Weekend Watching

A couple of fall premieres this weekend, and one special footnote.

Law and Order - I spent a little time with Law and Order Season Five, finally finishing up the last of it yesterday. I think I need to do a post all about Jack McCoy sometime.

Family Guy - Big season premiere. It was a Stewie/Brian episode, which is my favorite kind - 'Road to the Multiverse'. Basically glimpses of alternate universes including a Disney parody that had my sides splitting and a shot at Robot Chicken that was pretty entertaining, too. I love the friendly jabs those shows take at one another.

American Dad - It's basically the same show as Family Guy, of course, but I like'em both. I did not watch the new Cleveland show, because I think I've got enough Seth MacFarlane content to watch already.

Titan Maximum - The creators of Robot Chicken give us a genre-aware version of Voltron. It's definitely funny, but I'm hoping that subsequent episodes have a little more densely packed humor, now that the premise is fully established. The Sasha character - token 'Mean Girl' of the group - is pretty funny despite the age of that particular cliche.

From the ending :

(Titan Maximum has just defeated a rampaging robot - the robot's chest beam fires, blowing a hole through Titan Maximum and toppling it. The team gets out of the wreckage and assembles in stunned silence at their close-call, pyrrhic victory. Sasha breaks the silence, addressing the other girl on the team.)

Sasha : Look at what you did, Jodie.

I also like the monkey-janitor on the team, who reacts to everything anyone says with the same look of passive indifference.

I'm sure a lot of my watching this week will be 30 Rock, Season Three and Star Trek, Season Two (on Blu-Ray! Mmmm..) which arrived from Amazon yesterday.

Weekend Watching

A new 'feature', wherein I briefly discuss what television show or movie had my eyeballs glued to it over the weekend.

Warehouse 13 - Saved on my DVR from Tuesday. I'm not excited enough about the show to need to watch it the night it comes on, or even the day after, but I do really enjoy it. If I could change one thing about it, I would stop the writers' herculean effort to push the two leads together romantically. It's not that the actors in question don't have chemistry, it just feels so predictable in a show that's otherwise pretty innovative. Wikipedia has a list of artifacts from the show so far. Saves me from having to put one together!

Law and Order - I'm a big fan of 'classic' Law and Order, mainly because Jack McCoy is the greatest District Attorney who ever fictionally lived. So I finally picked up some of the season DVD sets, starting with Season 4 which is the one preceding Jack's debut. Watched several episodes while working on painting pewter miniatures.

Important Things With Demetri Martin - Offbeat, funny. The first episode I saw on Comedy Central hooked me - I really like Martin's low-key comedy style. Picked up the DVD.

Anchorman - A friend of mine hadn't seen Anchorman, which I consider to be Judd Apatow's second funniest film, after Walk Hard. Mainly because of Steve Carrell as Brick Tamland. I love lamp.

Legend of Drunken Master - Local video store went out of business, and sold off their movie stock. The pickings were pretty thin by the time I got around to checking it out, but with movies at $4 apiece, there were still a few things I was happy to pick up, this among them. There's never a bad time for a Jackie Chan movie.

Pride of the Yankees - And this is another one I snagged for $4. Quite a shift, tonally, from most of the rest of the stuff I watched this weekend. But there's also never a bad time for a Gary Cooper movie.