- Rarely do coaches get the chance to trade the same player twice. Typically when you ship a guy out, that’s the last you’ll see of him on a team you coach. Not so for new New York Knicks head coach and alleged liar/manipulator Mike D’Antoni. By signing the bloated 4-year, $24 million contract he signed to become coach of the Knicks, he also inherited the wildly overpaid, underperforming malcontent that is Stephon Marbury. D’Antoni already coached Marbury once, back in Phoenix. He traded the man known as Starbury in February 2004 because he got tired of Steph’s act, shipping him off to….you guessed it, the Knicks. Little did D’Antoni know then that he would screw over Phoenix by deciding he didn’t want to be their coach anymore despite being under contract, ask to negotiate with other teams and then lie to one of his potential suitors (the Chicago Bulls) and go behind their backs to take a job he told the Bulls he didn’t want (the Knicks job). Had he realized back then how duplicitous, gutless and unethical 2008 Mike D’Antoni would be, he might have handled the Starbury trade differently. As is, D’Antoni sat on the podium Tuesday during the news conference to introduce him as the Knicks’ new head coach and lied about looking forward to working with Starbury in New York even as reports were beginning to circulate that he was actively looking to trade Starbury and his massive contract - again.
- Last night wasn’t just the season finale of Smallville, it was also the end of an era. With series staples Kristin Kreuk (the hottest girl on TV in my opinion) and Michael Rosenbaum not slated to be back as full-time cast members next season (both are signed for occasional guest spots, the flagship show for the WB/CW will look very different (and not nearly as good) next season. That being said, the show didn’t end this era on a very strong note. Last week’s penultimate episode actually felt much better than this week’s finale, to be honest. There were no breathtaking scenes, no “can’t miss” moments that made you want to rewind the TiVo. The episode began with Kara Kent in some very un-Kara-like behavior, sneaking onto the flight of Edward Teague as he fled Montreal after last week’s showdown with Clark and Lex at the city’s St. Christopher’s Cathedral. While on his way to Buenos Aries, Argentina on a chartered jet, Teague was met and assaulted by Kara, who demanded to know the location of the device that could control the Traveler, a.k.a. Clark Knet. After punching a hole in the plane’s hull, Kara coaxed the answer she wanted out of Teague: talk to Lex Luthor. After that, Kara jetted out of the plane, blowing a second hole it in and causing the craft to come apart in mid-air, killing everyone on board. When Clark and Chloe get their hands on the audio from the plane’s black box, Clark uses his super hearing and unearths Kara’s voice amidst the noise. Clark realizes from the audio that she’s after Lex and finds her at the Luthor mansion, looking for the mysterious metallic orb Lex found last week. Clark then grabs Kara and super-speeds them both to the Kent Farm, where he confronts her with his suspicions that she hasn’t been acting like herself ever since returning from Krypton. Kara wants none of his input and after a struggle, she flies away. From there, it’s back to the Luthor Mansion, where Kara promises to lead Lex to the Fortress of Solitude where he can use the device to control the Traveler, reveals that she too is a Kryptonian and all but tells Lex that Clark is the Traveler. Lex wastes no time in fueling up his jet and heading to the Arctic. Clark and Chloe are busy in the meantime trying to find a way to help Kara. They settle on using kryptonite to subdue her, but when Chloe lures Kara to Chloe’s apartment above the Talon and pulls out the green rock, it has no effect. It’s at that point the truth is revealed: the being who looks like Kara isn't her; it’s BRAINIAC. While back on Krypton 1989 last week, BRAINIAC trapped Kara in the Phantom Zone and left her there, ending her season the same way Clark ended Season 5. BRAINIAC assaults Chloe, trying the same brain-zap, coma trick he used on Lana. But Chloe’s meteor powers manage to short-circuit BRAINIAC and ends up taking a hit himself. Chloe is comatose and hospitalized, but when Clark sees her condition he realizes that BRAINIAC is responsible. Clark tracks BRAINIAC down at the nearest power plant, looking to refuel. Before BRAINIAC can do that, Clark accosts him and tosses him around. At long last, Clark comes out on top by using broken electrical cables to infuse BRAINIAC with so much electricity that he explodes. BRAINIAC tries to Jedi mind-trick Clark out of killing him by saying the Man of Steel could never deliberately kill another man, but CK points out that BRAINIAC is a machine, not a man. He kills his nemesis, which immediately releases both Lana and Chloe from their comas. But before Clark can make it to the hospital to see Lana, she gathers he things and bolts, leaving only a short video message for him. She says that she loves and needs him and always will, but the world needs him more. She’s vanished and asks him not to follow, which was a predictable plot point when you realize that Kristin Kreuk won't be a series regular next season. Clark finds comfort in the support of Lois lane, who finds him watching the video at the farm and consoles him. Lois has problems of her own to deal with; she just doesn’t realize it. She’s been digging into Lex’s secrets and is close to the truth, but Lex calls in his favor that Jimmy Olsen owes him for Lex getting Chloe off the feds’ most-wanted list and orders Jimmy to get Lois off his trail by feeding her misinformation. She buys the lies, but Lex then informs Jimmy that they are far from even. He tells Jimmy that he must keep spying on Lois, which Jimmy refuses to do. So even as he’s on his way to the Arctic to find the Fortress of Solitude, Lex throws Chloe back into the fire with the feds and shortly after getting out of the hospital, she’s arrested. Just as Jimmy proposes using a vending machine ring from the hospital gift shop, agents burst in on them at the Talon and arrest her. Makes you long for the good old days when Lana worked the counter at the Talon, serving lattes while Clark and Chloe stopped by to do homework for classes at Smallville High. But Chloe, Jimmy and Lana aren’t the only ones with their status up in the air as the season ends (a true Smallville tradition). Lex reaches the Fortress, only to be met by Clark. A confrontation ensues in which Lex expresses hurt that Clark never trusted him with his secret and repeats the lies that BRAINIAC told him while posing as Kara, namely that Clark will destroy the human race, not save it. As Lex inserts the metallic orb into the Fortress’ console, the entire structure crumbles and disintegrates, vanishing and leaving just another empty, barren Arctic plain in its place with no sight of Clark or Lex. That’s where the season ends, a good season with a lackluster ending. It was jacked up by the writers’ strike and shortened because of it, but that’s no excuse for a bummer of an ending. It was too predictable, too copy-cat of previous season finales for the show and all in all, not that exciting. Hard to see how it’s going to get better next season with both Lex and Lana gone as series regulars, but maybe the return of the Green Arrow, a.k.a. Oliver Queen (Justin Hartley) and others from the League of Justice will help. So another season of one of my favorite shows comes to an end, always sad. Until next time, kids…..
- Rarely does a TV show live up to the billing when its network hypes it to the extreme, but Lost has been doing just that the past few weeks and the trend continued with last night’s episode. Not surprisingly, one of the best episodes of the season relied on a strategy I’ve been screaming about all season long, getting the entire cast involved in an episode rather than focusing on a select few and ignoring most of the group. The flash-forwards and the present continued to get closer together this week, with the episode kicking off as the Oceanic Six (Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Jin and baby Aaron) arrived back in the United States at a naval base in Hawaii. They were flown in by military transport and answered questions at a massive media conference at a hangar on the base with Oceanic Airlines conducting the event. Before they landed, Jack reminded them of their strategy for handling the questions, with that strategy basically being to lie about everything. Their story was that their flight crashed into the ocean near a group of islands near Indonesia, after which eight survivors drifted on rafts or seat cushions for a day before washing ashore on an island. There, they lived for the next few months before finding a raft and using it to float to a nearby, occupied island where the natives found them and from there, they made their way back to civilization. According to the false story, Kate gave birth to Aaron instead of Claire, Sun’s husband Jin died before even making it to the island and there was no chance that anyone other than the eight who made it to the island survived the crash. After the news conference ended, Sayid got a visit from his girl Nadia, who came under a fake name. In the weeks after coming back to civilization, Jack held a wake for his father, Hurley’s parents threw him a birthday party and everyone tried to get back to normal. That became impossible for Jack after the wake when Claire’s mother came up to him and revealed that Jack’s father was in Australia to visit Claire because she was his daughter. That meant Jack and Claire were brother and sister, something they never knew on the island. Of course, Jack couldn’t tell Claire’s mother that because it would have blown the cover story the Oceanic Six were selling. It would also have let Claire’s mother know that Aaron was her grandson, something Jack clearly didn’t want to do. This also explains why in earlier flash-forwards, especially the one after Kate’s court case where she was acquitted, she told Jack she understood why he didn’t want to be around Aaron and her. Meanwhile, at Hurley’s birthday party, his father snuck him away from the party to give him a special gift - the car the family had owned when Hurley was a kid and that he’d wanted restored for a long time. It was now restored and Hurley had the chance to take it for a drive - right up until he sat in the driver’s seat and saw that the odometer numbers read 481516 and the trip odometer read 2342, with those two numbers together being the same cursed numbers he’d used to win the lottery and that he believed had ruined his life. Hurley ran screaming from the car, which would lead you to believe that this moment might have been what set him off on the wild car chase we saw in his first flash-forward of the season, the one that landed him in the mental hospital. Back in the present on the island, things got tense in a hurry. With Martin Keeme and his men landing on the island to implement the “secondary protocol,” everyone on the island was suddenly in a hurry to get off. Sayid made it back in the Zodiac speedboat and turned it over to Daniel from the freighter people to begin ferrying people back to the freighter. Jin and Sun were in the first group off the island, making it back to the freighter where they were stunned to come face-to-face with Michael, a.k.a. Kevin Johnson. He told them how he made it back to New York and was now back to the island. Michael was then called away by Desmond, who was trying to figure out what was jamming the ship’s sonar and keeping the captain from piloting the boat near the island because he feared striking the reef. The engines were already fixed but without radar, the captain wouldn’t budge. Unfortunately, when Desmond searched for the problem, he found several piles of C4 explosive on the ship’s lower levels, leaving he, Michael and Jin to figure out how to deal with them. Life wasn’t any easier on the island, where Jack and Kate left camp in search of the helicopter that had flown over camp the night before. Using the satellite phone thrown from the copter as a tracker, they made their way into the jungle but instead of finding the chopper, they found Miles, Sawyer and Aaron. They then heard the news about Claire disappearing during the night, leaving Sawyer to care for the baby. He passed Aaron off to Kate when Jack decided that he was going to keep looking for the helicopter. Sawyer and Jack went on that search as Kate and Miles headed back to the beach. Despite bleeding from the abdomen because of the loose stitches from his recent appendectomy, Jack made good time and he and Sawyer found the helicopter shortly thereafter. Frank Lapidus, the copter’s pilot, was handcuffed to the craft and told them that they needed to get off the island ASAP. That advice was ignored when Jack learned Hurley was still on the island with Ben Linus and Locke (these three again provided some great comedic moments, including a scene in which an old Dharma Initiative case is discovered and Locke tosses Hurley a package of Dharma saltine crackers from inside, which Hurley immediately eats, prompting Ben to scold him, “You know, those are 15 years old). So off Jack and Sawyer would go, but before they got anywhere near Ben, Hurley and Locke, those three were in big trouble. After tromping through the jungle in search of the Orchid station, they arrived there and found the place crawling with Keeme and his men. To get to the Orchid, they first had to pass through an area of the island where the Others were now living, but Ben signaled them using a mirror and was granted safe passage through the area. At the Orchid, Keeme and his men were waiting because they had information from Charles Widmore that Ben would need to go there if they invaded the island and he wanted to save it. So Ben formulated a plan to outwit them, which started with him surrendering while Locke snuck inside the station and went underground to ser in motion the plot that would fulfill Jacob’s instructions to move the island in order to save it. Whether Locke is successful wasn’t shown, but when Ben showed himself, Keeme and his men surrounded him and knocked him out with a pistol whip to the forehead. Back in the jungle, Kate and Sayid tried to track Jack and Sawyer but were surrounded and captured by the Others. What the Others’ agenda is, we don’t know. Do they want to save the island and are they part of Ben’s plan? Did he signal something to set up the plan when he used the mirror to signal them on the way to the Orchid? What have the Others been up to since leaving the barracks (or as Sawyer called it, New Otherton)? Those questions will be answered (at least some of them) and we’ll see the actual rescue of the Oceanic Six…in two weeks. As you might remember me telling you a few weeks back, due to scheduling conflicts and two season finales already set for next week, the two-hour season finale for Lost (man, was this a short season, but I’m sure when DVDs of it are sold, they’ll be cheaper because of the short season - NOT) won't air for two weeks, on May 29. So until that time rolls around, that’s it and that’s all…….
- Breathe a sigh of relief, pedophiles, because the former home of the world’s biggest pedophile appears to be safe….for now. The King of Molesters/Pop, Michael Jackson, had been in danger of seeing his own oversized amusement park, adult alarm and all, sold off at a foreclosure sale because he owed $23.5 million to Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based hedge fund and investment group. The sale of Whacko Jack-O’s Neverland Ranch was planned for this week, but those plans are on hold after the company sold the property to Colony Capital, a real-estate investment group. According to the King of Pervs, he is now in negotiations with Colony Capital “about the ranch and other matters” and that he hopes to reach a settlement that will allow him to keep the adult amusement park he used to lure in young boys for him to molest, er, have play dates with. After all, what else can you do with a property that has a special alarm installed to let you know when an adult is approaching the bedroom you’re in with a 8-year-old boy? Congrats on saving your property for the time being, Jack-O, so you can live to molest another day.
- You can argue whether New York photographer Spencer Tunick’s work is art or not, but what you can’t argue is that it’s inevitably revolting. Tunick has become famous for taking nude photos of groups consisting of thousands of volunteers all at once. Wherever he goes, controversy follows because many people view the sight of thousands of people naked, posing for a photograph to be obscene. His latest photo shoot took place at the Happel Soccer Stadium in Vienna, Austria on Sunday. Approximately 1,840 volunteers showed up to appear in the shoot, with three rules: no sunglasses, no smiles and no clothes. Tunick snapped pictures of his volunteer subject in various scenes, including several with a soccer ball, which was apropos because Austria will be a co-host of the Euro 2008 soccer championships along with Switzerland. My problem with Tunick and his work is as follows: there are just some people in this world who should never be seen nude by anyone outside of their spouses and themselves. You know who I’m talking about: those among us who are disgustingly obese. It’s not politically correct to rip people for being fat, but f’ political correctness. If you’re so fat that you have man boobs, that you have multiple chins, are clinically obese and have many, many rolls of flab collecting around your midsection, then no one needs to see you nude. That truly is obscene and nasty, but Tunick has no criteria based on weight or fitness for his subjects. I’m not demanding that everyone in the pics be model thin; I’m just asking for some sort of reasonable standard. If your physique can aptly be described as Marlon Brando-esque or Rosie O’Donnell-esque, you should not be photographed nude ever - ever. So how about we establish at least a few standards for your photographs, Tunick. Maybe ask your subject to run at least 50 yards without keeling over and passing out, or set a body-fat percentage limit, that’s all I’m asking for…..
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