Non-Geek TV From The Geek Perspective: Blunt Talk

There’s a lot of TV out there, and some of it isn’t quite what you might think it is when you hear who’s behind it.

This week, we’re covering the Starz series Blunt Talk.

Non-Geek TV From The Geek Perspective: Eleventh Hour

There’s a lot of TV out there…and I haven’t done this column in a while for a wide variety of reasons, but then I subscribed to Acorn, an online streaming service for British television.  About a five dollars a month.  Can you beat that?  Even with a stick?  I sure couldn’t.  Man, the stuff there…

Oh, this week I’m writing about Eleventh Hour.

Be Careful What You Wish For!

Ever made a wish on a star?  We found a funny strip that collects the wishes of a few celebrities that MUST have come true!

And Finally Today: Happy Birthday To Patrick Stewart and Harrison Ford!

I hope I look this good in my mid-70’s

Happy birthday to two Geek Legends!  How do we go about making this a national holiday?

Trailer: Mr. Holmes

Not Pictured: Dr. Watson

Gabbing Geek reported a while back that Sir Ian McKellan was playing Sherlock Holmes in a new movie due this summer, Mr. Holmes.  Now a trailer has been released and a little more is known.  It appears the movie deals with Sherlock Holmes suffering from memory loss due to his old age.  As a man who has always relied on his sharp mind, this is an interesting development.  So, while it may not be the sort of mystery Holmes is used to solving, it could lead to an interesting story all the same.  Also, it explains why my dream casting of Patrick Stewart as Dr. Watson may not be happening, unless its a fan service cameo…and given the film’s pedigree, that seems like an unlikely scenario.

Trailer below the cut.

On Our Heroes Dying

1931-2015

The entire geek portion of the Internet was united recently by the death of Leonard Nimoy.  It was enough to get a lot of stupid talk about a dress off my Facebook feed, so even if it wasn’t enough Nimoy was one of the people who led me to science fiction, he has my gratitude for that one final favor.

And while I am a little saddened by the death of a man who I honestly never met, I am also not as shocked as I was by some past deaths.  Nimoy’s health has been rather bad for a while now.  There’s a reason even when he did some acting work, that it was done to keep his actual appearance to a bare minimum.    But there’s something else to consider:  Nimoy was 83 years old.  As timeless as performances captured on camera can be, Spock got old, and he died.  He wasn’t the first, he won’t be the last, and its something we will all do ourselves.  What do we do when people we have never met, but have touched us in some way as we became the adults we are, die?

Patrick Stewart: Beloved By The Geeks

We love this man.

Most geeks first experienced seeing Patrick Stewart in the role of the very un-Kirkish Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  Stewart had been an actor for years at this point, having been trained as a Shakespearean actor who played the London stage in tights that looked every sillier than the spandex uniforms he was asked to don for the first two years as Picard (Gene Roddenberry’s death allowed the producers to switch to more comfortable wool uniforms later in the series run).  Later on, he played a character that sheer dumb luck was designed to look exactly like him, Professor Charles Xavier.  Ask a number of geek fans if they know any other role he’s done, and they might be hard-pressed to name something.

Geek Love is not misplaced in this instance.  We should love Patrick Stewart if for no other reason than he seems to be having fun most of the time, and he may very well be up for anything.

Urban Fantasy: Fact Or Fiction?

Picturing a fantasy setting might give a person of supposedly sound mind an image which revolves around something that came from the mind, pen, or fever dream of J.R.R. Tolkien, even if the person in question thinks that name belongs to a particularly odd Muppet.  Or perhaps the idea is more of some sort of Game involving Thrones.  Maybe King Arthur came off his flour bag to do his thing with Merlin or Galahad or people with names way cooler than anyone else you may know, provided you don’t know any chimps of the Link family (though, to be fair, he is a rather secretive chimp).

But fantasy usually just boils down to magic and the supernatural, and if The Ring taught us anything, and it didn’t, it is that magic and the supernatural can exist anywhere, which is where the Urban Fantasy subgenre comes in.

Stewart/McKellen will NOT appear in the next X-Men movie!

The old make way for the young:

In an interview with Larry King, Patrick Stewart (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”) delivered some sad news. When asked if he was going to be in the next X-Men film, Stewart replied, “No. Nor Sir Ian McKellen, either.” Wow, not only is Stewart’s Professor Charles Xavier not going to be in it, but  McKellen’s master of magnetism Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto, won’t appear either. That’s a bummer, man.

Probably the right move, but I like these two so much that it still makes me a little sad. 

Source

Casting Rumors for Young Cyclops, Storm and Jean Grey

Time travel makes all things possible.  Because X-Men: Days of Future Past employed the ol’ “time travel to fix problems” move, we will see Wolverine and folliclely UNchallenged Professor X cultivating the talents of younger versions of Cyclops, Storm, and Jean Grey.  Such a reboot like that could only be found in….well….in an X-Men COMIC BOOK.  So now, we get to recast these roles with young talent to battle Apocalypse.  Who will it be???