I both commented on it. (That, and we knew she had to be evil, 'cause, duh, that's how you know on this show.)

I also love that the editor didn't slap on a pic of Lois being amazingly beautiful but she did find a shirtless Bloomesday pic. Good decision.

It's a shame Sam Witwer isn't generally prettier. It's also a shame that he isn't naked more often. Latest Smallville review is go!

The super spent all day fixing a leaking pipe in our shower and then repairing the tile that he ripped out. And guess who got to sit and wait to let him in and out?

I did get to have two inordinately long phone conversations with my mother and sister. Oh, and I got my Smallville review up at Pink Raygun. And finished the third season of Prison Break. And reported a broken disc to Netflix.

In other words: SO BORED.

I don't know why, but I didn't hate Maxima on Smallville. She was cute enough and she managed not to be entirely repulsive even though she was throwing herself at guys left and right. I didn't hate it.

I suspect that as long as Heroes is determined to break my brain each week, I could probably take just about anything from Smallville. Perhaps this is a good time to watch the entire fourth season, since chances are I never will be able to survive it at any other time.

PR review of Heroes 3.03, "One of Us, One of Them" is up.

Season three has only just started, but I'm wondering which will prove to be worse: the pointlessness or season two or the deliberate plot-and-character torpedoing of season three? I think there's more room in a show like Heroes for boring episodes than episodes that destroy the rules of the world and the characters in it. It wants to have a mythology, but it keeps sabotaging it because things aren't "cool" enough.

It's agonizing exactly because, as I was saying to ivy03 and mithras03, things that are half good, half terrible get me more worked up than things that are all terrible. Because you can see where there were chances for the show/movie/etc. to be really awesome and go a really fun direction and the show just blows it. It's like watching the season premiere of Smallville each year: they might have had a half-way decent threat built up over the course of the previous season, but they squander everything in the first episode and then never revisit it.

And that's Heroes in a nutshell, only it doesn't have the routine established like Smallville does, so when they're done with something they lurch away from it and get to make all new and better, grander mistakes in the process of not-learning from the old ones. What really bugs me is that there are ideas that could be explored on Heroes that won't be, and now can never be. AU fanfic reads better than this show right now.

Also, pardon me, but The 4400 did a lot of this better. It wasn't perfect either but at least it enjoyed some internal consistency. Its worst failings didn't break the world the way Heroes' do.