- Great opening day of the NCAA Tournament yesterday. Yes, there were a lot of lopsided games early, but when you get the chance to witness history being made, it’s still a great day. That history came courtesy of the Kent State Golden Flashes, who were anything but golden in scoring a tournament record-tying low 10 points in the first half. The Flushes were absolutely putrid, turning the ball over 17 times and mustering only five field goals in the half. Their 10 points in that half tied the record for the fewest points scored on a half in the history of the NCAA Tournament, which has to be a proud way to cap the season for your team. And no, I don’t care that in a second half where the outcome was a foregone conclusion, Kent scored 48 points. They still lost 71-58 and never closed the gap to single digits. Watching these clowns toss the ball around like it was greased up with Crisco and they were wearing blindfolds just proved that although they may have won the Mid-American Conference, they are nowhere near the level of the so-called BCS conferences, not even close. I’d argue that their performance is worse than that of Mississippi Valley State, which only scored 29 points the entire game but has the defense that they played UCLA, the top seed in their region. Top seeds are supposed to beat #16 seeds by wide margins, period. Kent was seeded ninth (nice job on that one, selection committee) and playing a UNLV team seeded eighth, so theoretically it should have been a fair matchup. At least the rest of the day’s games featured teams that actually looked like they had played basketball before, so there’s something to be thankful for.
- Believe it or not, last night’s episode of Smallville was marked by deception, half-truths and scheming. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe. But things kicked off in arresting fashion (pun intended) as Clark Kent was abducted by men in black, military-like garb with the help of Kryptonite-laced Taser guns. Just as he was about to pull out the key for the portal to the Fortress of Solitude, CK was nabbed and Lana and Chloe were left to find the aftermath. They went to Lionel Luthor for help and he lied to their faces, telling them he thought Lex might be responsible when Lionel directed the whole plan. Of course, Lionel was dealing with a blackmail threat of his own from Patricia Swann, daughter of the late Victor Swann (played on the series by the late Christopher Reeve), a scientist who helped Clark figure out his destiny. P. Swann had been sending Lionel threatening notes because she believed that he had offed her father and three other members of a secret society known as Veritas that had been formed by four wealthy families looking for one they called “The Traveler,” who turned out to be Clark Kent. Patricia Swann believed the Lionel killed the other Veritas members to have Clark all to himself. Also included in the group were Oliver Queen’s (Green Arrow) parents, whose plane Lionel sabotaged. Patty Swann threatened to release evidence implicating Lionel in the deaths of the other Veritas members unless he took her to see Clark and then released CK. Clark was being held at a special, Kryptonian-proofed detention facility Lionel had set up, complete with über-thick concrete walls, a Plexiglas cage and waves of Kryptonite running through the walls of the cage. A sadistic former security chief for Lex’s 33.1 meteor-freak project had charge over him and was bent on killing someone he viewed as a threat to the world. When Lionel revealed that killing Clark wasn’t in the plan, this guy flipped out. Patty Swann had already been knocked out and Lionel was going to screw her over by flying her out of the country without meeting Clark, but this gun-toting security whack-o knocked him out as well. Just as this nut job was about to kill Clark with a fatal surge of Kryptonite, a miraculous intervention happened. Kara Kent, who had been living at the Luthor Mansion with Lex, was just about to have a memory retrieval procedure that Lex insisted would help her get back the memories she’d lost when she had amnesia. Of course, Lex only wanted her memory back so he could exploit her and get closer to the truth about Clark. Chloe and Lana broke into the mansion just in time to save Kara, ushering her off to the Fortress where Chloe talked Clark’s Kryptonian father Jor-El into helping Kara get her memory back. Once Kara was back to normal, she had her Kryptonian powers back and bum-rushed the facility where Clark was being held. She disabled the cage, freed Clark and they were able to escape. In the aftermath, Patty Swann visits Clark back at the Kent Farm and declares that if he won’t accept her offer to get away from Smallville to a safer place, she will be getting an apartment in Metropolis so she can be close to him and give him the same support her father provided to Clark. Clark then goes to confront Lionel, who launches into a trademark diatribe about how he was only kidnapping Clark to protect him because initially he didn’t know who the threatening messages that were ultimately revealed to be from Patricia Swann were coming from or what danger there was to Clark. To keep Clark from going after their source and finding danger, Lionel tried to spin the fact that he kidnapped the Man of Steel. The detention facility, he explained, was for other Kryptonians, ones who have proven much more violent than Clark. Clearly Clark didn’t believe the story, because he pronounced Lionel to be the same deceitful, duplicitous man he’s always been. Proof of that comes near the end of the episode when Patty Swann’s driver pulls off the road on the way to Metropolis and shoots her, making her the latest Veritas-related death and ending her run on the show at one episode.Thankfully, Smallville is one of the only shows that won’t be beginning a several-week gap in between new episodes next week, so next Thursday it’ll be time for more Smallville talk, but that’s all for now….
- Maybe the writers and producers on Lost haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been saying about a largely underwhelming season of their show, because last nights’ episode Lost was more of the same. In other words, 95 percent of the episode is about one character and almost the entire rest of the cast gets zero screen time. Other than a quick scene with Ben, his daughter Alex, her boyfriend Carl and Danielle Rousseau, the crazy French chick who has lived on the island for nearly 20 years, and another with Rousseau, Carl and Alex and the end, everything in between was Michael-centric. At the beginning of the hour, Ben warns Alex, Carl and Rousseau to leave the barracks immediately because when the people from the freighter come to the island to get Ben, Alex will be in danger because they will use her to get to Ben. So the trio departs and aren’t heard from until the end of the hour. In between, we find Michael on the freighter, being confronted by Sayid and Desmond. They demand to know what he doing on the boat, posing as a man named Kevin Johnson. Michael tells them his tale, which we see in the form of a flashback. As it turns out, after leaving the island on an Others-provided boat at the end of Season Two, Michael and his son Walt returned to New York. Unfortunately, life back in Manhattan wasn’t able to wipe away the memories of the island. Michael, overcome with guilt over shooting and killing Libby and Ana Lucia in Season Two when the Others had kidnapped Walt and forced him to break Ben out of custody of the Oceanic 815 survivors, tells Walt about the two murders he committed. At the same time, Michael operates under the belief that no one can know who he and Walt really are or that they have survived the crash of Oceanic 815. Walt goes to live with his grandmother, Michael’s mom, and she refuses to even let Michael in the house when he comes to visit his son. Michael’s response is to repeatedly attempt to commit suicide, beginning with crashing his car into a wall in a local shipyard at high speed. He has a suicide note pinned to his shirt, a note written to Walt, but when paramedics find him in his crashed car, still alive, they take him to the hospital and he refuses to give his name to the nurse or to tell her who Walt is. Michael next attempts to kill himself in a dark alley by shooting himself in the head with a gun he bought courtesy of pawning the watch he was given back on the island by Jin. However, just as he’s about the pull the trigger, Tom, a.k.a. Friendly of the Others, appears out of the shadow with a mysterious offer. He asks Michael to go onto a freighter about to port in Fiji and pose as a member of the crew. He also tells Michael that no matter how many times he tries to commit suicide, the island won't allow it. Its mysterious powers extend beyond its physical boundaries, it seems. Tom tells Michael that he has work left to do and to come find him in his penthouse hotel room when he’s ready to do it. Michael pus Tom’s words to the test by attempting suicide again inside of his apartment, but a news broadcast about the supposed recovery of the remains of Oceanic 815 at the bottom of the ocean gives him pause. When he does try to pull the trigger, the gun jams, which finally convinces him that Tom is telling the truth. When Michael goes to see Tom in his hotel room, he’s presented with evidence that Charles Widmore did indeed fake the recovery of the remains of Oceanic 815 by digging up 324 graves in Thailand for the bodies to stage the fake wreckage, buying an old plane and shipping it out to sea to a location where it could be dropped and sink so deep that recovering any remains or identifying any of them would be impossible. All of this, Tom explained, were done so no one would look for the real location of the crash and thus find the island that Widmore so badly wants. Based on this evidence, Michael signs on to go aboard the freighter posing as Kevin Johnson and to kill everyone on board, one by one, to keep the freighter from reaching the island. When he arrives in Fiji, Michael begins meeting members of the crew that we’ve already come to know this season - Naomi, George Mintkowski, Miles, etc. - and starts to have second thoughts about killing them. However, a care package from the Others changes his focus. Inside, hidden under some tools, is what looks like a bomb. The message seems clear: blow up the boat. But when Michael takes the “bomb” to the engine room and enters the code to detonate it, nothing happens. He’s cringing, preparing to be blown to bits, but all that happens is a flag popping up, just like in a cartoon. The flag has two words written on it: NOT YET. Shortly after this scare, a call comes in to the boat for Michael/Kevin. It’s allegedly from Walt, but when Michael picks up, Ben is on the other end of the line. Ben tells him that he was just making a point with the fake bomb, that although he’s willing to go to war to save the island, he won’t kill innocent people to do so. Some of the people on the boat are innocent and don’t understand what a monster Widmore is, so Ben didn’t want to kill them. As Michael finishes his story and we’re back in the present, Sayid doesn’t take the whole situation in very well. In a rage, Sayid forced Michael into an impromptu meeting with the captain and then rats Michael out by revealing his true identity. Meanwhile, back on the island, Alex, Rousseau and Carl are on the run in the jungle, headed for the Temple, a sanctuary where Ben told them that the rest of the Others are. As they stop for a water break, they are taken down by gunfire. Carl’s water bottle takes the first hit, followed by a fatal shot to Carl. When Rousseau and Alex make a run to save themselves, Rousseau is shot as well. Alex is left alone and surrenders, yelling that she’s Ben’s daughter and pleading with her faceless enemy not to shoot her as well. She stands up, puts her hands in the air and….that’s where things ended. Oh, and because the f’ing writers’ strike held the show to only eight pre-strike episodes and this was the eighth episode, new ones won’t be airing until April 24. So two months after the season kicked off, we get a great big gap to further disrupt and already rocky campaign. So until April 24….
- Heading into a new weekend at the box office, the defending champ from last weekend is the animated Disney flick Horton Hears a Who!, which pulled in $45 million in its opening weekend. With Jim Carrey voicing the lead character, the film scored big with moviegoers and with this being a holiday weekend, it looks to have a good chance for a second consecutive big payday. Last weekend’s second-place movie was the historical epic 10,000 B.C., a film with cavemen, mastodons, sabertooth tigers and more…and a film I have no interesting in seeing. Great FX aside, I just don’t have any desire to watch a film about what some filmmaker thinks the world might have looked like 12,000 years ago. Third in last weekend’s box office earnings race was the clichéd fight film Never Back Down, which made $6 million. However, since the estimated cost for the movie was just $20 million, it was actually a decent haul. Stay tuned for this weekend, which should be a decent one at theaters.
- One other NCAA Tournament note: Memo to all businesses out there across all sectors of our economy - stop trying to gravy train on March Madness by attempting to work the word “madness” into your company’s commercials or ads. Doing so isn’t clever, cute or amusing. Including the word madness doesn’t link your company with the excitement of the tournament; it makes you look like an unoriginal, un-creative ass. CBS tried to link the madness concept to its Monday night lineup of lame comedies for this coming week, failing to realize that no matter what term you use, those shows still suck. Same goes for tire stores, electronics stores, restaurants, clothing outlets, etc. What you’re trying to sell has absolutely no relationship to the real March Madness and basically by using the madness concept you’re just showing that you either can’t or don’t want to take the time and effort to come up with a slogan or tag line that’s actually good and related to what you’re pitching. So if you’re reading this and what I’ve said hits a little too close to home, I make no apologies because I’m doing you a favor by pointing out something you need to fix.
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