Dan Didio has said repeatedly that the DCU reboot is permanent.

However, in less than two months, they have changed their mind as to whether Wonder Woman should wear pants.

Constancy is not their strong point, you know?

Your guest judges tonight are Mary Murphy and Rex Harrington, who is Mary’s gay best friend who lives in Canada.

Lauren and Rodrigo: hip-hop. I love that Luther knows that a good hip-hop routine doesn’t have to have a storyline, and I really liked his choreo here. Rodrigo was predictably excellent here, just straight-up killing it for ninety seconds solid. Not a step wrong for him. Lauren was much better than I expected she would be: there were a few moments where she wasn’t hitting it at all and was just going through the motions and looking a bit awkward, but there were more where she was dancing perfectly good hip-hop. Given that Lauren and Rodrigo have superb chemistry together, a few flubs on Lauren’s part were easily ignored, though. Strong opener.

Lindsay and Christian: contemporary. Blake explains that his routine is about how nice it is to touch people, which is barely an explanation of what it’s about and that suits me just fine. Lindsay was very good in this, as should surprise nobody. This was a seriously forklifty routine for Christian, what with the approximately 5000 lifts he had to perform, but he did them quite nicely – my only complaint, actually, is that one point he had to take a few steps away and then turn and his hips just fell into a Latin promenade-and-swing-around, which looked absolutely ridiculous (in context, it made him look like he was doing a hip-cock “look at my ass!” moment – especially given his dramatic expression at the time) and took me out of the routine for a second. But other than that, this was good.

Denitsa and JP: jive. While I’m glad to see Tiny Hugh Jackman Danny back to choreo, this felt lacklustre, and I feel like some of the blame has to JP on this: the entire thing felt about 3/4 speed, just a hair too sluggish to be really enjoyable. His extensions on his kicks weren’t terribly impressive either. Denitsa tried her best, but… yeah. Not enthralling. Not terrible, mind you, not actively bad or anything. Just… not riveting. It was an average dance on a show that’s at present wildly above average.

Carlena and Boneless: dancehall. Okay, here’s the thing: by any objective standard, Carlena did a standout job on this routine: she hit every move just about perfectly and flowed with the dance as she should have done, and brought her personality to it as well. But the problem is that she was dancing with Boneless, and Boneless was so fucking good in this routine that he actually made Carlena look a little less good just because he was working well above her already extremely high level. In other words, this was amazing. (Hearing Mary imitate Tre’s Caribbean patois was less amazing.)

Teya and Kevin: Viennese waltz. Sadly, this was not even remotely close to good. I was really rooting for Teya and Kevin to nail this, but Teya in particular just had no technique whatsoever: at times it appeared as though she was actually stumbling through her moves rather than dancing at all and at least once I was certain that she was about to fall down. Kevin at least had a little rise and fall, but only a little bit, and he didn’t execute the lifts anywhere near sufficiently. The judges call this “not bad,” which in SYTYCD Canada judgespeak means “this was atrocious.” Just terrible.

Geisha and Francois: hip-hop. I liked Tucker Barkley’s choreo a lot more than I liked his choreo last week, but I didn’t like the dancing as much as the judges did. I thought Geisha was good – not great, as she started off softer than I would like, but good overall – and Francois was borderline acceptable at best, the absolute minimum of what a competent hip-hop performance should be – I particularly think he sacrificed a lot of technique to match the routine’s speed. However, the judges gave him more props than they gave Geisha, which is just sort of wrong. Then Rex Harrington exclaims that he is using so much hip-hop jargon that he will become black by the end of the night, which – no, Rex Harrington. Just no.

Yuliya and Adam: samba. Gustavo MOTHERFUCKING Vargas explains that this is a Brazilian samba, which apparently means that he can blend capoeira moves into it as he sees fit, which protects Adam a lot because Adam’s actual samba was only passable at best – but he was quite good at capoeira-style flipping and leaping, and the choreo blended that in with Yuliya’s insane hipwork extremely smoothly, and Adam and Yuliya were much better at partnering each other this week than last week when they were a bit stiffer. Which is to say: I don’t know if this was especially good, but I know that I enjoyed it.

Melissa and Shane: contemporary. A really astounding bit of work from Sabrina Matthews here, who is really impressing me so far this season. Yes, granted, it was a Very Special Dance (about contracting HIV), and some of the lifts didn’t really make sense to me (if Melissa is supporting Shane, why is he lifting her?), but generally my response to that was “so what” because the dancing was really just excellent and powerful on multiple levels here by both Melissa and Shane. This was just very, very good, and there is not much more to say than that.

Shelaina and Matt: hustle. Although I’m always happy to see hustle on SYTYCD, this didn’t especially thrill me: the lifts were big and epic, and I can’t fault the dancers on that score, but the floorwork just left me wanting more commitment: it felt tentative, lacking confidence, and the quick reverses didn’t snap as they should have done. This was disappointing. Not outright bad, but… mediocre, let’s say, or bland.

Jordan and Joey: jazz. The plot of this Sean Cheeseman routine is “girl doesn’t want guy to kiss her,” which given that Joey seems very doubtful to be interested in the ladies is a bit ludicrous, but Jordan and Joey do their best to go over-the-top with Jordan making ridiculous pouty faces and Joey… kinda looking like a goldfish? But, that aside, the movement here was insane, just what-the-hell choreo, every move done absolutely perfectly. An excellent ending routine to the show.

Probable bottom three: Shelaina and Matt, Teya and Kevin, Geisha and Francois.
Should go home: Teya and Kevin.
Will go home: Teya and Kevin.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I just got back from watching the first episode of Torchwood (a local British-pub style bar and restaurant hosts a monthly Doctor Who showing, and this month was ‘A Good Man Goes to War’ and ‘Miracle Day’), and I have to admit, as someone who was never really grabbed by Torchwood the way I was by Doctor Who, this one was pretty good. Russell T Davies really seems to have hit on something with the idea of making the entire season one long multi-part story, centered on a single big worldwide phenomenon that the Torchwood team investigates. (Of course, by this time it’s the Torchwood duo…one of the other things I admire about the series is that they don’t pretend Torchwood is actually all that special at their job. They are not the best of the best of the best, they are bloody-minded and too curious for their own good.)

This time, for those who haven’t heard, the big phenomenon is that people have stopped dying. All over the world, the morgues are emptying out as they stop getting new customers. It’s not that people are magically healing or anything; one of the new characters, a CIA agent played by Mekhi Phifer, has a hole in his chest that was briefly filled by a piece of rebar. But they’re staying alive, a fact which is taken as evidence of a miracle…until people start realizing that we don’t have the resources to take care of a population that gets old and sick and wounded and hungry but never ever dies.

At which point, Jack and Gwen, formerly of the Torchwood Institute, begin to get involved. It’s an interesting hook, and while we’ll have to see where it goes, the first episode is sharp and clever and has lots of interesting bits. (It also has one transcendently silly bit where a child murderer is set free because he claims that he was executed and hence has served his sentence, which I will chalk up to RTD being a British TV writer and not an American lawyer.)

On the whole, I’m interested enough to keep an eye out for Part Two; for one thing, I’m curious to see whether my crazy theory about why everyone’s immortal is correct. (Crazy theory: Jack’s immortality has been siphoned out, as part of a murder plot against him, and has wound up being distributed among the rest of the world’s population.) For those of you who liked previous seasons of Torchwood, this one’s good too. For those of you who, like me, tuned out after the first three episodes and never went back, this is better than those were. For those of you who’ve never seen Torchwood, this is a pretty cool mini-series so far.

People have been asking me in email if I think the difference between the quality of the Canadian version of SYTYCD (thus far – be wary, as they all danced mostly in-style this week and next week is the real test) as to the American version which has not enthralled this season so far is down to the quality of the dancers or the training or something else entirely, and the answer is “I’m not sure.”

However, one nice thing about the Canadian version is that they always show the full dances the dancers have to go through in finals week, and it gives me an opportunity to show off Jean-Marc Genereaux and his wife France (sorry, “thelovelyFrance”), who always demo the ballroom portion of finals week and who are always sick.

Is the American version as rigorous as this? I’m not sure, because they never show the full routine.

My first encounter with Signalman came in an issue of Justice League of America I read when I was about five – specifically a two-parter where he was part of the Ultra-Humanite’s Secret Society of Super-Villains. (This was one of the periodic JLA/JSA teamups which were so awesome at the time and which modern-day comics writers try to duplicate, not understanding that once the JLA and JSA are basically neighbours the idea of the JLA/JSA teamup loses a lot of its cachet.) In this story, he beat up Batman. Batman. (In the same issue the Monocle beat up Hawkman, which was awesome.) And the way Signalman beat Batman was brilliant: he hypnotized a crowd of innocents and let them beat up Batman, using Batman’s unwillingness to harm innocents against him in a sort of Bronze Age-version of Bane using Batman’s own dedication against him. Clearly this was a major player!

Imagine my disappointment years later when I did some checking up and found out that Signalman was a Golden Age chump of a bad guy who wasn’t anywhere near as awesome-looking when George Perez wasn’t drawing him and who was basically a lesser equivalent of the Riddler, except worse because the Riddler’s riddles were usually at least reasonably difficult whereas Signalman’s were just stupid. And let’s be honest, at least the Riddler has a sense of style: he wears nice suits. Signalman wears fugly red-and-yellow tights, with diagonally striped underwears, and a cowled cape with “signals” all over it.

And Signalman finally figured out that warning Batman ahead of time that you were going to commit a crime was stupid, what did he do? He adopted a new identity: the Blue Bowman. And then he tried to beat Green Arrow at super-archery. What the hell, Signalman. What the hell.

A rating earned mostly by the time George Perez drew him and he was briefly kind of awesome.

Your guest judges this week are Jesse Tyler Ferguson of Modern Family and Sonya Tayeh. Ferguson is verbose and actually occasionally helpful, and makes the long-overdue point that Cat Deeley really deserves an Emmy nomination for her work as host. Sonya is a neverending stream of celebratory nothing.

Sasha and Alexander: paso doble and Broadway.. Alexander says his character is “ready to go” in the gentlest, most boyish way possible, which tells you a great deal about Alexander. Tony-N-Melanie choreographed a paso here where apparently both dancers were playing the male role, and Sasha was better at it than Alexander, which also tells you a lot about Alexander. Anyway, this was your standard mediocre two-contemporary-dancers-do-ballroom paso on SYTYCD, but there have been far worse.

Tasty gives another Broadway, which was unfocused but not bad. Sasha slips up at the end, but covers for it well. Alexander is Alexander and that is all you need to know: Nigel gives him props for being strong for once, which… he was okay and in any proper season of this show would have lasted three weeks (or get Kameronned in top 10, which is what looks to happen).

Jordan and Tadd: contemporary and Broadway. I really liked Travis’ choreo on the contemporary: it was like what he was trying to do with that Legacy contemporary in season 6 – use a B-boy to make violent choreo more emphatic – except this time it worked properly and wasn’t a mess. Tadd was excellent. Jordan was… well, she was perfectly adequate, which is what I expected from her at this point. Jordan doesn’t really engage me as a dancer yet: whereas Tadd has demonstrated some really exciting work, Jordan has just never screwed up anything and is competent all the time. But, unfortunately, also kind of boring.

The Broadway was cute (Spencer Liff going two-for-two) but very, very basic, and it looks like they took everything Jordan couldn’t do out of the routine? I don’t know. The judges act very disappointed, thus giving the audience permission to not vote for these two so they can eliminate the only non-technically-trained dancer remaining. Oh, wait, that’s just my running conspiracy theory.

Ryan and Ricky: Broadway and cha-cha. Spencer Liff put together a really engaging and impressive bit of choreography for the Broadway, and Ricky and Ryan did not really carry it. Ryan danced heavily like she always does (but, on the bright side, got to dance in a style where her constant smiling is an asset rather than a hindrance); Ricky made the mistake of trying to match unison with Mollee 2.0 instead of simply outdancing her, which is both gentlemanly and stupid. Nigel again praises last week’s lousy “fashion zombie” routine, which – shut up, Nigel.

The cha-cha was… oh my god so bad. SO GODDAMNED BAD. Ricky was okay and I think with more practice could be quite decent at this. Ryan was terrible. I mean, there was nothing good about that performance: every second of it was awkward, her footwork was a mess, she didn’t have anything resembling a decent Latin carriage… I could go on at length. The judges soft-sold their criticism. Mary calls it the “fastest darn cha-cha I’ve ever seen,” which – not even remotely close. This was horrendous, arguably worse than Missy and Wadi’s cha-cha three weeks back.

Caitlyn and Mitchell: hip-hop and contemporary. Christopher Smith says this routine is about child soldiers, which… sure, whatever, anything to distract me from what was one of the most godawful hip-hop performances I’ve ever seen on this show. No unison, almost completely absent of hip-hop technique, no flavour or attitude whatsoever. Both Caitlyn and Mitchell were completely lousy in this, and it was already a routine that had quite a few points where they weren’t doing anything but running around so I’m not inclined to be generous with them. Judges give them the “it sucked but you’re still awesome” judging.

Travis’ contemporary choreo was mostly a miss for me: some interesting lifts, but nothing else that really impressed me. (One of the dangers of constantly tossing out and celebrating contemporary choreography is that it all starts to run together – such as, for example, when in a single night you have four contemporary routines and three Broadway routines with SYTYCD’s standard contempo-focus.) Mitchell and Caitlyn were perfectly okay in it, however.

Melanie and Marko: tango and contemporary. Louis Van Amstel! Woo! And the tango was… okay. Their execution was not perfect, but it had some great bits of choreo (the portion by the stage’s edge, the final lift) and they executed those bits quite nicely, and I can’t really call a routine where they hit the high points dead-on “bad” per se. It was okay! But only okay, and thus the judges’ overpraising of it was really irritating. Coincidentally, this is the only time in the first five weeks that Melanie and Marko have had to dance out of their genre (I refuse to count their “lyrical hip-hop” as being anything other than contemporary set to a beat).

Dee Caspary’s choreo was lovely and they danced it perfectly, which is not surprising, and the constant pimping of Melanie and Marko as a power couple when they’ve danced in their genre effectively five times out of six (and have had their weakest moments when they strayed away from their comfort zone) drives me batty, but it was a good routine and danced well.

Clarice and Jess: hip-hop and jive. On Twitter I was asked “Jess performing hip hop: Horrible farce or insult to all dance?” and the answer is: a-ha, false premise, because they were dancing a contemporary piece with beats in, just as Melanie and Marko did a couple weeks ago. Which they did quite well, given that they weren’t dancing a hip-hop routine: ignore what it says on the tin, as Christopher Scott has learned well that this show is not interested in actual hip-hop choreography any more. And for that, their unison was good and their chemistry excellent (and it is worth noting that their chemistry was initially terrible and they have worked hard to rectify that).

The jive was… laboured, is the word I think to use here. I think this is another one of those pieces where with more practice it would have been much better, but as it was I could see them mentally preparing for the big tricks. Judges praise it to high heaven, because I guess this is what constitutes “good” ballroom on the American show these days. Sorry if I sound bitter, but the Canadian show this week was so much better in just about every possible way and such a reminder of what the show can be that seeing what the American show has become is endlessly frustrating.

Probable bottom three: Ryan and Ricky, Caitlyn and Mitchell, Jordan and Tadd.
Should go home: Ryan and Mitchell.
Will go home: Caitlyn and Tadd.

On Twitter, @magiclovehose asks:

Something for the “give me something to write about” list: the legal ramifications of copyright and 3D printers?

The thing about 3D printers is that they directly challenge one of the assumptions upon which copyright law is predicated.

See, right now, in most countries you can’t copyright the design of a utilitarian item. Say I am IKEA and I design a chair. That chair can’t be copyrighted: it’s utilitarian. The point of the chair is to make many more chairs just like it for common use: the idea of the chair is not copyrightable. (The building instructions, on the other hand, can be. Which is a minor reason IKEA does things the way that they do.) However. Say I am not IKEA, but instead I am a humble woodworker. And say I design a chair, but I design it as a work of art: the back of the chair is a gorgeous woodcarving of Jesus and Muhammad Ali fighting aliens. Now it’s not just a simple chair: it’s a personal expression. Therefore, it now attracts copyright.

That’s how the law works for chairs – and other utilitarian items – right now. If you mass-produce it, it’s not copyrightable; it’s utilitarian. (You may be able to patent it, of course, but that’s a different kettle of intellectual property-fish.) But when 3D printing enters the scene, that turns this entire legal scheme on its ear, because 3D printing will eventually render everything mass-producible. I carve my Jesus/Ali/Aliens chair, and then somebody else 3D scans it and suddenly you can torrent the .cad file to make my chair in a 3D printer from half a dozen places on the net.

So what happens at this point? Have I lost copyright in my chair because it’s been mass-produced and therefore my chair has become utilitarian and a piece of non-singular design? Or have the people downloading the file and reproducing my chair in iChair 2015 infringed my copyright in the chair? The answer at this point is “ask again later” because I sure as hell don’t know: thanks to technology we’re once again approaching a problem that copyright systems never anticipated coming. Will iChair’s additional features allowing the user to make sure that design features of customized chairs don’t keep the chair from being used for its traditional “sitting in it” purpose strengthen the utilitarian argument? What if iChair lets you design chairs from scratch and autocorrects you to make sure the chair is viable and won’t fall apart, which essentially means that with enough market penetration no original design will be non-duplicable even without people copying it? (This is the “sooner or later someone else will make a Jesus/Ali/Aliens chair” argument.) Does mass production therefore destroy whatever copyright exists in industrial design, or does it mean that legislatures and/or judiciaries will find new sources of copyright that do not as yet exist?

Like I said: I don’t know. But suspecting that the answer will benefit whoever stands to massively profit from the new industrial design landscape when 3D printing comes around will probably not be entirely inaccurate.

Your judges tonight are Jean-Marc, Tre, Blake, Luther and Mary. No surprises for the first episode – well, other than the fact that they went with five judges, and Mary’s judging two shows this week, and what happened to Moses, which is just downright tragic. (For SYTYCD USA viewers who don’t follow the Canadian show: Moses has auditioned all four years for the show, made it to final cut years two and three, and finally made the show this year – and then had to pull out because of torn shoulder ligaments a week before the first performance episode. The backstage video was just him crying. Poor dude.)

Lindsay and Christian: salsa. (Lindsay: contemporary, Christian: ballroomer.) This was a ridiculously good way to start off the show: easily one of the best kickoff performances for a season ever (up there with Philipchbeeb/Jeanine from season 5 USA and Ben/Pania from Australia s2). Tony-N-Melanie called it a street salsa, but for me this split the difference between a competition-style performance salsa and a street dance. This is not a criticism, as both Lindsay and Christian were very, very good in this: the over-shoulder split-leg lift could have been a bit faster and smoother, perhaps, but I suspect that it was actually choreographed that way. Lindsay in particular was impressive because she matched Christian step-for-step (and he was predictably excellent). I’m sorry, but it’s been so long since I saw a really great ballroom performance on SYTYCD and I am jazzed.

Jordan and Joey: contemporary. (Both contemporary dancers.) In vignettes, Joey is shown dancing practice dances with Sabra, which is random but wonderful. This dance was a Stacey Tookey number that was apparently dedicated to “everybody suffering in natural disasters,” and although that theme didn’t come through for me – it felt like a dance that could apply to any difficult situation solved through selflessness – that doesn’t mean that the choreography wasn’t lovely and the dancing superb on Jordan and Joey’s part. The twinned leg extension on the floor: amazing. And Stacey Tookey defied my expectations because, when the music hit its crescendo, I was expecting standard SYTYCD intense contempo-flailing and then she did not do that thing, instead going to slowness and deliberation, and I was very pleased to see that happen.

Denitza and JP: hip-hop. (Denitza: ballroomer, JP: hip-hopper.) Despite that JP is the hip-hop dancer here, I actually felt Denitza did the better job simply on the basis of performance: JP looked a bit nervous and uncomfortable. They all hit all their marks, but I didn’t particularly care for the choreography, which wasn’t up to what I expected from Tucker Barkley (who is a really insanely good hip-hop dancer); it felt thrown together and often arbitrary, and I don’t know if that’s to Denitza and JP not getting his steps and the dance having to be dumbed down, or if he just had an off night. This wasn’t especially bad, but it was average, and suffered following two excellent performances in comparison.

Shelaina and Matt: contemporary. (Both contemporary.) I really liked the shit out of this routine. I don’t think Shelaina and Matt danced it quite as well as Jordan and Joey danced their routine (Matt in particular had one or two visible bobbles), but Sabrina Matthews’ living-doll choreography was exceptionally entertaining, and minor mistakes aside both Shelaina and Matt really got into their characters and danced the hell out of this: the piece had a great edgy, brittle feel to it which I appreciated greatly, and the lifts were just cool in a way that’s really hard to approach with contemporary lifts. This was very good.

Yuliya and Adam L: “theater.” (Ballroom and jazz, respectively.) Adam L looks suspiciously like Pasha and dances suspiciously like a jazz dancer version of Pasha. I believe there has been cloning! Anyways, both Yuliya and Adam L danced this quite well, but here is the problem: it is a Melissa Williams routine, which means that even before the dancing begins I am expecting something corny, frenetic, disorganized and mashing up genres for the sake of it, and once again I am not disappointed. For all that this was a “theater” piece, what it actually turned out to be was a jive with some jazz flourishes to it, not unlike Melissa Williams saying “well, I have a trained ballroom dancer and a jazz dancers – let’s work with that!” and then failing. Again. (I’m sorry if this seems like I am being hard on Melissa Williams, but it has now been four seasons and she hasn’t choreographed one single piece I liked. I am just thankful this was not “new disco.”) It’s a shame, because in spite of the lackluster piece I thought Yuliya and Adam were doing their best with it.

Cassandra and Francois: rhumba. (Cassandra: jazz, Francois: ballroom.) Cassandra refers to herself as “Cassexy,” which – she is eighteen, so it is forgivable that she would do something like that, but that does not make me say “.nnnnnno” any less. Eric Katy and Kelly Lannan’s choreo was really very nice here, hitting exactly that level of “epic” I like to see in a SYTYCD rhumba (to the point that, when rosepetals began falling from the ceiling, it didn’t seem forced), and Francois and Cassandra mostly did it justice: she was a little tentative in parts, especially at the beginning, but as the dance progressed she clearly found her groove and transitioned from just walking through the steps to dancing them. Francois was, unsurprisingly, really terrific. This was damn good.

Carlena and Boneless: hip-hop. (Both hip-hop.) Carlena gets the “by the way, I had a horrible childhood” vignette, presumably because the producers realized that after the judges lectured her for being bitchy they needed to counter that so that voters wouldn’t treat her like the plague. Anyway, the crowd went absolutely apeshit for this, which isn’t surprising because Carlena and Boneless absolutely murdered Steve Bolton’s choreography, and I think the last time I wrote that about a hip-hop routine on SYTYCD was when Alex Wong and Twitch danced off in season 7, and that is sort of cheating because it was Twitch, who was proven and professional talent by that point. (Aside: when is Twitch going to get to do choreo for a show? He deserves a shot if he wants it.)

Teya and Kevin: contemporary. (Teya: hip-hop, Kevin: contemporary.) There’s a sort of point where a non-trained dancer can hit when they’re doing technical choreography that I really love seeing (and this goes for other genres as well): they’re not doing extensions in the way that a trained dancer does, but they fall into the dance and work it to the best of their abilities, and it becomes something special, which is the reason to watch this show in the first place. Pasha hit it in season 3 USA, Demi hit it in season 1 Australia, Legacy hit it in season 6 USA, and Teya hit it here. Kevin was extremely good, justifying his inevitable fan-favorite status (as he’s been auditioning since season 1, and lost sixty pounds over the four years as he pursued dancing – really, the visual contrast is striking). Stacey Tookey’s choreography here was more what I expect out of a “standard SYTYCD choreography” mode than her first piece, but that didn’t make this not good.

Lauren and Rodrigo: cha-cha. (Lauren: Latin ballroom, Rodrigo: hip-hop.) GUSTAVO MOTHERFUCKING VARGAS routine, oh yes, and his choreo did not disappoint, but if we are being truthful this is the sort of routine that the term “hot mess” was invented to describe. The performance quality was off the charts: this really felt like a genuine club performance and Lauren and Rodrigo have insane amounts of chemistry., and Lauren can cha-cha like nobody’s business. However: Rodrigo wasn’t doing a cha-cha here. He was doing this sort of weird synthesis of hip-hop with a little Latin flavour and some purely animalistic movement, and I can’t call it good cha-cha in conscience, but it was extremely entertaining, and I suspect that since he took his shirt off the teen girls will be voting for him in force.

Geisha and Adam L: new disco. (Both contemporary, but Adam clearly has some b-boy roots.) OH GOD IT’S MY FAULT I SAID “NEW DISCO” AND IT’S LIKE WHEN YOU SAY “CANDYMAN” THREE TIMES. Yes, it’s another Melissa Williams routine, and I’ll say again that “new disco” is just an uneven fusion of jazz and disco that veers back and forth between focusing on one or the other depending on who’s dancing it, and why can’t Melissa Williams stop trying to make “fetch” happen? Geisha and Adam did as well as could be expected with it, for what that is worth, but… yeah. The entire thing felt half-speed. (Also, I am unabashedly rooting for Geisha right now as she is a fellow Carletonian.)

Melissa and Shane: afrojazz. (Melissa contemporary, Shane jazz.) Both Melissa and Shane are tryout veterans (her four times, him three), so they are clearly pleased to be here. An excellent piece of work from Sean Cheeseman, I thought, and Melissa and Shane murdered it: their unison moves were dead perfect, their performance quality was superb and their chemistry solid. I don’t have much else to say, other than A) this was great and B) this episode contends with Australia season 2 and USA season 5 for “best opening performance episode ever.”

Probable bottom three: Denitza and JP, Yuliya and Adam L, Geisha and Adam A.
Should go home: Yuliya and JP.
Will go home: Yuliya and Adam L.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

For those so inclined, this week’s sub-headers for Davinder and myself contain a Clue (!).

Is it still entertaining to mock Harry Knowles, or have we moved on to the point where we view him as just sort of faintly sad? I mean, at this point we all know exactly what Knowles’ flaws are as a film journalist, but is he still relevant enough that we can take deep pleasure in seeing him suffer?

I ask because I found his review of Toy Story 3 while wandering through the site a few weeks back, and it has to be one of the sweetest pieces of schadenfreude I’ve seen in a long time. If you really feel like it’s not worth it to make fun of him, though, just let me know and I’ll give you written permission to skip the rest of the entry. (Please allow 4-6 weeks for processing of your request.) Oh, this would also be where those of you who don’t want spoilers for Toy Story 3 should skip out.

continue reading "I Forget…"

So over the July 4 weekend I finally got around to seeing X-Men: First Class, and…ugh.  I know that movie’s a critical hit and all, but it just left me…angry, I guess, that I’d wasted my time.  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I hated the movie for the same reason I don’t really like the X-Men in the first place.

I’ve never been able to get into the X-Men.  I can dig just about all the other classic Marvel guys–The Fantastic Four, Captain America, Spider-Man, you name it–but by and large my impression of the X-Men is a lot like my impression of First Class–too many characters running around in an overwrought, self-important morality play.  (I liked the original 2000 movie, and I remember thinking this was because it avoided the usual X-Men bullshit.)  The theme that mutant/human relations serves as a metaphor for real-world civil rights issues is a good one, but it’s trotted out all too often to justify stories where mutants just worry about their personal problems, or sit around being douchebags.

X-Men: First Class suffers from an abundance of douchebags.  The movie presents three choices for the mutants–they can follow Professor X and seek peaceful coexistence with humans, they can follow Sebastian Shaw and use their abilities to live like kings, or they can follow Magneto and attack the humans before the humans hit them first.  This is a great start for a story, but the movie fell apart for me when I realized I don’t really want any of these three guys to win because they’re all racists.  I mean, setting aside the various obnoxious things they do to their fellow mutants, each of them clearly sees normal humans as an inferior race–Shaw treats them like lackeys and beasts of burden; Magneto treats them like irrational savages hellbent on a race war; and Xavier treats them like children who won’t understand tolerance until he talks down to them about it.  This is especially problematic when the movie hinges upon Xavier and Magneto as the heroes.  The end result is a three-way conflict of equally unappealing ideologies, the likes of which have not been seen since the WCW vs. NWO-Hollywood vs. NWO-Wolfpac feud of 1998.

There are advantages to making Xavier more irritating and Magneto more sympathetic.  It certainly makes both of them deeper, more realistic characters.  But there’s a reason fiction tends to prefer stark Manichaeism over shades of gray–people don’t want to hold their nose and back the lesser evil, they want to find a clear favorite to root for.  Admittedly, in the real world, we’re always supporting one dickhead to better oppose some bigger dickhead, but in the real world we have to.  If I don’t like the state of immigration politics in the US, my only choices are to live with it or try to do something about it.  If I don’t like the state of mutant civil rights in the Marvel Universe, I have a third option–I can stop buying X-Men crap and it all goes away.  So you can see where I think Marvel has a clear incentive to give me a mutant activist I can truly get behind.

What would help such a character win people over is if he would actually accomplish a goal.  Pop quiz, when was the last time the X-Men unequivocally won anything? My first thought was the time they beat Norman Osborn in that Dark Avengers crossover, but when I say “beat” I actually mean they fled American soil rather than fight a lost cause.  That’s usually how it goes–they blunder into a storyline and consider it a success if they escape with their lives.  Restoring the status quo is a typical and acceptable goal for most superheroes, but that’s because most superheroes prefer the status quo.  The X-Men are opposed to the status quo (“world that hates and fears them,” remember?) so every story where they don’t make the world better is sort of a failure for them.  What are the X-Men comics doing these days?  I guess Wolverine and Cyclops are fighting over who gets to lead the X-Men.  What difference does it make?  I’m sure it’ll be appealing if you’re into the personal relationship between Scott and Logan, but that’s the selling point of a soap opera, not a superhero story.  A superhero story is about getting stuff done; the X-Men tend to just mope about how stuff is hard.