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Pop Culture Current presents - Star Trek - Boldly Go, Indeed
The Pop Culture Current site is pleased to present current pop culture articles from our guest authors. Enjoy!
Star Trek - Boldly Go, Indeed
By Ian Sawyer
J.J. Abrams has boldly gone where George Lucas has failed to go in over 20 years, and I am thankful. Finally, someone has taken an element of my childhood imagination and modernized it without adding superfluous fluff and fodder for the sake of action figure merchandising. Admittedly, I’ve always been more of a Star Wars fan than a “Trekkie.” But, after seeing a thoroughly eye-popping, adult-friendly Star Trek, I might have to reconsider. Star Trek will probably be one of the more appreciated and cherished ‘popcorn’ movies of the summer, following in the footsteps of last year’s Iron Man. This reboot of Gene Roddenberry’s original TV series has the all the sexiness, the humor, and the balls of great science fiction without any of the camp and silliness. Believe me, I love panning movies, and was ready and willing to churn out lines like, “Spock’s ears have more of a point than this masturbatory nerd porn,” but that’s simply not true. For better or worse, Star Trek, is the new model for what blockbusters should be-frakking fun!
I won’t bother laying out the plot-that would be illogical. All I need to say is that the casting, the direction, the writing, and the production (effects out the ass!) are about as spot-on as Hollywood can seem to deliver these days. I wasn’t expecting to really enjoy each and every young, relatively unknown actor reprising such previously iconic sci-fi characters. Not only do the new Kirk (a perfectly cocky, yet vulnerable Chris Pine), Spock (a delightfully wooden, yet vulnerable Zachary Quinto), ‘Bones’ McCoy (a smolderingly stoic Karl Urban), Uhura (a smolderingly hot Zoe Saldana ), Sulu (a surprisingly serious John Cho), and Scotty (a hilariously Scottish Simon Pegg) fill the shoes of the original actors, they accept these characters as their own with refreshed vigor.
The only moments of possible failure occur halfway through the film’s briskly paced two hours when the plot suffers the near-fatal sci-fi condition of time-travel. Abrams, as cocky a director as Capt. Kirk is, well, a Captain, seems to enjoy melting our brains with Lost-esque time-travel twists. Thankfully, Star Trek pulls out of the tailspin gracefully and actually uses the time-travel conceit as a way to ease the audience into accepting the fact that not only is Star Trek back as a franchise, it may just be even better than before.
George Lucas, take a lesson here: professional screen writers, a concern for actual character over ‘Space Politics,’ and a love for humanity over special effects are what make a truly inspiring science fiction epic. Apparently the learner has now become the master.
Read other well-written and humorous film reviews by Ian Sawyer at http://www.examiner.com/x-3224-Portland-Film-Examiner
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Pop Culture presents - Top 10 TV Shows of 2009 You Need to Start Watching Now
The Pop Culture Current site is pleased to present current pop culture articles from our guest authors. Enjoy!
Top 10 TV Shows of 2009 You Need to Start Watching Now
By Nicholas Shin
Note: The Shield and The Wire are both highly recommended, but because both shows had ended in 2008, they are not included on this list (among many others).
10. Fringe
(FOX - 2008 - Sci-Fi)
At first this show didn’t stick with many of us on the must watch show list, but the unique plots lured us back and now we consider it a must watch. This show is about a government task force tracking down paranormal activity with the help of a research scientist, Walter Bishop (actor John Noble), who has the characteristics of Frankenstein and the brilliance of Albert Einstein rolled into one, his sarcastic son Peter Bishop (actor Joshua Jackson), and FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (Actress Anna Torv). Besides the X-Files element in this show, one of the things viewers will notice is the parent-child conflict specifically between Walter and Peter as they try to resolve cases. Fringe is big on conspiracies and some intense twists on “fringe science”. This show just stands out from the rest in its plot developments.
9. Monk
(USA - 2002 - Dramedy)
Background: This is the creator of the website talking, Nick Shin. Call me an idiot or ridiculous and I certainly deserve both, but I personally ignored this incredibly humorous show for about 6 years solely because of the title; not once did I give this show a chance before 2008. I thought the show was literally about a monk and the adventures inside the monastery. I figured how can a show about a monk and a monastery be remotely interesting. Bad assumption (don’t judge a show by its title?) On a random weekend in 2008, I was incredibly bored, had no commitments, and had all the time in the world. Thus, my introduction to Monk. Now onto why you need to start watching too.
Monk is one of those shows where every single person in the world can relate to its main character, Adrian Monk (actor Tony Shalhoub). How? 3 words, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Your situation may not be as, to put it lightly, as severe as Monk’s, but every person has some sort of OCD whether it be washing your hands in a certain way, putting on your socks/shoes a certain way, morning routine, bedtime routine, and on and on. The title character of this show works as an obsessive compulsive private detective and consultant for the San Francisco Police Department homicide unit. At one point, and (fans) correct us if we’re wrong, Monk’s nurse/assistant pointed out 120 or so phobias. What’s entertaining about this show is not only Monk’s brilliance and attention to detail on the field as he solves the cases, but Monk’s ability to deal with his numerous phobias throughout the show including the always humorous therapy sessions. It is the subtleties of Monk and the characters around him that becomes a laugh out loud moment. Each episode is a stand alone so start watching this show.
8. In Treatment
(HBO - 2008 - Drama)
Each episode of In Treatment features therapist Dr. Paul Weston (actor Gabriel Byrne) having a session with one of five patients. The casting for this little known show offers an array of characters ranging from teens to middle aged and singles to married couples. In Treatment displays a full range of emotions with superb acting that makes you care about and believe what you are watching. One of the more unique and riveting parts of this show is the portrayal of the therapist (Paul) going to his own therapist. The character development and the artistic storytelling is brilliant. This show might make you uncomfortable at times and it might take a lot out of you, but what we do know is that the combination of incredible acting, storytelling, and character development will get you hooked; don’t give up after one episode.
7. Breaking Bad
(AMC- 2008 - Dramedy)
Quite possibly the most entertaining show and most original show to watch right now, Walter White (actor Bryan Cranston - the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) quite simply is a high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal lung cancer going entrepreneurial to raise enough money for his family. Well, the entrepreneurial part isn’t exactly what one might suspect and this is where the show becomes extremely entertaining. Walt decides to team up with a former student, whom Walt flunked, to get into the crystal-meth business. How’s that for unique writing? If you’ve ever felt you’ve been way in over your head, you will certainly enjoy watching this show as Walt quickly learns the dangers of competing with rival meth dealers.
6. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (IASIP)
(FX - 2005 - Comedy)
Remember Seinfeld? The show from the 90’s that everyone seemed to enjoy immensely due to its random plots and often commercial resolutions. The oft-imitated formula has been mirrored throughout the years, but one show in particular has nailed it on the head. IASIP is possibly the funniest show on television due to the obvious lack of rules or shame. We follow the lives of Mac, Charlie, Dennis, and Dee as they scheme and screw people over on an hourly basis. In the end, everything blows up in their faces in a commercial fashion. If there was ever a show that embodies the basic drives of the human nature within all of us, this is it. Just watch it. Now.
5. Entourage
(HBO - 2004 - Dramedy)
We know, anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock knows about the show so we’ll try to make this one short. Entourage deserves a spot on any “best of” TV shows list. The only reason why the “professional” critics do not include this show is because of its target audience. There are just some out of the target demographic that do not want to watch quirky, douchebag-like, 20 (and 40?) somethings, and their adventures as a group. We know that it is extremely hard to argue that Entourage is the most well-written show or even best performed (although Jeremy Piven as Ari Gold is absolutely brilliant and the reason why you should start watching), but this show just entertains. It is mindlessly distracting and addicting.
4. Dexter
(Showtime - 2006 - Dramedy)
How many of us have a dark side? A special side (mmmm, frites) that lays dormant within our mind and only comes out for special occasions. If you raised your hand, then you need to watch Dexter. Dexter is a forensic blood spatter analyst by day for the Miami-Metro Police Department (MMPD) and a serial killer by night. Before you turn to a different website in disgust, you need to know that Dexter has a conscious. As a youth, Dexter show signs of a sociopath, but his adoptive father, a detective for the MMPD, took those tendencies and taught Dexter to use them for the good of mankind, or in this case, killing people who have escaped their due punishment from the justice system. The show is in no shortage of thrills and suspense. Touching, clever, exciting, and often humorous, Dexter, is one anti-hero that every one can relate to, even if you don’t want to admit it.
3. Damages
(FX- 2007 - Drama)
Thought the show was canceled? Actually many of you reading this top 10 list realize it’s been awhile due to the writer’s strike. Well, it’s back and it’s wonderful. With the final episode of season 1 airing back in October 2007, the second season is (well, has been) officially back. Due to the hiatus, Damages has fallen off the radar, but this show absolutely deserves a “best of TV shows” nod. Damages is a legal thriller that stars Glenn Close as the brilliant and ruthless litigator Patty Hewes. The show revolves around Patty and her protege, Ellen Parsons (actress Rose Byrne). With so many legal thrillers on the air, it’s hard to describe how and why this series stands out head and shoulders above all the others. To put it simply, superb acting, intelligent writing, thought-provoking, an actual story line as opposed to one story per episode, and in true sense of the word, a thriller. The story itself is intriguing, but it’s the storytelling and the performances that really make this show a must watch now. We feel like this is still not doing the show justice….let’s see, you will never be bored watching this show; it is consistent from beginning to end. The folks at FX is doing something right and everyone needs to take notice.
2. Rescue Me
(FX- 2004 - Dramedy)
We all enjoyed The Sopranos. It made us feel bad and yet, so good. The ultimate anti-hero, Tony Soprano, was someone we hated and loved at the same time. Since it left television, where does one go to root for a likeable bad guy? The answer is Rescue Me. The main character, Tommy Gavin (actor Denis Leary), is a member of the NYFD. He is about as rough as they come and highly respected for his displays of bravery on the field.
Whether he is sleeping around with widows of victims from 9/11 (a large theme during the show), abusing drugs and alcohol, hitting people and being a sleezeball, one can see why Tommy Gavin is not a likeable fellow….on the show. However, we in the real world find ourselves enamored with a guy that is a coin-flip away from being cool or being a turd, just like Tony Soprano.
Here is a list of similarities between The Sopranos and Rescue Me
* Sopranos = New Jersey. Rescue Me = New York. You can connect the two.
* Infidelity
* Drug and alcohol abuse
* Curse like sailors
* Violence towards strangers, friends and family
* Hallucinations
We are sure the list could go on, but it would distract the attention away from this show you need to watch. Feel free to comment if you find additional similarities and we will consider adding it to the list. Anyway, this is a tremendous show that only adds to FX’s taste in great shows. Watch it.
1. Mad Men
(AMC- 2007 - Drama)
Okay, you get it, we get it, Mad Men is a great show based on the countless number of critics and wannabe critics like ourselves. By now Mad Men (and AMC for that matter) has received the major props it deserves, but we cannot emphasize it enough. We would never have imagined the slowest possible drama on television topping our list of “must watch TV for 20093. Where’s the action, where’s the humor, where’s the convenient douchebag that we like to talk about, where’s the [insert additional analogies]. With all that said and the hype the show has been garnering since its debut, we still think Mad Men is an underrated show.
Definition of Mad Men as explained during the first episode - “In the 1950s and 1960s, the advertising industry was based on Madison Avenue in New York City. In fact, ‘Madison Avenue’ used to be slang for ‘the ad industry’. Madison/ad men was contracted into “mad men” by the mad men themselves.”
For those still doubting this top TV show to watch now, perhaps the very reason you are not watching this show is because of the time frame in history in which the story takes place; we admit, it was for us. The 60s was far before any of our times at Everything Topped, and based on the show the 60s was racist, sexist, unhealthy (based on the number of cigarattes the characters smoke every 5 seconds), and most importantly, a transition period. Actor Jon Hamm as the lead character, Don Draper, is brilliant as the creative director at Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency. Don struggles to stay ahead of the changing times and the young executives at the Agency all the whilst making the plays in the boardroom (and bedroom). The intense performances are portrayed not only in Don’s personal life, but also through the unique aspect of how people sell themselves in the ad industry. The characters are complex, sophisticated, and well developed. It’s a slow moving drama, yes, and many who are impatient and simply close-minded, will not enjoy Mad Men. Getting a truly accurate picture of a time when not many shows or movies are set makes this the top show you need to start watching for 2009.
There you have it, our list of the Top 10 TV Shows of 2009 You Need To Start Watching Now. We would love to hear your thoughts so feel free to comment on the list. Ridicule us, praise us, hate us, love us for our list. Got topics/categories you’d like topped? Give us a shout through the comments or contact us.
You may use parts of this review for your own site or blog as long as you link back to http://www.everythingtopped.com
Nicholas Shin is a Marketing Manager by day, and a review/list creator by night. He focuses on reviews and creating lists by doing research and testing products. He also likes to create lists that are purely for entertainment purposes. As he continues to do hours and hours of research random products and services, he decided to start a website based on his own personal research. The purpose is for the site to become a resourceful solution by providing reliable reviews with the utmost integrity. He finds pleasure in researching and sharing his knowledge with others in hopes that you won’t have to spend as much time as he has researching. With that, the site was launched in January of 2009. You can visit the site at http://www.everythingtopped.com
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Pop Culture presents - “Watchmen” Movie Review
The Pop Culture Current site is pleased to present a variety of pop culture articles by our guest authors. Enjoy!
“Watchmen” Movie Review
By Marty Meltz
“Watchmen” (7 out of 10)
Director: Zack Snyder
Screenplay: David Hayter, Alex Tse, based on the Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore graphic novel
Cast: Ensemble, including Jackie Earl Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup
Time: 2 hrs., 43 min.
Rating: R (strong violence, sexuality, nudity, vulgarity)
Grandly eloquent, gruesomely grisly and breathtakingly spectacular in what it wants to say, but clumsy and amateurish in its wrap-up.
The much anticipated “Watchmen” deserves a lot more artistic accolade than the knee-jerk criticisms are allowing it. It is, quite frankly, the most wildly ambitious comic book expression on the big screen ever, superior to “Dark Knight,” “Sin City” and other attempts. Measured in terms of sheer creative input and explosive output, it absolutely had me hypnotized by its total audio-visual force all the way up to an ending that you can easily see is sputtering badly, headed for an unstoppable letdown in intelligence and imagination.
Up until then, the film rarely leaves you in peace. Set in continuous off-tones of deep sepia and and icy blues, its whiplash montage of vigorous images are nowhere arbitrary and everywhere pulsating. Every image is pumped up to max. This is pure comic book artistry supercharged into the demanding designs of the motion picture at uncompromising levels of film mastery. If there’s a conventional confrontation, say a hand-to-hand fight or a lethal threat between individuals, it ratchets the energy up way beyond the orthodox, power-injecting every small aspect of the scene with hardball augmentation of blood, mutilation and bodily destruction.
And yes, as you might expect, this is the ultimate test of the admonition that in artistic expression, one must give the devil his due.
This is not the first time in film history that hideous violence has had to be painfully conceded as having its own energy to be judged in creative terms. The magnificence of the grotesque.
Yet you start to wonder, after almost an hour of this, if the film actually expects to roll continuously on its boosters and after-burners. Shouldn’t we have some serious characters and emotional involvements?
Well, . . . it does seem to want to recognize that, but, let’s see what’s involved.
Based on the comic book, “Watchmen,” often reputed among many critics and Hollywood insiders to be unfilmable, is certainly a grandly offbeat, bizarrely styled fantasy sci-fi adventure set in an alternate universe in a 1985 America. In this, Richard Nixon has been re-elected for a third term and nuclear war with the Soviet Union is imminent. By law, all superheroes have been outlawed. But a group of them calling themselves the Minutemen is inspired back into action when one of their number, “Comedian” (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is brutally murdered and those remaining realize their own destruction may be imminent. More to the point, they will find that a far more grandiose and villainous plot is afoot, one involving nuclear destruction.
Their talents? Well, for those newcomer audiences to this ongoing saga, there’s the masked Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley), a sociopath with an ever-changing “Rorschach blot” mask who breaks thugs’ fingers, dorky Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) who’s a genius with gadgets, the smug Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) who has licensed his identity as Ozymandias, “the smartest man in the world,” and seductive Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman) who unwillingly inherited her mom’s superhero status. She loves Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup), a.k.a Dr. Manhattan. A government experiment had both destroyed him and granted him unimaginable superpowers that made him a weapon for the U.S. military.
It is Rorschach who sees a sinister connection between the murder of The Comedian and a coming apocalypse.
The film, with its often sharply observed cultural and political themes in more than a few cannily written dialogue segments, takes its cues from its bleak and barren comic book origins. It attempts to ground extensive violence into strong character and emotional values soundtrack by cleverly cued songs (Bobby Dylan’s “The Times They are A-Changin’,” Simon & Garfunkle’s “The Sound of Silence,” plus Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”). But in that, it fails. Those attempts come off as terribly ordinary.
The cast is ensemble, that is, not centered on any one. Intellectually, the film thrusts almost satirically, and often effectively, at modern examinations of chaos and order in a context of loony fanaticism and will in the way of The Joker and Batman, even as it pokes generously at the denseness of men, in particular military and presidential authority, in their macho- and ego-driven parodies of power. It has conventional murder mystery elements and various judgments on the subject of heroism.
Indeed, “Watchmen” lays doubt on notions of heroes and villains even as the survival of humanity under the protection of the Watchmen is in itself called into question.
The film draws no world calamity into play that it cannot depict with stratospherically spectacular screen dynamics. Watch Manhattan being consumed by nuclear blasts at the street level, or the incineration alive of a couple standing together in a kiss as their skeletons remain Watch the grandose representations of the planet Mars.
How, you may ask, is the film going to resolve all this? The final interactions are embarrassingly trivial. You may find yourself blanching in chuckles as the empty final statements. But hey, I was glad I saw this movie and do regard it as a landmark production. There really is something missing in your life’s artistic experience, however ugly it may project itself to you in this film.
http://www.martymoviereviews.com. 30-year former films critic for the Portland (Maine) Sunday Telegram. Offering right-to-the-point reviews that address directly the question of the film’s entertainment value to you. Films have personalities. It doesn’t matter who wrote it, who directs it, who stars in it, if it doesn’t reach out to you with charisma. I examine its honesty and intelligence. Are you being respected, or are you being jerked around?
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