Cogs can think.

I just saw Der Untergang for the first time.

And I cried. Out loud.

This is by far the best film ever made. This is the first ever film that did not depict the high-ranking Nazi officers as brutal monsters with no conscience or emotions - bear with me here before accusing me of Nazi sympathising - they were portrayed as human beings, with human feelings, human emotions, not just as sick killing machines.

And it is that element of humanity that made the sickness ever more apparent.

They were like you, like me. This film makes you realise more than ever that the brutality of the Nazi regime is not something of the past, it’s not something that we can leave behind. It’s not a page we can rip out of our history books, and put away in a sealed envelope on the top shelf of our existence. This is a page that we must always bear with us, a page that we must keep in the back of our heads during our every day decisions, our judgements, our characterisations of other people.

And when we vote.

If there is one thing that Bruno Ganz’s astonishing acting performance makes clear, it’s that there is no reason to assume it will never happen again. The acts of the Nazis were committed by monstrous humans, not by humanly monsters.

Of het ooit terecht is
Dat het een gevecht is
Om gewoon ergens te zijn
Om te wonen en te leven
En al was het ook maar even
Echt een mens te kunnen zijn
En dan los te komen van je plaats en tijd…

It made me sick to my stomach. It gave me a headache. It made me want to turn off my computer. I didn’t want to see this, and yet, I continued to watch it.

These are children we’re talking about. CHILDREN. Tabulae rasae. Doing this to them is, as far as I’m concerned, child abuse. I hope that whenever the time comes that this sort of religious programming of children sets foot in my country, my government will act strongly and swiftly and declare it illegal.

Children must not be brainwashed like this. Adults - I don’t give a rat’s ass, adults can make whatever decision they want. But children. CHILDREN. CHILDREN!

It’s weird, almost intriguing, how the death of a loved one can make people transcend their normal abilities, cross their own borders. It makes some people rise far above themselves. You see this in the weirdest of places.

8 Simple Rules. A fairly mediocre, but at times quite entertaining comedy series. I watch the syndications every day, but more as a matter of ‘roomfiller’ than anything else. It has a few fairly clever jokes each episode.

Until I watched today’s episode, where the main character of the show actually died. The show transcended its normal abilities, and the actors delivered an outstanding performance. In fact, it was moving. Their pain felt extremely sincere, honest. The arguments, the frustration, the emotions - it felt as if I was being sucked into my television. I stopped doing my dishes right there, and sat down on my coffee table. I’d never seen an episode this good - it stood out like an American in Paris. I went onto Wikipedia to investigate this anomaly of an episode a bit more closely.

And that’s when I realised why this episode was so good.

That main character, the actor portraying him. He had in fact died. He really died right before shooting that episode, and the makers decided to incorporate his death into the show. And they did a marvelous job.

I’ll be watching the show with more attention now.

I’m fairly sure that in a few decades’ time, when we all look back upon these times, we’ll recognise South Park as the best satirical TV show of all time - maybe even the best TV show, period. Never has there been a show more capable of holding a mirror in front of society, never has there been a show capable of using absurdity to such great lengths to prove points about how we lead our western lives.

Yesterday’s episode (that’s legal) was unnerving, funny, and extremely tragic all at the same time. It should be mandatory material for everyone.

Just one more, Britney.

We have to talk Star Trek.

I have a love-hate relationship with the franchise. On the one hand, there was a time when I thoroughly enjoyed Star Trek: Voyager. It was aired on a regular schedule on Dutch TV (six episodes a week), and I watched it religiously. On the other hand, Star Trek is probably the most overrated franchise you can find. Star Trek - I’m sorry to say - is really, really bad. Seriously. If there is one series in this world that makes absolutely no sense in any way imaginable, it’s Star Trek.

So, I liked Voyager, but at one point, I just snapped out of it. I saw the ridiculousness again, got ahold of my mind, and stopped watching it. I believe I missed most of the last two seasons - did catch a few episodes here and there, and read up on how it ended. Anyway, my Trek days were, luckily, over.

Until a few days ago. For no apparent reason, I had a longing to watch Star Trek. I have no idea where it came from. Suffice to say, I decided to dive into The Next Generation, at the beginning, season one. And oh yes, it’s every bit as bad as I remember it. Seriously. This is really, really crappy television. The only thing keeping it alive is, of course, Patrick Stewart. I don’t like Picard as much as I liked Janeway (I’m alone in that, aren’t I?), but Patrick portrays the guy excellently.

I read that the other seasons are much better, so I guess I’ll just keep ploughing through season one, biting my lip, shaking my head in utter disgust that this abomination got to see more than one season, but that Dead Like Me and Threshold got cancelled. Such unfairness can only come from Hollywood.

Best Southpark joke ever (s06e05).

Check it out guys, I’m calf-curling.

I actually ‘like‘ curling (don’t worry, I like pick up trucks so it evens out).

I’m in a Dead Like Me period again. I’m watching the series for, I don’t know, the tenth time or something. I can basically lip-sync the entire show.

Episode 5 of season 1, ‘Reaping Havoc’, is probably my favourite; it also happens to split the series in two. Part one, with Betty, and part two, with Daisy. In this episode, Betty ‘piggy back rides’ along with a dead soul into the afterlife, right after becoming George’s only real friend, leaving George devastated.

Betty - “a real pistol” - is probably the most mysterious character in all of Dead Like Me (as George puts it, “mysterious and reassuring”). She appeared in the first five episodes only, and she spent one of those locked in one of those drawers at the morgue (”She’s incapacitated.”). Apart from Rube, Betty was definitely the most skilled reaper of them all. The ease with which she reaped souls was stunning, and she always tried to put a smile on the face of the person she was about to reap. Her Polaroid camera was invaluable - “happy thoughts”, she’d say, right before taking a picture of the soon-to-be dead person. The photo would go into one of her many sacks.

Betty disappears, and nobody knows what happened to her. Reapers can’t go to the afterlife like the souls they reap can. When Betty jumps into the afterlife, we see her turning into lights, that circle around one another right before they explode. We don’t know if she’s in the afterlife, or just plain ‘gone’.

This episode is filled with nothing but brilliant and beautiful quotes, but I think the final voice-over by George is the one that touches me the most.

When you can’t make sense of someone leaving, you try to make sense of what they left behind. And it makes it a whole lot easier when what they left you was beautiful.

CBS must die.

Ok, I’m glad I got that off my chest. I just finished watching the only season of Threshold, and oh yes, it only got better during the 2nd half of the season. Many new elements were introduced, and character development was excellent. The vigilante, Allenville, the baby, Cavennaugh’s emotional side, and so on. The show had so much more in it than just one season. Something interesting I read was that the show was even supposed to change it’s name - from Threshold, to Foothold, to Stranglehold, indicating the amount of infectee presence on earth. Very interesting.

Now we don’t get to see any of that, thanks to those fcuk-ups at CBS. Apart from Dead Like Me, I now have two TV shows that need to be resurrected.

Crud.

I’ve been really enjoying “Threshold” this week. They started airing the show a few months ago on Dutch TV, but since I missed the first few episodes, I decided not to spend any time on it - despite the promos tickling my fancy. One of my best friends did get to see it, and he liked it.

So, I downloaded the entire season (the only one made) and I must say, I really enjoy it. Sure, it’s no Dead Like Me or even Lost, but it does its job of entertaining me, with enough suspense and development that make you want to watch the next episode. There are a few really good things about the show - for one, it’s not a soap opera like Lost is. It’s more like Dead Like Me in that each episode has a beginning, a storyline, and a conclusion - while also having several storylines that span all episodes, storylines that help you solve the mystery. I like such a structure better than I like the soap opera structure of Lost.

Another good thing about Threshold is that contrary to what is usually the case in alien invasion Hollywood stuff, there’s no Will Smith here that discovers the aliens, and learns how to deal with them and kill them in 90 Hollywood minutes, in a slick and stylish fashion. In Threshold, I’m now about 20 days into the start of the story, and they have learned only a few things about how to deal with this - and they learned these things in a way that I would think resembles real life: a bunch of weirdo scientist anti-heroes that by means of luck and gut-feeling find answers to their questions, through weeks and weeks of work. This gives this whole story a very authentic feel (insofar a story about an alien invasion can be authentic).

Another good thing is that the cover the Threshold team has fails numerous times. They are a small top-secret government team, but they are not invincible, nor are they ghosts. They are normal people, and make a lot of mistakes that lead to their covers being blown quite a few times, contrary to numerous similar Hollywood flicks where top-secret government agencies can do whatever they want, without anyone ever blowing their covers or making mistakes. Again, this failing on behalf of the Threshold team adds authenticity to the whole thing. Additionally, the political part of Threshold is also very interesting.

A final upside is the excellent humour in the show. The humour doesn’t come across as forced or scripted, but feels natural, and is generally used during moments where any stress needs to be relieved - like right after a dangerous situation. This, again, feels very natural, as using humour to blow off steam is a very common thing among humans (trust me, I know a thing or two on stressful situations - more than I bargained for in any case).

There are the usual crappy things in Threshold too, of course. Especially all the technological, computer and software stuff sounds ridiculous to someone like me, who knows quite a lot on these matters - but if I switch that knowledge off, and stoop to the level of normal people, I can easily see how even the computer and software stuff would make sense to normal people. Apart from that, you can also see that the budget wasn’t as high as on some other shows, but still, they seem to have managed pretty well.

So, definitely not the best show out there, but really, I have seen a lot of much, much worse shows that have continued for much longer than Threshold. Give Threshold a go, I’m sure you’ll like it.

Oh, and I totally dig Carla Gugino.

Some people… Some people just have it all. They meet Ellen Muth, and get her to sign a cool skeleton figurine. And to top it all off, get her to hold that figurine while wearing a big, warm, and honest smile on her ever so pretty and enchanting face.

You really can’t imagine the amount of jealousy rushing through my synapses at this point.