Tag: Blog

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve watched a handful of newer gameshows. A couple of them are in the style of the studio game shows we know from being sick on a school day, and one reality show.  I didn’t hate any of them, but I most definitely didn’t like them, either. So let’s discuss the problems.

The first batch we’ll call the Modern gameshow. In a studio, with an audience, but each one of them is using the ‘So You Want To Be A Millionaire’ or ‘Deal or No Deal’ approach which is to slow down the content with tremendous amounts of hemming and hawing. The Box features challenges inside of a weird cube. Everything about this show I enjoyed except for the fact that a single question or challenge can last an entire segment between breaks. Cheat involves 4 people cheating on trivia questions, but each set of questions comes with a round of ‘Who was the cheater’ where the host vamps unendingly to stretch out that timeframe.

Why do they do it? Because if everyone is tense, the stakes must be important… but when you compare it to the cornball silliness of Price is Right or the spitfire trivia of Jeopardy, it all looks like the show is playing at 45 rpm.

The reality show was a newer NBC jam, The Traitors though.. this show.. it’s almost there.  The good is that it has over a dozen people in the house, there are Traitors who will ‘Murder’ every night and the object is to figureeout who they are and vote them out.  This should sound familiar to anyone who has played Werewolf or Mafia or Secret Hitler. Along the way there are challenges to increase the winnings and dramatic discussions about people acting weird.  The problem here is, in all of those listed games, there is a mechanism for the “good guys” to solve the mystery. In this show… there weren’t. The Traitors weren’t even incentivized to screw up tasks like The Mole (which is enjoyable as hell). If the traitors say nothing, they’re playing the same game as everyone else. Votes are arbitrary based on people over-reading each other.

These shows are all almost there, and I hope as we continue to move to a streaming, watch at 1.25x, fast forwarding world, we can get back to game shows that feel like there are stakes without big synthesizer breaks and lighting to signal us to be interested because until then… I’m not.

Hey Somethings!

So, I get in these weird music.. ruts?  Trenches?  Time Loops?  Not sure what you’d call them, but I inevitably end up stumbling across a song I enjoy that I haven’t heard in *years* and that leads me down this rabbit hole of stumbling across other songs in an amazingly frenetic headlong dash… much like a Tesla at a school crossing.  So without further ado, here’s what’s currently been playing in my ride…

Take On Me – Reel Big Fish

I don’t think I ever fell in ‘love’ with Ska as a musical type, there are just certain songs/bands I enjoy that happen to be Ska bands.  I first discovered my enjoyment of Reel Big Fish on the BASEketball soundtrack and this song immediately grew on me.  Great cover, great song.

Click Click Boom – Saliva

Probably the only song I could ever actually tell you Saliva did (I couldn’t name another Saliva song), this one was part of my karaoke repertoire back in the “Before Times”.  One day, I’ll get back to karaoke… and I’ll probably dust this song off.

Inside Out – Eve 6

Another karaoke staple of mine from days gone by, I forgot how much I love this song until it wormed it’s way into my YouTube “mix” randomly.  There’s just a certain drive in this song that I dig, and it’s one of my favorite songs to sing harmony to.

Butterfly – Crazy Town

I’m sensing a pattern here.. all these songs were released between ’98 and ’01.  Another band that I can only name one song from, this song takes me back to a time when you couldn’t beat The Wiz, Napster was brand new, and “I See Dead People” was blowing people’s minds.

How about you?  What’s been shuffling around on YOUR playlist?  Hit our socials and let us know!

– PCR

I recently recognized that I am falling behind on Marvel movies. When we look at the journey to the fight with Thanos, I was there. New movie – new me watching it. I was so invested in the joining of the Avengers and the big story to get there.

THen what happened.

They beat Thanos and nowwww… ok, look, I was similarly invested in Wandavision and I think it may be one of the best things DizMar ever did in terms of scope, visual style, and just plain weirdness. I was even invested in Falcon and Winter Soldier, albeit I had no problem waiting until the whole thing had been posted online to give it a glance.

But what of your Thors and AntMans and even your Wakanda Forevers?

I’ll get to them.

I know the great bubble we lived in messed up the release schedule and it is only now that we’re seeing the Marvel U try and get back to its big chapter 2, but … where’s the hype? Where’s the ‘oooooooooooooh’ moments that make us need to see the next installment? It feels like DizMarvel has lost them. The MCU feels lived in and you can show up in your pj’s if you want, but there is no urge to go running to the movies like I did for Captain America.

Then again, it may just be me burned out on comic movies until the X-Men comes… because the few glimpses that they are on their way as made my head pop up like an excited puppy.

Look.. let’s face it.. Hatton and I feed off each other’s creativity.  Hatton makes a blog last week referencing LOST.. and it sits in my brain until I have to let it out.  I’d make some pithy joke about it being like entering The Numbers into Desmond’s computer, but.. I liked Desmond, and this post is about the other side of things.

19 years later, these are my Top 5 Unanswered Mysteries from LOST

5 – What the hell was the Cork in the Pond in the Cave?

Out of all the things I WASN’T expecting to see in the ‘Heart of the Island’.. was a kiddie-sized wading pool carved out of rock with a big cork stopper in it.

I mean… what?

Was this an analogy for the writers being so pent up with unanswered BS from previous seasons is was akin to a stopper in the pool of their creative brain?  I mean, that would have been a better explanation than whatever they had for.. whatever that was.

4 – Annie

No, not the redheaded, pupil-less orphan, I’m talking about the only friend a young Ben Linus had while growing up in the Dharma Initiative.  Did you forget about her?  So did the show.  Lindelhoff and Cuse went so far on the DVD commentary for “The Man Behind the Curtain” to say that she was going to be a ‘huge part of upcoming storylines’…. SO big apparently, she was mentioned in one episode ever and then promptly never heard from again.

3 – Horace’s Cabin

I was convinced we were going to get some kind of answers about the island once the survivors found this… the circle of ash around it.. the person in the chair.. but, much like a lot of the rest of the show, it got ‘weird’ without ever being really explained.  Some of the biggest ‘huh?’s.. why could it move around the island?  What was the circle of ash keeping in (or out)? Who broke the circle?  Why… 19 years later do I care?

2 – Libby

I thought Libby overall as a character was great, and I enjoyed that she was a love interest for Hurley.  Hurley did keep mentioning that he felt like he knew her from somewhere, and it turns out they were both in Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute at the same time.  Why did they not remember each other?  Was it the same reason Ben Kenobi didn’t recognize R2?

1 – Walt being ‘Special’

The BIGGEST “wtf” letdown of the show in my opinion.  They tease up Walt being special, even show us him (apparently?) telekenisis-ing birds into a glass door… he ‘seems’ to be able to make things he thinks about happen, but we’re never given proof that it’s not more than coincidence.. I mean.. he MUST be right?  Why else would Hurley and Ben convince him to go back to the island to ‘help Michael’ even though Michael is dead?  According to Lindelhoff, Walt is special “because he is”.  Thanks Damon…

What about you?  What are some of YOUR biggest unsolved issues with LOST?  Let us know at all the usual places!

– PCR

Look, it’s a well established fact that the Somethingcast has a loved/hate relationship with Lost. It’s the sort of sad kind of relationship you read about in the first half of tawdry romances when things are so beautiful… the fair buxom maiden meets the constantly oily broad shouldered man and they make sweet love on an island where a plane crashed in one of the greatest television openers of all time. Then the pair reveal their history piece by piece, the mysteries getting ever thicker. The questions ever deeper…

…and then it’s revealed that the hunky man actually was the same bloated corpse of a guess you had in the first season and he wastes three seasons of his life plodding over garbage like how he got his tattoo.

Yes, I know this metaphor fell apart two paragraphs ago. Yes, I am also aware we are the buxom maiden in this.

The point is – Lost invited a lot of copycats. Shows that were built around a solitary mystery or weird happening that we have revealed excessively small detail at a time.  And yet.. for some reason.. I watch them thinking that they will be different and the reveals will justify the incomprehensible journey.  The fact is, once a show like that goes longer than a season, if the mysteries were amazing in the first half, the only way to keep your attention once you have the answer is to create mysteriouser mysteries. And yet… I watch.

Here’s a few shows I’ve given at least one season and the show I’m currently engaged with and looking forward to the moment it lets me down.

Persons Unknown – 2010 – Starring Alan ‘Cameron, Ferris Bueller’s Friend’ Ruck and a young Chadwick Boseman, a handful of people wake up in a weird hotel filled with puzzles only to escape and find out they are in an almost empty 1950s town except for all the weird people with weird puzzles run by a weird corporation called ‘The Program’. It ends with them “escaping” … but they only wake up in a weird hotel.  Weird. Not really.

I-Land – 2019 – A shockingly recent entry into the ‘We Learned Nothing From Lost’ novel of failed television shows, a bunch of people wake up on an island with amnesia and are assholes to each other until they find out that they’re in virtual reality prison for some reason. You’ll ask ‘..but why..’ a lot, but since it had a 3% Rotten Tomatoes rating, you’ll never find out the answer.

The Wilds – 2020 – Even more recently, a bunch of women get stranded on an island due to a plane crash and say ‘fuck’ a lot. Oh, and also there’s a secret experiment by a mysterious overseer and we learn all about how they’re interconnected through flashbacks. Were they even trying!?

And now, The Manifest – 2018 – The elevator pitch here is ‘Ok, what if we have a Lost show, but the plane doesn’t crash’. Instead, the passengers jump five years ahead in time and have to deal with the world as a mysterious magical, mystical, scientific, religious, historical voice (no, seriously, all of those) tells them to do things to fix the world. There are also flashbacks and logic jumps so mind boggling, I don’t know how I’m in the middle of Season 3 and the last part of the show got picked up by Netflix.

Maybe one day I’ll talk about the ones that don’t suck. Sound off on your favorites and thanks for enjoying my pain.

Hey Somethings! PCR here!

I’ll start by saying, if you’re a member of our Patreon you can HEAR our blogs now!  If you’re not, head over and check it out, help support our show, and get your Something early, uncut and unedited!

So, there are a LOT of movies coming our in 2023.  Honestly, it’s been a while since I’ve seen one in the theater… but I do have a list of movies that I’m hyped to see (either in theater, or streaming) and some that… I’m not so hyped about.  Let’s get to it!

Ant-Man and The Wasp : Quantumania (Hyped)

The first Ant-Man movie to me was… ok.  Wasn’t great, wasn’t terrible.. but fun.  Ant-Man and The Wasp was a bit of a better offering, but I still feel the strength of that movie was in the moving along of the greater MCU narrative at the time.  I don’t think Quantumania will be any different.  I’m predicting an “ok” movie what will be amazingly overshadowed by setting up Jonathan Major’s Kang flexing as the MCUs next Big Bad.

Air (Hyped)

You don’t have to be a huge basketball fan (I’m not) to know the name “Michael Jordan” and what he did for the sport.  Directed by Ben Afleck and staring Ben, Matt Damon, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis, Chris Tucker, Chris Messina and Marlon Wayans, this is the story about how a sneaker company struggling to find it’s identity went all in on a rookie who just would just happen to turn out to be the GOAT.

Fast X (Hyped)

Not crazy about it being “the first part” of a two part story wrapping up the Fast and Furious franchise, but whenever you get Dom and his crew together, you know two things going in.  1) You’re going to see some 0utlandishly entertaining stuff and 2) It’s all about family.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Hyped)

I hope this is Ford’s last crack of the whip.  Crystal Skull was… not good, and I’m hoping this instalment rights the ship before finding a way to move on for the future.  Based off Ford’s on comments on how impressed he was with the ‘de-ageing’ footage, I’m hoping to see equal parts current and flashback to avoid the suspension of disbelief of an 80 year old Indy still adventuring.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Not Hyped)

Wasn’t a fan of the second movie, it kind of felt uninspired to me.  I enjoy Pratt as Star Lord.. but in small doses.  We’ll see how this one fits in to the new arc the MCU will be taking, but I don’t feel the urge to run right out and see this though I’ll likely catch it on streaming once it’s out… eventually.

The Flash (Not Hyped)

Fun Fact : I dislike Ezra Miller.  I didn’t like his Flash in either version of The Justice League, and I could honestly care less about his solo film.  The ONLY thing that will make me possibly watch it is the return of the best Batman ever.  If I watch this, I won’t be watching a Flash movie, I’ll be tolerating The Flash in a Michael Keaton Batman movie.

What are some movies YOU’RE looking forward to (or not)?  Hit us on our socials and let us know!

– PCR

When we discuss The Who – what do you think of?  Pinball Wizard?  Baba O’Riley?  The Kids Are Alright?

All fine choices, and nobody can argue that The Who will go down as one of the greatest, or at least most influential, rock bands of the 20th century, and for good reason.

Yet, even though they will go down in history as greats, and they deserve all of those accolades and if Behind Blue Eyes come on, you better not press ‘Next’… none of that is what comes to mind for me when I think of The Who.

I can’t stop myself from thinking of a song that The Who didn’t do specifically.. Pete Townsend did, but not The Who.  For years, I just assumed every movie that featured a comedic bent on a love story needed this song to even be considered a good film. In the movie in my head, the end credits must be overlaid with Let My Love Open The Door – even if the movie is a tragic apocalyptic horror film.. perhaps specifically in that instance.

I don’t know what happened in the late 80s, but starting somewhere around Look Who’s Talking, this song became synonymous with ‘An unlikely pair find love’ and ever since then it has been featured in a list of movies that, upon doing research, is every movie ever made. Pete Townsend surely lives quite well for himself, but is it because he was the lead guitarist of a band of legends or is it because when a boy meets a girl (can we make this any more obvious…) and sparks fly, the only song that is in your head right now is Open The Door.

Is that Townsends real legacy? Not a rock opera. Not the 1976 Guinness Book of World Record’s Loudest Concert. Not the fact that he wrote almost the entire Who discography…. but that he created a song that became a pop-culture saturated meme of a song long before people put impact font on cat pictures… and still, if it came on the radio right now, I would still bop to it.

What do you think?

…to hate.

So, this blog was GOING to be about some of my favorite TV villains, but then I shifted it a bit to be some of my favorite TV villain ACTORS.. and that was when I came to a realization and had to make this about one man, and one man alone.

The man I love to hate.

The man who.. even when he plays ‘one of the good guys’, your brain keeps asking you..”But… is he?”

One man holds that distinction.  Regardless of if you know him as Harold Finch, Morton Norton, Leyland Townsend, or Benjamin Linus…  Michael Emerson will ALWAYS be someone who, when he shows up on my screen, I’m expecting him to be the worst of humanity.

Other actors do very well at playing ‘both sides’.  I loved watching “Oz”, and J.K Simmons and Christopher Meloni play some iconic villains there that defined their careers at that time, but they’ve also moved on to play some great non-villain characters as well.  Sure, J. Jonah Jameson may be a douchebag.. but no one sees him come on screen and think “Yeah… he’s definitely going to eat someone though”.  With Emerson, that always seems to be on the table regardless of who he’s playing.

He’s a brilliant actor who has made playing smart and socially awkward terrifying, and I urge anyone who hasn’t yet seen him to watch something with him in it.. be it Lost or Person of Interest or EVIL or anything else he’s been in.

– PCR

As a fan of professional wrestling, even when I’m not wholly invested in the product, my favorite weekend of the year is this weekend – The Royal Rumble, where 30 people enter the ring 2 minutes apart and the last one standing at the end gets a big title match at Wrestlemania.  It has been a yearly tradition for me to gather with friends, pick numbers, and enjoy it.  In 2018, that same group got to watch live in person as Shinsuke Nakamura won the Men’s Rumble and Asuka won the Women’s.  This year is the first time in three years we will all gather together again after .. well, ya know..

So I thought I’d take a minute and talk about a few wrestlers, modern and old, that never won the Rumble but should have, or just won’t.

Kofi Kingston – When I was a kid, I was really into wrestling. Now, I get occasionally invested in a wrestler or a story. The story of Kofi’s rise to WWE Champion was the last story WWE did that I felt so full-heartedly invested in that when he lost in a garbage match to a garbage person, I stopped watching and haven’t gone back other than the occasional big event.  To see him win the Royal Rumble… I’d probably be back to weekly viewing unapologetically.

Mr. Perfect – Curt Henning was an amazing performer from top to bottom. A technical wrestler before the era of smaller framed guys was the thing. A character that exuded so much obnoxiousness you just wanted someone to beat the snot out of him. The mileage he could have gotten out of a Rumble win would live on to this day. In 1990 he was the last person thrown out by the winner, Hulk Hogan.. but imagine a world where he won it.

Bryan Danielson – If you know anything about the history of Bryan and the Rumble… you’ll know how his lack of appearance, or quick elimination, drove an audience to turn on The Rock, Roman Reigns, Rey Mysterio.. for two years in a row. For a minute he was the only person in wrestling people cared about, and he did great for himself without that win, but it would have been amazing to see him get it.

Barry Horowitz – Ok, here me out.. because non-wrestling fans are going ‘Who?’ and wrestling fans are going ‘..wait, what?!’ – The Rumble is supposed to be this moment where anything can happen, and yet year after year it is the people who you probably expect to win.. winning. You walk in knowing the top 5 options and sometimes the only option. For as much as its touted that anything can happen – very often it is an hour long showcase of ‘won’t happens’ and 10 minutes of ‘which obvious answer’.  So why shouldn’t a guy like Barry Horowitz, who is known as one of the greatest losers in wrestling history. A man who lived to make other guys look dangerously good. …What happens if he wins? What happens if someone you just don’t expect comes out and wins?

Why can’t the Rumble be a place where, out of nowhere the least likely candidate becomes a Main Event Contender.

The answer is money… obviously, but I hope one day we get a Rumble that defies all expectations.

Maybe it’ll be this weekend.

Hey Somethings,

You’ll hear about me talk about this a bit on an upcoming episode, but, I recently purged a bunch of my streaming services to cut down on expenses, and have been living the Tubi life lately.  Every time I start up a new free service (I did the same with Peacock), I inevitably find myself wrapped up in shows I don’t have to think very hard to watch just to see what they offer… so it’s a lot of “Fail TV” and “IdiotTV” and such as I typically watch as I’m going to bed and it’s easy to fall asleep when it’s something you don’t have to devote a lot of thought or attention to.  Invariably, I start looking for something else to watch, and… as the tug of nostalgia is strong.. I end up stumbling upon a show I’ve seen before but loved, and I watch it all over again.

Enter “James May’s Man Lab” and “James May’s Toy Stories”

James May is from the trio that, along with Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, brought you Top Gear on the BBC for many years.  Beyond that, he brought us these two amazing shows as well.

Man Lab tries to ‘bring back’ the heyday of when men did (or could do) manly things… like.. change a tire, woo a woman, how to duel, or build a remote-controlled picnic table.  Airing from 2012 to 2013, Man Lab takes popular science and ramps it up just ‘extra’ enough to be hilarious yet still amazingly entertaining.

“Toy Stories” does the same when it comes to ‘going big’, but with less tongue in cheek and far more ‘extra’.

From building a nearly three mile long slot-car track, to a fiberglass Supermarine Spitfire at a 1:1 scale, Toy Story takes toys from May’s childhood, and blows right past “11” while ramping them up to 15.

If you’re a fan of British humor, science, and attempting the absurd, I highly recommend checking them out!

– PCR