Belated kudos going out to the folks at New Line for the way they handled the posting of the next Lord Of The Rings trailer on the net. Unlike so many in Hollywood (this means you Paramount), it is clear that New Line seems to get how their audience uses the Internet. It’s nice to see that unlike Paramount, New Line doesn’t have a problem with fans downloading a copy of their trailers for further viewing. Or maybe New Line just has a brighter staff than Paramount, and they realize that if a trailer gets seen by more people it will likely mean a bigger haul at the box office for that movie. Hope the bozos at Paramount responsible for the latest Star Trek trailer wake up soon and smell that pot of coffee.

¶ 10/07/2002 06:01:00 PM //

Boomtown – I thought it was overrated in week 1, and last night’s second episode barely kept my interest during a good portion of the show. Firefly – Only caught last half, but what I did see was better than last week’s episode. And the humor of the ending was reminiscent of an early Buffy episode. John Doe – Lost interest in Friday’s show pretty quickly. Law & Order: Special Victim’s Unit – Is one of those shows that is worth watching if there is nothing better on. This week’s episode was one of their better ones in a while. I guess I’ve always been a bit disappointed in this show because even from the beginning it has never measured up to the original Law & Order.

¶ 10/07/2002 05:55:00 PM //

JAG – Week two was an improvement over the season opener. At least there were no Touched By An Angel elements this week. West Wing – Is there ever really a bad episode of this show? Law & Order – It is hard to believe that this show has been on the air well over a decade. The season opener was as entertaining as anything this show has done in the past decade. Too bad that Law & Order’s two spin-offs aren’t even half as entertaining as the original. Survivor – Week three brought a little more conflict and a little less predictability. Maybe this show still has some more life left in it. ER – Popular’s Leslie Bibb started her guest run on the show last night. Too bad she had all of about 3 minutes of screen time. It likely would have made an improvement to the show. Noah Wyle is a good actor, but am I the only one who thinks they are going to have to bring in another strong lead if they ever want to fill the vacated shoes of Anthony Edwards and George Clooney?

¶ 10/04/2002 06:12:00 PM //

Here are just a few random thoughts on my impressions of the new TV season so far. RETURNING SHOWS West Wing – I forgot how much I missed it. If last week’s two hour season premiere was any indication, West Wing will continue to be the best show on television. ER – Severing a character’s arm. Is that the best they can do? Apparently the writers are so short on ideas that they have to resort to shock value. Newsflash to NBC - cable shows are gaining in the ratings not just because they are shocking. It is because in addition to the shock value they are very well written. If slicing Dr. Romano’s arm off is the best they have to offer, I might be looking elsewhere on the TV dial this year on Thursday nights. By the way, I wasn’t impressed when JAG pulled a similar stunt on their season finale last year; ER’s rip-off of it didn’t make it any better. JAG – Speaking of JAG, it went out on a very low note last year by blowing off a character’s leg. Yeah, I know they are trying to realistically depict war. Call me a prude, but since the show airs at 8pm when kids are likely to be watching, there was absolutely no need of them being that graphic. In fact, I was so annoyed that I almost skipped last week’s season premiere. I almost wish I had. In it we had one-legged Bud fighting for his life after getting his leg blown off by a land mine. Then the poor bugger dies on the operating table, only to magically come back to life when his young son makes some sort of psychic connection with him from thousands of miles away. Huh? By the end of the hour I wasn’t sure whether I was watching JAG or Touched By An Angel. Either way, the last two episodes of JAG have ended on sour notes. Hope they can turn things around. Third Watch – This is a show that I had all but given up on last year. But I did catch a rerun of the season finale a couple of weeks ago and decided to catch the season opening. The show has improved since I stopped watching, and is on par with its first season. It’s far from the best show on TV, but it is one of the better things on Monday nights. Survivor – I began to lose interest in this one last year. The first episode of the new season didn’t do much to reverse that trend. The show is going out of its way to be unpredictable. But all it really is doing is becoming more predictable in that the audience is now expecting the curve balls and anticipating them before they happen. Actually, I’m almost inclined to call the show deceptive. In the promotions for the show, it was billed as a male tribe versus a female tribe. Anyone who watched the show knows that lasted a good five minutes. I guess when you have stopped being able to come up with good ideas to surprise the audience, you can always just try deceptive promotions. The Sopranos – The new season has been disappointing so far. Boring is actually a better word. NEW SHOWS CSI Miami – I enjoyed the preview of this show during an episode of CSI last year, but I’ll have to admit that I was saddened to hear that they felt the need to start meddling with the show before it even hit the air. As soon as I found out that Kim Delaney had been added to the cast, my interest in seeing the show dropped considerably. She didn’t disappoint. She isn’t an asset to the show. And why exactly does David Caruso always have to play these overly intense characters? Try something different already man. At any rate, the first episode wasn’t bad, but I lost interest in last night’s second episode about half way through the show. I’ll likely tune in again next week, but if it doesn’t improve, that’s it for me. Firefly – Not bad, but not anywhere near what I would have expected of a show created by Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Joss Whedon. The quality was such in the first episode that I only bothered to catch the last few minutes of the second episode, and I don’t think I missed much. John Doe – I liked this show a lot more than I thought I would. Good premise. The first two episodes have kept my interest. Time will tell if a show about a guy who knows everything but his own name will have any legs. OTHER SHOWS These aren’t new shows but I have just started tuning in recently, as they have finally made their way to Canada. The Shield - I have to say that The Shield exhibits the same kind of quality that was found in the first couple of seasons of The Sopranos. It’s also nice to see Michael Chiklis back on TV. The Osbournes - While The Osbournes have been airing for a while here in Canada, it is only recently that they have been airing uncut (without bleeps). Having never seen the bleeped versions, I can’t imagine how they would be anywhere near as entertaining as Ozzy uncut.

¶ 10/01/2002 05:59:00 PM //

Speaking of QuickTime, specifically Paramount’s new trailer for Star Trek: Nemesis, why exactly can’t you save the full screen version? It’s bad enough that Apple makes you fork over $29.99 just for the privilege of being able to save a file, but then we can only save “certain” files. Yeah, I know QuickTime Pro gives you more stuff than that, but most people just want to be able to save movies, and could care less about the rest of the included features. What gives? Why exactly does Paramount not want people to be able to save the full screen version of the trailer, but will let them save the smaller versions of the trailer. Are they afraid that people might distribute the trailer to others on the net and give the movie too much publicity? Is that it Paramount? After all, trailers are really just advertisements for upcoming movies, and God forbid that advertisement got seen by too many people. Why exactly wouldn’t Paramount want the trailer distributed around the net? It’s cheap free publicity. Why do they want to send everyone to the Apple site to download the trailer? It’s not like bandwidth is free. If the trailer were being traded on services like Kazaa it would not only reach a larger audience, but would save Paramount a few bucks in bandwidth costs. I’ll tell you why. Control. Hollywood is so hell bent on not losing control of their content that they have lost sight of the bigger picture. Sorry to break this to you Paramount, but people trading your movie trailer is not going to automatically lead to rampant file trading of the whole movie. But it might actually get more butts into theaters when the movie is finally released. Oh, and by the way, when someone has just forked over $29.99 for QuickTime Pro and they realize out of 20 trailers that they try to watch, only one won’t let them save the file, they tend to get a little annoyed at the studio that released that trailer. I tried to download and save the full screen version of Star Trek: Nemesis because I was looking forward to the movie coming out. Had I been able to easily save the trailer to watch again, it may have even built up my anticipation for the film. But as it is, I am left with a sour taste in my mouth. While my butt may very well be sitting in a theater on Star Trek’s opening weekend, it is far less certain that the theater containing me and my butt will be showing Star Trek. Good one Paramount.

¶ 10/01/2002 05:58:00 PM //

Just wanted to extend my thanks to the morons over at Apple computer’s QuickTime division. On the weekend I made the mistake of trying to download the full screen version of the new Star Trek: Nemesis trailer from Apple’s QuickTime Trailer site. Unfortunately, little did I know that Apple's wondrous QuickTime 6 was going to feel the need to change the display settings on my computer and in the process break the display driver. Good one Apple. More thanks to the bozos at HP (who built my computer) for the appalling lack of technical documentation about my machine at their new and improved web site. I wasn't even expecting to be able to get the driver from them, but a little heads up as to what type of video cards they put in their systems would have been nice. Anyway, I muddled through and located the model of my machine's ATI video card. More loving thanks to them for the blistering 2 K/s download speeds that I got from their support site. I've haven't seen a 1.5 Meg file take so long to download since my dial-up days. Odd though, the rest of ATI's site was plenty fast (you know, the parts that are geared towards selling product). I guess you don't count as much after you have already forked over your cash. But at least HP and ATI have should give Apple some comfort in knowing that they aren't the only incompetent high tech firm out there. Needless to say, my next machine will be a Gateway, with an nVidia graphics card running Windows Media Player.

¶ 10/01/2002 05:57:00 PM //