Smallville: Review of Season 9 Premiere and Episode 2

Since last we spake of all things Smallville, the season premiere of Season 9 has come and gone: “Baby” Zod introduced, Tess the not-quite-hot Lex replacement reintroduced, Chloe weepy, Lois flummoxed, Green Oliver shirtless. And, of course, Kal-Neo with the black trenchcoat. To my surprise, early on in the plot there was a brief argument with Jor-El (The Useless) about flight, which the writers are setting up to be something of a reverse-impotence problem: whenever Clark thinks of Lois he can’t get it up, or rather, he’s never gotten it up. There’s even a throwaway scene where Clark leaps from the Statue of Liberty and plummets (the outcome is never shown so we can assume he went straight into the ground).

Most of the show was TIVO chow, that is, filler and needless exposition, but that’s true of most shows. The Kryptnonian Ninja-Girl who looked like a rip-off of a Mortal Kombat character made little sense. In the “sky train” she and Lois trade blows but later on KNG is seen using heat-vision. Well, does she have The Powers or not?

KNG introduces an extra minute or so of hot barn combat that comes free-of-charge with every Season Premiere. It was pleasing to see Clark FINALLY kicking some ass/holding his own after ninja-girl uses blue K to temporarily strip his powers. Before exiting stage left KNG warns Clark that he betrays everyone ‘one year from now’. Even Marty McFly had the good sense to write a goddamned letter explaining WTF is going on; just seems like common sense for any time traveler would be to have a ready explanation DVD or other media for when she meets herself, knowing she might be killed or knocked out on arrival.

Ah yes, I almost forgot, the most magical MacGuffin of all, the Power Ring which can alter entire plotlines in a single bound, and which in future eps will no doubt be used to bring Jimmy Olsen back and possibly even Lex.

The scenes with “Baby Zod” were all right, Callum is trying his best. The best thing about Zod and Friends are those Kryptonian army dog tags they wear, which I hope the WB has the good sense to make and sell to many nerds such as me.

“Special Guest” Brian Austin Green I’ve saved for last because his character runs right into the second episode, where he, as John Corbin, mysteriously becomes Metallo. It’s a mostly useless, predictable transformation, using the absurd and totally fake-looking CG hit-by-a-speeding bus effect. Corbin awakens not knowing how or who or why he suddenly has a kryptonite heart (in case he seems too sympathetic, writer laziness also has the kryptonite affecting his brain to make him ‘eviler’).

Actually, 9-0-2-1-Metall-0 makes a surprisingly strong case against Clark and his meddling. Turns out Clark saved a busload of prisoners from crashing…one escaped and raped and killing Corbin’s sister. To Corbin (and me) Clark is ultimately responsible for this negative outcome. It may not be right, it may not be fair, but godlike powers = godlike blame. Now we all know Superman doesn’t kill, but given the choice between saving a runaway bus loaded with rapists and killers blessedly heading for a tall rocky cliff of taxpayer savings or rescuing a kitten from a tree 100 miles away in the other direction…

Smallville Season 9 is off to a better-than-average start, but before anyone gets a big head over at the CW, let it be known when I mention the very name Smallville, almost universally the response is, “Wow, is that still on?“

The witty primer to this Season 9 ep review can be found here.

Smallville Season 9: “And then there’s Zod…”

SMALLVILLE is back!

I, like so many other nerds will be there Friday night (or TIVO will) for the premiere of Season 9 . The first ep of a new season is usually the most exciting because of the deceptively well-edited recap of the last season (ugh), spending a tad more on the effects and well, there’s just a lot of promise and potential…at least for the first half of episode one.

I don’t know what to make of the Season 9 promo. Clark in an all-black Matrix Reloaded Neo getup…minus flight. So many people would sacrifice 20 or even 30 years off their lifespan to be able to fly, yet for some reason Clark has no interest in it. Even if he hated to fly, shouldn’t he realize flight would enable him to save more people faster?

I know their hands are chained by all kinds of legal and story continuity/canon reasons, but Smallville’s producers/writers have shown time and again, they’re not overly interested in the logic or story shards they CAN work with, not even comic book logic. Season 8 sucked, there’s no way around it…the only interesting moment I can remember is Lois possessed by Faora, Wife of Zod. Season 7 was even more atrocious than 8, and would’ve been redeemable only by having Lana thrown into the sun, any sun, red or yellow. Lex Luthor’s character arc was ultimately a bust. Doomsday should’ve been a one or two episode character, not a dragged out, go-nowhere, season-long fugazi.

Brian Austin Green as Metallo? Well, Green’s been working with robots the past few years, but Metallo is Metallo…ultimately just another one of 50 or so characters that have thrown Clark across schools, labs, forests, caves, icicles or fields. Every time Clark meets new villains, he seems completely clueless how to fight them; like he has no prior experience. Which after 8 years has gotten very, very old.

And then there’s Zod.

I Was A Teenaged Zod. Oh look, finally, a roomful of kneelers to actually listen to Zod command them!

I’m going to take a guess about the origin of this new younger Zod, who is supposed to be not yet as evil and powerful. Instead of being born evil, this Zod will be a cynical military officer who was somehow betrayed by Krypton’s government in a none-too-subtle liberal allegory of the Iraq War (or Afghanistan). Hey, my guess is as good as any.

Actor Callum Blue* seems interesting enough and even has a “Zod-like” voice, but who knows? Sam Witwer was a superior actor last season and his character went nowhere.

Word is that a Season 10 of Smallville is official. Instead of committing to it, now would be a damned good time to end Smallville and begin “Metropolis”, a fan-inspired idea for a show about “grown-up” Superman. Put Welling in the suit already! No blame to Routh, but Superman Returns was a bad, illogical movie. Let Metropolis rock for a few years on the tube, then do a Superman reboot for the big screen.

For all your Smallville needs (minus my bullshit) be sure to visit KryptonSite.

* The name “Callum” means “dove”. Irony!

 

Read the follow-up review to this post here!

Quoticle – “Ah C’mon”

The people are shit
that’s how I feel
I’ll smash your fucking head
that’s how I’m real.

~Chuggo

I don’t give a shit movie reviews

Transformers 2: Recap. for anyone who thinks it rocked…5 primes huddling like gay faggots and turning into a mountain.

Terminator Salvation: I once pooped while dehydrated and without enough fiber and swore I was shitting a cactus made of sandpaper.  That was better than T:S.

District 9: space roaches have a giant anti-gravity spaceship and a few cool spaceguns only they can operate, but they’d rather live in a slum, buying cat food from Nigerians and knocking junk out of each other’s claws.

G.I. Joe: Storm Shadow the Japanese ninja is played by a Korean. G.I.Joe lives under the pyramids. Half the team are unlikely foreign Blacks plus a fucking Muslim. Mandatory, totally unnecessary, insulting interracial hookup in this movie  is jive-asshole Marlon “Ripcord” Wayans pursuing a vapid, flat-butted White girl “genius” (Scarlett) who falls for him anyway, proving she’s an idiot. A lot of CGI and nonsense. Rip-off of Firefox. Cobra Commander sounds like Darth Vader. TUH-HANE!

Watchmen: All anyone remembers is that glowing blue guy’s penis. I liked Rorschach. Everyone does.

Wanted: Finally saw it. Too much slow motion. The White guy who almost got eaten by Idi Amin is in it. Angelina Jolie is hot but has ugly hands. Bullets curve around things. Morgan Freeman is Black. The looms were the most interesting things.

Date Movie: Alyson Hannigan, aka Flutepussy, is cute in one scene and ugly the next. A Black Midget. Crunk scene was the only real laugh.

Animated Wonder Woman movie: Tits or GTFO. Peppy. Amazon MILFS. Nothing to jack off to.

Hope you enjoyed this.  If not, it’s too late.

So much more to hate about “More to Love”

Fox’s More to Love is a train wreck featuring a fat guy looking for a “Rubenesque” wife.

Don’t know if they filmed this prior to the economy shitting the cot, but Luke (The Fatchelor?) is a ’successful real estate investor’ who owns his own home (no small feat in Mexifornia) and at age 26 makes six figures. That alone should be enough to have the shallow whores of Santa Barbara spreading their fake-tanned legs, I don’t know why this guy wants to lose half his shit at such an early age.

Watching ‘humble’ Luke walk down the beach shirtless, I thought, ‘This fucker’s not really that fat: 330lbs on a 6′3 frame? Love handles, sure, but that’s it.’ He used to be some football behemoth, playing the position of Brick Wall, and the conspicuous absence of body hair meant we’re dealing with yet another fucking shaved dolphin. No, modest Luke’s not worried about extra flab, but body hair on a man in the 21st century? Not unless you’re Wolverine.

Poor Puke. I’ve never heard a reality show “actor” sound more scripted and wooden. “Real beauty is on the inside.” Fuck you.

The other half of this train wreck is the women and their not inconsiderable cabooses. They’re introduced to the traditional reality show colorfully lit mansion (likely owned by some porn king) via limo, but the editing makes it look like all 20 big-boned women are emerging from the same long black clown car.

If you’re a Simpsons fan you may recall the ep where Moe gets plastic surgery and becomes a soap star. Before his transformation he overhears a producer say she wants, “Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island ugly, not Cornelius on Planet of the Apes ugly. TV-ugly, not…ugly-ugly”. Nineteen out of the 20 women weren’t fat-fat, they were “TV-fat” and gorgeous knockouts, to me and probably a lot of other dudes watching. I would be overjoyed to fuck the shit out of any one of them or all of them at the same time (I’m a hopeless romantic as well as insane).

When the broads meet Puke they are all in some kind of evening wear and gorgeous. About half of them have “sexy confidence” which may or may not be a lie. All of them, via embarassing confessionals, explain how they’ve never had boyfriends or been on dates. I wanted to feel sorry for them but I know too much. The reality is when The Gang is together or out at the club and the cunty thin bitches are being their usual impossible selves, the feral shithead men turn to (or on) the fatties to get suction. Sadly I’m sure every one of the 20 has sucked lots of crooked cock and done a whole lot more in a desperate scramble to get whatever the hell it is they want–”love” being the usual trope –but their pain seemed to run a lot deeper than that meaningless word.

During the hour (40 min. if you have the miracle of TIVO) Puke the Fatchelor is taking the “girls” off to the side one or two at a time and getting mouth kisses, which I found offensive. Kissing is an intimate act, handjobs would’ve been more apropos. The banter and confessionals of the women really hurt. Not a few of them kept crying and saying shit like, “This is my last chance!” Bitch, you’re fucking TWENTY-ONE and you met Puke not more than 20 minutes ago. Last chance? Enough.

Here’s the one Puke will probably pick. “Malissa” may or may not have the best tits in the bunch but she was the best at showing them off.

The Jeopardy! Clue Crew Hotties

I got nothin’, not even any new Jeopardy! hotties to comment on, so I’ll turn my attention to the Clue Crew hotties, Kelly Miyahara and Sarah Whitcomb.

I don’t want to take away from their intellectual accomplishments but I find them quite hot, which is the point. Both have fantastic, rockin’ bodies but for me Miyahara has a slight edge ’cause even in a post-surgery world you don’t see many stacked Asian women, not like that anyway.

I’m greatly disappointed by the dearth of images of these women on the intertubes, but it makes sense, they must deliver important information and they’re distracting enough fully clothed.

I am not the nerd in this pic but I would like to be, a nerd of meat in a Clue Crew Sandwich (or for you more refined intellectuals, a ménage a clue).

In other news, I’ve decided to commit suicide in 2013 if certain goals of mine aren’t achieved. That way, if the world ends in 2012, no one will notice.

Marmalick

Struggling for second place

“I have found God, and he is insufficient.” -Henry Miller

Henry, I feel the same way. Earth is just a giant waiting room and I’d feel better as a ball of energy than a meatsack human being. This body is nothing but trouble, a festering cesspool for the ego to roll around in.

The mind is a crumpled paper airplane in a hurricane, but the ego thinks it’s a fighter jet.  The capacity for self-delusion is bottomless.  The mind is its own worst enemy; why it throws fear at itself I understand, it’s a survival mechanism. But why does the mind attack itself with doubt?

Life was brutal for the caveman but far simpler: at any given moment he was either alive and afraid or unaware and eaten. Attempts at poetry or deep thought were ended by saber-toothed tigers.  Now there’s nothing to stop bad poetry.

Sorry God, but I’m ready to go back. I won’t learn anything else here, life is all reruns now. I’m too lazy to meditate, I’d rather sleep.

I’m having trouble remembering why I didn’t commit to suicide when I was an atheist.  If it was all meaningless, why didn’t I end it?  The Satanist proclaims pleasure the greatest virtue.  I couldn’t extract pleasure out of anything except being an observer and surfing over others’ hypocrisy.  Obviously I survived.  But lived?

I was alone then, before then, and now.

My pal Hal swears if he won the lottery he’d build an underground house and never leave it.  Everything would be ordered and brought to his door.  I don’t blame him.  “Hell is other people,” is the greatest line ever written.  Everyone else with a pen or keyboard only struggles for second place while the moon shits cold fire and the women sleep with other men.

How I spent my last Saturday off

Every few weeks I get a weekend off and drive across the bridge to Hal’s. Hal lives with a ’slave’, a real-life woman who obeys him. Mostly. But this post won’t be about their absurd relationship. I’m a firm believer in the main point of Geroge Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant”, which is. when one party assumes the role of tyrant, it’s their own freedom they destroy.

Sorry to get you interested in what I won’t be talking about for the rest of this post, but here’s a little bit more: Hal’s slave is far younger than he, with great snowy skin, but she’s fat in a not-hot way, despite the large rack. Also, though Hal knows her moods, I find her unsmiling obedient presence dour; I’d like to show her the door when I’m over there.

Hal has one of those ginormous big flat fucking televisions and all we do 90% of the time is play Xbox360. I find myself totally absorbed in the games, especially on the huge screen.

For the third time in as many weekends we tried to get the cheat of “Unlimited health” for Metropolis in the terrible Superman Returns game, but it never works. I really wanted to love the game, but it just sucks. I bought it for $9.99 at a Gamestop where the girl clerk said she should pay us $5 just to take it away.

After Superman, we played the demo download of the new X-Men Origins: Wolverine game. This was the highlight of the day. While the game has some flaws (everyone has their nitpicks) Wolverine the character is damned-near indestructable, just like in the film. But the game is so much gorier than the movie and Wolvy so brutal, I actually felt bad for some of the African mercenaries, literally diced into salsa like tomatoes in a blender. Nerdgasms will ensue.

Hal and I played the new UFC game demo. It was realistic and fun, and I say this not as a UFC fan. I like fighting and fights, strategy and sportsmanship, but UFC is a sport, not combat, and after awhile the ground stuff begins to look gay, even when one guy is ground and pound-ing the shit out of the other’s face. I found myself getting angrier and angrier at losing quickly. Just like in the real UFC, being hit at the correct angle drops your guy like a bag of dirt. I was cursing up a storm even when I won.

I played Ninja Gaiden II on the sissy setting. Excellent graphics but very tedious.

After a long, LONG day and night, eating the shit out of everything in sight (pizza, cheese sticks, ribs) and with my eyes feeling like scoops of napalm jelly, Hal and I fired up Rainbow Six Vegas 2, an excellent game with a dizzying shitload of options. Hal and I played split screen matches where we hunted 35 terrorists in various settings. We both ended up infuriated with each other for our incompetence and lack of communication, and were shouting and cursing and getting more and more pissed off. It was both hilarious and very depressing to be killed so many times, I wondered if these games make anyone think twice about going to war. Thanks to practicing meditation, between rounds I did have moments of absolute calm where I would laugh at the intensity of my rage. When I felt anger, frustration and hatred it was VERY real, yet a few times I could close it all off like a spigot. Negative emotions literally eat your strength away, but don’t tell it to Hal, who admires the Sith.

That was how I spent my last Saturday off. It will be three weeks before I get another one. We need some new games.

There’s nothing cute about acute gastroenteritis

I’m guessing it was the lone strawberry I ate after dinner. On one side he was fuzzy and ugly with a small puke green patch on him…the other side was still a deep and succulent red. I nibbled the red side and it was sweet. Soon after my body temp plummeted and hours later I was pissing shit out my ass in a laserlike brown stream, funny because at work I enjoyed telling others: “If you can’t be happy for any other reason, thank God you don’t have violent diarrhea (and if you do have it, thank God you’re not constipated”).

Violent puking joined the dia-chorus an hour later and would continue at two hour intervals all night long. I’d be reading in bed when first the squirts, then the puking, then using an entire roll of toilet paper, then back to bed quaking with chills, repeat as needed. I was wearing three shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of sweatpants and lying wrapped beneath two giant blankets, the larger one made of super-insulating goose down, and I was still shivering.

During one of the liquid breaks I managed to get online (WebMD sucks, BTW, nothing like than struggling with an unintuitive POS website when you’re dying). I was terrified I had signs of appendicitis or a kidney stone, and though my insides felt like Mike Tyson’s heavy bag I still didn’t have the sharp pains that accompany each of the really bad conditions.

I must have squirted enough brown to fill an oil drum, and by the time early morn arrived, there wasn’t a single grain of rice or bit of fish (or strawberry) or drop of liquid in my system. The last round of puking, without any water left in my body to move it, brought up pure Alien grade acid from the pit of my stomach, burning the hell out of my throat. I was too weak to drink water, but eventually managed to get some down.

I was only too happy to miss work today, the downside being I still haven’t the energy to slink over to the grocery for Gatorade. Life’s been reduced to a quest for electrolytes. I prefer it to the existential pain of living every day as a healthy but gormless fugazi.