Monthly Archives: March 2014

“Revolution” 3/5/2014 (spoilers): Me and Beardy McGee

March 6, 2014 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Zak Orth, Aaron Pittman, Revolution, NBC

This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! Come to think of it, reality doesn’t have those, either!

Is it a hoax? A dream? An imaginary story? A holodeck accident? A parallel world ruined by Walter Bishop? A mess for the Doctor to straighten out? A pilot for a new spinoff series called Leave It to Google?

Tonight’s new Revolution episode “Dreamcatcher” throws brainy sidekick Aaron Pittman into a strange old world filled with working electricity, first-world tech-biz problems, cold beer, product placement, and familiar faces in incorrect places. As with most such stories, the question isn’t whether or not Our Hero has awakened to true reality — it’s about how many levels of unreality he’ll have to escape before he’s back on his old show.

Travel this way inside the mind of Aaron the hapless genius!

2013 Road Trip Photos #33: the Three Investigators and the Case of the Abandoned Prison

March 5, 2014 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Day Nine was the final leg of our journey, from the fair city of Cleveland to our hometown of Indianapolis. By this time my wife, my son, and I were ready to finish our gallivanting, return home, climb back into our own sleeping quarters, and swear off free hotel breakfasts for the rest of the summer. A man can only ingest so many stale mini-muffins before madness begins to creep in at the edges.

But it wouldn’t be our kind of road trip if we let a single pass without at least one stop along the way. Fortunately we found just the place to unwind, wander around, stretch our legs, clear our heads, broaden our horizons, and imagine how daily living might look if we walked in the shoes of another man completely unlike ourselves.

So we went to prison.

cell door, Ohio State Reformatory, Mansfield

Open the door and see what awaited us inside…the Rusty Reformatory of Reckoning!

“Almost Human”: Almost Renewable?

March 4, 2014 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Almost Human, Fox

Left to right: Dorian, Detective John Kennex, and I’m really sorry but after thirteen episodes I still don’t know her name.

Tonight was the season finale of Almost Human, the science fiction series created by Fringe showrunner J. H. Wyman about a grumpy future detective (Karl Urban, a.k.a. Spock or Eomer), his emotional robot partner (Michael Ealy, previously on TV’s FlashForward), and their buddy-cop adventures in a world where all the tech advances seem to benefit the outlaws more than the citizens. Thirteen episodes later, the show’s fate rests in the hands of Nielsen commoners and Fox executives, left to decide whether or not the show deserves a second chance to address any of the questions viewers have had since episode one.

Why cancellation might not bother me…

Oscars 2014: Three Big Winners and Not Enough Pizza to Go Around

March 3, 2014 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres

“Possibility : 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. Possibility : you’re all racists.”

Thus did host Ellen DeGeneres conclude her ten-minute opening monologue for the 86th Academy Awards — possibly not as safe and innocuous as the producers might’ve hoped, but not likely to inspire internet firestorms on Monday morning, either. Of all the nominees, three films walked away with the most awards, most of them unsurprising to anyone who kept up with the discussions to any degree. I’d guess Best Original Screenplay probably ruined the most Oscar pools this time around.

Continue reading →

My 2014 Oscar Picks, 100% Accurate on Some Alternate Earth

March 2, 2014 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Oscars 2014 Banner

Internet tradition holds that any users who say the word “Oscars” more than three times during the months of January or February are required either to prognosticate the winners or to divulge who’d get their votes if they were eligible to exercise that power. This year, the evening before the 86th Academy Awards go live on ABC, I must uphold that custom or else the makers of the Paranormal Activity series win.

If I were a card-carrying member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the following list would represent my hypothetical ballot selections, no less subjective and arbitrary than the average AMPAS member’s official ballot. These are not my predictions as to who will win, because that’s not my forte. Betting on me will bring you misery and cost you your life savings. I’m aware of many of my deficiencies, and Oscar-guessing is one of them. If more than one-third of these match the actual results, it’s because my fifty-year-old self acquired the technology and the bitterness to travel back in time and sabotage the sacred PricewaterhouseCoopers envelopes.

And now, the winners aren’t…

MCC Q&A #6: Captains Courageous or Otherwise

March 1, 2014 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp

Captain Jack Sparrow. Just because a reader asked.

I rarely trumpet this service, but Midlife Crisis Crossover maintains an open policy of Ask Almost Anything, which extends not only to regular readers and commenters, but also to constant Likers, silent Followers, and fleeting passersby. If you have a question, a suggestion, a comment that’s constructive or Dadaist, or a listicle request that the mainstream media refuses to attempt, simple reply here or to any other post of the vaguest tangential relevance, and our trusty MCC staff will be happy to escalate it into a Main Topic for a future entry and explore the subject further in depth. Or I might just reply to your comment, who knows.

Every so often we also review queries and curious sentence fragments from passing search engine users, because even the silent, fleeting passersby deserve to be heard, even if they’re no longer around to find the answer they needed. Because I need a break from movies and I’m working six days this week, a quick dive into the ol’ mailbag feels like a nice way to relax for a few minutes.

* the real life of capatian jack sparrow/ not the movie

Few moviegoers realize the character of Captain Jack Sparrow is based on the exploits of real-life pirate Jakub Sperovicz, a pirate from Warsaw who was renowned for his lifelong battle with rum addiction, his eventual arrest on multiple counts of boatjacking, and his CG monkey. During his heyday Sperowicz was in his mid-60s and suffered from chronic psoriasis. His story was tweaked a tad for typical Hollywood purposes.

More questions, more answers…