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Five-link Friday
• "Come aboooooooard, we're ex-pecting yoooooooou." Are you ready for "? Here's my suggestion: Forget about making a feature version of that '80s classic. Instead, someone like Nickelodeon or Trio should buy the rights and rerun the Saturday shows of the 1980s, all in a block. "Love Boat," "Fantasy Island," even the like "JEM and the Holograms," "Transformers," "Smurfs," you know the drill. A smart network would even offer blocks of different decades -- imagine seeing '60s TV one day, '80s TV the next. Get the old commercials, too.
• More than a decade after singer Mia Zapata's murder, the man who killed her . Sometimes, justice gets done, even if it has to crawl. DNA taken from wounds on Zapata's body eventually was traced to a man thousands of miles away from the Seattle murder scene.
• Now there's a . A little late, don't you think? The Onion also had a .
• And you thought "Dawn of the Dead" was only a movie. are holed up in California fighting the undead, with their only communication device a Weblog. Won't someone please save them? (Via .)
• Yeah, I know online quizzes are so over, blah blah blah. But that didn't stop me from taking the one called My results:"Darling, it seems that you belong in Gone with the Wind; the proper place for a romantic. You belong in a tumultous world of changes and opportunities, where your independence paves the road for your survival. It is trying being both a cynic and a dreamer, no?" (Thanks to Paige for the link!)
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A decent clip show?
has been showing the other reality shows how to do it ever since the show premiered -- classy concept, decent host, big prize. Now the CBS show is leading in another area, this one an unexpected one. The "Survivor" franchise even put on a decent clip show.
I'm sure "Survivor" has had clip shows in the past, but they were as unmemorable as any other program's clip show. So what happened between the "Pearl Islands" season and this "All-Stars" season? Did they hire a new editor? Decide a clip show didn't have to be just a throwaway week? Or was it the louder-than-life personalities gathered for the "All-Stars" season who made it lively?
Producers of other reality shows, take note. "Survivor's" clip-show secrets are easy to determine. Show a lot of unseen footage and get contestants who are willing to have some fun.
The kiss of death to most clip shows is that if you've watched the show regularly, you've seen 90% of the footage before. What's funny the first time doesn't necessarily hold up on future viewings. And with no vote-off, it's easy to skip what is essentially a rerun.
"Survivor" took advantage of a ton of unseen footage and found clips that would have been hilarious either in a regular episode or in a clip show. The show offers up bits that were lighthearted and goofy, and which had no effect on the game's outcome.
One hilarious segment for which editors deserve kudos was a lengthy look at tribe trying to translate his thick-as-molasses Southern accent. Not for Tom the gentle drawl of a Georgia belle, instead, he sounds like nothing more than undecipherable . His tribe was completely perplexed by some of Tom's utterings, once even calling for a translator.
The editors may get credit for that bit, but it was the contestants themselves who provided the next hilarious moment.
The Chapera tribe wasn't sent to tribal council in the first episode, so instead they staged a mock tribal council all their own, with each contestant taking on another's identity. Big Tom was a flawless , made himself some seaweedy hair to play , stuffed her bra to play ousted winner , and best of all, delivered a dead-on mimicry of host Jeff Probst, denim shirt and all.
They carried the sketch all the way through to completion, with Rob-as-Jeff snuffing the ousted contestant's torch. But best of all was the end, in which the entire tribe happily sang along to the "Survivor" theme song — it's an instrumental, which made it all the funnier.
I'm not saying I'm going to suddenly become a fan of clip shows — they still feel to me like perfect opportunities to turn off the tube and get outside — but credit where it's due: "Survivor" threw some life into a genre that was always pretty useless.
• March 24, 2004 | 6:00 a.m. PT
Cousin Geri returns
The 1980s child in me could not resist this news item: Rumor has it that Geri Jewell is guest-starring on CBS's soap opera this Friday and Monday, March 26 and 29.
Who's Geri Jewell, you ask? You so obviously were not a fan of the "Diff'rent Strokes" spin-off that starred Charlotte Rae as Mrs. Garrett, the dietitian and housemother at Eastland School for Girls.
"Facts" was famous for many things. For getting rid of not-yet-a-star Molly Ringwald after only one season. For Kim "Tootie" Fields being forever on roller skates. For reinventing itself constantly, with the setting shifting from school to Mrs. Garrett's gourmet shop to a goofy gift store called "Over Our Heads." In the last episode, rich Blair Warner buys the school and took it coed, but the only people watching at that point were relatives of the cast members.
As a girls-school student at the time the show aired, I watched the show like a fanatic. All-girls' schools were never shown on TV, and it was somehow encouraging to see girls in uniforms not that dissimilar to ours (black jumpers and saddleshoes, thankyouverymuch).
played Blair's cousin Geri, and both the actress and the character were comedians with cerebral palsy. Geri's jokes were never that funny (OK, never funny at all). But that wasn't why Jewell was on the show, it was to teach young viewers how to deal with people with CP or other disabilities. Blair was at first embarrased by her cousin, then gradually grew to admire and love her. Kind of like an After-School Special in prime-time.
The rumor is that Jewell will be on "Young and Restless" interacting with the character Brittany Hodges, who was recently badly burned on her face (electrified stripper pole...don't ask, it's the soaps). I can only imagine that much in the same way she did on "Facts," Jewell will get Brittany to realize that she needs to stop feeling sorry for herself and live a full life.
She also has a role in HBO's new western with a difference, "Deadwood." I'll be tuning in to that and her "Y&R" guest-star spot, but she'll always be Cousin Geri in my heart.
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Zombified
(Warning: Stop reading here if you don't want any spoilers for Although maybe it's hard to spoil a zombie movie. It's not like you're sitting there wondering whodunnit.)
Forgive me if I'm a little bleary eyed this morning. You see, I saw "Dawn of the Dead" yesterday. In it, a young woman cheerfully chats with an adorable neighbor girl, then goes to sleep and wakes up to find the neighbor girl zombified and chowing down on the woman's husband.
Less than an hour before the movie, my husband and I strolled across our nice quiet street and bought lemonade from an adorable little neighbor girl. After the film, I spent half the night on alert in bed wondering if that creeeeeeeaking noise at the bathroom window was the little lemonade girl ready to zombify me because we didn't give her a big enough tip. (Instead it was our cat, who's not zombified, but might as well be.)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love horror movies, and I have a . I watched "Dawn of the Dead" with a somewhat critical eye, since I didn't want the legacy of the George A. Romero trilogy to be sullied with a crappy remake. Overall, I was pleased with "Dawn." Not as good as the , but the tone was satisfyingly creepy, the main characters weren't idiots (rare in a horror flick these days), and a few creepy touches even improved on the original. (Best: Zombie-bitten gun-shop owner Andy holding up the whiteboard he used to communicate with our heroes, only this time it was smeared with blood.)
After seeing a movie, I like to go home and read a batch of critics' reviews and see if we agree or disagree. I'm especially entertained by the , meant for parents who want to know about the violence and sex content of a film before sending their kids there.
It cracks me up that their review, while detailing such “Dawn of the Dead” happenings as “We see a close-up view of a zombie being shot in the head (with blood, a piece of skull and possibly brain matter coming out),” also takes the time to note “The survivors throw a toilet through a store window (that shatters) to enter the mall.”
Yeah, I was all set to let my child see the zombie movie what with the cannibalism and the brain matter, but wait, a toilet breaks a window? Sorry, Junior, maybe when you're an adult you can rent it.
I also checked out the (the Times requires free registration).
In it, Mitchell claims the little girl who attacks Sarah Polley and hubby is their daughter, when it was so obvious to me and every non-zombified person seeing the flick that she was the neighbor girl. Let's see if we can count the ways this is made obvious.
1) Sarah Polley's character calls the girl by her first name, not “hon” or “sweetie” or any other mom-to-daughter term.
2) The girl skates off, and Polley doesn't tell her to come home or worry about where she's going, just tells her maybe she'll skate with her tomorrow.
3) Polley goes in and jumps in bed with her husband, then they have sex in the shower, never worrying about a kid being around. We do not see girl or sign of any child in the house.
4) We see photos of Polley and husband, but none of the girl.
5) In the morning, Polley's husband sees the girl obviously messed-up in the house, calls her by her first name, and can't figure out why she's in his house.
6) Or, as my pal Linda reminded me, how about when Polley yells to the girl “Say hi to YOUR MOM!"