Never Go Full Bateman

I know, I hate linkblogging, but just as the internets goes crazy about it, I feel compelled to post this remix of Christian Bale's masterpiece, "McG, you got fucking something to say to this prick?"



Kudos to Revolucian for that. I'm tempted to get the RuPaul album as a thank you for making me laugh hard enough to hurt my guts just now. If I had been in the studio with him I would have asked him to include the little, "Ah-dada-dada," tune he does about a minute in, but still, that's great work. I found that on the AICN talkback a couple of minutes after my Hathaway-hating nemesis thechauffeur posted it elsewhere. Predictably, the AICN talkback is going back and forth on whether Bale is a galactic-level douche or not. That's the bread and butter of the internet, of course, but you also get people reacting quickly and cutting and splicing stuff in honour of this monumental moment in pop culture history, which never fails to delight and impress me. Kudos also to BorschtKilmeister for this one.



But is this meltdown as notable as this one?



It upsets me greatly when Lily Tomlin bitches out Dustin Hoffman 2.0 (i.e. the new cuddly version of Hoffman who is an endless delight on talk shows). Or is this crazed rant the ultimate?



That one, of course, inspired Paul Rudd and Michael Showalter (Thanks to Santanico for reminding me that existed). Maybe it's best I don't work in films. I'm not very good with confrontations.

Oh, all of that is not safe for work, of course. And, apparently, neither is Bale.

An Incremental Uptick In Civility Should Be Welcomed

::Cannibalising this rant from my Quantum of Solace post in order to keep that epic a teeny tiny little bit more focused. Apologies for looking like a lazy bastard by reprinting something as a new post::

As I said yesterday, we saw finally saw Quantum of Solace many days after it opened (which is torture for a Bond fan). While the main reason was sheer lack of the pounds, we also balked at seeing it in the midst of a seething mass of ill-behaved douchebags, which has happened way too often over the years. We went to great trouble to see the movie at our local Vue, which was offering an over-18s only screening, which, according to the jerkoff who wrote that Guardian article, is the kind of behaviour only fun-hating assholes could possibly want. Fine, I'm a fun-hating asshole, but I'm a fun-hating asshole who was absurdly happy last night. Only about forty people attended the screening, but with an employee on hand to keep an eye out for bratty kids (the traditional bad apples that spoil the bunch) sneaking in and causing havoc, for the first time I've ever experienced in a big chain cinema, there was a feeling of happy community as we all got on with watching the goddamn film like we wanted. I've had too many shitty experiences going to the cinema, and it's the main reason I don't go as often as I used to. Quint had a memorable rant on Ain't It Cool News a while back, and I love that the talkbackers were almost 100% united behind him, something that almost never happens.

Paint me as a curmudgeon all you like, hack Guardian loser, but I'm sick of going to the cinema only to have to endure ice cubes thrown at my head (Ocean's Thirteen), kids having a party three rows in front of me (William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), threats of violence (Blade), incessant phone use (The Dark Knight, which was, other than that, a superb experience), or sitting in the middle of what felt like a flash mob gathering designed to create the maximum amount of carnage, misery, noise, and disruption possible (Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, which was exactly like that scene in Gremlins where they all watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, except scarier). I'll pay the extra pound just for some enforced civility which, of course, didn't need to be enforced because the people who bought tickets were eager to watch a movie without distraction and not have a get-together with their mates. It's fucking science. Kudos to Vue for making the experience feel a little more special than it usually would.

Adventures In Awesome: New Thomas Frank Book!

It's Anger Week on the Intarnettz this week, according to my experiences jumping from site to site and message board to message board to see that the humidity of summer has made people go, "Bzzzt furious rage!" at just about anything. Seeing AICN melt down over something as innocuous as The Clone Wars and hearing that Latino Review was being targeted by Microsoft for posting a couple of pictures for a movie that isn't even being made was enough to disturb my equilibrium quite badly, without all of the other random snippiness and bullying that comprises about 56% of internet interaction over the past few days, so I shall attempt to make the online world a happier place with an inconsequential post filled with joy over the release of a new book by my intellectual mancrush Thomas Frank.


I'm all a-dither with excitement. In the past I have railed against the iniquities of The Market, and the peculiar popular belief in its impassive, emotionless benevolence, which is something that has irked me long enough that I can remember being very uncomfortable watching pretty much any movie or TV show from the 80s featuring Michael J. Fox in a shirt (i.e. almost all of them). Maybe that discomfort is why I have such a problem with money, and talking about money, and any kind of economic thinking. Or maybe it's the other way around. It's hard to say. What is obvious to me, though, is that my understanding of what money is and how to make it work is so embarrassingly immature that any kind of balance sheet or bill or bank statement looks to me like this.


In an attempt to get over this I read two books that I have mentioned before; The Lexus and The Olive Tree, by Thomas Friedman, and One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank. The utter worthlessness of the first book was obvious even to someone like myself who once thought that newspaper headlines about the IMF were referring to The Impossible Mission Force (I really really wish that was a joke). One of Friedman's arguments, that The Market is riddled with democracy-germs that rub off on countries that make out with it, is backed up with statements barely more substantial than, "this is what will happen because... because... just because, damn it!", not to mention conjuring up the image of goat-herders in the Middle East giving up on their traditional work in order to sit on a rock with a laptop and trying to eke out a few tiyin here and there by day-trading (an exaggeration, but not much of one).

There was a lot of other unconvincing stuff in there, but don't take my word for it. My man Paul Krugman dishes out an entertaining review of it here. My dislike of Friedman's populist drivel is such that recently I potentially alienated a friend of Canyon's after seeing a copy of The World Is Flat on her shelf, which triggered a ten minute rant from me that scared her cats and made her back away from me while reaching for a baseball bat. If you ever read this post, Friend of Canyon, I apologise profusely. The anger management classes are going well, you'll be glad to hear. The point I was trying to get across, behind all of the "GRAAAAR!" and "Noooooo!" and "Banish him to Uzbekistan!" statements, was that if Lexus was anything to go by, I wouldn't be surprised if Friedman was actually trying to argue that the world really was flat. That's how little I respect him.

One Market Under God, on the other hand, was a revelation; funny, angry, and filled with shocking examples of pro-Market propaganda hurled at we, the people, by those who would benefit most from our mute acceptance of the status quo. It was just the tonic I needed. His next book was called by two names What's The Matter With Kansas? in the US, and, rather uncharitably, What's The Matter With America? in the UK, because we Brits have never heard of Kansas and might think he is talking about some village in Greenland or something. It might be even better than One Market. I don't know. I tend to have internal debates about which book is better, like the comic fans who debate whether Superman or Thor would win in a fight (it's Thor, obviously). That said, while One Market made me angry, What's The Matter just made me depressed. Recently I read Matt Taibbi's disappointingly slender but undeniably hilarious The Great Derangement, and it conjured up similar feelings of desperate misery of a "Hell in a handbasket" kind of way.

The Wrecking Crew might make me feel just as bad, but I can't wait for it anyway. I thought it was coming out next week, but it's out now, and I've already ordered it, though my eagerness for it is so intense it's even made me crave a Kindle so I can immediately download it and read it instead of chunter on about it. Until then, check out Frank's homepage, and watch the interview with Stephen Colbert. As a big fan of both of men and their Amazing Powers of the Brain, it was a treat to see that last night (what? Our PVR is full of old Daily Shows and Dexters and we got behind with watching!).

This Is A Post About Terry Gilliam

In all my time on the internet tube system, I've never seen a flurry of horror, speculation, rumour, sadness, recrimination, spite, misinformation, grief, and bad taste jokes as last night at 23:15 GMT, when we finished watching Julie Delpy's sour but funny culture-clash movie Two Days In Paris and logged on to find a maelstrom of news surrounding the tragic death of Heath Ledger. Though obviously we don't know him personally, our reaction was one of total shock and disbelief, followed by much sadness. Lots of holier-than-thou jerks on AICN and AV Club took people to task for grieving for someone as lowly as a mere actor when no one laments the millions who die every day of disease, famine, warfare, terrorism, crime, and meteor landings.

They are all tragic losses too, but those people often have no name, and have not made an impression on my life. I can have a detached feeling of sadness for all deaths, but someone whose personality, face, voice, and talent has impinged upon my consciousness is going to feel more real than any of those people, and it's pointless to apologise for that. The news of a deadly plane crash horrifies me. Seeing Ledger's face on the Guardian homepage last night did something more visceral; it made me freeze in my seat, made me ill, made me hope it was a hoax gone wrong. That was Ennis Del Mar. I cried for him once. It's a connection. It might not be as real as that between me and my friends, and family, or even my legion of enemies who plot against me in their dungeon lair every Thursday night, but it's still a connection.


The other thing it made me do is despair for Terry Gilliam. Not on the same scale I felt for Michelle Williams and her daughter Miranda, obviously, but it did cross my mind that yet again his career is scuppered by events beyond his control. Which inspired me to write a post about Terry Gilliam, a man I idolised when I was young, and then kinda gave up on.

At first I fell in love with his magnificent Monty Python animations, but it was when he became a live-action director that I fell in love to the point of obsession with his vision. I remember making one of my beloved lists when I was a kid, of my all-time favourite movies. It was about as unimaginative and as typical a list as you can imagine. All the Star Wars movies to that point, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jaws: you get the point. The only film that wasn't by Lucas or Spielberg was Time Bandits, a film that had given me nightmares and freaked me out but fascinated and delighted me nonetheless. I had no reason to think that admiration would grow until he became my favourite director, but seeing Brazil (which made it to the UK pretty much intact) sealed the deal. It upset me so profoundly that I could barely cope with it, but just like you poke at a painful tooth, I went back over and over again.

One of the things I loved most was his imaginative use of the frame. The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the short film before Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, is usually dismissed as a frivolity, but for a one-joke short, it not only pushes that joke as far as it can, it also shows off his distorted compositions and command of movement. Not just the beautifully sculpted progression of the action, but the movement of the characters from the beginning of a shot to the end. Check it out, in two parts.





Now, I love fast editing too, especially when it's done well, but old school control of pace within a single shot prior to being added to other equally well-designed shots is lovely too. I'm no film scholar (can you tell?), but I know what I like, and Gilliam had that in spades. And that's before we get to his prodigious imagination, his outrageous flights of fantasy, his angry humour.

Unfortunately, he also has the shittiest luck of any major filmmaker. Not to mention the best chronicled. If you've seen the Criterion Collection DVD of Brazil or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or seen Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys or Lost in La Mancha, or read Andrew Yule's upsetting chronicle of the Munchausen debacle (Losing The Light, which is highly recommended), then you know what I'm talking about. For years I despaired as his vision was compromised by the foolish choices of producers and moneymen, and ignored by the imagination-deprived masses. Why was his genius not recognised? Why did he have to toil so hard for so little attention and praise? It made me unhappy, and just as rooting for the underdog makes you associate with them more, I almost felt his failures as if they were my failures too.


And then came The Brothers Grimm, and I suddenly stopped watching his movies. I'm still not sure why. I will see it eventually, and Tideland as well, which seems to have split opinion right down the middle. It's not even like Fear and Loathing put me off him. I loved the damn thing, and think it's due some serious critical reappraisal. I just suddenly thought, "You know what? All this time, thinking Gilliam was the victim of the financial shortsightedness of robotic accountants, thinking his vision was just too pure and radical to be appreciated by the blinkered peoples of the world, and yet now I find myself wondering if he's just a bit of a dick and cannot even be bothered to try to get on with anyone. No one is that unlucky. There has to be something else at play." It was a weird epiphany, coming without warning.

It meant that for once I sided with the Weinsteins (enemies of cinema that they are, and oh yes, Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures is approaching the top of my to-read pile). From what I gather from the single Amazon review of Bob McCabe's Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm, & Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood, Gilliam certainly didn't approach the making of this movie in the most professional manner. Apparently he didn't even want to make the movie, but did it because he had nothing else going on.


I'm kinda torn. He has so much difficulty getting his own work going that I understand him wanting to get some work, any work, especially something that might have been a success. However, acting like it was a hardship to make it is a dick move. And so I started to look back at his career and think, perhaps these villains who have compromised his work are not as bad as I thought. Perhaps they were pushed into being careful with their money because he was so unhinged! Oh my God, what have I done with my life? Why couldn't I idolise Ron Howard instead of this difficult maniac?

And then last night, when the shock of hearing about Ledger's death had subsided and my heart had relaxed to its usual beat, I thought, "Damn, Gilliam isn't a dick. He's just jinxed." It's not him, it's what happens when you make films. People die (and some die way too soon), floods ruin sets, producers get cold feet and cut the budget, studio heads think they know better than artists and impose their own ideas on the director; it happens to every filmmaker, but it happens to Gilliam more than most. I should have kept giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Who knows what will happen to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus now that Ledger is dead. Will it be dropped altogether? Was enough footage filmed to be able to salvage the movie? Will the insurance pay for the film to be reshot with a new actor? I'm sure people will tut-tut at me for thinking about this when someone has just died, but, you know, I can have two thoughts at the same time. The mind is a complex thing. Yes, even mine.


Okay, I've rambled. The short version of all of this is that I have exorcised myself of my sudden distrust of Gilliam for entirely irrational reasons, and will now go and find The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, even if they are as bad as people have said. I will continue to support him and his career, because even if he never recaptures his old mojo (or finishes another movie, which always seems possible), his work was important to me during my formative years and is partially responsible for who I am and what I think. Hopefully this tragedy won't be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and he gets back on his feet soon.

One last thing, apropos of nothing. An actor I think would work well in Gilliam's movies is King of Charisma Sam Rockwell. Today I found this picture, that made me smile while flicking from gossip site to gossip site looking for news of Ledger's death.


Enjoy this gratuitously goofy image, my lovely readers.

ETA: It's not looking good for Dr. Parnassus. From that article, it's interesting to note that Ledger was planning a chess movie, starring Ellen Page. Yet more sadness that we would never get to see that film.

ETA again: IMDb and AICN are running this rumour, that Gilliam is going to have many actors playing Ledger's character. The character passes from world to world and could conceivably be played by different actors each time. Sounds great to me. The alternative is we never get to see Ledger's final performance, and that's not something anyone wants.

Five Random Things That Make Me Very Very Happy (2)

1: Doctor Orpheus from The Venture Brothers.


There are lots of things to love about The Venture Brothers, which is pretty much the funniest animated series on TV right now, but the thing that is 100% guaranteed to make me laugh is Doctor Orpheus. He's an obvious spoof of Marvel Comics' Sorceror Supreme, Doctor Strange, but whereas that character is a confident and worldly force for good, Orpheus is plagued by insecurity, desperate for the friendship of Dr. Venture, and miserable over his inability to gain the attentions of an arch-enemy. Scared that his best years are behind him, and stuck looking after his grumpy goth daughter Trianna (who he loves but doesn't understand), he rents a spacious room in the Venture compound and tries desperately to gain the acceptance of his landlord, even though Dr. Venture is an absolute dick. In the second season he reforms his superteam, The Order of the Triad, but even that is not enough to satisfy him.

He would be a great character anyway, but the hilariously overwrought voicework by Steven Rattazzi pushes him right over the top. There are many ways to deliver the line "Do not be too hasty in entering that room. I had Taco Bell for lunch!" upon exiting a toilet, but the way he bellows it as if delivering a hammy piece of Shakespearean verse is genius. Sadly Adult Swim are good at taking down footage from their shows from YouTube, so if you want to see him in action, I suggest you buy the DVDs. Strongly suggest, in fact. Actually, I order you. Immediately. You won't regret it.

There's only one drawback to this. I'm currently reading Austin Grossman's fantastic novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible (an awesome birthday gift from Canyon), and the main superteam, The Champions, has on its roster a sorceror called Mister Mystic. Whenever he talks, all I can hear is that hilarious voice. I'm sure the character is meant to be taken seriously, but it's just impossible. BTW, you should also buy this book. It's fabtriffic.

2: The news that production on Mad Max: Fury Road has begun again.


When I was but a little boy, of the age where I would skip to school whilst wearing shorts and a cap, eagerly on the lookout for conkers while starlings and blue tits chirped in the trees, I really really enjoyed coming home and rewatching my knackered video copy of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, just to see the Feral Child chop off a guy's fingers with a razor boomerang, or Humongous flexing his outrageous muscles like something out of a Roman gladiator movie, or Vernon Wells getting killed in a head-on collision between a tanker truck and a car.

Okay, I tell a lie. I was actually a teenager. The stuff about shorts and caps and conkers is true though. Maybe that's why the cool kids kept throwing stuff at my head. I also remember playing Car Wars, the Steve Jackson game that emulated the same post-apocalyptic car battle scenarios. Many hours would be spent pushing tiny slivers of cardboard around a flimsy map, trying to beat my game-obsessed cousin, who was older than me and actually knew the rules, thus putting me at a disadvantage. Ah, memories. The worst part of this exposure to all the grimy angry vroom-vroom is that I now think that such a future is not only entirely plausible but inevitable. And I don't even know how to drive! Man, when the world falls apart, I am so screwed. That said, I have a really bad arthritic knee and grey wings in my hair, so I've got that part of the Max Rockatansky shtick going for me.

Loving Road Warrior is not exactly controversial, but some of the guys I knew who were in the year above thought I was mad for also liking Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, as it featured kids and was therefore not as hardcore as Road Warrior. Perhaps they had a point. If I went back to it now I'd probably agree, but at the time it just made me want to live in a post-apocalyptic world as part of a community of warrior children and hang out with a murderous Mel Gibson while trying to avoid Tina Turner. She was on Radio 1 all the time when I was a kid, so I reckon it would have been a common fantasy.


It's been years since I've seen them (mostly because Warner Brothers have not bothered to release proper DVDs, opting instead for barebones cheap-ass versions instead), but I still remember them fondly, and kept wishing directorial maestro George Miller would get the fourth film underway. Sadly for the fans, the project has had its fair share of bad luck over the years: Miller directing one of the biggest flops in film history (Babe 2: Pig In The City) and then being ostracised by the industry; budget trouble; African location shooting proving problematic; Mel proclaiming loudly that the Jews are responsible for all the world's ills (I wonder if he thinks the Californian fires that menaced his house were a plot) and thus expending every last bit of good will I had towards him (until I saw the very entertaining Apocalypto, which has thrown me for a loop). I'd given up on it, especially as Miller is now working on the Justice League movie, but Moviehole have revealed the project is going ahead again, sans Gibson, and pre-production will be done during the Justice League shoot.

Miller is one of my all-time heroes. The closest he's got to making a bad movie was The Witches of Eastwick; when people complain about the Hollywoodisation of a book I get so mad at the implicit snobbery in that phrase, but there is no other word for Michael Christofer's adaptation of John Updike's bizarre novel. All of the risk has been surgically removed, and the only thing that redeems the movie is Miller's muscular direction. I still love it, and have seen it a trillion times, but it's not the movie it should have been. Other than that, he's made some great stuff. Lorenzo's Oil, Babe 2, the Mad Max movies; all great. I even enjoyed Happy Feet lots and lots, and think it gets a ton of unfair criticism. Whatever. The master is back now he has an Oscar in his hand, and hopefully this second wind will see him restoring his reputation as one of the great storytellers of our age (and if you think I'm gonna apologise for the hyperbole, you can forget it), as well as making a movie set in a world that is more relevant than ever. I really cannot wait. Plus, the release of the new movie might spur Warner into giving the original movies a proper big DVD re-release, with all the bells and whistles! ZOMG!

Until then, check out Ain't It Cool's coverage; Merrick has been nice enough to put clips of the final chase sequence from Road Warrior. It's not a clean, speedy scene with nimble cars doing outrageous things; it's more a war of attrition, with outrageous violence and masterful stunts. Cinema at its best.

3: Frank Caliendo imitating John Madden on Letterman:

My only real exposure to John Madden is through playing the game, but you don't need to know what the real guy is like. This works beautifully anyway. The fact that it's an uncannily accurate impression is just a bonus. As with great Moments in Presidential speeches, this never fails to amuse.



4. Vern's work in the field of Seagalogy.

Speaking of Ain't It Cool, one of the site's more entertaining features are the reviews by Outlaw Vern, which are works of chaotic, grammatically dodgy brilliance. For years he has been working on a book of Seagalogy, and it finally got printed this week (I think; well, I found it today, so I'm sticking with that). Criticism can often be such a perfunctory thing that when you come across someone with a singular voice, it doesn't matter if you often disagree with them. It's just good to find entertaining and thoughtful writing about pop culture. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, Stephanie Zacharek and Andrew O'Hehir of Salon, Moriarty from AICN, the AV Club guys; I head straight to them every week.

While they will review most things released, Vern focuses on the long discredited action genre, and treats it with the respect it needs. His particular area of expertise, obviously, is the filmography of Steven Seagal, and he has the same love/hate relationship with him that I do with David Caruso. All you need to know about his credentials is that he thinks Out For Justice is Seagal's masterpiece, and it is, so he gets full marks for accuracy. Yes, I have often disagreed with him, but he makes me laugh even while I think he is horribly horribly wrong.

His entertainingly incoherent writing (almost certainly a pose, a bit like the wonderful Ami Angelwings) can be bought as real actual books or downloads from Lulu, and I heartily recommend them. Wow, I'm really trying to shill stuff out today.

5: We Both Reached For The Gun by Kander and Ebb, from Rob Marshall's Chicago:

Canyon recently recommended I watch Rob Marshall's film version of Chicago, and though a few years ago I would have said, "But the NO!!!", this time I jumped at the chance. Since seeing Once More With Feeling and Guys and Dolls (with Ewan McGregor and Jane Krakowski), I've started to love the genre. Chicago was better than I had expected, and I wonder if the lukewarm reviews it occasionally got at the time had more to do with the garishness of the visuals compared to the starkness of the stage version. As far as I could tell, Marshall did a pretty good job of mimicking Bob Fosse's directorial style, and though it was a little flashier, it worked very well.

Of all the songs in the show, We Both Reached For The Gun is my favourite (with Mister Cellophane coming close behind), but it was the scene itself, with the conceit of Roxie and the attendant press corps as puppets at the whim of Billy Flynn, that appealed to me most. If I'd give the movie an 8, this scene gets an 11. It's just genius.

The new TV season is making me sweat

Ain't It Cool has printed a list of the new shows for late 2007, and it's insane how many shows we're watching. Try 18 for now, with The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica turning up later (as well as Big Love and Flight of the Conchords, though they're months away). It's just insane. How will we get through them all?

The interesting thing is that the UK buys TV shows from the US and hardly ever makes a big deal about it. Unless they become hits in the US, of course. When Heroes exploded the Beeb could hardly contain itself, bragging about their acquisition even though it took 9 months to get on BBC2, and that was after Sci-Fi milked it to death. I can understand the usual caution. For every Lost there's a Deadwood (a failure on Sky) or Boomtown (a failure in general). This year, however, Sandro Monetti of the Sunday Express (in their first interesting article ever) has revealed which show is going where. I'd link to the article, but it's the Express. Their website is, like, totally medieval. You'll have to make do with my interpretations and take my word for it.

C4 is getting Dirty Stupid Monkey (I swear to God, I made that stupid joke weeks ago and now I think it really is called that) and Back To You, the seemingly unwatchable archaic sitcom with Kelsey "Not Hank McCoy" Grammer and an actress I don't recognise. If DSM is even half as bad as is rumoured, that's not really a safe investment for C4, but I'll wager they're hoping it will be this year's Brothers and Sisters. As for Back To You, it shows a staggering lack of imagination on the part of the channel. It's blatantly obvious they're trying to chase the Frasier fans with another show that will feature jokes about high culture and wine as a veneer of sophistication while the majority of the comedy comes from laboured, smutty puns and hi-larious farcical misunderstandings, this time without the saving grace of David Hyde Pierce. Or Eddie the Dog. Cheers re-runs would be more welcome. ::grumble grumble::

The Beeb has splashed out for Damages, when it should have paid for Mad Men, which might be a tad overrated but still has a better shot at lasting more than one season. Five is buying the Duchovny sex-a-thon Californication, which seems shrewd, especially now Sky has pilfered Prison Break (at enormous expense; £500,000 an episode! For that shit?). Sky also has Journeyman, i.e. Quantum Leap with that junkie from Trainspotting, which sounds like this year's Standoff in terms of longevity. At least they didn't option the similarly named but actually completely different Traveler, which didn't actually go that far. ::pats self on back::

ITV1 has got Pushing Daisies, and would be well advised to make a huge deal about it. That's a brilliant move, landing a critical darling starring the fragrant Anna Friel, and will pay huge dividends. And oh, they've got Bionic Woman too, and have stuck that on ITV2. At first glance I thought that was a terrible mistake. It's not like ITV2 is the BBC2 to ITV1's BBC1 (oh God, what did I just write?). ITV2 is as much a ghetto channel as ITV3 or ITV4, which is where they shove good or great shows (ahem Friday Night Lights ahem) to die a terrible death, at least in the past. However, with the digital switchover right around the corner, and ITV2 being a free-to-air channel, it could work out. There's a chance it will bury the show, but it also might prove to be a stroke of genius. There must be millions of UK TV watchers who are fascinated to see how Michelle Ryan deals with the new show and her brand new cheekbones, so this could go well. It's rare that ITV do something smart, so kudos to them.

No information on when the shows will appear on our screens, but don't expect any of them in 2007. We can't have that now, can we? It's a particular bugbear of mine, and something I hope to find out more about in the near future. I'm sure there's a reason. I just doubt it will be a satisfying one.