The Rabbit Hole

( First, an excellent fannish meme. Recommended to all! )

Went out with arcane_the_sage to celebrate his reverse teenage birthday, which was lovely. Wish I'd done better by his gift, alas, but dinner was fun and Resident Evil: Extinction was as good as it needed to be for me to enjoy it. Which is to say that I've seen everything in it done better in another movie, but I still had fun. Ali Larter was foxy as fuck, too, even as her character was pretty useless. The movies bear as much resemblence to the games at this point as your average Uwe Boll movie. Fortunately, the acting and production values are better (the acting not by much, though).

Wine tasting party was superb, as was finally getting to see moonlightalice and wellgull's place. Obscene how nice it is, really, even if it is far out in Jersey.

And I think I have most of my costume for Halloween. Just needs a few alterations which my former roommate is going to help me with. She'll be coming up for dinner and the Heroes season premiere. She'll have to suffer through Prison Break, but so will I. We'll make it!

This quote killed me. Found some random Red Dwarf quote generator that spit out one of my favorites:

"So let me get this straight. You want to fly on a magic carpet to see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your freedom, and you're telling me you're completely sane? "

Substitute everything from "magic carpet" to "freedom" with my last nattering post, and you've got me. I forgot to mention I downloaded a Red Dwarf book on tape to listen to on my trip. Chris Barrie is still an amazing mimic. Astounding. Except he doesn't do himself as Rimmer as well as he...uh...is Rimmer. Yes.

I go lunch now.

So, after much procrastinating in favor of Lego Star Wars II, I finally finished Red Dwarf entirely. The cute little video on the extras as a recap of all the hijinks over eight series makes me miss the first few series more. Not that VII and VIII didn't have their highlights (I think Chris Barrie perfected the idea and look of "git" to the level of a Platonic ideal--imagine the quintissential git, and you're really thinking of Rimmer), but the early seasons were much more standout. I'll have to revisit them eventually, if only to listen to the commentary. Like old friends. Or something. Hard to say. I don't like how the last series ended particularly, but I could see it as them making it a concerted effort to get the movie off the ground or another series made. Pity neither happened.

Now, it's onto the 30 billion other shows I queued up at Netflix--Dr. Who, Deadwood, Carnivale, God how many more? I also did buy Animaniacs Volume 1 at Best Buy when I went to grab Lego Star Wars II, and there's the last disc of Futurama Volume 4...

And I'm only sixty percent on Lego Star Wars II, come to think of it. That's all right. feiran has it right now, and maybe that will encourage me to get the thirty other things I could be doing done. I'm already working on uploading pictures, getting music sorted onto the new computer (only took several months!), and I even did a little cross-stitching (which kitties put the kibosh on right-quick).

So apparently Netflilx does send out completely movie-or-TV-show-free discs when you queue up something. I almost cancelled the last disc of series seven Red Dwarf because I looked up online and found that discs one and two had covered all the actual episodes. Just in case this was not so, I let it arrive at my apartment (also, by the time I realized this, it was already on its way). I discovered it was just a bonus features disc, and nearly chucked it right back in the mail.

I ended up watching it and rather enjoying the retrospective on the entire series seven--the drama! The departures! The something else that begins with a D! They went episode by episode after the initial warm-up, which worked well because you got to see progression, problems with individual episodes dealt with, et al. It's amazing just how much of what is great about a show is completely do to mistakes, cock-ups in management, and the limitations of both budget and material. A lot of really great art comes about by mistake or by response to limitation--a great example (non-Red Dwarf!) would be the limitation on Batman: the Animated Series where they weren't allowed to show the pivotal scene of Bruce Wayne's parents being shot, so instead they just have them walking down a dark alley that transforms into the muzzle of a gun. It's really classy.

What I really loved about the Dwarf extras? British people's non-honesty. Not dishonesty, just honesty by another name that makes it seem like lying but isn't. So the writers had a falling out before series seven, and watching the writer who stayed with the show try to call his ex-partner a git without actually calling him names is both funny and painful. Ditto when people talked about Chris Barrie leaving--the writer was very kind, but instead of saying the actor was tired from working two shows at once, he said something like "Chris got used to the way the other show was shot--just show up, do your lines, go home--and that's not how we did it because we had all the visual effects."

So, basically: "The stupid git was being a lazy bastard about putting up with blue screening, but I can't say that and still look at the man again if we ever bring the show back."

See? Non-honesty. Concession to the other person for having a point while maintaining an air that you think they were being stupid throughout. I loved it!

I guess this is a round-about way of asking this: Do people watch extras on DVDs often? Commentaries, making-ofs, goofs, et al? I rarely do. I make the exception for something that is good or extensive (hello, Lord of the Rings), or inclusive (all-cast commentaries are usually great), but otherwise, not so much. What say the rest of ye?

I was about to post something about television shows, but dotsomething got there first.

Fortunately, I have a different slate of shows on my docket! ( Which you can hear about here! )

I'm sure I will stick with the shows I already watch, barring any of them sucking so hard I drop them (Smallville, I am looking in your direction), and not really take up with any other new ones, which is funny because TV shows are making up more than half my Netflix queue right now. I figured, so long as I have the two-discs-at-a-time plan I should make the most of it and rent the things that I would most benefit for having two discs of at once. I started it for Red Dwarf's last two seasons which aren't on just the one disc, but I chucked on a few series I had recommended to me (Deadwood's on there from my cousin raving and deepredbelle praising). It's such a strange turn for me because I've never liked TV as much as movies (animated series notwithstanding). I think it's the TWoP influence--they've been loving Prisonbreak in their newest recaps so very hard, I've been considering that, which is amazing. Hell, I could catch up with the phenom of 24, borrow my mother's set of the first two seasons (and, again, only because Kiefer Sutherland makes me ruin my chair with his hotness--ugh, that was TMI, my bad).

Oh, but speaking of Red Dwarf? The "lost" Cat-centric episode? I don't want it ever filmed. In fact, I wish they could ret-con the entire season out of being filmed just to have Chris Barrie narrate the storyboard stills. I noticed before that he does some wicked good impressions, especially in the Old West simulation where he had a perfect middle American accent going (meaning not accented at all, no Southern drawl or NE twangs, just blandly American, which is fucking hard to do--I can't even do that). Then I watched the episode where he narrates in his natural voice, which is different from his own voice as Rimmer, and then he did everyone else on the show perfectly. I wonder what the other actors thought of his impression. For a moment, I didn't believe it wasn't the guy who plays Kryten speaking. His Lister is almost as good, and his Cat, though not great, is still amazing. I would have loved him to do Holly.

And, my God, I get Kochanski for the rest of the season instead of Rimmer? I spoiled myself by reading trivia about the show on the IMDB, and apparently Chris Barrie only did four episodes of the eight for this season, which makes my brain hurt because it means I've only one more with him in it as he's been in all three of the ones on the first disc. Kochanski's reality--where Lister is the hologram and her the last human--sounds like HELL. If I had to put up with Lister and Kryten and Cat without Rimmer to difuse their boringness by mocking them all and being hilariously silly, I'd jump ship for the show's universe in a heartbeat.