My weekend and some geekery

[angelophile]

Yeah, I know it's Tuesday, but Monday was a Bank Holiday, so I feel quite content to talk about my weekend.

Pretty much slept a lot of Saturday, just because I was so wiped after deadline as usual. Pretty light deadline, but I'm always so hyped I stay up until the wee hours of the morning anyway and I didn't get to sleep until around 4 or 5am. Went round to my sisters in the afternnon and spent some time with my niece and helping my sister and brother-in-law getting the house together for viewings and cleaning the exterior.

Sat and watched the Six Months Earlier episode of Heroes with them in the evening. I've got them into it as well. No, I still haven't caught up and I have the latest five episodes still to watch.

Sunday I was no more productive, but more active. Went out and walked from my place down through the park into Poole. Not a hugely long way, about three miles or so, but got some fresh air at least. Pottered around the park and in town until the shops closed, then sat on Poole Quay and got nicely mellow on Pims and lemonade, before walking back home, picking up a takaway on the way and settling down to watch Doctor Who.



Not a bad episode this week. I thought the monster lacked subtlety and was a little too all out scary for the time slot. Sadly, even the stronger episodes of this series have so far not touched any of the episodes from series one. The writing seems lacklustre compared to the freshness of that series and there's a feeling of treading water with a lot of the episodes. The upcoming Paul Cornell episodes look excellent, however, and the teaser for the rest of the series definitely maked me bounce. John Sim's Saxon already creeped me out in the very brief glimpses we've seen of him in trailers so far. I hope they don't mess it up.

One strength this series does seem to be that they're trying to get to different time periods and planets (although still lacking in the latter). I hope they keep that up.

Yesterday, I wasn't feeling too hot, but had a nice day with family regardless. Not really good enough weather to go anywhere, but had a family get-together at my sister's with my mum and dad and we had a nice dinner and just played with my niece and generally relaxed. Hardly the most active of weekends, but needed to unwind. It was nice to spend the weekend in company as it helps distract from the normal emoness I feel after every deadline. I just need some more sleep.

Dentist tonight. He has to repair a cracked filling, so that should be fun.

Catching up with my comic reading. Nothing really startling this week, although Daredevil continues to be a solid read and Loners was, frankly, a whole lot of fun. It seems to have done fairly well in sales, so maybe there's a market for it. Hope that the series will continue since it's been a fun, solid read and RealPenance returned this issue. I'm a sucker for Penny.

At the other end of the spectrum, Astonishing X-men continues to disappoint. The same snappy dialogue as ever, but the plots seem to be wandering all over the place continuously. And yeah, I know you've always had a crush on Kitty Pryde, Whedon, but can we perhaps tone down the shagging her by proxy stuff? When she was with Pete Wisdom, it felt like a real adult relationship. Back with Piotr, Whedon seems to be writing them both like a childish relationship, but with sex and it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. I can't really understand why people rave about this book - compared to Mike Carey's current X-men run, it's very weak. Whedon's taken characters I cared about and made me ambivalent towards them. Carey's taken characters that, on the whole, I didn't give a damn about and made me like them a lot. I guess Astonishing has the prettier art though.

Read Runaways, though, and that felt like a real hatchet job. Whedon's handling of the Runaways themselves is... average, but his writing of the Punisher and especially the Kingpin was borderline pathetic. Punisher as a sociapath, sure. Frank as a sociapathic child killer who'll slaughter kids for burglary? Um... And yeah, I know Whedon's schtick is having villains act randomly geeky for humorous effect (Spike loves daytime soaps, etc), but the Kingpin interrupting a villainous diatrade to scoff on a chocolate bar was about as funny as cholera. (Hur hur! Fat people like chocolate!) I'm actually glad Whedon's run is gonna be short if this is the quality of the stuff he's churning out.

At least I can rely on Marvel Zombies Vs. Army of Darkness for the funny. It doesn't get much better than Nextwave cameos and zombie Power Pack and Howard the Duck in the same freaking issue.

Oh, and Wisdom... While this titles lacked the polish and frantic pace I was hoping for from the first issue, what's not to love about alternate reality Jack the Rippers and Pete's moment of drama? And that final page. By god, I didn't see THAT one coming.

Oh and it's been confirmed that Prime will have a mouth for a lot of the new Transformers movie. Not just a mouth, but a horrific fanged, monkey face. As enthusiastic as I once was about this project, it's time to face facts that this is gonna be a great, fun, impressive summer blockbuster, but not the movie to capture 20 years of obsessive fan geekery. It's a shame. It could have SO easily been a movie to appeal to fans and general audience members alike, because most of the things fans wank over, Joe Public couldn't give a damn about. But this is definitely Michael Bay's Transformers, not the Transformers I hoped for. This'll be a Transformers movie in the same way that Fantastic Four was a Fantastic Four movie or LXG was a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, or X-3 was an X-men movie - taking beats from the original sources, but not capturing the essence of the comics they're based on like Spider-man 1 did.

It's not the end of the world, it's only a movie, it's still a missed opportunity. It's still gonna be an enjoyable film, as I've always said it will be, however, it's now totally apparent that it's not gonna be the fan pleaser I'd hoped for. Not even the fan pleaser I hoped for when I read the first leaked script. I knew then that the script they had barely resembled the material it was based on, even though it had it's strengths, but over the last 18 months there's been room for change and changes have been made. At the end of the day, now it's clear that not enough had changed to pull this into fan friendly TF movie territory.

I'll sit and enjoy it in the same way I enjoyed The Island and LXG, but it's not going to capture the essence of a franchise I've loved for over twenty years. Ho hum. All I can do is lament that. I'm not hateful, or upset, just disappointed.