timepiececlock | Entries tagged with life on mars

Title: Some Kind of Hero
Fandoms: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and How I Met Your Mother, with two other minor crossovers if you can catch them!
Source:

barneyrobin Drabblethon Challenge
Genres, Pairings, Characters, etc: Barney/Robin, Hammer/Robin, humor
Spoilers: post-season 3 for HIMYM, pre-canon for Dr.H.
Wordcount: 2,500

Summary / Challenge prompt: “Captain Hammer runs into Barney and mistakes him for Doc Horrible.”

Notes: You’ll have to forgive me for this one, folks. It was born of a challenge, and it’s a bit of a parody at heart. Please, please do not take it seriously. There are run-on sentences, and a lot of silliness too.

Some Kind of Hero

( ''Okay, I lied. I am Doctor Horrible. You found me, damn you.'' )

I tried to watch the first few minutes, got bored and skipped to The Scene. And... it's so wrong! The guy's acting is terrible. And the direction/set design... WHY IS THERE NO ARTISTRY? It's flat colors, no dominating objects like the billboards in the original scene, no intense, high-contrast, high-saturation colors. And the circle-shot, which is so iconic in the original LOM episode 1, is done face-on at head height, instead of at the far more visually angle-from-below the original's director chose. There's also the fact that, aside from the car, there's nothing in this shot that tells me he's in a different time. It's just... junky L.A. scenery.

And what the hell is up with the costume department? And who decided this guy looked right? He looks like a tall, military guy, like someone who bullied kids in middle school. I dont' think that Sam Tyler needs to look like John Simm, but I do think it works better if the guy is smaller and less FBI-looking. Someone who looks like he got the job because he was a good investigator and not because he had a muscled physique. Also, someone with an interesting face. A little more sensitive and yet cynical. Less...dopey. This guy looks DOPEY. And Sam Tyler is many fucked up or crazy or weird things, but he's not dopey.

I hate this gamma thing they're doing with the colors. And why, I ask, is this scene completely lacking in dramatic tension? I must have watched the original scene in the british version at least six times, because I loved the cinematography of it so much. ...oh, now it's over and he's wandering. What happened to the cop finding him? I'm going to skip forward to the parts with Gene.

Gene's not bad. Annie, I'm not to keen on. How come she doesn't actually LOOK like she's from the 70s? I'm skipping to the end.

47-48 minute mark: holy crap, I know this music. HAHAHA! ::plays back to listen again:: They're using the Donnie Darko score! This is... this is either "Liquid Spear Waltz" or "Manipulated Living", I'm not sure, but it's definitely from Donnie Darko. If I close my eyes I can see Jake Gyllenhaul in my head following the glowing spirit balls around his house. It has that tell-tale "whrrrrooooommm" sound effect, and the piano.

What hacks! I hope they weren't planning to air it with that score. And I can't believe there wasn't any 1970s music they could use instead.

He's such a bad actor. His "sad face" looks like an exaggerated clown face.

Overall: I knew the trailer was bad, and I know some people were nervous, but I didn't think it could be THIS bad. I generally don't mind watching remakes of shows. I was excited for the idea of an American Sam Tyler, in a different setting and with different people. But this tried to follow too closely to the original show (a mistake) while not giving any serious thought to casting, set design, costume, or cinematography. I am le sad.

If they wanted something good, they should just air the original British series uncut as two miniseries. That would get plenty of attention.

I'm feeling a deep urge to write a LoM fanfic where Sam stays in the past and lives an entire life, all the way until he dies in the mid-1990s in a quick-mart robbery, after which he wakes up on a hospital bed in 2006, 7 months from the day of his accident.

And then he goes and hunts down the people he knew in the past. And he finds Annie, his wife, as an older woman of 60. An she looks at him and sees the face Sam wore the year she met him, and it all becomes startlingly clear.

fandom:

lifein1973

Life On Mars: A Review (no spoilers)

I can't remember the last time I liked all the first 6 episodes in a row of a show as much as I like the first 6 episodes of this show. Even Doctor Who, I loved the characters, the concept, and the style more than the actual writing of the plotlines. But this show... wow. Six episodes so far and each has been interesting and provocative. Even familiar tropes (an undercover episode, a crime boss episode) have been played with a fresh zeal and energy.

The characters, mainly Sam, Gene, and Annie, are all fully-fleshed out, engaging characters. They have more development in six episodes than most achieve in their entire first season. Sam's gotten the most attention (naturally) and Annie the least, but even though we know little of Annie's past her personality in the present is strongly defined.

Given that this show is about a 2006 cop stuck in 1973, the show so easily could have been sucky. I can just picture it turning cheesy like Quantum Leap. But even the moments that could have been cheesy if played with lesser actors or filmed with a lesser cinematographer or written by a lesser screenwriter... all of them rise to the task. The filming is awesome, first of all, with great perspective shots and framing, and great color. The brownish, saturated color scheme works perfectly for the era and also displays a sense of grit and everything being tactile. The visual difference between this show and stuff like CSI is a bit like the visual difference between Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone versus Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban. And now that I've brought up HP in a conversation about Life On Mars, I think I'll go bang my head into the wall in shame.

Linking the visuals of the show to the story is the music. Oh, the music! I haven't been so concious of the soundtrack of a show since the first time I watched Cowboy Bebop. ( Review continues, no spoilers. )

Now, that's quite a bit of squeeing for only 6 of 8 episodes of season 1. Is this my favorite show? No. My favorite current shows are still Doctor Who and Veronica Mars. But if episodes 7 and 8 are as entertaining as 1-6, Life On Mars is definitely unseating House, M. D. as my third favorite currently running series. House is funny, but everything that House does wrong with character development and writing, Life On Mars does right. And its missteps are smaller, and don't leave me with the frustration that House does. Can this strength in writing and dramatic tension last through multiple seasons? Hard to say. It depends on where the writers choose to take the supernatural aspect of the series. If they let it get too much like a crime procedural in retro, it'll be boring. If they make it too supernaturally, they'll risk being like Lost... endlessly frustrated and nonsensical with the underlying appearence of making it up as they go along. But if they keep the writing tight, this show could easily go three or four seasons. Especially with such short seasons.

Overall, I'm smitten with LoM. Smitten is the perfect word for it. Everyone should go buy the DVDs or download it or something. Be wary of the BBC America airings-- they cut out about 20 minutes of every episode to make it fit the time slot, and from what I hear they butcher the best part of the show-- the characterization--all to hell. But go find it! Because I need some fic from y'all.

You Stand A Good Chance of Enjoying Life On Mars If You Enjoy These Shows/Movies:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (!!!)
Dead Like Me
Groundhog Day
Angel
Early Edition
Veronica Mars
Doctor Who [new]
Strange Luck
Almost Famous (the movie)
Quantum Leap
The X Files
Monk
Fight Club
Firefly/Serenity
Millenium
The Outer Limits
Monster (anime/manga)
Picket Fences
The Dead Zone
Haunted
Law & Order (on crack)
Trigun (don't ask)
The Sixth Sense

I'm sure this show also owes a lot to cop shows and cop movies of the 1970s, but those are all out of my knowledge space so I can't comment.

Hmm... I *really* need to see a LoM fanvid to "Mr. Blue Sky" by E.L.O. I wasn't kidding about the Eternal Sunshine exclamation marks.

24:43 minutes in

Girl: "If you let me out of here, I'm dead. I've got no one else to turn to."

*headdesk* No Sam, no! Oh god, there's a sucker born every minute. Come on, Sam! You're smarter than this. Come on.

Edit: As this show and the "Happy Time" episode of Angel have proven, puppets on tv that start talking to you are always, always creepy.

Much love for this show, still. It's very much a boy's club show, being that it's about a male character and most of the supporting characters are men. But that's counterbalanced in an interesting way by the fact that the main male character, Sam, is pretty sensitive and considerate, so he stands out from the boy's club. He's still in the club, but he's got a metrosexual vibe coming from a time when everyone's trying to be politically correct and he's not as tied down by certain gender roles. I'm sure back in 2006 he doesn't appear overly sensitive (crying silently because his girlfriend/partner's been kidnapped and murdered does not by itself a sensitive man make), but compared to the 1973 standard presented in the show he's a lot more sensitive, tactful, and considerate than the other cops. And maybe being in that time period has reinforced his considerate manners, like a sort of unconscious rebellion against the "backward" ways of thinking he's now surrounded with.

You could argue that certain non-PC social attitudes, like prejudices about gender, race, people with disabilities (all covered in the show so far) haven't actually changed in this day and age, they've just been more cleverly veiled and made subtler. And that's partly true. But there's also an element of honest differences-- Sam's startled reaction to the way Annie gets treated at work played very genuine. There's not equality in the workplace yet (not in England or here in the US), but you can tell Sam didn't really expect the full reality of how it was before.

Man, that little blond girl is one of the creepiest kids I've seen on screen in a long time. She's fifty times creepier than Walt on Lost.

::shudder:: Dude, most of this show doesn't make me blink an eye but that girl is just freakin' creepy.

Edit: What is this "one nill" thing they were all chanting at the end? Is this some kind of British cop thing?

"I need my mobile."
"Your mobile what?"
"...phone?"

I think I'm going to like this show. Just a gut feeling.

21 minutes in: I like this actor. His ability to freak out is admirably done.

Finished: Well. That was one of the best pilots I've seen in a while: story, script, acting, production: fine across the board. I'm definitely going to watch more of this show. I like the mixture of cop drama and psychological surreal sci-fi.

EDIT: I was poking around for internet reviews of the show, and I came across this article. It's a pretty basic, non-spoilery overview of the first episode and general premise of the show. But what amused me was this random line at the conclusion of the review:

"There’s room in your life for both this and Doctor Who. Love them equally."

I wouldn't say I love them equally, but there's certainly room for one more British tv show in my life. And it's a long wait until the new Doctor Who...

EDIT: The American version planned for 2007 is being done by David E. Kelly. I'm thinking...that's a good thing. That's a good thing, right? I mean I liked the first few seasons of Ally McBeal. And my brother swears by Boston Legal...