Life On Mars is fantastic. Go watch it. And wish along with me that there were more than sixteen episodes. Gene Hunt is my new hero.

If you liked the first three quarters of season 2 of Twin Peaks, you're going to love Meadowlands. All of the repulsively dysfunctional soap opera without even a ghost of the {mystical|initiatic} undercurrent that made the middle of Twin Peaks worth slogging through. A young cross-dressing special needs Robert Smith wannabe beating off to a hambeast with a superiority complex the size of Rhode Island might scream OMG TEH KEWL to some people, but to me it feels like the writers overdosed on David Lynch and managed to miss the point entirely.

Maybe I'm missing the point - the show seems to be equal parts influenced by The Prisoner, so there might be something more to it... but three episodes in and it feels like someone threw an X-Files production team at an arc of Guiding Light and then edited out the monsters. It's got enough bleh to irk me, but it also has Ralph Brown. Ralph Brown is awesome, so I'll keep watching for him and hope that the soap opera dies down and the drama ratchets up.*

The "doing something other than sitting on my ass staring at a monitor" I alluded to in the previous ATC post involved lots of sitting on my ass staring at a screen, actually - I took my sister out to see the Transformers movie. It was everything I expected - it was Big, it was Loud, it was Gorgeous, it was camp and it was shallow. Fuck, all porn - be it naked girls porn, naked boys porn, guns-and-explosions porn or giant stompy robots porn - is shallow. You're going to this movie to see big honkin' robots pounding the crap out of other big honkin' robots, and the story does what it can to accommodate. It ain't Shakespeare, but it is entertaining. Especially if you like the "find the continuity flaw" easter egg hunt - there's a bunch, and a couple of them are huge. Like, Death Star huge.

There's more to report on, but this started off as an ATC page post and I still have to upload that. So.

* Which it did, about ten minutes later.