As always, my weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, this week I’m pulling double duty at TheCourt.ca, starting off today with a post about R. v. Walker and its implications for judicial reasoning requirements in criminal trials.

One nice thing about a week with little internet and having to do a lot of work in my room meant that I finally had time to catch up on Doctor Who after losing track of it early through David Tennant’s first season. Now, Doctor Who is pretty goddamned great teevee, all things considered.

However. There do exist purists who feel that the Doctor Who theme must remain purely in its electronic, creepy form, as per the early serials, as follows.

This is a valid viewpoint to take, because come on – that is near-perfect sci-fi television music. (I actually prefer the Baker theme to the higher-pitched Peter Davidson theme, and I was introduced to Doctor Who with the Fifth Doctor, so that should stand as testament to how good the Baker theme is.) There’s a reason it’s iconic; even today it sounds futuristic and vaguely unsettling. It is great theme music, and I don’t think anybody can disagree with such an assertion. However, just because that interpretation is great doesn’t mean the more orchestral spin that was created for the 2005 revival is invalid.

This is a different interpretation on the classic, but the eerie Theremin is still there, predominant as it needs to be to maintain the integrity of the Doctor Who sensibility; the driving strings and drums beneath that eerie electronic slidewhistle serve to give the tune more intensity, which is very much in keeping with the mindset that seems to create the modern Doctor Who show – “still weird and wonderful, but now with an extra daily helping of FUCK YEAH.”

But there is such a thing as too much of that.

Electric guitars? Replacing large chunks of the theremin with a horn section? This is far and away the worst Doctor Who title sequence ever, managing to be even worse than the schmoopy, cloying, synthpoppy Sylvester McCoy sequence.

PLEASE FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY! Or I will be forced to stop illegally downloading the show!

Yeah, I know this is kind of beating a dead horse, but – Australia’s So You Think You Can Dance instantly was the best season of an already top-class reality competition show.

Also, it is my blog, so nyah.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

In the final episode, the judges and choreographers dance in the big opening routine along with the contestants. And they are good.

Honestly, that’s a sort of national character thing right there.

Twitter. I utterly fail to see the appeal of Twitter. Understand that I am someone who is online a lot – I am not offering up the standard crank “why you kids playin’ with those danged computers dang it” rant here. But this need for total connectedness is beyond me, and frankly it’s not even total connectedness because it’s entirely a one-way conversation: you blather whatever into Twitter and other people see it, but you don’t have to listen back to them. Which, come to think, is pretty ego-driven communication in a passive-aggressive sort of way. You can tell people what you’re doing and you don’t have to listen to their responses, and not is this the expected norm, it’s the driving design principle!

What the fuck is up with that? People have suggested this is the evolution of the Facebook status message, but Facebook exists primarily for the purpose of two-way communication, obsessive as it might be. (Well, that and Scrabulous.) Twitter in essence takes the self-absorption that the connected lifestyle demands (all the co-presence of a community, without the niggling demand of learning to tolerate the in-person social quirks of others) and caters to it.

All of this might be forgivable if Twitter produced clever, interesting communiques, but it doesn’t – it’s an endless parade of banalities. Another way of looking at Twitter’s general pointlessness is to consider how many Twitter messages would be worthy of mention when replying to the question, “so how was your day?” Easily most would not qualify, because in person when someone asks you that, you don’t tell them about the thousand little annoyances in your day; it’s just the (relatively) important stuff.

The “Green Arrow goes to supervillain jail” movie. People recently started talking about this again and I just don’t see the appeal. The concept isn’t bad, but I can tell you right now the execution will be hamfisted dogshit.

Why will it be hamfisted dogshit? Well, other than Green Arrow being a terrible superhero concept (“has a bow”), this is the sort of movie that demands immense, immense amounts of exposition to explain what the hell is going on. The problem is that most filmmakers are really, really bad at delivering details of a differing world without simply vomiting up a horde of banal, boring, patronizing explanatory dialogue.

(This is one of the things that people who mock the original Star Wars trilogy really miss – Lucas created an entire expansive universe and, unusually so for him, resisted the temptation to explain anything more than necessary. It is a rare achievement, which is one of the reasons the original trilogy is so good and the second prequel trilogy is not.)

This is not to say that the movie might not be good. It might well be good. It just very likely won’t, because it’s setting itself up for failure right from the premise by choosing such a difficult focus, and let’s be honest, you are not going to get a Bryan Singer or Christopher Nolan making this movie. This is the Steel of this generation right here, people!

Also, “Supermax” is a terrible, terrible title, sounding not unlike a giant Japanese fighting robot. GO SUPERMAX! ELECTRON JUICE ATTACK SUPREME! Et cetera.

People who bag on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It’s a better movie than Last Crusade, people – a movie which gets by mostly on Sean Connery’s charisma and the extra import added by the Holy Grail. (And I like Last Crusade, people, so don’t start.) Yes, Kate Capshaw is kind of annoying. Yes, Short Round is a questionable character idea. But it’s got the best action in the entire series – moreso than Crusade and even Raiders – and its closing sequence is easily the best, most exciting in the series. It’s simply the most daring movie of the franchise.

Grey’s Anatomy. It’s like Scrubs, except not as funny, not as good at the dramatic moments, and twice as long.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Longtime readers will be aware that I am an unabashed fan of the television show So You Think You Can Dance, AKA “American Idol except for dancing instead of singing and also it doesn’t suck,” which has just commenced its fourth American season. It’s a better show than Idol in so many ways.

The judges are much, much better than Randy, Simon and Paula; less self-impressed, less self-important, less attention-seeking (although Mary Murphy’s tendency towards gimmickry – catchphrases, her incredibly annoying shrieking – is starting to really grind). Their moments of humour tend to be organic rather than have the bad-sketch quality anything associated with Paula Abdul generates. Most importantly, they tend to be more respectful of the contestants. This is, I think, in part because professional dance is a much smaller world than professional musicianship is; nobody wants to get a bad reputation in the business.

That same quality is what leads the contestants to be, on average, so much better than on Idol. I particularly remember last season, when the judges were particularly harsh in their criticism of Cedric, an unschooled but brilliant hip-hopper with no professional technique worth mentioning. The audience began booing, but Cedric told them to be quiet, because – and this is why I love this show – he hadn’t learned enough and he knew he had to learn more, and was eager to learn more. (Also, Diana Ross Debbie Allen gave him free admission to her dance school based on his performance, which is also awesome, but that is neither here nor there.) The serious professionals know not to piss anybody off and be respectful, and the talented amateurs – mostly B-boys and krunk grrls, but the occasional freestyle lyrical performer as well – all want to prove they’re as good as the schooled kids.

The best thing is that, unlike Idol, where the theoretical entertainment of the tryout episodes is derived from bad singers (be they attention whores or simply deluded), with every season of So You Think You Can Dance there is less and less bad dancing in the tryouts, because bad dancing is so rarely entertaining. You might want to see a bad singer every so often for novelty value over a competent singer, but given the choice between a fairly inventive breaker or a idiot flailing around, most people will pick the breaker. Or the lindy hoppers. Or the ballerina.

And that’s just the tryouts. The performance competition inevitably trumps Idol. Every year. Period. When Idol gets a breakout performer like a Melinda Doolittle or Bo Bice upping the ante for the entire episode? That is the norm for SYTYCD. Every season has half a dozen performers of that calibre minimum.

But the best part of this show, for me, right now, is that there’s two of it. The first season of the Australian version of the show just finished up (I’m downloading it like a madman), and it’s arguably even better than the American version. Interestingly, it’s a lot more multiculti and diverse than the American version, for some reason, despite Australia being a lot whiter on the whole than America is. Take all the strengths of the American version I just listed and emphasize them, improve the format and editing and pacing of the show itself (the Aussie process of tryout is more formalized but with greater leniency on the parts of the judges – and the editing is just heaps better) and that’s the Australian version – it’s just fucking fantastic television.

Plus, they all have funny accents. And Demi is the cutest goddamned little firecracker I’ve seen in ages. And this is just awesome.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.