Mockingjay 2: Tossing Out the Blockbuster Rulebook

From the moment I finished reading the Hunger Games novels back in 2011, as the first Hunger Games movie was already starting production, I worried about Mockingjay.  It's hard enough to make a PG-13 movie series about kids being thrown into an arena and forced to kill each other, and to expect general audiences to want to watch said series.  But to follow the story through to its fairly bitter and sobering end, and expect people to keep sticking with it, was beyond what I could imagine.  I was 34 when I read these books, and as I closed Mockingjay after finishing its final page, all I could think of was, I am a fully-functioning adult, and I feel like I need therapy right now.  How in the name of all that is holy could a 12 year-old read this and be o.k.??

At that point, all I hoped for from the the movie adaptations was for them to be decent, and to get enough of an audience that they could make all 3 movies (well, 4 - it's basically a given these days that studios will split the last book into 2 films for the extra cash-grab).  And then The Hunger Games was released in March 2012.  And it became the 11th highest-grossing (domestic) film of all time.  And then Catching Fire was released in November 2013, and it made even more money.  It was the highest-grossing film of 2013 (domestic), and surpassed the Hunger Games to become the 10th highest-grossing movie of all time.  Not only that, but The Hunger Games was a pretty damn good movie, and Catching Fire was flat-out fantastic.  All of this was about a billion miles past what I could have ever hoped for from this series.

'The 100' Analysis #2: Rubicon

If you missed my 100 analysis #1, you can catch that here.  By the way, I'm still in the phase where I call it "the one-hundred" instead of "the hundred" and I just can't seem to get out of it.  I need to convince some of my real-life people to watch so I can say it out loud more often, lol.  Anyway.

Just to re-iterate what I'm doing here, I'm examining this show from two very specific angles.  I'm delving into two key points in the series (or what has aired so far which is the first 2 seasons) when I realized that this show was not quite like anything else I had ever seen on TV ... or anywhere for that matter.  My first analysis was on "Spacewalker", and also on the entire Clarke/Finn relationship, and how it progressed from the pilot through Spacewalker.  For my second analysis, I'm going to focus on "Rubicon".

WARNING: Like my last review of The 100, this review contains SPOILERS.  LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS.  TURN BACK HERE if you have NOT seen the first 2 seasons of this series in its entirety.  Seriously.  If you haven't seen the entire show and you continue past this jump, you're an asshole.

The Plopper Discovers 'The 100'

Hey look at this fancy new show I've discovered!  O.k. fine, "new" might not be an entirely accurate description.  But it's new to me, and that's what matters.  It only took me 2 seasons to discover it!  That ain't so bad, is it?  It's not that I didn't know this show existed; I did.  As a matter of fact, Matt Barber, former editor of Chuck and coincidental friend-of-a-friend, was an editor on it in season 1.  It even got positive reviews from critics, from what I saw on Twitter.  So why was I so skeptical?  Well, it takes a LOT for me to get into a new TV show these days.  There are just sooo many shows on the air right now, how the hell does a girl decide??  What finally swayed me to check out The 100 was Mo Ryan, one of my favorite critics since the Chuck days.  She's always said good things about this show, and they only seemed to get better in season 2.  Plus, someone I know on tumblr started posting a bunch of 100 pics and memes and gifs recently, and it must have wormed its way into my brain.

Updates: Has Twitter FINALLY Taken Notice of TrollBoy?

A little over a year ago, I posted about Piper Perabo's Twitter stalker/harasser, who has been trolling, bullying, and harassing her and her followers for over 2 full years now.  My intent was to try to get the word out about how insanely pathetic Twitter's anti-abuse measures were.  At the time I made that post, in July 2014, to even call them anti-abuse measures at all was laughable, because these theoretical "measures" didn't actually exist.  Twitter had abuse policies, sure, but they were doing nothing to enforce them.  Like, literally, at least in our case, nothing at all.  Zip.  Zilch.  Nada.  The policy was like, "Hey guys, don't do this stuff, k?"  "Oh o.k. so you're doing it?  O.k.  Oh well."

2014 Stuff I Liked: TV

O.k. now that I've done my music round-up for 2014, I'll get to the TV shows I enjoyed in 2014.  Again, like I mentioned in the music post, there is no way in hell any one person can watch EVERY one of the hundreds of TV shows that are airing and streaming simultaneously at any given time.  Let alone for an entire year.  So, I only saw as much TV as I could find the time for, and that's gonna be my frame of reference here.  But half the point of this is so that if anyone actually reads this, they can tell me what I missed and what I should check out.  I can already think of several shows off the top of my head that I still plan to check out in 2015.

Here we go:

Hour-Long Shows I Enjoyed in 2014

In the past, the hour-long shows would be mostly dramas and the half hours would be comedies, but it all blends together these days.  We've got a good number of dramedies that fit into both categories.  So I'm just gonna split this by hour-long and half hour shows.  In no particular order, for each.

Game of Thrones Season 4
 

I spent the first 3 seasons of GoT being convinced that the show was absolutely not for me.  I'm not really into the whole fantasy/medieval kings and queens and magical fairies and knights type stuff.  I was when I was a kid, but not so much as an adult.  But last year right at this time, during my Christmas break, something convinced me to finally try it out.  I did, and it sucked me in pretty much immediately.  There was no looking back.  You see, the setting of the show really doesn't matter ... it's the stories and the characters that suck you the hell in.  It's like what a soap opera would be if soaps were SUPER high quality and the characters and stories were way more awesome hahah.  And I say that as someone who looooved a couple of the classic soaps when I was a kid. I speak the language.

2014 Stuff I Liked: Music

I created this blog to use for basically anything and everything that I fangirl over, including TV, music, movies, books, whatever.  But I find that at any given moment, I only have enough time and energy to actually write about one thing I'm currently fangirling at a time.  I do Covert Affairs reviews over at GeekFurious that real people actually read and care about, which means I can't slack off on it.  So when I'm doing those every week, I don't have time for much else other than my day job and my actual life haha.

But Covert's season ended about a week and a half ago, which is good timing, because now I can do a couple posts about the stuff I fangirled in 2014.  I've never done one of these before, because I always feel like I can't make a "Top 10 Best" of anything, since I don't have time to actually see ALL movies, or buy ALL albums, or watch the hundreds of TV shows that are on the air and streaming simultaneously these days.  So instead I'm just going to do "Stuff I Liked," which just covers whatever I could actually get my grubby paws on this year.

This post will cover music.  So let's get to it.

Stuff I Loved in 2014

Deafheaven - Sunbather

I liken the listening experience of this album to attempting to hug/cuddle a beautiful fuzzy adorable kitten, while said kitten psychotically tries to scratch your face off.  I own a good number of albums that cannot physically be taken in all at once, in just one listening experience, due to the sheer punishment on your ears.  So that in itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but what this album has that most others don't is that fuzzy kitten it's using to deliver that brutal brutal pummeling to your brain.  It's just so ... pretty ... and evil ... all at once.  I literally cannot listen to more than 2 songs at a time hahah.  But I love it and it's a great album to put on when I'm feeling pissed off or frustrated or just kinda emo.

Covert Affairs Season 5 Review

You know what I love about Annie Walker?  It's that she can find herself face down on the pavement in a shady alley somewhere from a myocarditis attack while her mission goes completely sideways, bad guys left free to their own devices ... and yet, by the time she wakes up ... if she's lucky enough that someone has dragged her lifeless body somewhere safe ... she STILL manages to have all the attitude of someone who just threw a winning touchdown.  She gets up, she dusts herself off, and she's right back on the mission.

Covert Affairs Eps 5.11-5.16 Reviews

Hey, so, has anyone been wondering where my Covert Affairs fall season 5 reviews have been?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Huh?  No?  No one?

O.k. look, it's not that people don't still care about Covert Affairs; they certainly do.  It's just that for whatever reason, this blog just is not showing up on Google searches for the show.  At least not any higher than like, page 53 of the search results.  So I haven't stopped reviewing the show, I've just stopped reviewing it here.  I'm still doing my full reviews every week on GeekFurious.

Covert Affairs 5.10: "Sensitive Euro Man"

Hmmmm what's that look on your face Annie?

Covert Affairs 5.09: "Spit on a Stranger"

Shit.

Things were going SO well last week until that goddamn dog walker had to come in and ruin everything.  My GeekFurious review of "Spit on a Stranger" is here, but I'm just going to leave this post to a super quickie comic strip this week - the end scene with Annie & Auggie, which happens right after the one above.

Covert Affairs 5.08: "Grounded"

Uh. Oooohhhhhh ... looks like our dear Annie has been ... grounded.  That is, suspended from the agency for lying about her heart condition.  Well, amongst many other things that go down in this episode.  It takes a while to get all the way to suspended territory.

Covert Affairs 5.07: "Brink of the Clouds"

Oh, Covert Affairs.  How you have a way of driving me insane on some weeks, and then turning around and grabbing a impressively powerful grip on my heart on others.  Last week's ep drove me so nuts with B plots that it made the otherwise enjoyable A plot keep losing momentum.  And I just felt like we didn't spend enough time on it overall.  But this week, oh this week ... you punched me in the gut with goodness.

Covert Affairs 5.06: "Embassy Row"

Hello, ladies and gents ... err, no one.  And I say "no one" because that is exactly who's reading these reviews - Literally, no one.  Not one person in the world, except me.  So I'm going to keep this even shorter than last week and just tell a short story in pictures, of the storyline I cared about in this week's ep.  Sadly, far too much time was spent this week on Calder's ridiculous lady dramas that no one cares about, which took precious time away from Annie & McQuaid.  We also got a lot of Auggie juggling two chicks, and Arthur and Joan's marital woes. 

Covert Affairs 5.05: "Elevate Me Later"

I'm not entirely sure why I'm still posting these mini-reviews, because they are getting literally zero hits.  Google doesn't like this blog for whatever reason.  So instead I'm just gonna keep this extremely short and link to my real review at GeekFurious:

Covert Affairs 5.03-4: "Unseen Power ..." & "Silence Kit"

I'm late on the Covert Affairs 5.03 link because I was on vacation last week, so I'm just posting both of these eps together (5.04 as well).  Not that it matters, since I can't seem to get any hits on this blog to save my life.  I'm not sure what the issue is because my CA season 3 and 4 posts on my other blog are still getting hits.  I'm going to have to start linking from there to here now, yeesh.  Maybe I should have never moved them, as this blog is clearly not showing up on Google searches, for whatever reason.  Oh well.

Twitter Has Apparently Stopped Enforcing Its Abuse Policies

The culture of the internet is a fascinating thing, ain't it?  TV fans, are you on Twitter?  If you're a proper TV fan(atic), you probably are.  I've been there for over 5 years now - I joined in 2009, for the specific purpose of the "Save Chuck" campaign.  I've seen all kinds of wild and wacky things during this 5+ years on Twitter.  I follow a bunch of peeps from my favorite shows, I follow several comedians, a few news folks, a few movie folks, etc.

Now, have you ever followed Piper Perabo (@PiperPerabo) on Twitter?  Actually, what I should ask is, have you followed her at any point in the past year?  Because if so, you probably subsequently received one or more spam tweets that look like this:

That is because there is a lunatic troll out there who has been harassing Piper and her followers on Twitter non-stop for a full year now, as of this writing - July 2014.  He has created probably upwards of a thousand troll/spam accounts at this point, and set up bots to send these spam tweets to every person who follows Piper.  These days it has gotten so bad that if you follow her right now, you'll probably get spammed from several of this troll's accounts with the same message.  In my 5+ years on Twitter, this is the only situation I've ever seen like this.  Trolls and dickheads come and go, but I've never seen someone continuously harass one person for this long, this relentlessly.

Covert Affairs 5.02 "False Skorpion"

Covert Affairs, you're wooing me again.  More so than you have since mid season 3, which was my favorite stretch of this series (3.01-11 to be exact).  Goddamnit, please don't toy with my heart like this.  We're only 2 eps into season 5.  I loved ep 2 of season 4 too, and then you went on to give me an incredibly frustrating season.  So there's still plllleeeeeeeeennnnty of time for you to screw the pooch on season 5, too.  Please don't.  Please don't screw that pooch.  It's not right.

Covert Affairs 5.01 "Shady Lane": Annie Are U O.k.?

Hahah goddamnit now I have that song in my head again.  I got it in my head before with a season 3 Covert Affairs review once, and it just popped back in there due to the nature of the season 5 opener.  The problem is, the version that gets in my head is never the original MJ version, it's always the cheese-tastic Alien Ant Farm version from like 13 or 14 years ago.  Fun fact: They were a local band from Riverside, where I went to college, while I was in college.  Oh shit Wikipedia just informed me it's technically Moreno Valley, a much smaller town right next to Riverside, which I also spent a lot of time in while in college.  Even more obscure.  But point being, their big hit was quite an achievement for the ol' Inland Empire.  A real flash in the pan.  Great job, Riverside (Moreno Valley).

O.k. I can't believe I just embedded that here.  I feel so dirty and embarrassed.  But I'm not taking it out because I can't get it out of my head now.  And the lyrics do really fit this Covert Affairs episode pretty perfectly.

So here we are.  Covert Affairs season 5 premiere, "Shady Lane."  Season 4 of this show had me so incredibly frustrated that I had kind of given up on putting much hope or care into season 5.  But guess what?  They just f*cking sucked me back in.  It's almost like they called me on the phone and asked me exactly the type of stuff I'd want to see in this show and then they did it.  Hold up, I shouldn't go that far, I'll just jinx it and it'll end up giving me just as much TV blueballs as season 4 did.

The Dying-slash-Thriving Art of the TV Title Sequence

It has been a thing as long as I can remember that a TV show will start off in its first couple seasons with a nice long title sequence, and then gradually cut it shorter and lamer and shorter and lamer as the series goes on.  It seems to me that that trend has reached an extreme in modern television, with shows keeping title sequences to the bare minimum to allow themselves more time for storytelling.

Err, but wait ... then why are there so many fantastic title sequences out there right now??  Oh right, it's the difference between shows that have a strict time constraint with ad time + traditional 30-60 minute slot, vs. the shows that ... don't.  Shows on premium channels like HBO and Showtime usually still stick to the traditional 30-60 minute slot, but they have the luxury of zero commercials taking away from their story-telling time.  And then you've got the basic cable networks, which can go either way - a channel like USA sticks to the traditional formula, where as a network like FX lets some of their shows (e.g. Sons of Anarchy and The Americans) take up all the time they damn well please.  Sure they've still gotta deal with commercials, but they also regularly run like 5-15 minutes past the hour mark.  Not all networks give their shows that luxury.  Oh and don't forget about Netflix!!  Talk about being able to do whatever the hell you want - these guys have it better than anyone in that category.  Must be nice.

The Dying Theme Song

On one hand, let's take a show like Castle, which I'm pretty sure never even bothered with a full title sequence in the first place, right?  Wasn't it always just that quickie little ditty with the ... OH wait!!  I just remembered, they used to start every episode off with that little backstory first!  But yeah, they stopped doing that quite a while back.

And then there's Louie, whose theme song was catchy as hell, but they seem to have cut it out entirely for its most recent season.  And New Girl, which started off with a pretty short opening theme, and only shortened it from there (it's gotta be like 10 seconds long at this point right?).  Didn't Breaking Bad go that same route?  Also Covert Affairs, which kept its full sequence for its first three seasons, but then just pulled the cord and cut it out completely in season 4.  Now they just do a fade in and fade out of the title.  In their case I was actually fine with the elimination of it, because I was never a huge fan of the original theme/sequence to begin with.  It was pretty cheesy.

This is Why No One Takes Your TV Show Seriously

I need to just take a minute to bitch and moan a little about a TV pet peeve of mine: When a show, at least in some respects, refuses to step outside its basic formula, like ever.

A perfect example is Castle.  If I had the energy, I'd try to figure out how many times Castle has done an episode without a case of the week which gets solved by the end of the episode (or by the end of the 2-parter).  It's extremely small, right?  Out of six full seasons of the show, at 128 eps total?  But haven't those very few episodes that have stepped at least a little bit outside of the typical formula been some of the best of the entire series?  I'm thinking like, "Knockdown," "Knockout," and "Always," as the examples that come to mind.  I'm sure there are a few others I'm forgetting.

So why the HELL don't they do this more often??  Why do they feel the need to do a new murder case every single episode and to always solve it by the end and to always structure it to follow the same Scooby Doo formula??  I don't understand.  Now, to be fair, Castle is usually cranking out 23 or 24 eps per season, so they do have to put a lot of filler eps in there.  But still, as the series goes on it feels like more and more filler/cookie-cutter formula and less substance eps.

In a sense, it's entirely unfair of me to lump Covert Affairs in with Castle on this topic, because Covert has actually done a FAR better job than most other shows at evolving and constantly striving to improve.  Not only did it step outside its original mission-of-the-week formula starting in season 3, it completely re-invented itself as a serialized and much more serious show.  It continued its evolution on that path in season 4, and while I don't think it has always been successful in its quest to give itself and its characters more depth, I still love the fact that it's at least making an honest effort to do so.  I didn't even bother watching the show until season 3 for this exact reason, and then I finally watched because I had major respect for the writers/producers/etc. for having the balls to kinda turn the show on its head a bit, with good results.

So then, given all this, why the hell are the season posters still so damn lame and generic looking??  Here's the first two seasons, for reference:

I mean, could these things possibly be any more generic??  "Single woman.  Double life."  "Under Cover Girl."  The only way they could be more bland is if they were literally just pictures of saltine crackers or like, Gap ads.  It's no goddamn wonder I refused to watch this show in seasons 1 and 2.  To be fair, the show itself was pretty generic too at this point, so at least the posters fit a theme there.  Still, it did have a bit more substance than you'd think just from looking at these things.