The New Doctor

Up until the David Tennant run on Doctor Who, there had always been an odd quirk, something that I just couldn't take seriously, that would keep me away from regularly watching any run of the series.  I enjoyed watching the old Tom Baker reruns when I was a kid on the CBC, much in the same way I enjoyed watching the black and white sci-fi movies, but there was always something hokey about them that kept me from really being a fan.  The Christopher Eccleston series started to change a lot of that, and then with Tennant, I was watching as soon as they aired.

Unfortunately, that hokey quality seems to be creeping back in to this new run with Matt Smith.  Now, I like Smith as the Doctor.  He's not as good as Tennant, Eccleston or Baker, but he's still rather endearing, and Karen Gillan is quickly becoming my favourite companion since Billie Piper, but...Daleks in WWII facing off against Winston Churchill?  Part of me liked the absurdity, part of me wanted to change the station.  This week's episode, with the weeping angels, however, seemed to appeal to me more.  I'm still watching, but it may turn out to just be an occasional thing if nothing else is on and I'm home.

So Happy You Could Cry

Well, I hate to say it, but I don't think that Happy Town is going to last much longer than its initial batch of episodes.  Despite having its strongest character (MC Gainey's Sheriff) unconscious for the episode, I still kind of liked it, but I do think that it's being too quirky for its own good.  The mystery of the intial murderer is solved in a fairly unusual fashion, so it gets points there, but at this stage in the game, everything's still so fresh that we don't necessarily have any baseline to be shocked by any events.  Everything in Haplin seems off kilter, so there isn't any sort of "normal" grounding.

Random Funny Thing

I've been looking for a release date/pre-sale for the new Spiritual Front album, and in doing so went to the Canadian, American and German Amazon sites and came across something I found endlessly funny.  On both the Canadian and American sites, Amazon is highly featuring the Kindle.  On the German site, the main feature is a washing machine.



I did, however, manage to find that the video for the first single from the new album has been posted, "Darkroom Friendship".  It seems much more accessible compared to how dark some of Armageddon Gigolo was, nevertheless I quite like it.  It still continues with the Morricone-inspired guitar feel and I like the trumpet and accordion.

Be afraid, be very...something or other

I'm working on another project that I'm going to unveil in the not too distant future, but in doing research and background for it, I discovered that there are, not including last year's made-for-TV-remake, seven films for Children of the Corn.  Doesn't that seem a wee bit excessive to anyone else?  It was originally a thirty page short story about children going nuts a la Lord of the Flies and some creepy dark thing instituting some of that "old time" religion in the youngins.  Seven films.

...because I can't sleep...

I've been clicking the "Next Blog" link at the top blogger bar for about an hour now, just seeing what people have decided to post.  Most are about as interesting as watching paint dry, especially the preponderance of Christian blogs proselytizing at me while playing midi hymns (I thought midi files on pages were banned back in the 90's?), but then I guess the same is true if you just randomly came across this page in your travels.  It only ever really matters to the person writing it, so well...

What I did kind of find interesting was the sheer amount of people, all with the same basic template, who are "Bringing home..." whomever; the adoption blogs.  Maybe I'm just overly cynical, but most of the adoption sites just seem like so much a scam, even to the point where I swear that some of the blogs themselves are made up since several of them seem to duplicate the same material.

C'Mon Get Happy

I watched the first episode of Happy Town.  It's too early to really say much, this episode really was just an introduction of characters, basic premise and setting, but it did a decent job.  MC Gainey is great as Sherriff Conroy, but he's really the only one whose individual performance stands out.  The group of catty widows and their landlady were interesting, emphasizing the oddball characters bit.  At some points, it feels like it's trying too hard for the Twin Peaks by way of Stephen-King-made-for-TV-mini-series tone, but we'll see how it turns out.

No Matter How...

The new Coheed and Cambria album, Year of the Black Rainbow has grown on me considerably over the past couple weeks, particularly the song "Far". Below is an acoustic version that I think is even better than the album track -- albeit the video and audio is kind of poor, cell phone recording likely.

We've got armadillos in our trousers. It's really quite frightening.

A little while ago I picked up Avantasia's two new discs, The Wicked Symphony and Angel of Babylon. I'm an uabashed fan of what you could call over-the-top, pretentious metal, and have a certain fondness for projects like Tobias Sammet's Avantasia and Arjen Anthony Lucassen's Ayreon. Due to the cheese and power metal aspect of Avantasia, I've not been able to get past track five, "Blizzard on a Broken Mirror", from the first disc, but I'll probably eventually put the two discs on as background noise while I'm cleaning or something and let it diffuse.

I do, however, quite like the first single, "Dying for an Angel", which has to feature the biggest, catchiest butt rock chorus this side of 1980's Bon Jovi. Check out the video above. Turn it up to eleven.

You Won't Know

After finally catching the latest episode of Stargate Universe, "Divided", I must say I'm really enjoying this show. I was never a fan of SG1 or Atlantis, both shows just seemed to focus more on the humour and seemed to lose the plot half the time, that I just tended to leave them alone. This placement in that universe, however, has enthralled me since the beginning. It's still early in the series development, but the characters seem more engaging, the writers are actually contributing to regularised serial story, and although the overaching plot seems borrowed from Star Trek: Voyager and -- along with its shooting style -- Battlestar Galactica, it seems like something different.

I think it could partially just be the outstanding performances from all of the actors, specifically Robert Carlyle, Louis Ferreira and David Blue, maybe it's just because Blue's character of Eli Wallace just lands so close to home, maybe it's Elyse Levesque spending most of the season in yoga pants, or maybe it's because the rest of the rabid Stargate fans seem to hate it, but I'm quite enjoying this.

Birds flying high...

The Muse concert last night at the Pacific Coliseum was quite good. I've been impressed with their albums for quite some time, but they are indeed better live. I was slightly disappointed that they didn't play "MK Ultra", but it was more or less made up by playing "Map of the Problematique" and causing me to realise just how good is Dom Howard a drummer.

First Impressions of a Rainbow

I've been privileged to have a first listen of Coheed and Cambria's new album out April 13, Year of the Black Rainbow, and I have to say I quite like it. It doesn't come off as nearly pretentious as their previous releases, and seems to focus more on standard song structure and less on the overarching concept of the whole Armory Wars nonsense. It also features what's probably Claudio Sanchez's best work in "Pearl of the Stars". I'll definitely be picking this up when it comes out.