My Favorite Podcasts

I moved up from an iPod Shuffle to a 30GB iPod video in August and I started really getting into podcasts. At first I listed to news and political commentary, but that quickly got boring and I moved on to sports and fiction.

During the baseball season I was really into ESPN Baseball Today. Their coverage was great through the regular season and through the conclusion of the World Series. I also listened to Steven A. Smith. I’m not sure if I like his style or not, but there’s something inherently creepy that hits you after you listen day in day out to sports guys trashing black and Hispanic men. It’s nice to hear at least one non-white guy give his opinion.

ESPN Podcasts

During the baseball season I was also listening to Without A Curse, a bi-weekly podcast by 13-year-old Red Sox fan, Alex Reimer. He’s not bad for a adolescent. He has a tendency to say “sucks” too often, and since he’s only 13 he has no sense of history (thing about it – in his lifetime the Braves and Indians have had more good seasons than bad), but, like I said, he’s not bad. He even manages to get adults who know a little something (like sports editors and the like) to appear on his show and do phone interviews. His show is weekly now that the season is over, but I’m still listening.

Why do I listen to a Red Sox show, you ask? Why, because it’s so fun to hear the suffering. You’d think they didn’t win that championship in 2004. More importantly, there’s no one doing a similar Yankees podcast. What’s up with that?

When I’m not listening to sports podcasts I listen to fiction podcasts. My favorite is Escape Pod, which gives me a weekly 30 to 50 minute sci-fi, fantasy or horror fix. Escape Pod tries to supply Hugo award winners or nominees to the listeners, so the quality of the stories is good. So far my favorite Escape Pod stories have been The King’s Tail and I Look Forward to Remembering You.

I also like the Union Dues stories, which fall into the superhero genre:

EP80: Cleanup In Aisle Five
EP62: Baby and the Bathwater
EP49: Off White Lies
EP27: Glass Jaw

Escape Pod has a sister show called Pseudopod which is dedicated to horror. My favorite Pseudopod stories have been Turista and Sacred Skin.

In the superhero genre I like How to Succeed in Evil, the story of an “Evil Efficiency Expert” who helps villains maximize their potential. Unfortunately, it’s been a month since an episode has come out, so they may have run out of steam.

Last but not least, I like Retrieval Detachment, which is a podcast that reviews other podcasts, but alas, they’ve disappeared since they’re doing NaNoWriMo. What I liked about the podcast was the freeform brainstorming of the two hosts as they analyze the themes of different stories – mostly Escape Pod stories. I liked their discussion of time travel as a business. They went way beyond the idea of guided tours to the past and came up with fun ideas like kidnapping Leonardo DaVinci to teach a special one day “Master Class” at a university. LOL!

Grizzly Man

I saw a very disturbing documentary called Grizzly Man about two weeks ago. The film was about a naturalist named Timothy Treadwell who was so enamored of the grizzly bears in Alaska that he dedicated his life to studying them and living so close to them that they eventually killed him.

Treadwell is alternately portrayed as a caring, child-like soul and an egomaniacal asshole. The film combines footage shot by Treadwell himself in the months (and hours) leading up to his horrific death with interviews with friends and family shot by director Werner Herzog. The director tries hard not to be judgmental, but one can see that he views Treadwell's death as senseless.

Treadwell's pre-naturalist life seems senseless as well. He was a drug abuser, and he had tried his luck as an actor, narrowly losing to Woody Harrelson for the role on Cheers. Evidently losing that role was so devastating to Treadwell that he retreated from reality and sought solace as far away from civilization as possible -- with wild animals in Alaska.

The footage shot by Treadwell is really impressive. Over the years he had built up such a (misguided) confidence in his ability to approach bears, he got REALLY close to them. In many scenes he's, oh, 10 feet away from a full-grown male grizzly that is not tame. Probably the creepiest part of the movie is when he's talking to the camera about an older bear who has been having difficulty finding food and is starving. He warns the audience that this is the sort of bear that kills people and he jokingly says over his shoulder to the bear, "How about it? Are you the one that's going to kill me?" And of course, that is the one that eventually kills both Treadwell and his girlfriend.

The mauling, which is, admittedly, what everyone deep down really wants to see, is not in the film. Herzog surmises that the attack by the rogue bear happened so fast that Treadwell and his girlfriend never got the lens cap off of their camera. However, the camera was on in Treadwell's final moments and the audio of the attack was captured. Herzog doesn't let us hear that, which is for the best, I think. He does listen to it himself with headphones and also plays it for the coroner. They both react with horror, as you would expect. Evidently the bear bit Treadwell in the head and briefly released him. Treadwell was too badly hurt to get away, but he tried to tell his girlfriend to run. She didn't. She tried to attack the bear with a frying pan, with predictable results.

I wouldn't call this a great documentary, but it is thought-provoking and worth renting.

Halloween Movies: “Ravenous”

Another little-known movie for your consideration:

Ravenous -- Starring Guy Pearce, better known for Memento.

It’s hard to come up with an “original” horror movie, but this one comes pretty damn close. The setting is the American West, sometime before the Civil War. A disgraced Army officer is assigned to a remote, sparsely manned fort where he assumes he can serve in obscurity. Things go awry, of course, and what follows is a unique story blending elements of the freakish (and true) Donner Party tragedy with the Native American legend of the wendigo.

Great subtitle: “You are who you eat.”

Halloween Movies

With Halloween approaching, I’d like to recommend three lesser known horror movies for your enjoyment:

• The Abominable Dr. Phibes -- Featuring Vincent Price and Joseph Cotton. This revenge plot centers on the reemergence of a organist thought to be dead who seeks out the ten people involved in the death of his wife. The tale skillfully mixes in humor with events from the Old Testament.

• Snow White: A Tale of Terror -- Featuring Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill. A creepy retelling of the familiar Brothers Grimm fairy tale. If you think you know the story, you’ll be thrown off by some of what goes on in the movie.

• Dead of Night -- A group of strangers gathered at an English estate share tales of the supernatural, some amusing, some sinister. The ending is clever.

I’ll add some more movies as I review my DVD collection in the next two weeks.

The Night Stalker

Observations:

• From the narration it is immediately apparent that this incarnation of Carl Kolchak is a much better writer. The character from the original show was a bit of a melodramatic hack. But it worked fine for his subject matter.

• The opening sequence was much more effective and tense than that of Supernatural, the other new show this one will be compared to.

• The paper this Kolchak works at is much more mainstream than the paper the original Kolchak worked at.

• There is immediate and predictable sniping between Kolchak and Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union) as they fight over whose story it is. Ho hum.

• The story begins with the murder of a pregnant woman. Her body is found with the fetus torn from it. We are obviously supposed to be reminded of the death of Lacy Peterson. Tacky, tacky choice of subject matter.

• Kolchak is smug. He's shown to have better gut instincts than the black chick who is the senior crime reporter. Of course she needs this white guy's help to write a story. She’s only been doing that on this paper for the last four years without his ass to tell her what an angle is. Amazingly, she isn't terribly hostile about him invading her territory, though she does initiate a background check on him that temporarily lands him in jail.
  

• The cinematography reminds one of The X-Files. Obviously it’s no accident, but it’s a good move. The story feels more mature than the episodes of Supernatural, and part of that is camera work.

• The easiest way to set up a story of horror is to show women and children in danger. In the first 15 minutes of Night Stalker, a woman and her unborn child are killed, then another woman is attacked and her ten-year-old girl is abducted. Off to a great start.

• There’s a brief cameo of Darren McGavin, the original Kolchak, in a newsroom scene, but it looked superimposed. I thought he was dead, but he’s apparently still among the living.

• This new Kolchak has a dark secret. He's suspected of killing his wife. In the original made-for-TV movie, Kolchak's stripper girlfriend was killed by a vampire, but I don't believe he was actually a suspect.

• This new Kolchak has the same joyless driven nature as Fox Mulder. But Mulder was occasionally amusing in his a deadpan way. It remains to be seen if Kolchak will develop a sense of humor.

• Surprisingly, like the original Kolchak, this one doesn't use a gun. I am wrong (so far) on one of my hunches. For some ridiculous reason, when going in to the monsters' lair, he arms himself and his companions with electric cattle prods, of all things.

• The Perri Reed character isn't a black version of Scully (so far), which is good. It's been done. She's not ultra-skeptical or science-oriented. Betcha she turns out to be a church-gal, though.

• The first episode ends with no real resolution of what the monsters were. They seem to be werecoyotes that target pregnant women. Why? Who knows? Surprisingly, Kolchak chooses to not to report the supernatural angle of the story and writes it up as a simple unsolved kidnapping. It is Reed that argues that the public has the right to know the truth. A little role reversal there just to let the X-Files fans know they are going to try not to be exactly the same, I guess.

The Verdict:

• It didn’t suck, and it has potential, but I think it’s on the wrong network. I don’t think ABC will stick with the show and give it time it will need to grow an audience the way that UPN or WB would.

Horror in Fall Lineup

In addition to the Sci-Fi shows that are debuting this Fall, there are two Horror-genre shows as well.

Supernatural (WB): “Two brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester, travel the country looking for their missing father and battling evil spirits along the way. Ever since they were little their father has been consumed with an obsession to find the evil forces that murdered his beloved wife, and recruited his two young sons to help them. They have grown up as hunters of the supernatural. Sam escaped this way of life after high school, and now has a happy life with his girlfriend, Jessica, and a promising future career. Dean, however, stayed behind with his father to join him in his ‘hunting.’”

This debuted last night. I found it boring. The brothers weren’t personable enough and the monster in the first episode wasn’t scary or unique enough to make me want to see more. This show is likely to be cancelled by November.

The Night Stalker (ABC): Shame on you if you don’t know the premise of this show or that this series -- the original one that is -- is the father of The X-Files.

Anyway, for those of you who really are too young to know this show, this is the (new) premise:

“Crime reporter Carl Kolchak is partnered with Perri Reed at The Beacon, a Los Angeles newspaper. Together they investigate a string of strange murders...all of which may be related to the death of Kolchak's wife 18 months earlier in a similarly bizarre manner. A murder that the FBI considers Kolchak the primary suspect.”

Reasons why this remake will flop:

• Stuart Townsend is playing Kolchak. Townsend (AKA "Lestat" from the lackluster Queen of The Damned) has the distinction of having been the original choice to play Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings. After a single day on the set he was fired and replaced by Viggo Mortensen.


• The original Kolchak was an over-the-hill hack writer. He was often scared shitless of the monsters he faced, but he only armed himself with a camera or a blessed magic item. That was the charm of the show. Since they’ve gone with a much younger man, expect this Kolchak to actively seek to kick monsters’ asses.


• Gabrielle Union is the love interest. It’s doubtful that this will go over well on mainstream TV.

Like the Sci-Fi shows I mentioned yesterday, I’ll watch these at least once and report back, especially if they really suck.

Summaries are taken from TV.com