Robots That Aren't Disguised That Well

Our fancy spancy Mitsubishi TV is acting up again. It gets into this mode where you turn it on and the screen will flash up a warning that "TV will shut off in a few seconds. Please check the airflow filter is not blocked." So there's nothing remotely close to the TV blocking any air vents that we can see. Mitsubishi tech support offers this gem of advice "Turn off the TV and unplug it for 20 minutes". That's their solution? Seriously? Anyway, the unplugging doesn't always work. But usually some combination of switching inputs, hitting system reset and turning it off and on seem to eventually clear whatever bit is stuck. But I haven't found a proven sequence of steps that assures it of being cleared. It's more like keep trying stuff and resetting and hope that if something has shorted out it will fix itself. Luckily the TV is still under warranty at this point. And looking online it appears that a lot of people are having this problem and it seems that if they got the "thermal fuse" replaced the problem went away. At this point I'm starting to wonder if it's too late to get an extended warranty.

CBS surprised me today. No, it's not that they canceled "Viva Laughlin" after just two episodes (an hour long musical drama about a casino, what were they smoking when they rubber stamped that one initially). No, I believe that cancellation was to be expected. What surprised me was that they ordered four more scripts for that "Moonlight" show. I'm really shocked that's still on the air (although if it's gotten better, I wouldn't know it since we dropped it weeks ago). But sadly Moonlight is pulling in numbers that are a lot better than Reaper, which is probably my favorite new show this season. And so far the CW hasn't given Reaper a full season order yet. Come on CW, cowboy up and green light a full season of Reaper already.

I watched the new Transformers movie last week. I missed the boat on the cartoon, as it came out during the end of my high school years. And while sure, I'll admit I still watched cartoons then, I wasn't watching just any cartoons, I had refined tastes for stuff like Looney Tunes (I didn't get back to newer cartoons until stuff like Spider-Man, X-Men and Batman: The Animated Series came out). So all this is a fancy way of saying I'm not nostalgic for Transformers. They don't occupy a special place in my memory or anything like that. I know that distorted cyber sounding tagline and that's about it. So with that in mind you might realize why I thought this was just an average movie. It's long (around two hours and twenty minutes). And it's Michael Bay directing, so a lot of crap blows up. Constantly. The CGI on the robots is well done for the most part, but you never really feel like what you're seeing could be real. And the plot (if you can call it that) is basic and lacking in any depth or explanation. Don't get me wrong, the movie starts of trying to follow a plot, but then things start happening and suddenly you feel like the producers just said "to hell with it, let's introduce the robots" and suddenly you have ten minutes of exposition where all the robots formally introduce themselves and what they can do. Not that it helps that much. I mean I guess if I knew the character from before I could differentiate all the robots, but they're all big shiny metal robots. Prime and Bumblebee are about the only ones I can see and know who it is. All the others just look the same to me (does that make me a robot racist?). Right after the part where the robots introduce themselves they have a comedy sketch that lasts for about ten minutes or fifteen minutes, then the action starts in earnest and never really lets up. Not saying it's all good action, but it's all action. The main human character (Sam) that interfaces with the robots is kind of annoying at times. I think all his dialog is either "No no no no no no" or "Go go go go go". Not a lot of range there. Luckily his female companion Mikaela is easy on the eyes and makes up for having to deal with Sam (well, some at least). Overall it was a colorful escapist film that you never really escape into since it never feels real. Now having said all that, if big robots slugging it out is your thing, then this is your movie.