The antidote to Rio, Madagascar, all of those shitty talking animal movies... and seeing this on the BIG screen with a full audience with people falling over each other laughing takes it to a whole other level that watching online or on a box doesn't.

http://vimeo.com/62085792

Cause it's not just about the skills, it's having something to use those skills to say.  Talent is meaningless without content.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg

Well, having finally watched the last remaining episodes and finishing the three-hour capper miniseries "The Peacekeeper Wars," I'm proud to say I finally finished the entire series.  Incredible.

The show was on Sci-Fi channel in the early 2000s (maybe 1999), shot in Australia and co-produced by the Jim Henson Company, and it's a sort-of update on Blake's Seven, centering around an unlucky astronaut named John Crichton who falls through a wormhole and comes out the other side in the middle of an intergalactic prison escape.  He finds himself aligned with a ragtag group of fugitives escaping the facist Peackeepers in a living leviathan spaceship called Moya.

Oh, and because it was Jim Henson Co, the aliens looked like THIS





And the draw was that they designed a new alien in just about every episode, so they just went NUTS and, especially in the first few seasons, the variety was astounding.  Not only did no other TV show look like it, no other movie looked like it... and to be quite honest, outside of the Hellboy (Heckboy?) movies, I don't really know of any SF/fantasy with this look to it.  Which is a darn rare thing.

And this is the true big bad of the series, Scorpius, a half-Scarran half-Sebaccean Peacekeeper with dingy metal rods in his head who's hunting Crichton to steal wormhole secrets out of his bed.

And beating Battlestar Galactica to the punch, there's a second Scorpius called Harvey inside Crichton's brain who's got a wicked sense of humour.



Harvey is slowly driving Crichton insane, but honestly he was well on the way beforehand, his brain just can't cope with what's happening.  Which works well for Ben Browder's brow and the fact he plays crazy and agitated very well... and very loudly.  There's one season opener where he's on another leviathan, an older dying one, and he's got a long bushman beard and loudly singing the 1812 overture in the hallways with a painted old DRD (these sort of bug/lice/robot things that fix the ship).

I always thought that Rygel, being an actual hand-up-the-butt puppet would be the first cast member to go (the cast does shift around), yet he stays the whole time and is pretty darn entertaining.  I'm still waiting for him to have a cameo in one of the muppet movies... he deserves it.


At the time, the only SF on TV was probably Star Trek, all clean and shiny, this is dark, grungy, the characters pee and puke (they puke a LOT), have surgery, open their heads up, it's not graphic or gory... well, it kind of is, but it's real and practical.  And the sense of humour on the show is brilliant, there's references everywhere and the episodes have titles like "Eat Me" (about cannibals), "Out of Their Minds," and the pregnancy trilogy is called "We're So Screwed."

And also unlike Star Trek, where the characters were guided by a higher ideal and a mission and the thirst for knowledge (which I do love), the Farscape characters are motivated by their basest desires, need, desperation, and outlaw spirit.  In a very early episode they amputate Pilot's arm to sell to a scientist who then stiffs them-- and never ask or apologize later, and I don't think they learned anything from the experience.  It's actually rather shocking (and Pilot is my fave character in the show probably, despite the fact he's a bug the size of a Volkswagon Bug).

Something I love that the series does is not just manage to imbue all these puppets with life, but also make you feel and care for the Moya, despite it not emoting at all and only communicating through Pilot ("Moya and I will not be part of this," etc).  It actually reminds me of how I felt for my old dog Cosima, an old, sweet thing with a dead eye.  There's a particularly sad episode that I won't spoil, but the crew is asked to kill another Leviathan and their first instinct (and mine too) was "yes, of course, we love you so much we will do that."

I'm sure you all have seen it, but if not, I had to throw in something about it, I enjoyed it so darn much.  It was a real rebel of a show and I'm so glad Netflix put it up because the DVDs were so darn expensive... ADV priced it like anime.

Okay, with the season upon us, I thought it only appropriate for a thread devoted to X-mas and holiday movies.

For one thing, if the story is magical in any way, the existence of Christmas ITSELF will be in jeopardy.  As if we couldn't continue well enough on our own.  Hogfather actually gave this some meaning which I quite liked, but you can really only get away with that one ONCE.

Usually in a Christmas movie, there's usually no consideration for other holidays, and unless its' strictly Christian, no mention of Christ as being the accepted origin of the holiday (instead of the Fonzie of it, having co-opted the celebration from the Pagans, but that's another issue).  it's like Christmas is a holiday severed from the religious institution, which it kind of is, to permit more people to spend money at that time of year.

I think the non-holiday movies they release on Christmas deserve some mention too, usually big four-quadrant unrisky pictures that whole families can be dragged out to see (like the upcoming "Parental Guidance") just so they can drag grandma and the cousins to see something so they get two hours of silence and a subject of conversation instead of how sick of each other they all are.

Um, what can I say?  My name's Chris and I got an invite to the forum from ChipRocks on Deviantart.  I just started my account and haven't looked through the other forums yet, so I'm not all sure what the forum is but happy to be invited.