Before I begin, I’d just like to take a moment to apologize for the lateness of this post; no matter how much I say things like, “Oh, I’ll take my laptop to (insert vacation destination here) so I can blog from wherever I am,” it just doesn’t happen. Vacations always seem to happen in a strange parallel dimension where the laws of time and space don’t apply normally. But now that I’m back, normal service has resumed!

And it resumes with me talking about obscure comics characters. Every comic-book universe seems to accumulate these after a while; maybe they’re attempts to create a new hit that never caught on, maybe they were deliberately comic or strange characters, or maybe they’re supporting characters that linger in the memory long after the book they were in got canceled. (Rick Jones, for all that he’s become the linchpin of the Marvel Universe, started out as the Hulk’s sidekick before his book got canned after only six issues.) But they pop up with an absurd irregularity as different creators revive them (usually out of nostalgia…) It’s almost as if they live their own strange, private lives that only occasionally intersect with the comics we get to read. (Which is, of course, the whole joke behind Squirrel Girl.)

So who are my favorites? I’ve always had a soft spot for the Constrictor. He’s developed a wonderfully fatalistic personality over the years; he’s a C-lister and he knows it, but he gamely soldiers on in his career as thug and assassin, hoping not to bump into a super-hero and taking his lumps when he does. The Taskmaster sometimes falls into the same class; you have to admire someone who cheerfully takes government money to train the new Captain America just as readily as he hires himself out to fight Captain America.

I like the obscure villains who shouldn’t be obscure. Flag-Smasher is a great character and should be an excellent foil for Cap, even though he’s rarely used well; he’s an anarchist who wants to tear down the entire concept of nationality, and he’s got a huge freaking mace. (And henchmen with a lovely chiaroscuro design scheme. And berets.) Ruby Thursday is genuinely fucking creepy in a way that Steve Gerber exploited to great effect and almost nobody has ever used since; she’s completely normal from the neck down, but her head is just a featureless red sphere. THAT CAN GROW TENTACLES THAT STRANGLE YOU. Oh, and she’s chillingly remorseless and casually murderous. And Doctor Demonicus is a wonderful seething cauldron of resentment and rage; he’s a scientist who exposed himself to radiation…and got skin cancer. And he’s still trying to conquer the world.

And I like the heroes who you don’t see very often. I’m always a sucker for Hawk and Dove (thank you, Gail Simone!) and I love Jolt. What’s not to like about a young, idealistic super-heroine who finds out that she’s become the new team mascot for the Masters of Evil? I adore the Guardians of the Galaxy–the originals, that is (nothing against the new team, but I miss the classic squad.) I’m even a fan of big, bland blond Wendell Vaughn, AKA the Quasar that keeps dying. He’s just so refreshingly normal.

Characters like Rocket Raccoon, Ego the Living Planet and Cloak and Dagger make the universe a more enjoyable place. They’re like the tiny brushstrokes in a landscape painting; barely noticeable individually, but adding up to a portrait of an entire world. I cherish every strange, silly, entertaining one of them.

Feel free, in the comments, to add a few of your own favorites!

FLAPJACKS: Why are you watching Wheel of Fortune? This show sucks.
ME: I’m killing time in between games. It’s on the CBC for some reason. I don’t want to get up and change channels. I’ve got a laptop here, why do I need to get up and change channels?
FLAPJACKS: I mean, look at this guy spinning the wheel. You can tell this is the absolute peak of his life. In fifty years he will tell everybody about the time he went to Vegas and fucked a hooker, and the time he was on Wheel of Fortune.
ME: Three words. It’s an event.
FLAPJACKS: He’s got the S, and the C, and the L – “children’s music class?” That counts as an event?
ME: It does on this show.
FLAPJACKS: …he just bought all the vowels.
ME: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: In a row.
ME: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: NO YOU STUPID DUMBASS WHY WOULD YOU ASK FOR A “T”?
ME: Well, it is the most common –
FLAPJACKS: No no no don’t do that. “Music class” was already entirely solved. All he needed to do was figure out what began with “C” and ended with “N” before the apostrophe. Somehow this dipshit must have figured there was a T in there. “Chumpstain’s music class.”
ME: “Cranston’s music class.”
FLAPJACKS: “Chaplain’s music class.”
ME: That one doesn’t have a T in it.
FLAPJACKS: Neither does “children” and yet somehow he asked for a T. I’m pretty sure this guy is the stupidest person ever. They probably edited out the part where for his very first letter he asked for “Q” and Pat Sajak took a few minutes to explain that maybe he would like to pick a different letter.
ME: And now that there is no T, of course, Shwanda gets a spin.
FLAPJACKS: This show is so white trash. They get two midwestern white people who are so white they white white the white, and the black person? Is named “Shwanda.” That is like the ultimate White Person Imagines A Black Person’s Name For Laffs name.
ME: Yes, but Shwanda isn’t that imaginary black person. She’s apparently a working professional academic.
FLAPJACKS: I bet she actually applied for Jeopardy! and then the Wheel of Fortune people were all “crap, we need some black contestants, we’re short this month” and they went over to the Jeopardy! applications and saw “Shwanda” in the pile and thought they had struck gold. And then she shows up and they are all “…oh, well.”
ME: Shwanda just spun a “lose a turn” spin.
FLAPJACKS: That’s another reason this show sucks. Sometimes you just get fucked and it’s not your fault in any possible way. This show is entirely about dumb luck.
ME: As if to prove your point, the stereotypical midwestern mom just spun the eeny-weeny million dollar prize spin.
FLAPJACKS: That means she gets a million dollars?
ME: I think she has to solve the puzzle, first.
FLAPJACKS: Well, she’s successfully figured out “children’s music class.” Given that there were two letters left, not hard.
ME: And now she gets to start the next puzzle. I guess she has to win the show to win the million dollars.
FLAPJACKS: “Around the house” is the category. I have no idea yet.
ME: Something something “beach towels,” judging by housewife’s first four letters.
FLAPJACKS: When does Shwanda get another turn?
ME: Not until the housewife misses a letter or spins badly.
FLAPJACKS: This is bullshit. I demand justice for Shwanda.
ME: Yeah, well, it’s pretty obvious that the housewife has figured out that it is “fluffy plush beach towels,” given that she just named F when she got $3500 per letter.
FLAPJACKS: And now she’s buying vowels again. Why is she buying fucking vowels? She already knows the answer. She is literally just giving the money she has already won back to the show. “No, no, you and Vanna do such hard work, Pat. You should keep some of it.”
ME: Ben Stein wouldn’t let anybody give him back the money. That’s because Ben Stein is ballin’ and Pat and Vanna are still pretending it’s the Eighties.
FLAPJACKS: Vanna doesn’t even turn letters any more. She just walks in front of the screens where the letters are and kind of waves at them. I feel sad for her in a way. She was never exactly useful, but now she’s even less useful because she’s not even eye candy any more.
ME: Come now. It’s a lot of hard work to play straight man to Pat Sajak for the thirty seconds a day where she has to talk to him. I’m pretty sure I would stab him in the eye after about ten seconds of his patter. You can see that Vanna’s suppressing the urge to kill whenever they’re close together. She can do it because she has experience.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, so the housewife wins the show. Does she get the million dollars now?
ME: …it looks like she has to solve a final puzzle.
FLAPJACKS: And then she gets the million dollars?
ME: No, apparently the million dollars gets put in a second wheel and she spins that wheel and gets that prize if she solves the final puzzle.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, this is even bullshittier. Seriously, what is the point of the million dollar prize? “You have a tiny chance to win an equally tiny chance to win this prize, but only if you solve a puzzle first!” Has anybody ever won the million dollar prize?
ME: Wikipedia says yes.
FLAPJACKS: I bet they killed that person afterwards just so they could continue to make this show. This is a show where they used to charge $400 for a fucking blender. Wheel of Fortune is the cheapest, most skinflint show ever. I bet whenever the Jeopardy! people run into the Wheel of Fortune people on the lot, they look down their noses at them.
ME: As is right and proper. The Jeopardy! people haven’t forgiven them for stealing away Shwanda.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

John Seavey’s first attempt to try and instill a true nerd/geek/whatever film canon was a good idea, but suffered from obvious operational flaws: namely, the ability of people to add and veto in unlimited amounts. The first is problematic because it means people will add things of which they have fond memories but which aren’t really all-time favorites. The second is problematic because of the jerk factor and because it means people can dismiss films with no cost, which is sort of the opposite of “consensus,” because a consensus usually involves a degree of compromise in the agreement.

Thus, a suggestion. Start the Geek Consensus list over from scratch, but this time, the rules are simple: you can add up to three movies and veto up to two, with no blanket vetoes like “all Pixar films.” (And you can save adds or vetos for a second post if you’re of the “this list will not have Sex and the City 2 on it” variety, with which I can sympathize.) This means that the consensus list will gradually grow, but only films to which people have a serious objection on an individual basis will be removed. I think this removes most of the problems with the first experiment.

Thus, I kick it off with:

Back To The Future
Big Trouble In Little China
Zulu

So this year’s top 10-instead-of-a-top-20 So You Think You Can Dance turned out to eventually be a top 11, because they just couldn’t cut down from five classically trained male dancers to four. This makes eight of 11 dancers (more than 70 percent!) from the various classical training disciplines (ballet, jazz and contemporary), plus your token B-boy, ballroom girl and tapper so they can still claim to be a diverse dancing show and have the season’s usual array of patronizing commentary about “journeys.”

I can’t help but think that the reason the show’s taken such a stiff right turn towards classically trained dance is that the Vegas weeding-out portion has become so inflexibly forgiving of it. Consider that now it’s pretty much set in stone that hip-hop and ballroom get done first, and only then do the remaining rounds – usually contemporary, ballroom and group dance in some order – proceed. Now, if you’re eliminating dancers at every step, this means that the later rounds are “tougher,” and it means that dancers who don’t dance well are less likely to be forgiven on the basis of excelling in their styles.

In turn, however, this means that if classically trained dancers are always dancing out of genre in the earlier rounds, they’re thus more likely to be forgiven on the basis of dancing out of genre badly. The most recent Vegas episode Wednesday night made this fairly clear: Giselle Peacock, absolutely stunning in ballroom, danced poorly during the final contemporary round and got cut, whereas Adechike danced badly not one but three times in a row (his opening solo, hip-hop and ballroom) and made it through to the top 11 largely on his strengths as a contemporary dancer.

I don’t think this is the only reason SYTYCD has so sharply veered into a contemporary-heavy focus. After all, there are quite a few other reasons one could name – for example, the idea that promoting contemporary means SYTYCD can better distinguish itself from Dancing With The Stars and America’s Best Dance Crew, which exclusively promote ballroom and hip-hop, respectively. Or the reflexive need to promote the idea of excellence through dance education (culminating in the rampant idiocy of calling Legacy in season 6 “untrained,” because clearly anybody can do airflares and crabwalks when they so choose). Or the fact that of the regular judging panel, only L’il C comes from a hip-hop background.

But it’s certainly part of it, and if you follow the various fan-run SYTCYD message boards, it’s apparently starting to affect the audition process outright, because increasing numbers of hip-hop and ballroom dancers are supposedly passing on the opportunity to audition1 – because why bother if you’re just going to get patronized by Nigel Lythgoe while contemporary dancers are applauded for performing poorly in your area of expertise? Hell, this season, they’ve brought back Comfort and Twitch and Pasha and Anya among the “all-stars” in what seems like a desperate attempt to cover up the continuing lack of ballroom and hip-hop ability in the supposed top ten eleven.

Shorter version: Show needs to get right quick.

1. Which would explain why this season’s audition episodes were so barren of anything other than contemporary and jazz dance; you could count the number of non-contemporary auditions in six hours of TV on both hands. [↩]

So the swirling rumour in Canadian politics of the day is that the Liberals and the New Democrats will unify to create a new, centre-left party.

Now, on the one hand, this sounds reasonable, because this is basically what the right-wing parties in Canada did years ago. On the other hand, the basic argument for this idea is that the Liberals are incapable of finding a leader with charisma, and at least Jack Layton looks vaguely human. (Note that the link points out that a “Liberal Democrat” party led by Layton would be victorious, and one led by Michael “useless limpdick” Ignatieff would lose. That Michael Ignatieff would lose an election in a country where generally only forty percent of the country at best is inclined to vote Tory tells you a lot about how useless a limpdick he in fact is.)

Of course, the problem is that in getting the strengths of both parties, you also get their weaknesses: this means you combine the funding collapse of the Liberals with the not-ready-for-prime-time economic strategies of much of the NDP (and, speaking as someone who has spent time in the NDP previously and is pretty reliably left in his politics, some of the lack of understanding of basic economic principles of many Dippers is just incredibly irritating to me). The potential voter has both the leeriness of voting soulless Liberal (and the Liberals will be soulless for as long as it takes them to start defending their record of leadership; why nobody in the party bothers to point out that Paul Martin’s government is largely responsible for Canada mostly avoiding the global financial meltdown is beyond me) and unready NDP. That combination is potentially toxic.

Of course, what’s more important is whether or not a reformed Liberal party would have any chance of picking up additional seats. Would they get a majority? Probably not. Looking at 2008 election results, if you go with a formula of “Liberal Democrats” getting a combined vote of the NDP and Liberals in any given riding and then subtracting ten percent (assuming the most pessimistic scenario with swing voters going Tory and disaffecteds voting Green), they pick up about another twelve to fifteen ridings, which still doesn’t win them an election. However, the upside is that the ridings they’ve already won become extremely solid, which means they can campaign harder in swing ridings and have more effect; they can also more reliably portray themselves as a national party, as they would become competitive in quite a few ridings in BC and Manitoba where they currently aren’t.

Is it a good idea? With the right leader, potentially. Unfortunately, they don’t really have the right leader. When Jack Layton is your best-case scenario, you have issues.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

One of the things that I genuinely adore about writing for mightygodking.com instead of my own blog is that I get a lot of comments. People love to give feedback on what I’ve written (and ultimately, that’s what every writer really wants, to know that people are listening. Money is just a measurement of that, albeit one that can be used to pay your rent.)

But after a while writing for a high-traffic blog on the Internet, you do start to notice that no matter what you say, someone disagrees with it. I’m not complaining about it; you don’t get into writing, especially writing opinion pieces, if you don’t have enough confidence in your opinions to avoid taking disagreement personally. But I am curious. Is there really any opinion out there that everyone, absolutely everyone can agree on? Is there something we all like?

So, here’s the experiment. I’m going to name ten movies that I consider to be awesome. Not the ten best movies of all time, or the ten all-time classics; just ten movies that I love, and that I could sit down and watch at any time and enjoy them. And in the comments, you can either add movies to that list, or veto movies that someone has added. You don’t need to defend your choices, either to add or to subtract. In fact, I don’t want you to; I’d prefer that the comments not get bogged down in a big argument about whether or not “Buckaroo Banzai” sucks. I’ll try to go back and edit the list occasionally, so people can see at a glance what the current content is, and we’ll see if anything survives as something everyone on the Internet could sit down and watch together.

UPDATE: I went through the first sixty-two comments and updated the list based on everyone’s new picks and vetoes. A few points I want to clarify for future commenters: You do not, I repeat not need to take something off the list in order to put something on. The list can be as long as it needs to be. Comments that said “replace X with Y” were treated as “Veto X, Add Y”. Also, there is no need to re-nominate or re-veto a movie. I won’t take anything off unless it’s vetoed, and once it’s vetoed, it can’t go back on even if someone nominates it again. The whole point is finding films everyone wants to watch! (If you want to make my life easier, you can just make your comments: “Veto: A, B, C, D” and “Add: E, F, G, H” so that it’s easy to figure out what you want me to add and remove. Also, it’d help if you mentioned whether you meant the original or the remake. I assumed the original unless otherwise specified.) Oh, and sorry, but if you nominated a film specifically to watch the Rifftrax version of it, that doesn’t count.

The current list:

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Alien, Aliens, Animal House, Apocalypse Now, Army of Darkness, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Better Off Dead, The Big Lebowski, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, The Blues Brothers, Das Boot, Bringing Up Baby, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Chinatown, City Lights, A Clockwork Orange, Dawn of the Dead, Death to Smoochy, Doctor Strangelove, Donnie Darko, Empire Records, The Empire Strikes Back, Enter the Dragon, Fargo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fight Club, Forbidden Planet, The Full Monty, Ghostbusters, The Godfather, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, High Society, Highlander, The Hudsucker Proxy, Hunt for Red October, In Bruges, It’s a Wonderful Life, It’s My Party, Jaws, Juno, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, LA Confidential, Last Night, Last of the Mohicans, Latter Days, Little Miss Sunshine, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Lone Star, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings, Memento, Metropolis, Miller’s Crossing, MirrorMask, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Moon, Muppet Christmas Carol, The Muppet Movie, Murder by Death, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, Night of the Living Dead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Perseopolis, The Princess Bride, The Producers, The Professional, Pulp Fiction, The Quiet Earth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ransom, Rebecca, The Right Stuff, Ronin, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Rushmore, Ruthless People, The Shining, Silver Streak, Snatch, Sneakers, The Specials, Spider-Man 2, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Sting, The Terminator, Thank You For Smoking, The Thing, The Third Man, Throne of Blood, Time Bandits, Unforgiven, The Untouchables, Watership Down, Willow, The Wizard of Oz, Used Cars, The Valet, X-Men 2, Yellowbeard, Young Frankenstein

The Vetoed List (remember, once it goes on this list, it can’t come off):

Airplane, Amelie, Avatar, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China, Blade Runner, Blazing Saddles, Brazil, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Bug’s Life, Caddyshack, Chasing Amy, Children of Men, Clue, Contact, Cowboy Bebop, Dangerous Liasons, The Dark Crystal, Dogma, Drunken Master 2, Evil Dead II, The Fifth Element, Finding Nemo, (500) Days of Summer, The Goonies, Groundhog Day, Happy Gilmore, Hot Fuzz, Hudson Hawk, The Incredibles, Iron Man, Jacob’s Ladder, The Jerk, Jurassic Park, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Love Actually, The Matrix, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Monsters, Inc., Pan’s Labyrinth, The Patriot, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, The Philadelphia Story, Police Story 3, Ratatouille, Repo Man, Schindler’s List, Serenity, Sexy Beast, Shaun of the Dead, The Shawshank Redemption, Shrek, Silverado, Sin City, Star Wars, Stargate, Starsky and Hutch, Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, The 13th Warrior, 30 Days of Night, This Is Spinal Tap, Tombstone, Tommy Boy, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Unbreakable, Up, The Usual Suspects, WALL-E, When Harry Met Sally, Zombieland, Zoolander

There we go; let the consensus-building continue!

I don’t see how anybody can’t not love El Papagayo.

I mean, honestly: can you imagine a better foil for mean old never-smiles Jonah Hex? El Papagayo is such a happy and friendly backstabbing amoral bastard. He has a happy parrot! How many baddies have a happy parrot? I bet Jonah Hex really hates that parrot. “Fuckin’ parrot,” he mutters under his breath (because Jonah Hex mutters under his breath, that is a very Jonah Hex sort of a thing to do).

And if there’s anybody who’s going to be the “damn Mexican” who gets away every time, who’s the guy Hex can never quite manage to fill with lead, I defy anybody to have it be someone other than El Papagayo. Because he has a happy parrot. Not everybody can pull off a happy parrot. Captain Stingaree, for example, never could. But then again, Captain Stingaree was insane and thought he was a pirate.

ME: That was a surprisingly unsatisfying set of trailers we just saw.
FLAPJACKS: Says you. I was enthralled to see that we will get another chapter of Resident Evil, and this time in three-dee!
ME: Do you kind of get the feeling that that trailer was intended to be shown in 3D and then… wasn’t shown that way?
FLAPJACKS: You mean with all the shots of Milla whatsername –
ME: Jovovovovovitch.
FLAPJACKS – whatsername shooting RIGHT AT YOU and then her and the other girl who I assume is supposed to be a clone of Milla jumping backwards through the window and then falling while shooting RIGHT AT YOU through a haze of glass shards? I dunno, maybe they thought “whoa, if we don’t show this in three-dee, maybe the nerds will be all “damn, now I got to see that with the goggles on” and we will make lotsa money”? Like that?
ME: Yeah.
FLAPJACKS: I dunno. Maybe. I kinda think that the actual Resident Evil 3D will just be two hours of Milla bobbing her head back and forth in front of the camera, like in Count Floyd’s Monster Chiller Horror Theatre.
ME: Which will still be more entertaining than Get Him To The Greek. “Hey, remember that one character who was funny for about the first ten minutes he was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall Here’s two hours of him!”
FLAPJACKS: “Also starring Jonah Hill, for some reason. We’re not really sure why, to be honest.”
ME: Jonah Hill is definitely one of those actors who does, like, one thing.
FLAPJACKS: What thing does he do?
ME: I’m not sure. But he does it. Man, does he do it.
FLAPJACKS: I wonder what’s gonna happen when Jonah Hill loses the weight that his doctor probably tells him regularly he should lose for health reasons? I mean, is it going to be like Wayne Knight? Did you see that? He lost all that weight and then he just wasn’t Newman any more.
ME: I hear Wayne Knight does critically acclaimed off-Broadway stuff now, so I doubt he’s worried. I mean, worst-case scenario, he just goes into a closet that’s labeled “Seinfeld Money” and takes out a laundry bag full of hundred dollar bills. The closet is five miles deep.
FLAPJACKS: Will Jonah Hill ever have that kind of closet?
ME: It’s entirely possible he already has one. I bet his has guardian Morlocks in it.
FLAPJACKS: Topic change! Jonah Hex. What do we think?
ME: Well, on the one hand you have a cowboy with a gatling-gun horse and rocket-dynamite crossbows who talks to dead people. That’s kind of awesome. But on the other hand, that’s not Jonah Hex. Jonah Hex doesn’t need a gatling-gun horse or rocket-dynamite crossbows or the powers of the Sixth Sense kid. Jonah Hex only needs a knife and a revolver and pure motherfucking anger to kill you. People who fight Jonah Hex should have gatling-gun horses just so they can find out how useless those things are when you fight Jonah Hex.
FLAPJACKS: So it’s kind of like they made a Batman movie with Adam Sandler as Batman.
ME: Shut up shut up shut up I don’t want Bruce Vilanch to hear that and get ideas for the next Oscar ceremony’s “comedy” bits.
FLAPJACKS: Speaking of which, Grown Ups. What the fuck? I mean, seriously, what the fucking fuck? Wasn’t Adam Sandler’s career over already? I can’t even remember the last three movies he made.
ME: Funny People, Bedtime Stories and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.
FLAPJACKS: I forgot. You’re like the film-school version of Rain Man.
ME: Look, you have to understand: his movies always make back all the money they cost, and then some. And given that this is a guy whose comedy about an Israeli commando-turned-hairdresser cost ninety million dollars, that says something. Plus, Kevin James is in this one, and after Blart Blart Mall Blart he is apparently a giant cheque in human form, merely waiting to be signed.
FLAPJACKS: Wait, what the fuck is Maria Bello doing in that movie as his wife? Surely there must be some clause that says “there is a limit to how fat and stupid a man can be, even in a Hollywood movie, if Maria Bello is going to play his wife.”
ME: Girls think Kevin James is cuddly. The fact that Sandler gets to have Salma Hayek playing his wife disturbs me a lot more than that. I mean, Adam Sandler’s actual wife is honestly pretty hot. Why does he need Salma Hayek? It’s like he’s rubbing it in that he’s rich and famous.
FLAPJACKS: At least they kept David Spade single in this movie.
ME: I’m pretty sure they learned their lesson when the ending of Joe Dirt, where Spade gets the girl, resulted in a massive increase in cancer diagnoses coinciding with the movie’s release.
FLAPJACKS: There are like, no good trailers before this movie.
ME: Well, we are seeing Macgruber. Isn’t that mostly admitting that we have no standards? The studio people were probably all “oh, whatever, just throw ads for shit we wouldn’t make dogs watch in front of MacGruber. They’re already there anyway. Maybe they’ll decide to buy a ticket.”
FLAPJACKS: No, no, I think they were very deliberately marketing to idiots.
ME: And yet, we are here.
FLAPJACKS: No, you’re here. I’m just a figment of your imagination.
ME: No, you’re not.
FLAPJACKS: Look, run with it, will you? I don’t want people finding out I actually paid money to see MacGruber. If I’m just a figment of your imagination then maybe when somebody I actually know asks me if I went to see MacGruber they will believe my lies.
ME: I doubt it. You’re not trustworthy. You still haven’t returned my wok.

Not half as bad as many critics have complained, but the constant whitewashing of the setting borders on the ridiculous: British people (or Americans with bad British accents) are just not Persians, and it’s honestly kind of offensive to try and pretend otherwise, which serves to ruin an otherwise innocuous two-hour bit of entertaining pointlessness.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.