Quick note. Lots of spoilers below for both shows, as well as various comics.

So, Heroes was back on the air this week after a pretty lengthy hiatus, which gives me an opportunity to examine the increasing apathy I feel towards the show. Certainly, there are issues with the show’s pacing follow the initial nine-episode arc, but I think a lot of it is the increased distaste I have for Tim Kring every time I read an interview with him. This month’s writeup in Wired really drove home just how determined Kring is to let everyone know his complete lack of familiarity with the superhero genre. I’m not sure what the point of that is (aside from being a handy way to deflect criticisms of lifting storylines and characters from particular comics), but it ends up conveying (to me at least) a sense of condescension and scorn for the genre that is making him huge heaps of money.

As mentioned in that article, Kring has brought on writers who are a little more familiar with the genre, particularly Jeph Loeb (previously a writer/story editor on Lost and Smallville). Of course, Loeb’s actual work in comics is kind of awful. His most successful run was a 12-issue run on Batman in which Batman fights all the enemies…. at once! Not exactly pushing the boundaries of the genre or convincing anyone that there’s anything worth defending in the medium.

And, while having a legitimate (if not particularly good) comics writer on the show may arguably help with better presentation of genre tropes (though, as far as I can tell, it’s only led to some painfully clunky dialogue), it also removes Kring’s ignorance defense when it comes to plagairism (as I assume/hope Loeb would be familiar with Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme, from which the Ted Sprague character seems pretty directly lifted). The final arc appears to be shaping up as a mash-up of Watchmen and Days of Future Past, which is fine, I guess, but both original sources have been delivering diminishing returns in the twenty-plus years since they were published, so are perhaps not the best things to be drawing from.

Aside from my issues with Mssrs. Kring and Loeb, the narrative structure of the show has sort of gone to hell after the initial (and effective) story arc. The handful of episodes that preceded the hiatus were largely pointless, largely consisting of flashbacks and serving to use up what little tolerance I had for some of the characters that walked the fine line between charming and annoying (I’m looking at you, Hiro). Really, the only bright spot in those episodes was the introduction of Christopher Eccleston, who is now off the show. The return episode should have had some some sort of forward motion to kick off the end of the season, but instead seemed to feature a lot of Malcolm McDowell and Adrian Pasdar staring at each other.

I should also take a moment to bemoan the rapid thinning of non-superpowered characters on the show. Bennett’s wife and son have disappeared quite abruptly, though he (and Parkman, whose pregnant wife has also vanished) is focused on a sort of inexplicable trip to New York instead of wondering what happened to them. Isaac/Peter’s girlfriend is dead. Clea DuVall’s gone. As is Rena Sofer (not that I’m complaining about the latter). I can understand wanting to get away from the repititive nature of the “hiding my superpowers” storylines, but it does remove all the characters from relatable situations, which is (according to Kring’s self-promotion) the main appeal of the show.

Meanwhile, Lost is sort of actually going somewhere this season. After a very weirdly paced opening to the season, it’s moving along pretty nicely. I don’t know if this is due to the recent decision to pick an end date and work backwards from there, but I’m enjoying the show more now than I have since the first season. I place this credit on Lost’s current comic writer in residence (replacing Loeb and Paul Dini), Brian K. Vaughan, who actually writes comics I would (and do) recommend to non-comics readers (Ex Machina and Y the Last Man are both really good titles, even if the latter flailed around a bit before settling into the last few conclusion arcs. Also, if you’re under 15, I’d really recommend the first volume of Runaways.) I’m sure the show isn’t going to conclude itself as well as I’d like to hope, but, these days, my hopes are reasonably high.

As the title indicates, we actually managed to leave the house long enough to catch a movie on Sunday, which is one of the more exciting events recently. Kitchen’s become fairly neurotic with all these assorted trips to the vet, so, even though she’s no longer on excercise restriction, it’s very hard to leave her home alone knowing she will completely freak out on our return. We’ve been doing small trips to do errands or have a meal, but this was the longest we’ve left her alone. She did very well on her own, and we got to see Children of Men, which was good, but not quite as good as I was expecting.

Otherwise, another quiet weekend at home. Finished up Life on Mars, which had one of my favorite series endings to date. More Vigo (A Propos de Nice), some Cassavetes (Shadows), and some trashy, but highly enjoyable, horror (Slither). Also, attic organizing! Do we know how to party, or what?

As a follow up to the last post, I thought I should share this list of the ten best films I haven’t seen yet.

1. Sunrise (Murnau)
2. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
3. L’avventura (Antonioni)
4. The General (Keaton)
5. Andrei Roublev (Tarkovsky)
6. City Lights (Chaplin)
7. Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
8. Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi)
9. Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein)
10. Ordet (Dreyer)

Sadly, there’s really only one of those I’m looking forward to (Andrei Roublev, since I’ve enjoyed the last two Tarkovsky films so much), but I’ll have to see them all at some point (though Au Hasard Balthazar sounds bleaker than I am able to take on any given day)

As long-time readers of this blog may recall, a little over a year ago, I decided to compile a list of films that received at least one vote at the deca-annual Sight & Sound poll and start trying to watch as many of them as possible in an attempt to improve my overall film literacy. A while back, I retooled the list so as to weight films by number of votes recieved (so that viewing Citizen Kane would count as a greater contributor to being a literate film viewer than, say, Boom).

Anyway, when I made up the list, I was languishing down around 35%, and, as of yesterday afternoon, I am now up to 50% (if anyone’s curious, it was Kieslowski’s Blue that put me over the top). Of course, I’ve hit most of the big, high-score films I’d been missing, so it’ll take me a while to get to the next milestone (which would be 60% – I’ll no longer have a failing grade).

Should anyone out there choose to find out their score, you can take the test here.

Aside from extensive movie watching, not too terribly much going on here. Kitchen was released from restricted motion on Tuesday, so we made a couple brief outings over the weekend to acclimate all of us to the idea of having a dog that can stay at home alone again. Aside from that, my life has consisted mostly of movie watching (30 films in the last 6 1/2 weeks!), TV watching (2 seasons of Carnivale, 1 1/2 seasons of Life on Mars, 1 season of Doctor Who), book reading (nothing I’d really recommend aside from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I got the impression I’m the last person I know to read that one). Quite exciting.